Page 9 of Finding Elodie
Elodie inhaled sharply. Danny was dead? “No,” she whispered. Danny had a wife and two kids back home in Wyoming. He couldn’t be dead. Her entire body began to shake.
“You go down and make lights go back on!” one of the pirates ordered Bo.
“If we’re going to make it through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait without ramming this thing into Perim Island or Djibouti on the other side, you need me up here. Without the captain’s expertise, I’m still not sure I can do it, but I know this ship a hell of a lot better than you do,” Bo said in a shaky voice.
A tear fell from Elodie’s eye. She didn’t like the sound of that at all. Had they also killed Walter? How many of the other officers had they killed?
The next thing she heard was another loud gunshot and a thud.
She gasped and pressed a hand over her mouth.
The pirates began speaking to each other in their own language once more.
How long Elodie stood in the darkness not moving, she wasn’t sure. But eventually her sadness and shock turned to anger. How dare these men come aboard their ship and start killing her friends? And if Bo didn’t think he could get the ship through the small passageway of water that led to the Red Sea, and their destination port in Sudan, how in the world did these pirates think they could?
Which led to another thought—the pirates obviously didn’t care about the lives of the people on the ship. So if they steered into that island Bo was talking about, they wouldn’t care one whit. All they wanted was money or things they could sell.
Suddenly, the ship intercom squawked and one of the pirates began speaking, his voice echoing throughout the galley and mess rooms around her.
“This is Hamza. I in charge of boat. You do as I say or you die. Your captain no listen, he is dead. The others, they no listen. They dead! You be dead too if lights no come on. You have ten minutes to put lights on, or we come down and find you. All we want is money. We no care about you. Save yourselves.”
Elodie narrowed her eyes. Bastards. She really wished she knew how to make that microwave bomb right about now. These guys thought they could kill all the officers and engineers and somehow still get this massive ship where they wanted it to go? They were delusional.
Turning, Elodie was glad for all the time she’d spent in the galley. She knew this place like the back of her hand. With her arms out in front of her, just in case a chair had been moved, she made her way back through the crew mess, gingerly shuffled through the crew pantry room, and headed straight for the back wall in the galley. It took her several seconds to find what she was looking for, but when her hand brushed against the flashlight on the wall, she grabbed it triumphantly.
There was emergency lighting she could activate, but she shook her head. “Why make it easier for them?” she muttered softly. Then she stood in the middle of her galley, with the flashlight beam pointed toward the floor, and debated with herself.
“I could sabotage the place,” she reasoned. “Break some glasses and spread the pieces around, pour out a few gallons of oil…but that would alert the assholes that someone was definitely here. But can I really sit around here and do nothing? Like a sitting duck? El, you aren’t Superwoman, what can you really do against armed assholes? Well, one thing you can do is try to make sure they don’t get any other weapons.”
Hearing the sound of her own voice, even if it was whispered, made her feel better. As did having a plan. Quickly, Elodie began to search the galley for any kind of sharp implements. She didn’t want to make it obvious that all the knives had disappeared. She also didn’t want to make it easy for the pirates to find them if they went looking. So she slid one big butcher knife under the chiller. Another went into one of the ovens. And so it went. She hid the cutlery all over the galley.
That done, she looked around, wondering what else she could do.
The ship lurched under her, almost sending Elodie crashing to the floor.
The vibrations she’d gotten so used to suddenly stopped, leaving behind an eerie silence. The unmistakable sound of the watertight doors cranking down filled the air. She knew there were ways of getting around with the doors shut, but it made things much more difficult. And she hated not knowing if the doors had been shut because of what the engineers were doing down in the bowels of the ship, or if they’d come down automatically because they’d run aground or hit something.
Pulling the radio out of her pocket once more, Elodie saw that she’d somehow bumped the dial off of channel ten. She turned it slightly and heard the pirates speaking in their own language. Knowing she wouldn’t be able to understand anything they were saying, she turned it to the channel she’d used to reach the US Naval ship.
“…Mustang, come in. Damn it, Rachel, where are you?”
Elodie had never been so happy to hear anyone’s voice in her life as she was Scott’s. “I’m here,” she said softly.
“Thank fuck,” Scott breathed. “I’ve been trying to reach you for at least twenty minutes. There have been some updates to your situation.”
“I know,” she admitted. “I know you told me not to, but I had to find out what was going on. They shot Walter. And some of the others.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“They were good men,” Elodie told Scott. “A little rough around the edges, and some of the officers were a little conceited, but they didn’t deserve what happened to them.”
“No, they didn’t,” Scott agreed. “But now we’ve got bigger problems.”
“Yeah, they don’t know how to drive this thing, and now they want to kill all of us on sight.”
“Exactly. I need you to hunker down and stay put.”
“The watertight doors just closed,” Elodie told him.
