The Catch: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

He busied himself with his AK-47, which was what all of Leo’s team used because parts and ammunition were so easy to find in this part of the world and the telltale staccato blended in with the enemy’s.
    Courtesy of Leo, she’d be keeping watch unarmed, just a warm body to fill his obligations. Victor handed her a radio and an earpiece, then nodded to his ballistic helmet. “You can use if you want,” he said. “We trade when we trade shifts.”
    “You don’t want me dead like Leo does?” she said.
    He chortled and, noticing her interest in his weapon, said, “You use this before?”
    “Something like it,” Munroe said, and this time he laughed as ifshe’d let him in on a private joke. He wagged his finger again, as was his way. “You go on the ships, you use the guns.” He ran a palm over his weapon, but paused and shook his head. “You make up stories.”
    She smiled and shrugged. In all, she’d probably spent more time on the ocean than he had, mostly in cigarette boats and in gutted and refitted fishing trawlers that had hauled the smaller boats longer stretches, up coastline in the Bight of Biafra, all part of the gunrunning operation she’d abandoned when she was seventeen. On ships she’d laughed, and loved, and killed, and on a ship she’d fled one life for another. Now here she was, more than ten years later, another circle completed.
    Victor put the weapon in her hands, pointed out its working parts, and she listened, allowing him to teach her what he felt she should know, and when he was satisfied that she’d been properly schooled, he took the rifle away and returned to his own work.
    The ship shuddered beneath their feet, indicating that the lines had been cast off and the voyage was about to begin, and Munroe left the berth for the passageway and the main deck, for Leo who had no idea of the sweet talk and magic that had been involved in guaranteeing the tug and the pilot would be available, arrangements that he’d never had to make before, would probably never make again, a task that shouldn’t have fallen on her shoulders but had, due to his hiding their boarding from the agent.

CHAPTER 4
    Munroe stood on the open deck of the
Favorita
, night-vision binoculars dangling uselessly from her wrist, staring out over the water and the pinpricks of light that dotted the vast blanket of darkness while the ship rolled a gentle back and forth in its forward churn through the ocean swells.
    They traveled at about twelve or thirteen knots—fourteen or fifteen miles an hour in land-based language—a slow and easy target in high-risk-area terminology. Leo had put her in this spot an hour ago with the instruction to keep watch, and knowing it would frustrate him, she’d stood exactly here and had done nothing more. The ship and the people on it weren’t her responsibility; she couldn’t care enough to pretend that they were.
    Another two hours and dawn would come, and if she had it her way, with the passage of time he’d become more irritated with her ineptitude until eventually he’d give up on her and wish he’d left her in Djibouti.
    Munroe glanced aft and caught the movement of his silhouette on the bridge port wing, some fifty feet above the main deck, where he patrolled, war-gamed up in a combat vest and helmet, cradling his automatic weapon: a contrast to the flashlight and whistle that he’dgiven her, both of which she’d tucked into pockets in the tactical vest because she had no intention of using them.
    He’d laughed when he’d first seen the vest, as if she were a child playing dress-up. Had asked where she’d gotten it, wanted to know what was in her pockets. When she wouldn’t answer, he walked away in disgust and she watched him go, trying hard to see what kept Amber Marie attached to him. Smart and independent, Amber humored his Napoleon complex and committed herself to a lifestyle she hated, for a man more often away than home. Whatever Leo gave, whatever Munroe