Blindfold Game

by Dana Stabenow

  They went through a series of corridors without seeing a soul. “Where the hell is everyone?” Lewis said in a hoarse whisper. “This is getting creepy.”

  Hugh didn’t say what he was thinking. He was thinking the crew of this ship was dead, every last one of them, the same way the crew on the Agafia was dead. He touched the nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson in the holster strapped to his side. It comforted him.

  They went through an exterior hatch and began to climb the outside stairs to the bridge. The fresh air was welcome to them all, but especially to Hugh, in whom fear was beginning to be superseded by nausea. He was almost wishing he were back in the small boat. He thought of Sara. He’d seen her standing on the bridge wing, watching as they pulled away from the cutter. Don’t worry, babe, he thought, I’ll be back. Me and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  Which was probably why he was the one to stumble into the first man they’d seen since they boarded. He came around a corner the rest of the team had just passed, with Hugh bringing up the rear. He had earphones on and walkman in one hand, the other hand snapping to the beat.

  He was also armed. When he saw Hugh, he drew and fired in one smooth motion. The shot went wide and he was smothered by a pile of furious, frightened Coasties before he could get off a second. When they got up, he was out cold, possibly for good.

  The shot had been heard. They heard cries from the deck below and footsteps from above and quickened their pace, the stairs clanging beneath their feet. A shot ricocheted off the bulkhead near Hugh’s head, followed by the sound of another shot from the deck. A third shot, this one from above, made them all duck. Delgado, who seemed to have the instincts of a cat, didn’t flinch but trotted directly to another hatch, which led to an inside stairwell. He pointed up. “Bridge.”

  “Weapons,” Ostlund said briskly. He looked as if he might not so secretly be enjoying himself. Hugh, still nauseous, wanted to shoot either Ostlund or himself. “Okay, Delgado, take Segal and Chernikoff and locate the engine room.” Segal and Chernikoff were the EO’s choice for this insertion. “Segal, Chernikoff, disable any secondary controls. If you find the hydraulics controlling the rudder, cut it or break it. Once we’re in command we can always take her in tow. What we want is control.”

  “Aye aye, Ensign.” Delgado and the two engineer’s mates disappeared through a hatch.

  “Okay,” Ostlund said, “let’s go,” and then a surprised look crossed his face. He looked down at the blood welling from his thigh and said, “Oh, shit.”

  The crack of single bullets alternated with the explosion of shotgun rounds. It didn’t sound at all like it did in the movies. Hugh reached for his sidearm and then was hit in the back with a large club and felt himself falling forward, ever so slowly, ever so gently, onto a big black bed, oh, so soft.

  Sara, he thought.

  “Delgado!” Ostlund yelled into the handheld, right into Hugh’s ear from where he had fallen next to Hugh.

  “Sir!” Delgado responded over the radio. “Segal and Chernikoff are both down! I am pinned down!”

  “Understood, Delgado, I am sending assistance!” Ostlund pressed his hands against his thigh and looked at the men still standing. “Reese! Take two men and go get them!”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  The next shot sounded like a cannon, like the last trump, like Armageddon. The ship, already trembling from the pounding it was taking from the seas and the violent change of command, shuddered.

  Okay, not sounding at all good for our side, Hugh thought. As for himself, he was tired, and he thought he’d take a little nap.

  ON BOARD THE SOJOURNER TRUTH

  A GREAT SPOUT OF water went up off their port bow.

  “What the hell was that!”

  Mark Edelen, looking through binoculars, said calmly, “A bunker buster.”

  “A what?” Sara said.

  He elaborated, sounding like a firearms manual. “A shoulder-launched assault weapon firing rounds with explosive loads.”

  Another puff of smoke from the bridge of the Star of Bali, another trail of darker smoke, and this time the marksman didn’t miss. The shell impacted aft of the bridge. The deck shuddered and everyone turned to see that the starboard cannon was gone.

  “Yes,” Sara said, speaking over the ringing in her ears, “I see. Let’s fall off a little, shall we, Chief?” She looked down at where Edelen was crouched against the console.

  “Jesus,” the chief said. He straightened. “I mean, aye aye, XO. Helm, all ahead one quarter.”

  “All ahead one quarter, aye,” Seaman Cornell responded with a sangfroid to match Sara’s own.

  Sara looked at Ops. “What’s the word from Ostlund?”

  “Ostlund’s down. Delgado got to the boat and is picking up the ones who went over the side.”

  “Who didn’t?” Sara said sharply. “Who isn’t with them?”

  “Lewis. Segal. Chernikoff.” He looked away. “Mr. Rincon.”

  Sara’s face went gray. Ops seemed to recede into the distance. She brought him back into focus with great difficulty. He looked worried as he watched her. “Are they sure?” she said, the words coming from a great distance.

  “Ostlund saw him go down, XO,” Ops said. “I’m-I’m sorry.”

  There was a dreadful silence on the bridge that seemed to go on forever.

  When Sara spoke again her voice was hoarse. “Did they find the missile?”

  Ops swallowed. “No, XO. Delgado says the Star of Bali had too many men and they were too well armed. Our guys were driven back. Most of them went over the side. Like I said, Delgado is picking them up in the small boat.”

  Another dreadful silence.

  “Chief,” Sara said.

  “XO?” Edelen said.

  She said in a distant voice, “If you wanted to disable a ship, and you didn’t think your twenty-five-millimeter cannon would do the job, especially if the only working one had just been destroyed, what would you do next?”

  He actually paled. “XO, I-”

  “Where would we want to hit her, Chief? Where would it do the most good?”

  He swallowed audibly, and said, calmly enough, “She’s probably a five-hatch ship. Somewhere between the second and third hatches.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Sara said.

  “What?” Ops said.

  “Hitting them at a ninety-degree angle would be best, XO, but we’ll still lose the bow.”

  She nodded, almost dreamily. “I figured. The collision bulkhead should hold her, though.” She went to the plot station and looked at the Transas. “Pan in, Tommy, would you, please?”

  Tommy, looking a little gray herself, zoomed in.

  “Yeah,” Sara said, and pointed at the screen. She looked around and found everyone frozen in place. “Huddle up,” she said. “Now.”

  There was a scramble of feet as everyone except Cornell on the helm stumbled across the heaving deck to peer over Tommy’s shoulder and follow Sara’s pointing finger.

  “They’re headed straight up Resurrection Bay,” Sara said. “I’m guessing we decided to board them at just about the same time the terrorists took control of the ship. And why not?” she asked herself. “Why wouldn’t they just ride it in until they absolutely had to have the ship under their control? Makes perfect sense. It’s what I’d do myself.”

  “XO?”

  “Never mind. They’re going up the inside.” She traced the Star of Bali’s route up Resurrection Bay. “We’ll go up the outside.” She traced the Sojourner Truth’s route up Eldorado Narrows.

  “That’s awful skinny, XO,” the chief said.

  “We’ll never catch them, Captain,” Ops said.

  “We’ve got six knots on them, and they think they’ve disabled us. Even if they were looking for us, they’ll be watching for us to come back at them from behind, not from the side. Hugh said-” Her breath caught, and she swallowed painfully and went on. “Mr. Rincon said that they probably wouldn’t fire the missile until they cleared Caine�
��s Head, and that it would take an hour for the firing sequence to be activated. The pilot boat will come out, and when they don’t take him on board, it will probably be the first time the people on shore know something’s wrong. By then it’ll be too late.”

  She saw her second in command’s anguished expression and said with a thin smile, “Don’t worry, Ops. I don’t plan on sinking us. I don’t even have to sink them, although I admit it would be a nice bonus.”

  There were nods all around. She looked at Mark Edelen. “Yes, Chief?”

  He swallowed. “Permission to speak freely, XO.”

  “Granted, Chief,” Sara said, almost pleasantly.

  The chief squared his shoulders and spoke directly. “How personal is this?”

  “It’s personal as hell, Chief,” she said, still in that eerily friendly tone of voice. “They killed my husband. I want them dead.” Another shot from the assault weapon whistled toward them and went long, poking entirely too large a hole in the wave about to crash over the stern. In some distant part of her mind Sara noticed that they now had a following sea. She wondered how much this would increase their speed. Of course, it would also increase the freighter’s speed. “However, the missile they’re getting ready to fire trumps my need for revenge. We have to stop them, people. I don’t want them getting any closer to the mainland. I don’t want to turn my back on them for an instant. There are two hundred and forty thousand people a hundred miles from here who don’t know they’re counting on us. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  She didn’t wait for a reply. “Chief, fall off to starboard. Let them think they’ve chased us off.” They hunched over the Transas again. “Okay, Tommy, what’s your best guess for intercept?”

  Tommy punched in some numbers. “If we want to surprise them, right here.”

  “We do. How long?”

  “About an hour.”

  Sara looked over her shoulder at the receding stern of the freighter. “Man, that’s just cutting it too damn close.” She turned back. “Lay in a course. Chief, we slow down over long enough to pick up the crew.”

  “What about the inflatable?”

  “Leave it, we don’t have time. Ops, break out the machine guns. Order the gunners to lay down a covering fire to suppress the hell out of that bastard with the rocket launcher when we catch up to them.”

  “Aye aye, XO.” Ops took the portside hatch at a run.

  She slipped and slid across the deck and grabbed the microphone. “Attention all hands, attention all hands, this is XO Lange.” She paused. She really didn’t know what to say this time. She only hoped she didn’t start a mutiny. She struggled to sound as calm as possible, as if one heard this kind of order everyday on board a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. “You’ve got about an hour to prepare for collision, I say again, one hour to pre pare for collision. Batten everything down and keep one hand on those survival suits. I say again, all hands, prepare for collision.”

  ON BOARD THE STAR OF BALI

  HUGH WOKE UP TO the feeling of someone pushing a red-hot poker through his lower left back. He groaned, partly in pain, partly in humiliation. He’d been shot in the ass. He could hear Kyle laughing. “Shut up, Kyle,” he muttered.

  “Hello,” someone said in Korean.

  With a tremendous effort, he turned his head and pried his eyes open to see a pair of combat boots in front of his face. He groaned again.

  “Yes, you have been shot,” the voice said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Me, too,” Hugh said, surprised that he still had the ability to speak.

  “I have noticed that there is no blood, so I assume you are wearing body armor.” One of the shoes nudged him. “Get up.”

  Sweating, straining, Hugh pulled himself to his knees, where he threw up on the combat boots.

  “Very amusing,” the voice said. “Stand up.”

  He pulled himself the rest of the way to his feet, and stood, swaying, partly from the motion of the ship, partly because little stars were flying around his head and chirping. Or was that little birds twinkling?

  He was on deck. They must have dragged him there. That would explain why every bone and muscle in his body ached.

  The deck beneath his feet jarred and twisted and his hand slipped and let go of whatever it had been holding on to. Hands caught him and set him ungently back on his feet but not before he’d caught a face full of spray. He blinked around at the circle of hostile faces.

  “Careful,” the voice said, revealing itself to be a young Asian man with sallow skin and expressionless dark eyes. Not Kyle, then. “We wouldn’t want you falling overboard.”

  He held a pistol in his hand that Hugh recognized. He looked down and though his head swam at the movement he could see that his holster was empty.

  “Who are you?” the man said.

  Hugh licked his lips. “Could I have some water?”

  The man nodded at someone behind Hugh. A bottle of Evian appeared. Hugh almost laughed but he was afraid it might hurt. He unscrewed the cap and drank thirstily.

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” Hugh said.

  The man gave a little bow. “Ja Yong-bae.” Almost as an afterthought he brought the pistol up and hit Hugh in the face with it.

  Hugh went down again, and was caught again by the same rough hands and dumped back on his feet.

  “Who are you?” the man repeated.

  A head appeared over the side of the container and said something to Ja that Hugh didn’t catch over the sounds of wind and sea. “Don’t stop!” Ja shouted.

  He turned back to Hugh. “You came from a U.S. Coast Guard ship. I must assume that you have captured the Agafia. Where is my brother?”

  One brother per boat. “He is a prisoner, along with those of his men who survived.”

  “You lie,” Ja Yong-bae said. “He would rather die than live in captivity. As would I.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Hugh said.

  The man gave a very European shrug. “I would have thought it was obvious.”

  “It isn’t. Please explain it to me.” Hugh was only half paying attention to their conversation. He didn’t know what Sara was going to try next, but he knew Sara and he knew something was coming and that it would be big and bad. Sara didn’t do redundant. And she would be operating on the assumption that he was dead, so she would not be constrained by fear for his safety, and she would be highly motivated for revenge. Hugh wanted off the Star of Bali, and he wanted off now. If Ja offered him the chance to jump overboard he’d take it and thank him.

  Ja considered. “Why not? There is time, and you have come so far.”

  He had Hugh hoisted up over the side of the container. There wasn’t a lot of room inside because it was mostly filled with the missile and its launcher. Men hunched over the controls.

  “Why do this?” Hugh said. It had bought him time before and he liked to go with what worked. “Who do you work for?”

  “Myself.”

  “You trained with al-Qaida in Afghanistan.”

  Ja raised an eyebrow. “You’re remarkably well informed for a member of the United States Coast Guard.”

  What the hell. “I work for the CIA.”

  Ja’s eyebrows raised. “Do you,” he said after a moment. Then, amazingly, he smiled. “It took you long enough to catch up with me. Didn’t I leave enough clues?”

  With a groaning of gears, the head of the missile began to rise.

  ON BOARD THE SOJOURNER TRUTH

  “WE’RE JUST COMING UP on the northern point of the island, Captain.”

  “Are they in sight yet?”

  Everyone on the bridge strained to look. “No.”

  Sara hoisted herself into the captain’s chair to see if height would give her an advantage. The dark green seas were whipped into whitecaps by the winds howling up out of the southwest, but the swell was way down, and what was left of it was pushing them north.

  It would also be pushing the Star of Bali north.
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  “Let’s kill the lights,” she said.

  Ops nodded. The ship’s lights went out, inside and out. Sara got down and walked out onto the starboard wing and looked back. Even their running lights were out. They were as indistinguishable from the dark green water as a two-hundred-and-eighty-four-foot white hull with an orange stripe down both sides and a big white square retractable helo hangar could be. She wondered where Laird and Sams were, if they were alive and safe.

  Probably not, because if they had been they would have been able to yell for help, and if they had been able to yell for help there would have been no need for the task in hand. She hoped yet again that she was doing the right thing. She hoped she wouldn’t lose any more of her crew.

  Sara had heard all the cliches about command, but she had never understood until now the definition of the word “lonely.” She turned and saw Mark Edelen looking at her, and thought she saw condemnation in his eyes.

  She squared her shoulders and went back inside, this time climbing into the captain’s chair without thinking about it.

  They were coming up Eldorado Narrows all ahead full, as fast as the EO could push all four generators. Fox Island, a series of three mountain pillars connected by two ridges, was passing by on their left. The ridges were high enough that they couldn’t see the Star of Bali, presumably passing up the outside of the island as the Sojourner Truth was passing up the inside. Which meant that the ridge concealed the Sojourner Truth from the Star of Bali as well.

  Cape Resurrection, on their right, had been succeeded by a series of sheer cliffs contorting themselves into a sinuous convolution of coastline that was mostly bare rock dropping into eighteen, twenty-nine, thirty-seven fathoms of water. Ahead, a narrow spit thrust out from Fox Island to the northeast, a rude gesture of land thickly crusted with trees, most of them dead and bare of limb. An old fishing boat was tossed up among them, its wooden sides as gray as the dead tree trunks.