Dead Water (39 page)

The boys and the boats have vanished. ‘Their boats are so shallow you can’t see them on radar. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have fishing boats out there armed with rocket launchers. They never hit anything.’ David is full of these factoids and little anecdotes. He has it in him to be a bore: a fact that Roopa finds strangely reassuring.

Now they are back where they started, looking over the water. David tells her: ‘If we take the correct channels, if we pass your information to the International Maritime Bureau, our insurers will hike up our premiums across the entire fleet.’

Roopa shakes her head. ‘An open and honest game is the only game I’m prepared to play.’

David’s exasperated. ‘Who made you World Policeman?’

Roopa shrugs. ‘If that’s your attitude, I’m sorry to have troubled you. To hell with it. I’ll send everything I have to IMB’s anti-piracy centre in Kuala Lumpur, let them sort it out.’

David reaches into the pocket of his suit for cigarettes. ‘Jesus.’ He doesn’t offer her one. ‘You really are pulling the tiger’s tail, aren’t you?’

‘I want the Yadav syndicate to know I’m here.’

‘Oh, they’ll know, all right. Do you know what they do to informants?’

‘I can look after myself.’

David draws deeply on his cigarette. ‘Seizures of this sort, normally the line pays the buggers off.’

‘Not this time. I want them to come after me.’

‘Yes?’

‘I have to flush him out somehow.’

‘
Him?
’

Roopa says nothing more.

David takes the cigarette out his mouth. He pulls a face, as though it tasted bad. He grinds out the coal. He has an orthopaedic shoe, a built-up heel. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘let’s get this over with. Can you give me a lift to my hotel?’

Roopa unlocks the Land Rover, David joins her in the cab, and they pull away, across the gravel apron, and turn inland on a road that winds up into the mountains. They top a saddle and a deep scoop of still water extends before them. In the middle of the inlet there is an island.

‘Telegraph Island. There’s nothing there but rock. People there used to go crazy. Terrible messages got pinged to India. Obscene stuff. Lights in the sky. You know “round the bend”?’

Roopa has noticed that David likes these constructions. They are a way of getting people to express an interest in him.

‘This is the bend they meant.’

‘Where are we headed?’

‘Wait,’ he says.

They come out on a level plain. There is no habitation here, just a bowl of land under thin vegetation, divided by ruined dry-stone walls. David leans forward, feels under his jacket, and pulls out something so crude, so home-made, Roopa takes it for a car jack. She stares at it: functional, squared off, familiar. David swivels round in his seat and presses it to her leg, just above the knee. The road is a cinder track, well maintained, but there are ridges, ripples really, where heavy plant has rucked up the surface of the road, the way you’d wrinkle up a bedsheet. The mouth of the thing judders against her leg. David pushes the barrel firmly against the flesh of her leg and pulls the trigger.

Roopa’s lower leg waves and writhes stupidly, expressively. Blood wells from the wound. Roopa feels a great weight on her, a fantastic yet invisible pressure, numbing and comforting her. Before she can even be grateful for it, the pressure lifts, and pain comes from deep inside her. She feels her leg stretch and explode. She falls into David’s lap. He leans forward, turning the wheel of the Land Rover so that they coast off the road and over the gravel plane. He drops the gun into the glove compartment. It is still smoking. He closes the lid.

The engine stalls and the vehicle rolls to a stop. David pushes Roopa off his lap and into the footwell. He undoes his seatbelt, opens the passengerside door and climbs out. He pulls Roopa from the car, into the night heat. Roopa’s leg flaps and drags after her, a burning thing, a stinging thing, a giant stinging grub fixed to the stump of her leg by its sting, a hornet, a horsefly, a red thing, a maggot. David drops her on the ground, reaches in again, opens the glove compartment, pulls out the gun, turns and aims it at her face. He says, ‘It’s going to be all right.’

Roopa sits up. The gun jumps, and Roopa’s brains spill out of the back of her skull and plop on to the ground.

Captain Egaz Nageen shoulders his way out of the New Myoma City Development Supermarket (a lacquer-ware box for Suniti; a Mandalay Spiderman marionette for Sabir) and descends fractured concrete steps into a heaving high-street crowd, red with monks.

This place gives him the creeps. Once a bright and cheerful state capital (Suniti’s guidebook says: ‘Distinctive regional twists include the enjoyment of much spicy food’), Sittwe’s showing the strain these days. Ten trillion cubic feet of natural gas have been discovered under the city and the presence and promise of all that untapped wealth has been steadily rising like damp into people’s brains. Each time Nageen visits, there’s some new species of predator cruising the town. In the early 2000s the Chinese and the Indians were the two main contestants slugging it out for Burmese government concessions. Then a plague of American ‘observers’ descended on the town – all of them posing as the same video cameraman for National Geographic. And it goes on. The whole circus has degenerated into farce this year, as the city’s drunken and despised riot police play host to a party of pallid Kalmykians. Where the fuck is Kalmykia? Name a famous Kalmykian. Hands up who can spell Kalmykia?

Then – once he’s run the gamut of Sittwe’s human stew, Buddhist nutjobs spitting at him as he goes – there are the hawkers gathered outside the gates of the Deep Water Facility. ‘Look sir, look sir, MP3!’ This snatchand-grab mob annoys the hell out of him. Most of their gear has been stolen from ships berthed in shallow water a mile down the coast: they have stolen some barefoot fisherman’s prized possession and now they’re peddling it to him, who could buy this tat a thousand times over in any store in Dubai.

‘Get out of my way! Hey!’

And he is in. No denying the relief he feels to find himself at once among the suited and the salaried. The blank-faced, unlovely office towers of the Sittwe Deep Water Facility are too few for all the bureaucrats flooding in to operate Burma’s latest gas concessions. Daewoo have nabbed most of the purpose-built space, while bamboo scaffolding and aluminium ladders make toy tower-blocks out of shipping containers stacked three or four high: temporary offices for Focus, Westburne, Sinopec, Essar. The oil companies’ logos are riveted, brightly optimistic, against their streaked and corroded walls.

Nageen enters a pine-panelled waiting room. He wants to put his bags down, he wants to sit, but the room’s toffee-coloured vinyl armchairs are occupied. He joins a line of fellow latecomers circling the room, passing and repassing the same pencil-amended timetables and printed regulations.

USE OF WHISTLES

A whistle shall not be used within the limits of the Facility except: (a) As a signal of distress; or

(b) To prevent collisions; or

(c) In fog, mist, heavy rainstorms or any other condition similarly affecting visibility; or

(d) In accordance with the Rules contained in this Order and for the control of tugs; or

(e) To test the whistle.

A few minutes of this and Nageen feels himself caught up in a subtle, predatory game of musical chairs. Outside, through plexiglass so fogged and scratched it must have been reclaimed from a dead ship, he can see over calm waters to the Layshinedaung lighthouse. At this angle, at this time of the afternoon, the sea is exactly the same colour as the sky. Truly, you can’t tell them apart. Approaching the jetty, the launches might be spaceships, hanging in the air.

Around 4 p.m. a port service boat ferries Egaz Nageen to his new command, the MV
Ka-Bham
, a 120-metre Japanese-built general cargo vessel. Fully laden, a ship like this will reach a top speed of just under fifteen knots. Nageen knows from experience that her hull will prove a dog in bad weather, no autopilot will be able to handle her in a storm, and the rudder will cease to steer under five knots. These considerations are academic. The five-day map shows no weather that needs steering around. The ship has a dark blue hull and beige exhausts. Its deck is hidden under 40-foot steel shipping containers, stacked three high. The iron house is white: a five-storey superstructure spanning the ship, seventy feet from side to side. There are three red-painted derricks, two forward, one aft. This gear is a sure indication of the ship’s age since these days even shallow-water ports boast their own gantry systems. The
KaBham
, at twenty-five, is well on its way to retirement.

Climbing aboard, Nageen surveys the ship’s superstructure with mounting dismay. The port-side door is held shut with a bicycle lock and the frame is knobbled under a fresh coat of paint: by the week’s end the whole panel will be orange with rust.

He enters the iron house by a ladder to the first floor.

MUSTERPOINT IN NO.1 DECK ALLEYWAY

NO SMOKING

NO OPEN LIGHTS

The interior is cramped and ill-lit. The East European crews he prefers have a devil of a time on these Japanese tubs. Too small, too narrow, too low, like bedding down in a doll’s house.

Most of the crew are asleep, catching what rest they can before they sail. Long ago – before Nageen’s time – it took days to unload a ship and a ship’s crew could spend most of this time resting and drinking and whoring themselves silly on shore. Such capers are relegated to the storybooks now. These days, time in port is measured in hours; junior officers pull twelve-, even eighteen-hour shifts, and regular seamen are rarely allowed off the ship. These days, a crew works itself to exhaustion in harbour and spends the voyage recuperating.

Successive crews have done their best to cheer up the mess room. Red paper lanterns from Chinese New Year dangle from the ceiling alongside gold, red and silver decorations proclaiming Selamat Hari Raya, the feast that ends Ramadan. There’s a skeleton watch of three waiting for Nageen. First Officer Kamal, Chief Engineer Sen and Third Officer Waddedar greet their new captain warily. Nageen’s reputation precedes him. He will keep them up all hours on pirate watch. He will have them chiselling away at all manner of minor repairs. His master’s certificate may be a typical Marshall Islands knock-off but he has made the most of his years at sea. Many of his contemporaries still barely know port from starboard. Nageen, on the other hand, has worked to become the thing he once aped: a competent commander of ships and men.

The iron house is coming to life. The last boatload of chandlers and peddlers has arrived to wake his crew with offers of cigarettes, beer and toothpaste. The first officer excuses himself and Nageen hears him steering the peddlers firmly away from the officers’ quarters.

Waddedar offers Nageen a cup of chai, but he declines. His wife and son turn up in a couple of hours. It will be Sabir’s first sea journey with his father. Suniti will be struggling with too much luggage as usual. Till they arrive, he wants to be alone with his ship.

Two days out of Sittwe, at around half past six in the morning, the MV
Ka-Bham
is swallowed by the docks at Gangavaram. Not even swallowed. Imagine a piece of krill fetching up against the strainer-teeth of a whale. On the bridge Nageen’s twelve-year-old son Sabir presses his nose against the glass, trying to wrap his mind around India’s biggest deep-water port. The
Ka-Bham
is the largest ship he’s ever sailed on and its maximum weight, including cargo, crew, fuel, passengers, and stores, is 12,000 tonnes. Port Gangavaram has been built to service super-Capesize vessels with a deadweight of 200,000 tonnes.

Gangavaram is so massive it keeps coming apart in the eye, falling away into the apparently unspoiled green of distant hills. There is nothing human in this landscape to give it scale: no high-rise, no temple, not even a town. It is spectacular and disappointing at once.

The pilot brings them bumping up against a mobile harbour, well to the side of the main channels: a maître d’ seating underdressed diners behind a pillar. Two flesh-coloured cranes tower over the ship and pick through her cargo in a fraction of the time it would have taken using the ship’s own gear, and by late afternoon they are ready to sail again.

Back at sea Sabir loses interest in the bridge and goes back to the captain’s cabin. Truth be told, there is nothing on the bridge for Nageen either. Time at last to explore the ship. Noisy grille staircases lead into the vessel’s body and bowels. The
Ka-Bham
is a fussy tub. There are five cargo holds, four forward and one aft of the engine room. The forward holds, A to D, are separated by twin transverse bulkheads, fitted out with narrow stairs. Hatches provide access to the holds at four levels. For a multipurpose vehicle, plying every halfway-deep port between Singapore and Saihat, this difficult internal design is a nuisance. Much of the cargo this trip is break bulk. Holds B, C and D have their tweendecks engaged, bearing all manner of bales, bags and drums. Below the tween-deck, in the main body of the hold, B and C are stacked high with palleted aluminium ingots, greasy and grey as fish under polypropylene wrap. Hold A, at the prow, is smaller than the others, and is designed for seawater ballasting. The containers here, like those on deck, carry every imaginable non-hazardous, non-perishable cargo, from mobile phones to sterile plasters.

The
Ka-Bham
’s fuel tanks run below the
Ka-Bham
’s cargo holds, on the centre line below holds A to D. Hold E, behind the engine room, has buckled guide rails and is being used exclusively for break bulk. Most of this is low value: solvents and chipboard furniture.

Nageen takes the stairs back up into the iron house and climbs, weary, to his cabin on the fifth floor. The officers’ accommodations on the
Ka-Bham
are surprisingly comfortable after the lacklustre impression afforded by the rest of the ship. He has two rooms of equal size, overlooking the stern. The first room has his desk. It also has the biggest wardrobe, but Suniti says she’s happy enough next door. There’s a TV and a VCR in there to keep Sabir amused. Nageen glances in: the room is empty. Most likely they’re in the mess room, playing pool.