Читать книгу After the Monsoon: An unputdownable thriller that will get your pulse racing! - Robert Karjel - Страница 6

Mortal fear. Not anger, not surprise. Fear. He jerked so violently that he knocked the machine gun out of the sailboat’s cockpit, before he could get ahold of it again.

The sea was glassy, without so much as a ripple. The sails on the MaryAnn II hung limp. The boat sat motionless, the nearest land five thousand meters below. A nameless position in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

He picked up the gun and stood in a crouch, holding it to his chest. The safety still engaged. He hesitated. A feeble, half-conscious hope: what if they saw that he was armed, the way he saw that they were? But it was useless. They kept closing in.

The fast motorboats—skiffs—had come out of nowhere. They were speeding toward him at the stern. Someone shouted from there, he couldn’t make out the words. He turned toward the hatch, where his family was still unaware, below deck, spending the day out of the heat. He was just about to warn them, when he heard even louder shouts from the skiffs, and his protective instincts took over. They had to be kept down there. Not a chance in hell he’d let them set foot on deck. He cocked his rifle and glanced at the spare magazine lying on the cockpit floor. The only thing he knew was bottomless dread.

The first shot was his, fired straight up into the sky. More a hopeless plea than a warning. A few seconds later, the pirates answered with a volley that hit like whips around the stern, the bullets raising white jets in the water, tall and slender as spears. The last shot tore a trail through the wooden deck, splinters flying.

In that moment, his world was reduced to the men maneuvering their boats and his own gun sights, which at first he found impossible to control. He fired shot after shot, driven by his instinct to keep them away, unable to focus, much less correct his aim. They moved in fast, so close that he could now see their faces. He saw how the recoil threw them backward when they fired. Yet he was completely oblivious to the white trails their shots made in the water around him, or to the dull thuds in the canvas behind. In the battle frenzy, they all shot wildly, and despite the short distance, no one had hit his mark.

But then one boat made a slight change of course, so that he could see not just the bow but also down along the side, and he fixed his eyes on the man steering the outboard motor. A clear target—one that might actually stop them. After a few long seconds, he paused and aimed.

The shot hit the man’s shoulder, the bullet’s power at short range shattering the bone as it burst inside his body, nearly severing his arm. It hung by skin and tendons, while his torso was thrown sideways. In the shock of the moment, a very brief moment, the man sat there, expressionless. The throttle also got thrown to one side, and the boat made a violent turn. The second shot was luckier, hitting the man in the middle of his chest. Just a tremor before he collapsed, dead.

Sailing around the world. A family that dreamed of going to the Great Barrier Reef and back. But this wasn’t just an adventure, it was a new beginning in a life that would otherwise have fallen to pieces. They’d passed through Gibraltar in February and spent a few months in the Mediterranean. It wasn’t hard to find destinations: the Riviera, Sicily, the Messina Strait, and then the whole odyssey of the Greek islands. Outside Rhodes, for the first time they saw dolphins playing by the bow. Near the Balearic Islands there’d been a few days of sun and Jenny had gotten some color, and with her tan came the bright lines around her eyes, the ones she hadn’t had since she sailed as a professional. Her hair was thick and wavy; she’d worn it down past her shoulders as long as anyone could remember. She was the type that, if she felt pressured or uncomfortable, quickly turned defiant, and in school, she often got blamed for starting fights. But here on the boat she felt at home; she felt strong now. For the first time in ages, she liked how her husband looked at her. Carl-Adam, who could win over almost anyone. He was not yet forty, and the first thing people always said about him was that he made you laugh. Yet beyond his joking, there was something larger-than-life about him, and not just because he was a big man. The years of overwork, red-eye flights, five-course meals, and sauternes had gone straight to his waistline. He’d stopped playing golf several years ago, and tennis was out of the question. But he still needed the competition, so instead he’d pushed to become ever more well-informed, quick with the numbers, convincing in arguments. With his brusque smile, he was the one who closed the deals. It became a kind of relentlessness, his trademark, getting things his way in the end, driven to always be the best. Yet out here, he accepted that he’d never come close to Jenny’s level as a sailor. He’d started to lose weight, and he no longer made a nasty comment if she smoked a cigarette in the evening breeze. In Porto Salvo, they’d even left the children on board overnight and gone to a small hotel near the harbor.

“They have the cell phone if they need us,” Carl-Adam said, when she hesitated for a moment. They hadn’t felt this kind of fire in a long time, and they didn’t just make love at night but were also surprised by their desire for each other at dawn. Not sleepy caresses, but instead a force that took ahold of them. This wasn’t dutiful lovemaking, it was pure sex for the first time in years. Back on the boat, Alexandra asked about the bite mark on Carl-Adam’s neck.

They’d talked about it before, but not until they left Crete heading south did Jenny begin to worry. The Suez Canal and the Red Sea lay ahead—no dangers there—but then came the Gulf of Aden. They’d read about it. The pirates. Checklists in the sailing magazines, websites listing the latest attacks. Experts saying: keep away from the obvious trouble spots and stay in close communication with navy ships. Still. Reading about it from far away was one thing; sailing straight into it, another. Carl-Adam dealt with it in his own way. As usual, he preferred action, not just vague advice and relying on others. Alexandria was their last port stop in a big city. They tied up for a few days in the empty cruise-ship harbor not far from the center. A little sightseeing for the whole family, a trip to the pyramids of Giza, and Carl-Adam made his own little excursions in the city.

He returned to the boat one evening carrying something slender wrapped in burlap. He glanced at the port guards through the windows before cutting the strings and taking it out. A Kalashnikov, with two magazines and four hundred cartridges. “Arab Spring,” he snorted with contempt. “They’re losing their grip. Would you believe it, this cost me only two hundred dollars. Two hundred.”

The object lying on the dining-room table didn’t convey the slightest sense of security. Dented wood and dirty metal. With a flimsy bayonet attached below the barrel, and reeking of gun grease. It had to be hidden going through the Suez. Carl-Adam didn’t want trouble from the inspectors sent aboard by the canal company to take bribes, or to give them any excuses. But in the Red Sea, he took it out. Carl-Adam emptied a magazine into a plastic jug he towed behind the boat.

Afterward, he rubbed his shoulder with his thumb. “If they come too close, they’ll eat it.” Sebastian, the boy, played with the empty shells, while his big sister, Alexandra, was quieter than usual that evening.

They passed through Bab el Mandeb, at the southernmost point of the Red Sea, and continued into the Gulf of Aden. The fishing was good here, and Yemeni fishermen steered their skiffs in small fast-moving clusters. The same open boats that the pirates sat in, from those photos online. The same thin, dark figures. Although the fishermen often waved as they passed, Jenny grew uneasy. The Somali coast lay no more than a few days’ sail away.

Moving on, they passed by Djibouti, where convoys of ships seeking protection from Somali lawlessness were organized. The convoys required a speed of twelve knots, but that was impossible for the MaryAnn, as she would have to rely solely on her engine to keep her place in line. Carl-Adam and Jenny took down the sails and joined a convoy for slow-moving vessels. A collection of the lame and crippled. Freighters and tankers, real tubs, flying the flags of East Africa, Pakistan, and North Korea. Twenty merchant ships—and the MaryAnn. Radar showed them in a formation of two lines, with a few Japanese and Chinese naval ships making a weak show of power on either side. On the common radio frequency, there was constant chatter. Strange languages and obscenities in broken English. “Fuck you, Pakistani monkey.” One night they heard strange moaning and wet sounds on the frequency. Finally they figured out that the night watchman on some ship thought he’d cheer up the convoy by playing the soundtrack to a porn movie. For hours it continued, you could turn down the volume but had to leave it on. Because all of a sudden, things would change into terrified shouts and uncomfortable silences. “They are shooting, shooting …” “Where, where …?” It always sounded confusing. “Who is calling?” Chaos. “Pirates, pirates …!”

They knew the navy ships didn’t scare off the pirates. Ships were getting hijacked even within the convoys. Jenny and Carl-Adam tried, but they couldn’t both stay up all night. They had to take shifts, sleeping badly in between. It wasn’t for this that they’d left home, Jenny thought at some point, but said nothing. Old patterns repeated themselves; they shared shifts up on deck, but she still cooked all the meals below. The children were listless, often seeming downright spoiled, and Jenny got angry when they complained about helping with chores or started fights. Often, it felt crowded on board.

In the Gulf of Aden also came the heat. With the sails down and the engine running, there was almost no shade on deck. Only the black finger of the mast, moving through the hours like the shadow of a huge sundial. The air was thick and hot with every breath, and the children stayed below. Jenny and Carl-Adam took four-hour shifts under the canvas roof of the cockpit. On the digital nautical chart, the northern Somali coast passed by too slowly. Their eyes fixed on what lay ahead: a timber freighter burning coal, its dense smoke rising in a black plume. A couple of ship silhouettes to starboard, and now and then a navy ship speeding past them, making sweeps that seemed mostly random.

“Jenny! Jenny!” It was always Carl-Adam who sounded the alarm. Sometimes he was already carrying the Kalashnikov when she came up on deck, sometimes he nodded with only a “There!” while he followed through the binoculars. A lone freighter in the distance, or a group of fishermen that navy ships had already checked out and reported on over the radio. He didn’t have Jenny’s ear for languages and still had a hard time deciphering what was said over the airwaves. Yet whenever he shouted, her heart would pound. The kids exchanged frightened glances whenever their mother raced up on deck. The seconds it took to understand what was happening, their temples aching before the danger could be dismissed.

They passed the Horn of Africa, and the convoy broke up where the Indian Ocean opened out. The MaryAnn returned to good form and set sail again. They continued east—following the advice of Yachting World—to get beyond the pirates’ range. Nearly to the Arabian Gulf, before turning south to head down through the middle of the Indian Ocean. They were on their way to Mombasa to refill both diesel fuel (the tank nearly empty after the Gulf of Aden) and their food supplies. Even better, they’d spend a week at a hotel and live at the beach. Jenny looked forward to taking walks, to the smell and feel of leaves, and to sitting at tables already set, with someone else cooking the food.

But somewhere out there, the wind died. Mornings, the sea was often glassy, despite their being in mid-ocean. They moved slowly, while the heavy gray storm clouds passed by, always missing them. Jenny longed to get drenched and cool off. At best, the clouds brought a few minutes of teasing, a few barely cool gusts of wind, without the sun’s burning flame being obscured for even a second in the sapphire blue sky.

They didn’t see a single ship for more than a week. Only a gray military helicopter heading straight on its course, far away. A brief crackle on the radio, and the sound of the distant rotor fading out. Then gone. Jenny was the one who saw it, hearing the crackle. Everything so still that she saw no reason to mention it to Carl-Adam.

Jenny was down in the children’s cabin, distractedly helping Alexandra with her math homework, when she heard her husband’s clattering on deck. She listened. A shout in the distance. It wasn’t Carl-Adam’s voice. And then a shot, followed by silence.

And suddenly, all hell broke loose. A bullet tore through the deck, whistling just above their heads. Jenny shouted at the children to lie down on the floor and ran as she’d never run before, like an arrow, to get her head up into the cockpit. She saw Carl-Adam standing at the rail, holding the Kalashnikov in front of him. And there beyond him, a fast little skiff. Full speed in a wide arc around them, not even a hundred meters away. Dark figures, flapping T-shirts. Weapons in hand, a couple of them raised in some kind of gesture. Threat, victory? Her thoughts stuttered as she tried to understand—not here, nobody would come here, there was nothing here. A shout again, a strange voice from somewhere behind her, at the bow, her view blocked by the cabin roof in front of her. All her impressions converged in a split second, while she was still on her way up to the deck.

The instant she took the final leap, there was a series of quick shots. She flinched, and in the same instant the vicious bullets hit the water at the stern. Carl-Adam followed the skiff with fear in his eyes, raising and lowering his arms a few times.

Jenny sensed something at the bow. She turned around, and now with a clear view, she saw a second skiff. “Carl-Adam,” she cried. They were close, heading straight at the MaryAnn. “Turn around!” He didn’t react, was overwhelmed, unreachable. Only watching the one boat he could see. “There are two!” Not even ten meters left, before the other one would reach the bow.

New shots came from the boat farther out, throwing up spray at the stern, where Carl-Adam stood. Jenny’s gaze wandered from the bow to her husband. He raised his arms at last and fired a few shots. He must have hit something, she didn’t know what, but the boat veered away sharply, out of control.

She shouted: “Bow! The bow!” And watched the man who sat at the front of the skiff, the one her husband couldn’t see, stand up and take aim. Straight at her, it seemed. She crouched behind the cabin roof in fear. A shot.

Carl-Adam twitched as if he’d been punched. His weapon was tossed aside, and he fell to his knees. Blood. Something thudded into the MaryAnn. Jenny ran to the stern, grabbed Carl-Adam with both hands, got a confused look in response.

“I shot,” he said. “I shot one.”

Blood covered her hands. Behind her, she heard steps running. In the bow, they’d already come on board. She tried to say something to Carl-Adam, and he said something back that she didn’t understand. There was something wrong with his leg. The man who came on first was tall and gangly, with bloodshot eyes. Barefoot. Without a word, he pulled back his gun and rammed it into Carl-Adam’s back. Jenny lost her grip on him when he collapsed. Two other men pushed past. They disappeared with their machine guns leading, down below deck. She thought about the children and was overwhelmed by the feeling that something had come to an end.