Meanwhile Jeremiah had gone on the attack. “Do it again!” he shouted as the man turned his attention back to him.
Cindy hit the man again. Blood gushed from the wound, painting the water around her red. She hit him a third time. Her fear of the water was gone, everything else replaced by her need to stop the man from hurting Jeremiah.
The man’s struggling became weaker. They were winning, she realized. She took a step back, waiting to see what Jeremiah wanted her to do.
Jeremiah shoved the man’s head under water, drowning him, and she watched, heart racing. Then he hauled him up out of the water. The fight had gone out of the man, though, and she realized that he was dying.
“Which way?” Jeremiah demanded, leaning over him.
The man said something, but Cindy couldn’t make it out. Then he was gone.
Jeremiah dropped his body back under the water.
“What did he say?” she asked.
Jeremiah pointed to the left. “He said it was this way.”
But she noticed that he wouldn’t meet her eyes and she had a sneaking suspicion that he was just guessing. She didn’t say anything, though. She could be wrong.
Jeremiah headed to the left and Cindy followed, shivering when her leg brushed by the body. They slogged forward several more yards and the fear of the water began to overtake her again as they left the dead man farther behind.
“How much further?” Cindy asked.
“We need to get another deck toward the top, possibly two before we can get free of the ship.”
“Are we going to make it?” she gasped, her teeth beginning to chatter as the water swirled above her waist.
“We’re going to try,” he said grimly, pushing on.
“What killed that man?” she asked, fearfully.
“A bullet wound. He was bleeding out slowly. There was no way he would have made it much farther in the shape he was in.”
“So, I...I didn’t kill him?” she said, remembering the gush of blood.
“No, I did, when I shot him earlier. His brain just hadn’t gotten the message yet,” he said, his voice gruff.
She felt relief rush through her. And as her worry over that subsided her fear of dying there in the dark, underwater came rushing back.
She told herself that they had defeated their captors and they could defeat this, too.
It was getting harder to move, though, the water dragging at every step. It reminded her of when she had been a little kid and tried to run out of the pool. Her legs were burning with the effort of moving so quickly. But they didn’t have the luxury of making their way more slowly. She followed right behind Jeremiah, trusting him to help them avoid sudden openings since she could no longer see the walls they were walking on through the dark water. His penlight was shining just a couple of feet ahead of her, a beacon of light.
Finally they found another passageway leading to a higher deck and were scrambling. The water was swirling ever higher and it was now at her chest. She kicked something with her foot and pain spiked up her leg.
Jeremiah twisted to look at her.
“I’m fine,” she said. It was a lie. She was beyond exhausted and she wasn’t sure how she was even standing upright. It had to be the adrenalin, she theorized, but how long did that stuff work before it wore off?
God. God had to be keeping her alive, keeping her moving. Maybe He still had a plan, a work for her to do. She had to keep going, keep trying, even if it felt like her legs were too heavy to take another step or her heart was racing so fast it felt like it was going to burst out of her chest. Truth was, she was so exhausted that she was even starting to fight to stay awake, to keep going. But every time she nearly stopped, the fear would kick in, prodding her, reminding her. To stop moving was to die.
“Do you need me to carry you?”
“No, just get us out of here.”
~
Just get us out of here.
Cindy’s words rang in Jeremiah’s ears. She was placing so much faith and trust in him and she had no idea just how hopeless their situation actually was. His knowledge of these kinds of ships was so limited that he was little better than stumbling around in the dark.
He cast the penlight back and forth, keeping it going, trying to find the path they needed. He would have thought there would have been someplace on the ship where you could access all the desks, a central stair location. If there was, so far he hadn’t found it. Of course, thanks to the water that was slowing them down more and more they probably weren’t traveling as far as one would have thought.
He pushed forward, saying a prayer for safety, for strength. And he kept wondering where Kapono was. Why hadn’t they been picked up before they had been brought onboard this ship?
It didn’t sit right with him. He let his mind puzzle over it to combat the creeping fear that he was going to fail and that Cindy was going to die in the middle of the ocean and it would somehow be his fault.
A terrible suspicion dawned on him. What if Kapono was playing both sides? That would explain why no rescue had arrived. But if that were the case wouldn’t he have simply handed over the bank account number on the card after he got it from Cindy?
Unless he was planning on ransoming the account information or he worked for a competitor. Dark thoughts swirled in Jeremiah’s mind even as the water swirled around his waist. He ran back through in his mind everything Kapono had said and done since picking him up at the airport.
At least he knew for a fact that Mark had called someone on the Honolulu police force for help. But maybe Kapono had seized the opportunity to insinuate himself into the position of liaison. But for what purpose? Maybe he wanted to sell the account numbers to their owner but he didn’t actually know who they belonged to so he needed to discover the identity of the man behind Cindy’s kidnapping first.
It made a terrible kind of sense. If it was true there was no help coming, not even when they made it to the surface. Jeremiah had woken up in the raft and had no idea how long they had been out to sea, how many miles from shore they were.
One thing at a time
, he cautioned himself. He didn’t need to figure out how they were going to swim back to shore or find a boat to pick them up. All he had to figure out now was how to get out of the ship. Then they had to swim to the surface. There were a lot of steps that had to be accomplished successfully before he could even begin to worry about being adrift. And step one wasn’t going well.
The only thing going in their favor was how slowly the ship was sinking. If they did make it out they were going to need a fighting chance of getting to the surface with just the oxygen in their lungs. From what he could tell anything remotely useful on board the ship had already been stripped out. They were on their own.
The ship began to tilt slightly, back toward being right side up. It wasn’t much but it was disconcerting, and if it kept going the ladders could become a real issue.
The water rose, swirling around his chest and just under Cindy’s chin. They were running out of time. And then he saw a murky light shining in front of them. He pushed forward as fast as he could until he could make out portholes in the ship submerged under the water.
He stopped and Cindy looked down. He took a deep breath and then dove under the water. The latch on the window still worked, but there was too much water pressure on either side to allow it to swing open. His only chance was to break the glass which was already under a terrific strain.
He pulled the gun out of his pocket. He wished it was a Glock 17 which was designed so it could be fired underwater. What he had, though, was a Sig Sauer P239 which meant he’d be able to fire it, but only once. He was going to have to make the shot count.
He positioned the gun about six inches away from the glass and pulled the trigger. The bullet exploded outward, punching through the glass, shattering it. The casing didn’t eject, jammed into the slide. He had expected that. He took the gun and smashed the lingering bits of glass clear from the porthole frame. He looked at it closely. The opening was two feet wide. It was wide enough for Cindy to get through, but not him.
He surfaced and Cindy gave a cry of relief. He looked at her. She was pale and shaking and there was terror in her eyes. The water was even higher now and she was struggling to keep her head above water.
“You’re going to go down, out the porthole, and then swim clear of the ship and up to the surface. You’ll have to be careful to get out from under it. We should have you going out the top side, but I’m not sure we can cross over to it in time,” he said.
“I’ll follow you,” she said resolutely.
He shook his head. “I could never get my shoulders through, it’s too narrow. But you could make it.”
“Not without you.”
He picked her up so that her head was higher above water. It was rising much faster now. She put his arms around his neck and hung on, eyes pleading with him.
~
Cindy couldn’t believe what Jeremiah was saying to her. He couldn’t be serious. How did he think she could go and leave him behind? After all that they had been through together, all that they had survived. They had to both make it out of here alive. Anything else was insanity and she wouldn’t hear it.
“It’s the only way,” Jeremiah said with a gasp.
“No! I can’t leave you. We’ll make it, there has to be a way. We’ll keep walking, we have to find our way out. I won’t leave.”
“You have to,” he insisted, struggling to get the words out around the water that was beginning to rush into his mouth. “I’ll keep trying to go up. But this is the best...chance.”
She took a last breath of air before the water rose above her lips and shook her head wildly. She didn’t want to leave him. How could she after all this?
And in her mind she saw her sister, dead, eyes frozen open. And the image morphed instead into Jeremiah. She hit his chest with her fists and pointed onward, but he shook his head.
Then he grabbed her around the waist and twisted her around. She struggled, but he was too strong. Then he was shoving her out the porthole, pushing until her legs were clear.
As soon as she was out she spun around, staring at him through the porthole. He gave her a small, sad smile and then sank from her sight.
18
Cindy wanted to scream, but her lungs were already burning for air. She stared into the porthole, but it had grown too dark and she couldn’t see anything.
Her lungs ached harder and her legs began to kick almost involuntarily. She bumped her head against the side of the ship and then shook it to clear her vision. Then she turned and saw pale light above her. She kicked for all she was worth and got free of the ship and then she began clawing upward with arms too. She began to blow tiny bubbles out of her mouth, desperate to expel the carbon dioxide that was building up.
She was getting weaker. Her body had already been wracked by exhaustion and deprivation. She realized she couldn’t make it much longer. The surface seemed so far away. She flailed wildly. She started to lose her vision.
And then, just as her lungs felt like they were going to burst, she broke the surface. She gulped in a huge lungful of air and then let it out in one terrible scream.
The sun was rising on the horizon. A new day was dawning. A day without Jeremiah. She screamed again, hearing the sound as though it were being ripped out of her body. She thrashed in the water, panicking, as her mind began to process where she was and not just what had happened.