The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe found Victor in the room, which suited her fine, and she suspected he’d been the one to arrange to have her bunk with him. Munroe dumped her gear on the floor, and without looking up from the array of equipment he’d already spread out on the bed, Victor said, “Leo says you take first.”

  “Is he on first too?”

  Victor nodded and said, “You know the ships?”

  His was the same question as Leo’s, only this one came from a place of concern instead of wanting to see her lose breakfast.

  “I’ve been on a few,” she said.

  Victor grinned and wagged his finger. “You keep secrets,” he said, and the way his gray-streaked beard twitched with his exaggerated speech forced her to return a smile. He’d already unloaded half his bag and unpacked his weapon, had laid out the equipment: handheld VHF radios, protective gear, and supplies—backups to his backups. He busied himself with his AK-47, which was what all of Leo’s team used because parts and ammunition were so easy to find in this part of the world and the telltale staccato blended in with the enemy’s.

  Courtesy of Leo, she’d be keeping watch unarmed, just a warm body to fill his obligations. Victor handed her a radio and an earpiece, then nodded to his ballistic helmet. “You can use if you want,” he said. “We trade when we trade shifts.”

  “You don’t want me dead like Leo does?” she said.

  He chortled and, noticing her interest in his weapon, said, “You use this before?”

  “Something like it,” Munroe said, and this time he laughed as if she’d let him in on a private joke. He wagged his finger again, as was his way. “You go on the ships, you use the guns.” He ran a palm over his weapon, but paused and shook his head. “You make up stories.”

  She smiled and shrugged. In all, she’d probably spent more time on the ocean than he had, mostly in cigarette boats and in gutted and refitted fishing trawlers that had hauled the smaller boats longer stretches, up coastline in the Bight of Biafra, all part of the gunrunning operation she’d abandoned when she was seventeen. On ships she’d laughed, and loved, and killed, and on a ship she’d fled one life for another. Now here she was, more than ten years later, another circle completed.

  Victor put the weapon in her hands, pointed out its working parts, and she listened, allowing him to teach her what he felt she should know, and when he was satisfied that she’d been properly schooled, he took the rifle away and returned to his own work.

  The ship shuddered beneath their feet, indicating that the lines had been cast off and the voyage was about to begin, and Munroe left the berth for the passageway and the main deck, for Leo who had no idea of the sweet talk and magic that had been involved in guaranteeing the tug and the pilot would be available, arrangements that he’d never had to make before, would probably never make again, a task that shouldn’t have fallen on her shoulders but had, due to his hiding their boarding from the agent.

  CHAPTER 4

  Munroe stood on the open deck of the Favorita, night-vision binoculars dangling uselessly from her wrist, staring out over the water and the pinpricks of light that dotted the vast blanket of darkness while the ship rolled a gentle back and forth in its forward churn through the ocean swells.

  They traveled at about twelve or thirteen knots—fourteen or fifteen miles an hour in land-based language—a slow and easy target in high-risk-area terminology. Leo had put her in this spot an hour ago with the instruction to keep watch, and knowing it would frustrate him, she’d stood exactly here and had done nothing more. The ship and the people on it weren’t her responsibility; she couldn’t care enough to pretend that they were.

  Another two hours and dawn would come, and if she had it her way, with the passage of time he’d become more irritated with her ineptitude until eventually he’d give up on her and wish he’d left her in Djibouti.

  Munroe glanced aft and caught the movement of his silhouette on the bridge port wing, some fifty feet above the main deck, where he patrolled, war-gamed up in a combat vest and helmet, cradling his automatic weapon: a contrast to the flashlight and whistle that he’d given her, both of which she’d tucked into pockets in the tactical vest because she had no intention of using them.

  He’d laughed when he’d first seen the vest, as if she were a child playing dress-up. Had asked where she’d gotten it, wanted to know what was in her pockets. When she wouldn’t answer, he walked away in disgust and she watched him go, trying hard to see what kept Amber Marie attached to him. Smart and independent, Amber humored his Napoleon complex and committed herself to a lifestyle she hated, for a man more often away than home. Whatever Leo gave, whatever Munroe couldn’t see, Amber loved him enough that for her the rest was worthwhile.

  Munroe turned from him to the water, to the invisible danger that might or might not lurk in waiting. The captain had taken them northeast, presumably into the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor, an unmarked sea lane between Yemen and Somalia where warships from two dozen nations patrolled nearly six hundred miles along the world’s busiest sea route.

  Fortune had turned against Somali piracy in recent years; the rate of hijacking attempts had fallen far below the heyday when dramatic confrontations and multimillion-dollar ransoms made international headlines. But the threat hadn’t gone away. Ships were still hijacked, just not as often. Travel in the Gulf of Aden was a calculated risk: The ocean was too vast for the warships to respond to every distress call, yet the odds were slim that any one ship would be the losing pocket on a roulette wheel of twenty-two thousand a year. Armed guards made safe transit a sure thing; in spite of attempts, no armed ship had ever been hijacked.

  Defending a moving fortress, guards had the advantage of the high ground; they were also better trained and better equipped, and three or four could do what twenty pirates on skiffs below could not. Even so, most merchant ships traveled without them. Armed transit was expensive, controversial, and, depending on the ships’ flag state, in many cases illegal.

  Leo moved out of sight to the far side of the bridge, so Munroe sat on the deck and leaned against the bulwark. Across from her, not more than a smudge of shadow beyond the crane, David held watch the way watch was meant to be held. He was Leo’s friend from their years together in the French Foreign Legion: two men already used to working as a team, now on the same sentry cycle to compensate for her perceived uselessness. That would be the order of things until they reached Mombasa—four hours on, four hours off, in a schedule that would turn days and nights into eight-hour segments and force her to wait several shifts before her off time rolled around at an hour that most on the ship would be sleeping and she’d be free to explore unobserved and unhindered.

  Munroe stood again, and, almost as if on cue, Leo’s voice sounded in her earpiece. She made a show of fiddling with the bud and then spoke too loudly so that he yelled at her in a whisper, and that made her smile. He instructed her to walk the port side of the ship, to keep alert, and so she made a slow amble, aft to fore and back again, with ocean spray carried up by the wind stinging her face and probabilities playing against facts, because as much as she didn’t care what happened to the ship, she cared what happened to herself. No matter what Leo claimed, this wasn’t a standard voyage or standard contract, and she fully intended to get back to land no matter how badly anyone else fucked things up.

  The sun rose, and Victor came as part of the relief of the next watch. “You do good?” he said.

  She pulled the flashlight from a pocket and handed it to him. “Your weapon,” she said. “Just in case.” His beard twitched and he wagged his finger, so she gave him the whistle as well.

  When he laughed, she grinned and turned away for the galley to grab food and see what more she could learn from her shipmates. Leo’s team was far too egalitarian to fit neatly into the formal segregation of officers and crew, but at sea they followed the patterns of their hosts, and on the Favorita that meant Leo and David ate in the officers’ mess, socialized with the officers, and had t
heir berth on the officers’ deck while the rest of them were relegated to the crew’s mess and crew’s quarters.

  The arrangement was how Munroe preferred things—it kept Leo away from her—and in any case, the crew interested her most. She ate in silence, listening to the cook hash out an issue with the mechanic, understanding nothing of the words rattled off in Tagalog, but plenty of the body language, and references to the captain, who came up in the conversation more than once.

  From what she’d observed, overheard, and coaxed out of the cook during a brief conversation before they’d fully embarked, the ship had three officers and thirteen crew—a Russian captain, first and second mates and engineer from Poland, and the crew mostly from the Philippines with the exception of three who were from Egypt. She didn’t know how long the captain had been with the Favorita, but it was longer than the cook, who’d been with the ship for four years.

  The mechanic left, the cook went about his work, and Munroe returned to the berth in an attempt to sleep, a fight against memories that were sometimes easier to forget than others. She tossed fitfully and, when the effort seemed futile, pulled the packet from her vest pocket and brushed her finger against the back of the facedown photo. Held it there a long while, connected to Miles Bradford, lover, lifesaver, companion, and friend, in the only way she could be.

  She’d contacted him once in the past eleven months, had sent him a newspaper clipping of a burned-out yacht, the end of a monster who’d nearly destroyed both their lives in his purchase of female flesh, a newspaper clipping that would have told him that she’d succeeded and was alive. She’d kept up with him from a distance, through status updates and news on his company blog, breadcrumbs that he put there for her because he had to know she was in the shadows, lurking, watching, though lately the breadcrumbs had become fewer, and her temptation to return stronger.

  The separation hurt, but it was better than the death that inevitably followed her, destroying the ones she loved most. This way, maybe they’d both stay alive.

  MUNROE WOKE TO the sound of the door handle turning, a firm yank out of a sleep she’d had no recollection falling into: a yank that pulled her out of bed and onto her feet ready to fend off an attack before the door had swung fully open.

  Victor stood in the doorway, one foot over the threshold, body frozen in place, muzzle of the rifle raised halfway in her direction, surprise etched onto his weatherworn face.

  Munroe raised her hands in a show of backing off. Said, “Bad dreams,” and stepped a retreat toward the bed. “I didn’t expect to sleep,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

  Victor lowered the weapon and moved past her, into the berth. He unsnapped, unzipped, and pulled off the tactical gear. Munroe stooped to scoop the fallen packet of pictures off the floor, reached for her vest, and with her head down and avoiding eye contact, stepped out, away from the shame of having given evidence of the emotional disequilibrium.

  Leo glowered when she arrived late. She turned her back to him and faced the water, allowed monotony to take from her what sleep could not. Time became routine and followed a rhythmic pattern that rose and fell with the motion of the sea and passed into the rotating of the watch.

  Leo gave up on her after her third turn at not even pretending to care, and, cautious to keep out of sight, she didn’t bother showing up again after that. They rounded the Horn of Africa and turned south along the Somali coast, presumably routing far off course as was standard procedure to evade pirate sightings, running dark at night to escape attracting attention with the lights.

  She spent daylight sleeping or talking with the crew, avoiding her bed, the berth, and the potential of being compromised around people she didn’t trust. When she did sleep, she did so on deck, among supplies or in hidden nooks that she’d discovered in her exploratory forays, and in the deep night and early morning she slipped down the access hatches and into the holds.

  There was something on this ship that made the crew nervous, caused huddled talk, shifting glances, and tension in their posture and interactions. With Leo’s flashlight she searched for inconsistencies in the way the bags of rice had been loaded, and it took over two days of incursions into the belly of the freighter before she found the first storage crate buried two bags deep, directly beneath the center of the number one cargo hatch.

  A touch of splintered wood had led her to more until she’d uncovered a portion of what had to be a larger cache, a mixture of small arms, Russian-made assault rifles, and antitank and antiaircraft weapons. There were possibly additional stockpiles, perhaps even larger munitions, buried deeper or that she’d overlooked in the other holds, but discovering this was enough for her questions and suspicions to find answers: If these weapons were legal and intended for discharge in Mombasa, they wouldn’t have been hidden, which meant they would have to be offloaded before reaching Kenya, and the only place to do that was Somalia.

  Munroe reburied the cache and made for the ladder, moving hand over hand, anger at Leo rising higher with each rung toward the deck. He hadn’t been hired to protect the ship, which was old and carrying worthless cargo; not even hired to protect the crew. Instead of diverting hundreds of nautical miles out of the way to avoid the hazard area, at some point they would be traveling directly into it. He’d been brought on to stand guard over the arms delivery itself.

  She reached the top of the ladder, disgust rising at the audacity, not the gunrunning—given her history she could hardly be a hypocrite in that regard. Leo had played God with her life, had deliberately taken choice away from her by withholding information: an act made all the more vile because as far as he knew she was young and inexperienced, and if things went to hell, he’d knowingly written her a death sentence.

  Munroe moved through the opening and crouched onto the deck, resealed the hatch, skirted between the coamings, and waited in the shadows, watching for Victor to pass on patrol. Strategy and tactical possibility laid themselves out on a chessboard inside her head, cold calculation muting the fury.

  It was one thing for her to play the fool and willingly allow someone to use her, another entirely to be played and used as if she were a fool.

  Certainly Victor, too, knew what lay beneath her feet, and his betrayal in the face of his act of concern stung worse than if this entire venture had only been Leo’s doing. And Amber Marie? What of her?

  Munroe drew in a deep breath and let the anger seep out, pulled rationality into its place. Detachment would serve her far better.

  She felt Victor’s approach before she saw him, instinct long honed during the years of hunting and being hunted in the dark. Waited for him to pass and then rose to approach from his blind spot, moving soundlessly, steps drowned by the wind.

  Victor startled when he felt her, said, “Christ!” and spun to face her. “Are you crazy?” he said, and then trying to cover the surprise gave her his bearded grin and said, “What new secrets do you bring tonight?”

  She kept beside him, stride matching his. “I think it’s you who’ve been keeping secrets.”

  “My secrets?” he said, and his voice betrayed a genuine earnestness that she’d truly hoped wouldn’t be there.

  “Where is this ship headed?” she asked.

  “That’s no secret. Mombasa—we all know this.”

  “Before Mombasa.”

  He stopped walking, turned to study her, and in the moonlight his expression twisted and his eyebrows lifted as if he’d begun to understand.

  “I’ve been exploring down in the hold,” she said. “Found a few interesting things. So where do we stop to deliver them?”

  Victor started walking again. “You didn’t know?” he said.

  “Didn’t know what exactly?”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Obviously, Leo knows,” she said. “And you know, and I assume that David knows. What about Emmanuel? Marcus? Am I the only one that Leo neglected to tell?”

  “He briefed me alone,” Victor said. “Told me he would do the same
for the others and that we were not to speak of it again.”

  “What’s your cut?” Munroe said.

  “If Leo finds out,” Victor said.

  “He’s the last person I’d tell anything.”

  “One-sixth,” he said. “On top of the voyage pay.”

  Munroe stopped walking. Whatever indifference she’d maintained after boarding the ship shed like the last of a snake’s old skin. Leo had gall forcing her on a gunrunning mission while cutting her out of the hazard pay.

  Victor paused, waiting for her, but Munroe had nothing more to say. She turned and strode away, and after a hesitation he continued on again.

  Munroe kept to the shadows, breathing in the dark and timing movement to skirt the others on patrol, went up on the inside, where, although she might be spotted, possibly caught, she wouldn’t cast shadows and invite a bullet the way she would outside. She’d not yet been on the officers’ levels, but she knew where Leo bunked and how to find him thanks to innocent questions and friendly banter with the bosun that had given her enough to map out the deck in her head.

  She reached the level and turned down the passageway, quiet like the rest of the ship, and when Munroe found the berth that she understood to be Leo’s, she thrust the door open.

  Leo was already upright on his bed, reaching for a sidearm, when she strode through.

  “There’s no point in shooting,” she said.

  The light in the room switched on, brilliantly painful, and Munroe shut the door, leaned back against it, and crossed her arms.

  Weapon two-fisted in her direction, Leo swung his legs over the side of the bed and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Demanding my cut,” she said.

  “Are you insane? You walk into my room in the middle of the night and start nonsense.”

  “I’ve been down in the hold,” she said. “I understand basic math. There are six of your people on this ship. I’m one of them. I want my cut.”