Shadow

by James Swallow

  The refugees were all on board now, and one of the crew who spoke French was telling them to obey or suffer the consequences. The foreigners easily outnumbered the men on the ship, but not one of them had the guts to stand up and show some backbone. Anyone who so much as eyeballed one of the crew was cowed by the automatic rifles that could cut them down in seconds.

  DeVot put his fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing whistle, sending a signal to a man on the flying bridge. The ship immediately rocked into motion as the props bit into the waves, and the bow swung back in the direction of the Libyan coastline. At full steam ahead, the decrepit fishing boat was dragged alongside, seawater spilling into it as they made headway.

  Lazlow heard some of the refugees jabbering to one another. They knew what was going on. He waded in and joined the other men with rifles as they went through the next step, forcibly separating the males and the females. He looked forward to the moment when one of the men tried to stop them from pawing at the women, and he was soon rewarded.

  Lazlow clubbed the man who dared to rise, hitting him across the face with his rifle and breaking his nose, slamming him down to the deck in a gush of blood. The deckhand laughed and scanned the terrified faces in front of him, hoping to find another one who wanted to be defiant. But they didn’t oblige.

  Too pathetic to defend themselves, he told himself, they deserve everything they get.

  He aimed his rifle at the men and made gunshot noises, sniggering when they recoiled. DeVot shouted at him to stop, and at length he walked away, frustrated that he couldn’t take out his bottomless wellspring of anger on someone. Lazlow was always annoyed about something. It was how he got through the day.

  Anything the refugees had on them that might be valuable was taken and tossed in a plastic drum. Any cash made from selling it later would be divided up among the crew as beer money—not that these mongrels ever had much worth stealing. Tonight was a little different, though, as one of the other men came up with an electronic watch he had cut off the wrist of some Nigerian. Lazlow took it from him and eyed it, unsure of what it could do.

  “It’s a smartwatch,” offered Maarten.

  “Did I ask for your opinion?” Lazlow snarled back on reflex, and he tossed the watch into the drum with the rest of the meager pickings.

  “Keep your guns on them,” DeVot was saying, pointing at the men as he strutted up and down the deck between the two groups of refugees. “I’ll look over the women and see what we can use.”

  Lazlow nodded. This was where they could make some serious money. DeVot had a connection with the Albanian mafia, and those creeps were always on the lookout for new merchandise to traffic. DeVot had already spotted a few good candidates, and he was weighing up his options. There would be a bonus if the women were in good condition, but then again Lazlow had his needs and it would be a while before they made port again.

  His short attention span was broken by the sight of the Dutchman, looking around like he was up to something, instead of doing what he was told.

  “Hey! I’m talking to you, Genius! What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” Maarten looked morosely at the deck.

  “You’re such a pussy.” Lazlow strode over to the Dutchman, getting in his face, leaning over him. “With your fucking hipster beard and your long hair.”

  He flicked a finger at Maarten’s neck, where his shoulder-length hair was hanging unkempt and messy. The other man didn’t react, meekly refusing to meet his gaze. Lazlow kept on goading him.

  “Are you queer? Is that why you said that shit before? Because you’re a fucking faggot?”

  “No.”

  The Dutchman fingered the strap of the rifle hanging off his shoulder.

  “So prove it.” Lazlow jabbed a finger at the women. “Let’s have a little show.” He smirked at the idea of it, moving to grab one of the female refugees at random, a skinny little one not much more than a kid. “Go on. Get in there, Genius.”

  He shoved the terrified girl in Maarten’s direction, then glanced at DeVot and saw that the other man was smirking as well. DeVot was an old pervert, and he wasn’t going to stop this from happening or challenge Lazlow for his place as top dog among the crew.

  “Do it!” shouted one of the other men, gathering in for the entertainment.

  “I’m not touching her,” said the Dutchman, and he shook his head.

  “Told you he was a faggot!” Lazlow barked, getting a swell of callous laughter in return.

  But then a sly smile that Lazlow had never seen before crossed Maarten’s face and he pushed the young girl away, instead nodding toward another woman. The Nigerian.

  “I like that one better.”

  That earned the Dutchman a round of raucous cheers as he walked up to the older refugee and pulled her out of the group, ignoring the pleas of the others around her. Lazlow blinked. He hadn’t expected the little shit to show any mettle.

  “What are you going to do?” said the Nigerian, as Maarten unbuttoned the camo jacket he was wearing.

  “I’ve got something for you,” said the Dutchman, and he reached into his waistband.

  But Lazlow’s amazed laughter died in his throat when Maarten’s hand came back with a small-frame semi-automatic that he slapped into the woman’s open palm. In the same motion, the Dutchman shrugged his AK-47 off his shoulder and into his hand, as the Nigerian brought up the pistol and fired at Lazlow.

  A single .25 caliber round smacked into Lazlow’s forearm and he screamed, dropping his Kalashnikov as blood flowed from the wound. The pain was intense and his knees turned to water. Collapsing to the deck, he saw Maarten sprint forward and grab DeVot by the back of the collar, pulling the captain to him as a human shield.

  “Drop your weapons or I slot him,” the Dutchman shouted at the other men, and suddenly his voice was different, with all the rough edges of a British accent.

  “You heard the man,” said the Nigerian, who went through a similar shift from African to American.

  “Do it!” cried DeVot, folding immediately. “Guns down, guns down!”

  The other men didn’t obey, but through his fog of hurt Lazlow was barely aware of it. The bullet had splintered bone and torn nerves, and he could barely breathe for the agony of it. He lost control of his bladder and shuddered.

  Another shot rang out from the little pistol, this time blowing off a chunk of someone’s foot, and he heard the woman call out.

  “Were you not listening?”

  At length, the crew dropped their weapons to the deck and Lazlow saw men among the refugees spring up to grab them for themselves. Then he fainted, remembering vaguely as his world turned dark that his poor pain tolerance had been the reason why the German army had passed him over. That, and his hateful personality.

  * * *

  “Was that good for you?” she asked, and he had to crack a smile.

  “Oh yeah.”

  He expected her to toss away the hijab now that their undercover identities were well and truly blown, but she didn’t, instead slipping the little Beretta 950 pistol into the folds of her robe and gathering up the AK-47 that Lazlow had dropped. For his part, he was happy to stop being the meek “Maarten from Amersfoort” and go back to being Marc Dane, ex-MI6 field officer turned private security specialist.

  With the professionalism Marc expected of her, Lucy Keyes checked over the Kalashnikov with a soldier’s careful eye, and pursed her lips.

  “This is okay.”

  Years back, long before Marc knew her, Lucy had been a recon-sniper specialist assigned to the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, more commonly known as “Delta Force,” and she had lost none of the skills they had taught her. Most of the world believed that unit was crewed only by men, but inside the clandestine structure of the detachment there was a team-within-a-team, that used women on missions where a female operator was a tactical requirement for infiltration. Now, like Marc, Lucy worked in the private sector for the Rubicon Group. />
  He still didn’t know the full story behind Lucy’s recruitment into Rubicon’s “Special Conditions Division”—just bits and pieces. A dishonorable discharge, an escape from a military prison. There were a lot of unanswered questions, but Marc respected her privacy and he didn’t push to know more.

  His own journey into working for Rubicon’s enigmatic CEO Ekko Solomon wasn’t exactly conventional either. Accused by his own agency of being complicit in the deaths of his former team—including a woman he cared deeply for—Marc had been a fugitive when he crossed Solomon’s radar. Working together, he and the Rubicon team had exposed the real traitor in MI6 and gone on to avert more than one catastrophic terrorist attack in the months that followed. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that, cut off from everything that he had known, Rubicon had become Dane’s lifeline. Solomon had pledged to use his wealth and the reach it gave him to better the state of the world, and that intent expressed itself in covert actions like this one. Rubicon gave Marc a purpose when his future was at its bleakest, and he couldn’t deny it felt good to know he could make a difference.

  The two of them were an unlikely pair. Lucy—the dark-skinned New Yorker with an athletic build, a boyish face and a sleepy gaze—was proficient at blending in, making herself part of the background. An expert markswoman, she carried herself with a wry manner and a ferocity that could be intimidating to some. Marc—a working-class white guy born and bred on a London council estate, wiry and fast, with a wolfish cast to him—was a dyed-in-the-wool techie who had become a field agent the hard way, and he was still strung somewhere between those two points, surviving on his wits and his ability. Like all of Solomon’s people, they were a couple of outsiders who had found a renewed purpose working for the African billionaire.

  Marc watched as Lucy talked with the refugees in Arabic, calming the teenage girl that Lazlow had tried to force on him, and rallying the ones who had taken up the guns. Soon, they were turning things around on the Bastion League crew, forcing DeVot and his men to surrender all they had on them. They searched the ship and marched everyone they found up to the deck to join their comrades.

  Marc didn’t speak the language, but he could tell that the angry refugees, strung out and weary from their ordeal at sea, were furious enough to start shooting. Lucy talked them down, even though Marc had to admit he felt the same way. If even half the deeds they had bragged about doing were true, Lazlow and the others didn’t deserve any restraint.

  For months, Rubicon’s digital hunter teams had been building up a virtual model of the Bastion League’s network of influence, tracking their connections to other extremist groups and criminal organizations. This mission was the end result of an operation to interdict and dismantle a human trafficking ring that stretched from North Africa to Russia, a trail of misery and suffering that had ruined hundreds of innocent lives.

  Tomorrow, offices of the Bastion League in four different countries would be raided by police armed with warrants to seize their computers. Forensic data sweeps would find a money trail tying the group directly to incidences of bribery, corruption and worse. At this moment somewhere in Eastern Europe, thanks to iron-clad intelligence given to them by Rubicon, an Interpol-backed strike force was moving on a compound run by the Albanian mob, where dozens of kidnap victims were being held.

  The private contractor’s Special Conditions Division had taken on the task of handling this end, inserting Marc into the activist group via a compromised contact in Amsterdam, and dropping Lucy in-country over the Libyan border to follow the line via the smugglers’ route. Within a few days, this horrific scheme to prey on the weak and vulnerable would be in ruins. But first DeVot and his men would face summary justice.

  “What do you think you are doing?” said the captain. “Are you going to arrest us? Who are you people?”

  “That’s a lot of questions,” Lucy replied. “If I were you, I’d be thinking more about my immediate future.”

  “You gonna kill us, bitch?” Lazlow had come to when another of his buddies had slapped him awake, and now he was cradling his ruined arm, swaddled in bandages from a first aid kit. “You can’t!”

  “I shot you one time already,” she retorted. “You reckon I won’t do it again? Don’t you get it? We’re here to mess with your program.”

  DeVot ignored her and put his attention on Marc.

  “Are you going to let these…?” He faltered over the word. “These people gun us down in cold blood?”

  Marc’s jaw stiffened. He’d had his fill of these racist dickheads within an hour of stepping on board this tub, and playing dumb for the last few days had taxed him to the limit.

  “Get over there.” He pointed at the refugee boat with his rifle. “All of you.”

  “What?” DeVot actually gave an indignant snort. “This is my ship, I’m not leaving it to you.”

  “We’re not asking,” said Lucy.

  “No—” DeVot began again, and that was enough for Marc.

  He levelled his AK-47 over the heads of DeVot and the others, and let off braying bursts of orange fire that lit up the darkness, spraying rounds left and right. The men immediately reacted, flinching back, ducking away. Some of them got the message and scrambled into the leaky fishing boat. Marc marched forward, ejecting the spent sickle-shaped magazine from his rifle and grabbing another from the pocket of his threadbare camo jacket.

  “You hear that?” he snarled. “That’s the wake-up call those people get every bloody day!”

  DeVot saw the furious look in his eyes and decided to jump for the boat himself, stumbling aboard after Lazlow.

  “Easy, tiger…” Lucy spoke quietly, so that only Marc heard her.

  “You’re not the one who had to share a boat with these bigots for the last week,” he replied.

  “No,” she agreed, slinging her rifle so she could pull a corroded fire axe from its mount on a nearby hull frame. “I was just undercover in a war zone.”

  “Fair point,” he agreed.

  “What do you think is going to happen when we get back to port?” DeVot started speaking again, proving beyond any doubt that he didn’t know when to shut up. “You can’t hijack this ship, that’s piracy!”

  “Yo ho ho, asshole.”

  Without warning, Lucy brought the axe blade down on the lines tethering the refugee boat to the Bastion League ship, again and again until they were severed.

  The choppy waves immediately took hold of the old fishing vessel and pulled it away. Marc stood with one foot on the rail and took aim at the aft, where the boat’s fuel bladder was located. He fired off another burst, holing it in several places. Diesel sputtered out and washed across the waterlogged deck. Then he pointed southward, pitching his voice up to be heard.

  “Get that engine going, and I reckon you’ll have enough fuel to make it back to the Libyan coast before it pisses away.” He scanned the fearful faces of DeVot and his men. “If you’re quick, that is. You can walk home from there.”

  Lazlow started shouting something, but Marc didn’t hear it. The bigger ship’s motors revved and drowned him out as one of the refugees took the throttle, and they left the old trawler behind in the swell.

  * * *

  Lucy asked Fatima and Remi to help her organize the people from the boat, taking them below to find the cramped mess hall the Bastion League crew had been using, and dividing out food and water for those who needed it most. It took a while for her to explain it so that all the refugees understood, but eventually she won them round with the promise that help was a few hours away. They were going to be safe, and no one was going to try to hurt them.

  She emptied the ship’s medical locker for the ones suffering from sunstroke and dehydration, while Marc walked off to the flying bridge to make sure they were sailing in the right direction. Somehow, through a combination of sign language and pointing at maps, he was able to get the man on the wheel to put them on course for their rendezvous.

  As the adrenaline from the hijacking
faded, Lucy felt the fatigue of the last few days threatening to overwhelm her, but she beat it back with a mug of tarry, acidic coffee. Glancing through a porthole, she caught sight of the Brit standing at the rail on the open deck. He was staring out at the dark waves, lost in thought.

  Her first instinct was to go and speak to him, but something pulled her back and she frowned. Suddenly Lucy felt awkward about it, dwelling on a sense of distance between the two of them.

  It had been several months since they last worked together on an operation, but it felt like longer. Their last assignment—a fraught race against time to chase down a rogue hacker collective in possession of a deadly digital weapon—had ended in fire and recrimination on the streets of Seoul. Dane and Keyes had almost lost their lives stopping a plot to provoke open war between North and South Korea, but worse still had been facing up to a betrayal from one of their own. Kara Wei, the Special Conditions Division’s cybersecurity expert, had put them in jeopardy to follow her own agenda, and Lucy had learned how little she really knew the woman she called her friend. And if that wasn’t enough, she and Marc had come down on opposite sides when it came to finding forgiveness for their former teammate. It had pushed the two of them apart, and now Lucy wondered if they could bridge that gap. She didn’t want to admit that she was fond of the reckless Brit.

  Lucy grimaced, and not just at the horrible taste of the ship’s coffee.

  Act like a professional, she told herself.

  Marc looked up as she walked across the wet deck toward him and a few emotions crossed his face—surprise, worry, concern—before he settled on a wan smile.

  “Hey,” he began. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s going…” she replied, with a weary sigh.

  Marc fell silent for a moment, looking back out over the water again.

  “You think we did the right thing, shipwrecking DeVot and his bully boys? They know our faces now.”

  “We made ’em an offer they couldn’t refuse,” she said, with a smirk. “I reckon a taste of their own medicine is the least they deserve. They’ve been preying on these refugees for months. Now they’re gonna learn what it’s like to be them.”