Alexis pulled open the heavy interior door the chamber and squeezed in. There was barely enough room for her and the collapsed doctor. The young woman listened for breath but found none. She checked for a pulse and shook her head in frustration. Fatima buried her head in her hands.
The young Texan straddled the doctor’s body and pounded on his chest with both hands, trying to restart his heart, force the seawater from his lungs. She leaned over his cold, motionless body and her lips met his. Air rushed into his lungs, his chest rising.
Watching the video, Hassan unconsciously touched his lips, as if he could detect some tiny residual sensation of her lifesaving breath. On screen, his entire body contracted with enough force to throw Alexis into a bulkhead. The doctor continued convulsing, pink-flecked foam gathering at his lips.
Decompression sickness, he thought, diagnosing the symptoms with clinical precision. Systemic pain, pink-flecked foam from the lungs, it couldn’t be anything else. To reach him, Alexis had been forced to initiate a rapid, dangerous decompression. All of the gasses that had saturated into his blood and tissues were now expanding inside the doctor’s body like a shaken soda can, gathering in his joints, bloodstream and spine.
On the video, Alexis sealed the inner door and ordered Fatima to re-engage the pressurization sequence. Alexis winced, her ears popping as the pressure inside rapidly built, slowing the doctor’s unconscious convulsing. Fatima tried to ease the pressure build-up, but Alexis urgently waved for her to speed it up, faster, fast enough to save the doctor’s life.
The pressure leveled off and Alexis held the breathing doctor in her arms like a limp rag doll. His skin was still blue from the cold and lack of oxygen but he did not shiver. She zipped down half of his wetsuit and felt inside his armpits.
She’s checking core temperature, he realized. She knows I’m hypothermic.
He watched as Alexis unzipped the rest of the wetsuit, slipping his naked body out of the neoprene. Vitaly looked slightly away from the screen, preserving some modicum of modesty. Alexis stripped off her wet tank top to a sports bra. Pulling off her cutoff shorts, she rolled the doctor’s inert body onto her own, holding him in her arms, rubbing his skin, warming him with her own body heat.
Mercifully, Vitaly killed the video feed. It presumably continued for hours as Fatima and Alexis fought the hypothermia and pressure sickness. All Hassan remembered was waking up in his own bunk.
“I show you this,” said Vitaly, turning to look at Hassan, “because if someone feel this way about me, I would want to know.”
Hassan opened the door to the armory in the far stern of the submarine. He’d hoped it was empty; somewhere he could spend a few hours sorting medical kits alone with his thoughts.
“It’s the butcher come to see me again,” Dalmar said, looking up. The pirate sat cross-legged on a towel he’d draped over the deck, a disassembled assault rifle laid in front of him.
“I see you’re making yourself at home.”
“Indeed,” said Dalmar as he reassembled the freshly cleaned and oiled rifle. “Home is in the company of my friends and brother.”
“Aren’t your friends and brothers back home? In Somalia?”
“My men are in Somalia,” said Dalmar. “My brother is here, with me.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s simple, very simple,” said Dalmar. “Your Captain Jonah saved me at the risk of his own life. This makes him my friend.”
“He’s saved all of us,” said the doctor.
“But you,” said Dalmar. “I do not particularly like you. You are not my friend, but you are my brother. Your mother’s blood flows through my veins, just as it flows through yours. We are family now. You are brother Doctor Hassan Nassiri. I am brother Dread Pirate Dalmar Abdi. Our mother has been killed by our sworn enemy.”
“I’ve never had a brother before.” The pirate’s statement was so bold, so genuine, Hassan could do little but accept it at face value.
“I have spoken with Jonah,” announced Dalmar, reaching across the assault rifle to clasp Hassan’s hands in his own. “He has agreed to bring me home to my soldiers. There is much to do, much planning to be prepared if my friend needs me in the battle of Bettencourt.”
“I will be sad to see you go,” Hassan said, his hands bound by the pirate’s. “Asalaam alaykum… and safe journeys.”
“I wish peace upon you as well,” said Dalmar. “But there is little peace in my country. My friend is taking me to the fishing grounds of another dear and trusted friend. I will find my men there. But as my time with my friend and brother draws short, I find myself troubled.”
“Troubled? How?”
“Brother Hassan the Butcher, I have come to a crossroads. I am a man who has outlived his purpose. I am not a revolutionary, I am a fox. I love to play this ancient game of hide and seek — deadly as it may be. But the game’s rules are always set by the hyena. When the fox becomes too much trouble, the fox is called jihadist, terrorist. Illegitimate for rule, even after victory on the battlefield. For even if the fox expels or defeats the hyena, the world will shun the fox.”
“What should the fox do?”
“The fox should die honorably. I vowed I would never outlive what little good I have done with my life.”
“And what of Jonah? And myself? How do we fit into this ancient game of fox and hyena?”
“This I do not know,” admitted Dalmar. “I think Jonah is a man who will only play a game by his own rules. But he is no hyena. And this changes everything.”
“Indeed.”
“Enough with this idleness.” Dalmar released Hassan’s hands and slapped his thighs, abruptly ending the musings. “We are speaking like two old women. The Russian — find out if he likes me. Will you do that for me, brother?”
“Vitaly?” Hassan asked, taken aback. “I guess I can ask,” he said, despite having absolutely no idea how to broker such a request.
“Good!” The pirate smiled mischievously. “He is very beautiful, you think so? Maybe he would make the fox happy.”
A pirate who asks before the taking, thought Hassan. Hardly a blood-thirsty brigand. Perhaps they weren’t so different after all.
“Everyone assemble in the command compartment,” crackled Jonah’s voice over the intercom.
Hassan sat up in his bunk, but an overwhelming pall of grief prevented him from moving any further. Passing by, Dalmar extended his hand, pointing at the doctor with a single extended index finger.
“Come with me, my brother,” he ordered.
The pair made their way into the command compartment, joined by Alexis from the engine room. Vitaly sat down at a central computer console and the others crowded around him. Jonah pushed his way to the center of the pack.
“This,” Jonah began, pointing to plans of Anconia Island on the screen, “is the Bettencorps fortress.”
Dalmar snickered. “And the thermal exhaust port is the key to the fortress.”
“Thermal exhaust port? I don’t get it,” said Hassan.
“It’s a Star Wars joke,” Alexis said without looking at the doctor.
“Anconia Island is a massive, heavily fortified, heavily reinforced target,” Jonah went on. “She’s built off the same underpinnings as North Sea oil platforms, designed to take typhoons and tsunami alike. We could ram her with the Scorpion at full speed and it wouldn’t so much as knock a pen off Charles Bettencourt’s desk.”
“Please say ramming Anconia is not plan,” said Vitaly.
“It’s not the plan,” said Jonah. “In fact, I’d like everybody to hear your plan.”