Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8)

by Devon C. Ford

  I made Nemesis wait by Mitch and carried on, my pace slowing involuntarily as the ground angled sharply upwards. I was forced to stop running quickly, instead taking long strides until the ground became so steep I had to all but crawl up it. Slowing as I reached the crest I turned to survey the lush valley below and picked out some of the others in their obvious positions of cover. Nobody showed themselves, but I knew that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  Crawling slowly, I reached the summit and peered over to see that my suspicions had been right and my caution rewarded. I peered through the small binoculars from a pouch in my vest for long enough to know what was going on and slithered back down to pull my carbine up and rapidly hit the button of the flashlight attached to the barrel. I waited, seeing the answering blink of the same torch attached to Dan’s weapon.

  He was watching.

  I held up both hands, every digit extended deliberately to signify the number five on one hand and a single finger on the other. The torch flashed once. I pulled my weapon up to locate Dan in the optic and flashed once in return. He pointed to himself, snaking his hand around the bluff of land, then pointed at me before making a gun shape with his raised thumb and extended forefinger to point it at me and drop the hammer of his thumb.

  I’ll go around in the open, he said, you stay on overwatch and shoot if I say to.

  As far as plans went it was simple, if pretty risky. I shuffled along the ridgeline about a dozen paces until I nestled into a position and brought the rifle up. It was all I could do to not start taking shots, to start taking heads, until Dan had spoken to them. I saw AKs. PKMs. Machetes. I saw pirates relaxing around a crude roadblock made of a few branches dragged into the road and a small fire burning beside their position.

  It took Dan a few minutes to come into sight of them, the first I knew of it being their panicked movements as they scrambled to pick up their weapons and point them at him.

  He emerged alone, having left Ash out of sight because he never liked taking the dog into a kill zone, and walked towards them holding his carbine up with the butt on his right shoulder.

  And a white rag stuffed in the barrel.

  The Art of Negotiation

  Dan sat Ash down and gave him a stroke on his big head in case this was the last time he ever saw his best friend. Telling him to stay, he pulled a cleaning rag that had once been white, or at least white enough, from a pouch and stuffed it into the end of his barrel before taking a deep breath to steady himself.

  He walked slowly, taking his time and trying to stay calm because he didn’t trust himself not to open up on the bastards out of anger or fear - both emotions were running neck and neck for the lead - the second he saw them. He saw them before they saw him, lounging around without any discipline, angering him further because of their unprofessionalism.

  They aren’t soldiers, he reminded himself, they’re scum. They’re animals.

  They fell over themselves to snatch up weapons and run to line the road ahead of him, not fanning out to flank his approach or taking cover at all. His face contorted as he fought to control his disgust at them. He walked, not speeding up or slowing down in response to their reaction until he stood his ground ten paces from them.

  “What do you want?” he asked them. Their faces scanned among themselves as no clear leader emerged. He asked the question again, raising his voice and frightening them. He didn’t want to make them react, mostly because he didn’t want to test the ballistic properties of his old vest against a hail of up-close 7.62. He was pretty sure how that would turn out. Instead he wanted them flustered, scared and confused.

  “Who’s in charge?” he barked, taking a step forwards and repelling them like they were afraid he was contagious. “Is it you?” he asked the one nearest to him. He just shouted back in a language Dan didn’t understand so he turned to another and took a pace forwards, his gun still held in a way so as not to offer any threat. “Are you in charge?” he snapped at the terrified man.

  “What do you want?” an accented voice demanded. Dan looked in the direction of the voice as the only man not to have jumped up to grab a weapon stood. He stooped to pick up a gun with a folded stock and an elongated, curved magazine. He held a small stick, a tree root if Dan had to guess, in one hand and pointed it at him as he spoke.

  “You come to here,” he said as he put the root back in his mouth to his molars and chewed on it, “and you shout at my men like you are the king of these hills.” He waved a hand around grandly, secure in the false knowledge that he had the upper hand.

  “So you’re in charge then?” Dan asked with a smile. He lifted his left hand up, making the symbol for a gun once more with his empty hand. He didn’t glance up at the high ground to his left because he knew precisely where his daughter would be.

  ~

  I saw the interaction between Dan and the man. It was clear to me before I even got the signal what was about to happen, and I gently nudged the safety catch forward on the 417 as Dan lifted his finger and gave the signal.

  My mind wandered back to a story Lexi once told me. It had taken her close to three years to laugh again after her ordeal at the hands of the psychotic Frenchman who had tortured her for information about us. She told me of the time they went to a place which was now legend, even among the children born at Sanctuary after the battle of Slaver’s Bay had taken place. She told me how she and Steve had climbed to the rooftops before the sun broke the horizon to be in place for the plan to work. She told me how she had shivered as she waited, freezing half to death as she lay as still as possible, waiting for the time to go to work and worrying that she would be shivering too much to shoot straight or else her frozen fingers wouldn’t move. The way she described it seemed more like the effects of adrenaline to me than it did actual cold, but she was a delicate woman after her suffering and I didn’t like to interrupt her.

  She laughed as she told me how Dan was wearing colourful clothes that somehow made him look far less intimidating, not ‘Dan’ like at all, and how he went through some strange and ridiculous warmup routine before pointing his empty hand at the monster who called himself Bronson. I knew that part of the story wasn’t overly embellished, as Dan himself had told me that the man must have been six-six or six-seven at least; a head taller than him and twice as wide.

  Her eyes seemed to glaze out of focus and her voice grew quiet as she spoke about the killing: the moment when Dan levelled his empty hand at the huge man and pulled his imaginary trigger for Steve to end the man’s life in a heartbeat, before she took her toll on the slavers to rack up a body count that she used to be proud of.

  I watched and waited for the signal, only taking the shot in the instant Dan’s cocked thumb dropped to his hand. I wasn’t watching my target, I knew where that was and it was firmly in the middle of my crosshairs; I was watching Dan’s hand.

  The report of my first shot sounded impossibly loud over the open landscape and echoed far off into the distance as my second and third rounds drilled into the confused group below who were so close I couldn’t miss.

  Dan had dropped to the deck as soon as he had fired his make-believe gun. I was vaguely aware of how fast he moved as I made sure to keep his body out of my sights. I remember thinking that, all things considered, he moved pretty well for a man who must be what? Forty-three? Forty-four?

  I continued to line up my shots and time them perfectly to take down targets one after another until none remained a threat.

  Only one of them moved. He was dragging himself across the dusty ground with one limp leg trailing blood, his hands fighting desperately for purchase to claw his way closer to the fallen weapon fixed firmly in his sight. Dan stood, walking towards the crawling man to place a dusty boot on the back of his wounded leg making him cry out in pain and fear. He stepped to his side, rolling him over with a boot to expose the damage my shot had done to him: the front of one knee was all but gone.

  His hands fluttered as the barrel of Dan’s gun, now devoid
of the white flag of truce, pointed directly at his face. I saw lips moving but heard no words as I watched intently. My tactical awareness came back to me, overriding my need to know what was happening down there, and I scanned the rest of the terrain for signs of more enemies. There were none; no silhouettes on ridgelines and no reflections of binoculars or similar. I panned back to Dan who startled me as I hadn’t heard a shot from his weapon, but the man he had been questioning had evidently been dispatched. I fumbled for my carbine, seeing the same image of his below me only zoomed out, and flashed the light at him to say I was watching. His hand signals given clearly, I turned to point the weapon down towards Mitch and hit the light again, seeing his answering flash. Relaying the instructions for them to join Dan, I slung my weapons and began the awkward scramble down the steep slope.

  Much like the steps, those hundreds of stone steps leading from Sanctuary to the fort high above that somehow never seemed to be the same height or shape, going down a steep incline was harder on the body than going up it.

  The constant pressure on my ankles as my body fought to arrest the momentum aided by gravity was painful, and by the time I could stand tall and go with the laws of physics to run the last section and allow my movement to slow naturally the others had arrived. Nemesis ran to my side before I’d reached flat ground to check I was still the same as when I had forced her to part from me.

  The militia fighters, either under instruction or by themselves, had begun to gather up the weapons and spare ammunition belonging to the pirates to take it back and bolster our defensive capabilities for a few minutes or months or years longer.

  “What did he say?” I asked Dan, my voice strained with the effort to get my breath back.

  “Not much,” he replied, walking past me to start pulling at the woeful barricade and open the road up again. He kicked at the fire to snuff it out and snapped his fingers for Ash to join him and sent him ahead with the command to search. Guessing what he was doing I added Nem to the task and stood as we watched them work.

  Both of them picked up a trail going back along the road and began to follow it until a short, sharp whistle from me caught my dog’s attention. Holding up a hand for her to wait for me, the signal for her to sit, I waited for the others to be ready before we set off to follow.

  At the lead beside Dan I asked him a question in a low voice.

  “Isn’t there supposed to be something about respecting a flag of truce?” I enquired as delicately as I could.

  “Yes,” he replied flatly, “only not for these bastards, and it’s not like any of them are going to tell their little pirate mates about it.”

  Valid point, I thought.

  Urgent hand signals were given, splitting our group up into three parts again as we silently established a firing group and two flanking moves. They had set up their camp, either intentionally or by dumb luck, in a perfect spot where the natural depression of the ground offered a reprieve from the elements. Even at that time of year the wind speed had the same chilling effect there as it did by the sea, and the green bowl they occupied kept them safe from it.

  I say occupied; I meant the bowl they had occupied, because it was clear when we arrived that they were gone. We organised a search of the surrounding area but no other trace of them remained. They were gone.

  “Rest here, head back, or go to the farm?” Mitch asked, laying out our only real options.

  “Farm,” Dan said, “make sure the bastards haven’t gone there. We’ll head home in the morning.”

  The farm took us another ten minutes to reach as the sun was beginning to set, and despite being frightened and on edge at being circled by the sharks, the people living there were unharmed. We walked inside the low wooden palisade wall past the farmers defending their home with a mixture of military weaponry and what amounted to sharp sticks, and we were welcomed with relief to be given food and warm greetings.

  “Tell me, Leah,” a familiar voice asked me in French to take my breath away with shock, “did you pass through my trading post?”

  “Roland?” I said as I spun around to face the old man who smiled at me through his random assortment of teeth. Despite not knowing him that well I threw my arms around him in pure relief that he was still alive, only to stop and worry that he would know who the butchered man strung up to the ceiling had been.

  “Roland,” I said gravely, needing him to know that the news was bad but not willing to tell him the details, “who was left at the post?” The old man frowned, the frown melting and merging into a look of concern, then into one of tragedy and loss.

  “It is Christophe,” he said, his mind not yet fully comprehending my use of the past tense. I tried to keep my face neutral, but I must have shown some relief that it was a name I didn’t recognise, and so selfishly relieved that I didn’t have to grieve for a man I knew personally.

  “I’m sorry, Roland,” I said simply. Inadequately. He left me then, thankfully not asking questions about the specifics.

  We were fed and given a place to sleep. Dan hated being away from Sanctuary, as did I, but I could feel the physical tension radiating from him like anxiety waves as he lay a few feet away from where I slept. I tried to sleep anyway, but my own nerves and stress kept me awake throughout portions of the night, and although I didn’t know it at the time it was for good reason.

  Night Operations

  Ahmad Gareer had taken a personal lead to dealing with the people inside that small fortified town on the edge of the coast nestled between the cliffs. He had sent crews out on small crafts in the dark of night moving slowly so that the people watching their mothership, their fuel tanker, had no idea how many men he had sent ashore.

  It took only five days for them to return just after dark with news of the building at the fork in the road and the secrets the lone man there had yielded. Many of his crew were French speakers, and although the dialect there was very different they retained enough common vocabulary to speak.

  The pirate leader, once a terrorist and internationally wanted criminal, moved his pieces around the chessboard. He had sent a crew ashore intentionally to spread fear and panic among the people inside the walled town that he wanted for himself, and he had to admit that the stories of what they had done, and the few women they had brought back to his ship alive, was a reward greater than any he had hoped for. He was certain that the men and women inside those walls would be enraged and terrified in equal measures. He wanted them angry, just as he wanted them scared, because that way he could manipulate their responses.

  The only setback of his plan was the loss of the entire crew who had done such a fine job at spreading terror he had sent them back for another turn. A day later he looked through the massive set of binoculars that had hung from the arm of the ship’s captain’s chair, which he had taken as his throne, and saw their skiff anchored in the bay. He assumed them dead or captured but had no concerns of what they would tell anyone under interrogation, even if they told of everything they knew.

  Gareer had a ship, they could say. They had come from East Africa. He had crews numbering close to fifty armed men. He had sent them ashore to have fun.

  They could say nothing more of the plan because the only man among them to know it was him.

  “Boqor?” a voice said from the open doorway of the tanker’s bridge.

  “What do you want?” he answered, not looking at the skinny youth who spoken to him as a mark of his superiority.

  “It’s the boat,” he said, “they are signalling us.” Gareer stood, snatching up the binoculars as he walked to the platform outside of the bridge. That bridge, like many large ships, was at the stern of the vessel and built high above to offer a commanding view ahead. He raised the powerful binoculars and scanned for half a minute, not wanting to ask where the crew was, until he located the boat in the distance towards the west, with the open expanse of the Atlantic behind them. They flashed a powerful ship’s light towards the tanker giving the agreed signal.

  “
Signal them back,” Gareer ordered, “and prepare everyone; we go ashore tonight.”

  The agreed signal, a simple one to inform the leader that the fighters had left the safety of their walls, meant that Gareer could launch his offensive on the town that he mistakenly thought would be unprotected. He wasn’t to know that there were more than enough capable defenders left behind, but that he was banking on the best fighters being far from home was a sound strategy and one that no doubt worked.

  ~

  “Mamon?” a little voice said from the doorway that Leah hadn’t noticed creak open. Leah, startled but suppressing her reaction to swear loudly, turned and smiled at her daughter.

  She’s definitely yours, she thought, she could sneak up on anything.

  “You know,” she told Adalene after she had stopped her heart from thumping double time, “your grandfather would say we have to put a bell on you.”

  The girl frowned as she thought. “He says this all the time,” she said in her accented English which she often mixed with fluent French as though she spoke a single mixed language. “What does this mean?”

  Leah looked at the girl and smiled. She had been worried when her daughter hadn’t spoken a single word until she turned three years old, but relieved and amazed when she did finally start speaking that she used whole sentences in both French and English, as though she had been waiting and listening to bide her time until she understood both tongues.

  “It means,” she told her as she reached out for a hug, “that Granddad is old and cranky and won’t admit that he’s going as deaf as he is blind so he accuses everyone of sneaking up on him.”

  “But why does he want me to wear a bell? Is it so he can hear me coming from far away?”