Dead Water (44 page)

The call comes through on the wrong phone. He answers it anyway: ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Thank you for taking the call.’ It’s David Brooks.

‘I can give you one minute.’

‘Roopa Vish tried to sell Moyse Line documentation relating to the taking of the
Ka-Bham
.’

‘What documentation?’

‘All of it. Everything my girl fetched us out of Dubai.’

Rishi hunkers down against a dawning horror. ‘We’ll have to scuttle the ship.’

‘Yes, we’ll have to scuttle it.’

He closes his eyes. ‘Go on.’

‘Roopa contacted the line’s Toulouse office and by a miracle their people patched it through to me. I had to make a decision. I’m sorry.’

Rishi doesn’t have to ask what this is. He knows how this goes.

‘It was quick,’ David says. ‘As quick as I could make it.’

Rishi begins to speak but it comes out all wrong. There are no words in it at all.

David says: ‘Get the ship off the ocean as fast as you can.’

Rishi pulls himself together just long enough to say that he expects never to hear from David again.

‘I’m gone,’ David says, and cuts the line.

When Rishi’s hands are steady enough, he taps out a text message. Nothing comprehensible: just a string of numbers. He dials and the message flies far, far out to sea, to a man whose name he does not even know. He takes the chip out of the phone and throws both chip and phone into the harbour. He is being so careful, but still he has no idea – none – what he is up against.

Egaz Nageen is learning to see.

Bit by bit he has turned himself around to where he knows the messroom windows must be. Definitely, there is light. Nothing more than light, no form – but light itself is something. He tells himself this: a painstaking workman and fiercely sane. He is learning to see through the rag binding his eyes. He is learning to wring every mote of information from his tiny world.

The captives are fed. Porridge and fish bait. He eats, he gags, he eats more than he gags. He will keep this down. He gags again. Good God, are these men amateurs, after all? Are they only fishermen, driven by desperation? What’s an amateur now? The Somalis are fishermen. For years they were reduced to eating fish bait. Now they take tankers at will.

These are not Somalis. Nageen knows what Somali sounds like. He has heard practically everything but Somali on board since the cargo was unloaded. Indonesian, Chinese, Malay, Thai. No, these are an old Malacca crew. He imagines them, bound to their mothership, stranded at sea since MALSINDO drove them out of the Strait. How many years since they set foot on land? Four years? Five?

They take him to the toilet. He stumbles as they pull him from the stall, deliberately slumps, and his head cracks the side of the stall.

The rag around his eyes is giving way.

Sabir’s sobbing has shrunk to nothing now. The pirates have amended their mistake. No more heavy boots: just the slap-slap-slap of feet that have never known shoes.

‘We will cut you up. Heads on the floor.’

No more games. No smell of khat. No more chai.

Have they taken the kettle away?

Night falls. (There is day and night now. There is time. It is something.)

Egaz slumps on to his side and tries to sleep. He wakes up and feels something against his cheek. A hard wad of something. A dried bolus of khat. He waits. He listens. He cranes his head and takes the dry lump into his mouth. He breathes deep, trying not to choke. His mouth is dry. His spit turns to foam. He waits, he breathes, he tries not to choke. Eventually the lump softens. He chews on dead stalks, dead leaves. He will use whatever he can get hold of to rebuild his world. The khat is chewed to nothing; there is no goodness left in it, none at all.

He chews and chews and chews.

There is light. Egaz sits up, stomach muscles straining. Much more of this and he will not have the strength to sit up any more. He listens, turning his head this way and that, trying to get his bearings. There is something wrong with the engine. There is something wrong with the ship. It is listing. Perhaps it is the wind, the direction of the waves – No. The ship is listing. They have not trimmed the ship correctly. If the weather deteriorates, it will handle badly.

A can is lifted to his mouth. Dirty water. He drinks, tries not to gag, gags anyway, hunts for more but there is no more, the can is gone.

Slap – slap – slap. He glimpses movement through the rag binding his eyes. A mote of red as the can is pulled away from his mouth.

Esso.

It is an Esso can.

Night falls.

He tries to sleep.

‘Egaz –’

‘Shut up!’

Feet slap across the room, from door to window. (He knows where the door is. The window. He knows who called out for him. Suniti. His wife.)

Suniti cries out as something – a foot, a hand – clips her, hard, knocking her over. He hears her fall. She sobs.

‘On the floor now. Heads down.’

Obediently, Nageen rolls on to his side.

‘Kiss the floor, all of you.’

A different voice, from a different part of the room. A Thai. There are two of them. A Thai and – a Malay? Two of them. Now he knows, and knowing this, his world expands. Two men and an Esso can – and Suniti. Suniti is here.

He sleeps, sure now of his world. His wife. His son.

In the morning the ship is listing still further. There is something wrong. He tenses against his bonds. His feet are dead. His hands tingle. He tries to sit upright, falls back, tries again, falls back.

There is something wrong. Have they turned him around in the night?Has he moved as he slept? The list is wrong. The list is to starboard now. Yesterday they were listing very slightly to port. It is light. He can very dimly make out the shape of the windows. He has not been turned around.

There is something wrong with the ship. He closes his eyes, squeezes them tight shut. He cannot hear a thing. Only breathing. There is no vibration. They are drifting. The breathing is very loud. Too loud. It is not only breathing; and the other sound, the not-breathing – it is not a sound he knows. What the hell is that sound?

It is coming from below.

He jackknifes, comes to a sitting position, feels a muscle tear. ‘Hey.’ Nothing.

‘Hey!’

No footfall. No acid. No threat.

‘Hey!’

A constant hiss, far away, below them, below the engine room, where the cooling pipes run.

The sea valves are open.

Egaz Nageen drags his head back and forth across the floor of the mess.

He gags, drooling vegetal spit. His broken lips burn. He shouts, barks: guttural noises, more animal than human. Shallow pimples in the rubber floor tiles scrape and snag at the rag bound round his eyes. Now there is no one to kick him or threaten him or burn him, getting rid of the blindfold is easy – just a matter of patience and time.

Slowly, slowly, he rolls the rag from his eyes. His vision flares. Ink blots spill across his eyes and resolve into images, pure black on pure white. The edge of a pool table. Lines and squares: windows. Slumped forms. His crew. His child. His wife.

Long white bars. The room’s fluorescent strips are lit up. The generators are still running and even were they to die, even were they to be shut down, there are emergency generators hard-wired to the ship’s grid. These days, when ships go down, they carry their light into the dark.

He strains, sits up, feels muscles in his stomach tear. He cries. Tears roll down his face as he bends long-crippled legs. His feet are useless knuckles. He thumps and scrapes, begins to move across the room. Around him men flex, blind grubs against the rubber floor. He recognizes them. Chief Engineer Sen, First Officer Kamal. His son.

Sabir’s face is scalded white, blistered, smeared with blood where he has scraped the pustules open, fighting against the rag still around his eyes. Nageen is level with him now. Nageen wants to say how proud he is. He wants the first words from his lips to be words of love. He want his son to hear, his wife, and all of them, how much he loves his boy. ‘Shut up,’ he says, and kicks Sabir with senseless feet. ‘Shut the fuck up.’

The boy keens, sobs, is overcome.

‘I’ll break your teeth, you don’t shut up.’

Love, right now, would kill this kid as sure as a knife against his throat. Love will soften, will make a space for fear. Sabir will get no love from him. Not yet. If they go down, they’ll go down spewing hate and rage. His promise to himself and all of them. They’ll bloody fight. ‘Keep still, you bloody fool.’

Sabir buttons up, his scalded lips pressed white, his body slackening against its bonds. Egaz thinks his heart will burst. This much he allows: ‘I’m coming back for you.’

He thumps. He scrapes.

Why not an urn? Why not a samovar? Why not something bolted down? Whoever heard of a mess-room kettle? Stupid. Non-regulation. There’s the cord. It’s plugged in at midriff height, above the table, held by staples to the wall.

He leans against the table, takes hold of the leg with bound hands, and works himself backwards up the table leg, pushing and scraping. If he tips his head back he can feel the edge of the table. He uses his head, an extra pressure, kicks and heaves. He gets one shoulder on to the table edge. Don’t turn. You turn, you fall. His stomach burns and rumbles, torn to shit. If he falls now he’ll never have the strength to get up again. He shimmies, gets a shoulder blade against the table edge. Some more.

Don’t turn. Not yet. Now –

He turns.

He sprawls against the table, weak-kneed, held there by his weight against the table edge. It digs painfully into the bottom of his ribcage.

He’s not quite on, no, not quite stable, if he slips...

He moves his feet. He hops. The table edge knifes its way under his ribcage and his forehead bumps against the kettle.

His weight is mostly on the table. He squirms, nudging the kettle sideways. It stops. It sticks. The wire feeding the kettle base is stapled to the table.

The kettle is plastic. The switch is under the handle. He heaves, sticks out his tongue, and licks the switch. The kettle wobbles on its base.

He kicks, slips, recovers. He moves after the switch, tongue extended, hopeless, bestial, gets the switch under his tongue and lunges. The kettle rolls off the base and rocks away out of reach, against the wall.

Desperate, he lunges against the table. The kettle rocks. The table top is melamine. Nice, slippy melamine. He gets his feet under him and rocks against the table. The kettle skips and wobbles.

Six inches of this. Six inches to the side of the table. He breathes, he rocks, he hunts for rhythm. How long till it falls?

Behind him, blind grubs quest for light. ‘Mr Nageen!’

‘Shut up,’ he gasps, ‘shut up.’

‘Mr Nageen, the sea valves!’

‘Shut your face!’

The kettle falls.

Nageen tries rolling off the table, his feet slip out from under him and he falls, cracking his head on the rubber floor. His nose blooms, a dull flower of pain and tears spill from his eyes. Pain vices his forehead. He lies there, straining, clinging to consciousness. A minute goes by before he can think about anything but pain.

The kettle rolls by his head in a puddle of old water. Off its base.

Powerless. Useless.

He’s only half-done.

He shimmies back against the wall and jackknifes, inch by fractional inch, back to his feet. He edges round so his back is against the table, fingers weaving, feeling for the plug. He finds it, inches it out of the socket with his fingertips. It hangs off a staple. He gets hold of the plug and pulls, leaning against the flex. The first staple pops, his weight comes on to the flex and the cable stutters free as he falls to the floor. The kettle’s plastic base flies off the table, lands, and snaps in two. Nageen stares from piece to shattered piece. The nearest is the biggest; the plastic nipple that powers the kettle is still intact. The wire is still attached.

There are power points under plastic housings all over the ship. He just has to find them.

‘Dad.’

Sabir has worked his blindfold off. One half of his face is ballooned, unrecognizable. The other half is trying to smile. He nods spastically.

There is a ribbon of metal by his hip. A wire handle. Nageen rolls towards his son. Sabir sits up, shimmies round, gets his thumb under the wire and pulls. The housing lifts free. There are four plugs.

Sitting with his back to the panel, Nageen fumbles the plug into a socket. Is there any power? There’s no way to know yet. How long before the power dies? Emergency generators feed lights and pumps and automatic doors. The ring main’s an unknown. He plugs the wire in.

Sabir’s already wiggling over to the kettle.

‘Mr Nageen?’ The voice is controlled. Quiet. Manageable. It is Sen. ‘Hold on, Mr Sen.‘

Sabir nudges the kettle across the room with his forehead. This is going to take a while. Nageen allows himself a moment’s rest. The crew are sobbing. Everyone but his wife.

Softly: ‘Suniti.’

‘I’m here.’

‘Suniti.’

‘Shut up.’ It is Sen. ‘Shut up.’

There are footsteps. Voices. They do not come closer. They do not retreat. There are men still aboard. There are men inside the iron house.

They wait.

Sabir whispers: ‘Father –?’

Nageen shakes his head: shut up.

Minutes go by.

The ship lists to starboard. A swell runs under the ship. The kettle rolls over and comes to rest against its handle.

Footfalls, at a run.

They are gone.

Nageen lies back, raises his feet and drops his heels hard against the kettle housing. The plastic body pops from its base. This thing really is a piece of shit. Together, back to back, Sabir and his father manoeuvre the kettle base into the plastic nipple hanging from the power cord. Sabir has hold of the heating element. He drops it.

‘It’s hot.’

Nageen twists round as far as he can. ‘Get it off the wire!’ Sabir tugs the wire out from under the coil. As it heats, it turns from bluish grey to grey.

‘Okay.’

‘Dad.’

‘Okay.’

He can do this. His son’s taken worse than this. He studies the coil, its position and angle, then shimmies round. The flooring is already responding to the heat. He can smell it. He can hear it. A faint hiss.