Finding Elodie Page 3

  “I’ll try.” There was a slight pause, then she asked, “What now? Do we say over and out or something?”

  Midas chuckled softly.

  “No need. We’ll be in touch,” Mustang told her.

  “Right. Okay. Um…bye for now then.”

  Mustang shook his head. Damn. She was adorable. And it was completely fucked up that he was thinking that about someone in the middle of a damn op.

  Then he didn’t have any more time to think about Rachel Walters as Pid turned up the sound on the radio channel he’d tapped into on the bridge. They had intel to gather, a plan to make, and a ship of almost two dozen crew members to save.

  Chapter Two

  Elodie felt better after talking to Scott. She’d never met a real live Navy SEAL before. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but he was so…normal sounding.

  Listening hard, she didn’t hear anything from outside her hiding place. Her legs were hurting from being scrunched up in the cabinet for so long. She wasn’t super tall at five-six, but she also wasn’t quite small enough to be able to fit in her hiding place for long without discomfort.

  Her heart beat fast as she made the decision to venture out. Moving slowly, just in case one of the pirates had been left behind as a sentry, she peered out of the cabinet.

  The lights in the pantry were still on, and she didn’t see anyone in the storage room. She awkwardly climbed out and stood, stretching her muscles so they would hopefully work correctly if she needed to make a fast getaway.

  Putting the radio in her cargo pants pocket once more, Elodie crept to the door. She listened and, after hearing nothing but her own heartbeat, slowly cracked the door open.

  The hallway was empty. She couldn’t hear anything but the hum of the freezers nearby and the rattling of dishes caused by the vibration of the ship. It had taken a bit of getting used to when she’d first come aboard, but now she barely even noticed it.

  She wasn’t sure where she was going or what she was doing, but just knowing that someone was going to be coming to help them made her feel a little braver. She crept into the galley and saw one of the packages of water bottles she’d put on the counter was now gone, as was some of the food. Good. Her plan had worked…for now.

  For a second, Elodie thought about doing what Steven Seagal had done in the movie Under Siege, making a microwave bomb, but she immediately dismissed the idea. First of all, there was no way to time it correctly to go off just when one of the pirates was in the vicinity. She never understood how that had worked in the movie. But second of all, and more importantly…she had no idea how to make a microwave bomb.

  She wondered if Scott would know.

  “He might, but he’s not here,” Elodie said softly.

  She was walking through the galley when something caught her eye. The block of knives she used while cooking.

  No one onboard was allowed to have a gun. She’d been relieved when she’d read that in the rules and regulations she’d received from the shipping company. Now she realized that it put them at a decided disadvantage against the pirates. But just because they didn’t have guns didn’t mean they couldn’t still arm themselves.

  Her knives were sharp. Very sharp. She made sure to keep them in top condition. The thought of actually using one against someone made her physically ill. But if it was stab someone or be raped and tortured, she’d choose to protect herself every time.

  Briefly, Paul Columbus flashed through her mind. The man was seriously unbalanced. It made no sense whatsoever that he’d decided she had to die simply because she’d refused to do as he asked. Who does that? But if it came down to staying alive, or being at the mercy of Paul, any of his henchmen, or the pirates, she’d choose life. And if that meant using one of her cooking knives to buy her some time, so be it.

  Elodie didn’t have a good way of transporting the knife, no holster of any kind, but she quickly realized if she chose one of the more slender blades, it would fit through the belt loop of her pants and the hilt would keep it from falling to the ground. It wasn’t ideal; if she fell, she could seriously hurt herself. But she definitely didn’t want to be unarmed.

  Walking slowly, Elodie went to the crew pantry and saw that it had been ransacked. Food had been pulled out of the cabinets and was spilled all over the floor and counter. She had no idea if the pirates had been looking for valuables or for something to eat. It was ridiculous, the idea that there’d be anything worth a substantial amount of money in the pantries. This was a kitchen, not a secret hiding place for a safe or something.

  Feeling disgusted at their stupidity, Elodie went through the crew mess to the door at the end of the room and opened it an inch. After hearing nothing out of the ordinary, she peered out into the hallway. She had no idea what she was looking for. Pirates? Some of the other guys who worked on the ship? The captain?

  Suddenly, she felt completely alone. It was silly, as she knew there were many other people onboard. She’d never really liked the game hide-and-go-seek, always afraid the “seeker” would get bored with the game and quit. Leaving her in her hiding spot, waiting in vain to be found. For a moment, she thought about going down to the engine room and finding some of the other guys. Maybe Ari or Troy. They’d help keep her hidden. The thought was tempting.

  Curiosity got the better of her, and Elodie pulled the radio out of her pocket. She hadn’t heard from Scott or anyone else from the US ship since they’d answered her desperate distress call. Making sure the volume was turned down extremely low, she changed the channel to ten and put the radio up to her ear.

  She needed to know what was happening on the bridge. Maybe Walter and the other officers had managed to subdue the pirates and she was slinking around for no reason.

  But instead, what she heard made her blood run cold.

  “You’re going to run us aground,” Walter said, the agitation easy to hear in his tone, even through the radio. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

  “I a fisherman. I know boats,” one of the pirates claimed.

  “Yeah, but a ship this size is very different from the skiffs you’ve operated.”

  “I in charge!” the man yelled, scaring the shit out of Elodie.

  There was the sound of scuffling—and then the unmistakable sound of a semi-automatic rifle being fired.

  Men shouted, someone screamed, more gunfire.

  Elodie stood stock still and prayed for the officers on the bridge.

  Then the pirates began yelling in their own language. It sounded as if they were arguing with each other.

  Suddenly, the lights blinked out without warning.

  Elodie was plunged into pitch darkness. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. The only light in the room was coming from the blinking red dot on the radio in her hand.

  There was more swearing from the men on the bridge.

  “What happen to lights?” one of the pirates asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Elodie heard Bo, one of the officers, say in a shaky voice.

  “You fix!” he ordered.

  “I can’t!” Bo exclaimed. “First, you just killed Danny, he was the expert on the gauges and shit up here. He knew what every single one meant and when something was wrong with them. Second, everything is controlled from the engine room!”

  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 ki
lled?

  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.

  “What?”

  “The watertight doors. Are we sinking? Or was that the guys downstairs?” she asked.

  “You aren’t sinking,” Scott told her.

  Elodie let out a breath of relief. “Okay.”

  “But things are gonna get dicey when they attempt to navigate that strait.”

  “Are you still coming?” she couldn’t help but ask.

  “Yes. But it’s too dangerous to do so in the daylight.”

  “Shit!” Elodie said.

  “You’re going to be all right,” Scott told her.

  She appreciated him trying to comfort her, but she didn’t feel very reassured right about now. “The engineers cut off the lights too. So it’s really dark in here.”

  “We’ll handle it.”

  “Okay. Scott?”

  “Yeah, Rachel?”

  Damn. She’d forgotten again that everyone thought Rachel was her name. “If something happens to me…there’s no one to contact. Just give me a burial at sea and be done with it. Okay?” She wasn’t sure how well her fake identification would hold up…and she didn’t have a family to contact anyway.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Scott told her firmly.

  “But still—” she started.

  “I need you to think positive. The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is give up.”

  “I’m not giving up,” she told him. “Right now, I’m mad. Pissed that Walter and the others were killed unnecessarily. Many of those guys had wives and kids. This sucks.”

  “It does,” Scott agreed.

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?” Scott asked.

  Elodie knew she should get off the radio. She was risking her life by continuing to talk to him. Besides, he probably had other things he could be doing…like planning how he was going to get onto this ship and kill the bad guys. But she couldn’t bring herself to break the connection. Scott was literally a voice in the darkness, and he made her feel not quite so alone. “Have a wife and kids,” she said.

  “No to either.”

  “That’s good, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Hang in there, Rachel. You’re doing a good job.”

  “I hid the knives,” she blurted.

  “What?”

  “I thought about breaking a bunch of shit and creating obstacles here in the galley, but then I figured they’d know someone was here and would turn everything upside down looking for me. So I decided it was better to keep everything as it was the last time they were here. Maybe then they wouldn’t stay very long and wouldn’t try as hard to search for anyone. But I didn’t want them to get any more weapons, so I hid all the knives.”

  “Smart.”

  Elodie wasn’t sure about that. “I kept one though. It fits through the belt loop on my pants.”

  “Be careful. You can’t win a gunfight with a knife,” Scott told her.

  Amazingly, Elodie chuckled. “Is that some ancient saying or something?”


  “No, common sense,” he answered.

  Elodie could hear the humor in his tone. And for just a second, she felt…normal. As if she and Scott were two people who’d met online or something and were getting to know each other. But then his next words snapped her back to reality.

  “Do what you need to do to stay hidden,” Scott told her. “Do not let them find you, Rachel. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “This is gonna be over soon.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I know so.”

  “I’d always heard you guys were cocky, but I have to say, it’s kind of refreshing right about now.”

  “It’s not being cocky if it’s true.” Then his voice lowered. “I’m sorry about your friends.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll talk to you soon—and see you soon, as well. Just try not to shank me or anyone on my team, would ya?”

  Amazingly, Elodie chuckled. “I’ll try.”

  “Mustang out.”

  Elodie put the radio back in her pocket and listened for any sign of the pirates coming down into her area. When she heard only that same eerie nothingness of the engines silenced, she headed back into the hallway with the storage rooms. She had the perfect hiding place. She’d thought of it a few weeks ago but had forgotten it until now.

  She went into the smallest of the pantries and took a deep breath before reaching a hand toward the shelving units. She carefully climbed up to the top shelf, a good eight feet off the floor and at least three feet deep. She moved boxes from the back to the front and shimmied herself behind them. It was a good defensive position if she was spotted, although the wooden shelves wouldn’t stop a bullet. But hopefully the pirates would never know she was there, hiding in the dark, even if they searched the room.

  Putting her head down on her hands, Elodie closed her eyes and prayed for the day to pass quickly. The sooner night fell, the better, because that meant help would arrive.

  Chapter Three