“There!” called Alexis, pointing without dropping the binoculars from her eyes. “I see them!”
The other four swiveled in her direction, seeking out the refugees. “Count off — how many do you see?” demanded Jonah. “Did they all make it?”
“I’m seeing maybe… forty?” said Alexis. It was only a rough guess. She could barely make out one figure from another in the shuffling group as it slowly advanced towards the surfaced submarine.
“Good,” said Jonah, dropping the binoculars to the strap around his neck. “It will be tight, but we can handle forty.”
“Are you sure about that count?” asked Marissa, uncertainty in her voice. “Looks like more than that to me.”
“I do not see forty,” announced Dalmar.
Alarmed, Alexis swiveled her binoculars. The whiteout before her cleared for a moment, allowing her to see that the single group of refugees was actually one of two, the trailing group more than twice as large as the first.
Shit. And they were running. Closer now, she could see they were dressed in rags, some wearing no more than sandals against the cold, thin cotton bed sheets held tight for warmth, rushing towards the uncertain safety of the submarine.
“This is not the deal,” said Dalmar stubbornly, pointing to the approaching mass of humanity. “We must charge extra now.”
Marissa and Alexis just stared at the massive Somali pirate with a strange mixture of fury and empathy as they struggled to find the words.
“Not the time,” interjected Jonah, searching across the ice with his binoculars. “Something is wrong — they shouldn’t be moving this fast.”
“What should we do?” demanded Alexis.
Jonah bent over the conning tower hatch and shouted to Vitaly below. “Prepare for emergency dive!” he ordered.
“Look at them — we can’t leave them out here!” shouted Marissa. “They’ll die!”
“We’re not leaving anybody,” said Jonah. “Dalmar— Marissa — I need you to open the main deck hatch. We can load the Scorpion twice as fast if we don’t use the conning tower. Doc — I need you in the crew compartment. These people look like they’ve been walking for days. We could have dozens of exposure and frostbite cases.”
Hassan mumbled a checklist to himself as he made for the supply closets, rattling off words like heaters, hot water, blankets, first aid. The remaining crew scrambled as the first of the refugees reached the submarine, pounding the outer hull as they pleaded to be let in. Dalmar and Marissa rolled a boarding net over the side, allowing the first and strongest of the masses below to step across the cold, broken ice and grab ahold of the fraying net. They crowded the hull in expanding numbers, the young and able-bodied helping children and the elderly ascend first. Once on the main deck, some stood transfixed before Dalmar and Marissa, scarcely able to tear their eyes from the pirate or the American.
“Why are they just standing there?” demanded Alexis. “They’ve probably never seen foreigners before,” said Jonah softly.
Alexis nodded, not entirely convinced. She had an itchy, uncomfortable feeling all over her body, the same one she got when they first crossed into Somali waters a lifetime ago — this was dangerous territory, and the operation was already taking entirely too long. Confirming her unease, Alexis began to hear a growing rumble in the distance, a slow, building roar almost entirely lost to the blizzard. She turned to Jonah. “Do you hear that sound?” Her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.
Jonah cocked his head, a newly concerned expression crossing his face. He hadn’t heard it, but she had — and that was enough. “Any radar contact?” he asked, shouting down to Vitaly in the command compartment below.
“Nyet!” answered the Russian. “Weather terrible, cannot see nothing onscreen!”
Alexis looked back toward the horizon just in time to see a low, massive military hovercraft in the distance, still all but hidden by the blowing snow. Double-shit—less than a third of the refugees had made it on board. Just two hundred yards out now, the intruder would be on top of them inside sixty seconds. Dalmar and Marissa hadn’t noticed the craft yet, and were arguing with each other as they struggled to lower a shawl-wearing grandmother down the deck hatch.
“Hey!” shouted Jonah, slamming his palm against the side of the conning tower loud enough to get their attention. Wordlessly, he pointed. Dalmar and Marissa turned to stare, stopping their bickering as they let go of the old woman, dropping her into the waiting arms of family below.
Marissa sprinted up to the base of the conning tower. “What happens to these people if we leave?” said Jonah, calling down from above.
“The unlucky ones die in a concentration camp!” shouted Marissa over the howling blizzard.
“And the lucky ones?”
“They’ll shoot them right here on the ice!”
“Forget the hatch,” said Jonah, yelling to both Marissa and Dalmar. “Just get them all up on our hull!”
The refugees had seen the hovercraft, too. Frightened screams and cries rang out from the crowd as they began to push and shove, crowding around the boarding net, dropping their few possessions as they frantically tried to save themselves. A young boy slipped and fell into the freezing water between the pack ice and the submarine hull, only to be yanked to safety moments later by his older brother.
Dalmar leapt from his post, slid down the side of the submarine, and splashed into the ankle-deep water among the broken ice. He began to grab children and physically hurl them onto the deck from the snowy ice below. Rather than protest, parents surrounded the massive pirate, pressing their children into his hands. Time was all but out. Through the whipping snow, the hovercraft was now close, dangerously close.
“Are they going to shoot everybody?” whispered Alexis, her voice betraying her fear.
Jonah shook his head — but somehow she didn’t quite believe him this time. “If they were going to shoot, they would have already,” he said. But she wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince her, or himself. And then she saw it… the first spark of a plan entering his mind.
“It’s too windy for walkie-talkies,” said Jonah, jumping over the railing to the exterior ladder. “Stay here — relay my instructions to Vitaly!”
“What should I do?” called Alexis after him.
“Tell him — on my signal, full power to the engines!” shouted Jonah. She tried to ask him what the signal was, but he’d already reached the base of the ladder. Jonah pushed himself through the throngs of refugees, joining Marissa as she crammed frail bodies into the deck hatch, one after another. Having thrown the last of the children onto the deck, Dalmar jumped onto the boarding net and dragged himself back aboard.
Alexis looked down the interior of the conning tower, catching sight of the top of Vitaly’s head from above. “We have an incoming NK hovercraft, danger close! Jonah says full power to the engines on his signal!”
“Da, da!” Vitaly yelled back, readying his computer terminal. “I will be ready!”
“He didn’t tell me what the signal is!” Alexis shouted from above.
“Signal is explosion!” called Vitaly. “With Jonah, signal is always explosion!”
Alexis looked back over the deck, wishing she could be as confident about anything as Vitaly was about the nature of the signal. All she could see was the incoming hovercraft — the fucker was massive, seventy-five feet in length and thirty across, ringed by a thick rubber skirt with huge airplane propellers howling at the stern.