“An entire fleet sent to capture me!” announced Dalmar. “I am very pleased this day.”
“You’re still going to prison with the rest of us,” retorted Jonah. “So don’t get too pleased just yet.”
“We shall see. I think I am too famous for prison.”
More refugees emerged, and then Vitaly. The squirming Russian was hog-tied and carried in the air by two men who roughly dropped him into a puddle at Jonah’s feet.
“Rodilsya cherez jopu! Pizda s ushami! Worst captain ever!” was all Vitaly could sputter as he twisted against his bound hands and feet, rolling back and forth on the deck.
The flood of North Koreans from below decks trickled off as the boarding party was forced to boost the elderly up the hatch ladder one at a time. Their initial zeal, now tempered by the sheer volume of the task, left the soldiers halfheartedly restraining and loading the stooped, white-haired refugees at a snail’s pace.
The relative peace was broken when two of the boarding party pulled a duct-taped, struggling Marissa from hatch, the soldiers having long since run out of zip ties. Swearing and shouting, Marissa kicked and thrashed until she connected with the nearest soldier’s toes, causing him to briefly loose his grip on her collar as he whelped in pain. Marissa tried to hop away, making it all of three feet before the soldiers grabbed her, kicked her taped legs out from underneath her, and threw her to the deck with the rest of the crew. Shaking their heads and murmuring astonishment at the fury with which she’d fought them, the soldiers returned to the open deck hatch and descended the interior ladder once more. Jonah couldn’t help but smile — the soldiers had no idea who they were messing with. Marissa had been taking on tough-talking bouncers and handsy drunks since she was old enough to see over a bar.
“Looks like they ran out of zip ties,” whispered Jonah.
“Or found them inadequate to the task at hand,” Hassan added dryly.
The well-dressed man chuckled and briefly uncrossed his legs before crossing them again.
“What’s so goddamn funny?” asked Jonah loudly, daring another flurry of blows. The man just smiled without answering.
Marissa blew an unruly strand of frizzy hair out of her eyes as she turned to glare at Jonah, daggers in her eyes. Jonah just mouthed “Milk run,” and shot her a knowing smirk.
“Where’d they find you?” whispered Hassan. “Did you try to hide?”
“Laundry bin,” snapped Marissa.
“The laundry bin?” laughed Jonah. “Probably the first place they looked. Not a great hiding spot.”
“Clearly not, you fucking asshole!”
One of the Special Forces soldiers emerged from the hatch, walked to their well-dressed captor, and whispered into his ear. The search appeared finished — at least for the moment.
“You see Alexis?” whispered Jonah to Hassan, his lips barely moving.
“No,” said Hassan with a quick shake of his head. “She wasn’t with the refugees when they came out.”
Jonah nodded. Wherever Alexis had hidden herself, the boarders hadn’t found her yet. Given her knowledge of every pipe, bolt, and duct of the submarine’s interior, the Japanese might not find her at all. Maybe there was a card left to play yet. Jonah’s mind raced with possibilities.
Their captor rose to his feet as though sensing Jonah’s scheming machinations. He folded up his metal chair and handed it to the nearest soldier before stooping, putting the two men at eye level.
“You caught us,” said Jonah, stating the obvious. “What happens now?”
The man chuckled and drew himself to his feet again. He pointed at the conning tower of the Scorpion and gave a long, mournful whistle as he mimicked a submarine settling to the bottom of the ocean with his hand.
Hassan just looked at Jonah and shook his head. The doctor didn’t need to say a single word to make himself understood. Jonah couldn’t bluff, couldn’t gamble; not with Alexis’ life at stake. Jonah slowly struggled to his feet despite bruised ribs. Their captor shot Jonah a curious look and watched him carefully measured out three paces down the deck from the conning tower, turned sharply to starboard, and measured one more pace. Jonah stomped three times with one boot, waited a moment and stomped three more times before returning to slump against the tower with his crew.
A minute passed in silence, and then another. And then Alexis’ head popped out of the hatch, gingerly eyeing the captured crew before she emerged with hands in the air. Smiling, their captor waved the two intercepting Japanese soldiers away from the young woman — he’d handle her personally. For a moment, Jonah felt certain she’d be allowed to join the rest of crew by her own volition.
He was wrong.
As Alexis passed their captor, the well-dressed man roughly grabbed her from behind, violently kicking out the back of her knees as he shoved her face-first towards the deck. Gasping with surprise, Alexis was barely able to catch her fall with bloodied forearms as she skidded across the metal hull, stopping just short of Hassan’s reach.
“You bastard!” erupted Hassan. Jonah threw himself on top of Hassan, preventing the doctor from leaping to his feet and charging their captor headfirst. The rest of the crew swore and shouted with open fury, hurling invectives and abuse in four languages.
Jonah allowed himself a tiny spark of pride at his crew’s defiance. But as bad as things looked, at least he’d formed an educated guess about their well-dressed captor. No doubt the man was Public Security Intelligence Agency, Japan’s secretive version of the CIA. It probably hadn’t been difficult for a PSIA satellite to track the Scorpion in and out of North Korean waters; they’d been actively spying on the hermit kingdom since the agency’s inception more than sixty years previous. Jonah found himself deeply thankful that they’d been carrying refugees and not narcotics, counterfeit money, or embargoed arms. More than anything, he was thankful that they hadn’t picked up too many stray radioactive particles during their transit through the Fukushima exclusion zone. The Scorpion would have probably been sunk on sight if the Japanese Geiger counters so much as clicked when they surfaced.
“Leave my engineer alone,” demanded Jonah as he willed his crew into silence. “If you need someone to kick around, you go through me. Enough of the bullshit intimidation tactics. Time to tell us what you want.”
Their captor nodded. Turning to Alexis, he pulled a permanent marker out of his front pocket, bit the cap off, and spat it onto the deck. He grabbed the young engineer by the face, thumb and index finger squeezing her cheeks and chin as he scribbled a series of numbers on her forehead in thick black ink. Hassan shifted, face once more twisted in rage as the remaining Japanese soldiers raised their weapons in warning. One aggressive move and the doctor would be gunned down on the spot.
Finished writing, the intelligence officer dropped Alexis to the deck again and hurled his pen into the ocean. The engineer unconsciously reached up to touch the reddening skin around the blocky numerals on her face, but her captor violently grabbed her hands, twisting them away from the still-drying ink. Jonah squinted. He didn’t know the numbers, but recognized the format.
They were coordinates.
The officer snapped his fingers and the soldiers stepped forward, unsheathing knives as they advanced. Hassan recoiled and closed his eyes only to have his forearms roughly grabbed, the nearest blade easily slipping through the thick plastic of the zip ties. The rest of the crew was freed within moments, each rubbing their raw wrists as they looked at the now-retreating soldiers with utter disbelief. Only Marissa was left in her circles of silver duct tape, still facedown on the cold metal deck. One by one, the soldiers climbed back aboard their rubber boats and shoved off. Their violent captor was the last to depart, offering Jonah a mocking salute before turning his back to the Scorpion and boarding his small craft. Within moments, he was motoring back towards the destroyer at high speed without casting so much as a backwards glance over one shoulder.