The Devil's Waters

by David L. Robbins

  “Have you been there?”

  “Yes. Many times.”

  “Have you seen this?”

  Suleiman sighed, the indulgent manner of an older kinsman. “What does it matter that I have not seen a jinn when the Qu’ran says they exist?”

  Suleiman eyed the night where the black flutter had been and disappeared.

  “They are real. They are ayat.” Miracles. “So was that.”

  In the tales Yusuf’s mother told, the spirits were always beautiful. They looked like men, they loved or hated men. Even the evil jinn in her tales were never horrible to behold, not like the beasts and ostriches Suleiman described. She schooled him as a child that jinn could be killed with a date or a plum stone shot from a sling. He had none of these.

  In the east where the moon would rise, a pearly blush crept along the horizon. Time did not pause to worry over Yusuf or to recall the stories of his mother. Another minute of silence carried him closer to whatever this long night was going to be.

  He said, “They will not send regular soldiers to take this ship back. There will be killing.”

  Suleiman held his gaze into the stars. “The jinn has come to watch.”

  “This is what the signs say? That the soldiers are coming?”

  “No, cousin.” Suleiman lowered his eyes to the ship. He shrugged his Kalashnikov into his hands. “They are not coming. They are here.”

  Yusuf leveled his own rifle to the dark corridor at the base of the bloodstained steps.

  Behind his gun, Suleiman whispered, “I should like to see a jinn before I die.”

  Yusuf would not ignore his cousin’s portents or the memory of his mother’s tales. But he let Suleiman watch for signs.

  Yusuf watched for men.

  Chapter 33

  From the cargo deck, LB monitored the short exchanges between Wally and Jamie. Doc and the others surrounding the bridge would be listening too.

  “Clear.” Jamie had just arrived at the next landing down, checked it, found it empty.

  “Go.” Wally moved on his tail, watching their backsides.

  As he’d done an hour earlier, LB slipped in and out of the companionway, forging his way toward the stern. He dropped down off the cargo deck, lay flat, then crept in shadow below the level of the steel rail. LB gained as much distance as he could, then scurried up another dark ladder until the next guard had passed or turned away.

  He reached the aft corner of the cargo deck, ducking behind the last lashing bridge to catch his breath. The gray face of the superstructure seemed a giant tombstone. The radio buzzed in his ear.

  “LB. In position?”

  “Roger.”

  “Hold.”

  Moments later, Jamie spoke.

  “Target down.”

  LB hustled to the ladder. Landing on the deck, he spun the Zastava across his back. Jamie had detached the magazine from the dead man’s Kalashnikov to drop it overboard. He dug hands under the pirate’s armpits. LB hurried to take hold of the sandaled feet. Hefting the body, he noted the callused heels. The Somali’s blouse bore twin punctures in the chest. Black blood seeped into the linen.

  “Over here,” LB whispered. They lugged the body to a gloomy corner. No need to risk dumping it overboard. The corpse didn’t have to stay hidden for long. It was going to be one of many very shortly.

  LB shook hands with Jamie. “Sorry about this.”

  “Me, too. Later. Hey, did the engineer move his legs?”

  “A couple of toes.”

  “Nice.”

  “Hey, kid. Next time I say I got it by myself, kick me.”

  “I’ll let Wally do it.”

  LB didn’t follow the reference. It didn’t matter. Wally crouched, waiting in the companionway. LB and Jamie took knees beside him.

  “Which way?” Wally asked.

  “Good to see you, too.”

  “I know. Which way?”

  “Hit the stern first. Lock down our six. Three targets. The wind’ll carry the sound backward.”

  Wally tapped the Serb’s unsuppressed weapon hanging off LB’s shoulder. “Keep that quiet as long as you can. Jamie, take point.”

  The young PJ entered the narrow passage to the stern, coiled and athletic, holding the M4 ready. Wally gestured LB to the center, then took the rear.

  They moved quickly, keeping close and low. Nearing the corner of the stern, Wally whispered to LB, “Hold.”

  LB stopped. Wally edged past in the narrow corridor.

  Jamie eased the final distance to the corner, Wally tight behind him. Jamie dropped his NVGs over his eyes and lay flat. He edged his face forward. Directly over him, Wally hugged the wall, ready to step out and fire. Jamie murmured into the radio, “I got the far one. You take the close one. We’ll both get the middle.”

  Jamie skittered back. He gathered to a knee, night goggles down to rely on the IR beam of his weapon.

  Gun barrels tilted up, Wally said, “Now.” The two whirled around the corner, Wally high, Jamie bent low, M4s leveled into the open. They found their targets fast. Both guns jerked in tandem. The suppression tubes cloaked any flashes; reports were dulled to pops and the clacks of chambering rounds. The wind blew most of the sound out over the water. Jamie fired three times, Wally four. Without lowering their carbines, the two slipped around the corner. LB scurried behind them in support.

  Wally and Jamie hastened along the stern rail, the only two silhouettes in motion. Wan moonlight dusted the three downed pirates. Wally leaned over them to fire once into each. He heaved two AKs and an RPG overboard. Three towed skiffs bounded on the Valnea’s wake, attached to grappling hooks over the rail. Jamie trained his M4 on the starboard corner while Wally mopped up. LB pivoted away to do his part and guard the starboard passage.

  Six pirates were dead so far. One Serb. More to come. No one and nothing could stop the tempest of this night. Jamie, the youngest of the PJs, was handling himself well in close combat. This underscored how foolish LB had been to separate from him. There was no such thing as a milk run.

  Wally and Jamie moved beside LB. Wally checked his watch. Even in the poor light, blood dotted the rim of the suppression tube on his M4.

  LB asked, “Something you said before. On the radio.”

  “What?”

  “You said Doc assaults the bridge if we run out of time. What’d you mean?”

  “I should’ve told you earlier.”

  “Told me what?”

  “We got forty-four minutes. At oh-two-one-oh, a Reaper’s going to sink us if we haven’t secured the ship.”

  “Us? You mean, like, us?”

  “Hostages, pirates, us. Presidential order. It’s got to be done in deep water and before we get in range of the coast. They’ll blame the pirates for blowing up the ship. All very neat.”

  That it was. With a drone locked and loaded, invisibly high, the PJs had no choice down here on the ship. They were locked in, too, along with the Somalis. Neither side had any way out but to kill the other. This was worse than combat. It was gladiatorial.

  Jamie asked LB, “You know what’s on this ship?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Don’t tell me. But does this make sense to you? To blow it up rather than let the Somalis keep it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” the young PJ said, “at least that’s something.”

  Jamie flipped the NVGs over his eyes. He crouched, facing the bow, instantly ready. “Where’s the next one?”

  Chapter 34

  Wally kept his mouth shut about it, but LB was useless.

  He couldn’t fire the Serb weapon; one burst from the loud Zastava, and their position would be compromised. He wore no body armor. Creeping along the corridor, Wally had to keep him in the middle, protected between himself and Jamie. LB knew where the Somalis were, but Jamie’s NVGs showed him better than LB’s whispers what lay ahead.

  LB had little stomach for the killing. He had bloodstains on his pants and shoulders, and maybe that
was enough for him. LB winced at the blood Wally was taking on, splashed on the muzzle of his suppressor, sprayed over his boots. Wally couldn’t be sure all the distance shots he and Jamie took were lethal. He had to put the Somalis down to stay, couldn’t risk a wounded pirate sounding the alarm or sneaking up on them from behind. Killing was terrible work, but it was the mission.

  They crept past the starboard stairwell where Jamie had made his first shot, a clean takedown. Since then, Jamie, younger than LB and Wally by more than a decade, had held himself in check. He could’ve moved faster without the two of them in tow, but PJs didn’t operate alone. LB had known this when he sent Jamie back on the chopper.

  Thirty yards along the narrow passageway, passing the crane towering over the ship’s midsection, Jamie flattened to the deck.

  “Down.”

  LB and Wally dove for the steel floor.

  The next pirate to die trod their way, lit well in the goggles.

  Jamie set up the shot, propped on his elbows, eye pressed to the infrared sight. The thin emerald rail that only Jamie and Wally could see reached out to the pirate’s heart. Wally couldn’t bring his own weapon into play without sitting up straight, couldn’t back up Jamie’s shot because of LB lying in front of him.

  “Let him come,” Wally whispered into the radio. “Wait till he reacts.”

  The pirate closed to ten yards before his arms moved to bring up his Kalashnikov. His sandals skidded a backward step. Jamie’s single round continued the Somali’s reversal, lifting him off his feet and dropping him faceup.

  Wally pushed off the deck, careful to stay below the rail. LB leaped to his feet and beat him to the pirate. Kneeling, LB pushed two fingers into the man’s carotid for a pulse. His hand was there when Wally drove the M4’s barrel into the Somali’s chest and pulled the trigger.

  “Goddammit,” LB whispered from his knees. “He wasn’t dead.”

  Wally threw the pirate’s AK over the rail. He answered LB with a fresh glance at his watch.

  “Oh-one-twenty-nine. Let’s go.”

  Jamie resumed inching along the starboard passageway, and LB turned to follow. Wally bit back the urge to bicker.

  Forty yards later they killed the next pirate the same way, Wally finishing the downed Somali after Jamie’s shot to the chest. LB stayed flat on the deck until Wally pitched the pirate’s weapon overboard.

  The ship coursed over a flat and empty sea. The closer to the bow Jamie led them, the louder grew the noise of the hull carving the water. The young PJ quickened his pace, counting on the masking breeze and sea.

  Wally checked with Doc. Nothing had changed inside the bridge. The pirates and hostages rode the freighter into the night, nervous but unaware. Dow cut in to remind Wally of the time.

  The next Somali, the last one on starboard before the bow, came into view thirty yards away. This one leaned out over the rail, quietly studying the wake or the heavens. He exposed only his waist and legs to Jamie’s IR beam, his torso obscured behind a steel support. Wally couldn’t wait on the man’s reverie to finish. He had no time to indulge this pirate looking longingly for home or into the magnetic sky. Wally stood above the rail. He hoisted the M4 to his shoulder and strode past the kneeling Jamie and LB.

  The pillar blocked the pirate’s view of Wally stopping ten feet away.

  “Hey.”

  The Somali, thin like the others, a short man and darker than the horizon, brought his attention around the pillar. He faced Wally, hands lifted from his sides. Wally shot the pirate twice in the chest before he could complete the gesture of surrender.

  Wally did not fire into this one again. He’d been close enough to know.

  Seven down.

  He dropped the Somali’s gun over the rail, then lowered into the shadows beside the body. LB and Jamie skittered to him.

  LB wore no helmet or goggles, nothing to conceal his conflict over the carnage, no matter how necessary. Like the pirate, Wally gave him no chance to do more. He addressed Jamie.

  “There’s four on the bow. How do you want to handle it?”

  “Maybe we should back up. Go around the stern and clean up the port side one at a time, like we’ve been doing. Then hit the bow.”

  The time was 0132. Thirty-eight minutes left. By the time they’d backtracked two hundred meters around to port, staying out of sight the whole way, they’d have lost at least four minutes.

  “LB?”

  Wally made ready to cut him off if he brought up anything but a tactic. LB pulled his eyes from the corpse.

  “The whole starboard rail is bodies. Some Somali goes looking for a cigarette, we’re screwed. There’s nine left around the deck. We got four of ’em in one place. I say we go to the bow. After that, if things go bad, the numbers are a lot better.”

  Wally agreed. “We press the bow. Jamie.”

  The young PJ stayed on point, leading them the last twenty yards along the starboard rail. The overhang ended, and the bow opened to the night sky. Jamie halted at the corner to peek. He lifted his NVGs, motioning Wally forward.

  Wally nudged past LB to ease his head around the steel wall.

  From the top of a mast, a white beacon bathed the bow in garish light. Night-vision goggles would be useless here.

  Wally whispered, “There goes our advantage.”

  The bow was a wide but jumbled space. The business of anchoring and mooring the freighter took place here. Thick chains, lines, the metal stubs of hawsers—nowhere was there ten clear feet without an obstruction. Lit from above, the maze of gray steel was a warren of shadows and cover. A running firefight here could last a long time, longer than the Predator would give them. If the five pirates left on the port rail got involved, Wally, Jamie, and LB could get bottled up, probably until they were killed by either the pirates or the drone. Wally would have to put the call in for Doc to take the bridge.

  Wally leaned his head out farther.

  One Somali ambled along the starboard rail, tunic and head scarf fluttering in the gusts. He carried an RPG. Another, with an AK, walked the rail on port.

  “LB.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said there were four up here.”

  “There were an hour ago.”

  Wally let LB replace him at the corner. LB raised his head slowly to get a better angle across the cluttered bow. After seconds, he reeled himself in. Jamie took his place to keep watch.

  “Two of them might be sleeping, or sitting down. There’s a lot of places to hide up here.”

  Wally pushed his M4 around so it hung across his back, where it would jangle less.

  LB asked, “What’re you doing?”

  “Gotta go find them.” Wally rolled off his knees to his haunches. To Jamie, he said, “Stay ready. We’ll move after we know where they all are.”

  LB blocked Wally’s path. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Move.”

  “No. PJs don’t work alone.”

  Mirroring Wally, LB swung the big Zastava to his back. From under his pants leg he pulled a blood-sullied blade.

  LB shrugged. “Okay, I admit. I kinda forgot that.”

  Wally unsheathed his own knife.

  Wally lost sight of LB quickly. Squat and thick, LB disappeared into the jumbled terrain like a cat, shadows gathering across his back. Wally jackknifed himself as small as he could, bending at the waist and knees, and sped from cover to cover, the breeze and sea sounds shrouding the scuffles of his boots. LB scoured the right half of the bow, Wally the left. Around the corner, Jamie kept an infrared eye on the two pacing Somalis. Every few seconds, he murmured to the crawling LB and Wally about where the pirates walked or looked.

  Wally crabbed sideways, pausing in pools of shade made crisp by the harsh light overhead. He checked for places a tired pirate might loaf on a warm hijacked night. Maybe away from the light, or near the rail so his mates could wake him if a boss came near. Where was a soft place on this hard bow?

  Wally stole between hawsers. He
scurried into the open to hide behind the bulk of a giant spool, one of two windlasses for hauling the great anchor chain. The machine had a broad shadow, and there he found his pirate. The napping Somali was sprawled on a heavy nylon line laid out in switchback rows to make a bed. Beside him lay a rocket grenade launcher.

  “Got him,” Wally whispered. “Sleeping on a pile of rope. Next to the left windlass.”

  “Roger,” Jamie uttered. “You’re clear so far.”

  “LB?”

  “Hold.” Moments passed, then LB came back. “I see the ropes on this side. No one on them.”

  The reek of corrosion dripped from the iron chain. Wally slunk deeper into the shadow of the links.

  “LB. Anything?”

  “Nothing. This side of the bow’s clear.”

  “Sit tight. Jamie.”

  “Go.”

  “Looks like there’s only three targets up here. You still have visual on two?”

  “Roger.”

  “Can you make both shots?”

  “The one close to me, yeah. The one over by you, that’s forty yards. He’s moving. There’s too much stuff in the way.”

  “Can you make the shots?”

  “Clean? Negative.”

  Wally tapped the blade against his gloved palm. The plan formed fast for him, and he saw no other way.

  “LB?”

  “Go.”

  “Can you get over here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I know you’re hating this.”

  “Shut up, Wally. I’ll do him.”

  “All right. Move.”

  Wally raised his head to get a fix on the pirate twenty yards away, strolling the port rail. The quarter moon had slipped above the horizon, gilding the waters where the Somali cast his attention.

  Wally could take him. He slid away the knife and shed the M4 from his back into his hands. This pirate was chubby, with a protruding belly under the dangling Kalashnikov. How could that be, from such a poor country? The man walked barefoot with a lazy gait.

  Wally detected a rumple in the shadows. LB emerged to sidle next to him in the shadow of the windlass, knife in hand.

  “Jamie. LB’s in position. On my mark.”