“That shouldn’t be hard though. Surely you caught them?”
“No,” he corrected. “We caught the people who were on board at the time.”
She knew there were nuances that she wasn’t really getting with his words. “Translation?”
“There’s still a good chance that somebody is out there, somebody who orchestrated all this behind the scenes.”
“But they won’t care about me,” she said.
“Well, it depends on if they understand how much you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” she snapped, then glared at him. “I really don’t. I just woke up on that stupid boat.”
“So, what happened on the yacht?” He motioned for her to take a seat at the kitchen table, and he walked a little farther around the counter and put on a pot of coffee.
She watched in fascination as he instinctively found the coffee and the filters on the first go. She smiled and said, “You’ve been here before.”
“Nope,” he said, “but some things are fairly intuitive.”
She shrugged. “Not for me.”
“They would be if you’d done what I do long enough,” he said with a smile.
“It’s been years since I saw you,” she said. “But, when I got into trouble, you’re the only one I could think of in the industry who maybe would be out there, trying to help me.”
“Well, several of us were out looking,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d even remember me.”
“I know we didn’t spend much time together that night long ago,” she said, “but, when you’re lost and alone in a world that’s so ugly, I think it’s instinctive to envision this make-believe kind of relationship to give you something to hang on to, something to keep your sanity.”
“Whatever works,” he said. “As long as it kept you sane and moving forward, it’s fine with me.”
She smiled. “I certainly wasn’t trying to presume. I just needed to believe that somebody out there was trying to help us. It seems foolish now.”
“No, it’s not,” he interrupted. “It’s never foolish to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself grounded in reality.”
“And yet that wasn’t a grounded reality at all.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of times people get into trouble, and they talk to their mother, father, sister, friend, whatever,” he said. “It’s just a way of connecting to a world that’s outside of the situation you’re in. It’s normal. You didn’t do anything weird or wrong,” he said reassuringly.
She laughed. “That’s nice of you to say. Thank you.”
“Hey, it did cause a few of my cohorts to raise their eyebrows,” he said, with a laugh, “but that’s all.”
“I’m sure,” she said, with an eye roll. “I never really thought that you would be the one coming after me.”
“But you knew what I did for a living.”
“Yes, but that was past-tense too,” she said. “My understanding is that most don’t stay in the SEALs for very long.”
“Nope, eight to ten years is pretty average,” he said. With the coffee on, he sat down at the table in front of her, then picked up a pad of paper she hadn’t noticed before.
Dropping it in front of him, he pulled out his phone, pushed a button, and said, “Now that we got all the basics out of the way,” he said quietly, “just start from the very beginning and tell me what happened.”
She looked at him for a long moment, took a deep breath, and blurted it all out. Since he was recording it, somebody else could decipher the innuendos and the undercurrents of it all.
“I wasn’t supposed to be there,” she said, “but my mother asked me to join them after getting her final treatment done and having a clear diagnosis for the moment. She still wasn’t sure she would make it or not, and she wanted to celebrate the time we had. I made some quick arrangements, then flew down. I arrived that morning, and we were on the boat that afternoon, heading out to sea. Together we spent two days on the yacht—maybe three,” she corrected slowly.
“I’m sorry. It’s just the days are rolling into each other. Anyway, so later in the second or third afternoon, another boat approached, just kind of waved and honked. We talked for a bit, and it carried on, and we didn’t think anything of it. Other tankers and whatnot were out in the ocean, but we generally stayed away from everything.” She stopped, clenched her fingers, trying to distance herself from these memories.
“Another boat came up a little bit later, which kind of surprised us. They came right alongside of us, but this one was, I don’t even know what it was,” she said. “It looked ominous because it was all dark, blacks and grays, very sleek and streamlined. My dad was pretty impressed. Anyway, they got to talking, across the rails from each other, and, the next thing I knew, just as Dad went below to get something for them, four gunmen popped out from belowdecks on their boat, then hopped onto ours and took us all captive.
“At the time, we’d been drifting closer and closer to a tanker. I was trying to get my dad to turn on the engines and to change direction when one of the gunmen just looked at me and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s perfect.’”
Letting out a shaky breath, she continued, “I didn’t understand what he meant, until somebody came aboard, turned on the engines, and, instead of pulling us away, literally slammed us right into the tanker. Yet it seemed like he had a good idea of where to go and how to do it because the tanker didn’t appear harmed at all. But then it had a steel hull, where we did not.
“We started taking on water right away, and my mother panicked and screamed. She and my father were taken off onto the gunmen’s boat. I had raced down below but was grabbed out of the water and pulled back up. It happened so fast. The next thing I know, I was pushed onto the gunmen’s boat, but,
