of the men jumped from the copter onto the container stack, gun in hand.
I ran. Metal hit metal—a bullet pinging against the container. I had to get off the stack—the helicopter roared above me, circling, keeping me in sight as the gunman narrowed the gap between us.
I was caught between man and machine, boxed, now three stories above the deck, and I could see another thin crevasse between shoved-together stacks of multicolored containers.
I wriggled inside the gap. I had maybe thirty seconds to navigate down thirty feet to the deck before the gunman caught up to the canyon. I’d be a dead target if I wasn’t out and clear by the time he reached it. He could simply fire a bullet into the top of my head.
I bounced down, my feet catching the edges of the containers, just enough to break the descent, then dropping again. Find the line, I told myself. It was like a parkour run inside a pipeline; my shoulders bounced hard against the steel.
Twenty feet. I hit a skid, lost my balance. I slammed into the metal side, caught the edge of a container with my hands. I could hear the helicopter drumming above me like a hammer.
I focused and let go and managed to drop to the deck in a controlled roll. I spilled free from the container stack, out of the shadows, into the weak, ocean-guttered sunlight. Fifty feet ahead of me was a railing—and beyond that the uncaring gray of the sea.
I ran, staying close to the edge of the containers. I needed to get belowdecks. On a ship full of warm bodies and heating pumps and heavy engines, they’d have to do their thermal scans by hand. And hundreds more containers should be below. I could become the needle in the haystack for a while. I was going to make them work to find me, because I was sick of being stymied, of being pushed away from finding Lucy and my son.
I crashed into a crewman, a young Filipino who cried out in Tagalog for help. I showed him the gun and he froze. I pushed him away hard and ran through a doorway, started hammering down the steps.
Behind me I saw the gunman take a hard run, slide off a container, hit and roll with enough grace to hold his balance as he came off the front of the container stack.
I vanished into the depths of the ship. The crew was not likely armed; this ship wasn’t sailing past Somalia. I didn’t want to shoot an innocent person, and the sound would betray my location to the hunters. Best to be silent and vanish.
I ran down a long, narrow corridor, turning back and slowing to look for pursuit, and I slammed into a wall of a man as he bound out of a doorway. I staggered back and the man—heavyset, Asian—snarled and launched a flurry of blows at my face. He used Muay Thai: hard, sharp, brutal blows, a Thai fighting form designed to knock an opponent down and out with the smallest amount of effort. It hurts. A lot.
He landed two precise blows on my jaw and my throat before I could parry, and I fell to the ground.
Then he flicked open a switchblade. A switchblade? The eighties want their weapon back. “They pay for you,” he hissed. He sliced the air between us, smiled his hard awful smile. “You get up, slow, and—”
“That’s cheating,” I said. I thought we were sticking to fists, but whatever. I pulled my gun free and shot the knife out of his hand. At least I would play fair. He shrieked; the broken knife clattered along the deck. I glanced behind me, saw the gunman launching himself into the hallway behind us, so I cheated some more and I closed arms around the crying, bleeding sailor and made him my shield. The gunman held fire. Hurray for morals. I yanked the sobbing sailor back along the hall. We finally hit a door; it opened into the main container hold.
“Let him go, Mr. Capra, we want to talk,” the gunman called.
Mister? So polite. I acted like I hadn’t heard. I hurried the sailor down toward the hold floor. He didn’t struggle, moaning as he clutched his hurt hand. But two can’t move as fast as one, and as we reached the hold floor, I aimed at the lights above us. I needed the blanket of darkness. The gunman appeared at the steps and aimed. He