by Daniel Pyne
The two younger hunters cease shooting and listen. Language is noise. Wind rushes through the narrow spaces. Clouds skitter and gather overhead, shrouding the sun.
“Don’t know.”
“Go see,” the older man suggests.
The deck just past them in the passageway shows deep crevasses of steel bracing, where the full depth of the Jeddah’s lower cargo hold falls away dark beneath them. The Arsenal man looks down. One misstep could break a leg or, worse, send them plummeting down the slot.
“You go see.”
“Go. Both of you. Falcao, you take point.” The youngest man, Lucas, shoves Arsenal forward onto the struts and into the gap. The senior man follows.
Falcao tugs on the neck of his jersey and throws Lucas a wounded look but goes. It’s just a matter of being careful, he assures himself and eases toward the clearing, the lower hold dark beneath them. Falcao and the old man, fingers on triggers, nervous. They’ve seen what this woman is capable of.
Pauly Zeme is still angled up against the secure cabin wall like a sack of something, but now he’s listing, limp, when his twin brother comes into the safe cabin antechamber to check on him. “Pauly? Brah?” Bloody compression bandages from a medical kit are wrapped tight around Pauly’s chest. The English twist’s ruined training shirt is wadded in the corner, where someone threw it after using it to stanch the wound.
Bloodshot blue eyes open, dilated, fixed stare.
Pauly’s dead.
Unable to crouch down to him because of his knee, Castor reels from his brother, making a guttural keening noise. Turns his head away so no one can see his face get utterly wrenched by abject grief. That cunt. That fucking cunt.
His eyes burn; he tries to cry, can’t. Emptiness swallows him. Castor pivots, limps, threading between Carlito and Berto and, in the doorway, nearly knocking over the San Pedro Sula hire who brought him in here to see this outrage.
He staggers into the hallway and vomits.
Falcao and his wingman climb and stalk the staggered grid of cargo canyons for the woman who’s eluded them, who’s killed their employer and mates, who’s made them for fools. Lucas watches them angle across an interior gap where the blue shadows lighten. He sees their weapons pivot, low, high, constantly seeking a target, and ready, Lucas thinks, in case the woman has somehow climbed up above them. The flexing metal of the ship, the container stacks, and the rigging’s crack and moan spook him. The sorry slant of cold, overcast daylight high above them casts its feeble help down as the sky opens up to rain.
Their shoes slip; their sweat-stiffened clothing is flogged by the squall gusting through. Neither would admit to being scared, but Lucas can tell they’re jumpy for sure. His senses are acute, still a little buzzed from the bolus of Mexican brown he chipped for courage before they set out from the beach hours ago.
Eventually they circle back to a gap, an empty space, where a rustling flutter causes Falcao’s gun to worry upward as a seabird explodes from its nook. The older lanky hire opens fire without taking time to ascertain what it is.
“Don’t waste bullets!”
They step out of Lucas’s line of sight.
“Falcao?”
There’s a thump of a corpse landing, and then moist bird parts rain down, and the two men who disappeared start laughing, and the sound of them rattles out to where Lucas waits, nervously touching the ulcers on his face, confused by what he’s hearing and further agitated by an angry yell from the stern. He slips back out to the perimeter deck and sees striding toward him the boss man, Castor Zeme, and his broken-nosed, scarred meth-monster majordomo, whose name Lucas has never been told.
They look so unhappy. Lucas wonders if this cargo ship has been cursed.
Inside the cargo corridors, Falcao and his wingman can’t seem to stop laughing.
Standing firm on a container clearing poised above the hold, rain spattering down on them, the older man watches young Falcao flap both sleeves of his threadbare jersey and mime the exploding bird, setting off a whole new round of laughter. He’s embarrassed that he’s wasted bullets, glad that the kid finds it entertaining. It feels good to laugh. Falcao says something the older man doesn’t understand, then shuffles, giddy, backward to an open hatch that neither of them noticed before, where something takes hold of his leg and pulls. Falcao looks down, perplexed; the older man watches, helpless, as the woman they’ve been searching for yanks the kid violently off balance and drags him inside the bin below.
The older man shouts, “Look out!” and raises his gun way too late.
His younger colleague shouts what must be shit in his language as the crimson jersey disappears.
Bullets chip the lip of the hatch behind Sentro, spitting slivers of steel. No way can she go back and pull it closed. A shadow crosses the opening; hands jab an automatic rifle blindly down to fire three more short bursts into the darkness of the bulk cargo hold.
Sentro flattens herself on the flailing young mercenary she’s acquired, then rolls to the safe side of him as bullets burrow through the soybeans they’re swimming in. The boy jerks twice and coughs as stray shots rip through him. Sentro feels him deflate. Stripping him of his weapon, she presses his head under the surface of the soybeans and holds it there as he shudders and stills.
Someone calls down into the container: “Falcao?”
There are heavier footsteps, more voices: French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, in an incoherent, angry jumble. She’s succeeded in disrupting them; there’s no coherent strategy to their search. Now she will see if she can play that to her advantage.
The dry-bulk air thickens with stirred soil, preservatives, pesticides, and the acid smell of gunfire. She’s still scared but no longer angry. Not planning her next move like this is a chess game, just determined to survive and regroup. Desperate but resolute, she forces her aching shoulder to move, snaking away from the open hatch, shoving the dead kid’s rifle ahead of her, over the grain, and into the turgid darkness until her hands strike something sleek and solid beneath the surface, and in the faint light she can just make out the shine of a couple of heavy aluminum carrying cases buried in the soybeans. Something familiar about them. A car company logo. SAAB BOFORS DYNAMICS. She’s confident she’s seen these cases before, many times, in stockrooms and weapons caches, arms depots and stacks on tarmac, waiting for their due mayhem. But her mind draws a blank on precisely where or when or why.
She hears the scuffing of the heavier shoes and boots directly above her now, moving apace toward the open hatch. Three men. At the other end of the long bin, maybe twenty meters still to go, a thin shaft of daylight, thick with dust, beckons. She keeps crawling.
Following the steely echo of voices and gunfire, Castor has located his newly hired senior man huddled wet in the rain and squatting between stacks, staring worriedly into an open space and the open top hatch of a dry-bulk bin. A former FARC rebel, Colombia by way of Fortaleza; Castor and Pauly’ve never used this man before. They heard he had a drinking problem. Castor has never bothered to learn his name.
In a thick, rural Spanish dialect, the rebel explains to the pimply one, Lucas, how Falcao got pulled belowdecks by the woman.
Castor gets the gist of it, but Carlito translates anyway, and when he’s finished, Castor nods for the FARC man to go in and get her. The old rebel hesitates. Carlito snaps, smacks him on the back of the head. The lanky man sprawls on the wet deck, cursing in Spanish, but nevertheless belly crawls out of the safety of his narrow slot to the top hatch opening and, after murmuring what looks like a prayer, sticks his head and gun down into the container, expecting to be killed.
For a moment it’s a still life. He stays there, upside down, rain soaking his legs, before finally shouting something back at them. He can’t lift himself up without dropping his deadweight rifle. He yells, “There’s another hatch! She’s getting away!” in his inept Portuguese, so distorted by the bin that even Lucas is slow to understand: their Arsenal man is dead, and a woman’s legs have just disappeared up thro
ugh another hatch at the far end of the hold.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The squall whistles, compressed, a strange incantation through the containers; it catches on rigging and straps and trembles them like a warning. But the sudden rain has stopped.
Having effectively doubled back toward the accommodation tower, Sentro scrambles up out of the dry-bulk bin’s second access hatch and onto the main deck behind another row of containers, with the unfortunate Arsenal fan’s automatic rifle slung across her back. She could get out to the perimeter from here, but then what?
Still outnumbered and outgunned, she wants to take the higher ground.
Because her shoulder makes her whole arm balky, back braced against one side of a cargo stack, feet pressed flat against the other, she begins to chimney climb upward, using whatever tie lines and rigging she can for better hand- and footholds.
Halfway up, she rolls onto the flat of a container and looks down over the edge, not surprised to discover the alpha twin and his three hired men hurrying back toward the hatch from which she just emerged. She repositions for a better sight line. The AK rattles as she swings it into use; her pulse of gunfire drives Castor and his crew scrambling back for cover in the steel canyons. She shoulders the gun again and crosses to another stack to continue climbing.
Toward the top of this ascent, her shoe catches on and dislodges the lever on a container’s loading door. She’s startled when it swings outward but manages to grasp the handle and go with it as she feels the bullets from below punch into the door’s back side and tear up the boxed cargo exposed inside.
Hundreds of Korean hair dryers waterfall out of the open container and cascade down onto a startled scattering of her pursuers just as they appear to have regrouped for another assault. It allows Sentro time to haul herself the rest of the way up to the top of the stack before the door swings closed again, revealing, as Sentro rolls to cover, Castor down below, trying to find footing on the landslide of appliances and aiming up at where Sentro just was.
He must get a glimpse of her leaping over the next gap, because he fires wildly and misses, and from her new position Sentro can track the other three men on their awkward scramble out of the hair dryers to the main deck to regroup.
Sentro has climbed to a wide plateau of evenly stacked containers, and she’s exhausted. Open sea stretches vast to muted horizons on every side of her. The bow of the ship seems impossibly far away, and just the top of the accommodation tower shows its squat square face above a higher stack of containers behind it.
She listens for her pursuers but hears only the slap of waves against the side of the idled ship. They can’t be far.
Whatever adrenaline has driven her this far is waning. Her legs shake; her hands and arms are cramping from the climb; she can’t catch her breath. She starts running, or what passes for running given her fatigue, using the strength she has left to jump the breach between stacks, shoe and sock skidding on steel slick with rain, heading back toward the cabins and the imprisoned crew.
It’s not all that selfless. She needs their numbers to survive.
Before the next jump she stops, listens again for sounds of Castor and his crew, who she guesses are somewhere behind her, stalking the perimeter. She imagines their eyes scanning the ridgeline of the stacks and seeing nothing but the cloudless blue sky.
Faintly on the wind, she hears French, Castor’s voice, warning, “Get back to the hostages before she does!”
So much for another element of surprise.
She waits for the pounding of their shoes and boots on the U-deck perimeter. All four men, but in opposite directions. One of them is moving away from her, toward the bow.
Why?
She can make out another man’s stilted, “Où allez-vous?” It’s the scarred one Pauly has called Carlito, and he doesn’t get an answer.
Sentro jumps the gap and quickly climbs to the top of the next, higher stack of containers. She’s still intent on reaching the exterior stairs and platform outside C-deck; it’s almost level with this checkerboard mesa and runs clear all the way to the accommodation tower.
Her shoulder throbs.
Murmurs of Portuguese, a brief back-and-forth, rise on her left from the main deck. She crawls to the edge, peers over, and locates two of the mercenaries who have been chasing her struggling to carry the body of the Arsenal man back to the stern, where the fast boats are tied.
No sign of Carlito or Castor, but bullets begin to skip off the top of her current container, and when she looks that way, she sees other men firing at her from the tower’s C-deck landing.
Fuck.
Swinging the AK off her shoulder, she rolls and slides to the edge and eases over it, but her toes can’t find purchase on this container’s steel side. For a harrowing moment she’s exposed to the disfigured tweaker, Carlito, who is positioned underneath her, good eye keen, his face where she broke it a swollen bruise.
He raises his gun.
Fuck fuck fuck.
A sharp knife of pain stabs her rotator and causes her to lose her grip.
She falls. Gunfire from the hired men on C-deck chases her.
Carlito must have darted into the narrow gap too late to track her short descent. His speculative bullets rattle around corners, and Sentro feels steel splinters scrape her face.
She kicks out and propels herself backward, arresting her plunge downward but landing hard on her back on the top of a lower stack. The impact knocks the wind out of her; she gasps for air and loses grip on the Kalashnikov and, helpless, watches it clatter across and over the side and down to the main deck.
There’s an odd, soothing quiet, as if someone turned down the sound.
Then Sentro hears, distant, in accented English, “SUCK THIS!”
Arching her head back to look to the bow, she discovers that Castor Zeme has climbed to the crow’s nest beneath the forward masthead light.
He has a cannon tucked on his shoulder.
She knows what it is.
Castor triggers his RPG: the flash, the trail of smoke, so familiar and predictable, like an old friend. She can only watch, helpless, feel the hot projectile pass over her and slam into the face of the higher level of containers she just fell from.
They’re a bitch to aim, she remembers, even if you know what you’re doing.
The struck container explodes. Or rather, the ordnance explodes and blows the container apart. Pressed prone by the concussion, throwing an arm over her face, Sentro only imagines she can see Castor lower his weapon and crack a grim payback smile.
The blast momentarily blinds her.
But she feels the stack of containers she’s on come unbalanced. It and all the other stacks around it shift and tilt precariously to the port side, steel rigging snapping as part of the top row slides free and tumbles into the sea.
Sentro claws for a handhold as the whole cargo ship Jeddah rolls from side to side, the weight of its disrupted containers leaning out over the water.
Black smoke billows from the afterburn of the RPG. She’s on a half-collapsed house of cards. And blazing, insubstantial bits of lacy silk cargo are fluttering down from the sky like incendiary ticker tape: burning lingerie.
Dazed and exhausted, stunned passive, Sentro is a rag doll slung in slow motion by the violent pitch and roll of the ship. Gravity has its way with her. She tumbles over and off into the skewed black grime of darkness below.
PART TWO:
GIRL WOMAN ON THE SHORE
CHAPTER TWENTY
Say no, then. My feelings won’t be hurt.
Like a distant memory:
Smoke clearing, the naked Grey Wolves femme from her Cyprus acquisition gone sideways rushes out, grim determination, gun in her outstretched hand, aimed point-blank down at the client and her and
an unsteady thumping sound that might be a heartbeat
and faces, all the faces of all the dead, and
oh
her son Jeremy’s long face, ten years old, he
’s talking, the smile ironic, his eyes already judging her, but that could just be the Dennis of it, no? No. And all she hears is the ragged thump of her own heart and
she hopes it’s hers.
But where is Jenny?
and her heartbeat and that crazy MRI of her skull and brain, vibrating, as if alive, as if the resonant image of Aubrey Sentro in real time scans deeper and deeper, through the gossamer tissue, to the sparking telodendria and synaptic bouton of—
Rattled, restless thoughts dance and skip across decades like a badly scratched record but find the groove again on a slender spit of sand barrier off Port Isabel, where the blacktop park road on Padre Island dead-ended at a NO TRAFFIC BEYOND THIS POINT sign nailed to the wooden hardware that forbade further access, behind which stretched endless grass-studded dunes and a deserted beach washed by a long, low, rolling tide.
The boy—Andy Yoder—was alive when she found him. Wasn’t he?
She remembers how the winds tugged at her hair as she emerged from the black Corolla; she pulled the duffel off the seat and felt the strap cut into her shoulder and started walking north, where the small man in the filthy singlet stood at the top of a high dune, waving his arms and gesturing to guide Sentro where he wanted her.
The boy was alive.
A narrow old getaway skiff had been dragged up out of the surf, its paint-flaked sides nearly salt blasted down to the bare wood. The man on the hill gestured for Sentro to stop, then skated down the sandy slope to her. Small, Mexican national, stout. Sunglasses and a Texas Rangers cap. She was circumspect, on edge, fearful as always; she had promised herself long ago that she would quit the game if it ever happened that she no longer felt the dull scrape of fear.
“Hola.”
In English, the kidnapper said, “Hi.” His wasn’t the voice from the phone, which meant there were two kidnappers. The hostage was still at risk. This man seemed skittish, unsure, even scared. Not the mastermind. A messenger. Sentro glanced up and down the empty beach while the little man motioned to the bag: Put it down; open it. Inside were the shrink-wrapped bricks of cash the clients’ bank had delivered to the motel.
