Jeremiah shot, hitting him in the shoulder on purpose. He needed him alive later to help bring the others to justice. The man staggered and then ran through an open doorway.
They were in what appeared to be the interior of a navy ship although incredibly stripped down. Alarm bells were going off in the back of his mind, but he didn’t have time to stop and think about it.
“Tell me who you’re working for?” he demanded of the Samoan.
The big man chuckled. “It don’t matter bruddah, because we all dead.”
Somewhere a warning klaxon went off. The Samoan made his move, lunging out to grab at Jeremiah’s legs.
Jeremiah put a bullet in his head. As the Samoan’s body fell back Jeremiah cursed to himself. The henchman was no good to him dead. He’d just have to hope he could catch up to the other one.
A groan made him spin around. Cindy was coming to.
~
Cindy woke slowly, blinking her overly dry eyes as fast as she could as she struggled to focus. She began to panic when all she could see was gray. Then a few seconds later she relaxed slightly as she realized that was all there was to see.
“Where are we?” she asked, testing her voice. Her throat was dry, raspy, but the words came out.
“Inside a navy ship,” Jeremiah answered.
She managed to turn her head to look at him. He was standing a few feet away, tucking something into the back of his waistband and looking flustered.
“How long have we been out?” she asked.
The ropes around her wrists were chafing her but at least they hadn’t cut off her blood supply.
Her eyes dropped down and she saw a body on the ground a few feet away. She jerked hard and Jeremiah raised a hand. “It’s okay. He was one of the bad guys.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead.”
“Are you sure?” she asked as he came to her side and began working on the ropes tying her wrists.
“Pretty sure,” he said, his voice grim sounding.
“What is that sound?” she asked.
“Ship’s alarm bells,” he said as the knots began to loosen.
“What are they going to do with us?” Cindy asked as she stared around wildly.
“I think we’re about to find out,” Jeremiah said grimly.
Before she could ask him what he meant all around her the world exploded.
17
Cindy screamed but couldn’t hear herself over the roaring of the explosions. The boat shuddered hard and lurched suddenly onto its side.
Cindy fell, skidding down what once had been the floor until she slammed up against the wall that was now the bottom part of the ship. Her entire sense of equilibrium was thrown as they were tilting. It was like being on some insane carnival ride, but there was no stopping it to get off.
“What’s happening?” she screamed as Jeremiah slammed into her.
Then the roar of the explosions stopped to be replaced a moment later by the sound of rushing water.
“They’re sinking the ship,” Jeremiah said. “We have to get out of here now.”
Around here she could hear the groaning of metal and things rattling around as though falling. She expected to be pelted by flying debris, but miraculously nothing seemed to be coming their way.
He grabbed her hands and in moments had the ropes off. Then he pulled her up to her feet. She had the unnerving sensation of going downward, like an elevator that was going a bit too fast.
“We need to get to the top of the ship,” he shouted at her as he pulled her down a hallway and then angled off to the right where they encountered a ladder. Because the ship was flipped on its side, though, they didn’t have to climb up it, they just kept moving, walking on the wall.
They had just made it to the next deck when water began rushing in, pooling around their feet. She screamed. Jeremiah looked at her over her shoulder.
She grabbed onto his shoulders and stood on tiptoe, trying to get as far from the water as possible even though her conscious mind knew she was crazy.
“We’re going to drown!” she panted, her mind flailing wildly at the thought. This wasn’t happening, couldn’t be happening. She wouldn’t die in the water, couldn’t. It felt like the entire world was slipping away from her as panic set in. But through all the terror she could hear Jeremiah’s voice loud and clear.
“Not if I can help it,” he said. “Stay right behind me.”
~
Jeremiah could feel Cindy’s panic and he fought not to let it infect him as well. He pulled his penlight out of his pocket, grateful it was still there and shone it around, searching for some kind of sign or opening that would lead them to the top of the ship faster.
All the while he was searching he was thinking. It didn’t seem like they had come this far getting into the belly of the ship. Maybe they’d taken the wrong passageway. It was too late for second-guessing now. They couldn’t go back, all they could do was go forward and hope that G-d would lead them to where they needed to go.
He was sliding right hand along the wall that was supposed to be the ceiling of the corridor when he encountered something wet and sticky. He shone his light on it and realized it was blood.
Everything in him went cold. The other man that had brought them here, the one he had shot. He had assumed the man had made it topside before the charges went off, but clearly he had passed this way after the ship had tilted on to its side which meant there was a very real chance he was still trapped in here with them.
The possibility of death by something other than drowning reared its head and he ground his teeth. They didn’t have time to be cautious and go slow. Worse, with his flashlight there was a very real possibility that the other man would see them coming and have the advantage. Jeremiah just hoped he was as worried about escaping the ship as they were and he wouldn’t take the time to stop and ambush them.
He briefly debated sharing his information with Cindy, but decided against it. She had enough to worry about and no good would come out of giving her more stress at the moment. If they were lucky, she’d never have to know that they were trapped in the sinking ship with a killer.
He pressed forward, looking for more signs of blood. A wounded man could be twice as dangerous as a normal one. He wanted to know if they were still following his path or not. Hopefully he would know the way out and it meant they were going in the right direction.
He thought about the tracker he still had in his sock. He doubted it was water proof and it had probably failed already. But it should have been working up until the water hit them. So, why hadn’t Kapono arrived with the cavalry yet? Why hadn’t they rescued them while they were in the raft before they even made it to the boat.
He hoped the police had already captured the men on board the yacht. They shouldn’t have been that far behind him and they should have realized when he was no longer on the yacht so they would have known it was safe to close in on the boat without risking a hostage standoff.
But why hadn’t they come yet? Kapono had given him the tracker specifically so they could hone in on his location, under the assumption that he would find Cindy faster than the police. Hopefully the device itself had been functioning properly and not faulty.
Deep, groaning sounds reverberated through the ship. Behind him he could feel Cindy jump and her hand landed on his arm.
“What’s that?” she cried.
“Metal giving way. The ship wasn’t designed to be under water. Plus, the areas around the explosions have been weakened. It’s twisting, tearing itself apart,” he said.
There was silence behind him but her hand gripped his arm tighter.
“It’s nothing we need to worry about at the moment,” he said quickly. It was a lie. Those were bad sounds and could mean a host of things that could make their situation worse very quickly. She didn’t need to know that, though.
He pushed forward and they found another passageway with a ladder. On the wall he saw more blood. At the rate the man was bleeding, he was likely to bleed to death before making it out of the ship. The wound shouldn’t have been fatal, but it would require pressure placed on it quickly to stop the bleeding which this guy obviously had not taken the time to do. They walked carefully by the ladder and then he stepped cautiously into another corridor.
Jeremiah twisted his head to the right, shining his penlight down the new corridor to see if he could see any more openings. There were none. He turned his head toward the left just in time to see a fist swinging at him.
He dropped and twisted and the fist grazed his temple. The man he had wounded stood over him, features twisted in rage.
~
Cindy saw Jeremiah drop and a hand flash by his head. She jumped back a step and forced down a scream. They weren’t alone on the ship. It must be one of their other captors, she realized. And apparently the man still wanted them dead.
She looked around frantically, searching for something she could use to hit him with, but there was nothing. Jeremiah must have hit the man’s legs because he toppled over backward and Jeremiah jumped on top of him. The two began flailing in the water, sometimes beneath it, sometimes on top of it.
She saw the penlight drift down to the ground, knocked free of Jeremiah’s hand. With it a few feet below water everything was so much darker. Fear crept around her heart as she could no longer tell the combatants apart. Jeremiah was fighting for his life, for
their
lives, with a killer. There had to be something she could do to help.
But in order to help she had to be able to see better. Without giving herself more time to think about it she took a deep breath and then plunged under the water. She forced herself to open her eyes even though it stung and frightened her more. Just three feet away was the penlight and she reached down for it.
A flailing foot nearly kicked her in the head, but she twisted out of the way. She reached for the penlight, stretching her arm and her fingers as far as she could. Someone slammed into her and she grunted, expelling half her air. She was going to have to go up, but they were running out of time. If ever she was going to do this it had to be now.
She grabbed hold of the opening they had been stepping through, and pulled herself farther down. She was fighting the buoyancy of the seawater and her own crushing fear.
Her fingertips grazed the penlight and then she grasped it. She swung it up and shone it on the two fighters and pushed herself to the surface. She sucked in air with a gasp and tried to track what was happening in front of her. The other man had his back to Cindy but she could see that his hands were wrapped around Jeremiah’s throat. He was wearing a black tank top and she could see an oozing hole in the back of his left shoulder. It looked almost like a bullet hole. Regardless of what it was, it was clearly a bad injury.
Cindy stepped closer so that she would be in range of the man. Then, she grasped the penlight as tightly as she could, lifted it over her head and then swung it down, straight into the wound on the back of the man’s shoulder.
He let out a scream unlike anything she’d ever heard before and dropped Jeremiah instantly as he began to thrash around, reaching for his back. He knocked Cindy backward, but she managed to keep hold of her feet and the light.