Maybe, Jenna thought, but she knew that if she’d been in his seat, she would have taken “evasive action,” too.
Nicci nudged her. “That tanker looks like it’s just sitting there. I don’t think it’s moving at all.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Jenna asked. “Aren’t they more stable when they’re in motion?”
“Only in bad weather,” Alicia chimed in, then unsnapped her safety belt and stretched out like a diva on the couch across from Jenna and Nicci. Long dark slacks, long dark hair, and dark wraparound glasses. “The forecast is for calm seas,” she added.
Jenna bristled inwardly; forecasting was her specialty. “Any more demands from the hijackers?”
“It’s been pretty quiet,” Nicci answered. “Apparently, there are just two of them on board, plus the captain and Birk. All twenty-four crewmembers were killed and tossed overboard.”
“One of the jihadists has an AK-47 and the RPG that ‘almost killed us,’” Alicia said, as if she were quoting Jenna. But I never said that, the meteorologist wanted to protest. “The other one’s decked out in a suicide vest,” Alicia added. “They came to play.” The news producer raised an eyebrow. Jenna had always wished that she could do that. Hers rose together or not at all.
“And they’ve got Birk,” Nicci said.
“I hope he dies,” Alicia said blandly, which made her sound icier than ever. Even Jenna, no fan of Rick Birk, thought wishing him dead was over the top: You don’t speak ill of the deceased or the soon-to-be-slaughtered. She must have frowned.
“What? That bothers you?” Alicia challenged her. “That asshole once groped me and then threw up on me.”
“That would put a damper on things,” Chris laughed. His producer, notably, did not.
“Christmas 2003,” Alicia said. “Party at Williamson’s penthouse.” Williamson was the president of the news division. “Then, when I went to try to clean up, the bastard barged in on me, wanting to know if I’d like to ‘make it all better’ by taking a bath—with him.” Alicia stared at Nicci. “He’s lucky I didn’t cut off his dick and mount it on my wall.”
“Big ouch,” Chris said.
“I doubt it.” Alicia let slip her first smile. It looked like daylight seeping through a cracked ceiling.
Jenna noticed that Nicci was staring at the other woman and suddenly realized that her producer’s adoring gaze was the cause of Alicia’s pleasure. Jenna looked from one to the other. Oh, no, not her, was all she could think.
But it made sense: Alicia had long legs, long hair, and brilliantly red lips. Nicci’s perfect lover. I should have seen it coming.
Jenna looked out the widow. The glare had lessened, and she spotted the tanker’s white bridge as easily as she’d seen the gray-blue burst of the rocket. Somewhere, hidden in the length of that enormous vessel, Rick Birk awaited rescue. Or death. And wherever he was, five hundred thousand tons of liquid iron oxide was stored below him.
* * *
Get over here, you worthless raghead.
Birk tried to draw Suicide Sam’s attention to his laminates by pointing his chin down at his chest. The beaded chain on which they hung was painfully reminiscent of a bright blue noose that he’d seen around the neck of a prominent dissident at a public hanging in Tehran. Bastards let the poor son of a bitch swing for half an hour.
The correspondent’s liver-spotted hands were bound behind him in plastic cuffs to a three-inch metal pipe that ran along the lower section of a wall in the engine room. He’d been marched there by Raggedy Ass himself. Birk had spent two horrendous hours trying to nap in a seated position, only to be awakened at excruciating intervals by a herniated disc in his lower back. He’d been putting off surgery for years, but at the moment he would have thrown himself on a gurney for the first flight to the body butchers, if only he could.
What he needed far more than surgeons—and what he appeared even less likely to get—was a drink. His mood was as foul and festering as a Superfund site.
Suicide Sam shook his head as if he, a fucking killer, was disgusted by one Rick Birk, one of television’s greatest chroniclers of human events of the past half century.
“TV, pee,” Birk muttered, thrusting his chin toward his chest for the thousandth time, finding the juxtaposition of words strangely easy on his ears. He hoped the prestige of television would buy him a bathroom break. Maybe even that drink, he found himself thinking once more, yet another delusionary