The Wrecking Crew

CHAPTER 14

Jonah slowly stirred awake, sunlight easily penetrating the thin safety-orange ceiling to the ten-man inflatable raft. His gaze fell across Klea, who stared at him cross-armed as if she were trapped in the raft with a tiger.

“How can you sleep?” she demanded, her fierce eyes flashing.

Jonah gave her a pained smile but didn’t answer.

“I’m actually asking you how you can sleep right now,” she said. “It’s not a rhetorical question.”

“It’s a trick every sat diver picks up eventually,” Jonah answered. “Learn to sleep anywhere. You don’t know when or where your next snooze is coming, so you have to get ’em in as you can.”

“What’s a sat diver?”

“Saturation diver,” said Jonah. “Like recreational SCUBA divers, but much deeper and for industrial projects. Oil and gas industry, shipwrecks, that sort of thing. We stay underwater or in a pressurized environment for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Atmospheric gasses dissolve into our tissues to the point of saturation.”

“Tell me how you do it. How do you sleep like that?”

“I don’t know. Try forcing yourself to stay awake.”

“That’s stupid,” she said.

Jonah pulled himself up against one of the bumpers of the circular raft, using the wall for support. The raft was relatively well stocked. A side pocket held bottles of water amounting to about three gallons, fishing gear, a small knife, medical kit, and flashlight. He reached up and checked his slashed arm, finding it not as bad as he’d feared. It’d long since stopped bleeding, probably wouldn’t even need stitches. Good. He wasn’t looking forward to sewing himself up with repurposed fishing gear.

“What about you? How did you sleep when you were a prisoner on your ship?”

“Routine,” said Klea. “My captors gave me small electronics projects to work on, mostly from their outboard motors. Sometimes televisions or radios. I think they were running a little side electronics repair business for the locals. I’d work on those for most of the day. I’d make myself meals from whatever they’d bring me. I worked on the Horizon and made weapons all night. And then I’d do exercises until my arms and legs couldn’t move. I’d get maybe three or four hours of sleep if I was lucky.”

“Three hours a night? That sucks.”

“So what’s your secret?”

“My first rotation on a research ship was pretty rough. I was part of a base crew for a saturation expedition to a sunken turn-of-the-century ocean liner. Spent more time dodging hurricanes than we spent actually getting any work done. I barely slept. Every night was the same. We’d ride these waves like a roller coaster; bow in, one after another. Eventually I would get used to the rhythm and fall sleep. But then we’d have to turn around so that we weren’t so far off station when the storm ended. The ship would start to change course and we’d take a massive three, four story wave almost completely broadside. The entire ship would heel over nearly forty-five degrees. Anything not strapped down would go flying across the entire breadth of the ship. Terrifying. I’d get jolted completely awake. For a moment, I’d be absolutely convinced that the ship was going to turn turtle and I was about to drown.”

“How long did this last?”

“Weeks. Eventually, I realized I could catch a few minutes here and again if I slept in my full uniform and steel-toed boots. Maybe part of my brain figured it was safe to sleep if I could wake up at a moment’s notice and make a run for it. Eventually I didn’t need the boots anymore.”

“What’s your name?” asked Klea out of the blue.

“Jonah. Jonah Blackwell.”

“Your last name sounds familiar.”

“It’s usually attached to ‘disgraced CIA section chief’,” said Jonah.

“Can’t be you. You’re much too young.”

“My father.”

“Do you know my name?”

“Klea something.”

“Klea Ymeri.”

“Slovakian?”

She shook her head. “Kosovar. From what used to be Yugoslavia. By birth, anyway.”

Silence fell between them. At least she’d stopped looking at him like he was some evil, treacherous bastard that would throw her overboard at any moment.

“I’m really sorry about wrecking your dive equipment,” she finally said. “It’s my fault we’re stuck out here.”

Jonah nodded, considered the apology. It seemed heartfelt enough.

“I probably would have done the same thing,” he said. “So I’ll get over it.”

“Seriously? Just like that? You’re what, over it now?”

“Seriously. It was pretty shitty of me to come in with no intent of saving you. You saw your opportunity and took it. It wasn’t like you weren’t prepared, you certainly weren’t being vindictive. I mean, your plan to escape kinda sucked, but we made a decent go of it.”

“I spent years working it out,” she said. “I was so certain. I visualized every detail, mapped out as many outcomes as I possibly could.”

“By the look of things, you may have missed a scenario or two.”

“No need to be a dick about it.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What other way could I possibly take it?”

“Let me put it this way. Fatima’s son didn’t exactly hire me. He sprung me from a prison where’d I’d spent three years. I’d spent that time trying to dream up a way to escape. Lots of ideas came to me, but no real way to carry them out.”

Klea remained silent.

“So Doc Nassiri comes along,” continued Jonah. “And he offers me a way out. A real, bona-fide release from prison in exchange for some basic diving work. Basic for me, anyway. I got the sense he probably couldn’t pay anybody else enough to do it given the proximity to Somalia. But you know what I did?”

“What did you do?’

“I came within one second of taking his gun and trying to shoot my way out of the prison. And you know why? Because I only really knew of one way out. Death. I didn’t have a life to go back to outside those walls. Family is all gone; all my friends think I’m dead or holed up in Thailand with a needle in my arm. They’d said their goodbyes years ago. It was the one certainty I could find, the one absolute I could still control. Maybe I’d take a few assholes with me, maybe not.”

Klea shook her head, refusing to look up, refusing to make eye contact.

“I’m sorry I destroyed your ship,” he said. “I truly am. I know you can relate to what I’m saying. Your elaborate plan? All that Mad Max shit? Harpoons, spears, explosives, smoke clouds? I think you wanted to put yourself in a position where the only choice the pirates had was to kill you. I think you wanted to die on the Horizon.”

She was too strong to sob, but Jonah could feel her heart breaking with every word.

“I should have died four years ago,” she finally said. “I should have died with my friends.”

“Why does the Horizon mean so much to you?”

Klea sat back in the raft, her eyes open, and her cheeks dry.

“I was born in Kosovo,” she said. “This has a point to it, I promise. I was still pretty young during the troubles, but old enough to remember hiding in the woods and the six months I spent in a refugee camp. It’s the sort of thing that college admissions officers swoon over. That was great, because I was good at school. Like, really good. Especially math, physics, anything with numbers, formulas or computer programming. My family stayed observant, we drifted apart when I lost my religion.

“And then I met Colin. He was two years ahead of me at MIT. He was brilliant, an actual certifiable genius. Always smiling, always laughing. Friends with a lot of the girls in his classes but didn’t get many dates. He was kind of awkward and a little overweight. But he was so brilliant and so kind. He showed me a world of phenomenal creativity and passion. Passion for me, a type of intense infatuation I’d never experienced before. It was so pure, so painfully earnest. Maybe other girls found it smothering. One of his exes even tried to warn me off. But I thought it was wonderful. He became my best friend. And then he became more, much more.

“The Horizon was his masterpiece, the culmination of every moment he spent at MIT. He didn’t just want to build a ship that could go around the entire world using less fuel than any other ship before it; he wanted one that was fast and beautiful as well. Every line on this ship was an expression of his brilliant mind and open heart.

“He wasn’t quite what you’d expect of a globe-trotting record-setting maritime explorer. Colin could be a little ridiculous. He wore sandals with tube socks pulled up to his knees, and khaki shorts. Squared-off glasses, even though I went out of my way to get him fitted for contacts. He wouldn’t even go outside unless he was dripping with sunscreen. But I didn’t care about any of that. If you’d met him, you’d understand why.

“So there we are, sailing in the Indian Ocean. Colin thinks he’s planned for everything. We’re more than a hundred miles off the coast of Somalia coming out of the Gulf of Aden. Colin thinks there is no possible way the pirates are going to detect a vessel as small as ours.”

“But they still came,” said Jonah.

“Yeah, they still came. We had no idea how hungry these men were. How could we? Given my childhood, I thought I was wise to the world. We even laughed about the threat, can you believe that? Colin made jokes about joining them, said it’d make for a better career choice than trying to enter a down economy as a mechanical engineering major.”

Jonah allowed himself a tiny chuckle. Klea fell silent for a few moments, but Jonah didn’t mind. She’d finish her story at her own pace.

Finally he spoke up. “You must have gotten along well. The two of you, alone on the ship for all those weeks. Not many couples can do that. Most of the divers I know spend their rotations wishing they were home with their wives and most of the time home with their wives wishing they were out on rotation.”

“Oh no,” said Klea. “It wasn’t just the two of us. Colin’s best friend came along too. Kyle. He programmed a lot of the electronics. That was his ticket onboard. I think he was really just there for the adventure. He brought his girlfriend, Molly-Anne. She was a nurse; we figured she would be really useful in case any of us got hurt or sick, especially in some of those more remote regions. She was there because Kyle was there. I don’t think she really cared for the ocean or boats or anything. Molly loved Kyle, but I don’t think she trusted him very much by himself in foreign cities. More specifically, she didn’t trust him around foreign girls.”

“Girls liked him?”

“Girls loved him,” said Klea, laughing. “Kyle was one of those friendly, handsome guys that thought the world was just a really great place because of how nice everybody was to him. Super trusting. Smart, but not smart enough to realize how uniquely he was treated. The trust fund didn’t hurt either. If Colin would have let him, we probably wouldn’t have needed a single sponsor. Kyle could have personally funded the expedition without breaking a sweat.”

Jonah smiled and watched as Klea relaxed a little, sinking deeper against the inflated side of the raft.

“Kyle drove some old muscle car,” mused Klea, almost more to herself than Jonah. “Hadn’t thought about that ridiculous thing in a long time. I adored him and Molly. They had been together for a long time. I think Kyle was under some pressure to get on with it, if you know what I mean. He would have proposed eventually, I’m certain of that. Colin and Kyle would have been the best men at each other’s weddings.

“The four of us were about as close as friends could be. Molly was so jealous when Colin proposed to me the day we departed. He got down on one knee on the fantail of the Horizon in Bordeaux as the sun set behind us, gave me a ring he’d forged himself in the metallics laboratory.”

Jonah found himself gulping, trying to square his unconscious attraction to Klea with the specter of her martyred fiancé. He tried to look away but his eyes stayed locked with hers. Then, glancing away in discomfort, he found himself looking for a ring on Klea’s left hand. Klea caught him and waved the ringless hand in his face.

“It was stolen,” said Klea. “Ripped it right off my finger while others ran their hands through my pockets. Probably on the hand of some… pirate wench.”

Both Klea and Jonah simultaneously broke out in stifled laughter.

“A very lucky pirate wench.”

“The bitch had better appreciate it,” said Klea, still smiling. “So there we are, we’re making good time — not as good as Colin had hoped, but we were still on track to make the record, especially if we gained time during a spate of good weather we had anticipated over the following weeks. We’d already passed the point where we were closest to the Somali coast; we figured we were more or less in the clear. Still pretty stressful, but the worst should have been over. Colin was piloting, Kyle was in his bunk with Molly. I was on the fantail doing the fuel consumption calculations.

“That’s when I saw this glint in the distance, a single speedboat approaching us. We were out in the middle of nowhere, there should have been nobody and nothing around. I got curious and grabbed my binoculars. When I got a good look, it dawned on me that we were being stalked by a pirate ship. We heard this foreign language over the radio; I realize they’d called in other skiffs. They had a mothership on a scouting expedition in the area and were trying to box us in. We changed course, increased speed to maximum but they gained on us. Soon, there were two other boats chasing us.

“Everybody was up at this point. Molly was freaking out, Colin was more scared than I’d ever seen him, he and Kyle were yelling at each other while trying to squeeze just a few extra knots out of the engines. I was on the fantail, watching. The pirates started falling back, losing ground. Kyle and Colin got excited, they started whooping and hollering. They were already rehearsing the war stories they’d tell at the Miracle.”

“The what?”

“The Miracle of Science,” said Klea. “It’s an MIT bar. Our hangout spot. They’ve got a drink menu that looks like the periodic table of elements.”

“Ah,” said Jonah.

“Suddenly, I realized that we were not outrunning the speedboats. They were hanging back, getting into position. Getting ready to take a run at us. Molly stormed out of the cockpit, started yelling at me to come inside. The speedboats came towards us at full speed, firing guns at the Horizon. Molly just stood there, mouth hanging open and got hit twice in the chest. I’d never seen someone get shot before, not even in Kosovo. I was on my stomach, trying to find somewhere to hide. Kyle came running out, trying to drag Molly inside. He got her inside the cockpit but was shot in the back. He made this long, awful sound and dropped to all fours. I saw him crawling away and I never saw him again.

“I realized the pirates weren’t aiming at me because they thought I was already dead, I was just lying there on the deck doing nothing. They pulled back. What was really frustrating was how arbitrary it all was. They decided everything, when to attack, when to stop. We couldn’t fight back; we were just a bunch of college students. I couldn’t even tell what the pirates were trying to do. Were they trying to disable the ship? If so, why fire at us? Were they just trying to kill us? Then why were they shooting at the ship, too?

“At this point, I was too scared to move. Colin stepped over Molly to get to me, almost tripped over her body. He was trying to get me to move, to come inside. I wouldn’t do it. And then I saw his shirt, he’d been shot twice through the abdomen. He was white as a sheet, losing blood. He got woozy, went down to his knees. Then he was out, eyes rolling back into his head, breathing fast and shallow. I tried to remember what Molly told me to do, find the entrance and exit wounds, stop the bleeding. I stripped off part of his shirt but couldn’t make sense of anything. The Horizon was bouncing off waves, going way too fast, the engines were howling, there was blood everywhere, and I couldn’t even find out where it was coming from.”

“Jesus.”

“Then I took out my cell phone,” said Klea. “I still have no idea why I did this. Maybe the idea of leaving no record was unbearable. I was certain Colin was dead. Molly definitely was and Kyle had crawled off somewhere to die.”

“But you were alive.”

Klea pulled her shirt up to reveal one long, ugly scar against the left side of her toned abdomen.

“I didn’t even notice it,” she said. “Worst scar I have, and I don’t even know how it happened. So I had my cell phone. I recorded this ridiculous message on video. No memory whatsoever of what I actually said. I ran below decks. I didn’t see Kyle, but I saw a long blood trail where he’d dragged himself away. I found an empty mayo jar. I popped the cell phone in the jar and chucked it overboard. By the time I made it back up on the fantail, the pirates had boarded.”

“What did they do?”

“They did what pirates have done for centuries. Went through my pockets, beat me, stripped away my clothes. I started screaming out every prayer I knew from childhood, screaming in Arabic as loud as I could. They stopped beating me, stopped ripping my clothes. After that, they really didn’t know what to do with me. There wasn’t much of a plan. They gave me a veil and stuck me in a shipping container for a few weeks, then moved me back on the Horizon in the middle of their harbor.”

“You’ve been out here a long time,” said Jonah.

“But it didn’t end there,” she said. “I spent years living in Colin’s mausoleum. It was like being buried in his grave, him dead next to me and me clawing at the lid of the coffin. Every morning I would wake up in the bed we once shared. Every day, I would walk past the chair where he’d piloted the Horizon. I would sit for hours in the same spot he took his last breath. I saw Colin everywhere. You ever love someone like that?”

“No,” he lied.

Klea turned away, refusing to allow Jonah to see her cry. And for just a moment, the briefest of moments, Jonah wished he’d told her the truth.

“What happens next?” she asked. “How long can we hold out?”

“I’ll spare you the list of potential sufferings,” said Jonah. “At least we have water for a few days, maybe longer if we ration it wisely.”

“Food?”

“Don’t worry about food,” said Jonah. “Given our shared histories, I think we’re well-suited for some temporary starvation.”

“Not much to eat in a pirate compound. I suppose the same rings true for a Moroccan prison.”

“Yeah. There’s going to come a time — maybe soon — when we don’t want to carry on the struggle. When that time comes…”

Jonah trailed off. He drew the pistol from his belt with one hand, the two remaining bullets with the other. The implication was clear. There was no need to unnecessarily prolong their ordeal.

Angry, Klea tried to snatch the weapon away from him.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“I’m throwing it overboard,” she said. “I’m not finished yet.”

“I’m not goddamn finished either,” said Jonah. “But there’s no sense in limiting our options. If we’re out here for too long, there will come a time when you want the merry-go-round to stop.”

“Fine,” said Klea. She watched angrily as Jonah replaced the weapon and bullets into his wetsuit.

For a few moments, they simply stared at each other until Jonah felt uncomfortable and looked away.

“You got any tattoos from prison?” asked Klea.

“Muslim country,” said Jonah. “Not big on prison ink.”

“Any scars?”

“Sure. Got a good one pretty recently. Still sewn up.”

“Lemme see,” she said.

He shrugged, and then decided to oblige. He reached back behind his back and pulled at the zipper cord, then stripped down to his waist. Jonah looked down at the knife wound in his abdomen from where the Rabat gangster had stabbed him. The ugly wound was still held together with Dr. Nassiri’s perfectly spaced stiches.

They’ll be ready to come out soon, he thought. He always healed fast, ever since he was a kid.

When he looked up, Klea was already halfway across the small raft, steadying herself on all fours as she made her way to him. She wasn’t looking at the wound; she was looking at him, staring intently into his eyes.

Oh, thought Jonah. This was unexpected. Klea crawled on top of him, straddling him, pressing her body into his. She pushed her face towards his, kissing him deeply, biting his lower lip.

“Why?” he whispered as she ran her fingers through his salt-encrusted hair.

“Because I’m not finished yet,” she whispered back.