Dead Water (43 page)

‘The Soviets dropped bee shit...?’

‘T-2,’ says Sarah, helpfully. ‘A trichothecene mycotoxin. It infected the Soviets’ wheat supply in the 1930s and they were the first to weaponize it.’

‘Mould,’ says John. ‘Bread mould.’

‘Abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, prostration.’ Sarah counts the symptoms on her fingers. She’s proud of this: a lifetime’s recall still at her fingertips. ‘Give it a few days and you’ve got fever, chills, myalgias – bone marrow depression?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ says John.

‘Pharyngeal ulceration. Laryngeal ulceration. Melaena, bloody diarrhoea, epistaxis, vaginal bleeding –’

‘
Sarah
.’

‘The Israelis suspended their weaponization programme in 1972 but they couldn’t be persuaded to sign the UN convention. Indefinite secure storage was the obvious face-saver.’

John shakes his head. The rain has loosened his hairpiece: it is moving independently of him. ‘They’re a rum lot, the Jews.’

‘John!’

‘Well, it’s time they signed.’

‘I do hope you’ll write to them, John, and tell them.’

‘Sarah –’

‘I do hope you will make the effort to share your important political insights with Benjamin Netanyahu.’

‘If you’re going to be like that –’

Havard thumps the table. It comes out of nowhere. He doesn’t know he’s done it until he’s done it. He’s as surprised as they are. ‘Would you mind telling me what
the fuck
is on my ship?’

John flashes a mischievous grin. ‘
Was
on your ship.’

‘Don’t get upset,’ says Sarah, rather put out. ‘It’s not alive. Not after all this time.’

‘And what do I do?’

John folds his arms. ‘What do you do? Absolutely nothing.’

Sarah says: ‘Write it off. It’s not a big ship, is it? Not a valuable cargo?’

‘No,’ he says, defeated. ‘Not a valuable cargo.’

‘We’ll sort it out,’ John drawls. ‘We’ll put a call in to Ness Ziona. It’s their stockpile, after all.’

Sarah says, ‘I’m afraid the crew will have to look out for themselves.’

There’s a hand over his eyes, pressing his eyelids shut, he can’t see, and in the few seconds it takes for him to return to consciousness, Egaz Nageen is made a child again. Let me see the surprise. Let me see what you got me. But the hand is not a parent’s hand, Nageen is not a boy, and the hand over his face will not let go, it will not stop pressing against his eyes, and he wonders what this is, and then he remembers.

Egaz Nageen is cold all over. Every breath is a shudder. With every breath, gills spring open along his sides and ice-water gushes between his ribs. Only his eyes are hot, only his face, where the hand presses his eyelids shut, fiercely, as against a spring.

Time passes. A minute. Two minutes. Ice-water slops through every groove of him, every cranny round his grape-bunched lungs. How many breaths? Count your breaths. How many breaths to a minute? (He needs some grip, some control. He needs rhythm.)

He is aware, now, of other breaths, of other patterns of breathing, lapping and syncopating. They are together, then: the survivors. How many have been spared? How many killed? He’s still in one piece, just about. There’s been no payback, yet, for the boy he killed. Of course, he’s valuable: the captain. He’ll command a ransom. These other poor slobs are shark bait. Voiceless. Underskilled. Surplus to the industry’s requirements.

What of Suniti? What about Sabir?

This room is not cold at all. The cold is coiled inside him. He pictures it. A bristle worm. The cold will shake him apart if he lets it. He needs something to put between himself and the cold. He needs an idea. Or not even an idea. An image.

He pictures the hand across his eyes, or tries to: fingers curled against his face. If this is a hand, there must be fingers. Are there fingers? If there are no fingers, then this cannot be a hand. If this is not a hand, then –

He bucks, blindfolded, his body smarting against its bonds. His hands are secured behind his back with a cable tie; his eyes are bound shut with a rag. His feet have been chopped off and discarded, and chains loop round and round the stumps of his legs –

His blood pounds and his heart hammers, robbing him of control. Panic is cold in his throat and the backs of his knees. He bites down on his lip, hard, and blood seeps out, salt against his tongue. He takes a breath. A breath. A breath. He cannot feel the binding around his ankles. He cannot feel his feet. He cannot feel a thing. He has to assume his ankles are bound with the same stuff that’s pinning his hands behind his back. He has to assume his feet have gone numb, deprived of blood. He must conjure up things that are sane and real. He must assemble a world he can handle and predict. He cannot move; he cannot see, so he has to find some other way to hold on to the world. He experiments, twisting his wrists against each other. Plastic teeth chow down and the pain, catching him unawares, forces a sob from between clenched teeth.

‘Shut up.’

Not his voice.

‘Fucking shut up.’

Is it a voice?

‘Shut up or we will kill you all.’

It is a voice all right.

Footfalls. Heavy boots. The men who boarded his ship had bare feet: big, splayed toes. Who’s this in boots? He’s chewing something sweet and faintly rotten. Arabian tea. Khat.

Nageen fights the urge to curse. He fights the desperate need to do something.

He lies there, absolutely still. But something spills out. A sigh. A snarl. He feels the air moving around him as the man in boots draws back. ‘Shut up.’

Nageen’s head explodes.

Later – no telling how much later – Nageen wakes.

Footfalls. Heavy boots, receding. ‘We will kill you all.’

Same voice. Same footfalls. No time has passed. This is what Nageen tells himself. This is what he decides. I have not lost time. He holds on to the thought, as to a buoyancy device. One by one he begins to reel the parts of himself together: burning hands, needle-legged feet, a face as puffy as a mushroom, the flesh inside his mouth senseless and shreddable as tissue. He chews his lip. He needs the taste of blood. Why will his lip not bleed?

He must not stir. He must not sob. What is that noise? Please God, he prays: don’t let it be me.

It is a cadence he knows as well as his own, strained now, risen in the back of the throat. It is his son. Sabir is sobbing.

Footfalls. Heavy boots.

Nageen struggles to sit up.

‘Head down.’

Nageen hesitates.

The boots approach.

He waits for the kick. He needs to draw attention away from his son.

A hand presses his head firmly to the floor.

‘On the floor.’ The man’s breath stinks of khat: all green and rotten. ‘Don’t fucking look. None of you look. We’ll spray acid in your eyes. Keep your heads on the floor. Keep your faces on the floor.’ He rubs Nageen’s face against the rubberized floor and the rag binding his eyes scrunches a little; it pulls at his lids.

Footfalls. Heavy boots. Sabir is sobbing as the man lands his first kick. He cries out. A second kick to his stomach turns the boy’s cry into a gush of air, an unliving sound: a punctured inflatable folding up on itself. ‘Shut up.’

Another blow: Nageen groans.

Footsteps.

‘Don’t. Fucking. Move.’

Egaz Nageen doesn’t fucking move, and the man in boots moves away. As he goes he spits something out. It lands beside Nageen’s face. A gob of paste. Spent khat.

Nageen’s blindfold is dislodged a little. His eyes are fixed open against the cloth. His eyes are hot and wet and scratched. He cannot see a thing, but he is afraid to close his eyes, because if he closes his eyes, who’s to say he will be able to reopen them against the restraining rag? Eventually, inevitably, the irritation becomes unbearable and Nageen squeezes his eyelids shut.

And opens them. Not all the way, but a little. Snake-eyed, he strains for the light.

Nothing. He cannot see.

He shuts his eyes. Opens them a little. Shuts. Opens.

Nothing.

Perhaps it is night.

Perhaps, if he waits long enough, it will be morning and he will be able to see.

It is a start.

Hours pass.

Around him men are struggling with their bonds. (Is Sabir all right? Is Suniti here? Where are they?) Every half-hour the man in boots returns to threaten them and kick heads. He is becoming useful: a clock.

The smell of him – the smell of khat – is overpowering and vile. He’s chewing the stuff constantly, using it to steady his nerves. Nageen’s chewed enough khat in his time to know that this man’s only going to get more and more out of his head.

They’ve given him the job of guarding the hostages because he’s the weakest, the most anxious, the one they’d rather not have under their feet while they secure the ship. They don’t trust him so they’ve left him guarding the luggage.

Egaz Nageen forces a smile through broken lips, a chipped tooth. He wants to feel this. He wants to taste this.

They have made their first mistake.

Egaz Nageen wakes. His head feels as shapeless as a bag. It aches so much, the ache is a sound: a tinnitus that makes it hard for him to hear the rhythm of the ship.

There is nothing to see. No light. Still, Egaz Nageen squeezes his eyes tight shut, his lids scraping against the restraining rag, the better to listen. There is something wrong with the rhythm of the ship. There is something wrong with the engines.

Through the rubberized flooring, the rhythmic tremble of the engines has grown weaker and faster: the heart of a dying man.

Nageen’s own heart begins to race:
they have switched to the diesels
.

At sea, a cargo ship runs on fuel oil, but fuel oil has to be hot or it clogs the injectors. For manoeuvres, slow and dead-slow propulsion, a big ship runs on cooler-burning diesel. They are manoeuvring. Are they coming into port?

Nageen flexes against his bonds. He waits for the shout, footfalls, the impact of a heavy boot. If they are being watched, then whoever is watching them is a good deal calmer than their first jailer. Nageen squirms against the rubberized floor, seeking purchase. There is nothing to lean against. He clenches his stomach muscles and somehow manages to get himself into a sitting position.

Upright he can feel, much more clearly, the motion of the boat.

They’re still at sea.

Something strikes the ship. Not hard: Nageen imagines them coming alongside another vessel. Another blow reverberates through the hull. The sea is calm and they are in the middle of it. They are going to transfer the
Ka-Bham
’s cargo, and when they have transferred the cargo – what?

It’s happened before and it will happen again. In the scrapping yards corpses are discovered in a ship’s cold store, stripped of clothes, jewellery, teeth. Impossible to say whether they were crew or pirates, or whether they knew what they were, or cared, and besides the ship is dead and its paperwork leads nowhere, as usual...

Nageen bites his lip: the pain, trivial enough, is sufficient to bring him back to the present. He cannot afford nightmares. The whining and scraping is not Baba Yaga’s house, scrabbling about the deck on chicken legs. The ship’s gear is lifting containers off the deck of the
Ka-Bham
.

It’s brave of them to be transferring cargoes in mid-ocean. There is a definite swell. They are under a deadline. The syndicates are run these days by men who have no special knowledge of the sea. They are as likely as any city shipowner to tell a captain to ‘punch through’ a storm.

He bites his lip. He bites it, bites it hard. The moment. Stay in the moment. It is all you have. The clangs and scrapes come at him from different locations, different distances, and all of them just slightly below him. The sounds are clues: it is up to him to decipher them. He listens, he concentrates, he pictures the layout of the ship. He turns his head slowly from side to side, guessing directions and distances.

He knows port from starboard now. He knows they are high up in the iron house. He knows where they are. This is the mess room. It smells right: under the fug of khat and urine and unwashed bodies.
He knows where they are
.

‘Don’t move.’

His breath catches in his throat.

‘Don’t you fucking move. We’ll kill you all.’

Footfalls. Heavy boots.

‘You think the owners care about you? The owners don’t care about you. You think they’re going to pay a ransom? They’re not paying a ransom. You think we asked for a ransom?’

A click.

‘We didn’t.’

Nageen remembers being offered a cup of chai by Third Officer Waddedar.

There is a kettle here.

‘You think we want you to live? We don’t. You think we want to share our food with you?’

The kettle boils.

Nageen hunches, tense as wire.

The kettle rattles, plastic, lifted free of its base.

Footfalls.

Water dribbles. Sabir screams. The screaming goes on and on. It doesn’t stop. Steadily it loses whatever there was that was human in it. Whatever there was that was Sabir becomes pure pain, pure tone, and the scalding water pours and pours and pours, flooding Sabir, bloating him, washing his face away, his face just one big blister now, a white mask pricked with eyes: no more Sabir.

‘We have acid. We will kill you all.’

Ships lie gutted on the black, poisoned sands of Darukhana. Cut open, they yawn like mouths. Rishi likes to imagine them breathing. He likes to imagine them smelling what he can smell: gasoline, tar, solvent, bilge water. He tears open a can of Thums Up and drinks to take away, if only for a moment, the taste of this place. His home. His kingdom. The seat of his power.

This is recycling in the raw. Greenpeace may hold their noses and bleat about carcinogens but virtually everything is salvaged from these ships. Industrial fluids. Sump oil. Materials of every description. Men clamber from deck to deck, tearing through panelling and asbestos to get at the plumbing.

It’s low tide and the beach running between his workshop and the sea –
his
beach, his domain, fenced, signed, Private Property, Keep Out – his tongue of black and sterile sand stretches further than those pathetic kattas the river and Old Samey stole from him all those years ago.