The Catch: A Novel by Taylor Stevens Read Free Book Online

starboard wing of the bridge in a heated exchange with the chief officer, arguing in a French that Nowak couldn’t understand, while Nowak used broken English that meant nothing to Marcus. A simple flick of a switch and in less than a minute Munroe could have settled things, but the decision to intervene or not had already been made by Leo. They were on their own.
    Munroe grabbed the strap of her bag and belly-crawled out fromthe shadows and in the direction of the starboard railing. Far down the deck so that they were shapeless blurs in the dim, Victor and Emmanuel paced at their respective rails, too focused on scanning the water to get involved in the argument up top, which continued, increasing in volume if not clarity.
    Three shadows rushed through the doors of the upper deck, and all of them moved quickly toward the bridge. Again in her earpiece, another discussion, this time the captain’s voice, first in English to Leo, it seemed, something about the propeller getting caught in a fishing net or ocean garbage, about it not being unusual, about sending a man to look, then something in Russian to Nowak, which she would have understood if she could have heard, but the words were garbled. These were two wholly distinct reactions by the different factions: the captain and the
Favorita
’s officers, as if the propeller stoppage could have come from a number of different sources; Leo’s crew, as if an attack was the only possibility—which was what Leo was here for, of course—though logically, tactically, the captain’s reaction made the most sense.
    How did you stop a freighter, a pinprick of black against more black, in the middle of the goddamn ocean at night, without warning, and nothing to worry the radar? And yet Munroe sided with Leo.
    Not because of the weapons in the hold or her misgivings about the handoff, but because she’d heard of similar happenings, knew how she would have stopped the ship if it needed to be done.
    The lights didn’t power on, and from her earpiece the captain’s logic was clear: If there was nothing on the water, he didn’t want to attract something. Leo didn’t argue. If there was something on the water, he didn’t want to give the invaders a map and create targets.
    Munroe continued the low crawl toward the railing, covering the distance tentatively, knowing that Marcus in his nest up by the bridge would inevitably spot her and, amped up and trigger-happy as he was, might not register that it was she until after he’d already shot her.
    Nothing in her earpiece indicated he’d seen anything out in the darkness.
    Nothing of value came from Victor or Emmanuel, or from David, who’d by now joined Marcus on the wing. All of the men were equipped with night vision on their scopes, had low-light binoculars, but little good those would do as they hunted, hunted through a hazy green for small specks in the vast emptiness.
    Without the propeller the ship moved on momentum alone, and Munroe could feel the slowing while the pacing of the men intensified. The silence dragged on for long, long minutes until the ship was dead in the water and at the mercy of the wind and the currents.
    No armed ship had yet been hijacked off Somalia because guards were able to fend off attacks from a distance, made it impossible for the marauders to get close enough to fire at the bridge or put an RPG round through the engine room: the guards kept the ship
moving
, but tonight that strategy had been thwarted.
    Munroe scanned the ocean again, saw only blackness, and in the continued eeriness of the ship gone quiet, the only sounds were the water lapping and the whispered coordination in her earpiece while the jolt of adrenaline that had come in the wake of the stoppage settled some.
    The longer they went without any sign of attack, the more the tension subsided. Fifteen minutes passed, twenty perhaps. The engineers and the mechanic had been roused, and problem solving had gone into full swing. And then