by Daniel Pyne
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
She first noticed Dennis when Euclid Junior High merged their boys’ and girls’ PE classes, eighth grade. Ballroom dancing was the ruse with which the faculty intended to teach young men and women how to deal with each other as the Niagara Falls of hormones came crashing down. She had known him most of her life, but she noticed him then. Ropy and pale and helmet haired and smelling faintly of a nervous flop sweat that nevertheless never bothered her, even years later. He crossed to pick her as a partner. She assumed it was because of their friendship, that he was too shy to pick the girl she was convinced he was crushing on, but when he put his hand on her waist and she put hers on his shoulder and they struggled with the formal footwork of waltz, something caught in her chest and the world tilted, and she found herself thinking about him in an electric new way long after the class had ended.
The way time sideslipped when she was with him. No one image or gesture settling. An exhilarating smear of right now, the world left behind.
The unconditional freedom it allowed her.
Later, this would be what she felt in the field when she was working. She never told anyone. Not even Dennis. She was embarrassed to confess that the thrill was what kept her coming back into the game, that the joyous freedom she had felt dancing with her forever boy in the gym kept sending her into the field operational, again and again, back to the risks that she should by all reason and convention have rejected to remain with her family and settle into her role as a woman and a wife.
She doesn’t regret the choices she made, only the inescapable consequences of having made them.
So it doesn’t surprise or upset her when, having discarded her running shoes to climb down the pilot’s ladder barefoot, she’s shed much of the fear of what might happen. She looks down and watches the one-eyed tweaker’s boat motor past Castor Zeme’s, tugging grim Jeremy in the trailing inflatable, tethered by a long line. No more doubt, single minded, all Sentro’s focus has narrowed to this; she’s not going to let any harm come to him.
“Sack up, boyo!” Zeme is taunting him. He has some kind of tablet in his hand that evidently shows him the view down at the Jeddah from the overhead drone, because the cop at the controls of it sits in the back of the boat, eyes set skyward.
“You’re the mackerel, and we’re going trawling!” A swirling bay breeze catches up her son’s leather coat and flaps it open, revealing C-4 explosive duct-taped over his sweat-drenched shirt like a waistcoat; it looks to be rigged with a homemade throwaway phone detonator that Sentro makes an educated guess will be triggered by the old-school BlackBerry the malevolent alpha twin is holding up and waving at her smugly.
Acutely aware of how scared her son must be and how brave he has been to come all this way to find her, Sentro tugs down the shirttail concealing her signal gun and begins to descend to the endgame.
Up on the observation deck, Charlemagne takes his eye away from the telescope eyepiece. “Oh no.”
He watches one patrol boat curl past the other to come abreast of the Jeddah, where Sentro has climbed down to face both.
“No no no no.”
Charlemagne looks to Zoala, who has taken over the attempted assembly of the Gustaf. There are three pieces left in the suitcase, and they can’t figure out where they go.
Carlito throttles back, and his boat rolls on its own lazy wake and drifts sideways, while Jeremy’s dinghy goes wide. Sentro makes a quick sea-level assessment of her parameters but still sees only one way forward. Her son is almost twenty yards away, clutching the rubber dinghy’s fat sides, rolling on the patrol boats’ wakes as they cross and slap and rebound back and forth; Jeremy’s drifted to a position equidistant between her pilot’s ladder and the closer patrol boat carrying Castor Zeme and his vile sawtooth grin of triumph.
There’s a distant, dull droning sound she briefly worries might be a third rogue harbor patrol she hasn’t accounted for, but no, the noise she hears is high, steady, rising—a whine that suggests an air- as opposed to waterborne approach.
It’s not the drone.
The ransom?
“You’re a tough fucking chew, Mrs. Sentro.” Wide stanced, facing her like the imperious high sea freebooter he aspires to be, Zeme steadies himself on the bow, his gun hanging loose at his side from a strap. He has the tablet in one hand, the BlackBerry detonator in his other. “I’monna be thrilled to get shed of you.”
The gun is an automatic but not a Kalashnikov. Some expensive, manly, and exotic assault rifle he must have stolen from one of his previous death-dealing adventures. Sentro has no fetish for firearms; she can see at a glance it’s a killing tool, with an enhanced clip, thirty rounds. That’s all she needs to know about it. Her bigger problem, she’s decided, is the AKs slung over the shoulders of Zeme’s three attendant mercenaries, who, along with two of the crooked Porto Pequeno policemen in the stern, have thrown lines up to the Jeddah deck rails and are already clambering aboard, leaving Sentro with Zeme; his aide-de-tweaker, Carlito; and the remainder of the polícias.
She wants to do this before the climbers can settle and shoot back down at her.
“They’ve got a big gun up there.” She fashions an expression that’s calm, open, unhurried. “I told them to take you out if I don’t get my son.” Zeme keeps grinning back, vulgar but unreadable; nevertheless she can see the first threads of uncertainty twist in his empty blue shark eyes when he realizes she’s not bluffing.
“Get him?” Castor Z. bares his pointy teeth and bends the corners of his mouth down in what she decides he thinks is a grand, condescending smirk. “I see a foolish boy wearing a combustible do-it-yourself kit under his daddy’s jacket.”
Dennis’s name is stitched on the inside label with Love Always, Aubrey.
Sentro calls across to her son, a touch of stall, but she means it: “Honey, it’s gonna be okay.” Honey? Where in the world did that mom trope come from? Jeremy just stares back at her dully, numb with fear, quaking. Watching a mother she knows he has so thoroughly misjudged.
She finds the tears she wants next more easily than she expects, clearly confusing Zeme. Maybe they’re real. Tears are primal, always unsettling. And the momentary distraction allows her to draw her flare gun from under her shirt and aim it at Castor Zeme’s head.
“Hey now.”
A clattering of weapons that lift and aim at Sentro; nobody moving, and after a wired moment, Zeme bursts into laughter. “And what’s the point of that?”
The dull droning has kept rising, an insistent bumblebee hum as, from the west, a banana-yellow seaplane comes bearing down on them, fast. A lone figure with a safety harness leans out on one of the pontoon floats, holding a parcel with a chute attached.
Even from this distance, Sentro thinks she recognizes the stippled dome and distinctive cant of the figure’s sturdy frame. She knows him. A friend? She can’t remember his name.
“Getting your son seems, in all honesty, insanely optimistic, Aubrey Sentro,” Zeme says, glancing up at the approaching aircraft, looking pleased. “Considering I only needed my boys to get up on that boat long enough to show we have possession and collect my money.” There it is. Sentro regrets briefly that the captain didn’t hear this.
Zeme waves the tablet and whoops as the yellow seaplane swoops low overhead. The mercenaries on the main deck follow suit; the wings tilt, a parcel tumbles out, and its translucent chute mushrooms open.
It’s a beautiful sight.
“But that’s already ancient history, isn’t it? And your son’s a fucking memory.”
Zeme stows the tablet and raises the old phone to dial. Her breath catching, Sentro can only hope that, with all the tiny arcane buttons, it will take him a moment to figure out how to key the detonation.
A crack and a high-pitched whine draw everyone’s eyes up. The drone has come apart, and it’s whirling down in pieces. Salah has shot it with the Kalashnikov from an accommodation tower stairwell landing.
And this second distraction
proves perfect.
On the dinghy, Jeremy has risen, his shaking legs beginning to buckle as he anticipates a bad ending, but braced on the bottom rung of her ladder, Sentro has already moved the barrel of her signal gun to the right, and Castor, shaking off the drone’s distraction, looks like he can’t quite process everything at once. His finger is poised over the BlackBerry keyboard but not moving. As if time has been suspended, he puzzles the riddle of a woman taking aim at her child.
She fires at the swollen prow that curves behind Jeremy. The flare hits the vinyl flush and burns the hole she wants in it but doesn’t penetrate; instead, to her horror, it skips up and pinwheels madly into the left breast of her husband’s old leather jacket, where it blooms with phosphorous flame on her son. Sentro screams, “No!” as if she were the one hit. Jeremy’s rocked off balance backward by both the impact and the dinghy’s deflation; he plunges into the water, where Sentro is counting on the weight of the IED vest he’s wearing to take him rapidly under so the incoming cell phone signal won’t connect.
And to her great relief, it doesn’t.
Castor Z. reflexively flattened himself on the bow of the patrol boat when Sentro’s gun fired, and as if still catching up with what she’s done, he only thought to key the phone after he dropped, so the delinquent call to Jeremy’s C-4 pack rings and rings and rings without result. The local cops and hired men on the patrol boats are likewise caught short and even slower to react.
Sentro leaps off the ladder into the ocean, dives deep after her son, bullets from above zipping uselessly into and through the water behind her, quickly losing thrust. She kicks down toward the distant, descending shape of the child she knows has never learned to swim.
Above her, a fractured, bright flash blisters the sea’s surface, followed by the dull thump of one of the patrol boats exploding.
And then the dazzling rain of debris.
Charlemagne has been knocked on his ass by the recoil of the recoilless Gustaf, but Zoala is already popping another shell into the canister and urging the Tagalog back to his feet. The Tagalog shoulders the tube, shoves it over the observation deck rail, and fires again down at the second boat. This round only clips the stern but blows a mortal wound in it, and now it’s all madness below: the flaming wreckage of the first boat, the second one sinking, hired guns and police leaping to the ladder and lines coming up the side of the cargo ship.
The ransom parcel plummets in lazy circles into the vast field of cargo and snags there on top of an uneven Jenga of disrupted containers, parachute sagging and then draping over it.
By the time Charlemagne manages to find his feet again, Zoala has fumbled the remaining ordnance, and they watch as it rolls under the rail and off the edge. Bullets rake the accommodation tower wall from below. They stumble back to the open hatch, where Mulligan hustles them down into the bridge.
And Sentro swims.
Kicking down into the murky depths of the bay. No sign of Jeremy.
Who can’t swim.
When he was little, she promised him she’d teach him, but lessons kept getting delayed. Dennis told her, later, that Jeremy refused to go to the pool at the Y without her, and then life overtook them and Jeremy got too old for his mom to teach him to swim, and they both let it go.
Until now.
Fire and light ribbon around her in miasmic striations of luminous yellow green; the bay is churned murky, plankton-mud stew, visibility negligible; her lungs ache. Above her, rippling through the surface water’s glimmer distortion, she can see Zeme hanging from the pilot’s ladder, sweeping the aim of his assault rifle back and forth over the oily, smoke-shrouded water where the deflated dinghy bobs. Waiting for Sentro to surface.
When she must, using the inflatable as poor but sufficient cover, she comes up just to take one big breath and kicks down again. Zeme pivots and fires and shreds the dinghy, too late to hit his target.
Elsayed, she thinks, pulling the memory out of nowhere as she swims down into the sea.
What in the world was Lucky Elsayed doing in the ransom seaplane?
Passengers and nonessential crew have barely managed to secure themselves in the safe cabin, slamming the door shut just as one of Zeme’s mercenaries runs into the anteroom. A burst of frustrated automatic gunfire splinters the compartment’s wood laminate, revealing thick steel plating underneath.
The hired man spits on the door and walks back out into the C-deck corridor, where—WHAM—a wide-stanced Zoala, who’s crept up to watch this all go down, sets and swings his cricket bat as hard as he can, catching the unfortunate target full in the face with the square drive he learned watching Shai Hope on YouTube.
It feels sweet.
Even as the man falls senseless, Zoala keeps striking him, again and again, reverse sweep, then a cut and a slog, before the man flops facedown on the deck.
“Howzat? Howzat?” he shouts.
And like a good batsman worried about his overs, Zoala keeps hitting him until Captain Montez and his second mate emerge and Montez catches the boy in his arms and pulls him away while Salah kicks the rifle clear and pins the dazed, bloody mercenary to the floor until other crewmen can bring the rope from the safe cabin survival kit, according to plan.
The explosion came out of nowhere.
The brief flash of the flare drew Lucky’s interest while the seaplane pilot cast a lazy, looping circle around the cargo ship to afford them the full measure of it. But then hell broke loose. A confusion of white carets lifted up from the cargo when the patrol boat blew up. He strained to see through the smoke and fire, searched for a sight of his friend. The plane banked away and gained altitude to avoid getting taken down by the birds. When it came around again, swooping low across the Jeddah’s length, from the open doors under the wings on either side Reno Elsayed and the fed sent some provisional bullets down on the armed men cresting the main deck gunwales to see if they might encourage a retreat.
They couldn’t.
Lucky sits back into the cabin from the wing strut, out of the punishing wind, and watches another couple of what he assumes are pirates scramble up onto the stern deck, hard on the heels of the others. Directly below, one harbor-patrol boat that was visible on the first pass now lists badly, damaged, sinking, amid the smoldering debris of what must have been the other. No sign of Sentro. Tethered to the other strut, Special Agent Warren can be heard letting loose more pattern fire, which causes the new two-man boarding party to scramble for cover as the plane buzzes over them. But one man rolls onto his back, aims what has to be some fancy new Russian assault weapon at the plane, and shoots with alarming accuracy.
Warren shouts and swings inside as Elsayed watches a couple of rounds go through the belly of the seaplane, just missing him, and pins of light stream in. “Hell’s bells. Is that an AK-308?”
The pilot banks away.
Lucky has to lean out wide to observe the selfsame shooter rise to his knees and signal his partner, and together they sprint into the cover of a narrow canyon between containers.
“Going for the money,” Agent Warren guesses aloud.
No surprise, really, that the fed had a government Citation X fired up and waiting at Martin State Airport, and he drove Elsayed there directly after picking him up from his morning jog. No time to change, but plenty of time on the long flight to Georgetown to debrief Lucky on Aubrey Sentro’s unfortunate intersect with high sea piracy. Or at least as much as Warren claimed he could make of it, given the dissembling and stonewalling of the Jeddah’s Shanghai-based parent company and its byzantine web of underwriters and private insurers, who kept insisting that this was a private matter, sheltered from US jurisdiction, and anyway, they had everything under control.
Which was why, Warren said, he decided to track down running Reno.
It’s just like Aubrey to get caught up in the random violent crime or uprising or revolution. Some of the independent contractors who cycled through the doors of Solomon over the years, all men, have privately complained
that she is a trouble magnet.
Elsayed can only observe dryly that she is still alive and operational while most of them are not.
He doesn’t understand why the fed decided to dive headfirst into this but suspects that Aubrey’s name rang the alarm in some deep-cover old spook’s payback machine. All that she’s done for God and country, some of which is so classified even Elsayed can’t get the details, must warrant and deserve Uncle Sam’s eternal gratitude.
Or maybe Agent Warren was just bored with busting dope rings and Ponzi schemes and rich old pedophiles. Break out the bureau’s fancy jet and some M16s; live the dream. Elsayed will take it, either way.
Because of the noisy open doors, they wear headsets to communicate. Warren is asking, “You know that canard about shooting fish in a barrel?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s bullshit. I saw so on MythBusters.”
“That’s still on TV?”
“Far as I know, yeah. Maybe in repeats, I guess.”
“I thought MythBusters was bullshit.”
“No, no. Straight up. Those guys are good.”
“Huh.” Elsayed’s jogging sweats have been ripening for hours, and while the fed hasn’t made a comment, Reno’s thankful to be in a steady breeze.
It nags at him that he didn’t see Sentro on the last pass over. The pilot has looped back for another run. The fed leans out to fire down at the observation deck of the Jeddah. Another pirate drops, unmoving.
“No barrels here, luckily,” Agent Warren observes.
CHAPTER FORTY
Like a dark ghost, she can see him below her. What she hopes is him. A shape in the water’s half light that must be him: legs limp but scissoring with the current, the heavy jacket billowing out like ventral fins to slow him but still dragging him down. Almost gone.
Sentro has lost track of how long she’s been underwater this dive, and Jeremy has been down longer; her lungs heave against her ribs as with one last desperate surge she kicks toward the suggestion of her son.
