The Devil's Waters

CHAPTER 40





Yusuf crept through a cloud, the steel deck beneath his sandals the only solid thing. Suleiman stayed close at his rear, Kalashnikov up. Yusuf slung his own rifle across his back to reach under his khameez for the knife.

A body appeared at Yusuf’s feet. In the coiling mist he knelt and knew it to be Jama only because the man’s loose tunic had again slipped off his shoulder, showing one bullet hole through the heart. Yusuf’s next quiet strides revealed two more dead pirates, shot in the chest, too, and spreading black.

Along the port rail ahead, voices shouted in English. They sounded not like spirits but Americans.

Behind Yusuf, Suleiman muttered, “Allahu Akbar.” He raised his rifle to fire blindly at the voices. Yusuf pressed the barrel down, shaking his head.

“Your shaitann,” he whispered close to his cousin’s ear, “can see through the fog. Stay here.”

Quietly, Yusuf kicked out of his sandals. He rose to his bare toes and crouched, leading with the talon of the knife. His first steps gained him speed, silent on the pads of his feet as he charged through the cloud, low in the thickest part of the draining mist.

A shadow stood at the port rail. Yusuf ran at it, rising in the last moment to deliver the hardest blow. He struck first with his shoulder, slamming the soldier against the rail, trapping his hands there and his weapon. Yusuf drove the blade into the soldier’s back, up to the onyx handle. The soldier wore only a rubber wetsuit. Staying away from the muzzle of the man’s gun, Yusuf gripped the wetsuit at the collar to slam his face against the wall, the knife still in him like a windup key. Yusuf yanked out the blade, buried it again into the upper back to strike at a lung or the heart. He pulled back his knife.

Another shout entered the mist from the direction of the bow. Yusuf whirled, gripping the slumping body between him and the onrushing voice. A short gray silhouette ran down the port rail, shouting, jangling under a raised gun.

With full fury, not faith, Yusuf lifted the soldier over the rail. He did not just release but flung the body out over the water. The American fell, dying too fast even to scream as he plummeted. Let the running soldier see the first death on this ship in payment for Darood blood.

Yusuf slipped away into the blowing mist.