The Catch: A Novel (7 page)

Last few feet before the waterline, Munroe let go one hand, pulled the handgun from her pants, shoved her feet against the hull to push out, and dropped into the center of the boat. The little craft rocked hard and her shin landed on the captain’s arm, bone-crushing pain softened by the partial flexibility of the boat’s bottom.

Munroe pointed her weapon at the watchman, but preoccupied as he was with keeping the craft steady, she might as well not have bothered. He didn’t fully look her way until she’d shrugged out of her pack, one shoulder first and then the other, gun and focus always steady on him.

Only when he saw the weapon pointed at his face did he lower the oar he’d been holding against the hull and slowly raise his hands in surrender.

The man was older than she would have guessed, had at least ten if not fifteen years on the young men who’d gone up the
Favorita
. Like theirs, his clothes were black, but his were closer to rags, mismatched, torn, and ill-fitting.

Eyes never leaving his, handgun never lowering, Munroe reached for the rifle at his feet, and when she’d secured the weapon for her own use, she returned the 9 mm to her waistband.

“Untie and shove off,” Munroe said.

The man knelt to let loose the lines, then picked up the oar again and pushed hard against the ship. The inflatable responded, and Munroe braced for his retaliatory lunge, expected him to take a swing, but he didn’t.

Once away from the ship, he put down the oar and, taking the engine just above idle, turned the nose of the boat toward open water, then shifted his face toward hers to look askance. Munroe stole a glance at the bottom of the boat and confirmed what she’d seen earlier. Aside from the captain, who still lay unconscious, the little craft was empty. To leave the freighter and head into the open ocean like this would be a death sentence, but there was no way these men had gotten so far out with just the gas in the engine’s tank. Somewhere nearby, and yet far enough away that Leo’s men with their night vision hadn’t picked it out, was a mother ship that held what she wanted.

“Where is the fuel?” she said.

The man pointed away from the
Favorita
, waved far ahead.

“Take us there,” she said, and so he sat in front of the engine,
pulled a small compass and a flashlight from his pocket, and placed his hand to the tiller.

The whine rose louder and the inflatable surged away from the ship, dead ahead, in the opposite direction of the muzzle flashes and sounds of battle, which carried loud and long over the water’s surface.

Her willingness to leave the ship, to run from a fight she might possibly win into the arms of certain death if lost at sea, had been based entirely on the innate desire to stay alive—not hers, but that of the man in the boat, who wanted to live far more than she did. She trusted her instinct and his desire for self-preservation; the
Favorita
disappeared entirely into the night that swallowed them, and only the explosions in the distance were left to punctuate the dark.

Three minutes out and Munroe found nothing that could guide her; five and she first saw the pinprick of light, a candle flame that flickered, and with this as her beacon, she had the boatman idle the engine and motioned him around the captain, toward the front of the craft.

“Hands behind your head,” she said. “Face to the water.”

But instead of doing as she’d instructed, the man dropped to his knees and clasped his hands in a form of prayer and pleading. She only partially understood the dialect and the jumble of words, a stream of excuses and begging, most probably lies no different from Leo’s.

She read past speech for the body language, for the truth that words obscured, and touched the muzzle of the rifle to his forehead. “Tell me,” she said. “Who is your boss, and what value does the ship captain have to you?”

The man had no answers, only stories of fishermen unable to make a living, of being a simple man hired to watch the boat. She punched the rifle into him and he stopped. His was an old tale based on an even older truth that might have meant something back when Somali piracy was in its infancy and hadn’t yet turned into the multimillion-dollar cutthroat business that it had become.

As if he read her face, read her distrust, the man put his hands behind his head and pleaded again. “On the boat,” he said, and motioned toward the light. “He knows what I don’t know.”

Information from him would have been a bonus, but what she really wanted was a way to get to land. “You live if you do as I say,” she said. “If you don’t—” She punched him again with the weapon. “Understand?”

He nodded emphatically. “Everything as you say,” he said, and she lowered the muzzle and motioned him toward the tiller.

They started up again and the flicker on the water grew larger until it materialized fully into a wide flashlight beam swung in the hand of another man who was, as far as Munroe could tell, the only occupant on a V-hull about twenty feet long without any overhang or shade, definitely not the dhow or mother ship that she’d expected.

When they were within shouting distance, her watchman idled the engine, stood and waved, called out the news that they carried the captain with them, and the man on the boat motioned them in closer.

The inflatable slipped in behind the larger vessel where an outboard engine was tipped up, and beside it a ladder extended into the water. Munroe grabbed hold of the ladder, pulled herself onto the bigger boat, was over and standing by the time the guard got close enough to see her face. Butt of the rifle to her shoulder, muzzle toward his head, she said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

In response to her words, he gaped and stood staring.

“Drop your weapon,” she said.

He didn’t move, but his body language screamed shock more than threat. Surprise, perhaps, at the white man partially dressed in military camo, intruding on his boat to put a gun to his head—a white face speaking his language.

She didn’t want to fire a warning shot. Hadn’t been able to check the magazine in the rifle, though from her watchman’s reaction when she’d pointed the weapon at his head, she assumed it was loaded and functional. She took a step forward and the man flinched. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said, “but I will if I have to. Drop the gun.”

The man lowered the weapon and straightened.

“There’s a white man in the boat,” Munroe said. “Bring him up.”

The man remained mute and motionless, wasting her time, trying her patience, amping the adrenaline higher. Munroe pulled the 9 mm from her waistband and fired in the air, a deafening blast against the night that would, if there were other boats like this out there, probably send the curious in their direction.

The weapon report was enough to get him moving.

The man dropped the flashlight and scurried for the inflatable.

Munroe scooped up the light and switched it off. Knocked his rifle out of the way and followed him to stand guard while he climbed down; kept watch as the two men wrangled the captain upward.

When at last they’d heaved him up and deposited him into the bigger boat, she demanded her pack, which they brought up, and then she motioned them both back down into the inflatable and, while they waited, did a quick inventory of her boat. This wasn’t the mother ship by any means. No generator or air compressor, not much in the way of food or water, and no spare ammunition. But what the vessel did have was fuel in several large containers, and the fuel was what she’d come for.

Munroe leaned over the outboard and tipped the propeller back into the water. The men in the boat below guided the inflatable away. She fired a warning shot with the rifle, confirmation that the weapon was operational, enough to keep the men from veering off too far. She opened the tank vent, adjusted, primed, and pulled the engine to life.

The men stared, faces upturned, bodies motionless.

Rifle on her shoulder, voice raised to carry over the engine, she said, “Who do you work for? What do you want with the ship captain?”

No response.

She fired again. Closer to the inflatable and both men flinched.

“The ship captain,” she said again. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” the second man said, and when she raised her rifle toward his head, both men held hands up and wailed over each other in a pleading chorus of ignorance that wasted her time.

Munroe stepped back and set the rifle on the boat’s one wooden bench. Pulled out the smallest canister of fuel, dragged it aft, and dropped it over to the men, who came in closer to take it. Grabbed three water bottles, tossed them down, and then followed those with the short-range radio she’d taken from the grenade launcher. Setting these two free was a promise kept, and she didn’t know what was worse: that she left the men to possibly perish on the open sea, or that they might survive and go on to other plunders and other killings.

Munroe stood watch as the small boat shoved off, waited until the men faded completely into the night, and then turned to further inspect the upgraded version of escape and the supplies it carried. This boat was longer, wider, probably heavier than the cigarette boats they’d used when running guns in the Bight of Biafra, and the engine had less horsepower, but a rough estimate of consumption and the fuel on board said she could probably make about four hundred nautical miles before running dry.

According to Leo they’d been less than twenty hours from rendezvous. At the
Favorita
’s speed that put her somewhere in the range of three hundred nautical miles from the meeting point, and because it made no sense for the captain to hand off the armaments far out on the ocean—not in this remote part of the world, not if he’d hired an armed escort for his trouble—it also meant that with a hefty give or take and a dollop of assumption, she was within three hundred nautical miles of the coast—probably less, depending on what course the
Favorita
plotted.

Munroe inclined back to trace out the map in the sky, then pointed the bow to the west and opened the throttle, and the boat lurched forward, a pounding rise and fall against ocean swells that
jarred her body and promised to cover distance in less time than the
Favorita
would have. Without food, without shade, and with limited water, reaching the coast would be a long, hard slog, but as long as she reached land she could turn south and follow the shoreline into Kenya. If she didn’t make it that far before running out of fuel, so be it. Land was land. She spoke Somali, she’d find a way to survive, always did, and this wouldn’t be the first time fate had taken her across an ocean just to dump her on shore to figure her way from the clues at her feet.

That had been that other lifetime, the missionaries’ daughter who’d fled the continent with the blood of the sadist who’d trained her to fight, taught her to hate, still fresh on her hands. And as it had been with the
Favorita
in Djibouti, bribes had also paved the way for her flight from Cameroon when she’d boarded the
Santo Domingo
in Douala. She’d snuck off the freighter when the ship had reached Valencia, and without more money, it had taken two months of working the docks as a stevedore to figure out a way to get from Spain to the United States. She’d lived among the containers and in abandoned offices until a man had come in the dark with a knife and had made her a killer for the second time. He’d taught her how easy taking a life could be, showed her a first glimpse of the predator that the knife of her tormentor had created.

M
UNROE LOCKED THE
tiller in place and, struggling to keep her balance, tracked down the pieces the pirates had used to refill the engine fuel tank: makeshift funnel, smaller container, scooper to ply gasoline from the larger drums. Then she inspected the rifles and their magazines, each of which had been only half full, as if ammunition had been rationed out among the lower ranks and saved for the battle with the ship.

She consolidated ammunition, snapped the one full magazine back into place, and set the rifle aside. Scooted for the bench and for the third time made her way around a large twist of black-painted two-inch polypropylene rope that lay in the middle of the boat. Stopped, turned, and flicked the flashlight beam over the one item
that should have jumped out at her the moment she’d set foot on this craft. Rope of this thickness had no business here.

Munroe knelt and put her hand on a braid fat enough that her fingers didn’t meet on the underside and after a moment she stood. The captain had been close when he’d said fishing lines had jammed the
Favorita
’s propeller. A few hundred feet of rope like this, stretched out and floating in the freighter’s path, and the propeller would have sucked it right in and been wrapped to a complete stop. But to lay the rope out far enough in advance to avoid being spotted by the armed guards, to do it on the pitch-black of the ocean without the ship’s lights to guide them, the attackers would have had to know the ship’s speed and coordinates and exactly where the ship would be.

This wasn’t a random hijacking.

Munroe maneuvered herself over the bench, picked up her pack, and carried it fore, then took off her vest and put it beneath the captain’s head as a pillow of sorts to protect him from the pounding rise and fall and possibly prevent more damage than what had already been done.

She checked his pulse, his breathing, lifted his eyelids and shone the flashlight into them. His pupils weren’t dilated, which meant that it probably wasn’t brain bleeding that kept him out like this. She studied the lines and creases on his face, hints of secrets he hadn’t told, might never be able to convey again, and then shut off those thoughts.

The need to know was automatic, a desire to understand, to problem-solve, an analytical skill that had served her well over the years but which had no purpose in a present when reaching shore was the only thing that mattered. Munroe switched off the light, and in the boat’s repetitive pounding and the engine’s roar, in the endless water and the lightening sky, she had nothing but empty exhaustion that had followed on the heels of the adrenaline dump. In the monotony the memories came for company, prodding at her soft spots like calloused fingers picking scabs off a wound that had only just begun to heal.