Aftermath

Chapter 1-Not Vacation

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Chapter 1

Voss had never understood the feeling of helplessness, until this moment. As the weeping from the deck above grew louder, his brother Ivor and he nearly disconnected their shoulders struggling to break free.

The gag in his mouth tasted like gasoline. After the leader, Victor shot his kid brother Paul in the upper thigh, time seemed to stop, leaving him without a reference point.

The definition of vacation was time spent away from work in relaxation. Day two of his vacation was ideal for sailing, a crystal-blue sky kind of day, temperature in the mid-eighties with pleasant south-easterly winds. The Columbian kidnappers, hijackers, terrorists, whatever they were called had clearly done their homework in picking the right day to ambush Voss Sverkersson and his brothers, who had anchored their family sailboat in a secluded cove off Cayos Zapatilla, Panama.

Three days ago, Voss had been surrounded by well-armed security, rubbing shoulders at the session three wrap party, counting down the hours until he could leave the mind-numbing insanity of L.A behind. A month of surfing and fishing with his brothers his reward for making it through another overscheduled year...all his complaining of his overbooked schedule of filming and training seemed pathetic now, further proof of the toxic self-important spirit that festers in his industry...if Paul doesn't get help soon...if these bastards shot another of his brothers...

Bound and gagged along with his four brothers, he shifted over more so his brother Ander could raise his leg over Paul's, and apply what pressure he could over the wound. Their hands had all been tied with zip ties, plastic cutting into his wrist, tethering them all together in a cluster around a cramped galley table on the old luxury yacht that had been repurposed as a Panamanian dive boat. Voss flexed his hands, making a fist; his circulation reduced, driving pins and needles to his fingers, cutting off his power and strength.

How much blood could a kid lose before it was too late? Paul was pale, his eyes stayed mostly closed. Ivor's nose was broken. Ander's lip split and Voss's 'pretty face' was left untouched to fully highlight to him how this was going to go down. He was the target asset and he could cooperate, or one by one watch his brothers be tortured and shot.

Kidnapped for ransom the obvious explanation of why the smaller speedboat of Columbian gunmen had boarded their sailboat this morning, but the question remained just how much these assholes really knew about their family. Their sailboat was worth a few millions, but they forced Voss and his brothers off the sailboat and onto the small speedboat without even searching the cabin for cash or valuables, abandoning the luxury sailboat at anchor. His latest film contracts were made public, and then there was the damn Forbes article. Their father was a media whore and it wouldn't take much of an online search to come up with an estimate of his net worth, but if they dug deeper and found their mom's connections...that could complicate matters, it could turn a random hijacking for ransom into an international event.

Screams and shouting floated down the galley stairs of the dive boat. The smaller speedboat had ambushed the anchored dive boat with only one crewmember left on-board while the rest of the passengers were underwater on a reef dive. One by one, as the divers surfaced, coming out of the water and back on-board, they were greeted with a gun to the head. Sounds of crunching bone and wet flesh hitting the deck hard, as he imagined, the divers were suffering the same treatment as Voss and his brothers experienced. Next to scanning his kid brother's whitening face, hearing the cries of the women was the hardest to bear.

In minutes, the dive boat's anchor was raised and the sixty-foot vessel tore out of the protective waters at full throttle on a north-east heading into the open Caribbean Sea.