CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The freighter moved without lights beyond the harbor mouth, a slab of rust-black steel shouldering through a moonless sea.
Hunter caught the low rail first, pulled himself over, and turned to steady the climbing line while U-Jin, Sonny, and Brunson came up behind him.
None of them spoke. Below, their skiff was veiled with the stealth netting.
Her magnetic line connected to the rusted freighter until they needed it.
Hunter raised two fingers and pointed aft.
“Engine room first,” he breathed. “No gunfire unless we lose the choice.” U-Jin nodded once.
“Then let’s keep our choices.”
Sonny checked the narrow passage beside the stacked containers, while Brunson watched the bridge windows glowing faintly above the superstructure. The ship smelled of salt, diesel, and something sour rolling from the ventilators.
They crossed the main deck in single file, timing each movement to the pulse of the engines. Crates lashed beneath tarps bore false customs marks, but one corner had torn loose, exposing rifles packed in grease paper. Farther forward, sealed drums sweated chemical fumes into the night.
A deckhand stepped from behind a winch with a cigarette cupped in his palm. His eyes widened.
Sonny reached him before surprise became sound, caught his wrist, and lowered him behind a coil of tow rope.
“Easy,” Sonny whispered. “Go to sleep and you get to wake up.” Brunson bound the man’s hands and covered his mouth while Gunner listened for footsteps.
A metallic clang rang out somewhere above them. All four froze. A flashlight beam swept across the container tops, paused, then slid away.
“That wasn’t wind,” Brunson murmured. Hunter waited through three slow breaths.
“We’ve been noticed,” he said. “They just don’t know what they noticed.”
The watertight door to the machinery spaces resisted until U-Jin slipped a tool into its latch. Heat rushed over them as it opened, carrying the thunder of the main diesel. They descended grated stairs past pipes, gauges, and yellow handrails, each level louder than the one above.
At the lower platform, the engine rose through the room like a building, its housings trembling under dull red work lamps. U-Jin studied the control cabinets and fuel lines while Hunter and Brunson took opposite walkways. Sonny stayed by the stairs, eyes fixed on the shadows above.
“How long?” Hunter asked.
“Seven minutes if nobody interrupts me,” U-Jin said. Sonny glanced upward.
“Then call it four.”
A wrench struck the grating on the level overhead. It bounced once, twice, then dropped past Sonny’s shoulder into darkness. He looked up through the steel lattice and saw boots moving toward the alarm station.
“Company,” he warned. Brunson peeled away from the rail.
“Keep working, U-Jin.”
Two engineers emerged from the control room arguing over a clipboard. Hunter intercepted the first and drove him silently against the bulkhead. Brunson swung the door wide enough to catch the second, and Sonny was there to pull him down before a hand reached the alarm.
U-Jin opened a service panel and worked quickly, bypassing safeguards and breaking the propulsion controls in ways no hurried repair could reverse. The great engine faltered. Its rhythm staggered, recovered, and staggered again as alarms began to blink across the control desk.
“That sounds bad,” Sonny said.
“To them,” U-Jin replied, “it sounds expensive.”
He shut down the auxiliary generator next. The lights died in a cascade from the engine room to the decks above, and emergency lamps came on in weak red intervals. The freighter’s wake flattened as the propeller slowed, leaving the ship helpless in the black water.
A warning horn began to pulse through the ship, one low note every five seconds. Somewhere in the darkness, doors slammed and men shouted to one another.
“So much for quiet,” Brunson said. Hunter drew his weapon.
“Quiet got us inside. Now we make confusion work for us.”
Hunter signaled them upward. On the lowest cargo deck, locked cages of contraband filled the passage: ammunition, counterfeit medicine, bundles wrapped in plastic, and animal crates from which nothing moved. No voices came from there, only the creak of stressed steel.
On the next deck, a guard appeared at the far end with a flashlight and a pistol. The beam skimmed across Sonny’s shoulder. Brunson knocked it aside as Hunter closed the distance, and the four men left the guard secured beneath a stairwell before the dropped light stopped spinning.
The crew quarters were cramped and stale. They cleared each cabin, finding bunks, cards, liquor, and men waking too slowly to understand what had happened. Every threat was disarmed, restrained, and placed face down in the mess under Brunson’s watch.
Sonny found the manifest in the purser’s office, but its cargo columns were coded and the passenger count was blank. A penciled symbol appeared beside a refrigerated hold near the bow. He showed it to Hunter.
“This mark repeats beside every false container number.” Hunter folded the page. “People aren’t cargo.”
“Tell that to the men upstairs,” Sonny said. Hunter pointed down.
“After we get them out.”
They moved through a transverse passage where condensation ran down the bulkheads. Behind one steel door, they found more weapons and forged passports stacked by nationality. Behind another, they heard a cough, then the scrape of someone drawing back from the other side.
The cough came again, smaller this time, followed by a hurried whisper. Then heavy footsteps sounded at the far end of the passage. U-Jin glanced from the chained door to the approaching shadows.
“We cut it now, they hear us.” Hunter raised his weapon.
“We wait, the people inside stay locked in a crossfire.” Brunson set himself beside the bulkhead.
“Then we don’t wait.”
The lock was chained from the corridor. U-Jin cut it, and Hunter opened the door slowly with both hands visible. Women and children crowded the cold compartment, wrapped in blankets and torn coats, their faces pale in the red emergency light.
No one moved until Sonny knelt and set his weapon on the floor.
“We’re taking you off this ship,” he said softly. A woman near the front translated, and the silence broke into whispers that spread through the hold.
Brunson opened a duffel filled with water, foil blankets, and compact life vests. Hunter arranged the captives in small groups, placing the older children beside the youngest.
“Stay between us and keep one hand on the person ahead,” he said. U-Jin checked the passage, then marked the safest route to the boat deck with strips of white tape.
“Safest isn’t safe,” he warned. “It’s just the route with fewer guns.”
They climbed deck by deck as the disabled ship rolled beneath them. Sonny led with the flashlight shielded against his chest. Hunter stayed among the hostages, lifting children over high coamings, while Brunson guarded the rear.
The horn stopped mid-pulse. In the sudden quiet, a child’s shoe squeaked against the deck. From above came the click of a weapon being charged. Sonny switched off his light.
“Nobody move,” he whispered. A thin beam searched the stairwell, descending one step at a time.
At the galley landing, a burst from an automatic weapon chewed sparks from the wall. The children dropped as one.
“Contact front!” Brunson shouted. Hunter shoved a serving cart across the passage for cover.
“Sonny, get them back!” Hunter and Brunson moved through the confusion, forcing the shooter into the pantry. A final crash came from behind the swinging door.
“Clear,” Brunson called, but nobody rose until Hunter answered, “Move.”
The bridge held the captain and three, armed men barricaded behind overturned chairs.
Sonny cut the power to the bridge deck, and Hunter entered through the chart room while Brunson drew their attention from the wing.
In less than a minute, the bridge was secure and the ship’s radio was transmitting its position on an emergency channel.
On the boat deck, wind snapped at the raft covers. Brunson and Sonny released the canisters and hauled the inflation lines until the life rafts opened below in bright orange domes. Hunter secured the boarding ladder and tested every knot himself.
The children went first, passed hand to hand into the waiting rafts. The women followed, some carrying the smaller children beneath zipped coats, others refusing to descend until every child was accounted for. Sonny counted them twice and found the numbers matched.
Far off, a white light appeared and vanished between the swells, the rescue vessel answering the beacon. Hunter looked toward it, then back at the freighter. Smoke had begun to breathe from an aft vent where the damaged systems were failing.
U-Jin set an equipment bag on the deck and opened it. Hunter caught his arm.
“No. We have the people. We leave.” U-Jin shook his head and pointed toward the hold full of rifles, chemicals, and records.
“If they recover this ship, another one sails next week.”
“How long?” Brunson asked. U-Jin checked the waterproof timer.
“Six minutes once I start it.” Sonny stared at the smoke thickening aft.
“You’ll have three.” Brunson handed him the waterproof timer.
“If you miss the water, I’m not climbing back up there.” U-Jin clipped it to his vest.
“You’d miss me.”
“I’d miss complaining about you.” Hunter held U-Jin’s gaze for a moment.
“Three minutes. Then we turn back.”
U-Jin gave a small salute and disappeared through the hatch as the red emergency lights swallowed him.
The rafts pulled away under small electric motors, towing one another through the freighter’s shadow. Hunter stood at the stern line, scanning the rail. The women huddled around the children while Sonny kept the beacon aimed toward the approaching rescue lights.
Brunson watched the luminous face of his wristwatch.
“Two minutes.” Sonny kept the raft’s bow pointed into the swell.
“He knows.”
“One minute.” Hunter’s eyes never left the freighter.
“Turn us around.” Sonny hesitated.
“Hunter—”
“Turn us around.”
The raft began to circle back when a dull impact sounded inside the freighter, followed by a hiss of escaping steam. No figure appeared at the rail.
“Thirty seconds,” Brunson said.
Hunter reached for the boarding line. Then a hatch high on the aft deck slammed open.
U-Jin emerged at a run as smoke folded around him.
“Jump!” Sonny shouted.
U-Jin vaulted the rail without slowing and vanished into the water. For one terrible second there was only foam. Then his head broke the surface, already turning toward the rafts.
Sonny swung the last raft toward him. Brunson clipped a line to his vest and threw hard, the rope uncoiling across the waves. It landed short.
“Again!” Hunter yelled.
Brunson hauled it in, threw a second time, and U-Jin caught it as the freighter groaned behind him. Together they dragged him through the black sea until hands reached down and pulled him aboard.
“How much time?” Sonny demanded. U-Jin rolled onto his back, coughing seawater. Somewhere deep in the freighter, metal shrieked against metal. He looked at the men surrounding him.
“Not enough to argue about my timing.” Hunter grabbed the tiller and drove the raft away at full power.
The first explosion punched from the freighter’s lower decks, buckling the hull with a sound that rolled across the water. A second blast tore open the cargo holds, and orange fire climbed through the containers as burning debris arced into the sky.
Everyone watched the night turn white above the sinking ship. Hunter, Sonny, and Brunson stared without speaking, their faces lit by the distant fire. Only U-Jin smiled, seawater running from his hair as he looked toward the flames.
“Miller would be proud of me.” Sonny frowned at him.
“Who the fuck is Miller?”