One Chef!

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

“You open the door now!” Kate spoke harshly and drilled the barrel of the massive revolver into their jailor’s ear. She knelt in front of the cargo container’s inspection hatch.

He nodded fiercely, at least she assumed that’s what caused the gun to move up and down. Most of the small opening was taken by his arm and shoulder which was making communication difficult on top of his marginal English. She considered telling him to bathe more often as well, but kept her thoughts about his stale reek to herself even though it was overpowering the lingering cordite.

She released him slowly, pulling the gun back into the container so that only the tip of the barrel protruded. She shifted both hands to the weapon so that he wouldn’t be able to tear it from her grasp; he’d eat a bullet if he tried.

The man could be in no doubt that his life depended upon his obeying.

As their jailor moved away, she ducked down to look out the inspection hatch, cautiously in case he was planning to land a punch and recover his weapon through the small opening.

She was facing another stack of containers just five feet away, enough space to open the container doors in an emergency, but no more. The light, now that her eyes had adapted, was actually quite dim. They were deep in a steel canyon of stacked containers facing one another.

Apparently, bravery was nowhere in the jailor’s job description. He actually moved to comply with her order under the threat of the massive weapon. He didn’t even think to slam the inspection hatch closed, not that she would have let him.

It was all stevedore thinking.

No Special Ops-trained soldier would have missed such an opportunity.

She heard the metallic clank of one of the handle’s safeties. Standard Conex shipping containers had two doors on one end, like window shutters. Each door stood four feet wide, eight tall, and was stout enough to survive the impact of shifting internal cargo in rough seas. On the outside of each door were two locking bars that pinned the door in place. Their handles had to be freed from a small keeper latch, then swung outward. Two releases, two raised and turned handles, and the left door would be open. That’s all she needed.

Altering her position to keep both the gun and her gaze on the man, he appeared to be reaching for the door handles. It was awkward to follow him as the small inspection door was low enough that it meant she was lying on what she assumed was the bag lunch and had to knock the piss pot out of the way with her head. Thankfully, it was still dry and empty.

The jailor’s problem was that it really took two hands to unlatch a door and even that was awkward when the container wasn’t resting on the ground in front of you. A quick peek out the tiny hatch revealed they were high up in the cliff of stacked containers and he would need one of his hands to hold on.

After an inordinate amount of thumping sounds, probably multiplied by his scraped up and burned arm on one side and wrenched fingers on the other—neither of which Kate had not the least sympathy for—he managed to release one of the handles.

But the handle had also been his support and now it swung free. With a brief cry, he lost his grip and fell. His head—probably Korean from the brief glimpse she had of his terrified features—banged hard against one of the containers on the opposite side of the narrow steel canyon.

After that, he fell silently.