Page 39

Tactics

Zane

I fucking overshot the pit. I thought I had him, but he ran right by it.

The thicket’s kept me hidden, though he’s sniffing around me.

He’ll be around again, and the next time he does, I’m doing a cut-back.

It’s my favorite football play. Sure, it doesn’t always work, but what else do I have to try?

He’s going to find me here eventually. Though the sun is dropping in the sky.

I freeze, contemplating my next move. There’s a chance I might be able to dart off, round back to where the thicket on the other side of the island is. I’d have to cross the stream behind the pool, but I could still do it. Meet up with Easton.

But no, we need to keep him safe too. Haley first, Easton next. Sam’s right. They want Easton—he’s the money item. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between two ways of thinking: either they want him alive for ransom, or they want him dead because he was supposed to be killed the first time around.

But I don’t think these guys were involved with the saboteur.

They’re not that suave. They don’t seem to have an overall game plan.

It’s more of a money grab. So now I think they’re after the ransom or reward, whatever you want to call it.

But they still don’t want to give the ship up, so they can’t exactly just hand us over.

Something doesn’t fit. There’s part of this puzzle I’m missing and have been for months now. I feel like I can almost reach it, but it’s out of my grasp.

My pursuer circles back around again. I think this might be the time that I need to do it.

I crouch under the large clump of ferns that I’ve been tucked beneath and ready myself for takeoff.

I hold myself in a sprint position until he’s close enough to see me but too far to take a good shot.

Unlike the one who chased after Sam, this one isn’t sporting an AK-47—he’s got a handgun.

And so far, he’s fired no shots, something else I need to be cognizant of.

He takes a few more steps. The wind is blowing in through the jungle from the ocean.

It’s that time of late afternoon that if we’re going to get more rain, it’s going to happen now.

Instead of that little burst we had right as they landed, it could turn into a full-blown storm, or it could blow over. That’s the nature of this place.

I hold, waiting, just like when we were pulling the wire.

The wire worked. It didn’t quite work how I thought it was going to—I was hoping it would really slice into them, cause them more damage, instead of just slowing them down.

But it’s allowed us to at least try and work the plan this far.

I hold, and I hold, sweat pouring from my brow, the muscles in my legs twitching, wanting to go.

I see him from the corner of my eye, 50 feet behind, and I take off, sprinting through the ferns, jumping over the logs that I know are there, and scrambling through the undergrowth.

But what I didn’t account for is him screaming.

He’s screaming bloody murder. He’s been silent up until this point, and I don’t know why he’s screaming, but I’m not stopping.

I’m not going to let him affect me. Keep going.

Steady steps pound the leaf litter of the jungle floor.

Just when I think he’s behind me, I can see the pit up ahead.

Someone else bursts through the jungle too—one of the guys who had been following Sam, I guess.

Now I’ve got two of them, one coming at me, the other coming behind me.

The pit’s in the middle, and I’m not sure what to do.

I don’t hesitate, though. I run straight for it.

This is the one that I built with Calvin, and I know it well enough. I know that in the corner there are some heavier bamboo poles that are holding up the rest of the palm fronds. I nimbly step as close to it as I can, just as the two of them are coming up on me.

The one ahead of me doesn’t appear to have a gun. He’s just running, running straight at us. He’s yelling now, something in French or an Asian language, I don’t know which one it is. I don’t understand it. Mom told me to stay in French class, but I didn’t want to.

I hit the corner of the pit just as the two of them are almost on top of me, and I burst forward back to the beach. I hear it collapse behind me. They’re shouting and screaming, and then there’s utter silence. Nothing.

It couldn’t have been that easy, could it?

I keep taking steps, running away from it, but there’s no noise.

I dart behind a large banyan tree and wait.

I peek out from around it, and the jungle is empty behind me.

I can see a bit of the pit covering left behind, so I zigzag back from tree to tree, using the cover of the largest trees possible, until I get to the pit.

And there, down in it, are two mangled bodies. Unlike the pit on the other side, we used sharpened skewers in this one. Spikes that worked really well. It’s caught two boars over the last few months. We’ve trained Penny to stay away from them.

I crouch, looking for where the gun might have got too, avoiding the vacant eyes of the one that landed face up.

It’s there somewhere. I’m walking around the side of the pit when I hear a twig break from the direction of camp.

But I’m not fast enough. Sam’s walking toward me with his hands in the air.

“Easton,” Sam calls. “Easton.”

I stand, and only then do I see the guy with the gun pressed to his back.

“Where’s—”

“Back at camp.”

I nod. I have no idea why Sam’s calling me Easton. Anyone with access to the internet can look up what Easton Rockwell looks like, and it sure as hell isn’t me.

“Right,” I say. First law of improv: never contradict another speaker. One of my sister’s rules.

“Move,” the pirate says. Then he sees the pit and he jostles Sam to the edge and looks in. “Motherfucker.”

For a second I think he’s going to push Sam in too. Thought the corpses below might keep him from being too injured.

“Go.” He cocks his head at me, and I step back and away from the pit, heading in the direction of camp. “Hands up. I die him, no funny.”

“Right, got it, mate.” I put my hands up and walk beside Sam. Four came off the tender. Where’s the other one? I’m searching ahead of me. If Dante’s back at camp, is the other one there too?

The guy holding the gun behind me must be a heartless bloody bastard; he didn’t even flinch seeing his two dead crewmen in the pit. Didn’t even lean far enough over to see if they were really dead. Though I’ll give him some credit—they looked really dead. Like beyond dead dead.

We march into camp, our captor busy chatting it up on his radio.

There’s a lot of short bursts of angry words before he pockets the thing again.

Dante’s tied to a tree on the far side of camp, near where my net worked.

I shouldn’t smile. This isn’t the time for smiling.

I swallow it down and cock my head away from the gunman to hide my glee at the two feet sticking out from under the bundle of rocks.

The radio goes off in his pocket again.

Dante’s eyebrows rise, and when the gunman steps away from Sam to look through the jungle to the beach, Dante smirks and winks at me. I have no bloody clue what the hell the wink means. But it seems hopeful, or the chef’s finally gone all the way off his rocker.

The gunman moves all of us to the beach facing the boat.

We’re waiting and waiting while the sun sinks lower.

At last, two crewmen jump from the ship into the water and start swimming for the beach.

When they crawl out of the waves, neither of them are happy.

One has large zip ties, the kind the cops use.

The other guy pats us down. Mate, if I’d had a gun, I would have already used it on you.

But then I did what Calvin told me to do with my pocketknife back in camp: I slid it into my underwear behind my cock.

Ziptie grunts at Sam, and he puts his hands out.

The wet pirate yanks them so tight on Sam I’m worried for his circulation.

Dante’s next and then me. I do the trick my sister taught me when she was going to the rallies for the Just Stop Oil demonstrations.

She was never arrested, but she studied it up in case she was.

I tuck my thumbs into my palms, making my hands as wide as possible before the zipties are tightened, then relax them after, creating just enough slack for me to wriggle free later.

The guy is wet and mad and doesn’t notice what I’ve done.

“In,” he says, pointing to the tender.

Ziptie guy sits down and stays on the beach, while wet guy number two and our gunman usher us into their tender.

I’m not sure how long wet guy number two has been working on boats, but he hasn’t been driving a tender long.

He revs the engine before Ziptie pops up and has untied the line, and we lurch toward the big rock.

There’s more swearing, and I’m pretty sure I know “fuckturd” in Tagalog now, for as much as the gunman is yelling it at him.

But then we’re off, and he doesn’t do such a bad job lining up at the aft of the pirate’s ship.

Dante leans over to Sam to whisper something to him, but the gunman grunts and pokes him in the back with the barrel of the gun.

Climbing onto deck when your hands are zip-tied in front of you, though?

Yeah, it’s not easy. Sam goes first, followed by Dante, then me.

There are two more guys with guns pointed at us on deck, and one unarmed.

The gunman from the beach doesn’t come aboard the ship.

No, another guy jumps into the tender. And then we’re led along the starboard side of the ship and down another ladder.

I’ve seen ships like this before; this is where they would keep the fish if they were earning an honest living. The door slams with a thud.

“What the hell were they saying?” I turn to Dante, I think.

It’s so dark I can’t make anything out, but there’s a crack of light coming around where the aft hull meets the deck.

They have a light leak. Where there’s a light leak, there’s a water leak.

I wiggle my hands free and push the looped cuff into my pocket, retrieving my knife. “Give me your hands, Sam.”

He turns, and his cuffed hands slap into my side. “Sorry,” he says.

“No worries, Cap.”

“Your hands are free?”

“Better than that, I’ve got my knife. Now hold still so I don’t cut you.” I snip the bit off and catch it before it falls. “Keep a hold of this so we can pretend to be cuffed.”

Dante’s already got his hands where I can reach them. “What the hell were you winking about, Dante?” I hand him his cuff back.

“Half the crew speaks Indonesian and the other Tagalog. Half of their radio communications are them saying What and huh in broken French. But what I did get is the guy in charge wants us alive. Something about they won’t get paid unless they have the four guys.”

“Four?” Sam says.

“Yeah, four.”

“Whoever’s paying them doesn’t know about you,” I say to Sam.

“And that’s going to be to our advantage,” Sam replies.