Without Law 18 by Eric Vall (most difficult books to read .txt) 📗

for the walkie, but I held it away from her and pulled her in for a one armed hug instead.

“It’s okay,” I chuckled. “We’re alright.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the platinum-blonde muttered into my chest.

I smiled and kissed the top of her head. She was right to be upset, but everything had worked out, so there was no point in dwelling on it right then.

“Alright,” I said after a moment. “Let’s get back to work, I’ll go talk to Hammer real quick and--”

Anna threw herself to the railing and threw up loudly enough to cut off what I was saying.

“Okay, scratch that,” I said with a grimace. “Everyone except Anna get back to work.”

“Thanks,” Anna muttered as she leaned lifelessly against the railing and gave me a thumbs up.

“I’m the pregnant one, and somehow she gets out of cleaning up dead bodies,” Tara said with an eye roll. “Unbelievable.”

“You’re pregnant, not useless,” I quoted her with a devilish smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” she chuckled and turned around. “Come on, Bails. Let’s get some work done.”

“Minji, Paige, come with me,” I instructed.

“We can get started on the inventory if you’d like,” Minji offered.

“Yeah,” Paige agreed. “We don’t mind getting started on our own.”

“I’m bringing you in case there’s something wrong with the controls,” I explained. “Minji might need to translate.”

“Oh, right.” Paige nodded.

We walked along the deck until we came to the stairs that led up to the control room. The bodies on deck had slid around from the jerking of the ship, so there were even more blood splatters to clean up, but I’d focus on that later, right then I needed to talk to Hammer.

“Hey,” I said as Minji, Paige, and I stepped through the door of the control room.

“Hey,” Hammer sighed. “You come to lay into us?”

“Not exactly,” I chuckled. “I would like to know what happened, though?”

“You’re a better man than me.” Hammer shook his head. “I’d lay into my boys for that.”

“You already did,” Pike muttered, and Hammer glared at the back of his head.

“What was it?” I asked, thinking it was a dumb, avoidable mistake at that point.

“The controls just aren’t clean,” he explained. “The joystick got stuck, which made the propeller stick, obviously, and we had to figure out how to get it unstuck without breaking it.”

“It seems you were able to do that, though,” I pointed out.

“At the last second,” he laughed. “But, yeah, I suppose we were.”

“Look, you couldn’t have known about that,” I told him. “Better to know sooner than later, so even though it wasn’t the ideal way to test it, we know what we need to do now. And nobody got hurt. No harm, no foul.”

“I appreciate that,” Hammer said with a small smile. “I assure you, it won’t happen again. After we’re finished today, I’m going to have a couple of my men scrub this place cleaner than it’s ever been.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed. “We’re going to go do inventory, but if you need anything, let me know.”

“Alright.” He nodded.

Hammer was being hard on himself, and while I understood why, it wasn't necessary. Everybody was fine, and he’d discovered a problem we would’ve had to fix eventually anyway.

“Oh, before you go,” Hammer said as we were about to walk out the door. “I almost forgot.”

The SEAL picked up a stack of papers from on top of a small table and walked them over to me.

“Here,” he said. “We found these earlier. I figured you’d want to have Minji look them over. It seems like there’s some orders in there.”

“Oh, great.” I grinned and took the papers. “We tried looking in the Captain’s quarters earlier but didn’t find anything. I’m surprised to see they left them somewhere so easily found.”

“They probably weren’t planning on their ship being stolen anytime soon,” Hammer laughed.

“No, I guess not,” I agreed. “Thanks.”

“Of course.” The SEAL nodded. “I’ll pass along anything else we find, too.”

I nodded and led the girls back outside and down the stairs to the deck.

“Should I go over those while we do inventory?” Minji asked.

“That would be great,” I told her with a smile. “The sooner we know exactly what they’re up to, the better.”

“If there’s anything like that in there,” Paige said, and she pursed her lips. “That’s one thing I hate about this language barrier. Something could look important and just say, like, ‘need more cigarettes’ or something. It drives me crazy.”

“Probably because you want to know right away,” I chuckled. “You’re used to always knowing the answer, but unless you know the language, you won’t know the answer until you can figure it out.”

“It’s annoying,” the brunette huffed.

“Don’t worry,” Minji said with a smile as she grabbed the papers I held out for her. “I’m an expert with this stuff. I’ll have them all read in a jif.”

We made it down to the hold, and Paige and I started to go through all the equipment and supplies and separate them into categories. I wanted to just start tallying everything and add it all together at the end, but Paige said that could cause errors, and since she was the expert, I just went along with what she said.

Paige and I had started tallying plasma guns when Minji gasped, and both of our heads whipped toward the Korean woman.

“What is it?” Paige asked quickly as she rushed over to Minji.

“I’ve found some orders that outline their plan,” Minji said, and her face looked paler than usual.

“What do they say?” I asked seriously as I peered over her shoulder to look at the paper. It had a nice letterhead on it, and the NK flag as a seal at the top. It definitely looked legitimate.

“It says the West Coast was successfully taken,”