Orders were shouted down from higher up, from the deck of the big ship, and thankfully whatever was said made them put their guns down. I was dragged to my feet and rolled onto the rough wooden boards of the lift which squeaked upwards with jerking movements. That made it difficult to pretend I was still unconscious as I would have fallen off the side and back down to the water level if I didn’t reach out and grab hold of the side of a plank of wood, unable to let go even though I now had a handful of splinters. More shouts and I was prodded with a gun barrel until I lifted my head.
I saw over the metal side of the deck, taking in a disorganised rabble of more pirates all pointing and shouting at me. I was dragged aboard and my weapons were laid out in front of me like I was some deconstructed delicacy offered up to appease an angry and malevolent god.
That flippant description so easily given in my head turned out to be worryingly accurate, as the man who advanced towards me seemed so different to the others in his bearing and obvious authority that he could have been from a different species.
They told him things I did not understand as I tried to keep my eyes off the man, but I was drawn to the richly embroidered scarf he wore wound loosely around his neck and the better quality clothing he wore. What marked him out as really different, despite being clean and so obviously in charge, was the coldness of his piercing eyes. They promised, without him saying a word, to kill me without remorse if it served any purpose for him.
He stepped forwards to pick up my Glock and checked the action with practiced hands. Nodding his approval he gave more orders and I stood still as the holster and vest were pulled from my body. The gun evidently belonged to him now, as would the vest have done if he hadn’t turned it over and tutted his annoyance at the hole in the material. I saw where the hole was and tried not to think what would have happened had the bullet gone through; it was dead centre and would have cut through my spine to paralyse me had I lived. He walked away with the Glock and spare magazines giving a final order over his shoulder without giving me even a second look.
Hands grabbed me and shoved me along as the others jeered at me, leaning in to fill my vision with filthy teeth as they laughed at their newest prisoner.
Hostage, my mind told me, not prisoner. You are their hostage now.
Hopelessly outnumbered, I decided I would show at least some defiance rather than die slowly; when I reached the metal door one of them unlocked by spinning a wheel in the centre and I was pushed inside, I turned and held up my bound hands, asking in French for them to release my bonds. One hesitated, glancing at the others for permission or support, I could not tell which, until he summoned the bravery to step forwards and raise a rusted blade the size of his forearm to cut the ropes. I smiled when my hands were free, rubbing the wrists to check everything still worked and feeling the slight numbness in both hands which I knew would be a blessing for what I wanted to do next.
“Before you go?” I asked them as they turned for the door and made them turn back to face me. I guessed they wouldn’t kill me for no reason, but that the chances of getting off the boat alive were non-existent, so I decided to do things my way and to hell with it.
As the first one turned my right fist hit him with a hook that dislocated his jaw and sent him towards the metal deck in slow motion. The next nearest was the man who had cut free the ropes and still had the machete in his hand which he started to raise. I jabbed him hard in the throat with my left fist, following up with a second to the end of his nose which was rewarded by a crunch and a pop as blood instantly covered his mouth and chin. The third man in the doorway was out of my reach and reacting fast. Before I could step over the unconscious form of the first man I had punched he had raised his gun barrel at my chest and started shouting for me to get back.
I knew this because he screamed it in English, but at first my mind didn’t seem able to translate what he had said until he shouted it a fourth or fifth time. I held up both hands, happy that I had hurt two of them badly enough to soothe the wound of being captured, and stepped backwards.
Come on, I thought, shoot me if you’re going to shoot me.
They didn’t. Instead they backed off dragging the unconscious one with them, shutting the door to leave me in the darkened gloom. Feeling faint from the exertion and my throbbing head I staggered, shooting out a hand to lean against the cold metal wall to stop my head from hitting something again. As I steadied myself with deep breaths, I noticed for the first time that I wasn’t alone in the dark room.
The Plan
“They must have taken him,” I insisted to Dan, my eyes still puffy and red but my face a tense mask of anger. “It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“Leah,” he began in a tone of voice that I recognised but I wasn’t in the mood to be coddled and treated with sympathy.
“No!” I interrupted. “Don’t tell me to forget about it. Don’t tell me it’s pointless and don’t tell me he’s dead.” I breathed hard as I kept my mouth tightly shut to keep in the tears that threatened to come again.
“I was going to ask,” Dan said softly, “how you planned to get there?”
I looked at him, surprised and yet not at the same time. We shared a kindred spirit of wanting to do things that no sane person would, and I knew he would be itching to get onboard that ship even without the chance that our own people were imprisoned there.
“I… I…” I said, my face twisting with angry frustration as I knew I didn’t have the first clue how to get onboard the massive ship. I couldn’t even think of a way to get close enough to it without being detected.
“Mitch is dead against it now,” Dan said. I wasn’t surprised. He had scared just about everyone who had seen his display with the body and his subsequent clash with my father. The two men had taken themselves away after the uncomfortable altercation and returned as though nothing had happened, like the two friends who had been close for years hadn’t just fought in front of half the town. It was all very… male of them to just pretend it hadn’t happened.
“He’d rather stay defensive,” Dan went on, “rather kill them off as they try to come ashore until they’ve lost enough people to make staying here a thing for the ‘too difficult’ box.” I made a huffing noise to show what I thought of the plan to wait them out, but I didn’t judge Mitch for it; he had come too close to losing his family and that would have long-lasting effects.
“You know as well as I do that won’t work,” I told him, “you also know that doesn’t help us get our people back.” Dan’s mouth tightened, probably forcing down the urge to remind me there was no guarantee that Lucien was captured and not dead. I had argued all day with everyone who tried to comfort and console me, even having it laid out that he must have been taken out with the tide or else he would return to the water’s surface in the next day or so, as though the harsh truth would snap me out of my denial. We were saved another disagreement by a tentative rapping on the doorframe of the room we were in.
“Knock, knock,” Adam said pointlessly, giving verbal subtitles to what he’d actually just done. Both Dan and I bit back telling him this, as he had been in tears of guilt when we had spoken with him, having been in command of the day watch and in an exhausted slumber when the attack happened. He had managed to throw on some trousers and grab his vest and gun in time to see the last of the group who had infiltrated the main castle go down to a hail of small arms fire. Marie, we later found out as she hadn’t told us, had been leading that group of terrified people and formed them together as she lead them up the spiral staircases and over the first floor to descend behind their attackers to kill them. She had conveniently left that part out of her story, glossing over it with the most innocent detail, but the fact that she had pulled a trigger was a big deal. Luckily, enough of them had pulled their triggers so that the death of the man with the noisy rifle couldn’t be attributed to any single one person’s guilt, because taking a life would have affected Marie, I thought.
“What do yo
u need?” Dan said kindly, leaning away from me as our heads had been bent closer together as we spoke.
“Thought you’d both want to know straight away,” Adam said as he walked in, unslinging his rifle which had become as much a part of him as our own weapons and resting it on a wooden sideboard. “Danielle here saw something I thought you should know.” He turned to the bewildered Frenchman and nudged him with his elbow, saying, “Tell ’em, then.”
French Dan looked between us and Adam, mouth hanging slightly open with the unspoken threat of his remaining senses escaping via that opening, and closed it to swallow before speaking in gruff French.
“I saw them take a man on their boat. He looked like he was hurt, so I guessed it was one of their own. I didn’t realise until today, after I had slept, that I didn’t see any of them with blonde hair…”
“Sooo…” Dan said slowly with raised eyebrows almost meeting in the middle of his confused face, “you thought the blonde-haired person was one of the African pirates?”
The question hung in the air for a moment before French Dan shrugged. “They could have been from South Africa,” he explained lamely. I realised my own mouth was open then, and as stupid as the assumption obviously was I couldn’t help but accept the logic of his words, even if they were unsupported by any level of common sense. The facts of what he saw also raised my heart through the roof because it made me absolutely certain that they had taken Lucien when the few who had reportedly survived their failed attack fled in one of their boats.
I turned to Dan, seeing in his expression that he could no longer deny my beliefs, and nodded before thanking Adam and French Dan.
“Ad?” Dan said as the two men walked out of the room, making him poke his expectant face back around the corner in silent question. “You know it’s just the French way of pronouncing Daniel, right?” Dan said in a low, conspiratorial voice. “You know he’s not actually called Danielle, don’t you?” Adam’s face fell in mild shock that was quickly recovered.
“Yeah,” he chuckled in a way that I was sure he thought sounded natural, “’course I do!” His face disappeared again and ours met.
“Told you,” I said seriously. In any other scenario Dan would probably have taken the opportunity to get a dig in about Lucien, who he still called pretty boy as his looks hadn’t faded one bit in the last couple of years, but the severity of what we faced took all the remaining humour out of him.
“You did,” he said seriously, reaching into his vest pouch for a stale French cigarette which, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t be smoked inside. I watched in silence as he lit it, shaking the pack to double check there wasn’t another hiding inside somewhere before he crumpled it in his fist and patted a leg pocket for his secondary packet. If he’d gone through a full pack already by that time of day then he must have been stressed.
“So how do we get on that ship?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Dan said before he inhaled, screwing his eyes up as the harsh smoke didn’t seem to agree with him like the menthols he preferred. Exhaling, he looked me in the eye as his lips turned to blow the smoke away to one side and said, “So we had better figure it out pretty sharpish.”
The resonating finality of his words, combined with the smoke falling from his mouth as he spoke, was a memory that stayed with me in great detail for a very long time.
~
The ship was in the water. Very deep water to be precise, so I started asking innocuous questions of the people I knew who had experience of such things. Neil was my first stop, not because he was any kind of marine expert but more because he had an answer or an ingenious solution to any problem. I didn’t start straight in with, ‘hey, how would you get onboard… let’s say that big ship out there? Asking for a friend…’ but instead started slowly by asking him how his arm felt.
“Just creased me a little bit,” he said in very untypical Neil fashion by using his own voice and not quoting a film. I’m sure if I’d have asked him at the time when the adrenaline was high he’d have said that he didn’t have time to bleed or one of his other favourite quotes, but I could tell it had shaken him up and was hurting. I smiled and reached into a leg pocket before theatrically looking from side to side to check for anyone watching before I slid my hand palm down across the table towards him.
He played along, doing his own surreptitious checks for any surveillance as he took them without looking.
“Little something for later,” I muttered with a wink. “Now, I was wondering—” I said, though I didn’t the chance to finish my thought as he cut me off.
“How to get onboard a boat that’s too far away from shore to reach without being seen and too high to hop over the railings?” His eyebrows were up and his words soft and inquisitive. I deflated, knowing I had already let the cat out of the bag by not denying it quickly enough.
“Yes,” I told him simply. Neil smiled, leaning closer and lowering his voice.
“Now,” he said, “I don’t know if this is one hundred per cent true, but it was one of Rich’s stories and he didn’t strike me as a bullshitter.”
“Nor me,” I said, remembering one of my mentors of almost a decade ago in a bubble of fondness that was quickly burst by the recollection of his assumed death. “If anything he was quite the opposite.”
“Exactly,” Neil said, “so I have no reason to think this one isn’t real. He told me about an old boy he served with, who was posted up in Scotland which is where they hide all the nuclear subs – all deep-water inlets and the like – and not just our subs but the American’s as well.”
“Go on,” I said, unsure if I was going to be leaving with a recommendation of requisitioning a submarine from somewhere.
“Well, this old boy told him that some American SEAL told them over drinks about the time they were given a training exercise to infiltrate one of their own boats. One of those exercises people hand out when they’re bored or want to make a name for themselves. Well, this team of SEALs, you know what SEALs are, right?” I nodded. “Well this team split off into pairs and tried three different approaches; one pair tried to get aboard with hooky IDs and got pinched at the docks, another tried to nab one of the smaller boats by force but failed somehow, and the last pair decided to swim out and climb the anchor chains in the dead of night…” He waggled his eyebrows at me as though he had just imparted the secret of a magic trick.
“And they succeeded?” I asked, hopeful.
“Oh god no, one of them didn’t make it up the chain because the cold water had sapped him and the other one got battered by two cooks who clocked him slipping over the railing.”
“Neil,” I said, “you’re filling me with confidence…” He shrugged.
“Well they were only elite special forces,” he explained, “they weren’t Nikitas.” Despite myself I laughed, unable to see any sensible reason why trained men at the peak of their abilities and experience couldn’t get onboard, but some mongrel of a girl, who could shoot and won most of her fights because nobody expected to get cold-clocked by a girl or because a dog messed someone up for her, could.
“Well,” I said as I stood up, “thanks anyway.” I reached out to pat him on the shoulder, only stopping myself in time to not make contact with the body part that had had a brush with high-speed lead but not quickly enough to stop him hurting himself with the flinch of reaction. I backed away amidst his hisses of pain until they subsided and he turned to the secret offering I had given him.
It’s probably worth mentioning to people who used to remember how the medical world worked that France had a strange way of administering painkillers. Back at home, when everything still worked normally, you’d just buy paracetamol in almost any shop but would need a prescription for anything stronger. In France they preferred to administer their pain meds a different way, which took a lot of getting used to.
Neil looked at the packet, his eyes widening slowly as he realised firstly what the medicine was, and secondly how he had to take it.
“Really?” he yelled at my retreating back. “A suppository?” I laughed at his tone and the last words of his I heard echoing to me as I turned towards the docks. “For all the good this will do, I may as well shove it up my…”
The Recruiter
Neil’s story, while full of encouragement and rousing tales of success, had got me thinking. I knew I could climb up an anchor chain, especially one with links as big as that ship would have because it would be like climbing a ladder more than a rope, but the problem of how to get there was bugging me. There was no way I’d be able to swim that far out, even without my fear of deep water, not if I expected to be able to do anything but drown before I got there. That left a boat, and for the plan I had in mind to work I’d need to bring someone else in on the gig before I recruited a driver.
I walked the familiar route to the familiar house, finding the only unfamiliar part to be the wide, dark bloodstain on the cobblestones outside the open front door. I paused in the doorway, calling out “Knock, knock,” and wincing as I’d just realised I’d done one of the most annoying things in the world. Alita was there, eyes tired but the rest of her quiet face a mask of resolve that showed no adverse effects of having created the bloodstain outside.
“Got a minute?” I asked her.
“Mitch is not at home,” she said, misunderstanding who I was looking for.
“That’s alright,” I said trying to sound light-hearted, “I’ve had enough of him after the last few days anyway.” She didn’t seem amused, perhaps because my acting skills weren’t my strongest point. She kissed the forehead of the loosely wrapped bundle she carried and laid it down gently in the small wooden crib. She rocked it with expert care, shushing the baby without seeming to have to concentrate on which actions occupied different parts of her body and mind.
Piracy: The Leah Chronicles (After it Happened Book 8) Page 21
