Devil's Gate

4

ABOARD THE KINJARA MARU, Kristi Nordegrun struggled with the darkness. Her ears rang with a strange sound, and her head pounded as if she’d been drinking all night. She lay on the floor, her limbs stiff and folded under her in an awkward tangle.

Try as she might, she could not even remember how she’d gotten there, let alone what had happened. Based on the numbness in her legs, she guessed she had been in that position for a long time.

Unable to stand yet, Kristi propped herself up against the wall, fighting an unbalanced equilibrium.

She was in the deepest part of the crew’s quarters, several flights below deck and near the center of the vessel. She’d come here because the mess was on this deck and she was going to meet her husband for a late meal before they retired for the night. She looked around but didn’t see him. That concerned her.

If she had been knocked unconscious for some time, surely her husband would have found her. Then again, if the ship was in trouble, his first duty was as captain.

Kristi realized she could smell smoke. She couldn’t remember an explosion, but the ship was definitely on fire. She remembered her husband telling her there were some waters of the world where terrorists planted mines. But it seemed not to concern him on this journey.

She tried again to stand, fell to the side, and knocked over a table upon which cans of soda stood. In the darkness she heard a strange sound, like marbles rolling around.

The noise moved away from her but continued until ending with several dull clunks. At that moment Kristi realized what had happened: the cans were rolling away from her, gathering speed until they hit the bulkhead.

Her equilibrium was definitely off, but so was the floor. The ship was tilting, listing. Panic gripped her. She knew now that the ship was sinking.

She crawled to the wall, bumped into it, and then followed it to the door. She pushed on the door. It moved a few inches and then hit something soft. She pushed again, leaning her shoulder into it and shoving it a few more inches. Trying to squeeze through, she realized the object blocking her way was the body of a man, lying against the door.

As she pushed, the man moved a fraction, rolling over and moaning.

“Who are you?” she said. “Are you hurt?”

“Mrs. Nordegrun,” the man managed to say.

She recognized the voice, one of her husband’s crew members from the bridge. A nice man, from the Philippines, her husband had said he’d be a good officer one day.

“Mr. Talan?”

He sat up. “Yes,” he said. “Are you okay?”

“I have no balance,” she said. “I think we’re sinking.”

“Something happened,” he said. “We have to get off the ship.”

“What about my husband?”

“He’s on the bridge,” Talan said. “He sent me for you. Can you make it to the stairs?”

“I can,” she said. “Even if I have to crawl.”

“Is better that way,” he said, finding her hand and guiding her in the right direction.

“Yes,” she agreed. “We need to stay underneath the smoke if we can.”

Before getting married, Kristi had been a paramedic and then a trauma nurse. She’d been on the scene of many accidents and fires and even a building collapse. And despite her fear and confusion, her past training and experience were kicking in and taking over.

Together, they began crawling along the floor. Fifty feet on, they found another crewman, but they could not wake him.

Kristi feared the worst but had to be sure. She checked the man for a pulse.

“He’s dead.”

“How?” Talan asked.

She didn’t know. In fact, she could find no marks on him, and his neck seemed uninjured.

“Perhaps the fumes?”

The smoke was thicker here, but it didn’t seem dense enough to kill.

Kristi put the dead man’s hand back on his chest, and the two crawled on. They reached the stairwell and pushed the door open. To Kristi’s relief there was less smoke inside, and by holding on to the railing she could stand.

As they began to climb, a thin shaft of light shone down on them. In the hallway, some of the emergency lights were working while others were out, and at first Kristi guessed that this illumination came from an emergency light in the stairwell, but there was something odd about it. The light was whiter, more natural, and it seemed to dim and brighten sporadically.

Two levels up was a door with a tempered-glass window in it. Kristi guessed that the light was coming from there, but it made little sense to her. It had been dark when she’d gone to the ship’s pantry. How could it be daylight?

She knew there had to be another explanation. She kept climbing, trying to keep up with Talan. As they reached the landing at the top, daylight streamed in from outside, obscured off and on by waves of smoke that drifted by.

“It’s morning,” she said, dumbfounded.

“We must have been unconscious for many hours,” Talan said.

“And no one came to find us?” she asked, the fear in her heart stirring at the implications.

It didn’t seem possible for so much time to have passed, or for nobody to have come looking for them in all those hours, but based on what she was seeing it had to be true.

She stepped forward and nearly lost her balance. Talan caught her and eased her to the bulkhead.

“Hold on,” he said.

“I’m all right,” she murmured.

Talan released her and went to the door, touching it as if testing it for heat. Kristi noticed the glass in the window was sagging and discolored like melted wax.

“It’s okay,” he said. “No fire now.”

He pushed on the door and it squeaked open.

He stepped out and beckoned for her to follow. She stepped through and grabbed hold of the ship’s rail.

As Talan looked toward the bow, trying to gauge the condition of the ship, a man appeared through the drifting smoke, twenty yards aft. He was large-framed, broad-shouldered, and wearing black. Kristi couldn’t recall the crew wearing black.

The man turned to them, and she could see he held a machine gun of some kind.

She gasped. And out of instinct, perhaps, Talan pushed her to the ground just as machine-gun fire rang out. She watched helpless as his chest was riddled with bullets. He fell backward over the railing and into the sea.

Kristi lunged for the door and pulled on it, but before she could open it the man who’d appeared from the smoke was on her. He slammed it shut with a heavily booted foot.

“No you don’t, love,” he said with a distinctive snarl. “You’re coming with me.”

Kristi tried to squirm away, but he stretched out a big paw and grabbed her by the collar and then yanked her up to her feet.

KURT AUSTIN STOOD ON THE Argo’s bridgewing as the ship charged across the water. At 30 knots the bow was carving the ocean in two and blasting waves of spray up into the wind. Curtains of water spread out and fell, lacing the surface with patches of foam that were quickly left behind.

Kurt studied the stricken bulk carrier through the binoculars. He’d seen men going from hatch to hatch, dropping grenades or some kind of explosives into them one after another.

“That’s damn strange,” Kurt said. “Looks like they’re scuttling the ship on purpose.”

“You never know with pirates,” Captain Haynes said.

“No,” Kurt agreed, “but usually they’re after money. Ransom money or the chance to sell the cargo on the black market. Can’t do that if you’ve sent the ship to the bottom.”

“Good point,” Haynes said. “Maybe they’re taking the crew.”

Kurt took another look along the deck. The accommodations block sat at the tail end of the ship. The structure — which some sailors referred to as a “castle”—rose five stories from the deck like an apartment building.

It stood high and proud, but the flat foredeck of the ship was only just above the water, the tip of the bow no more than a foot or two from being awash. He could see little else through the fire and the smoke.

“I saw them shoot at least one poor soul,” he said. “Maybe they had an important passenger aboard, the rest being expendable. Either way. I doubt they’ll surrender.”

“We’ve got three boats ready to go,” Haynes told him. “The fast boat and our two tenders. You want in?”

Kurt put the binoculars down. “You didn’t think I was going to stand around and watch, did you?”

“Then get down to the armory,” the captain said. “They’re fitting out a boarding party now.”

ABOARD THE KINJARA MARU, the hulking leader of the “pirate” gang dragged Kristi Nordegrun across the deck. He was known by the name Andras, but his men sometimes called him “The Knife” because he loved to play with sharpened blades.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Where’s my husband?”

“Your husband?” he said.

“He’s the ship’s captain.”

Andras shook his head. “Sorry, love, you may now consider yourself single again.”

With that, she lunged at him, her hand slamming into his face. She might as well have punched a stone wall. He shook off the blow, threw her to the deck, and whipped out one of his favorite toys: a locking jackknife with a five-inch titanium blade. He locked the blade into place and held it toward her.

She shrank back.

“If you aggravate me, I’ll carve you up with this,” he said. “Understand?”

She nodded slowly, the fear plain as day in her eyes.

Truthfully, Andras didn’t want to cut her, she would fetch more money with a clean face, but she didn’t need to know that.

He whistled to his men. With the crew dead and the ship going down, the last part of a long job was done. It was time for the rats to leave the sinking ship.

They gathered round him and one of them, a scruffy-looking man with yellowish teeth and a fishhook scar on his upper lip, took special notice of Kristi. He dropped down, touching her hair.

“Nice,” he said, rubbing her golden locks between his fingers.

At that moment, a heavy boot hit him in the side of the head.

“Get out of it,” Andras said. “Find your own prize.”

Wearing a new welt on his face and a look of shock, Fishhook scurried away like a scolded hound.

“What are you going to do with me?” Kristi asked with surprising force.

Andras smiled. He was going to have his way with her and then he was going to sell her on the black market. A nice little bonus to the money he’d been paid for this job. But she didn’t need to know that either.

Ignoring her question, he put the blade away and dropped down beside her. Using a metal wire, he bound her hands, wrapping them several times before twisting the ends together. With a piece of cloth he gagged her. That would keep her quiet.

Before he could get her up, a voice shouted from above. “Ship approaching! Looks like a cutter or some type of frigate.”

Andras snapped his head up. He tried to peer through the thick smoke. He couldn’t see anything.

“Where, you damn fool?” he shouted. “Give us a direction.”

“West-northwest,” his man shouted.

Andras strained to see through the drifting cloud of soot and smoke. A large vessel approaching was bad news, but something far worse caught his eye; a thin white wake, close to the Kinjara’s hull.

He could see it in gaps between the smoke. It crossed toward the front of the ship, where it vanished in the dark clouds. He looked toward the bow, which was now awash in two feet of water.

A second later the oily haze parted, and a ribbed inflatable boat raced out of the smoke, gliding right up onto the bow. Two men lay prone on its forward section, aiming and firing M16 rifles.

Andras saw two of his men fall, and another was hit and hobbling. The others scrambled for cover as the fast boat beached itself on the deck near the Kinjara’s second cargo hatch.

Several men in fatigues piled out of the boat on either side as one of the shooters — a man with distinctively silver hair — aimed and fired with deadly accuracy.

Two more of The Knife’s men went down before the shooter rolled off the attacking boat and took cover behind one of the open cargo hatches.

“Americans,” Andras cursed. Where the hell had they come from?