Silent Fire (Vector Book 3) Read online

  SILENT FIRE

  Vector, Book Three

  ANTHONY J. MELCHIORRI

  Contents

  Newsletter

  -Prologue-

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  -8-

  -9-

  -10-

  -11-

  -12-

  -13-

  -14-

  -15-

  -16-

  -17-

  -18-

  -19-

  -20-

  -21-

  -22-

  -23-

  -24-

  -25-

  -26-

  -27-

  -28-

  -29-

  -30-

  -31-

  -32-

  -33-

  -34-

  -35-

  -36-

  -37-

  -38-

  -39-

  -40-

  -41-

  -Author’s Note-

  -Dear Reader-

  -About the Author-

  Newsletter

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  Silent Fire (Vector, Book Three)

  Copyright © 2022 by Anthony J. Melchiorri. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: January 2022

  http://AnthonyJMelchiorri.com

  Cover Design: © Damonza, Damonza.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  -Prologue-

  Patikul, Jolo Islands, Philippines

  Kherkar Payot woke before the sun.

  The birds in the trees hadn’t even started singing their morning revelries. Not that he would have heard the birds today if they had.

  Rain pinged off the corrugated metal roof of his home in a relentless patter.

  Payot took a small flashlight from the upside-down bucket he used as a nightstand. When he flicked its switch, he had to tap the end of the flashlight three times before it finally turned on. Even then, the light flickered as if it didn’t want to be woken.

  He was careful to aim the beam away from his wife and their two daughters, who were all still sleeping on the mat next to him. The light swept over the single room that was their home. Water seeped through the rusted holes and gaps in the roof, trickling over the tarp he had set out last night. The tarp was just enough to protect the old T-shirts, hijabs, and pants strung up on a line from becoming soaked.

  Still, rain dripped over the plastic dishes and cookware. Water soaked into the soiled scraps of carpet and blankets spread over the dilapidated concrete floor. Each falling drop contributed to a soft melody that he hoped would keep his family asleep while he got himself ready.

  Payot put on the shirt he had worn yesterday. It smelled of salty air, fish guts, and body odor. Unfortunately, those smells were the only things he’d come home with after spending a day at sea.

  Maybe today will be different.

  The kitchen was merely one corner of the room they shared, and he didn’t want to light the stove for fear of waking his family. A breakfast of cold sticky rice and dried milkfish would have to do. They didn’t have much more than that, anyway.

  As he chewed the salty fish, he hoped that today’s fishing would be better. He imagined himself proudly sailing back to shore with a whole haul of fish. With a healthy yield, he might be able to sell or trade most of it for necessities, then give the rest to his wife for a meal that would put some meat on the bones of his daughters.

  Twelve and fourteen, they looked so small. Sure, they wore the shirts passed down from their older brothers. But even so, the fabric draped over them like the sails off the mast of an old-fashioned bangka boat.

  He stopped chewing the fish. A sour feeling welled up in his gut.

  Not because the food was bad. But because of the guilt of eating at all when his daughters might need it more.

  He knew what his wife would say: “Kherkar, you must eat. You have to be strong to catch those fish. If you can’t pull in the fish, then none of us eat.”

  But even with her words ringing through his head, he couldn’t make himself take another bite. Besides, he needed more than the strength of his own hands. He prayed that today, Allah would bless him.

  After a final look back at his wife and daughters, he slipped outside.

  Raindrops danced across muddy puddles and smacked against the leaves of trees growing wild around the neighboring houses. Each of those homes was similar in shape and size to Payot’s. Some were made of concrete, others from plywood and planks. A few had metal panels on their roofs. All scrapped together from whatever the people who lived in the wealthier neighborhoods of Jolo threw out or discarded during construction.

  Payot stuck to the side of the dirt road as he trudged toward the shore. The gurgle of a motorized rickshaw growled beneath the constant din of the rainstorm. Water splashed from the rickshaw’s tires, and Payot jumped out of the way to avoid getting any more soaked than he already was.

  Unlike the man driving the rickshaw, Payot had no poncho. The family owned two, but they were both at home. He refused to let his daughters walk to school without them during the rainy season. Their books had to be dry for their lessons.

  He had vowed, several years ago when the family was in truly dire financial straits, that his daughters would get an education at any cost. At that time, when the fish had stopped biting like they once had, he sold their home in one of those nicer Jolo neighborhoods, along with almost all their possessions. Everything except for the pump fishing boat, his sole mode of providing for the family.

  His girls had to escape this island. That meant schooling. He’d done the same for his sons, refusing to let them follow their father into the fishing trade.

  A pang of sorrow filled his core with a leaden weight.

  He only hoped whatever his daughters pursued after they graduated offered them a better future than that of their older brothers.

  As he drew closer to the docks, he heard dogs barking from beyond the wall of trees to his right. More rickshaws and mopeds rumbled through the waterlogged streets, carrying goods and people into town. Payot ducked through the shopping arcades where most of these individuals were headed. A few were already pulling up the ribbed metal doors that protected their clothing and food stalls. Sickly yellow lights gleamed off the streams of muddy water under the feet of the workers.

  He lingered for as long as he dared. It was a short respite from the rain, but soon enough Payot had to walk outside again.

  He passed a mosque. The building had been a lighthouse when the Philippines was occupied by the United States. Now it was painted blue. It should have been a symbol of peace. Of Allah’s love. And for Payot, often it was.

  But that wasn’t true for all those who lived on Jolo or the rest of the Sulu region.

  A fiery anger burned in him at the thought of the Abu Sayyaf separatists who took refuge on the island. The terrorists had killed so many innocents.

  He could do nothing ab
out it. He was just a fisherman struggling to feed his family. All he could do was hope that Allah would sort out the sinners from the faithful.

  By the time he had made his way to the port, the rain had lightened. On another day, in a past decade, he would not have even walked his gout-addled limbs all the way to the shores just to push off in weather like this.

  But nowadays, he had no choice. It was either brave the rains, deal with the pain in his joints, and sail the dangerous, churned-up waters… or starve.

  “Kherkar, I was afraid you were not coming today!” Anton Jaboneta called, waving at him from between the line of boats pulled up onto the sandy shore. The man had a scraggly beard and dark hair mottled with graying strands. He wore a white short-sleeved polo shirt that had long since soaked through, pressing tightly against his ribs. His toes sunk into the dark sands as he shifted his weight toward Payot.

  Payot forced a smile. He met Jaboneta in a handshake and patted his back in a half hug. “I have never missed a morning of fishing in years, my friend.”

  “To your own detriment, perhaps,” Jaboneta said. “I’ve prayed that we do not get sick today, Insha’Allah.”

  “It would’ve been better to pray for fish.”

  “I don’t need prayers for that. I know that today we will catch something.”

  Other fishermen were headed toward the boats along the shore. The race to get out to sea had started earlier and earlier every month.

  Together, Payot and Jaboneta removed the tarp covering the central canoe-like portion of the pump boat. The small craft had two outriggers, much like the three-meter-long bangka boats Payot’s father used to sail.

  While Payot was proud of his fiberglass-hulled pump boat, its design was not drastically different than the wooden boat his father had used to trawl these waters. The most dramatic change was the small single-cylinder engine normally used to power a water pump, hence the name of the small craft. It had been fashioned into a motor to propel the outrigger canoe, allowing him to cover far more distance in search of the increasingly rare fish.

  He tried to ignore the aching in his knees as he pushed the craft into the crashing waves with Jaboneta’s help. They hopped onto the bobbing vessel. Payot started the motor. It burbled to life with a sound not too different from the motorized rickshaws.

  Turning the rudder, he aimed the vessel out to sea as Jaboneta prepared the gillnets they would drag through the water. The man threaded his knobby fingers across the nets, checking to ensure that, even with their age and damage, they might yet be strong enough to catch a thrashing fish or two. Countless tiny knots held the fishing nets together, and while Payot sailed, Jaboneta deftly twisted strands together to repair any new holes.

  They motored away from the shore, bouncing up and over the cresting waves.

  “There,” Jaboneta said, pointing toward the northwest. “That is where we’ll catch some fish.”

  “How do you know?” Payot asked.

  “I just know.”

  Before they were too far from the shore, the call to prayer from the lighthouse-turned-mosque wailed from the loudspeakers. Payot listened as the muezzin’s prayer crooned against the splash of the rain. He missed being a part of the adhan on land when he would take a moment and pause to join in the prayers before dawn. Now, all he could do was silently follow the ingrained words, repeating them to himself even when they had pushed out to sea far enough the muezzin’s voice was drowned out by the waves, motor, and rain.

  “So it begins,” Jaboneta said, casting out the gillnets behind them once they’d reached the place he’d indicated.

  They slowed, pulling the nets through the water. The rain seemed only to grow colder, the sky darker, even as morning grew closer.

  Over the next hour, the first rays of light emerged over the horizon, painting the sky with purples and reds that bled through the rain clouds. Eventually, the whole sky was lit up in a soft gray as the rains continued to weaken but did not stop.

  And still, no fish.

  “I was so sure,” Jaboneta said. He pounded a fist against the gunwale. “We’ll never catch anything. Not until those boats from China stop with their illegal fishing in the West Philippine Sea.”

  Payot was all too familiar with the contentious claims over the body of water that they called the West Philippine Sea and other nations called the South China Sea. The Philippines, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, and Vietnam had all staked their claims. Everyone wanted their share of the fish, sure. But mostly they wanted the oil, gas, and minerals stored deep beneath the sea.

  Where they fished, the Sulu Sea, was demarcated from the West Philippine Sea by the archipelago province of Palawan. The Chinese weren’t yet delving this far into Philippine territory, which Payot pointed out to his partner.

  Jaboneta ignored the explanation. “My brother lives in Masinloc. He says there are hardly any fish there anymore. He watched the foreigners destroy the reefs and take all the good catches. Anything to starve our people out. These foreigners are pure evil.”

  “You’re starting to sound like the separatists.”

  Jaboneta paused as if considering his words. “Abu Sayyaf may not be as wrong as we once thought.”

  Anger flared in Payot’s chest. “They are terrorists.”

  “They want independence. So do I. We need to keep our resources from the invaders and colonizers.”

  Payot twisted the rudder, guiding the ship up and over a fierce, rolling wave. “I sometimes think the lack of fish is punishment.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the violent people like Abu Sayyaf who call our island home and defile Allah’s name.”

  Jaboneta checked one of the knots that tied the gillnet to a cleat on the boat. “Or maybe it’s punishment for the infidels.”

  Payot shook his head. Jaboneta had always been a good friend, and they had fished together for years. But he did not always agree with the man’s politics. Still, he was unusually fired up today. Maybe it was the hunger. Maybe it was the frustration of not having caught anything more than a couple sickly scad and mackerel over the past few weeks.

  The man was desperate—and looking for someone or something to blame.

  “Let us not talk of such things,” Payot said.

  Jaboneta didn’t look up. “Your sons died because of the corrupt morals infecting our people from the West.”

  The spark of anger he’d felt before erupted into a bonfire. “My sons were innocent university students in Davao City. They were studying hard to earn their engineering degrees. They did nothing wrong.”

  “Then why were they killed?”

  “The Davao City Death Squad is as much a terrorist organization as Abu Sayyaf. They accused my sons of peddling drugs. You knew them. They would never commit such a sin.”

  “They left home to study instead of helping your family,” Jaboneta said. “Perhaps they lacked guidance to keep them from falling into bad company. Or maybe they were not as innocent as you believed.”

  Payot couldn’t hear the rain anymore with his pulse thumping angrily in his ears. His sons had been killed three years ago, but the wounds were as raw as the day he’d heard that the vigilante group had executed them with no fair trial or even evidence. “They would not do drugs. They would not sell drugs.”

  Jaboneta thumped his fist on the gunwale. “Which is all the more reason you should listen to me. They would have been safe here on Jolo. But at that university, they could not help but be tempted by sinners and—”

  “That’s enough,” Payot said. “You do not speak of my sons. Only Allah knows what sins they are guilty of.”

  Jaboneta opened his mouth but must have thought better of it. He turned away again.

  Neither spoke for a long time.

  They trawled through the water, the sun climbing higher behind the clouds, casting the world in a gray haze as the rain finally stopped.

  Finally, Jaboneta broke the uncomfortable silence.

  “I’m sor
ry,” he said. “You’re right. I’ve said too much. I’ve judged when I shouldn’t be judging.”

  “It’s the hunger. The bad catches.”

  “Always the hunger,” Jaboneta agreed. “I blame it all on these Chinese boats.”

  “Fine,” Payot said, accepting the truce. “We can blame it on them. At least the United States is sending that big aircraft carrier back.”

  “Ah, yes, joint exercises with the Armed Forces. I heard it on the news too. That always scares the Chinese away for a couple weeks. But it won’t make the fish return.”

  The net suddenly tugged hard on the boat, the pump motor whining. The rain pooling on the bottom of the canoe splashed against the inside of the hull.

  They had caught something.

  Something big.

  “Is that…?” Jaboneta let his words fade.

  But Payot knew what he wanted to say. No one had caught tuna around here in years. Especially not tuna large enough to yank their meager nets so strongly.

  Together they eagerly pulled the net into the ship. The weight of it dragged on Payot’s joints, pain flaring, but he didn’t care. He would be able to feed his family for months on a catch like this.

  “There, there!” Jaboneta said. “I can just see it. It’s—”

  He stopped.

  Now Payot saw what they had caught too.

  His gut soured. An intense urge to vomit or scream or curse welled up from his churning stomach.