The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe stepped back and set the rifle on the boat’s one wooden bench. Pulled out the smallest canister of fuel, dragged it aft, and dropped it over to the men, who came in closer to take it. Grabbed three water bottles, tossed them down, and then followed those with the short-range radio she’d taken from the grenade launcher. Setting these two free was a promise kept, and she didn’t know what was worse: that she left the men to possibly perish on the open sea, or that they might survive and go on to other plunders and other killings.

  CHAPTER 7

  Munroe stood watch as the small boat shoved off, waited until the men faded completely into the night, and then turned to further inspect the upgraded version of escape and the supplies it carried. This boat was longer, wider, probably heavier than the cigarette boats they’d used when running guns in the Bight of Biafra, and the engine had less horsepower, but a rough estimate of consumption and the fuel on board said she could probably make about four hundred nautical miles before running dry.

  According to Leo they’d been less than twenty hours from rendezvous. At the Favorita’s speed that put her somewhere in the range of three hundred nautical miles from the meeting point, and because it made no sense for the captain to hand off the armaments far out on the ocean—not in this remote part of the world, not if he’d hired an armed escort for his trouble—it also meant that with a hefty give or take and a dollop of assumption, she was within three hundred nautical miles of the coast—probably less, depending on what course the Favorita plotted.

  Munroe inclined back to trace out the map in the sky, then pointed the bow to the west and opened the throttle, and the boat lurched forward, a pounding rise and fall against ocean swells that jarred her body and promised to cover distance in less time than the Favorita would have. Without food, without shade, and with limited water, reaching the coast would be a long, hard slog, but as long as she reached land she could turn south and follow the shoreline into Kenya. If she didn’t make it that far before running out of fuel, so be it. Land was land. She spoke Somali, she’d find a way to survive, always did, and this wouldn’t be the first time fate had taken her across an ocean just to dump her on shore to figure her way from the clues at her feet.

  That had been that other lifetime, the missionaries’ daughter who’d fled the continent with the blood of the sadist who’d trained her to fight, taught her to hate, still fresh on her hands. And as it had been with the Favorita in Djibouti, bribes had also paved the way for her flight from Cameroon when she’d boarded the Santo Domingo in Douala. She’d snuck off the freighter when the ship had reached Valencia, and without more money, it had taken two months of working the docks as a stevedore to figure out a way to get from Spain to the United States. She’d lived among the containers and in abandoned offices until a man had come in the dark with a knife and had made her a killer for the second time. He’d taught her how easy taking a life could be, showed her a first glimpse of the predator that the knife of her tormentor had created.

  MUNROE LOCKED THE tiller in place and, struggling to keep her balance, tracked down the pieces the pirates had used to refill the engine fuel tank: makeshift funnel, smaller container, scooper to ply gasoline from the larger drums. Then she inspected the rifles and their magazines, each of which had been only half full, as if ammunition had been rationed out among the lower ranks and saved for the battle with the ship.

  She consolidated ammunition, snapped the one full magazine back into place, and set the rifle aside. Scooted for the bench and for the third time made her way around a large twist of black-painted two-inch polypropylene rope that lay in the middle of the boat. Stopped, turned, and flicked the flashlight beam over the one item that should have jumped out at her the moment she’d set foot on this craft. Rope of this thickness had no business here.

  Munroe knelt and put her hand on a braid fat enough that her fingers didn’t meet on the underside and after a moment she stood. The captain had been close when he’d said fishing lines had jammed the Favorita’s propeller. A few hundred feet of rope like this, stretched out and floating in the freighter’s path, and the propeller would have sucked it right in and been wrapped to a complete stop. But to lay the rope out far enough in advance to avoid being spotted by the armed guards, to do it on the pitch-black of the ocean without the ship’s lights to guide them, the attackers would have had to know the ship’s speed and coordinates and exactly where the ship would be.

  This wasn’t a random hijacking.

  Munroe maneuvered herself over the bench, picked up her pack, and carried it fore, then took off her vest and put it beneath the captain’s head as a pillow of sorts to protect him from the pounding rise and fall and possibly prevent more damage than what had already been done.

  She checked his pulse, his breathing, lifted his eyelids and shone the flashlight into them. His pupils weren’t dilated, which meant that it probably wasn’t brain bleeding that kept him out like this. She studied the lines and creases on his face, hints of secrets he hadn’t told, might never be able to convey again, and then shut off those thoughts.

  The need to know was automatic, a desire to understand, to problem-solve, an analytical skill that had served her well over the years but which had no purpose in a present when reaching shore was the only thing that mattered. Munroe switched off the light, and in the boat’s repetitive pounding and the engine’s roar, in the endless water and the lightening sky, she had nothing but empty exhaustion that had followed on the heels of the adrenaline dump. In the monotony the memories came for company, prodding at her soft spots like calloused fingers picking scabs off a wound that had only just begun to heal.

  She studied her hands and felt the blood, a stain that she couldn’t wash away no matter where she went or the distance she ran. Death followed her, embraced her, and beckoned her. She’d become one of Pavlov’s dogs, salivating for blood when her emotional dinner bell was rung.

  Munroe stood and reached beneath the captain’s head for her vest, pulled out the picture pack, and held the photo of Miles Bradford close. She’d been forced to join forces with him on a job that hadn’t turned out as they’d expected. They’d worked together a few times since, had risked their lives for each other, and killed to keep the other safe. Had lived together as lovers. “You have a gift and you have heart,” he’d once said. “Let them serve you.”

  She’d killed again since then, several times over, sullying herself while cleansing the world, and had finally said good-bye when that seemed to be the only way to stop the pain. The strings of attachment to him pulled at her even now, half a world away.

  She hurt, and hated that she hurt.

  Whatever peace Djibouti had given her was over. Maybe the run was over. Maybe it was time to go home.

  Home.

  Munroe turned the word over inside her head, then shut it down, shoved it aside. Tucked the picture away again, but wouldn’t lie to herself over what this was. In this fear there was no honor, no adrenaline, no release into the path of death, simply cowardice. She’d finally known peace, known happiness in being accepted and loved for who she was, and for the first time in her life, instead of rushing into the arms of what terrified her, she hid from it.

  FOURTEEN HOURS ON the water, stomach churning and head throbbing from the constant pound against the waves, and Munroe caught her first sight of something solid. A mirage, the glimpse of this thing filtered in and out and finally strengthened into a green-splotched dirt-gray that stretched out long in both directions, and so she turned the bow south.

  SHE WAS DOWN to the last of her water and twenty liters of fuel when clusters of white and swaths of color along the shore took on the form of construction far too organized, too much in one place, to be Somalia. Munroe turned west again, ventured closer, passed a wide waterway that led inland, and when she finally came upon buildings more Polynesian than African and the only explanation was that at some point she’d crossed into Kenyan waters and had reached something of a resort, she tossed the extra
rifle overboard, stuffed the banana clip inside her pack, and slid the remaining rifle behind the fuel containers.

  MUNROE SLOWED AND continued beyond pristine beaches, past occasional wooden fishing boats, and finally, spotting a jetty stretching into the water, she drew in for a better look.

  To the right of the pier a wooden fishing boat sat, sail collapsed, with its bow snug on the white sandy shore, and not far from the fishing boat, three men, barefoot and in tattered T-shirts and cutoff pants, watched Munroe’s approach with open curiosity. She assumed the boat was theirs, although the pier itself probably belonged to the nearest hotel, or to one of the houses that abutted the beach. Not far off to the left a man washed his bicycle in the ocean, and a few children scampered along the sand, chasing one another in shrieking laughter that she could hear even as far out as she was.

  Beyond this, the area was thick with the impossible-to-hurry that so often accompanied detachment from urban life; laid-back quiet that said wherever this was, it wasn’t anywhere near a big city; a place where violent crime was nearly nonexistent, and where a local face was enough to keep curious, entrepreneurial hands from running off with fuel and machine parts.

  Munroe slipped in along the far end of the pier and, finding a place to tie off, cut the engine, tossed the lines up, and climbed after them.

  She glanced again at the three men on shore, stretched her legs, and worked out the kinks in her neck while measuring the responses in their body language, the nuances of their expressions. Adjusted her posture to reflect the no-hurry of the heat, and with hands in her pockets, strolled toward the front of the pier.

  The men by the fishing boat, leaned back on the sand, stopped talking as she approached. She paused a few feet away and looked out over the water, measuring minutes with the hands of African time, and finally greeted them in English. She would have tried Arabic next, then Somali if the first two failed, but the one who appeared to be the youngest among them—eighteen, nineteen tops—responded in kind.

  She nodded toward the sailboat. “Is that yours?” she said.

  The English speaker motioned to the man at his left. “My friend boat,” he said, and then staring at Munroe’s black cargo pants and boots: “You army man?”

  “On holiday,” she said.

  He smiled, stood, and said, “You want private tour? I know good fishing, pretty place. Or maybe nice lady, I have sister, you come meet her.”

  Munroe smiled wide enough to show teeth. “I might,” she said, and since he’d saved her the necessity of making small talk before moving to business, she turned toward the ocean and nodded in the direction of the waterway. “How far does it go?”

  “She go all way around island.”

  “You know the island well?”

  “Know Lamu Island very good,” he said. “Know all islands very good.”

  Munroe nodded, turned toward the water again, and let the quiet speak. “I could use a guide,” she said finally, “and a watchman. Do you and your friends want work?”

  “What is watchman?” he said.

  “A guard. For the boat.”

  “You want askari?” he asked, and without waiting for a response he turned to the others and spoke to them in a language with which Munroe wasn’t familiar but that pinged inside her head and sent sparks of Arabic and English and German colliding against each other.

  The English speaker pointed to one of the men still seated and said, “Mohamed, he work five thousand shilling for day.”

  “And you?” she said. “What’s your rate?”

  He smiled. “I go five thousand shilling for day.”

  The men had told her where she was and that was what she’d needed. Hands still shoved into pockets, she said, “Let me think about it,” and turned and walked for the pier.

  Behind her the discussion started up again; got louder, carried closer.

  “We go three thousand shillings for day,” the first said.

  With no idea what the dollar-to-shilling exchange might be, she pointed to one man first, and then the other. “Two thousand, two thousand,” she said, and the English speaker stuck out a hand.

  “I am Sami,” he said, and Munroe shook on the understanding that she’d just been robbed. She turned to glance at the setting sun. “I have no shillings,” she said. “Does Lamu Island have a bank?”

  “Yes, closed now,” Sami said. “I have friend, he buy dollars, give good price.”

  She had enough fuel to get through the night, and hotels would probably accept dollars.

  Munroe turned toward the boat, toward the captain, still unconscious, deteriorating from heat and dehydration. There hardly seemed a point in trying to get him medical care, but if she didn’t, she might as well just slit his throat.

  Munroe clenched her fists, pushed back the invisible blood that stained her palms, and said, “Where is your friend?”

  “In Lamu Town.”

  “Do we take a taxi? Bus?”

  “No car on island, only donkey. We go your boat.”

  “I need a hospital first,” she said. “Do you have one of those?”

  “We have.”

  She nodded toward Mohamed. “You take me to the hospital and he brings the friend with the good price to meet us.”

  Sami turned to interpret for Mohamed, their dickering started up again, and after a minute of back and forth Sami said, “He show you hospital, I bring my friend,” and so Munroe swung her arm wide toward the pier, gestured Mohamed to the boat, and to Sami said, “Bring a liter of drinking water with you when you come.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Munroe followed Mohamed’s guidance back to the waterway and farther up the island’s coastline until they passed a collection of small resorts and hotels. Mohamed waved toward the beach and in a tone that was more explanation than instruction said, “Shela,” as if it had some importance, and perhaps to him it did because he believed she was a tourist.

  She acknowledged him with a nod.

  In an area this remote, where there were resorts there also had to be a landing strip and a place where commerce and money changed hands and where she could buy fuel and supplies. Beyond the hotels the shoreline thickened into foliage again, and by the time Mohamed pointed and nodded, waved and urged Munroe toward the shore, she’d still seen nothing that could stand in for what Sami had referred to as Lamu Town.

  They coasted on momentum into the shallows. Mohamed hopped out, waded ahead, and used the lines to drag the boat until the bottom scraped.

  Munroe unlaced her boots and pulled them off. Draped them over her shoulder, nudged her vest out from beneath the captain’s head, picked up her pack, took everything with her over the bow, and trudged up the beach toward a building that backed up to the sand.

  Around the front under the last of the day’s sunlight, Lamu District Hospital greeted Munroe in big painted letters. The area was quiet, no crowds milling about the main entrance, and she continued on through an open walkway with dirty whitewashed walls and patterned brick that allowed the ocean breeze to circulate and keep the smell of rot, sickness, and overripe body odor to a minimum.

  In a layout similar to that of so many provincial hospitals and clinics on the continent, the structure was courtyard-style, with concrete floors where there wasn’t dirt, and under the porticoes on rough-hewn benches women in color-splashed abayas and in tribal wraps held sickly babies and small children.

  Munroe found a nurse who spoke English well enough to understand her problem and mediate in locating a doctor; then she sat on the concrete and pulled her socks and boots back on. The nurse returned with a man Munroe pegged for a volunteer. Light-skinned, dark-haired, and with several days of beard stubble, he wore faded scrubs and the look of numbness that often attached to foreigners who, working too long in impoverished conditions without supplies and equipment, were forced to witness sickness and death they would otherwise have been able to prevent. He greeted her in fair English and with an air of forced patience.

  Wi
thin his words of introduction Munroe heard the accent and for her own benefit answered in Italian, utilizing language, that special form of magic that increased in potency the farther the spell was cast from where it was expected. The doctor’s expression shifted into a cautious smile, and in micro increments his posture relaxed with relief, almost as if he’d been holding his breath.

  Munroe mirrored his response, shook his hand. “Ho bisogno del vostro aiuto,” she said. “I have an unconscious man in a boat, can I show you?”

  On the shore Munroe climbed into the boat and the doctor followed. While Mohamed waited on the sand, she shone the flashlight down onto the captain, who might already be dead, and then handed the light to the doctor.

  He knelt and, as Munroe had done earlier, shone the beam in the captain’s eyes. Then he pinched at his skin, then picked up his wrist, and listened through the stethoscope. He turned toward Munroe. “He’s still alive. No sweating. Rapid heartbeat, probably low blood pressure,” he said. “How long has he been like this?”

  “I found him drifting,” she said. “I’ve had him for about twenty hours.”

  “He needs fluid urgently,” the doctor said. “Needs to have the head wound stitched, but fluid is an emergency.”

  “I’m on my way to Mombasa,” she said.

  “In Mombasa they have better equipment, but you can’t take him like this.”

  “How long would you keep him?”

  “At a minimum, twenty-four hours for the dehydration. But even after that he’s not in any condition to travel.”

  “I can’t stay in Lamu,” she said. “If you want, I will leave him.”

  “Better not,” he said.

  “I can wait for twenty-four hours, but not more than that. I’m traveling by sea—how long to Mombasa by car?”

  The doctor pursed his lips and blew a long exhale. “These roads?” He shook his head. “It depends on the day. Twelve hours? Eighteen? Could be three days if there are issues.”