by Daniel Pyne
Morehouse just shakes his head at her. “Define better.” He looks strung out, pale. Eccola casts off the line that holds them to the cargo ship. Zoala sees what’s happening and begins yelling at her to stop.
“Can’t do it,” the doctor admits to Sentro sadly.
“You could.”
“Can’t. Dude. Look at me.”
Sentro has been looking. The tracks on his skinny arms. The swollen red, probably arthritic knee. His surrendering eyes.
“Stay clear of the pier, at least,” she tells Morehouse.
“Duh.”
“And thanks for your help.”
Securing the AK that hangs on her shoulder, she leaps to the ladder and stands on the bottom rung.
The skiff drifts free. Zoala rubs away furious tears and starts to climb back down. Sentro’s arms keep him from leaping off into the water.
She calls out: “Take the boy with you.”
Morehouse busies himself with starting the engine.
Zoala’s in a panic. It’s not that he wants to join his sister. He wants her to stay with him. They talk at cross-purposes, the physical distance between them growing.
The doctor feathers the throttle; the boat pivots, throws a white wake.
“He will do better with you,” Morehouse shouts.
Tears falling, Zoala keeps yelling at Eccola, and she’s crying now too. But the skiff is already hurrying away.
Morning traffic is picking up; buses roll in on grimy diesel clouds to deliver local early-bird air travelers and airline support staff to the sleepy regional airport while, still waiting, fidgety, coat draped across his bag, Jeremy Troon distractedly watches a pretty white woman getting out of a kiwi-green taxicab. No luggage, not even a handbag; in designer leggings and a black sleeveless T-shirt, she pays the fare and flashes through the terminal’s glass doors. Something about her holds his attention until she vanishes behind the day’s bright reflection, and a late-model Jaguar comes racing in from the gravel access road to the blacktop terminal driveway, tugging a wake of dust behind it. It circles ominously around and skids to the curb where Jeremy stands.
His courage is in his throat. Here we go.
A copper-skinned man with a broken nose and a scar-slashed, ruined eye stares darkly across from the driver’s seat.
“Troon?”
Now shit gets real, Jeremy wants to say bravely, trying to bring back his coffee shop Vin Diesel. It doesn’t do the trick. The hot wind has him already sweating. The Jaguar man’s one good eye seems to drill right through him. Exposed, no turning back, Jeremy nods. Swallowing the acid of foreboding and repeating his other, brittle mantra: he’s here to save his mother.
The automatic locks jump open. The driver gestures for Aubrey Sentro’s son to get in.
His ship looks like it’s been crenellated with cotton balls. Every horizontal edge is dotted with equidistant white roosting seabirds of a species he doesn’t readily recognize. Hundreds—no, there must be thousands of them—stem to stern.
“I want engines operative and moving us seaward as soon as possible, okay?”
Cleaning up the shambles wrought by the mercenary crew, barking out instructions on the ship’s comm, Captain Montez has resumed his command and feels the familiar rush of adrenaline it engenders. “Check the payload to make sure it hasn’t shifted so much it has compromised our beam.”
But the birds are freaking him out.
With the ship’s communications room ransacked and their cell phones still in a bag possessed by Castor Zeme, there’s no way to radio Georgetown or another port for help. Montez is hoping to get north to a shipping lane where they might intercept a passing vessel and go from there. At worst, once they establish their position, he can head northwest and seek safety among the Lesser Antilles.
They’re a bad omen, these birds, every now and then bothered by the movement of the crew below them, lifting like a chorus line, wings beating, hovering a few feet above their roost, then settling again. He shouldn’t have let the American bring his people back here.
Montez stares out the bridge windows at the blight of birds and murmurs a Catholic school prayer for strength and courage.
The crew scrambles to winch the teetering containers back into a manageable shape and correct the nasty list they’re causing. The laughing gulls that dive-bomb them are a nuisance. Up on G-deck, the Swedes stare sadly at the late Bruce Bologna’s broken equipment, strewed out from his doorway into the corridor and all the way down to their cabin. Jack and Meg Gentry have locked themselves in theirs. Charlemagne makes short work of returning his belongings to his duffel bag, then, restless, goes out and up to the observation deck and finds Sentro watching the harbor for any approaching craft.
Diesel grime belches from the Jeddah exhaust stacks; the ship shudders as the engines power up. Charlemagne tells her, in great detail, something that she finds she can’t begin to translate.
“I should tell you, I don’t really speak much Tagalog,” she apologizes, but the truth is, for the moment she’s simply forgotten how.
“I knew this,” he says in English. “It’s okay.” Sentro can see that he’s become afraid of her—of who she’s been revealed to be—but that his instinct for survival must be telling him to keep her close. “We will not outrun them if they chase.”
Sentro says, “Oh, they’ll chase.”
“So what’s the plan?” First Mate Mulligan comes gimping out onto the deck, shadowed by Zoala. Mulligan’s leg is freshly bandaged, braced. Surprisingly, the ship’s medical supplies were relatively unplundered.
Sentro looks at him with her blankest expression. “The plan is to stay alive.”
Mulligan shifts, grimaces, shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have messed with things. I’m sorry for saying it to you, but the dead are as much on you as the pirates.”
She didn’t need him to tell her this. “They’re not pirates.” With only that answer ready, she waits for him to finish his indictment.
“This is just my opinion. You know.” Mulligan seems to be trying to measure his words, as if for a stubborn child. “But like we keep telling you, there is an unspoken but accepted protocol for these transactions.”
They’re not pirates.
“You think there is,” Sentro says. “You want to believe there is. Like in the movies,” she adds. “Because otherwise it’s all a bloody chaos, and you’d never come this way again.”
“You have no plan.”
Sentro remembers learning long ago, from a SEAL team captain who didn’t make it out of the sandbox: Plans are what you make ahead of time to keep your head busy and so you can pretend you have some say in the hellacious shit show about to happen. She wonders if Mulligan would understand.
“‘I am come in sorrow,’” Zoala recites suddenly, rote, from memory, but struggling a bit with his English vowels. “‘I am come, ready and unarmed.’”
“What the bloody hell is that?” Mulligan asks.
“Book, book,” Charlemagne guesses.
Sentro says, with a little more certainty, “Lord Jim.”
“This little kid’s reading Conrad?” Mulligan marvels, betraying what Sentro suspects must be a university education.
She explains, “He stole it from me. I thought I might enjoy a maritime adventure while we steamed across the ocean, but I never really had a chance to enjoy it.”
Mulligan looks at her like he’s worried she’s losing her mind but offers his opinion that nobody really enjoys Conrad.
“I doubt he understands much of it, but he probably likes to say the words aloud.”
“Lord Jim,” Zoala parrots, nodding gravely.
“Are there any weapons on board?”
“Only the water gun. And it’s dusted. The captain may keep a pistol in the safe, though it’s strictly forbidden. We’re trained not to resist. We’re not given any means to resist, save the water gun. So they don’t have any reason to harm us.”
Sentro nods. “These guys don’t need a reason.”
/> Mulligan studies her, deciding. “You have a plan.”
“I will if they come after us,” Sentro agrees, after a pause. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him it never factors.
At his usual table, nursing coffee and the tabloid Stabroek Sunday News, Robbens shifts his cell to his good ear, multitasking with the latest of a long-running series of BlackBerrys he’s been using since aught two. As part of his studied je ne sais quoi, he has a cache of them, purchased on eBay; when one dies, he soldiers on with the next.
“It’s all gone wrong, okay?” he explains to his caller. “Turns out he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s an imbecile.”
The city police captain, who Robbens knows is on the pad for Castor Zeme, sits across from him at a sunny table on the Malabar House veranda, gazing out through wraparound sunglasses at the sparkling bay and stuffing his face with scones and clotted cream.
Robbens has moments earlier promised the captain a considerable bounty, to be paid by the colonel and his friends, in return for a guarantee that Zeme will not, under any circumstance, live to collect his Jeddah ransom. It’s a fair deal, better than what the twin promised him. They shook on it. Now the Dutchman just needs to make sure the Jeddah’s underwriter doesn’t fuck this up.
“Quel imbecile, oui. Clueless. Oui. Just sit tight. I’ll be fine, I will, there’s . . .” He trails off and waits impatiently without paying any attention to what the caller is saying, then advises forcefully, “No no no no no. Don’t give him the money—he doesn’t have the hostages, he doesn’t have the cargo, he doesn’t have shit. Give me some time to sort this; something is not right here.”
Then Robbens sees someone step out onto the patio and cast a shadow over him. He shades his eyes. “There you are. Where the hell is my Jag?”
Aimed not quite point-blank, in fact still moving forward when the muzzle spits, the Glock blows away half of Robbens’s face. He topples over, very dead, and as Castor Z. lowers the gun, the grinding pain he’s felt behind his eyes ever since he learned the woman from the boat had taken his hostages eases; he decided to pop the Dutchman the moment he saw him come huffing up the staircase this morning, red faced, grinning, the little eyes like capers stuck in Spam.
Shuddering as he wipes the bits of Robbens off his face and hands, the police captain pushes away from the table, looking disgusted but unsurprised. Stuffing scones into his pockets, he rises and glances dispassionately at Castor Zeme, then informs the panicking club patrons in an officious drone: “Do not be alarmed. Tout est sous contrôle. S’il vous plait, restez calme, je suis policier . . . prenez vos affaires et dirigez-vous vers les sorties . . .” And then, in Spanish, he adds, “Tendré que tomar algunas declaraciones.”
Castor murmurs, “Asshole,” and thinks about shooting the duplicitous cop, too, but knows that will not further his cause, plus he needs official cooperation for the next part of his day. An insistent, distant, utterly confused audio squawking, like something trapped in a plastic box, calls his attention to Robbens’s odd phone on the deck. He picks it up and speaks into it: “Hullo? Hullo? Who’s this, then?” The caller identifies himself, a name Castor wouldn’t recognize but can assume is the Dutchman’s continental contact. “Yeah, yeah, listen, you: that was the sound of my shit hitting Robbens’s fan. Mmm-hmm. So. Now. Having got rid of the middle fucking man, let’s talk about where you’ll be delivering my money, yeah?”
The momentum of things is a sonofabitch. Time tumbles relentlessly, no matter what you do to slow it. And now she has to worry that she might not remember something important just when she needs it.
On the main deck of the Jeddah, with the sun high and an oppressive, windless heat settling, Sentro leads Mulligan and Charlemagne along and under the still-precarious tilt of containers the crew has given up trying to secure, to a midship gap between stable stacks, where Sentro unlocks and throws back with a clang a familiar dry-bulk hold hatch and climbs down into the darkness.
Zoala comes sideways through a different gap, looking curious. He’s been following the trio, clearly unsure if he’d be welcome.
Zoala grins big at Mulligan, whose stony face offers only indifference.
“Coming out.”
A black-clad equipment case stenciled with SAAB BOFORS DYNAMICS is propelled from the hold by Sentro’s hands. The first mate lunges to grab it with his good arm, but it bangs on the deck before he can pull it, scraping, away from the hatch. It’s that heavy.
Sentro climbs out shedding soybeans, while the first mate struggles to figure out the latches to unlock the lid and look inside. “The Gustaf recoilless rifle,” Sentro tells him, ruining the surprise. “All the rage with insurgents and jihadists, from Grozny to Darfur.” Bits of memories jangle back at her. “These look to be aftermarket, probably stolen military surplus.”
Giving up on the case, Mulligan asks the obvious: “What are they doing in the soybeans?”
Sentro takes a dry pause before answering: “Are you really asking me that?”
“Aimpoint sighting,” Charlemagne says suddenly. He glances at each of them in turn like a schoolboy who knows his lesson. “In Sweden, they say it is the Grg m/48 Granatgevär. Grenade rifle, model 1948. Soldiers of Great Britain say ‘Charlie G’; Canadians say ‘Carl G.’”
Sentro and Mulligan stare at the Tagalog, amazed.
“United States military call it ‘M3 Multirole Antiarmor Antipersonnel Weapon System.’ MAAWS. Or RAWS.”
Mulligan frowns at the Tagalog. “RAWS?”
Sentro cracks a smile. “We do love our acronyms.”
“Ranger Antitank Weapons System,” Charlemagne tells the first mate and makes a vague salute. “Gustaf bazooka. The ‘Goose’!”
“Like he said.” Sentro adds, “There must be four dozen of these bad boys buried down there, along with God knows what else.”
“I don’t think I want to know how he knows so much about these weapons,” Mulligan muses.
“Probably did a stint back home in the New People’s Army, resisting Duterte.” She kneels and pops the clasp, opening the case to reveal the cartoon components along with some ammunition neatly packed in lush foam protective padding, like high-high-end audio.
“That’s a rifle?”
“As generously defined.” Basically, a tube of steel. She feels a surge of optimism; even if the pirates catch them, this changes the game. But then, just as suddenly, she’s flooded with doubt.
“You know how to use this?”
She angles her head and stares at the components, drawing a blank. “I did.” She blinks, lost. “Shit.” She feels the queasy emptiness of another memory wipe. And a dull panic. “Fuck.”
Charlemagne steps forward and starts talking, excited, in Tagalog, gesturing to the gun.
“English,” Mulligan suggests.
Sentro’s attention is split, because from the radio clipped to the first mate’s belt comes a squawk: “Mr. Mulligan? This is Second Mate Salah, on the bridge? Over.”
Sentro gestures for Charlemagne to stop jabbering; he’s making a hash of both his native tongue and English. “What? Slow down. You learned how to use one of these where?”
Charlemagne answers; she still doesn’t understand most of it but thinks—is it wishful?—he’s saying that he knows how to put this Gustaf together. “NPA, for sure,” she confirms for Mulligan. Then, “Go, go, go,” she tells the Tagalog, closing the case lid and snapping the latches, and indicates for him to take it. “Do it. But do it up on the tower.”
In the meantime, Mulligan has reached for the rover on his belt, but not before the radio crackles again: “Bridge calling. Mr. Mulligan? Is passenger Sentro with you? Over.”
Things aren’t any better up on the control deck when they ascend to it; the captain holds out his radiophone for Sentro the moment she comes in, murmuring gravely: “It’s them. It’s him.”
She takes the handpiece but hears the voice doubled on the staticky bridge comm system. “I have something you want.”
“You’re a fucking pain in the arse, ladybits.”
Castor Zeme. The alpha twin. Game on.
Sentro looks out from the bridge window, back toward the Porto Pequeno docks. She can just make out, fronting the flashing lights of official vehicles, a cluster of indistinct figures and two big harbor-patrol boats waiting just below the edge of the quay, where she scuttled Castor’s fleet.
He says, “I have something you want. You have something of mine.”
“Look,” Sentro says, calm, “Ms. Fox has made her own—”
Castor cuts her off. “Oy. Not the English.”
Salah, his mournful eyes wide with fear, hands Sentro some binoculars, and she raises and adjusts them until she has centered all the figures standing not far from the cat container, flanked by police cars with their bubble lights active. Her heart flips because she’d know anywhere the angle and posture of the figure positioned off to one side, sandwiched between two mercenaries with guns.
“Your son. A Mr. Troon?”
Her son.
“Jeremy?”
Jeremy.
“You getting this?” Sentro watches the scarred tweaker lift a pair of binoculars and train them back at the Jeddah. It’s as if she’s looking right into him. And vice versa. Sentro lowers hers first, dazed. Hollowed out.
“Let him go.”
“He’s come to save you,” Zeme says, the amusement bright in his voice. “We gave him a ride from the airport, no extra charge.”
Sentro is too stunned to respond anything useful, so instead she just stalls with the stiff, expected, “What do you want?”
She knows.
“I want my brother back, but . . .” Zeme takes a dramatic pause that is his feeble attempt to mask the soul-searing pain saying it clearly causes him. His voice goes thick. “Lacking that, I want my boat, my passengers, my crew . . . and you.”
She tells herself, Breathe. Her worlds colliding. The one thing she never wanted to happen, that she sacrificed so much to proscribe. The singularity she has meticulously contrived, all these years, through the lies, the dissembling, the careful construction of parallel lives that would not, could not, ever intersect—to make sure, at whatever cost, her children would never be exposed to what she was—
