Merciless Charity: A Charity Styles Novel (Caribbean Thriller Series Book 1) (10 page)

As the day wore on, Charity began to turn more and more westerly, following the curve of the Florida Keys, staying between the chain of islands and the great Gulf Stream to the south. The Stream flowed east though the Florida Straits, then north up the Atlantic Seaboard. Sailing in its current would cut her speed drastically.

At noon, she set the autopilot and engaged the computer’s winch controls, allowing the boat to find its most optimal course and sail arrangement. The winches whined, moving the sails in and out, until the computer was satisfied.

Charity checked the knot meter and saw that the boat’s speed hadn’t changed all that much, over what she had done manually. This gave her a small sense of satisfaction. It’d been some time since she’d sailed a boat of this size. For the last few years, she’d been keeping her skills sharp, sailing a much smaller twenty-four-foot San Juan sloop.

Checking the radar once again and seeing nothing ahead, she went down to the galley to make lunch. She quickly threw together a sandwich and took the ripest mango from one of the nets, cutting it into thin slices before returning to the cockpit.

This is going to be my life for the next few days
, she thought, sitting back down at the helm and placing her plate beside her. All day and all night at the helm, with few breaks, sleeping right here for an hour or two while letting the computer sail the
Dancer
.

The more westerly her course became, following the sweep of the Keys, the broader the reach of the sails. Though the wind was holding at fifteen knots, by midafternoon, her forward speed had dropped to just ten knots, running before the wind.

Late afternoon found her just off Key West. Beginning to doubt her ability to sail straight on through the night, catnapping at the helm, for five days, she decided to take advantage of the last anchorage before crossing the southern part of the Gulf of Mexico, the Dry Tortugas. In November, there probably wouldn’t be anyone else at the old fort sixty miles west of Key West. If there was, she’d anchor outside the harbor on the lee side of the Fort Jefferson ruins.

Approaching the old fort just after ten o’clock, with the moon directly overhead and slightly astern, she couldn’t see any boats in the anchorage. Relieved, she started the engine and furled the sails. Thirty minutes later, after circling around to the north approach,
Wind Dancer
motored sedately into Bird Key Harbor. Charity chose this spot over the more popular anchorage on the east side of the fort, just in case another boat arrived during the night.

After the anchor dropped with a splash and Charity killed the engine, the silence of the night was overwhelming. Only the slightest sound of the tiny ripples in the harbor tickling the hull could be heard.

“Yeah,” she said aloud, breaking the stillness of the night. “I’ll get a good night’s sleep and start fresh tomorrow.”

It wasn’t in Charity Styles’s nature to second-guess her decisions. But, throughout the day, the ocean seemed to get larger and larger and the boat smaller and smaller. She’d covered two hundred miles of ocean in nineteen hours.

Only eight hundred more to go
, she thought. Even at seven knots, she could cover that in five more days.

“What’s an extra day?” she said aloud, talking to herself again. A gull on Bird Key Bank answered her, its laughing cry punctuating the doubt she was feeling.

“Fuck you,” she shouted to the anonymous gull. “Bet you’ll never see the Mexican coast.”

Double-checking the anchor, Charity went below, closing and securing the hatch for the night. She’d eaten an hour earlier and wasn’t hungry, so she took a quick shower under the cold fresh water, just to get the salt off her skin. It was a luxury she probably couldn’t indulge in while underway.

After getting ready for bed, she changed her mind and decided to unwind a little on deck before going to sleep. She grabbed her hammock from a storage bin and a cold beer from the fridge, and went back up on deck. Securing one end of the hammock to the mast and the other end to an eye ring in the lower part of the boom, she tested it with her hands.

Satisfied, Charity stretched out in the hammock, the light breeze cool on her skin, causing goosebumps wherever it touched. The first long pull from the cold beer tasted good, so she took another, marveling at how many stars she could see. A meteor streaked across the western sky, behind the
Dancer
, and she made a little-girl’s wish on it.

No television program could match nature’s show
, she thought, before exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep.

T
he nightmares came while Charity slept out in the open. The dank dinginess of the cave where she’d been held captive in Afghanistan, the putrid smell of garbage and human waste.

Charity’s head shook from side to side as she slept. Behind her clenched eyes, the shadows of several men moved through the gloom around her, each man laughing and taking his turn with her body. The pain of rough entry and the sickly smell of the men grunting above her, as she was bent over and tied to a table, had nearly made her sick. She’d remained in that position for more than a day, as at least a dozen men had beaten raped, and sodomized her, over and over.

They had taken her twelve times that first hour. After bending her over and tying her to the table, they’d sliced her trousers across the back and down both legs with a razor-sharp knife, leaving deep cuts in her skin. The rest of her trousers had been literally ripped from her body in the men’s frenzied lust, leaving only the top portion and her belt.

As the men had used her lower body for their sadistic pleasure, they’d used her upper body and face for a punching bag, moving around the table and taking turns raping and beating her, without mercy. A coarsely braided rope had stung her back each time she’d tried to move. The man swinging it would roar with laughter when the thick rope had torn at her shirt and skin, leaving both in tatters.

In her mind, as she tossed and turned in the hammock, Charity saw the man’s face looming above her. He’d grabbed her by the hair and twisted her head around so he could spit in her battered and bleeding face. He was the leader of the group, and two days after her capture, he had been the one guarding her when the attack had come. He had been the only one in the cave with Charity when she’d managed to free herself in the confusion of the attack. He’d had his back to her, absorbed in the madness of battle outside the cave.

She’d somehow managed to find the knife the leader had used to slice her trousers off. It’d been tossed into the recesses of the cave, covered with sand, when she’d struggled against them each time they came for their daily rape sessions.

Charity had been tossed into the recesses of the cave as well, fed occasional scraps and given tepid water if she begged for it. Her captors found that particularly amusing. They’d all but forget about her, until their base animal urges needed release. She had found the knife on the morning of her third day in captivity.

Charity had quietly slipped up behind the Taliban leader, wearing only her boots, the remnants of her uniform top, ripped open in the back, and her belt, which held up a ragged portion of her uniform trousers like a loincloth. She’d stumbled at first, when getting up. She’d felt weak and feverish.

With her left hand, she’d grabbed the leader from behind, her hand over his mouth, then plunged the blade deep into his back, thrusting upward and twisting the knife with all her might. The knife was sharp and well made. The backward-curved bolster had kept her hand from slipping off the handle as the man’s blood spilled over the knife’s handle, leaving it slick in her clenched fist.

The man had dropped to his knees then, as Charity yanked the blade out. She’d then yanked his head back by the hair, dragging him down onto his back in the filth of the cave. Kneeling over him, still holding him by his hair, she’d bent low over his face, staring at him fiercely through one eye, the other swollen shut.

The malevolence and hatred she’d seen in his eyes was gone then. All she could see in his dark eyes was fear. They’d blinked rapidly, pink foam dribbling from the corner of his mouth. The man’s life was coming to an end quickly.

Charity hacked phlegm into her mouth and spat in his face before plunging the long blade upward into his chest. She’d pushed the knife up from below the rib cage and yanked it from side to side, shredding the man’s black heart. All the while, she’d leaned close to his face, only inches away. She’d watched him closely as he died. Watched as the fear left his eyes and they simply went blank, like two lumps of coal.

Charity’s eyes snapped open and she stared up into the predawn sky, blinking. The moon was near the western horizon, the light from it reflecting off the shimmering surface of the Gulf of Mexico, like a million diamonds on a carpet of black velvet.

She swung her legs out of the hammock and placed them on the cabin roof, solid and comforting. The psychologists had prescribed drugs, counseling, meditation, and dozens of other things to keep the dreams at bay.

During her rehab in Israel, she’d met an Israeli soldier who’d spent four months as a prisoner. He’d told her how to use her dreams. “Don’t fight them. Use them to fight,” he’d told her. Physically healed, she’d followed her new friend’s advice, participating in months of hand-to-hand fight training.

She’d learned the basics of the Israeli combat technique known as Krav Maga. Unlike the eastern martial arts, there was nothing fluid, graceful, or self-defensive about Krav Maga. She learned to incapacitate and kill viciously and efficiently, using knives, rocks, even her bare hands. Whatever was handy could be used as a weapon to overcome violence with greater and more focused violence.

Standing, Charity felt a sudden wave of resolve wash over her body. No longer uncertain, she was ready to move on with a single-minded tenacity. The dreams fueled her for the fight.

Changing into sailing clothes in the salon, she started the engine before sitting down to check her email. There was only one message. Her target was still in place, encamped with more than a dozen other terrorists. They were still training in the crater of the extinct volcano, with their camp somewhere on the densely forested southern slope. They hadn’t moved in two days, but she would need to hurry. The information had been gleaned by a satellite circling high in space, looking down with its powerful camera arrays.

Checking the weather for the southern Gulf, between the Tortugas and the Yucatan, she was assured of good strong winds and a light following sea.

The port city of Progresso, on the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula, lay only thirty miles off the direct course to Alvarado. From her current location, a course change of only a couple degrees would allow her to clear customs there. It would be a four-hundred-and-thirty-nautical-mile trip to reach it, then another three hundred and eighty miles to Alvarado. But getting her visa stamped far from where she would kill someone seemed like a good idea.

Updating her course plotter, with Progresso as a waypoint, Charity figured that if the
Dancer
could average seven knots, she’d arrive in the Yucatan seaport before dusk in a little over two days. She could decide as she neared the Yucatan whether to clear customs there and lay over for another night, or press on to her objective in Alvarado.

The low whine of the electric windlass as it hauled up the anchor line was the only sound in the harbor, save for the quiet burble of the diesel engine’s exhaust. Both were drowned out when the first part of the twenty-foot anchor chain clattered over the pulley. Charity shifted to neutral until the anchor seated itself, to keep it from swinging into the hull. She then put the transmission back into gear, and
Wind Dancer
moved slowly through the harbor toward open water.

The rattling anchor chain must have awakened the gulls, and they took to flight from their perches on the nearby mangroves. Wheeling and crying angrily at the intrusion on their slumber, the birds punctuated the silence of the predawn hour with a cacophony of noise. It reminded Charity of the fake laugh track used in old sitcoms.

Clear of the markers, Charity turned south and raised the sails to the steady easterly breeze. They nagged and grabbed at the breeze as they unfurled, slowly heeling the
Dancer
to starboard a little at a time. Shutting the engine off, Charity made a slow, sweeping turn to the southwest, allowing the computer to control the reach of the sails. Pointing the bow toward the setting moon, the computer reached out with the boom and foresails to capture as much wind as possible.