The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe paused. Heard the thud again. Was fifteen feet away when the first man, dressed in commando getup, reached the deck and slid over the rails. A moment later a partner came up behind him.

  The second man untied a rope from his waist, pulled hand over hand, and hauled up a grenade launcher, which he gave to the first man, and a Kalashnikov rifle that he kept for himself. The man with the launcher passed within a few feet of Munroe, and he carried his weapon with the casual confidence of one who’d handled rifles since childhood, yet his gait, clumsy and ill-timed, betrayed him as an amateur playing dressed-for-war, as if he mimicked moves seen on television without understanding the reasons for them.

  Munroe breathed down the quandary. The boat they’d come from was her way of escape. And yet these men were far enough fore that without the night vision, Leo’s team would never see them, and there was no way to give Leo a warning without alerting the invaders to her own presence. Munroe moved from her belly into a crouch.

  The man with the launcher spoke, and she froze.

  The words came in Somali. “Remember, don’t shoot the captain.”

  “How do I know which is the captain?” said the other.

  “You saw his picture.”

  “But they are all white men.”

  “Only shoot the legs,” said the grenade launcher, and the man with the rifle signaled something and lay prone on the deck, face toward the bridge, while the man with the launcher crept away from his partner, as if he intended to continue around the foremost side of the hatch to the port side. Munroe strained to pull images from the dark, far down the deck. Still no Victor. Waited until Grenade Launcher approached the corner of the hatch and then slunk through shadow after him.

  She came on him from behind. Hand to head, foot to knee. Slammed his face into the metal edge of the coaming and his body went limp in a fight that had ended too fast to be fair. She’d killed more often than she wished to remember, had fed off the hunt and suffered from it all the same. The law of the jungle cried out to her to finish what she’d started, to answer treachery with treachery and dump him in the ocean, but this wasn’t her battle, it wasn’t personal enough to upend the numbness of Djibouti.

  The silence on deck ticked on.

  Munroe left the unconscious man where he’d dropped.

  The attack boats were out there. Couldn’t be much longer before chaos erupted, and she needed to be gone before it happened.

  At the corner of the hatch she leaned out toward the man with the rifle, still prone on the deck, playing warrior with his face toward the bridge.

  “Halkan kaalay,” she hissed.

  The man turned in her direction but didn’t rise and so she called louder, trying to mimic the accent she’d heard so briefly before. On the second call, the man with the rifle moved to his feet, scampered in her direction, and when he passed the corner, she grabbed his neck, pulled him off balance, and shoved him into the metal as she’d done with the first. But he didn’t go down.

  Instead he clawed. Twisted. Tried to regrip the rifle and get a finger on the trigger. Munroe smashed her forehead into his face and he crumpled. She grabbed the rifle and struck him hard, and when he collapsed completely she stood over him breathing heavily, wrestling through the desire for blood and violence that had enveloped her in those seconds he’d fought back.

  Munroe knelt and searched his clothes. Found a small handheld radio, snatched it up, clutched the rifle, and returned starboard. On the water she discerned the outline of an inflatable boat tethered to the freighter by the tails of the grappling hooks, and one man below working to keep the little craft from being washed into the hull of the ship.

  If he’d only planned to deliver his accomplices, then he would already have been gone. Instead, he waited. She could use that.

  Munroe searched the deck for Victor again. Couldn’t see him and so ran along the coaming in the direction he’d last been. Three minutes to find him and then she’d be gone, three minutes of time ticking off inside her head, and all she happened upon was empty deck.

  She crossed between hatches one and two, glanced fore and aft.

  Spotted a motionless form several meters in the direction she’d come and skirted through shadows toward it and found not Victor but the ship’s captain.

  In the burn of disappointment Munroe punched the man. He didn’t move. He wasn’t dead, she could tell that much, but was unconscious and bleeding from a head wound—as if he’d been on his way to the hold with the weapons and had been too close to the last flash-bang when it had gone off.

  In the heat of the moment, direction change in the midst of battle, a decision that had as much to do with frustration over not finding Victor as it did with scorn and loathing for this lump of a thing that meant something to the invaders, Munroe reached for the captain’s collar and dragged him toward her escape. She couldn’t guess what they wanted with him, but by getting him off the ship she’d deprive them of a trophy, and maybe find answers, maybe purchase a foothold for Victor, for Amber.

  Another round of automatic fire from the water shattered the temporary stillness and this time the muzzle flashes appeared to be moving closer.

  Time. She had no time.

  Munroe pulled the captain into the shadows and foot by foot wrangled him to the rope that the intruders had used to pull the weapons on board.

  In the dark where she had left them, one of the battered men had crawled to his knees. Hand on his head, he swiped at the blood. Counting every wasted second and regretting her decision not to dump him overboard, Munroe strode toward him. He opened his mouth but no sound came out, and he scratched backward to get away from her. Munroe slammed the butt of the rifle to the side of his head and he stopped moving.

  The battle on the bridge intensified.

  She returned to the captain. Pulled the rope beneath his back, looped it under his arms, twisted and tied it into a bowline knot. The rope was thinner than she would have liked, was enough to carry his weight but would probably cut into him. Face to the rail, focus on securing the man, she missed the scrape from behind. Felt the movement before it reached her, let go of the captain and stood at the same time the rifle muzzle pressed into her spine.

  The adrenaline uptick fed into her veins, clarifying thought into rapid calculations. One hand raised slowly in a show of surrender, her other inched toward the sheath for the knife.

  The muzzle punched into her back was accompanied by a rush of Somali, ordering her to turn around, the volume and tempo of the words telling her the person holding the gun was overadrenalized, scared; words she ignored because there was no logical reason she should have understood them, and if the man with the rifle followed the same instructions as his predecessors, he couldn’t kill her until he’d confirmed she wasn’t the same white face he’d seen in photographs.

  Ears straining, Munroe stretched past the battle, searching for clues to the number of men behind her, calculated the risk of turning to fight. Another flash-bang exploded somewhere on the deck, instant answer, instant out.

  In the concussion wave she dropped. Spun. Knocked the muzzle up and followed with the knife. Hand wrapped around the weapon, she shoved it away. The rifle discharged beside her ear, deafening, while the young man fought for control and her knife answered with a life of its own, the dormant demons ascending from deep sleep, instinct and speed in the face of death.

  His body dropped, the warmth of his blood trickled down her hand, and Munroe knelt, predator over prey, breathing in the fragrance of fear, scanning the deck for his companions, cursing Leo.

  There had to be one more man in the dark, someone with the launcher. Likely a three-man crew identical to the one she’d already encountered. She searched the shadows and didn’t see him. Turned back again to the rail.

  Paused only a moment and then leaned toward the water. She was finished here. Would not stay to fight a war that had never been hers to begin with.

  She called to the man below, “Waxaan hayaa kabtan
kii.”

  “Where is the signal?” he said back.

  “It is broken,” she said, words kept short out of fear that with so many variants of Somali, her dialect would be wrong. “Take the prisoner.”

  The man in the boat shifted and made a poor attempt to stand, and that was enough to know that he didn’t suspect. Munroe wrapped the rope around the top rail and then around her waist, heaved the captain up, leveraged him against the rail, and tipped him over. His deadweight pulled hard against her, and the rope burned her hands as she let it out. She fought to keep from dropping him, grateful for the short descent to the waterline.

  The man below guided the captain in and Munroe released her hold.

  “Waan soo socdaa,” she said, and the man in the boat didn’t object. She pulled the 9 mm from the small of her back and shoved it into the front of her waistband. Snagged her pack, shrugged through the straps, and, leaving the rifle on deck because she couldn’t carry it too, slipped over the railing, took hold of the base of the grappling hook, wrapped the line around her leg, and let herself over the side.

  She was vulnerable in those long seconds that she worked her way down, white skin against the night, hands, neck, and face a certain giveaway had the watchman been suspicious. It would have taken only a small bit of clarity for him to notice what he should have seen from the beginning and shoot her in the back. But in speaking his language she’d designed her own protection. Why should he doubt what he’d heard? He was too busy keeping the boat from getting rubbed bare against the ship to concern himself with her.

  Last few feet before the waterline, Munroe let go one hand, pulled the handgun from her pants, shoved her feet against the hull to push out, and dropped into the center of the boat. The little craft rocked hard and her shin landed on the captain’s arm, bone-crushing pain softened by the partial flexibility of the boat’s bottom.

  Munroe pointed her weapon at the watchman, but preoccupied as he was with keeping the craft steady, she might as well not have bothered. He didn’t fully look her way until she’d shrugged out of her pack, one shoulder first and then the other, gun and focus always steady on him.

  Only when he saw the weapon pointed at his face did he lower the oar he’d been holding against the hull and slowly raise his hands in surrender.

  The man was older than she would have guessed, had at least ten if not fifteen years on the young men who’d gone up the Favorita. Like theirs, his clothes were black, but his were closer to rags, mismatched, torn, and ill-fitting.

  Eyes never leaving his, handgun never lowering, Munroe reached for the rifle at his feet, and when she’d secured the weapon for her own use, she returned the 9 mm to her waistband.

  “Untie and shove off,” Munroe said.

  The man knelt to let loose the lines, then picked up the oar again and pushed hard against the ship. The inflatable responded, and Munroe braced for his retaliatory lunge, expected him to take a swing, but he didn’t.

  Once away from the ship, he put down the oar and, taking the engine just above idle, turned the nose of the boat toward open water, then shifted his face toward hers to look askance. Munroe stole a glance at the bottom of the boat and confirmed what she’d seen earlier. Aside from the captain, who still lay unconscious, the little craft was empty. To leave the freighter and head into the open ocean like this would be a death sentence, but there was no way these men had gotten so far out with just the gas in the engine’s tank. Somewhere nearby, and yet far enough away that Leo’s men with their night vision hadn’t picked it out, was a mother ship that held what she wanted.

  “Where is the fuel?” she said.

  The man pointed away from the Favorita, waved far ahead.

  “Take us there,” she said, and so he sat in front of the engine, pulled a small compass and a flashlight from his pocket, and placed his hand to the tiller.

  The whine rose louder and the inflatable surged away from the ship, dead ahead, in the opposite direction of the muzzle flashes and sounds of battle, which carried loud and long over the water’s surface.

  Her willingness to leave the ship, to run from a fight she might possibly win into the arms of certain death if lost at sea, had been based entirely on the innate desire to stay alive—not hers, but that of the man in the boat, who wanted to live far more than she did. She trusted her instinct and his desire for self-preservation; the Favorita disappeared entirely into the night that swallowed them, and only the explosions in the distance were left to punctuate the dark.

  Three minutes out and Munroe found nothing that could guide her; five and she first saw the pinprick of light, a candle flame that flickered, and with this as her beacon, she had the boatman idle the engine and motioned him around the captain, toward the front of the craft.

  “Hands behind your head,” she said. “Face to the water.”

  But instead of doing as she’d instructed, the man dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in a form of prayer and pleading. She only partially understood the dialect and the jumble of words, a stream of excuses and begging, most probably lies no different from Leo’s.

  She read past speech for the body language, for the truth that words obscured, and touched the muzzle of the rifle to his forehead. “Tell me,” she said. “Who is your boss, and what value does the ship captain have to you?”

  The man had no answers, only stories of fishermen unable to make a living, of being a simple man hired to watch the boat. She punched the rifle into him and he stopped. His was an old tale based on an even older truth that might have meant something back when Somali piracy was in its infancy and hadn’t yet turned into the multimillion-dollar cutthroat business that it had become.

  As if he read her face, read her distrust, the man put his hands behind his head and pleaded again. “On the boat,” he said, and motioned toward the light. “He knows what I don’t know.”

  Information from him would have been a bonus, but what she really wanted was a way to get to land. “You live if you do as I say,” she said. “If you don’t—” She punched him again with the weapon. “Understand?”

  He nodded emphatically. “Everything as you say,” he said, and she lowered the muzzle and motioned him toward the tiller.

  They started up again and the flicker on the water grew larger until it materialized fully into a wide flashlight beam swung in the hand of another man who was, as far as Munroe could tell, the only occupant on a V-hull about twenty feet long without any overhang or shade, definitely not the dhow or mother ship that she’d expected.

  When they were within shouting distance, her watchman idled the engine, stood and waved, called out the news that they carried the captain with them, and the man on the boat motioned them in closer.

  The inflatable slipped in behind the larger vessel where an outboard engine was tipped up, and beside it a ladder extended into the water. Munroe grabbed hold of the ladder, pulled herself onto the bigger boat, was over and standing by the time the guard got close enough to see her face. Butt of the rifle to her shoulder, muzzle toward his head, she said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  In response to her words, he gaped and stood staring.

  “Drop your weapon,” she said.

  He didn’t move, but his body language screamed shock more than threat. Surprise, perhaps, at the white man partially dressed in military camo, intruding on his boat to put a gun to his head—a white face speaking his language.

  She didn’t want to fire a warning shot. Hadn’t been able to check the magazine in the rifle, though from her watchman’s reaction when she’d pointed the weapon at his head, she assumed it was loaded and functional. She took a step forward and the man flinched. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, “but I will if I have to. Drop the gun.”

  The man lowered the weapon and straightened.

  “There’s a white man in the boat,” Munroe said. “Bring him up.”

  The man remained mute and motionless, wasting her time, trying her patience, amping the adrena
line higher. Munroe pulled the 9 mm from her waistband and fired in the air, a deafening blast against the night that would, if there were other boats like this out there, probably send the curious in their direction.

  The weapon report was enough to get him moving.

  The man dropped the flashlight and scurried for the inflatable.

  Munroe scooped up the light and switched it off. Knocked his rifle out of the way and followed him to stand guard while he climbed down; kept watch as the two men wrangled the captain upward.

  When at last they’d heaved him up and deposited him into the bigger boat, she demanded her pack, which they brought up, and then she motioned them both back down into the inflatable and, while they waited, did a quick inventory of her boat. This wasn’t the mother ship by any means. No generator or air compressor, not much in the way of food or water, and no spare ammunition. But what the vessel did have was fuel in several large containers, and the fuel was what she’d come for.

  Munroe leaned over the outboard and tipped the propeller back into the water. The men in the boat below guided the inflatable away. She fired a warning shot with the rifle, confirmation that the weapon was operational, enough to keep the men from veering off too far. She opened the tank vent, adjusted, primed, and pulled the engine to life.

  The men stared, faces upturned, bodies motionless.

  Rifle on her shoulder, voice raised to carry over the engine, she said, “Who do you work for? What do you want with the ship captain?”

  No response.

  She fired again. Closer to the inflatable and both men flinched.

  “The ship captain,” she said again. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” the second man said, and when she raised her rifle toward his head, both men held hands up and wailed over each other in a pleading chorus of ignorance that wasted her time.