Limit of Vision (40 page)

Ela
had been dozing when the first torpedo hit. She huddled on the floor, counting down the time until the second impact. Two million dollars for two carefully placed torpedoes.

A deep
boom
told her the bargain was fulfilled. The walls shivered. And then she was on her feet, ready to evacuate.

But minutes passed, and no one came.

The floor began to tilt.

Ela pressed her ear against the door. She could hear a distant, arrhythmic drumming . . . like fists against padded walls? Cries of terror teased at her mind, so faint they might have been imagination.

Then the cell door burst open, spilling her into the brig. She landed on hands and knees. Looking up, she expected to see one of the guards, but it was Summer Goforth. Her expression was wild, frightened and furious as she slammed the cell door back into its stays. “There are life jackets in the closet at the end of the hall!” she shouted gesturing toward the brig’s open door. “Get them out. Bring them here.” Then she stepped over to the next cell, and hammered in a code.

Ela scrambled to her feet. “Where are the guards?”

“Simkin forgot to tell them to take us out.” She slammed the cell door open.

“So we’re on our own?”

Summer punched in another code. “For now.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Ela said, reading the telltales on her face.

“Just get the life jackets.”

Roi Nuoc
were emerging from their cells, looking around with wary eyes. “Tell me,” Ela insisted.

Summer threw her a hard glance. “We’re locked in down here, on the lower deck. Daniel means for us to go down with the ship.” Another door slammed open.

“You said he wanted our
L
ov
s!”

“So far as he knows, you don’t have any!” Another door. “I’ve sent him a note clarifying that.”

“So we live or die depending on if he reads it?”

Another door. “Get the life jackets! Now. Get them on these kids while there’s still time.”

Ela grimaced. She wanted to stay and argue more, but Summer was right. They had to be ready to go . . . if they were to go at all. She crooked a finger at Phan and Oanh, and together they ducked out into the hall, sliding down the slanting deck to the closet, where they gathered as many life jackets as they could carry. “We’re going over the side,” Ela told them. “Be ready.”

Phan returned first up the passage. Oanh followed. Ela took the rest of the jackets and scrambled behind them up the sloping floor. By the time she returned to the brig, all the cells were open and half the kids already had their life jackets on. Summer was nowhere to be seen. “Where’s Summer?” Ela shouted. “The foreign woman.”

Ninh answered as he buckled a life jacket on. “She went with Virgil to see about the door. Take life jackets for them—and put one on yourself!”

A victorious yelp greeted Ela as she started up the passage. “They’ve opened the door!” Virgil yelled, his voice booming back down to the brig. Ela could see the foot of the stairs, but she could not see him. “Everybody out,
now
.”

“Everybody out!” Ela echoed, waving the kids past her. She stayed at the brig, making sure no one slid back down the passage. They were fourteen in number, fifteen counting Summer. No one panicked. They moved quickly, calmly up the corridor, like brave young soldiers from Marxist posters. Doubt was not allowed to intrude.

Oanh was last out of the brig. Ela followed her up the passage, catching her elbow as they neared the top. “Don’t wait too long,” she said. “We must go over the side as soon as possible. Make sure everyone knows.”

They reached the stairs. Ela looked up, to see the door standing open. The ship was listing so badly she and Oanh had to use the handrail to haul themselves up. Virgil waited at the top, a helping hand extended. “Summer said you planned this, that we’re to go over the side of the ship.”

Ela looped a life jacket over his head and helped him buckle it on. “Yes. We’ll be picked up in the water. Mother Tiger has it all arranged.”

He caught her wrist. “Mother Tiger?” Raw fear looked out of his eyes. “You’ve talked with Mother Tiger?”

An old panic stirred, and she tried to wrench her hand away. “Why are you holding me like that? Let go. What’s wrong with you?”

He released her wrist. He touched her face. “Ela, listen to me. We can’t depend on Mother Tiger anymore. Ky believed Mother Tiger caused Lien to die.”

“No. That’s crazy. You can’t believe that, Virgil. Don’t talk that way. Mother Tiger is our tool, our ally. It exists for us. Ky made it that way.”

“It’s changed.”

“Everything has changed! But it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. Stop talking nonsense, because this is our only way out. Virgil, we have no other choice.”

41

Virgil hesitated at
the weather door, wrapped up in a sense of doom. Their lives depended now on a
R
osa
he could no longer trust . . . unless the very fact of dependence meant safety? Mother Tiger existed to serve the
Roi Nuoc
. Surely they would be all right so long as they played that role? It’s what Ky had believed.

Ela glanced back at him, her eyes warning against any more crazy talk. Then she slipped out past the weather door. Virgil followed. The wind hit, slamming them both back against a wall. Two crew members were there, their shoulders hunched against the sheets of rain stomping across the deck. One of them clipped a lifeline to Virgil’s jacket, then shoved him toward the boats where the
Roi Nuoc
were being seated among a skeleton crew.

Dawn had not yet arrived. Clutching the line, Virgil glanced around at a dark gray sea raging beneath a sky of the same color. The bronze light of a setting half-moon leaked past a veil of clouds. Visibility was hardly a quarter mile even when the ship rose to the top of a swell. He could not see the vessel that would pick them up. He turned to look for Ela.

She held on to the line, a few steps behind him. Her wet hair whipped around her face, her dark eyes were stern. Her yellow life jacket looked so bright in the gloom it seemed to have an illumination of its own. He watched her hands busily unclipping her lifeline. She nodded at him to do the same.

Instead he leaned close, shouting to be heard over the wind. “Where is the other ship?”

“Gone! We couldn’t trust mercenaries to pick us up.”

“Then how—”

There was a cry from the boats, barely audible over the screaming gale. Virgil turned to see a peppering of yellow life jackets going over the side, pulled down by the white water of a clutching wave. He held the image in his mind and counted quickly. Nine. No, ten figures escaping into the black sea.

Ela’s hands scrabbled at his vest, fighting to unclip his tether. “Come on, come on!” she screamed. “Before they try to stop us. I have talked to Mother Tiger, Virgil. There is
nothing wrong
.”

Water sloshed across the rolling deck. The crew fell back from the boats in terror. Two smaller, slighter figures extracted themselves from the knot of panicked seamen and ran for the rail, pitching themselves over, headfirst into the storm.

Virgil felt his lifeline snap free. He stumbled backward, Ela’s weight propelling him toward the water. His mind was filled with horror. The kids were already gone, over the side with only their life jackets to keep them from drowning.
But there was no ship to pick them up
.

“Ela, we can’t do this! This is crazy.”

“Yes!” She tugged on him, pushed on him. “Yes, we were all driven insane by our
L
ov
s. They drove us to suicide. Now Virgil, over the side!”

Another wave washed the deck. Virgil fought against the retreating flood of white water as it curled around his legs, tugging on him. Then he looked up. Across the draining deck he saw Simkin returning to the rail to reclaim a half-flooded boat. Their eyes met, and in that glimpse Virgil knew that all the suspicions Summer had whispered to him as they crouched at the top of the stairs were true. Simkin had become a different kind of enemy, a hidden player in an invisible war. They would find no refuge with him in the boats.

The wave pulled away. He looked for Summer, but he could not see her. Then Ela tugged on his hand one more time. He turned. He put one foot on the railing, and as the side of the ship began to rise from the water he launched himself together with Ela over the side.

The
lash of rain had not prepared him for the shocking splash of the sea. Cold enfolded him as Ela’s hand vanished from his grip. He thrashed, trying to find her again, but everything had disappeared—the sky, the freighter, the bright yellow wink of her life jacket—erased by the liquid gray solvent of the sea.

Virgil did not go under, but it felt like he did as the wind drove salt water down his throat. Spume howled past his face as he crested a swell. He glimpsed the setting moon low in the sky, and then he spun half-around and went sliding down into a trough between waves, submerging at the bottom, only to be bumped up by something smooth and hard.

Stories of sharks were legion in the South China Sea. He thrashed and lashed out, but a mountainous swell was carrying him up again, and the phantom object was gone. He turned his back to the wind and told himself it could not have been a shark. Sharks were extinct, or nearly so.

The top of the swell blew off and wrapped around his head in a choking veil of white foam. Then he was sliding down again, and this time he saw it before he hit: a dark, oblong object just below the heaving surface of the moonlit water. He struck against it; felt the same smooth, unyielding texture beneath his hands. A hull? A blue hull.

He recognized it then. It was the marathon. Had Mother Tiger brought it here? Was this the rescue Ela had planned?

His questions fled as he saw the low mound that contained the hatch. He lunged for it as it went sliding past, and managed to catch the rim. But instead of the hard hatch plate, his fingers found a taut membrane stretched across the entryway. The hatch was already open.

As the marathon’s bow slid toward the swell’s crest he hauled himself over the rim. The membrane irised under his weight, opening just enough to let him wriggle headfirst into the little chamber, accompanied by a cascade of seawater. “
Iris!
”

He screamed the name of his
R
osa
, but it was Mother Tiger that answered. “You must bring my
Roi Nuoc
aboard.”

He lay still for a moment, stunned into silence by this simple command. It was exactly what the
R
osa
should have said, what he would have expected it to say if Ky had not sown doubt in his mind. “You saved me,” he whispered.

“That is what I am for.”

“But you didn’t save Lien.”

“Help my
Roi Nuoc
, before they drown.”

An ally or an enemy? There was no way Virgil could decide that now.

He sat up, slamming against the chair as the marathon rocketed down a swell. “Is this our only vessel?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“It is,” Mother Tiger affirmed.

Virgil could not imagine how they would fit fourteen
Roi Nuoc
inside the Marathon’s tiny cabin. All by himself he filled up the minuscule floor space.

Mother Tiger said: “Phan is outside now. Show him how to come in.”

Virgil looked up at the little hatch as the marathon churned in a trough. The membrane pulsed under the pressure of wind like an arrhythmic heart machine. A stream of water dripped through its center. Phan was drowning out there, along with all the other
Roi Nuoc
.

Moving quickly now, he opened a floor-level cabinet and pulled out a rope he remembered seeing there. He secured one end to the chair mount, then he stripped off his life jacket and tied that to the other end. “Is Phan still close?”

“Yes.”

Virgil stood, his feet splayed, using the chair and then the wall to steady himself. He held on to the life jacket with one hand; with the other he grabbed a rung of the hatch ladder and pulled himself up far enough to shove the life jacket through the membrane. The wind took it away, but he caught the rope and held on to that, then followed it through until he stood balanced on the lowest rung of the ladder, the membrane clutching tight around his ribs.

He could see Phan in the moon’s bronze light, gliding up the face of a wave. He was downwind, so Virgil let the life jacket pay out. There was no use shouting. His voice would never carry over the gale. But it didn’t matter—Phan had already seen the jacket skipping along the surface of the water. His eyes grew wide and white as they fixed on Virgil. For a moment Virgil thought sure he was going to turn and lunge away from this apparition, half-a-man standing above the wild sea.

But the
Roi Nuoc
had not been raised to superstitions. Phan lunged for the vest, catching it on his second try. Virgil hauled on the rope as the marathon accelerated over the crest of a swell, sliding down again in dizzy acceleration to splash against the trough. In the quiet interval as they rose on the next swell, Phan reached the marathon. Virgil grabbed him by both hands, then ducked through the membrane, dragging Phan after. They tumbled together to the floor, Phan choking, and gasping for breath.

“There are storage vaults here, and here,” Virgil said, slapping the walls. “Start emptying them. Get ready to throw the stuff out because we are going to need the room.”

Phan nodded, while Mother Tiger announced, “Ninh is outside.”

Virgil lunged for the ladder, resolving to accept the
R
osa
as an ally, at least for now.

Now
and then as she bobbed at the crest of some great swell Ela would glimpse a bronze half-moon persisting a few degrees above the horizon. Once, its dirty light sparkled across the dark shape of a distant lifeboat cresting on a swell. The boat’s storm canopy was buttoned down tight. It faced the waves as it properly should. Such modern lifeboats were supposed to be unsinkable, so whoever was aboard would certainly survive. She hoped Summer Goforth was among them.