The Law of the Sea : A Legal Thriller

by Dave Gerard

  The leader stepped forward brought the parang up carefully over my struggling and screaming form. I started gibbering something, and I heard Rockaway shouting “Wait, wait, let’s talk about this, he’ll tell you what you want to know, just—”

  And then at that moment, I saw the figure of Jared Diamond come barreling out of nowhere, slamming into the leader, knocking him over and making him drop his parang. Somehow, Diamond had gotten free of his bonds, and now he and the leader were wrestling viciously on the floor. Then Trevor Thompson, his hands still bound, yelled something and rammed into the lanun who were now trying to stop Diamond, taking two of them down in a heap.

  Everything was chaos as Diamond and the leader wrestled on the floor right in front of me. Diamond’s teeth were barred like a wild animal. But moments later, the leader freed his hand and reached for his belt. He grabbed a handgun, placed it against Diamond’s stomach, and triggered two shots at point blank range. The sound was deafeningly loud in the enclosed space. Ashley screamed.

  I saw Diamond choke right in front of me, and blood spurted out of his mouth. But then his face contorted into a terrible grin, and somehow he got his hands on the leader’s parang, and he plunged it right into the man’s stomach, once, twice, a third time, blood gushing out all the while. I saw the leader’s face twist in agony. Then Diamond brought his hands up to the leader’s face and in a snapping movement darted his fingers forward. There was a bloody scream and I saw, with horrified fascination, that Diamond had gouged out one of his eyes. The leader lay back, screaming in pain, blood welling out of the socket.

  Ricky Tang struggled to bring his rifle to bear over Trevor Thompson, who was stronger than the three skinny lanun trying to hold him down put together, but Thompson was shoving them and Tang couldn’t get a clear shot.

  Diamond managed to pull himself to his feet, leaving the leader screaming bloody murder on the floor, and went for the gun. But then Tang finally got the rifle free and popped off a half a dozen rounds straight into Diamond’s back. Diamond fell forward and crashed to the ground in a tangled heap. Then he twitched and was still.

  In the midst of all of this, I saw that Ashley had grabbed something from the leader’s belt. A phone. It was an old flip phone, from times past. I saw her grit her teeth and flip it open. Then she just stared.

  “What the hell do I dial?” she yelled.

  “Shit. What’s 9-11 in Malaysia?” I said.

  “I have no fucking idea!”

  “Google it?” Vijay suggested.

  “You want me to fucking Google it?” she screamed. Everyone was fast getting to their feet, and I could tell the situation was about to turn against us.

  “Call the American consulate!” yelled Schnizzel. “+60 3-9212 6000!”

  “Why in God’s name do you have that phone number memorized?” I said, amazed.

  “In case I get kidnapped in a foreign country and have a chance to use the phone! Katie used to call me paranoid. But look who’s laughing now!”

  I was momentarily nonplussed, but Ashley didn’t hesitate. She dialed the number. Apparently she connected with someone, because she started screaming into the phone about being a U.S. citizen, with a bunch of other U.S. citizens, and her name was Ashley Marcum, and they had all been kidnapped by pirates, or lanun or whatever, and that we were probably in Sumatra off the Strait of Malacca and we were in some building they called a coffee shop and that someone had just been shot and they—

  Then the phone was snatched away from her by Ricky Tang. He dashed it to the floor, where it broke into pieces. By then, more lanun had rushed into the coffee shop. They forced Trevor Thompson down and soon had the rest of us on the floor as well. Jared Diamond was bleeding out, dying or dead already. The lanun herded us into the middle of the room with the rifle, pistols, and parangs, and started yelling at us, which I couldn’t understand, but I got the gist. We all lay face down on the floor and put our hands behind our heads, praying that we wouldn’t get shot. Vijay tried to get medical attention for Diamond, and for Thompson, who looked to be in bad shape, but they kicked him in the face, splattering his nose with blood, and then he just lay there and shut up.

  From my position on the floor, I heard the lanun making frantic phone calls. Maybe to more senior people. I didn’t know what would happen. Maybe they would try to ransom us. Or maybe they would just kill us outright, for the trouble we’d caused.

  We lay that way, frozen, face down on the floor, for some hours, through the remainder of the night and into the early hours of the morning. The time passed without sensation. My mind was numb, and my thoughts refused to connect. My jaw was pounding, and I was dimly aware of cramps in my stomach. I was in desperate need of water.

  Some unknown number of hours into this ordeal, probably soon after dawn, judging by the light leaking in through the cracks, I began to hear noises outside. At first, I thought I was hearing things. But the noises steadily grew louder and louder. Mechanical noises. I heard the faint whir of machinery, coming closer. I figured it must be more lanun arriving in their pancung boats. But when I snuck a glance at the lanun, I saw that they looked troubled.

  As the noises grew closer and closer, and louder and louder, I began to realize that they must coming from heavy equipment. Heavier than anything the lanun would have. I heard the lanun talking to each other animatedly. Some of them ran outside.

  The sounds had sharpened into focus, and I could hear them clearly. They weren’t coming from boats at all. The whirring noises were unmistakably coming from the blades of a helicopter. More than one helicopter, I soon realized.

  I felt a spark of hope in my chest. There was no way that the lanun would have a helicopter. It had to be someone else. The Malaysian authorities, maybe. But how would they know where we were? I looked over at Ashley. Could her phone call have possibly worked? Was someone able to trace us just from that? It seemed too fast to be possible.

  The helicopter noises were almost overwhelmingly loud now. The lanun had lost interest in us. They shouted at each other frantically as they tried to figure out what was going on. I heard the sounds of yelling and heavy movement outside.

  Suddenly, we heard the bursts of gunfire. Pistols, firing scattered shots. Then the sound of heavy, sustained automatic return fire. Big holes broke out in the plywood walls of the coffee shop as bullets slammed into them. I kept my head down and screamed something.

  I heard more shouting and gunfire outside, and then the rush of booted feet. “Go, go, go!” came the shouts. It took me a few moments to process that they were speaking English, and I could understand their words. They weren’t Malaysian. They were American!

  In that moment, a big black combat boot slammed through the door to the coffee shop, bursting it clear out of its frame. Silhouetted in the doorway stood a bulky soldier in full camo gear, wearing a Kevlar vest, night-vision goggles, and holding a huge black rifle in front of him. He loomed in the entrance, looking like a veritable giant compared to the scrawny lanun. The soldier advanced inside with his weapon raised and yelled something in badly accented Malay. A prepared phrase. More soldiers followed him in a rush, their booted feet shaking the crude wooden floor of the coffee shop.

  The soldiers were shouting, and the lanun were shouting back, including Ricky Tang, and the soldiers had their rifles up, and then one of our guards raised his pistol and shot a round into the lead soldier’s chest, punching into his vest and knocking him back a step.

  The return fire came from half a dozen automatic rifles at once. It was so loud that I went momentarily deaf, and couldn’t hear my own screaming as the bullets passed over our heads and tore the poor lanun to shreds. Ricky Tang and the other guards immediately dropped their weapons and put their hands up, gibbering. They were quickly forced to the floor and taken captive. In the confusion, I saw Ashley lunge toward the leader’s still form, open the pouch at his waist, and pocket the gold coins that
they’d taken from us.

  The soldiers fanned out across the coffee shop and quickly searched the adjoining rooms. They called out “clear!” as they swept each one. More booted feet stamped around outside. Eventually, after all threats had been neutralized, one of the soldiers took off his night-vision goggles and approached us. He stopped in front of Ashley.

  “Ms. Ashley Marcum?” he inquired politely.

  After the soldiers finished mopping up the lanun and securing the area, they untied us, and a medic tended to our injuries. Thompson was pretty badly beat up, but he would be okay. Vijay had a broken nose. I had a loose tooth and a busted lip. There was nothing the soldiers could do for Jared Diamond, who was long dead.

  The pre-dawn raid had been a full-scale military operation. There were two combat helicopters parked in the clearing outside. Dozens of soldiers were roaming the area. I recognized their insignia. They were Navy SEALs. About a dozen lanun were lying face down in the clearing with their hands tied behind their backs. The leader was among them. He was badly injured, but still alive. About a half a dozen more of the lanun were dead, their bodies resting under white shrouds.

  “How did you find us?” Ashley asked the soldiers after we had thanked them profusely and things had settled down. “I didn’t think I’d reached the consulate for long enough to say anything useful.”

  “Yes ma’am. Someone must have received orders about you beforehand, because we were on alert when the call came in. When you called the consulate, we were able to trace it to right here.”

  “Who put you on alert?” I asked.

  “Don’t know, sir. Above my pay grade.”

  They gave us food and water, which we accepted gratefully. After they received the okay from mission control, the soldiers escorted us onto a helicopter. It took off with a roar, and the jungle faded away below us as we made our way over the ocean and through the sky.

  THIRTY-TWO

  I stood on the deck of the USS Pickney. It was high noon, and I was looking out at the blue waters of the Strait.

  The ship felt ominous here. The USS Pickney was an Independence-class littoral combat ship in the U.S. Seventh Fleet. It looked futuristic from the front, with concave, layered steel walls designed to repel water or radar or whatever else. The rear looked more like a station wagon, with a fat helicopter deck jutting out the back. The littoral combat ship was a jack of all trades, capable of anti-submarine warfare, intelligence, reconnaissance, and special operations. It was armed with Mk 110 57 mm guns and RIM-116 rolling airframe missiles. It housed two Seahawk SH-60 helicopters, as well as autonomous surface and underwater vehicles.

  All of this was being relayed to me in great detail by Petty Officer Third Class Connery, who had been assigned to guard me. Apparently, the Navy was considering decommissioning the littoral (a fancy word for coastal) combat ships. Connery thought this was a grave mistake. I half-listened to him as I tried to think through my situation.

  During our absence, the world had gone insane. The story of our capture by, and subsequent rescue from, pirates in the Strait of Malacca was getting wall-to-wall coverage in the media. It was a sensational story. Two American lawyers and their compatriots, working on the hottest case of the day, seized by pirates, and then rescued in dramatic fashion by Navy SEALs. We even made the Wall Street Journal, albeit on the third page, after an article about a two percent correction in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

  I felt for my cell phone before I remembered that it was gone. I imagined it must be ablaze with calls and texts from everyone I knew. The first thing I did was use the ship’s communications system to call my mom and tell her I was okay. After that I put in a call to HH&K. Then I read the news to try and figure out what was going on.

  The world was dancing perilously close to an international incident over the Flor de la Mar. The news was reporting military build-up from countries in the area. Malaysia had put its Navy on high alert. Indonesia had bulked up its presence in the area. So had India, which controlled the waters near the Nicobar Islands. Portugal was also reportedly sending a squadron of ships, although they would take some time to arrive. The world had somehow found out that Flor de la Mar was near the Nicobar Islands, though I didn’t know how. The exact location was still unknown. Air footage of the sea near the islands showed destroyers and heavy cruisers everywhere.

  The U.S. also had a prodigious presence in the region. The USS Pickney was part of the Seventh Fleet, which was the largest forward-deployed fleet in the world, operating primarily in the Pacific. The Seventh Fleet was based in Japan, and had sixty to seventy warships, including nuclear-powered submarines, an aircraft carrier strike group, and tens of thousands of Navy and Marine personnel at the ready.

  I thought about all the force all these ships could bring to bear in a mere moment. The seas by the Nicobar Islands were fast becoming a powder keg. The situation could be set alight by the slightest wrong move by anyone.

  But as earthshaking as all of that was, there was even bigger news. To me, at least. It was about the case. Someone had filed the death memo in Judge Graves’ court, and its contents were being widely reported in the press. The dramatic story of David Marcum’s death and Rockweiller’s coverup was all over the news, with details that could only have come from the memo. I couldn’t believe it.

  It must have been Harder, I thought. He was the only other person who knew. We had given him a copy of the memo for safekeeping in case anything happened to us. Maybe he had felt the need to do something to atone for the disqualification. To balance the scales. I didn’t know. I wondered what Judge Graves would do to him.

  I didn’t have to wonder what Judge Graves was going to do to Rockweiller. According to news reports, Graves had hauled Rockweiller’s top executives and the entire Badden & Bock team down to Galveston, Texas, and was stretching them out on the rack in a week-long sanctions hearing. Graves had threatened to throw the lot of them into federal prison if they didn’t come clean. Rockweiller’s stock had tanked, and the board of directors was resigning en masse. Word was that the CEO was going to be forced out. I had a dozen unread emails from Zachary Bock and John Cartwright, begging me to settle the case for ever-increasing sums of money. I couldn’t believe it.

  On deck, an officer approached me, interrupting my train of thought and Connery’s soliloquy about the littoral combat ship. Connery saluted and stood at attention.

  “Sir,” the officer said to me. “I’ve spoken to the U.S. consulate as well as Seventh Fleet Command. They’ve determined that there’s no further danger to you at this time. I have orders to escort you safely to a local airfield. A plane has been chartered to take you back to the United States.”

  The Navy flew us back in a transport plane. The aircraft was huge, the cavernous interior big enough to hold a hundred people and their gear. Today, it was only the five of us and Jared’s casket. On another day I might have been awed, but today I barely noticed. During the flight, we didn’t speak much. I sat quietly and thought about our capture and rescue. About Jared’s death. About the memo. About the case, and what was going to happen next.

  Before going back to Texas, we landed in Florida. To drop off Rufus Rockaway, and to attend Jared’s funeral. The military respectfully agreed to stop there and ferry us back to Texas afterward.

  The funeral was a simple affair at the Aqua Ray dive resort. Jared’s kin were there. I met his mother, a hard-bitten woman of eighty years. I also met his brother Jacob, who was his spitting image.

  I told them what had happened, and how Jared had saved us in Sumatra. That we wouldn’t have escaped without him. His mother nodded proudly. That was just like him, she said. He was never one to take it lying down. His brother said that was how Jared would have wanted to go, if he had a choice.

  Trevor Thompson said a few words on the beach, and then we took Jared’s ashes out on a boat. Jared had wanted his remains scattered at his favo
rite dive site. It was the sheer wall of coral that Thompson had taken us to on our first visit to Key West. I watched Jared’s ashes disappear beneath the surface, and imagined them drifting down to the bottom, like a deep well. Thompson broke down and shed tears, weeping unashamedly for his friend. Jared’s brother, mother, and I remained grim-faced. I felt sad for the role I had played in causing Jared’s death. But there were people more responsible than I was. And they were going to pay.

  After that, there was just one last thing we had to do in Florida.

  At 9 a.m. the next morning, Ashley and I walked into the Key West branch of Bank of America.

  Travis Scott had been frantically trying to reach me ever since we’d sent the demand letter about the safety deposit box. When he finally got ahold of me, he apologized profusely, and said he hadn’t known about the box. He agreed to give us access if we would forego sanctions against Bank of America. I said yes, and we went to go see the box.

  The bank was quiet. No one else was there. The branch was a standard retail office of the chain, with regulation desks, regulation teller stands, and a few artificial plants placed here and there. Some bland elevator music was playing. It was all so ordinary that it felt surreal.

  The bank manager hurried up to greet us. He was nervous. No doubt Scott had told him who we were and not to mess around with us. The manager led us back to the safety deposit area. Then he gave Ashley a key and a box number and left us alone. Ashley and I looked at each other.

  This was our last shot at the contract, I knew. The wrongful death lawsuit had basically been won. The death memo had done them in, and Rockweiller was desperate to settle. It was just a question of how much. That seemed crazy to say, after we had been pursuing the case with everything we had for the last year. It was stunning to see the mighty Rockweiller Industries and Badden & Bock fall so quickly, and so unexpectedly, while we hadn’t even been there to witness it.