Macinnes held his left ear, blood trickling down his hand. He looked at Jack, and guffawed. “That loser? I’m amazed you bother with him. That dive off Sierra Leone was one of the most incompetent things I’ve ever seen, all that fancy IMU equipment that doesn’t work. But when a little birdie told us you’d arrived in Somalia and were probably on our trail again, we knew your clown sidekick would be along as well. Lo and behold, he shows up. Take my advice, you’re well rid of him.”
That was enough. If Landor knew they were in Somalia, there was no question about who was behind the kidnapping. Jack remembered the last time he had seen Macinnes, having to toe the line and endure his snide comments after he and Costas had boarded Deep Explorer for the UN inspection. This time, Jack was in charge. He lunged forward, kicked the chair back, and reached for the scruff of the man’s neck, pulling him up bodily and slamming him against the bookcase behind. He punched him as hard as he could in the face, let him collapse, and then picked him up again, the blood pouring out of his nose and down his chin. He pressed the Beretta behind Macinnes’s ear, pushing it as hard as he could, his other hand around his throat. “I don’t think I heard your answer. Where is Dr. Kazantzakis?”
21
The trawler slammed into the waves again, sending a tremor through the hull that seemed to jar every bone in Costas’s body. Over the past few hours he had learned to accommodate himself to the boat’s movements, tensing as it dropped into a trough and then relaxing as it rode the swell, the engine grinding against its mounting one way and reverberating and shuddering the other. Twice he had nodded off and lost the rhythm, and had paid the price in an excruciating jolt. Sleep, he knew, would be an impossibility as long as the sea was this rough, but they were probably past the halfway point and the rest of the trip was a matter of endurance. He guessed they were heading toward the island near Socotra, the one that Ahmed had identified as the site of the U-boat pen; from their embarkation point at a fishing village several hours north of Mogadishu they should reach the island not much after first light. It was a question of lasting out the remainder of the night, of keeping alert and learning anything he could from the noise and the smell, of seizing any opportunity that presented itself to overcome his captors and escape.
He shifted slightly, bracing his feet against the engine mounting and his left shoulder against one of the timber frames of the hull, trying to find a better angle for his wrists. They had been handcuffed behind his back with a cable tie, and for several hours now he had been trying to cut the cable, pressing it hard with each jolt of the hull against an upturned metal edge beneath him. He had been blindfolded since being hustled out of the Toyota in the village and could only guess at his surroundings, but he knew that it was a large fishing vessel, undoubtedly the trawler that Captain Ibrahim had described, the mother ship for the pirate gang. He knew it was a fishing vessel from the appalling stench that had hit him when he was first pushed down the hatch into the hold, and the fish guts that slopped around his feet as the boat pitched and yawed. That and the stale sweat of the crew had made him gag and retch, but as soon as the engine had coughed to life he had been engulfed by diesel fumes and the reek of overheated oil. All he had been able to sense for some time now was a cloying in the back of his throat, whether from diesel fumes or blood from the beatings he could not tell. He felt as if he were a mountaineer in the death zone, knowing that no matter how much he breathed there was never going to be sufficient oxygen in this place to keep him alive. He desperately needed fresh air, and soon.
The engine coughed and spluttered, running on idle for a few moments, and then hacked back to life again. The hatch above him clanged open and someone dropped into the scuppers. He could tell from the stink that it was his captor, his tormentor. He clenched his jaw tight, knowing what would come next. The blow when it came was still a shock, snapping his head sideways, and he felt his mouth fill up again with blood. A hand roughly grasped his jaw, and he smelled the man’s breath again, the reek of tobacco and khat and marijuana. “Hey, English,” his captor said, his voice heavily accented. “I bring you water.”
“I’m not English,” Costas said hoarsely. “For the last time, I’m American.”
“No Americans here,” the man said, taunting. Costas felt the muzzle of a gun thrust under his chin. “No American Embassy, no George Bush, no Obama, no Clinton. No help for you, English.”
Costas strained his head up. “Your engine,” he said. “It’s bad, kaput. I can fix it. I’m an engineer.”
He heard the rasp of a lighter and a deep inhalation, and then he smelled the smoke. The last thing they needed down here was a spark to blow them all to kingdom come — himself, his stoned captor, the others on the deck above. “The engine,” he tried again, speaking more loudly. “It’s kaput, finished. I can fix it.”
The mouth of a bottle was pressed hard into his teeth, ripping at his gums. He drank as much as he could, trying to ignore the coppery tang of his own blood. The bottle was upturned as he drank, and most of the water spilled down his front. He heard the man inhale again, and his voice close against his ear, blowing smoke as he spoke. “No George Bush, no Obama, no Clinton,” he repeated. “No one to help you, no ransom. Soon it is you who will be kaput, English.”
The engine spluttered again. A voice shouted down from above, and the man answered, speaking quickly in Somali. The other replied angrily, and there was a heated exchange. The man seemed to concede, and spoke to Costas again. “Okay, English. The Boss wants you to look at the engine. You look, you tell me what to do. Anything funny, you kaput, you understand?”
Costas flexed his wrists, trying to keep the circulation going. He had no way of knowing how close he had come to cutting the tie, but he knew that he had at least made a notch in it. He felt the blindfold being pulled off, and then a searing pain in his left eye as the pressure was removed from it. He remembered the blow to his head after Zaheed and the marines had been gunned down, and then a confusion of memory as he recovered consciousness in their attackers’ vehicle some time later. He blinked, able to see nothing through the swollen eye, and then caught sight of his captor for the first time, leering at him in the gloom.
The man was scrawny, with sunken cheeks and eyes and yellow teeth, and of indeterminate age, probably much younger than he looked. He wore a grubby vest, and on one shoulder Costas saw the distinctive Badass Boys tattoo that Ibrahim had shown them, a stylized bird with a crescent above, and beneath that a dozen or so raised welts signifying how many people he had killed. He was holding a Kalashnikov with the wire butt folded in, the muzzle aimed at Costas’s gut. He leaned close, his eyes hazy and his chin covered with wispy hair, and took a final drag from his joint, flicking what was left into the scuppers and causing a small eruption of blue flame where leaked diesel ignited. Then he grabbed Costas by the hair and pulled him forward on his knees in front of the engine, holding the rifle to his head. “Now, English, you fix, okay?”
Costas pretended to scrutinize the engine, and then got up on one knee, nodding toward the stern. “I need to see over there, the propeller shaft,” he said. The man backed off slightly and Costas started to rise, lurching sideways with the roll of the boat, his head bowed under the low ceiling of the deck. The boat jarred into another wave, and in that instant he saw his chance. He pulled his wrists apart and broke the tie, in the same movement swinging his arms around and slamming his hands into his captor’s head, pushing him off balance. The man fell hard against one of the frames, clutching his left leg in agony, his weapon falling into the bilge. Costas lunged for it, but was brought up short by a savage blow to the head. He fell forward on his knees, a searing pain in his neck, and looked up blearily to see the Boss standing over him, his own Kalashnikov raised.