Survival (5 page)

The same smile was on his face when he came out of the head holding the gun. His men took his cue and retrieved weapons from beneath their blankets, and the eight seamen found themselves staring down the ugly muzzles of pistols.

“What the hell is this?” demanded one of the seamen. Igor punched him in the throat and the man collapsed, fighting for breath.

“I’m only going to ask this once. Where’s the rest of the crew?”

Nobody answered, the seamen preferring to stare at him in stony silence. Igor tilted his head at one of his men. “Leon? Get a knife. We’ll start cutting off fingers and see how long this bunch wants to play hardball.”

Leon gave the crewmen a malevolent grin and moved around the galley as he foraged in drawers. “Ah,” he said, holding up the gleaming blade of a serrated bread knife. “This should do the trick.” He slashed at the air with it a few times and then returned to where the men were sitting.

Igor motioned with his pistol at the youngest captive. “You. Time to lose your fingers. Are you right- or left-handed?”

The seaman, no more than early twenties, swallowed hard. “No.”

Igor shook his head. “You aren’t very smart, are you? It wasn’t a yes or no question. Last time. Are you right- or left-handed?”

The young man looked at his mates and shivered involuntarily. When his eyes returned to Igor’s, the hit man smiled.

“Please,” the seaman begged, his lip quivering. “There are four down in the engine room, the captain and the helmsman on the bridge, and two more in the staterooms. They’re sick. The flu.”

“And the passengers?” Igor asked.

“Asleep, I’d expect.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Describe them.”

“A guy. About forty. His hand’s in a cast. And a little girl. Maybe two, two and a half? I don’t know. I’m not good with kids.”

“What about the woman?”

The seaman’s eyes registered confusion. “Woman? There’s no woman.”

Igor’s voice quieted to a whisper, his tone silky smooth. “You’re telling me that the only passengers aboard this rust bucket are this man and his kid?”

“Yes. Two passengers. That’s all.”

“Which stateroom are they in?”

“Port side. First one before the crew quarters.”

Igor’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? Because if you’re lying or haven’t told me something important, when I come back I’ll carve you like a Christmas turkey.”

The seaman’s eyes widened. “No. I swear I told you everything.”

“Do the doors lock? On the staterooms.”

“I…yes.”

“Who’s got the master key?”

The seaman looked to his companions, who wouldn’t meet his gaze. “The captain has it.”

Igor stared at the floor for a moment and shook his head. “Leon, get some line and tie them up. You,” he barked at the seaman. “Line. Now.”

The young man walked unsteadily to the galley and opened a cabinet, reached in, and extracted a bundle of yellow nylon rope. Leon moved to him, his weapon steady as he neared, and took the rope from him.

Three minutes later the crewmen were bound, rags stuffed in their mouths. Igor paced in front of them, as though thinking, and then stopped and checked the time on his Panerai dive watch.

“Rafael, keep an eye on them. Leon, Carlos, you come with me to pay the captain a visit.”

“What about the crew in the engine room?” Leon asked.

“We’ll deal with them once we have the man and his daughter.”

“But if the woman isn’t there…”

“We’ll get to the bottom of that. We’ve got nothing but time. But first let’s find them.” Igor slid his gun from his belt and motioned to the stairs that led to the bridge. “But, Leon? Carlos? I do all the talking. Understood?”

Leon and Carlos nodded as Rafael took a seat, his pistol pointed at the bound men. Igor moved through the door and onto the stairs, his running shoes silent on the antiskid coating. They paused outside the bridge. Igor peered around the corner and then signaled to his companions before moving through the bridge door.

The captain’s expression changed from surprise to shock when he saw the guns in the fishermen’s hands. The helmsman sat frozen as the captain stood, an outraged look on his face.

“What the hell…”

Igor fixed him with a cold stare. “Shut up. I need the key for the staterooms. Now.”

“We rescued you…”

“I already thanked you. Now give me the key, or I’ll blow your man’s head off.”

The captain’s eyes remained locked on Igor’s. “What did you do to my crew?”

“They’re fine. Safe. One of my men is watching them. Now, last chance. Do you give me the key, or do I shoot your mate to prove I’m serious?”

The helmsman gave the captain a frightened glance. The captain dropped his gaze and crossed to a locked cabinet at the far side of the bridge.

Igor took a step forward, his Glock steady in his hand. “Easy. You pull anything out of that locker besides a key and you’re dead. You understand?”

The captain nodded and slowly slid his hand into his button-up jersey. He retrieved a chain with a key attached to it from around his neck and fiddled with the lock. After unlocking the cabinet, he retrieved a ring with six keys on it and handed them to Igor. “There’s no master. These are the keys to the six staterooms. But there are only two passengers, and they don’t have much besides what they’re wearing. A container ship is a bad bet for piracy. We’re only carrying olives and wine, that sort of thing. No electronics or anything valuable on the manifest.”

Igor ignored him and glanced at Carlos. “Stay here and keep the good captain company. If he makes a move, shoot him. Same goes for the helmsman. We’ll be back in a few minutes.” Igor looked through the windshields at the storm raging outside. “Looks pretty ugly,” he commented, and then turned, the ring of keys in hand.

The captain called out after him. “It’s just a man and a little girl. They don’t have anything of value.”

Igor couldn’t help the automatic smile. “You’re wrong about that, Captain.”

He and Leon crept down the stairs to the stateroom level. Igor pointed at the door at the far end of the corridor. They took cautious steps until they were standing in front of the steel door, listening for any sounds of movement inside.

Nothing.

Igor tried the first key, and it didn’t turn. Second one, same thing. The third was the charm. The lock turned and Igor tilted his head at Leon, who gripped his pistol with both hands and pointed it at the door. Igor took a measured breath and twisted the lever, shielding his body with the heavy door as he pushed it open.

And found himself in darkness. He swept the room with the Glock while he fumbled for the light switch. When his fingers found it, he flipped it on. The room was empty. Leon looked to Igor and whispered, his words a hiss, “Wrong stateroom?”

“The little bastard must have lied to me. He’ll pay for that.”

They moved to the next stateroom and repeated the procedure, only to be greeted by another empty bed. The third room was clearly crew quarters, as were the other three. The two sleeping crewmen awoke with a start to find themselves staring down a pistol barrel, and Igor had Leon take them to the galley with the rest of the crew. He stood in the doorway, watching Leon herd the seamen down the hall, his mind churning as he thought through what could have gone wrong.

Because something had. The man and the girl were nowhere to be seen. He’d memorized the ship blueprint, and aside from the captain’s quarters one floor down from the bridge, there was nowhere else they could be.

Igor tilted his head back and envisioned the ship blueprint in his mind’s eye. They had to be either in the captain’s quarters or one of the common areas the crew shared. Other than the engine room and the associated mechanical rooms, there was nowhere else.

Of course, there was the question of why they weren’t in their room in the dead of night. Could someone have sounded an alarm? How? And to what end?

Igor stalked back to the bridge, huffing for breath after the rapid climb, and wasted no time with niceties. He approached the captain and slammed the butt of his Glock against his head, knocking him out of his seat.

“Where are they?”

The captain felt the side of his head, and his hand came away with blood on it. He tried to get up, failed, tried again, and then managed to pull himself back into his chair.

“How would I know? In their stateroom. Where else would they be at this hour?”

Igor’s nostril’s flared and his eyes narrowed. “I’m only going to ask you one more time.”

“You can ask as many or as few times as you like. The answer’s the same. I have no idea. I don’t have them on a leash.”

Igor turned to the windows and watched as the storm raged, the waves still easily twenty feet with breaking white tops. A feeling of dread spread through his gut.

“Where else could they be?” he demanded.

“What do you mean, where else? There is nowhere else.”

Igor turned to Carlos, who was training his pistol on the pair. “Keep watching them.”

He stopped at the captain’s quarters and did a quick search of the rooms, not expecting to find anything. His expectations weren’t disappointed. When he reached the galley, he barked at Leon, “Come with me. We’re going to search every room on this thing. They have to be in one of them.”

They worked each floor, starting below decks, and after forty minutes it was obvious their quarry was nowhere to be found. When they made it back to the bridge, the storm was fading, the waves flattening, the winds and rain having blown by, leaving only an overcast night sky.

“Could they be in one of the cargo holds?” Igor demanded of the captain, his patience now gone.

“I suppose anything’s possible. But why?”

Igor’s eyes drifted to the helm, where a red LED was blinking on the console. He stood and moved to the light, staring at it as though hypnotized.

“What’s this? Why is it blinking?” he demanded, his voice low.

The captain peered at it, and the trace of a smile played across his face in spite of his obvious best effort to contain it. “It’s a warning light.”

“What’s it warning about?”

“It’s the lifeboat alarm.”

The blood drained out of Igor’s face. “Lifeboat…”

The bridge was silent for several moments. Igor glanced at Carlos. “How long has it been on?”

“I…I don’t know. I was watching them, like you told me to.”

Igor closed his eyes, barely containing his rage, and then opened them and glared at the captain. “Where’s the lifeboat kept?”

Igor and Leon ran to the watertight door and swung it open, then made their way to the sling where the enclosed lifeboat had been stored. Igor wasn’t surprised to see it empty, the deployment system dragging along the black surface of the ocean. Leon looked at him with a fearful expression, but Igor ignored him and stormed back to the bridge.

“What kind of lifeboat was it?” he shouted at the captain.

“A twenty-man job. Enclosed, diesel engine, the works.”

“What kind of range?”

“I…well over a hundred miles, I’d think.”

Igor cursed silently. “How fast is it? What kind of speed can it do in these conditions?”

The captain thought for a moment. “I don’t know. Not that fast. Six, seven knots?”

Igor did a quick mental calculation. Depending on when the lifeboat had been deployed, it could have been in the water for an hour or more. The ship was moving at eighteen knots, so it could be anywhere by now.

“Can we see it on radar?”

“Depends on how close we are. In these seas, it’ll probably be difficult. It’s not very big, and the wave crests are higher than its roof. If we’re more than a few miles from it, I doubt we’d pick it up.”

Igor pointed his gun at the captain’s head. “Try.”

The captain stood shakily, dried blood caked down one side of his face from Igor’s blow, and moved to the radar display. He stabbed at some buttons and narrowed the range to two nautical miles, then increased it to four, then to eight, then to sixteen. He stopped at forty-eight and pointed at some blips on the screen. “Those are other cargo ships and tankers. I don’t see anything else.”

Igor debated his options – he could turn the ship around, but then what? That would attract attention and invite the navy to board the vessel and inspect it. And the area that the ship would have to cover to search for the lifeboat would be vast, nearly impossible in the sea conditions. Moving at seven knots in any direction, assuming at least a half hour, possibly up to an hour and a half…it was an impossibility.

He moved to the windows and gripped the rail that ran below them, his face a mask of fury, and gazed out at the remnants of the storm as his mind raced.

Somehow they’d been alerted, and the man had proved resourceful. He’d managed to figure out how to get off a thousand feet of moving ship in a storm without being discovered, leaving Igor holding an empty bag, all his effort for nothing.

Chapter 7

22 miles north of the San Blas Islands, Panama

Juan Diego cocked his head as his fishing boat putted along in the predawn gloom that hung over the Caribbean. He knew the sun wouldn’t be up for a few more hours, but his eyes still instinctively searched along the horizon for any faint trace of light. Off to the south, dry lightning flashed from over the Panamanian mainland, the thunderheads the last remnants of the storm that had battered the area for the last fourteen hours, and the plum-colored clouds illuminated for a brief second as they brooded over the jungle.

He heard it again. The unmistakable sound of rotors beating the air, a fast-approaching helicopter from the west. He wiped a trickle of sweat from his forehead with the back of his knotted, callused hand, evidence of a hard life of manual labor, and squinted into the darkness.

A high-wattage spotlight flashed to life from the helicopter and fixed on his boat. Now the sound of its turbine was clearer, moving at high speed before stopping and hovering in a position a hundred yards off his bow. He stood transfixed in the beam, a white glare that turned night into day, and shielded his eyes with one hand as he glared up at the intruder.