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

more? Probably never—being blinded again was too great of a risk. And then as if to confirm the thought, another concussion grenade landed midship and brought more searing light.
    This was Leo’s war. He and his men could do what they’d been paid to do, but she wasn’t sticking around. No matter how far away the suppressive fire might be, something was close enough to get those grenades on deck, and that was her way out.
    A minute passed, then two, while she continued a cautious stop-start in Victor’s direction; she’d drag him with her if she could, if only for the kindness he had shown, and then she heard the thud, soft and sick: a body being hit with a metal pipe or a rubber-coated grappling hook laying hold somewhere along the railing.
    Munroe paused. Heard the thud again. Was fifteen feet away when the first man, dressed in commando getup, reached the deck and slid over the rails. A moment later a partner came up behind him.
    The second man untied a rope from his waist, pulled hand over hand, and hauled up a grenade launcher, which he gave to the first man, and a Kalashnikov rifle that he kept for himself. The man with the launcher passed within a few feet of Munroe, and he carried his weapon with the casual confidence of one who’d handled rifles since childhood, yet his gait, clumsy and ill-timed, betrayed him as an amateur playing dressed-for-war, as if he mimicked moves seen on television without understanding the reasons for them.
    Munroe breathed down the quandary. The boat they’d come from was her way of escape. And yet these men were far enough fore that without the night vision, Leo’s team would never see them, and there was no way to give Leo a warning without alerting the invaders to her own presence. Munroe moved from her belly into a crouch.
    The man with the launcher spoke, and she froze.
    The words came in Somali. “Remember, don’t shoot the captain.”
    “How do I know which is the captain?” said the other.
    “You saw his picture.”
    “But they are all white men.”
    “Only shoot the legs,” said the grenade launcher, and the man with the rifle signaled something and lay prone on the deck, face toward the bridge, while the man with the launcher crept away from his partner, as if he intended to continue around the foremost side of the hatch to the port side. Munroe strained to pull images from the dark, far down the deck. Still no Victor. Waited until Grenade Launcher approached the corner of the hatch and then slunk through shadow after him.
    She came on him from behind. Hand to head, foot to knee. Slammed his face into the metal edge of the coaming and his body went limp in a fight that had ended too fast to be fair. She’d killed more often than she wished to remember, had fed off the hunt and suffered from it all the same. The law of the jungle cried out to her to finish what she’d started, to answer treachery with treachery and dump him in the ocean, but this wasn’t her battle, it wasn’t personal enough to upend the numbness of Djibouti.
    The silence on deck ticked on.
    Munroe left the unconscious man where he’d dropped.
    The attack boats were out there. Couldn’t be much longer before chaos erupted, and she needed to be gone before it happened.
    At the corner of the hatch she leaned out toward the man with the rifle, still prone on the deck, playing warrior with his face toward the bridge.
    “
Halkan kaalay
,” she hissed.
    The man turned in her direction but didn’t rise and so she called louder, trying to mimic the accent she’d heard so briefly before. On the second call, the man with the rifle moved to his feet, scampered in her direction, and when he passed the corner, she grabbed his neck, pulled him off balance, and shoved him into the metal as she’d done with the first. But he didn’t go down.
    Instead he clawed. Twisted. Tried to regrip the rifle and get a finger on the trigger. Munroe smashed her forehead into his face and he crumpled. She grabbed