Thieves of the Black Sea. Joe O'Neill
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Название: Thieves of the Black Sea
Автор: Joe O'Neill
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Учебная литература
Серия: Red Hand Adventures
isbn: 9780990546986
isbn:
Tariq couldn’t help but feel as if he were in a dream. He recalled the voice of Melbourne Jack in his head, telling him to find a panther in Constantinople—and now a sea captain was telling him that’s exactly where they were headed.
He took another drink of water and ate some more orange slices.
Inez couldn’t move or talk. Her hands had been tied behind her back and her feet were bound together in front of her. A dirty cloth had been stuffed into her mouth.
Her head felt like a sack of cement.
Two burly and dour German men stood in front of her smoking cigarettes, studying a map, and occasionally giving her an angry glare.
Inez’s long red hair was caked with blood and dirt. Just fifteen years old, she’d recently gone through a growth spurt, and her gangly legs and arms ached as the rope dug into her skin. Her brown eyes, wide with terror, studied the men as they glanced at her. She breathed heavily, almost hyperventilating. For the first time in her life, she felt helpless.
Once, she had gone rabbit hunting with her father and they had laid a steel trap with turnips and carrots. Half a day went by, and when they returned, they found a hare in the trap, the steel teeth gripping its left leg. The terrified hare had tried to scramble and break free from the trap’s teeth, but the steel pressed deep into its skin and wouldn’t release. The animal screamed in fright as they edged closer to it.
Inez remembered what it felt like to grab the hare by the scruff of its neck, and how it looked at her with such fear. As if it knew it was headed for certain death.
Inez felt like that hare—trapped and horrified, and completely at the mercy of her captors.
The last thing she remembered, before waking up with her hands and feet bound, was spying on these same men from up on a hilltop. Then everything had gone black. One of the men must have snuck up behind her and knocked her unconscious.
The men clearly weren’t happy, as they kept arguing in German, scratching their heads, and pointing at Inez, until finally they put the map away. Two of the men picked her up—one at her armpits and the other at her feet—and threw her into the bed of a truck that was covered with a cloth canopy made from heavy cotton and held up by steel girders. She landed hard on the steel grate and it stung her back sharply. The truck reeked of oil and gasoline and the bed was a mess of rust and mud.
Looking up, Inez saw one of the men stare intently at her with such evil that she shuddered. He screamed something at her in German and waved his hands, motioning for her to move to the back of the bed. Complying, she scooted until her back felt the hard, cold steel.
Satisfied, he flicked his cigarette at her.
The truck’s engine roared to life and soon rumbled along the dirt road. A similar truck tailgated so closely behind, Inez could see the growth of the driver’s beard.
The two trucks drove away from the farmhouse and away from her school and the safety of her home and friends.
Inez had never felt so alone.
Rain slapped down on the tent roof like the pitter-patter of thousands of pairs of little feet.
The night was especially dark, as the sky was filled with thick, gray clouds. Strands of water fell from the sky to the dirt below, forming huge mud puddles on the battlefield, which was now a temporary encampment. The blood of thousands of fallen warriors created red streams that seeped into the earth.
Zijuan slept fitfully in her tent when the dreams came to her.
A boy swimming with a shark.
A faraway city.
An old book of some importance.
A black panther.
A sea captain with a beard.
Then the images changed, and she saw Melbourne Jack sitting above them, almost floating, smiling in an angelic haze.
She tossed in her sleep as more images filled her mind.
A city, gray with smoke, appeared, its buildings bombed and smashed, as if a tornado had ripped them apart. Soldiers fought and butchered one another. In the background, some kind of shadow watched over it all. Images of Fez, Aseem, and Tariq came into view. A red handprint dissolved like sand through an hourglass.
The sound of hundreds of thousands of people crying out shattered everything.
The images were so prolific and horrifying that she awoke with a start and sat up in her bed, completely confused by her surroundings. Her pulse raced and she felt her heart beating as if she’d just run a marathon. Beads of sweat dripped down the side of her face and her hair stuck to her neck.
Unable to shake the nightmare, Zijuan walked over to a basin and splashed cold water on her face.
She lit a lantern and laid a small rug down on a dry part of the dirt floor so that she was able to sit down cross-legged. She then removed a scroll and fifty sticks of equal length from a small chest. Breathing deeply, she began to throw the sticks across her tent. After making a series of throws, she interpreted the sticks’ positioning.
She was performing a variation of I Ching—an ancient form of fortune telling.
With each throw, she felt herself grow tense, each outcome more ominous than the previous one.
“Tariq…,” she muttered with her last throw.
She stared at the sticks in disbelief. Never had the readings been so foreboding, and never had she felt such fear. She was about to pick up the sticks when a voice came from outside her tent.
“Zijuan, are you awake? May we enter?” Sanaa asked.
“Yes, please come in,” she answered.
Malik and Sanaa entered the tent.
“Sit down,” Zijuan instructed.
Malik and Sanaa sat down on the rug. Outside, the rain started to pour down harder and Zijuan could hear thunder in the distance. The smell of smoke and charred flesh lingered in the tent. The smell had been thick in the afternoon, when they’d cremated hundreds of dead soldiers before the flesh could rot. The welcome rain had begun to wash the smell away.
Together in that small tent sat the three deadliest, and most respected, assassins in all of Morocco, and perhaps all of Arabia and Africa.
“We’re having nightmares.”
“Both of you?”
“Yes,” they replied at the exact same time.
“Tell me about them.”
“We see Tariq, Fez, and Aseem, but they are in a foreign city with some kind of captain. A large black cat. Then we see strange СКАЧАТЬ