“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.”