“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Jonah. “Losing Buzz hurt us. I know he was an idiot, but he was a reliable idiot. I’m in, but I need Alexis as engineer. If she’s not in, it’s no-can-do, full stop. We can’t risk an engine problem leaving us dead in the water.”
“Fair. More than fair.”
“I’d like to say I’m doing it for you.” Jonah tipped his head back and finished his beer. He chucked the empty over the side and into the ocean.
But he’s not, the doctor thought to himself, mentally finishing Jonah’s sentence. Finding my mother might provide the only leverage we’ll ever get.
As if summoned, Alexis popped her head out of the conning tower hatch, just in time to see the last rays of the sun dip beneath the horizon, rewarding the three observers with a thin flash of soft green as it disappeared.
“Got the autopilot workin’,” she said in a sing-song voice, laying on the Texan accent as thick as she could. “Soon we will be mother-fucking-fuck the fuck out of here.”
Dr. Nassiri and Jonah looked at each other.
“Uh oh,” she said. “What now?”
CHAPTER 11
Sunset descended over the pirate outpost, an intense paint-streaked display of light filtering through third-world dust and smoke. Two large stone towers guarded the concrete and stone walls of the small harbor, vestiges of a decaying public works project of some long-ago Marxist regime. Much of the stonework and concrete underpinnings of the jetty were gone, as were dreams of a better future for the nearby city. The unnamed patch of settlements were little more than a loose collection of dusty tower blocks and tin shacks.
The guard towers overlooked a sheen of oil, plastic, and sewage coating the harbor water as it lazily seeped into the ocean. As poor as it was for the aesthetics of the harbor, it couldn’t have been better cover for the Scorpion.
Temporarily roused from his medical sedation, Vitaly had done a masterful job of steering the Scorpion into position just outside the harbor. The Russian helmsman set the submarine down on the shallow, sandy seafloor, deep enough to remain undetected. Even the largest pirate ships could pass overhead without colliding. More importantly, they were shallow enough to use the periscope to spy on the harbor.
“Raising periscope,” said Jonah, more to himself than anyone else.
Vitaly was back in his bunk, but he didn’t seem to mind the handcuffs. In fact, he didn’t act like he minded much of anything — except Jonah. He never missed an opportunity to flash Jonah a scowl thick with a millennia of Russian indignation. It was as if he believed receiving two gunshot wounds from point blank range — while unarmed, no less — was a cosmic imbalance in need of eventual rectification.
Earlier, Jonah had tried to ask him why the Scorpion had been deployed against the Fool’s Errand.
“Sometimes goat eat wolf,” was his only reply.
Jonah suspected that particular folk saying may have lost something in the translation. And that was that, as much as anyone could get out of him. Even Alexis took a flirty soft-touch run at him to the Russian’s complete disinterest and total lack of cooperation.
He’d been compliant, but Jonah resolved not to leave his back turned to him, not if it could be prevented. People were funny about revenge, especially Russians coming down from a healthy dosage of opiate painkillers.
Jonah reached down and unlocked the periscope, leaving the device hanging from the ceiling. He felt a sense of satisfaction that the Scorpion had one of the old-school types with actual mirrors and lenses instead of a video screen. An old-school periscope couldn’t fail if the power was ever knocked offline, and no pixel-smoothing algorithm could match a well-trained human eye.
The American started with a full 360-degree swivel to check if the pirates had noticed the periscope pierce through the sheen of oily water to spy on the harbor. For a moment, a small collection of plastic garbage washed by, obscuring his vision. With any luck, even if spotted, the periscope would be mistaken for trash.
He checked on the two stone guard towers first, adjusting the angle upwards to see the bored guards within. In the taller of the two towers, the single guard was dimly illuminated by the screen of his cell phone. In the other tower, two guards played an endless card game by lamplight.
At first, Alexis, Dr. Nassiri, and Jonah had tried to divvy up the spying duties equitably, each taking a few hours at a time. As time wore on, Jonah took up longer and longer shifts until the other two found it best to simply leave him in peace. Jonah kept elaborate notes on the comings and goings of the pirates — shift changes, food delivery, prayers, even visits by girlfriends. In Prison 14, the only timekeeping was the movement of men, and Jonah had developed a seemingly inexhaustible patience for the practice.
Jonah twisted the periscope, allowing his vision to fall on the Horizon. The hijacked racing trimaran yacht gently rocked in protected waters of the harbor. She looked like a long-since broken wild stallion, grime and dust coating her matte-black carbon fiber skin, poorly patched bullet holes across her hull. She’d been at dock nearly four years and looked like every day of it.
I don’t belong here, the yacht whispered. Set me free.
For the seventeenth time that day, Jonah decided he’d rather see this beautiful vessel on the bottom than tied up in a pirate harbor, crumbling away. She was a mechanical work of art, pure function over form. She’d been captured long ago, so long that Jonah had actually remembered a bit about the incident.
It seemed the pirates more or less left the two female occupants of the Horizon to their own devices. They were not free to come or go, but they had reign of the imprisoned ship, spending long periods of time sitting on the rear fantail, sometimes in silence, sometimes in conversation. A guard was always watching from shore. When they eventually went below decks, the pirates did bed checks every four hours, their timing just random enough to make Jonah nervous.
The older of the two women was Fatima, Dr. Nassiri’s mother. She came out less than the other one and spent too much of her time pacing. She’d clearly never been confined for any significant period of time.
“She’s very beautiful,” Alexis remarked when first seeing her two days ago during her shift.
Darkness fell and Jonah switched over to night vision. The Scorpion had a decent third-generation system, capable of taking starlight alone and rendering it into green tones.
The second woman stepped onto the fantail. Jonah found himself breathing a little faster. She was young; maybe mid-twenties, but the youth he assumed could have been just her utilitarian pixie haircut. Like Fatima, she had dark hair and a small stature. Unlike the scientist, her skin was pale and fair.
Dr. Nassiri sat down next to Jonah and set a plate of food on his lap. The incredible richness of the smell pushed Jonah from his prisoner’s concentration, forcing him to take notice. It smelled so good he could have almost cried, it smelled better than he remembered food could ever smell.
“De Laa lamb,” said Dr. Nassiri. “Grilled chops with dates, mint, and orange sauce.”
Jonah dug in with his hands and shoveled it into his mouth. Amazingly, it tasted even better than it smelled.
“The larder is surprisingly well stocked with Moroccan staples,” said Dr. Nassiri.
“Thanks. Are all Moroccan surgeons this good at cooking?”
“I certainly hope not,” said Dr. Nassiri. “This was always my secret weapon when courting a woman.”