He stayed there for a few moments. When he could hold on no longer, he pulled his body onto the platform and crawled on his hands and knees up the steps until he was at the opening in the deck rail. He leaped onto the deck in a clumsy defensive stance and was glad to see that no one was waiting in ambush.

Austin waved at Zavala, who was running a parallel course to the containership. Zavala waved back.

The captain’s frantic voice crackled in the walkie-talkie. “You okay, Kurt?”

Austin felt like newly ground hamburger, but he said, “Finest kind, Cap. I’m on the ship. How long do I have?”

“You’re about five miles from the rig. You’ll have to allow time for the ship’s momentum to stop or turn.”

Austin sprinted for the sterncastle, but a terrible sound stopped him in his tracks. Coming from a space between container stacks was a woman’s scream, and there was no mistaking the terror in her voice.

NUMA 7 - The Navigator

Chapter 12

CARINA HAD REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS only minutes before Austin had climbed aboard the ship. Her return to the land of the living had some drawbacks. Her head throbbed with pain. Her vision was squirrelly. Waves of nausea sloshed around in her stomach.

The ache and discomfort kept her from sliding back into oblivion, and she became aware that she was still in the container, her body lodged between packing crates. Her arms were bound tightly behind her back. In their haste, the hijackers had left her legs untied.

Combining sheer force of will with a lean physique strengthened from hours of working out at the UNESCO gym, Carina rolled onto her belly. Using her tight abdominal muscles to the max, she leveraged her body into a kneeling position. She stood on wobbly legs and waited until the dizziness passed. Then she backed up to a packing crate and rubbed the duct tape binding her wrists against the corner.

Splinters stabbed at her skin, but she ignored the pain. After a few minutes of self-inflicted torture, she slipped one hand free. She was prying the tape off her wrists when a figure appeared in the opening the hijackers had cut into the container.

Carina recognized the man’s face. She didn’t know his name, only that he was one of the Filipino crewmen she had seen working around the ship.

“Am I glad to see you,” she said with a sigh of relief.

“I am very glad to see you, senorita,” the man said with a wolfish gleam in his eye.

Carina’s feminine antennae picked up the suggestion of danger in his voice. She glanced past the crewman’s shoulder. “Are the hijackers gone?”

“No,” he said with a grin. “We are still aboard.”

We.

Carina tried to step past him. The Filipino shifted position to block her way.