The Devil's Waters (12 page)

“An odd thing to love.”

“Can you show me where it happened?”

Chief cocked an eyebrow, quickly suspicious. LB wondered if growing up under secret police had made the crew on this boat itchy. Or if this unexplained voyage from Vladivostok to Beirut was doing it.

“You are investigator now?”

“No. I’m stuck on this ship for two days. What else is there to do?”

Chief hunched. “Okay.”

He handed LB ear protection headgear. Sliding on his own muffs, he opened a thick door. A fleet, warm gush of air greeted them on a suspended platform. They looked down over a massive room, a collection of steel blocks, rods, trusses, pipes, every hard bit of it adding its bawl and whine to stir the roar rattling LB’s chest, rapping on the pads blocking
his ears. He lifted one earpiece for a moment to hear the real, deafening din.

Razvan led him down the stairwell. The floor under this hive of machines did not tremble as LB thought it might. It felt concrete. Even with a ruined piston, Chief’s engine ran balanced and tuned, just as he said.

Without turning to see if LB followed, Chief strode purposefully through a warren of equipment and apparatuses, all interconnected by cables, ducts, and miles of electric wire. The primary color was a mute yellow, with interruptions of battleship gray. The bolts and nuts holding everything together were the size of LB’s fists. He recognized nothing; not a piece resembled anything in a regular car or boat motor. The scale of the freighter’s engine beggared any machine LB had seen, even on naval ships. The
Valnea
’s engine was dazzling, even chugging at half speed.

Razvan ducked into the maze, beneath a web of catwalks and beams, conducting the tour at a long-legged gait without pause or explanations. Along the way, LB stayed lost. He could not find his way out if Razvan took a powder on him down here. He made out only one recognizable thing: a spinning black shaft the size of a tree trunk, horizontal, disappearing into the hull. Attached to the other end must have been the gargantuan propeller to push this ship.

Rounding a final corner, Chief mounted a platform running beside the heart of the engine, the row of oversize pistons. He strode down the line of chrome and copper cylinder housings, setting a hand to some to feel for the enemy in this room, vibration. At the seventh, he finally faced LB. Beneath the raging sounds of the engine room, he mouthed, “Each one weighs four tons.” Then, unexpectedly, he playacted the moment of injury for the second engineer Nikita, slamming himself into the railing in slow motion.

The quiet piston casing was not blackened or warped by the incident, though its housing, gears, cables, dials sat motionless. Razvan laid hands on the casing to
draw forth the sense of its failure. Chief showed no disdain or anger for piston seven; nothing in his engine room lost value just because it was out of order. LB, who saved broken men, admired this.

Somali dhow

Gulf of Aden

In late
afternoon, a helicopter flew their way to investigate the dhow.

Yusuf shouted for his crew to look like fishermen. The men quickly dropped lines without lures, climbed into the skiffs to cast and trail nets; one-eared Deg Deg steered a wide circle as if trawling. By the time the copter arrived, bearing the markings of the Chinese navy, Yusuf and his pirates looked engaged and innocent. They waved madly and stupidly until the hovering copter and its guns veered away.

Within the hour, a convoy of freighters and low-riding tankers appeared over the horizon. Six ships in a line, all making fifteen knots, filed past Yusuf’s dhow two miles away. Like a herding dog, the brute Chinese warship kept a steady distance from the ships. Deg Deg slowed the dhow; they would drift here on the rim of the transit corridor and watch the parade of commercial freighters and their bristling escort.

Six hours remained to sundown. Bobbing on gentle swells, ready to take up make-believe fishing at a moment’s notice, Yusuf and the crew marked the passing of every vessel plying the path to and from Suez. Gigantic container ships more than three hundred
meters long scudded past, loaded with mountains of cargo. From miles away, Yusuf and Suleiman could read the company names painted in huge letters across their hulls: Maersk from Denmark, Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, Switzerland’s MSC, COSCO of China, Israel’s ZIM. These ships employed the latest designs—bulbous bows, immense length, and tremendous engines. They sailed without the protection and bother of convoys, lone fortresses made impregnable by their speed and high freeboard.

Automobile haulers cruised by, leviathans from Korea and Japan headed to European or Saudi markets. Ponderous, high-walled, and ungainly as they looked, with all their cargo shielded belowdecks, they were nevertheless among the fastest freighters on the water.

Humbler ships, flagged out of Liberia, Panama, the Marshall Islands, Portugal, were more common on the gulf—brown-hulled chemical and oil tankers, rust-bucket cargo ships, commercial fishing vessels with arms spread wide, trawlers, net seiners, longliners swarmed by gulls when catching. Indian or Pakistani dhows, trawlers manned by Yemeni smugglers. Even a sailboat in the far distance, likely some insane and intrepid white people trying to sneak through these dangerous waters.

Yusuf and Suleiman sat alone on the rolling bow, sipping cool tea, bearing down through binoculars on every freighter as soon as it grew visible in the distance. Yusuf lifted his black-and-white-checked
keffiyeh
to hood his head from the sun. Over five hours, they let three dozen westbound ships slip by; the same number headed east. Whenever a likely vessel passed too far away to be identified, Deg Deg steered them closer, until Yusuf waved him off; not the right ship.

The cousins watched until two more hours of sunlight remained on the gulf. If their target did not appear in the next sixty minutes, the plan was to turn west and motor through the night at top speed toward Bab-el-Mandeb, that mile-and-a-half-wide passage
connecting the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, a 350-mile sprint. That way they could stay ahead of the coming traffic, wait for their prey at the narrow strait through which every ship going to or from Suez had to pass.

Sheikh Robow’s description of the freighter made Suleiman and Yusuf expect she would not be part of a guarded convoy; those clusters were for older, slower boats. She’d be off on her own, running twenty-plus knots. Her captain wouldn’t feel the need for naval protection or a gaggle of other ships around her, not with that kind of speed and guns aboard.

With an hour left, eyes worn down by binoculars and the water’s late-day glare, Yusuf stood from his wooden crate. His knees ached. In the west, the sun lowered onto a cushion of fiery clouds. Light polished the water as the day eased away and the low-lying mists melted. The bending horizon grew razor sharp against the sky.

From belowdecks, the smell of fried meat and
maraq
soup wafted to the bow. The rest of the crew had eaten earlier. Bowls of food sat untouched beside both cousins. Yusuf stuffed a cold slice of seasoned goat into his mouth. Chewing, he picked at a bit of gourd dipped in yoghurt.

Suleiman did not lower his binoculars from the east. Yusuf spoke to the black top of his head.

“Eat. I’m going to tell Deg Deg we’re moving.”

Suleiman had elbows on his knees, steadying the glasses. “Wait.”

Yusuf licked his fingers. “Why? What do you see?”

“I can’t be certain. Dolphins. We have luck coming. Good or bad, I can’t tell. But luck.”

“We have night coming. We need to go.”

“Sit.”

Yusuf wanted to raise his own binoculars, but he left this to Suleiman, who seemed to be trying to conjure the freighter
.

Long ago Yusuf had learned to trust Suleiman’s instincts. His older cousin studied the ways of spirits and animals and their signs. Dolphins were indeed
an omen of change approaching, like clouds. There was magic on the earth, a strangeness outside man’s world. Suleiman could put his finger on it. But this was not magic; this was the sea, where nature ruled alone. The two of them were searching for one ship out of a passing hundred on a wide water, on the word of an Islamist who’d threatened them, a man not of their clan. Their best chance now was to hurry to Bab-el-Mandeb, arrive at noon tomorrow, and wait there. Even then they couldn’t be sure their target wouldn’t pass them in the night, or that it hadn’t already come through here and they’d simply missed it.

Yusuf lowered his weight again to the crate. He set the cold dinner plate across his lap. He thought of Hoodo across his lap instead, warmer than this goat and curd, surer than this goose chase for al-Shabaab.

Without pulling his eyes from the glasses, Suleiman asked, “Do you remember what you said before we took our first ship? Seven years ago?”

Yusuf swallowed tea. He gazed toward the stern, where the crew smoked along the rails or watched the setting sun. Some toyed with the cat. Inside the wheelhouse, Deg Deg needed a decision. Instead, Suleiman wanted a memory.

Yusuf tamped down his impatience. He spoke to the side of Suleiman’s narrow face.

“Of course.”

“Tell me now.”

“I said that you and I would die on the same day.”

Suleiman nodded behind the glasses. Twenty minutes earlier, a convoy had passed the dhow, plowing to Bab-el-Mandeb. The eight vessels, European and Asian, guarded by a German war cruiser, had not yet sailed out of sight. Yusuf eyed the fading ships and their trail of smudges in the air.

Suleiman lowered the binoculars. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I said
that out of loyalty. It was not a prediction.”

“Do you want to do this?”

“Yes.”

Suleiman handed Yusuf the binoculars. He aimed a hand due east, at a white sliver alone on the blue rim of the world.

“I believe it may be this day, cousin.”

Yusuf bore down through the lenses. Quickly he found the ship. Even seven or eight miles out, in the slanting light of the failing sun, he read the tall, pale letters writ across the blue hull: CMA CGM.

A French ship, moving west on her own.

Not a single container stood on deck below her three cranes. She skipped high over the water, the brown skirt of her bottom paint visible. She sailed where, when, and how Sheik Robow had said she would.

Her name:
Valnea
.

CMA CGN Valnea

Gulf of Aden

The engineer Nikita wiggled
a big toe.

He could not shift his strapped-down head to see. He groped for LB on the stool beside him.

“
Vot edo da
! Did you see? Look! Look, Sergeant! Is moving?”

LB confirmed the toe did flinch.

“I am not cripple!
Gospodi
! Sergeant, I am not cripple!”

Nikita spread both arms to celebrate in a hug. LB hung back; the man would not stop shouting. On the next bed, the cadet groaned, waking to find pain. To quiet the engineer, LB bent over him for a quick embrace but could not wrap his arms around the board or the cot. Nikita clamped him tight, pounding the back of LB’s rib cage. He sobbed, “
Spasibo, bolshoe spasibo.
”

LB wriggled loose. “Okay, okay. That’s great.” He patted Nikita on the chest. “Let’s keep it down; the kid needs to sleep.”

“
Da
,
da
,” the engineer panted, sniffing back tears. “But this is good, yes?”

“It’s a good sign. The anti-inflams are working. You still might have a break in your spine, but it doesn’t look like paralysis. We’ll know more in Djibouti. And you’re staying on that board till we get there.”

“Of course, of course.” Nikita
kept his voice from climbing again. “Go. Find Grisha. I will wiggle for him.”

LB checked the cadet’s bandages for moistness. He headed for the door. Behind him Nikita whispered, “Thank you,
svóloch
.”

“You’re welcome,
hui
.”

The first mate Grisha was not in the wheelhouse, the only place LB knew to look for him. He found Drozdov in his captain’s chair. To the rear, the third officer sat at the map table, filling in the logbook.

LB told Drozdov of Nikita’s progress and the request to see Grisha. The Russian captain received the news with a long sigh of relief. Picking up the intercom phone, he found the first mate in his quarters.

“Nikita has moved a toe.”

Drozdov set down the receiver. LB imagined chubby Grisha bolting for the stairs.

LB climbed into the empty leather chair beside Drozdov, facing the broad tempered-glass windshield. Far ahead, a convoy steamed toward Suez
.
The
Valnea
sailed into an afternoon that had aged while LB kept vigil in the infirmary. The dropping sun shone into the ship’s westbound face.

On both large, round radar screens in the command dash, a red line swept out of the center blip that was the
Valnea
. The distant klatch of freighters showed as dark arrowheads, their speeds and headings digitized beneath each mark. To the north, a warship shadowed them. Above and below the convoy, two east–west electronic lines displayed the bounds of the IRTC, five nautical miles wide. Yemen lay a hundred miles to the north, Somalia an equal distance south. The
Valnea
plowed down the middle of the lane. She sailed alone.

“We cannot keep up,” Drozdov said. “The ships in the convoy are making sixteen knots. I have reported damage to UKMTO Dubai. That is all I can do.”

“When exactly do we get to Djibouti?”

The captain rolled
a track ball. The cursor on one radar screen zoomed ahead, scrolling the distance from the center blip.

“Three hundred eighty miles. At this
chërtov
speed, dawn day after tomorrow. Perhaps.”

“Perhaps what?”

Drozdov laughed a grave chuckle that wrinkled his pocked nose. He gazed forward to the lowering sun.

“What do you think of my ship, Sergeant?”

LB patted the leather arms of his chair. “She’s a beauty.”

“
Fah
. She is
govnó
. Shit.” Drozdov turned dark eyes at LB. “Twenty years ago I am master on ships that are at sea even to this day. I see them, I talk on radio to them. Those were made of thick steel, good material. I worked on ships half this size with crew of thirty. Today I have just twenty men. Is all about money now. Companies care nothing for men, for metal, only money. This
Valnea
, she will have life of maybe ten years. Then she will be scrap. The steel will melt, then go into another ship, then another. You watch, look around. Every day, crew is grinding, painting to stay ahead of rust. Razvan is fixing breaks in something all the time. Two boys are hurt bad because engine explodes. Now we are limping to hospital.
Da
, I am captain of shit. I have become man to do this only for money, like owners, like insurance company. I am no better.”

LB hadn’t sat with Drozdov for any of this; he’d just meant to report on Nikita. The captain didn’t break his gaze from LB, inviting comment.

“You’re not happy, so quit.”

Drozdov’s temples folded into creases etched by decades of ocean winds and shadeless light. Even grinning, his face dimmed.

“No. I drink too much on land.”

LB let the statement linger; it wasn’t the sort of remark to leave on.

“So tell me about Iris Cherlina.”

Drozdov’s narrow chest
shook to a private, dour chuckle. LB’s question seemed to have struck another nerve in the captain.

“I know nothing about Iris Cherlina.”

“How can that be? I mean, she’s your passenger. She was sitting right here when I came on board. You don’t talk to her?”

Drozdov tapped a finger on the arm of his chair, the way Grisha had done against his lips. Iris Cherlina made these sailors twitchy.

“You have curiosity, Sergeant?”

“No more than any regular guy would for a good-looking woman.”

“I will tell you what I know, since you are regular guy. Iris Cherlina eats alone at all meals. In the day, she sometimes sits on the bridge to watch the seas go by. The rest of the time, she stays alone. At nightfall, she disappears into her cabin. Or she walks forward into the dark. That is what I know. This is cargo ship, not cruise liner. I do not talk to her. My crew do not talk to her. We do what I suggest you should do. Look.”

This wasn’t very friendly on anybody’s part, but LB kept that to himself.

LB had two days on this ship. He wasn’t going to take Drozdov’s advice and just look. He kept that to himself, too. And he’d been told by Torres to show no curiosity about the
Valnea
’s crew and cargo. Iris Cherlina wasn’t a sailor, and she wasn’t in a container.

Drozdov pivoted his attention to his instruments and radar, releasing LB from the leather seat and the conversation. He slid from the chair with no more notice from the captain.

LB left the air conditioning of the bridge to step out on the starboard wing. In the dusk, Iris stood with a cigarette between her fingers. She leaned against the rail when she saw him, the gesture implying that she would stay in place for his company. The woman was the counterpoint to Drozdov, slim and unruffled, not worn by sea and weather, pummeled by long labor, or pitted by liquor. The wind and the tinted
light suited her. The breeze carried a puff of tobacco off her wide, smiling lips. She flipped the cigarette overboard. She did not look unapproachable, or off-limits.

Iris Cherlina spoke first. “I understand you are staying on the
Valnea
until we reach Djibouti.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Iris Cherlina appraised this development, which seemed suddenly to please her. She put forth a manicured hand—red nails against linen skin, a broad palm. She had the handshake of a musician, an artist, something where the firmness of her touch mattered.

“Let’s meet properly. I am Iris Cherlina.”

LB felt the urge for a hat he could remove, or a better suit of clothes than his uniform and communications vest to bow in.

“First Sergeant Gus DiNardo.” He held her hand for an extra shake, as if he were introducing himself twice. “Everyone calls me LB.”

“LB. What does that stand for?”

“It’s just a call sign.”

“For?”

“All right. Little Bastard.”

“Honestly?”

“Who would lie about that?”

“Fair enough. How on earth did you come by it?”

“I spend my summers as an instructor at the PJ School. It’s called the Pipeline. Some call it Superman School. It’s pretty tough.”

“What is a PJ?”

“Pararescue jumper.”

“You jump to the rescue, Sergeant?”

“That’s a good way to put it.”

“Exactly how tough is your Superman School?”

“One in ten make
it through. It’s the hardest training regimen in the American military.”

“Impressive. Is this the only place where you are a little bastard?”

“Yes, ma’am. Absolutely.”

“Forgive me. I think that is a half truth.”

“It might be. I guess it depends on which half you need at the moment.”

“I like that.”

Iris Cherlina blinked again, long and languorous, as if savoring. LB did not consider himself a man of charm, but he was making this woman stay in place to talk, work her eyes. Was this what Drozdov feared about her, that she might agitate some of his crew, start some fights?

LB hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “The captain. That’s a piece of work.”

“Yes, poor man.”

“How’s it going, being the only woman on a ship?”

“
Mne pó figu.
I don’t care.”

“So, what does Cherlina mean in Russian? ‘Dear,’ like in French?”

“Yes. But also, it means expensive.”

“Nice. Wow.”

“And you? DiNardo?”

“It’s Italian. Means I’m related to Nero. He burned Rome and killed Christians. So you definitely win the name thing.”

“I do.”

LB checked his watch. Every hour he had to wet the cadet’s bandages, change out his saline bag, keep him dopey on fentanyl. He had forty more minutes to spend with Iris Cherlina.

Gazing at her, LB thought she was as much a collection of question marks as this entire voyage. He didn’t know what to ask first, what might lead to more conversation, what might make her walk away alone. Silently, he toted up what he knew about Iris and the
Valnea
. Iris was a Russian passenger on a
freighter carrying a highly secret cargo—so secret his own government had told him to put on blinders—guarded by gun-toting Serbs. She had the run of the ship and stayed pretty much to herself, either because she wanted it that way or because Drozdov had gotten the same orders as LB—no curiosity. Early this morning an accident had injured two crewmen, making the
Valnea
cut her speed in half. The captain was an alcoholic who disliked his ship, who the first mate claimed had been made crazy by pirates. The Romanian chief engineer had no idea why his engine had failed. And this morning LB had been choppered in, an unexpected witness to whatever intrigues were on board.

LB figured, too, that a lot of what Iris Cherlina would say, if she talked to him, would be lies.

“Hey, I haven’t seen much of the boat. I figure you’ve been here for two and a half weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Give me a tour?”

“You do not strike me as a tourist. But whatever you wish.”

“So, you got on board in Vladivostok.”

“How did you know?”

“You just agreed you’d been here for two and a half weeks.”

“Of course.”

“Lead the way.”

Iris opted for the stairs down the side of the superstructure. LB followed. Descending, he asked her back, “What do you do in Russia?”

“I’m a scientist.”

“What kind?”

“Electrophysics. My specialty is heat resistance.”

“You don’t look like an electrophysicist.”

“No?” She pouted. “And I try so hard.”

“It’s awful cold in Russia for someone interested in heat.”

“I worked at a research institute.”

“Which one?”

“I’m afraid that’s off limits, Sergeant.”

“LB.”

“LB, then.”

The two wended
down more staircases. The late daylight purpled. The wide water lost its blue shades, inking toward gray.

“You said ‘worked.’”

“I have retired from that institute. I’ve left Russia. For warmer climes, as it were.”

“You look young to retire.”

“Thank you. I have taken employment at a lab in Lebanon.”

“Is there a lot of money in electrophysics these days?”

“Untold.”

“Government?”

Iris Cherlina waggled a finger at another question she would not answer. LB switched gears.

“You like falafel, I hope.”

“Better than cold beet soup.”

He and Iris rounded another metal corner of the six staircases. He allowed a gap in their talk, letting their shoes on the steel steps be the sound of their company. They descended two more floors.

“So why’d the lab in Russia shut down? If there’s that much money in heat resistance in Beirut, why not in Russia?”

“We’d gone as far as we could go there. My government has lost interest, and we lost funds. I’m taking the research in a new direction.”

“So you booked a three-week passage on a commercial freighter from Vladivostok.”

Iris Cherlina stopped on a landing between stairwells. Without dropping her smile, she turned.

“Yes.”

She held her ground, waiting for him to choose whether she could stay in his company or would have to leave him if he pressed.

He clapped. “Looks like
a great idea. No crowds. See the world. How’s the food?”