“You know nothing of my plans,” said Klea. “And at least I intend to get us all out of here together.”
“This shit-box has been shot to pieces. Look at this!” said Jonah, waving his hand past a particularly ugly streak of stitched-up bullet holes in the fiberglass upper works.
“I fixed it,” she spat back.
“Let’s see if you can follow my train of thought,” he said, hissing out every word as he holstered the pistol into his dive suit, took off his goggles and dropped them to the deck. “This ship, fast as she may be, was captured by pirates. Therefore, this ship is not fast enough to outrun pirates.”
“She doesn’t run,” said Klea. “She flies. Follow me.”
Klea lead Jonah into the engine room at the extreme rear of the ship, accessible below the main hatchway. The amount of damage was shocking, even to an experienced salvage diver like Jonah. Thick black marks streaked the interior walls, evidence of a vicious fire. Exposed wires dripped melted silicon insulation. Crudely patched bullet holes polka-dotted most of the compartment. The pirates had directed most of their fire at the engine room in order to disable the ship and capture it intact.
“She was scrap when I started,” said Klea. “Even the biodiesel tank was shot up and mixed with seawater. Our captors kept it all around anyway. They don’t really throw anything away here. They mostly wait for it to fall apart or sink on its own.”
Jonah looked closer at the bullet-scarred metal, his eyes straining under the dim solar lighting. Something was wrong about this damage…
Ah, clever girl.
The scarred-over engine compartment was all for show, an illusion. The massive twin biodiesel engine blocks certainly looked shot to pieces — but when Jonah ran a finger over a particularly nasty hole in the intercooler, he felt a perfectly welded patch. The “leak” was painted on. Same for the valve guides, cylinder liner, and the oil pump. The damage had been long since repaired, as awful as it’d look to the untrained eye. She’d done a similar job to the battery bank, repairing the ones that weren’t too badly damaged and bypassing the ones that were. Maybe the Horizon could still fly after all.
“Seawater in the fuel lines still is a problem,” said Jonah, not yet ready to fully acquiesce to her suicidal plan.
“Well, duh,” said Klea. “That’s why I distilled it. It’s now completely pure. Probably better than when we first bought it. They know I work on the ship once in a while, but I’ve been charging the batteries off of the excess juice from one of the shore generators. Reprogrammed the arrays to work more efficiently, and I managed to boost their capacity by twenty percent.”
“I’m still waiting to be impressed,” said Jonah, crossing his arms. She had his attention, but they were still a long way from an effective escape plan.
“I re-engineered the engine to run diesel and electric simultaneously,” she continued. “It will give us a significant extra boost of power before the pirates can completely mobilize, easily pushing her past thirty knots.”
“Bullshit,” said Jonah. “I saw the propellers when I swam in. They’re built for efficiency, not speed. How are you going to deal with the supercavitation issue? Those props spin fast enough, they’re just going to chop the water into foam and leave you stranded.”
“This is a hybrid,” explained Klea with no small measure of irritation.
“So?”
“So I programmed the engines to pulse.”
Jonah stood back for a minute to consider this. He’d read about this technology in a journal a lifetime ago. How could one engineer, a prisoner on her own ship no less, duplicate it with zero resources in Somalia?
Jonah nodded. “That’s some next-level shit,” he said. “I mean, we’re dead the moment we approach those two guard towers at the mouth of the bay, but I’m genuinely impressed. How much range have you sacrificed?”
“We’ll have enough electricity and fuel to get us to Oman.”
Jonah did the math in his head. Oman was optimistic, even foolhardy. The plan was reckless, overly complicated, and relied entirely on a series of untested assumptions.
“I’m more worried about getting out of this harbor. But if we do, Mombasa is probably a better choice.”
“Mombasa then.”
“Any weapons to speak of?”
“You’ll like this, frogman,” said Klea. Reaching up, she grimaced and slid open an aluminum wall panel. The panel resonated with a scraping sound as light spilled upon her creations.
This is some serious Mad Max shit, thought Jonah. The young woman had spent just as much time creating weapons as she’d spent fixing the engine compartment and patching the hull. His eyes scanned over several singleshot harpoon guns made with welded metal, thick bands of surgical tubing and sharpened steel rebar shafts for bolts. Nasty stuff, the steel bars were usually used to reinforce concrete. Probably not as useful or accurate as his 9mm, but they’d certainly make a statement.
She’d also assembled a set of floating mines. Klea had spent the most time on these, bringing the total to more than ten devices, mostly created from steel bottles of propane and other cooking fuels. Jonah could assume that once thrown, they’d explode when hit by one of the low, open-topped lightweight fiberglass hulls with powerful engines that were favored by pirates.
Next were two small handmade radio transmitters. Maybe to set off previously hidden explosives? All he knew is that they made him nervous; open-frequency detonators were finicky. His mind flashed back to an old news story about a terrorist who exploded himself in his apartment after getting a spam text over the mobile phone he’d rigged to his bomb.
Discount dick-enlargement pills available now, he thought. Boom.
“What’s this for?” asked Jonah, pointing to a particularly mysterious duel-ended crossbow weapon. Rather than firing one bolt forward, it simultaneously fired one metal arrow to the right and one to the left at ninety-degree angles. The two bolts were linked by some type of ultra-lightweight, high-tensile fiber wire.
“Prop fouler,” said Klea. “We use that at the mouth of the harbor, cut off the exit point. It’s neutrally buoyant, almost invisible when in the water. When they run over it, the high-strength line will get wound up into their propellers. At the very least, it’ll stop them dead in the water and force them to spend hours cutting it out of the propeller shaft. At best, they’ll burn out engines trying to chop their way through it.”
“I’m game,” said Jonah, resigning himself. “Let’s do this.”
It suddenly occurred to him that she didn’t even ask his name. This fact made him deeply concerned as to whether or not her plan included his survival.
“Fatima should be done with the mooring lines,” said Klea as she and Jonah exited the engine room.
Jonah and Klea froze, hearing the signs of a struggle, two sets of footsteps banging on the carbon fiber deck of the fantail, a loud voice yelling. Drawing his pistol, Jonah pushed Klea behind him, instinctually protecting her.
Fatima stood on the fantail, still clutching the knife with white knuckles while a pirate pointed an ancient AK-47 rifle at her head.
The pirate screamed at her in a language Jonah could not understand. All around them, the sleepy compound began to rouse. Lights flicked on in rusting corrugated tin shacks as humming generators struggled to keep up with the increased power load.
Drop the knife, thought Jonah, wishing, hoping, willing Fatima to get smart and just drop the knife.
The pirate screamed again, jabbing the rifle towards her aggressively.
Jonah wanted the rifle.
The diver stepped out of the hatchway onto the fantail, pistol already raised to eye level, drawing a bead on the pirate. He waited just long enough for the pirate to see him, to turn. But it was too late, and Jonah brought the butt of the pistol down on the pirate’s forehead.