“Then why the guns?”
Kenneth shot a glance down the companionway. Judy gave him a curt nod to let him know the shotgun was where he wanted it. They’d obviously been over this drill before.
“Because they have guns,” Kenneth said. “Lots of guns.”
Karla’s mouth fell open. “I thought we were staying south of pirate waters!” She gasped, her chest so tight she could hardly breathe. “You promised we’d be fine if we stayed away from the Philippines!”
The men in the approaching boat were yelling now, ordering them in broken English to lower their sails and come to a stop.
Tony grabbed her hand and clutched it tight.
“It’s not Kenny’s fault,” he whispered.
“I count seven of them,” Kenneth said out of the corner of his mouth. He waved, giving a forced smile as the fishing boat motored up alongside the sailboat, matching her speed of around six knots. Outrunning the skiff was unthinkable, even as loaded down as it was.
The men on the fishing boat screamed all at once, waving their guns in the air. There were no pleasant shouts of “Hey, mister!”
One of the pirates, a boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, raised a rifle and pointed it at Karla. Tony’s hand dropped for the flare gun at his waist, but he didn’t know guns. He was a parts salesman. As far as Karla knew, her husband hadn’t fired a gun in years. He fumbled with his T-shirt, causing the boy to swing the rifle his way—and loose a rattling barrage of shots that stitched up the side of the boat and into Tony Downs’s chest.
Karla screamed as her husband pitched forward, toppling over the side to splash into the sea. Lucky Strike quickly left Tony’s body behind, bobbing in the blue-green water that only moments before had been so incredibly beautiful.
Kenneth roared, reaching for the shotgun, and earned two bullets in the spine for his effort. He fell as he turned. The shotgun slipped from his hands, sliding along the deck to drop over the side with a sickening plop. It disappeared instantly beneath the surface. Judy, now armed with a large kitchen knife in the shadows, motioned Karla belowdecks—as if there could be any refuge from these men on the tiny boat.
Karla stood frozen as a man in a blue T-shirt and oil-stained khaki pants grabbed an upright metal stanchion and hauled himself over the lifelines, jumping deftly from the fishing boat to the Lucky Strike. The man released the sheets to let the sails pop and flap in the wind. The boat slowed immediately.
Others from the skiff began to pour onto the boat. All of them were young, with the wispy facial hair of boys trying in vain to be men. But they all carried guns and wore hateful looks, both of which they aimed at Karla Downs. She rushed past the man in the blue T-shirt in an effort to get down below with Judy. If she was going to die—or worse—she didn’t want to do it alone. A sweating young man reached to grab her, but the man in the blue T-shirt pushed his hand away, shaking his head, and the boy let her go unmolested.
She had to leap over Kenneth’s body to get down the companionway. She would have fallen, had Judy not been there to catch her. The poor woman had to look at her husband’s lifeless eyes staring down at her from above—and still, she somehow kept her composure.
Karla gulped, trying to catch her breath.
“What . . . ? I mean why . . . ?” Her eyes were transfixed on the stern, where her husband of nearly thirty years had fallen dead into the sea.
Judy blinked at her friend, fighting back tears. “I am so, so sorry.”
“What do they want?”
The small brunette squared her shoulders and sighed. A tear rolled down her stricken face. “Ransom, I imagine,” she said.
? ? ?
Out on the deck a young Jemaah Islamiyah recruit stood to the side of the hatch, a battered AK-47 held to his chest. This was his first operation, and he chewed on chapped lips, a bundle of frayed nerves.
“What if they have another firearm down there?”
Mamat gave a slow shake of his head. Dusk was falling rapidly, but he welcomed the darkness. It would only make their job easier. “They would have shot by now.”
“Shall I bring the women back on deck?”
Mamat closed his eyes and listened, the dead man at his feet, his back to the cabin. “In time,” he said. “For now, they are doing exactly what we need them to do.”
Stooping slightly and craning his neck, he was just able to hear a shaky female voice below as she whispered on the cabin radio.
“Mayday! Mayday! This is sailing vessel Lucky Strike. We are under attack from pirates! I say again, we are under attack from pirates . . .”
The woman repeated her call for help. Her shattered voice grew more shrill with every word.
At length, the words Mamat had hoped for crackled over the radio in a barrage of static.
“Lucky Strike, this is United States Naval Vessel Rogue . . .”
27
Clark had a vague idea of what Magdalena Rojas looked like from Caruso’s description, but he’d never seen a photograph of the child. Some girl was dead at the bottom of this grave, and he suddenly needed to know if it was Magdalena. Belly down, he slid feet-first over the edge, bringing a small trickle of dirt sliding after him into the pit. Dropping to his knees, he used a flat rock the size of his hand to scoop away the loose dirt around the raised arm. It did not take him long to work his way down the arm to expose the pale gray flesh of a female shoulder. Her neck lay at an odd angle, encircled with a thin line of blood from some ligature that had been used to strangle her. Long purple bruises crisscrossed the portions of ashen skin exposed by the dirt. The dead did not bruise. This one had been beaten, and beaten badly, before she died.
Clark closed his eyes, remembering another girl, similarly murdered so long ago. Pam Madden’s death had come during a brutal rape—and, if Biery’s suspicions about Matarife’s snuff videos were true, this girl had suffered the same fate before she was dumped unceremoniously into a pit in the middle of a grain field.