The Catch: A Novel (6 page)

And then more silence.

Even the radio went quiet and Munroe could feel the focus as each man studied the water, trying to find the threat that eluded them.

Another five minutes passed and then Marcus, a tremor of excitement in his voice, gave coordinates for an approaching attack boat, though no sound of an engine came in over the water. Then new coordinates. And new ones again. And again. The tempo on deck picked up. Not confusion so much as tension in trying to home in on
multiple moving targets far enough away that they were not easily spotted among the swells even with the aid of low-light goggles.

Munroe lay flat near the railing, watching, waiting, analyzing, puzzling.

So much about the scenario was wrong.

Pirates might follow a well-lit ship at night waiting for dawn before they launched an attack, but she’d never heard of a night strike that targeted a ship out in the dark like this.

Victor fired three more bursts.

Wrong
.

Even a calm ocean dumped four- to six-foot swells against the ship’s hull and turned waterline boarding into a climb up a sharp, wet, rocking, bucking wall. It was hard enough using grappling hooks and ropes and ladders when there was no armed resistance and you could see what you were doing.

This made no sense.

Flashes sparked out in the dark, far behind the freighter, and a barrage of weapon reports returned from the ocean, though it didn’t appear that the attack drew closer. And then there was silence again. An elongated stretch of minutes where the automatic weapons went quiet and the armed guards, finding protection behind strategically placed sandbags, searched again for the enemy, and in that eternity, the first flash-bang grenade hit the deck.

Even this far fore, dulled by the distance, muted by the open air, Munroe felt the concussion wave. David screamed, and Munroe knew his pain. Through the night goggles, looking at the moon was like looking into the sun—how much more the searing light that had just exploded in front of him.

Without the night vision, the men on the ship would be forced to fight blind.

And then another explosion, another flash.

Wrong, all wrong
.

Munroe struggled to pick Victor out from the darkness but couldn’t find him. A shadow or two moved down from the bridge, an
other one up, but she could no longer tell who was whom. The ship’s foghorn blew, signal to most of the crew to gather in the safe room. Another explosion followed, and then another, and then from the port wing of the bridge a staccato of weapon reports more sprayed anger than targeted shooting.

Munroe closed her eyes, breathed in the sounds of silence and the fragrance of the impending battle. She saw the strategy, knew the reason for the suppressive fire, understood that it wouldn’t be long before the fighting escalated and whatever was out there closed in: Leo’s team had the high ground, presumably had superior training and better weapons, but the ship was the length of a football field, and they could no longer see in the dark and hadn’t come prepared for a full-on assault of a standing ship. Leo’s team didn’t have the capacity to hold the
Favorita
indefinitely.

The silence lingered and Munroe knelt, palms to the deck. The cool of the metal bled into her hands. The first rush burned through her veins and, with it, release in abandoning herself to fate, to the predator’s instinct: tranquillity in the knowledge that death had come for her again.

Munroe crawled along the edge of the coaming in the direction where she’d last seen Victor. The muzzle flashes out on the ocean stayed dark and, without targets at which to aim, so did the weapons on deck. How long before Leo’s men pulled the night goggles back on and began hunting the water once more? Probably never—being blinded again was too great of a risk. And then as if to confirm the thought, another concussion grenade landed midship and brought more searing light.

This was Leo’s war. He and his men could do what they’d been paid to do, but she wasn’t sticking around. No matter how far away the suppressive fire might be, something was close enough to get those grenades on deck, and that was her way out.

A minute passed, then two, while she continued a cautious stop-start in Victor’s direction; she’d drag him with her if she could, if only for the kindness he had shown, and then she heard the thud, soft and sick: a body being hit with a metal pipe or a rubber-coated grappling hook laying hold somewhere along the railing.

Munroe paused. Heard the thud again. Was fifteen feet away when the first man, dressed in commando getup, reached the deck and slid over the rails. A moment later a partner came up behind him.

The second man untied a rope from his waist, pulled hand over hand, and hauled up a grenade launcher, which he gave to the first man, and a Kalashnikov rifle that he kept for himself. The man with the launcher passed within a few feet of Munroe, and he carried his weapon with the casual confidence of one who’d handled rifles since childhood, yet his gait, clumsy and ill-timed, betrayed him as an amateur playing dressed-for-war, as if he mimicked moves seen on television without understanding the reasons for them.

Munroe breathed down the quandary. The boat they’d come from was her way of escape. And yet these men were far enough fore that without the night vision, Leo’s team would never see them, and there was no way to give Leo a warning without alerting the invaders to her own presence. Munroe moved from her belly into a crouch.

The man with the launcher spoke, and she froze.

The words came in Somali. “Remember, don’t shoot the captain.”

“How do I know which is the captain?” said the other.

“You saw his picture.”

“But they are all white men.”

“Only shoot the legs,” said the grenade launcher, and the man with the rifle signaled something and lay prone on the deck, face toward the bridge, while the man with the launcher crept away from his partner, as if he intended to continue around the foremost side of the hatch to the port side. Munroe strained to pull images from the dark, far down the deck. Still no Victor. Waited until Grenade Launcher approached the corner of the hatch and then slunk through shadow after him.

She came on him from behind. Hand to head, foot to knee. Slammed his face into the metal edge of the coaming and his body went limp in a fight that had ended too fast to be fair. She’d killed more often than she wished to remember, had fed off the hunt and suffered from it all the same. The law of the jungle cried out to her to finish what she’d started, to answer treachery with treachery and dump him in the ocean, but this wasn’t her battle, it wasn’t personal enough to upend the numbness of Djibouti.

The silence on deck ticked on.

Munroe left the unconscious man where he’d dropped.

The attack boats were out there. Couldn’t be much longer before chaos erupted, and she needed to be gone before it happened.

At the corner of the hatch she leaned out toward the man with the rifle, still prone on the deck, playing warrior with his face toward the bridge.

“
Halkan kaalay
,” she hissed.

The man turned in her direction but didn’t rise and so she called louder, trying to mimic the accent she’d heard so briefly before. On the second call, the man with the rifle moved to his feet, scampered in her direction, and when he passed the corner, she grabbed his neck, pulled him off balance, and shoved him into the metal as she’d done with the first. But he didn’t go down.

Instead he clawed. Twisted. Tried to regrip the rifle and get a finger on the trigger. Munroe smashed her forehead into his face and he crumpled. She grabbed the rifle and struck him hard, and when he collapsed completely she stood over him breathing heavily, wrestling through the desire for blood and violence that had enveloped her in those seconds he’d fought back.

Munroe knelt and searched his clothes. Found a small handheld radio, snatched it up, clutched the rifle, and returned starboard. On the water she discerned the outline of an inflatable boat tethered to the freighter by the tails of the grappling hooks, and one man below working to keep the little craft from being washed into the hull of the ship.

If he’d only planned to deliver his accomplices, then he would already have been gone. Instead, he waited. She could use that.

Munroe searched the deck for Victor again. Couldn’t see him and so ran along the coaming in the direction he’d last been. Three minutes to find him and then she’d be gone, three minutes of time ticking off inside her head, and all she happened upon was empty deck.

She crossed between hatches one and two, glanced fore and aft.

Spotted a motionless form several meters in the direction she’d
come and skirted through shadows toward it and found not Victor but the ship’s captain.

In the burn of disappointment Munroe punched the man. He didn’t move. He wasn’t dead, she could tell that much, but was unconscious and bleeding from a head wound—as if he’d been on his way to the hold with the weapons and had been too close to the last flash-bang when it had gone off.

In the heat of the moment, direction change in the midst of battle, a decision that had as much to do with frustration over not finding Victor as it did with scorn and loathing for this lump of a thing that meant something to the invaders, Munroe reached for the captain’s collar and dragged him toward her escape. She couldn’t guess what they wanted with him, but by getting him off the ship she’d deprive them of a trophy, and maybe find answers, maybe purchase a foothold for Victor, for Amber.

Another round of automatic fire from the water shattered the temporary stillness and this time the muzzle flashes appeared to be moving closer.

Time. She had no time.

Munroe pulled the captain into the shadows and foot by foot wrangled him to the rope that the intruders had used to pull the weapons on board.

In the dark where she had left them, one of the battered men had crawled to his knees. Hand on his head, he swiped at the blood. Counting every wasted second and regretting her decision not to dump him overboard, Munroe strode toward him. He opened his mouth but no sound came out, and he scratched backward to get away from her. Munroe slammed the butt of the rifle to the side of his head and he stopped moving.

The battle on the bridge intensified.

She returned to the captain. Pulled the rope beneath his back, looped it under his arms, twisted and tied it into a bowline knot. The rope was thinner than she would have liked, was enough to carry his weight but would probably cut into him. Face to the rail, focus
on securing the man, she missed the scrape from behind. Felt the movement before it reached her, let go of the captain and stood at the same time the rifle muzzle pressed into her spine.

The adrenaline uptick fed into her veins, clarifying thought into rapid calculations. One hand raised slowly in a show of surrender, her other inched toward the sheath for the knife.

The muzzle punched into her back was accompanied by a rush of Somali, ordering her to turn around, the volume and tempo of the words telling her the person holding the gun was overadrenalized, scared; words she ignored because there was no logical reason she should have understood them, and if the man with the rifle followed the same instructions as his predecessors, he couldn’t kill her until he’d confirmed she wasn’t the same white face he’d seen in photographs.

Ears straining, Munroe stretched past the battle, searching for clues to the number of men behind her, calculated the risk of turning to fight. Another flash-bang exploded somewhere on the deck, instant answer, instant out.

In the concussion wave she dropped. Spun. Knocked the muzzle up and followed with the knife. Hand wrapped around the weapon, she shoved it away. The rifle discharged beside her ear, deafening, while the young man fought for control and her knife answered with a life of its own, the dormant demons ascending from deep sleep, instinct and speed in the face of death.

His body dropped, the warmth of his blood trickled down her hand, and Munroe knelt, predator over prey, breathing in the fragrance of fear, scanning the deck for his companions, cursing Leo.

There had to be one more man in the dark, someone with the launcher. Likely a three-man crew identical to the one she’d already encountered. She searched the shadows and didn’t see him. Turned back again to the rail.

Paused only a moment and then leaned toward the water. She was finished here. Would not stay to fight a war that had never been hers to begin with.

She called to the man below, “
Waxaan hayaa kabtankii
.”

“Where is the signal?” he said back.

“It is broken,” she said, words kept short out of fear that with so many variants of Somali, her dialect would be wrong. “Take the prisoner.”

The man in the boat shifted and made a poor attempt to stand, and that was enough to know that he didn’t suspect. Munroe wrapped the rope around the top rail and then around her waist, heaved the captain up, leveraged him against the rail, and tipped him over. His deadweight pulled hard against her, and the rope burned her hands as she let it out. She fought to keep from dropping him, grateful for the short descent to the waterline.

The man below guided the captain in and Munroe released her hold.

“
Waan soo socdaa
,” she said, and the man in the boat didn’t object. She pulled the 9 mm from the small of her back and shoved it into the front of her waistband. Snagged her pack, shrugged through the straps, and, leaving the rifle on deck because she couldn’t carry it too, slipped over the railing, took hold of the base of the grappling hook, wrapped the line around her leg, and let herself over the side.

She was vulnerable in those long seconds that she worked her way down, white skin against the night, hands, neck, and face a certain giveaway had the watchman been suspicious. It would have taken only a small bit of clarity for him to notice what he should have seen from the beginning and shoot her in the back. But in speaking his language she’d designed her own protection. Why should he doubt what he’d heard? He was too busy keeping the boat from getting rubbed bare against the ship to concern himself with her.