ABOARD THE KINJARA MARU, the hulking leader of the “pirate” gang dragged Kristi Nordegrun across the deck. He was known by the name Andras, but his men sometimes called him “The Knife” because he loved to play with sharpened blades.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Where’s my husband?”
“Your husband?” he said.
“He’s the ship’s captain.”
Andras shook his head. “Sorry, love, you may now consider yourself single again.”
With that, she lunged at him, her hand slamming into his face. She might as well have punched a stone wall. He shook off the blow, threw her to the deck, and whipped out one of his favorite toys: a locking jackknife with a five-inch titanium blade. He locked the blade into place and held it toward her.
She shrank back.
“If you aggravate me, I’ll carve you up with this,” he said. “Understand?”
She nodded slowly, the fear plain as day in her eyes.
Truthfully, Andras didn’t want to cut her, she would fetch more money with a clean face, but she didn’t need to know that.
He whistled to his men. With the crew dead and the ship going down, the last part of a long job was done. It was time for the rats to leave the sinking ship.
They gathered round him and one of them, a scruffy-looking man with yellowish teeth and a fishhook scar on his upper lip, took special notice of Kristi. He dropped down, touching her hair.
“Nice,” he said, rubbing her golden locks between his fingers.
At that moment, a heavy boot hit him in the side of the head.
“Get out of it,” Andras said. “Find your own prize.”
Wearing a new welt on his face and a look of shock, Fishhook scurried away like a scolded hound.
“What are you going to do with me?” Kristi asked with surprising force.
Andras smiled. He was going to have his way with her and then he was going to sell her on the black market. A nice little bonus to the money he’d been paid for this job. But she didn’t need to know that either.
Ignoring her question, he put the blade away and dropped down beside her. Using a metal wire, he bound her hands, wrapping them several times before twisting the ends together. With a piece of cloth he gagged her. That would keep her quiet.
Before he could get her up, a voice shouted from above. “Ship approaching! Looks like a cutter or some type of frigate.”
Andras snapped his head up. He tried to peer through the thick smoke. He couldn’t see anything.
“Where, you damn fool?” he shouted. “Give us a direction.”
“West-northwest,” his man shouted.
Andras strained to see through the drifting cloud of soot and smoke. A large vessel approaching was bad news, but something far worse caught his eye; a thin white wake, close to the Kinjara’s hull.
He could see it in gaps between the smoke. It crossed toward the front of the ship, where it vanished in the dark clouds. He looked toward the bow, which was now awash in two feet of water.
A second later the oily haze parted, and a ribbed inflatable boat raced out of the smoke, gliding right up onto the bow. Two men lay prone on its forward section, aiming and firing M16 rifles.
Andras saw two of his men fall, and another was hit and hobbling. The others scrambled for cover as the fast boat beached itself on the deck near the Kinjara’s second cargo hatch.
Several men in fatigues piled out of the boat on either side as one of the shooters — a man with distinctively silver hair — aimed and fired with deadly accuracy.
Two more of The Knife’s men went down before the shooter rolled off the attacking boat and took cover behind one of the open cargo hatches.
“Americans,” Andras cursed. Where the hell had they come from?