by Daniel Pyne
“What is this?”
“This” is the collection of patternless ragged scars on Sentro’s shoulder and chest. Violent puncture wounds neatly healed, pink.
“Accident,” is how Sentro explains them.
“With what, a drill?” Fontaine sits back, puzzling, her hands warm on Sentro’s hips. A faint, curious smile. “Who are you?”
Fighting unexpected tears, Sentro pulls her down and returns the kiss, lightly, brushing dry lips against better ones. Fontaine’s body, sour with exercise and spent perfume, has a languid softness, and not as much resistance as she expects. Sexuality has always been fluid for Sentro. Situational, largely monogamous; she found Dennis, or they found each other; it felt right, and random unimportant indiscretions aside, she was faithful only to him, girl on boy. But what she’s seen, what she’s done, the tenuous thread that she’s come to learn tethers a soul to this life, renders so much judgment pointless. And now, with her past probably slipping away, she finds herself riding the indefatigable roll of time, plunging forward to some distant landing she doesn’t much care about anymore.
She’s lonely. No one has touched her like this in a long, long time.
Fontaine breaks it off first. Taking a husky breath, she says, “It’s a love story.”
“What?”
“Your book.” She nods at the Conrad novel on the bedside table. “That’s how I see it, anyway.” And just as suddenly as she embraced her, Fontaine is lifting away from Sentro, up from the bed, peeling her leggings off, and heading into the tiny bathroom, pale naked white with accents of pink.
“We need a shower.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He doesn’t need to ask what they’re doing out here.
The motley trio of go-fast boats creases parallel white wakes through the waves seven o’clock off the stern, having risen up so suddenly out of the distant rolling water they might have been conjured by the sea itself; two curl off, like fighter jets leaving formation, because the cargo ship Jeddah looms in front of them, and they’re coming up on it now.
On the bridge, Captain Montez, lowering his binoculars, anxiety biting him, his voice thin, says, “Get the passengers into the secure cabin.” He’s been watching the meandering approach for the past ten minutes, hoping they were fishermen but sensing, no, this was going to wreak havoc with his schedule. He makes the requisite distress call to the company, knowing that no help will be coming within a reasonable time frame, and sends his wife a satellite text telling her not to worry. Their own private code.
Moments later, outside the passengers’ quarters in the G-deck corridor, crew members are herding Charlemagne, Meg, Jack, and the Swedes ahead of them, pounding each cabin door as they pass, the second mate, Salah, shouting, “Everyone below! Everyone below, into the safe room, captain’s orders.”
Bruce struggles to maneuver one of his big leather telescope cases out of the door, a journeyman arguing with him, “Leave it. Sir. LEAVE IT!”
“Long and deep, sweet pea. Slow. Slow.” Asta Nelson is hyperventilating. “Breathe,” her husband, Jesper, whispers.
“Ms. Sentro?”
She hears a distant, muffled voice—Mulligan’s?—and perhaps someone knocking on the cabin door, but in the bathroom, Sentro and Fontaine are well entangled, hot water spitting down on them, steam so thick it tickles. They’ve tuned out the world, Fontaine holding on to the top of the enclosure with one hand. “Oh my.”
“Sorry.”
“No—I—wait—oh—”
Sentro can’t hear anything except the water drumming against the fiberglass stall walls and the rattle of the glass door and the squeak of their feet on the floor and the soft whisper of her breathing, syncopated with Fontaine’s.
Deck guns shoot boarding lines up from the fast boats onto the Jeddah. Montez, alone now on the bridge, stuffs important papers into a time lock safe and takes one last look at the instruments. Company policy asks for a documentable display of resistance, but the priority is keeping the cargo intact, along with but not to the exclusion of the passengers and crew.
The former, per his orders, should be crowding into the safe cabin, asking the crew their panicked questions. He wonders if the women will be sobbing wrecks; he imagines the Tagalog murmuring silent prayers. The Swede strikes him as solid. The fat man could be a problem. The mysterious American, Aubrey Sentro, he hesitates to predict. Tasked with reassuring them is the ship’s steward, a practiced script: Stay calm. They won’t hurt us. This is just about insurance, and our company will pay.
Nervous nevertheless, Montez glances down at the assault again, gets a glimpse of Mulligan scrambling to the stern. What is wrong with him?
The captain hurries out.
First Mate Mulligan rips the cover off a stern-deck water cannon and swivels it down to bear on the attackers. His bonus is tied to profits, and this unfortunate development, he knows, is going to fuck all that to hell. Dark bodies have leaped from the boats to scale the hull of the ship, hand over hand, Russian automatics slung across several bare backs. He pulls the trigger. Water from the Jeddah gun wipes two pirates into the sea, but the others keep coming.
Mulligan watches a big pale man at the helm of the closest fast boat duck below the wheel as cannon water pounds across his bow. Two more pirates are sent overboard, but it’s a fruitless campaign; the Irishman’s goal is to buy a little more time for his crew to get all the passengers safely stowed. He’s planning to offer one more salvo and go when the fast boat man pops back up with a compact RPG-29 in his hands and fires up at the stern of the ship.
Mulligan dives for cover. The shell hits and blows the water gun to pieces, along with a good portion of deck and rigging and a bit of Mulligan as well.
In her cabin’s shower, finished for now and holding each other, Sentro turns her head automatically toward a disturbance she senses more than hears. “What was that?”
She shuts off the tap. The pipes knock. She thinks she felt the whole ship shudder.
“That was us.” Fontaine’s eyes stay closed, her breath quick.
Sentro listens. Silence, except for the dripping of the drain, the squeak of their feet on the floor.
Fontaine kisses her neck lightly. “What?”
Sentro isn’t sure at first. Defenses down, she’s in unfamiliar territory and hasn’t felt the need to establish a baseline. But instinct kicks in. She feels a change. “Someone’s cut the engines.”
As the full contingent of sea raiders breaches the gunwales of the ship and captures the main deck, Captain Montez hurries the bloodied Mulligan along the C-deck corridor, through the doorway, and into the antechamber, where the door to the secure room is already shut and locked. Passengers and crew, he assumes, are inside. Descending the stairwell from the bridge, he heard the RPG hit and, knowing that his brave and foolish first mate had gone to the gun, assumed the worst. He found him alive, was able to get him up and moving before the attackers breached the main deck. Montez has no delusions of bravery or resistance. He tries to stay pragmatic: A fungible inconvenience. Like turbine trouble or heavy seas.
He steadies his first mate and pounds on the door. “It’s the captain. Open up.”
The new hires have had precious little time for training; they’re not their normal crew. Everything the Zemes have heard about taking ships suggest this one won’t be heavily defended, but Castor insisted on hard men, not boys. Pauly doesn’t give a shit; it’s all the same to him.
It takes them a while to make their way up into the accommodations tower. There’s no sign of crew, but both Zemes exercise caution on the approach. Castor leads two pairs of the hirelings up the external stairs. Pauly brings another duo, with their AKs and rust-streaked machetes, to clear the lower corridor, where they ride the elevator to the top and work their way down.
When he gets to the bridge, Pauly kicks the door open the way he’s seen it done in movies and surveys the empty helm with only a little disappointment.
“Hullo.”
Sentro pulls on her jeans and a shirt, still uneasy and too aware of the ship’s eerie calm. Fontaine has to squiggle back into her sweaty running clothes and hoodie.
“Ugh. At least my walk of shame will be only about twenty feet. Let’s just hope Baloney Bruce won’t be . . .”
Sentro puts her finger to her lips: Shhhhh. Fontaine studies her, bemused, incurious; Sentro shakes her head, still listening. She needs to put on her shoes, but Fontaine, impatient, slicks back her wet hair and decides, “All right, let’s see what the kerfuffle is, shall we?”
“Wait.”
Fontaine is already at the door. Sentro lunges to stop her from opening it and, failing to do so, discovers a weathered young white man in the doorway staring back at them—broad shoulders, flip-flops, piercings, front teeth laminated an unholy ivory, and feral eyes that slur over both women, vulgar, vacant. Sentro feels a switch inside her flip; she’s back in that other, ugly world again.
Holstered pistol strapped to his leg like he’s a gunfighter, the young man swings a sawed-off shotgun up into Fontaine’s astonished face. “Perfect timing, that.”
Hard soldiers float behind him, slick with sweat, eyes empty, their assorted weapons aimed in nervously at Sentro. Fontaine starts to backpedal into the room, but he grabs her by the hair and drags her out into the hallway.
“This way.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sun-pinked pirate has an odd accent, surely Australian but, Sentro thinks, also vaguely South American—Chile or Brazil. Shotgun pressed up against the back of Fontaine’s neck and that fistful of hair in his hand like a short leash, he leads his captives out of Sentro’s cabin. On the ropy forearm that grasps the gun, Pollux is tattooed in looping blue cursive. His name? In case he forgets who he is? Sentro walks behind them, feeling a healthy mix of fear and familiarity; she had a therapist who once told her that when 9/11 happened, all the crazy clients got calm. Same for her, now, here: weighing options but keen to stay present and aware of the hard men flanking her, most burned black by the equatorial sun, but nothing like the underfed Somali teenagers she once encountered in the Guardafui Channel. Not as likely to shoot her from jittery nerves, she decides, as from malicious intent.
Mercenaries, then. Not pirates at all.
Through open cabin doorways as they pass, Sentro sees more of them plundering the cabins of the other passengers, looking for cash and jewelry.
That makes seven.
Herded out onto the stairway platform and down to D-deck, where other raiders stare at her from the doorway, faces hungry, bodies tense. Sentro counts another four posted near the stern, sharing cigarettes and tending the lines for their fast boats waiting below.
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Sentro marks their positions. Nothing about this will be easy.
On C-deck, impossibly, the pink pirate’s clone is waiting for them at the end of the corridor like a mirror reflection, slouching insolently outside the open doorway that leads to the safe room.
“Yo, Pauly, the fuck you been doing?” Incisors filed jack-o’-lantern sharp.
“Castor, brah, lookit these here classy slits.”
Identical twins.
“Muff divers.” Pauly grins. “Dueling batwings.”
Castor is the alpha, for sure.
Just inside, wearing a madras sports coat too big for him, the scarred one-eyed deckhand from the forecastle lets his gaze linger on Sentro and says something in Portuguese that makes the others laugh. The inside man.
Thirteen. And the matched pair.
“That’s everybody,” Pauly says.
“Hokay then.”
The madras man makes way so the sunburned twin can frog-walk Fontaine across the anteroom and shove her stumbling in front of the secure cabin doorway, where she falls to her hands and knees. Helpless, crying, but making no sound. Sentro wants to tell her it’s going to be okay but knows that it probably won’t be. A gun barrel prods Sentro into the anteroom, followed closely by Castor. The scarred faux crewman decides, just for shitgiggles, to piston-crack her at the base of her skull with the butt of his rifle as she goes past him.
She reels but doesn’t fall. Legs uncooperative, a burst of cartoon stars momentarily blinding her, her hands fly up to feel the open wound she knows she’ll find there. Blood mats her hair and trickles down her neck. She can’t hear anything except the ringing in her ears. She’s angry now, feels an adrenaline surge. Tingling in her fingers, hollow in the pit of her stomach; if she’s going to do something, it has to be here. Real soon. She watches Castor’s mouth move, but for the moment it’s all a muddle. He’s looking at Sentro but pointing his shotgun at Fontaine. Words gather from the confusion: “. . . get these wankers to open the door?”
Sentro figures out what he’s asking her but stares back at him blankly, as if still trying to sort it out. Buying time where there is none. Desperate to find an angle to play.
She watches Pauly lift Fontaine to her feet again. Castor takes one step and presses his .45 against her chest. Right where her heart is. “Do it,” he says to Sentro. “Now. Or your little lezbefriend will die.”
She blinks and finds herself dissociating, deciding: Fontaine is already dead.
“Oy!”
Her heart is pounding. Her Achilles’ heel is believing she can somehow bend destiny.
“Okay. Wait,” she whispers and moves to the safe cabin door, slaps it, flat handed, and calls out: “They have a passenger; they’re going to kill her unless you come out of there.”
But she knows they intend to kill Fontaine either way.
“Louder.”
“No. They can hear me,” Sentro says. “There’s a room monitor.” Eyes and ears on the whole ship, which she made note of during Mulligan’s tour. “They can hear everything you’ve been saying.”
She glances at Fontaine, on her knees, on the floor, gun to her chest, shaking, arms wrapped tight as if they’re all that hold her together.
The door remains closed.
Sentro turns, looks at Castor, and frowns. Something’s not tracking. An anomaly she can’t pinpoint, a glitch in the playback.
Hostages are currency, Sentro thinks. Why kill anyone?
“Time’s up.” He licks his teeth. “And see, me? I don’t bluff.” Pulls the trigger, flash of his .45. Fontaine folds and sags to the floor. Blood spreading underneath her.
She wills herself to feel nothing. Takes a half step backward and collides with Pauly, who, having traded his shotgun for a well-traveled AK, blindsides her down to the floor with its duct-taped butt, then swings it around and down at her.
“Now we do this one. But a little fun first, yeah?”
The precious second and a half Pauly takes to consider having a go at her lets Sentro parry the second blow to the side of her head from Castor and drive the meat of her palm into Castor’s kneecap, fracturing it, then stripping him of his .45 as he screams and tilts. Rising, Sentro catches the onrushing one-eyed tweaker with an elbow that crushes the cartilage of his nose, in the same rising movement shouldering away Pauly’s Kalashnikov as he finally thinks to tap its trigger, causing it to fire in a wild arc that sends his brother cowering to the floor while the other pirates bail out into the hallway, yelling for him to stop.
The scar-faced tweaker has bounced off the door, leaving a wet skid of bright red from his damaged face across and down it; he’s making ugly sucking sounds, struggling not to drown in his own blood.
As Sentro bulls her way out of the anteroom, into the corridor, Pauly’s weapon shreds a ragged line across the bulkhead trying to find her, so she stops, pivots low, and fires back through the breach he’s created, less to find him than to keep him guessing.
Head creased by one of Sentro’s bullets, his shoulder joint blown out by another, Pauly loses grip on his AK, and it hits the floor and continues firing; the other pirates—mercenaries—who thought they’d scrambled to safety do a mad dance down the hallway again to avoid getting hit.
Sentro empties th
e rest of the .45’s clip at them as she runs out and toward the exterior door. Handgun spent, hardly slowing, she uses the side of it to crush the windpipe of a pirate ascending the stairwell from B-deck before the man can even raise his weapon.
She whirls him around her like a dance partner as someone opens fire deep down the C-deck corridor. The bullets miraculously manage to miss her after ripping through his torso, but she’s misted by his blood and tipped off balance by the sudden weight of his dying, and letting go of the body, she tumbles backward down the flight of stairs.
Primary colors explode before her. Her senses again splintered and bent. Thoughts begin to plod half a second behind; she’s thinking of her next move after already having made it.
Sentro rolls upright and slips through the greasy railing and swings down to the next deck. She can hear Castor come out of the C-deck corridor, deliberate, and start down one step at a time, wary of any movement below, favoring his bad knee.
She takes a few deep, steadying breaths. Her playing field has, at least, leveled considerably. She’s running but not fleeing, and the twins are no longer calling all the shots. Through the narrow slots and gaps in the stairway superstructure, Sentro sees a gun poised and searching.
“C’mon, ya fuck. C’mon, then.”
