Redheads (29 page)

Captain Douglas checked the doors for the tenth time. There were two ways onto the bridge: a gangway ladder from the quarters below, and a steel door that led into a hallway cluttered with fire control equipment. The other end of the hallway opened outside, at the stern of the ship’s superstructure near the top of the track that launched the main freefall lifeboat. He’d locked the trapdoor to the gangway and had sealed off the steel door to the hallway, and for the last thirteen hours he’d been standing without relief at the helm, gripping the bridge fire axe in his right hand and pressing the flat side of its red blade to his chest.

Of course he’d taken the VIP on board before.

The call would come by scrambled satellite phone once or twice a year, always the same procedure. The crewmen would drop whatever they were doing, go to their quarters, and sit on their bunks. Steering from the bridge, he was the only one who’d see the helicopter settle atop the high stack of cargo containers on the deck; the only one to see the VIP scurry from the helicopter’s unlit cabin, a shadow that would quickly disappear down the side of the stacked containers and into the hull of the ship. Then the pilot would switch on the helicopter’s interior lights, a signal to the captain, who would use the ship’s intercom to order the crew to walk in single file across the stack, carrying their sea bags. Two hundred miles from the coast, headquarters would tell him when the next helicopter would meet him, the crew having flown across the Atlantic in a charter plane.

Either the VIP would slip back into the dark helicopter once the crew was back aboard, or he would stay hidden in the ship. It was impossible to be sure.

In the first three hours after the girl started screaming, he had thought about unlocking the doors and running down the stairs into the dark underbelly of the ship, ready with the fire axe and a D-cell flashlight. But his terror had stopped him and he had done nothing. He thought about steering the ship off course and smashing the controls, sending out a distress signal and making a run for the lifeboat on its launching track at the stern. But he had been too scared to take even that cowardly step. Not scared of being alone in the lifeboat on the ocean, but terrified of the fifty-foot hallway from the bridge to the lifeboat. He couldn’t face the forty seconds it would take to get to the lifeboat, climb into it, and trigger its release. And although the fiberglass lifeboat hatch would latch closed, there were no locks. He’d thought about the shadow scurrying head first down the vertical wall of cargo containers as the ship pitched in the dark.

The VIP.

What had he been carrying back and forth across the Atlantic?

This trip had been different from the moment the helicopter touched down on the stack. By moonlight, he saw the VIP emerge from the cabin, like the darkness that grows across the ground at dusk. No man could move like that. It slithered to the edge of the stack, arms and legs a black blur, so fast he wouldn’t have credited it had he not seen it before. But when it was gone, the helicopter’s cabin lights did not come on. Instead, the pilot hailed him on VHF channel 16, a breach of the normal procedure. There were three quick breaks on the microphone key to get his attention, and then the pilot spoke one sentence only.

“Stand by for additional offloading.”

There’d been no need to respond. The captain stood in the shadows and watched out the bridge windows.

The helicopter’s sliding passenger door opened farther and two men stepped out. Men who walked upright on two legs, whose faces were visible by moonlight. They wore black combat fatigues like members of a SWAT team, and they took their bearings on the deck before turning back into the helicopter to pull out a bag, a black bundle six feet long that they carried between the two of them, one at each end. They crossed the stack towards the bridge and disappeared with the bag. He heard them inside the ship a moment later, speaking in low voices and not in English. He’d made enough deliveries in the Baltic to know Russian when he heard it, even at a whisper coming up through the open spaces in the ship.

Then they were out again, back onto the deck and pulling a second bag from the helicopter. They brought it into the ship, but only one of them trotted back to the helicopter. When he was inside, the cabin lights switched on. The captain keyed the intercom and ordered the crew to the deck, single file as always. He watched them duckwalk across the stack and move into the helicopter at a crouch beneath its spinning rotors. He watched the door shut and the rotors pick up speed, the helicopter lifting off and hovering over the deck a moment before it tilted forward and moved off into the night, its red taillight blinking into the growing distance.

About five minutes later he’d heard the first animal roar and then the girl’s first scream. That was when he locked the doors and grabbed the axe. The VIP had been busy with her for the last thirteen hours and it wasn’t over yet. He looked into himself for the strength to go and do something for her and came up with nothing. He cursed himself and his cowardice, the shame of finally knowing, so late in life, that he wasn’t the man he’d thought himself to be. He knew men who wouldn’t have had a second thought. But he had locked the doors against his fear and had stood by doing nothing. Not even a radio call.

The girl screamed again.

“
No please no please please n—”
the last of it was cut off in a strangled cry that needed no translation.

He tightened his grip on the axe and waited for it to stop. Five minutes went by and then she was silent again. He looked down at his hand and saw blood coming from under his fingernails, his clench on the wooden handle so tight he’d burst all the capillaries in his fingertips.

He heard a sound and whipped around, his back to the helm station and the axe blade over his left shoulder, ready to swing.

It came again: tapping on the thick steel door.
Click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click.
He placed the sound and froze. He was listening to four, long-nailed fingers rapping in succession against the steel.
No
, he thought,
not fingernails.

Not fingernails at all. He was listening to claws
.

He was shaking all over, facing the door, trying to keep the axe steady. The clicking went on and on. Then the clicking stop and the VIP spoke to him.

“
Stand in the corner by the chart table, Captain.
” The voice was low and came to his ears by shivering up his spine like the tip of a rusty nail.

“I’ve never done anything to you,” the captain said. He thought of all the times he’d carried this thing across the ocean without questions. Wasn’t that loyalty?

“
Stand in the corner by the chart table.
”

His feet took him across the wide bridge and he stood between the chart table and the thin metal drawers that held charts for every deep water port and channel in the western hemisphere.

“
Put the axe on the floor and put your face in the corner
.”

He watched himself put the axe under the table. He was too unsteady to keep on his feet, so he knelt in the corner and rested his forehead against the bulkhead, eyes closed. He could feel the uneven motion of the ship as it broke through the waves. Behind him, the steel door blasted open with a loud
bang
as it swung the full arc on its hinges and slammed into the bulkhead. He cowered into the corner but did not turn around. The door opening was impossible, of course. The bridge had been retrofit less than a year earlier, prompted by the M/V
Arctic Sea
incident. The steel doors could be locked from the inside and the glass in the windows was bullet proof. Sealed off with the crew inside, the bridge was supposed to be able to keep pirates out for five hours, even if they had cutting torches and grenades.

The VIP had opened the door just by hitting it.

He could feel it standing behind him, hot breath on the back of his neck.

“
Stand up.
”

He did as he was told.

“
Turn around and open your eyes
.”

He turned slowly, taking a step so that his back was against the bulkhead. He opened his eyes, expecting to see the monster, but the bridge was empty. It must have been standing on the port wing, over by the recessed windows that looked out to the stern. The trapdoor to the gangway stood open.

“
Go down to the galley.
”

Yes, it was behind him on the port wing. He didn’t know how it could have opened the gangway trapdoor and then moved to the port wing at the same time he was feeling its breath on the back of his neck. He was dizzy and he realized he might have passed out. Maybe time had stretched farther than he realized. He took hold of the handrails and went down the steep ladder. An hour ago his bladder had been an urgent bursting pressure and now he couldn’t feel it. Then he noticed that his khaki pants were soaked all the way to his socks. He didn’t remember letting go. He was at the bottom of the ladder now, moving down the greenish-gray hallway in the direction of the galley. He knew the VIP was right behind him but he couldn’t hear anything. No sounds on the steel ladder, no steps behind him in the passageway.

He turned and entered the galley. If he hadn’t already emptied his bladder into his pants, he would have done so at that second. There was blood on the floor and blood on the stainless steel countertops and blood across the teak mess table. One burner of the gas range was lit, turned all the way up. He looked at the ring of blue-and-yellow flame under one of the bigger cast iron skillets. Smoke poured off the overheated pan and the lumps of blackened, leftover meat inside it. He felt the hot breath on the back of his neck again, and then that rusty-nail voice scraping into him like a sickness.

“
Clean it
.”

He stepped into the galley, dizzy again. The smoke alarm went off. He walked to the sink and thought,
This is a nightmare this isn’t real, this is a nightmare—

The dishwater in the sink was backed up, so he reached in, numb, to find the drain stopper. He touched something soft and slimy and pulled it out. At first he thought it was a filthy dish towel, but it was worse than that. He was holding a handkerchief-sized swatch of human skin.

“Clean it
,” the thing said again, directly into his ear. He could smell its rancid bloody breath.

This is a dream, this is a nightmare.

He dropped the skin into the trash can and watched the pink dishwater drain from the sink, staring at the bits of flesh and the old soap suds that clung to the sides as the water went down.

An hour later whatever was left of Captain Douglas was hidden in a back corner of his mind, crouching in the shadows and looking through his own eyes as though looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything was far away and removed. The only thing that got all the way inside was the voice. It told him what to do and he did it. He cleaned the galley and ran the filthy mop water down the sink and bagged the skin and bits of meat and the charred skillet. At the voice’s bidding he carried the bag to the stern rail and threw it over the side, into the ship’s wake. And then the voice told him what to do next. There was no question of disobeying the voice.

“
Engine room. Go.”

He went. The steel staircases leading into the ship’s belly were lit by bare bulbs inside steel cages. When he passed them, he could see the thing’s shadow on the catwalk, mixed with his own. The angles were wrong and the lights would dim as thing’s body blocked them. The hidden part of him, who was still Captain Douglas, realized the VIP was following him from above, crawling on the underside of the catwalks like a spider.

The engine room was dominated by two diesel power plants, each two stories high. There was a black body bag on the no-skid rubber floor in between them.

“
Get the first-aid kit on the wall
.”

He went to the bulkhead at the rear of the engine room and took down the metal first-aid box next to the fire extinguisher. He backed up with it and stood by the body bag.

“
Open the bag
.”

Captain Douglas knelt and unzipped the bag down its whole length. He thought of field spiders, the big black and yellow ones that wrapped their meals in neat packets of silk to save for later. He pulled the zipper to its end and parted the canvas to see the contents. There was a man inside, wrists and ankles cuffed. The thing’s prey was badly wounded, but very much alive. He had duct tape wrapped across his mouth, but his eyes were open. His face was swollen and purple and his chest bore deep bite marks in his pectoral muscles. Captain Douglas saw the man’s eyes focus near the ceiling. The man’s eyes widened. He lay still but alert. The shadows in the engine room moved and darkened as the thing crossed another light.

“
Clean the chest wounds.
”

He looked into the bound man’s eyes and saw something that called him forward from his hiding place. For a few minutes he was all the way back again, Captain Douglas of the M/V
Tantallon,
a man who had stood on the bridge during hurricanes and who had been the first lieutenant on a submarine in the Royal Navy and who had once carried himself with pride. And here in front of him was a man who would not have hesitated where Douglas had. Here was a man who’d have rushed from the bridge with or without a weapon when he heard the girl’s first cry. Douglas opened the first-aid kit and took out sterile gauze and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He met the man’s eyes again and an understanding passed between them. Douglas knew what he had to do. It was a tiny act and he did it secretly while he was cleaning the infected bites. The thing was above them on the ceiling, but Douglas could block its view of the case by leaning in close. He understood when he was finished here, he could retreat back into hiding, and there wouldn’t be much time after that. He didn’t know if what he was doing now would keep him out of hell—he suspected it was nowhere near enough—but he did it gladly. It was quick, and he went back to his work, cleaning the long tear below the man’s navel. The man didn’t even stiffen when he poured the alcohol directly into the gouge, but his eyes met Douglas’s for a second. They understood each other.