Power and Empire

Others from the skiff began to pour onto the boat. All of them were young, with the wispy facial hair of boys trying in vain to be men. But they all carried guns and wore hateful looks, both of which they aimed at Karla Downs. She rushed past the man in the blue T-shirt in an effort to get down below with Judy. If she was going to die — or worse — she didn’t want to do it alone. A sweating young man reached to grab her, but the man in the blue T-shirt pushed his hand away, shaking his head, and the boy let her go unmolested.

She had to leap over Kenneth’s body to get down the companionway. She would have fallen, had Judy not been there to catch her. The poor woman had to look at her husband’s lifeless eyes staring down at her from above — and still, she somehow kept her composure.

Karla gulped, trying to catch her breath.

“What…? I mean why…?” Her eyes were transfixed on the stern, where her husband of nearly thirty years had fallen dead into the sea.

Judy blinked at her friend, fighting back tears. “I am so, so sorry.”

“What do they want?”

The small brunette squared her shoulders and sighed. A tear rolled down her stricken face. “Ransom, I imagine,” she said.

• • •

Out on the deck a young Jemaah Islamiyah recruit stood to the side of the hatch, a battered AK-47 held to his chest. This was his first operation, and he chewed on chapped lips, a bundle of frayed nerves.

“What if they have another firearm down there?”

Mamat gave a slow shake of his head. Dusk was falling rapidly, but he welcomed the darkness. It would only make their job easier. “They would have shot by now.”

“Shall I bring the women back on deck?”

Mamat closed his eyes and listened, the dead man at his feet, his back to the cabin. “In time,” he said. “For now, they are doing exactly what we need them to do.”

Stooping slightly and craning his neck, he was just able to hear a shaky female voice below as she whispered on the cabin radio.

“Mayday! Mayday! This is sailing vessel Lucky Strike. We are under attack from pirates! I say again, we are under attack from pirates…”

The woman repeated her call for help. Her shattered voice grew more shrill with every word.

At length, the words Mamat had hoped for crackled over the radio in a barrage of static.

“Lucky Strike, this is United States Naval Vessel Rogue…”

27

Clark had a vague idea of what Magdalena Rojas looked like from Caruso’s description, but he’d never seen a photograph of the child. Some girl was dead at the bottom of this grave, and he suddenly needed to know if it was Magdalena. Belly down, he slid feet-first over the edge, bringing a small trickle of dirt sliding after him into the pit. Dropping to his knees, he used a flat rock the size of his hand to scoop away the loose dirt around the raised arm. It did not take him long to work his way down the arm to expose the pale gray flesh of a female shoulder. Her neck lay at an odd angle, encircled with a thin line of blood from some ligature that had been used to strangle her. Long purple bruises crisscrossed the portions of ashen skin exposed by the dirt. The dead did not bruise. This one had been beaten, and beaten badly, before she died.

Clark closed his eyes, remembering another girl, similarly murdered so long ago. Pam Madden’s death had come during a brutal rape — and, if Biery’s suspicions about Matarife’s snuff videos were true, this girl had suffered the same fate before she was dumped unceremoniously into a pit in the middle of a grain field.

Clark took a deep breath, bracing himself lest the memories overwhelm him, allowing the anger just enough of a foothold to focus his actions into a white-hot beam of fury. A lock of dirty-blond hair clung to the dead girl’s broken neck. Clark touched it to make sure it wasn’t a wig, then, out of pity, brushed away the loose soil and smoothed it into place. He blinked away a tear, then rolled onto his back, looking skyward, barely able to see the surrounding sorghum stalks from the bottom of the grave.

Knowing what he did about technology, he was sure some Keyhole satellite was up there, watching him, tough-as-nails John Clark, as he grew weepy beside a dead girl he’d never met. He shook it off and looked at the body again. He had never met Magdalena — and she certainly had no more value than the one lying dead in this shallow grave — but he found himself relieved to find out the body wasn’t hers. It was always possible that the Rojas girl was buried beneath this one, but Clark pushed that thought from his mind, chiding himself even as he did so for clinging to hope rather than cold, hard facts.