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

Victor whispered a slur, as if he’d found an enemy that even Marcus and David up by the bridge hadn’t spotted. He fired several quick bursts. A warning to whatever was out there, assuming something was out there.
    And then more silence.
    Even the radio went quiet and Munroe could feel the focus as each man studied the water, trying to find the threat that eluded them.
    Another five minutes passed and then Marcus, a tremor of excitement in his voice, gave coordinates for an approaching attack boat, though no sound of an engine came in over the water. Then new coordinates. And new ones again. And again. The tempo on deck picked up. Not confusion so much as tension in trying to home in onmultiple moving targets far enough away that they were not easily spotted among the swells even with the aid of low-light goggles.
    Munroe lay flat near the railing, watching, waiting, analyzing, puzzling.
    So much about the scenario was wrong.
    Pirates might follow a well-lit ship at night waiting for dawn before they launched an attack, but she’d never heard of a night strike that targeted a ship out in the dark like this.
    Victor fired three more bursts.
    Wrong
.
    Even a calm ocean dumped four- to six-foot swells against the ship’s hull and turned waterline boarding into a climb up a sharp, wet, rocking, bucking wall. It was hard enough using grappling hooks and ropes and ladders when there was no armed resistance and you could see what you were doing.
    This made no sense.
    Flashes sparked out in the dark, far behind the freighter, and a barrage of weapon reports returned from the ocean, though it didn’t appear that the attack drew closer. And then there was silence again. An elongated stretch of minutes where the automatic weapons went quiet and the armed guards, finding protection behind strategically placed sandbags, searched again for the enemy, and in that eternity, the first flash-bang grenade hit the deck.
    Even this far fore, dulled by the distance, muted by the open air, Munroe felt the concussion wave. David screamed, and Munroe knew his pain. Through the night goggles, looking at the moon was like looking into the sun—how much more the searing light that had just exploded in front of him.
    Without the night vision, the men on the ship would be forced to fight blind.
    And then another explosion, another flash.
    Wrong, all wrong
.
    Munroe struggled to pick Victor out from the darkness but couldn’t find him. A shadow or two moved down from the bridge, another one up, but she could no longer tell who was whom. The ship’s foghorn blew, signal to most of the crew to gather in the safe room. Another explosion followed, and then another, and then from the port wing of the bridge a staccato of weapon reports more sprayed anger than targeted shooting.
    Munroe closed her eyes, breathed in the sounds of silence and the fragrance of the impending battle. She saw the strategy, knew the reason for the suppressive fire, understood that it wouldn’t be long before the fighting escalated and whatever was out there closed in: Leo’s team had the high ground, presumably had superior training and better weapons, but the ship was the length of a football field, and they could no longer see in the dark and hadn’t come prepared for a full-on assault of a standing ship. Leo’s team didn’t have the capacity to hold the
Favorita
indefinitely.
    The silence lingered and Munroe knelt, palms to the deck. The cool of the metal bled into her hands. The first rush burned through her veins and, with it, release in abandoning herself to fate, to the predator’s instinct: tranquillity in the knowledge that death had come for her again.

CHAPTER 6
    Munroe crawled along the edge of the coaming in the direction where she’d last seen Victor. The muzzle flashes out on the ocean stayed dark and, without targets at which to aim, so did the weapons on deck. How long before Leo’s men pulled the night goggles back on and began hunting the water once