Instinct: A Chess Team Adventure - By Jeremy Robinson Page 0,6

aware of the most dreadful sensation. Silence.

She could see Daniel, who never wore his seat belt, crumpled on the ceiling in the front seat. And next to her, Ben dangled in his car seat.

With shaking hands she unbuckled herself and fell to the car’s ceiling. She fumbled to Ben and unclipped him. He fell into her arms. As a whimper escaped her mouth, she checked for a pulse. Nothing. She put her hand in front of his mouth and held her breath. She sighed with relief when she felt her baby’s breath on her finger.

The silence was shattered by shouts from above and an acrid smell that told her the same thing: “The car is on fire! Get out!”

She tried her door. It was jammed tight. Deformed by the impact. She tried the door on Ben’s side. It too was wedged closed. In fact, the whole roof of the car had crumpled down.

They were trapped.

And as smoke poured in through the heating vents, she realized they’d be suffocated or burned alive.

A loud explosion shook the back of the car and she screamed. But it was followed by a shout. “Take my hand, lady!” She looked back and found two young men. They’d smashed in the window with a large stone. Before she had time to think about how to get Ben out and then go back for Daniel, she was grabbed by the arm and yanked out of the car. She began screaming about Daniel, about how he was still in the car. As she was pulled over the rocks, which skinned her ankles, Ben began to cry. He was okay.

Her senses returned with the cry of her child and she demanded to be put down. Why were they treating her so roughly? Heat and odor brought her eyes back to the car. It was an inferno. Daniel was gone.

Her two rescuers pulled her and Ben over the rocks and into the ocean. When the car exploded they fell under the protective water. They were safe. But Daniel was dead. And no one would ever know what killed him.

The official ruling: fell asleep at the wheel. The cost of all that success. The news covered it for a night, focusing most of their attention on little Ben, now fatherless. Just another death to pad the nighttime headlines while folks waited for their reality TV.

THREE

Gulf of Aden—Somalia

A STARK WHITE motorboat bearing no national symbols, name, or markings of any kind rose up over a wave, catching air for a beat. The motor buzzed as it left the baby blue water before being muffled once more as the boat descended and the blades bit into the sea. The fifteen-foot craft leaped from wave to wave, dancing over the ocean as fast as the old engine could push it and its five occupants.

The five passengers were dressed in loose clothing and head wraps; only their eyes could be seen. Four sets of eyes were locked onto a single target—the Volgaeft, a Russian cargo ship. The only one of the five not looking at the cargo ship sat at the back, guiding the flat-hulled boat through the maze of five-foot swells. The seas were rough for such a small craft to handle, but as they closed in on the cargo vessel, none on board thought about the threat of capsizing; their thoughts were on the violence that would soon begin.

The Volgaeft was at full speed in a bid to outrun the band of pirates, and had no doubt issued a call for help, but the pirates knew they could catch the sluggish, heavily laden vessel. And, with some newly acquired technology, they would easily board it before help arrived. And help would arrive. After a short period of successful pirating that brought in an estimated thirty million dollars, the international community had cracked down. Warships from India, the European Union, the United States, and China patrolled the waters off Somalia, sometimes escorting ships from their various homelands, but always rushing to the aid of any ship in distress. And the Volgaeft wouldn’t have waited to put out a call.

The pirates’ sources put the nearest warship, a Chinese destroyer, roughly thirty minutes away. But with the Volgaeft now making a beeline for the destroyer and the destroyer for the Volgaeft, that half hour would be cut in half. And it had taken five minutes to pull up alongside the freighter.

Ten minutes left.

Typically, once a cargo vessel was boarded and the crew rounded up, there was