The Consignment (20 page)

Back at the stern rail, the crewman kept calling me. Warily, I went across. I was almost beside him before I saw what he was pointing at. It had nothing to do with the radio. He pointed astern, and a flash of silver broke through the wake seventy yards back. A huge fish had taken the hook on one of my lines. The crewman spread his arms.
“Grosso,”
he said.
“Grosso. Grosso.”

The line was as tight as a bowstring. The crewman ignored my suggestion to cut the line, he went and fetched some gloves from a bucket. He pulled on one pair, made me put on the other pair, then together we started hauling in the line. I’d caught several big fish in the preceding days, but this was something else. God knows how the line didn’t break. We hauled, but the line kept slipping through our gloves, we hauled again and the line jerked out of our hands, then finally we gave up and dragged the line over to the hand winch mounted on the rail. The crewman braced his foot on the stern rail and heaved in enough line for me to get a couple of turns around the winch barrel. When he eased off, the line went taut, and I cranked the winch handle. A dozen turns, then I locked the ratchet and let the crewman step up. While he worked the winch, I looked up to the bridge. There was no sign of Rita.

After a minute, I was back on the winch, wasting my strength on a goddamn fish. We kept it up awhile longer, taking turns, then the line suddenly stopped moving back and forth across the ship’s wake. It stayed taut. I locked the ratchet and stood up.

“It’s dead.” The crewman gazed astern. “Dead,” I said, pointing back.
“Morte.”

He kept staring astern, and now I saw he wasn’t looking at the line, he was gazing much farther back, to the horizon. When I followed his gaze, I made out a dark shape above the horizon. As we watched, it got closer, then it split into three dark shapes. Jets. They climbed, then banked in close formation as they arced south of the ship. A second later, the deafening thunderclap of the sonic boom struck us, and the jets arrowed eastward.

F16s. I recognized the profiles. A plane that our military-industrial complex has never yet been quite crazy or greedy enough to sell to any nation in West Africa. Their carrier was probably astern of us, below the horizon. They must have been dispatched on a recce over the Congo—either that, or they were taking a dummy run over us, confirming our identity before returning to blow us apart. For several seconds, I couldn’t move. I stood rock still and listened, straining to hear. An irrational instinct. I knew listening wouldn’t help anyone if they’d already chosen to take us out. We wouldn’t hear anything except the explosion that killed us. Maybe not even that.

I looked up to the bridge. No Rita.

The crewman turned from the eastern horizon where the jets had disappeared. He looked up to the bridge, then at me. Finally, with a bloody-minded peasant stubbornness, he went and found another winch handle. He inserted it in the far side of the barrel and impatiently called me back to work on the fish. I dragged my eyes away from the sky. I grabbed the handle, my arm cranked around, and after a minute the hauling got easier. I glanced skyward several times, then finally the dead fish broke through the water just astern. It was a swordfish, its body about six feet long, with another three or four feet of sword. We strained at the winch, hauling hard, craning the weight up the stern of the ship, till at last the sword tip appeared at the rail near our feet. We locked the winch and the crewman went and fetched a gaff. He hooked the gills and we manhandled the swordfish over the rails onto the deck, then we stood over it, our chests heaving.

“Grosso,”
he said, and I clasped my hands behind my head and leaned back, looking skyward, breathing hard. The sky was blue. Not a jet in sight.

“What in the name of Christ are you doing?” Rita. I turned to find her approaching from over near the lifeboat. Her brow was creased, she was looking at my chest. I glanced down. My shirt was smeared with fish blood. When I gestured to the swordfish lying silken-wet on the deck, Rita looked at me as if I’d gone crazy. “Didn’t you see those jets?”

I nodded.

“So you went fishing?” she said.

I took her arm and drew her away from the stern rail. I asked her if she’d gotten through to Customs.

“No chance. I had a stand-up shouting match with Damienenko. He wouldn’t let me near the radio.”

“Trevanian must have contacted him.”

“Damienenko just about wrenched his neck getting a look at those jets. They must have something to do with this coup.”

“They’re F16s. The only force out here with F16s is us.”

“The Navy? Our guys?”

I nodded, looking skyward. Our guys. But did they know we were their guys?

Bosnitch suddenly appeared, shouting. The jets seemed to have struck the fear of God into him. He stalked past the derricks, shouting to the crewman who was prodding the swordfish with the gaff. The crewman answered in Ukrainian, he seemed to explain to Bosnitch about the catch. Bosnitch raised his fist, but the crewman quickly pointed back to the lifeboat and the row of lockers. Bosnitch shot me a menacing look as he heard the crewman out, then the crewman led Bosnitch over to the lockers. All I could do was watch.

Crouching, Bosnitch jerked open the disused lockers, starting from the left and working his way along. In the fourth locker, he hit the jackpot. He reached in and brought out the radio. When Rita saw it, she groaned.

Pocketing the radio, Bosnitch came back to us. “You will go to your cabin.”

“We want the radio,” Rita told him.

They eyeballed one another, then suddenly a dull rumble like distant thunder rolled across the sea. We all turned. Just above the horizon, a single F16 sped like a black bullet toward the Congo. In moments, the jet disappeared, and the rumble died. Bosnitch faced us again. He didn’t say anything this time. He didn’t have to. I touched Rita’s arm, and we beat a retreat to our cabin.

CHAPTER 25

“They can’t keep us down here.”

“They can do what they like,” I said. I was sitting in the upper bunk, studying the atlas spread open on my knees. Rita was staring out the porthole, searching for jets. We hadn’t been locked in the cabin, just confined belowdecks, a restriction any captain might impose from time to time on non-crewmembers. Even now, Damienenko seemed determined to play it by the book. He’d done that since we first emerged from the hold, he was no dummy. If Rita and I got out of this alive, and his conduct was ever exposed to official scrutiny, he could plausibly claim the restriction on our movements was necessary for reasons of safety.

We’d been to the rec room and found that the TV had been removed. In the mess, the crew kept themselves well apart from us, but their previous indifference had turned to a brooding hostility. News of the coup in the Congo had obviously percolated down the ship’s chain of command, and the crew must have known about the contents of the containers belowdecks. The pass of the U.S. jets had rattled them. We were not a welcome presence.

“Why do you keep looking at that goddamn atlas?” Rita said, turning from the porthole. “Put it down. Figure out how we keep from getting bombed.”

“I think we’re safe.”

She put her hands on her hips. “That makes me feel so much better, Ned, I just can’t tell you.”

“There’ve been three flights go over. There’s high-altitude surveillance too. If they were going to do anything, they would have done it by now.”

“If? Jesus.”

I reburied my head in the atlas, my attention divided between our likely location at sea and Brad’s camp at Dujanka in the Congolese interior, near Mbuji-Mayi. I prayed Barchevsky had the sense to get Brad out.

“Remember I said two days, two nights to the Congo?”

“Ah-ha.”

“I was wrong. We’re closer.” I turned the atlas around and placed my finger on a point near the West African coast. “I reckon we’re around here.” When she saw where I was pointing, she snorted in surprise. “My guess at our latitude must have been off,” I told her. “We swung south in the night.”

“If we’re that close, wouldn’t we see land?”

I climbed off the bunk and went to the porthole. “What do you see?”

“Nothing.” She looked out. “The ocean. Some clouds.”

“Seen any other clouds like that since we’ve been on the ship?” She thought a moment, then turned her head, no. “Long and low,” I said. “Sea air meeting land air.”

She peered out. “That’s the Congo?”

We went back to the atlas. The national boundaries on that part of the coast were irregular. A slim finger of the Democratic Republic of the Congo jutted out to the coast, giving the country access to the sea, but to the north and south of it the territory was Angolan. We were cruising, on my new reckoning, southward along the north Angolan section. I pointed. “We should reach the Congo sometime tonight.”

“We have to get off this damn ship.”

I closed the atlas, my fingers drummed on the spine. “The only thing stopping Channon from taking this ship out,” I said, “is us.”

“So?”

“Rita. If Trevanian’s client gets his hands on the Haplon materiel, a lot of people are going to get killed.”

She looked at me. “Oh, no,” she said after a moment, shaking her head. “No, no.”

“No what?”

“No to whatever you’re thinking.”

“We’re partly responsible, aren’t we?”

“Whatever you’re thinking, I’m not going to help you.”

“Help me what?”

“I don’t know. Destroy the Haplon materiel? Our responsibilities don’t extend to getting ourselves killed. My only responsibility is to get myself off this ship in one piece.”

“We’re freighting an arsenal into a war zone.”

“We?”

“This ship.”

“This ship isn’t us. I’m not the engineer and you are not the captain. God, yesterday you were fishing.”

“There wasn’t a coup in the Congo yesterday. Yesterday I didn’t see F16s tearing across the sky.”

“I’m not having this argument, okay? If the Haplon materiel ends up in a war zone, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but there’s nothing anyone could expect me to do about that.” She folded her arms. I slung the atlas onto my bunk and climbed up. “I’m not going to feel guilty about this,” she said as I opened an old Mario Puzo and pretended to read. She went to the porthole, looked out, then came back. “If I’d just used my common sense and said no to you in New York, I wouldn’t be standing here wondering if I’m still going to be alive in ten minutes, or blown to pieces.” I turned a page. “Don’t do that,” she said, and I put the book down. I lay down with my hands behind my head on the pillow. “And don’t sulk,” she told me.

Rolling onto my side, I cocked my arm, resting my cheek on my fist. “You want me to leave the cabin?”

She slumped back against the wall and slid down till her ass touched the floor. She bowed her head onto her knees, silent.

I let her be. I knew I was never going to convince her to help me, but there was an outside chance she might convince herself.

“There’s nothing we could do anyway,” she said, after a minute. When I didn’t reply, she looked up at me. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“We can’t destroy the materiel.”

“Right.”

“But we can get ourselves off the ship.”

“Why am I listening to this?”

“When we get near the port,” I said, “Damienenko’ll have to wait for a pilot to take the ship in. We’ll be anchored within sight of land. If we can get ourselves off the ship, get to land—”

“Swim?”

“We’ll take a lifeboat.”

“The last time I listened to you I ended up stacking cherries till I nearly died.” When I didn’t reply, she pushed her hands up through her hair. “You ever read that book,
Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
”

“No.”

“Me neither,” she said. “I’m starting to think I should have.” I watched her but said nothing. Finally she gestured despairingly. “So tell me about the fucking lifeboat,” she said.

In the hours before nightfall we wandered belowdecks, not spending more than twenty minutes in any one place, getting the crew used to the idea that we weren’t always in our cabin. We moved from the rec room to the mess, and along the passage to the heads. I even went below to the engine room for ten minutes till the chief engineer came down and chased me out.

After the first hour or so, Bosnitch stopped traipsing down from the bridge to check on us and bawl us out. At supper in the mess, the crew talked among themselves in Ukrainian, we didn’t have to understand the language to feel the tension. They were like grunts about to enter the front line, guys who knew their lives were moving beyond their control. Rita and I ate quickly, then left.

I went to the rec room and stuck my head in a book. The cook and some other guy were playing chess, distracting themselves from the reality about to break over them. They’d been playing for a quarter hour, barely exchanging a word, when the cook suddenly lifted his head. I looked up. The other guy lifted his head too, then I felt it. The ship’s engines were throttling back. They abandoned their game and went out. I crossed to the porthole, looked out, and saw nothing but black sea and dark sky. While I was standing there, the pitch of the engines changed again, the ship juddered and perceptibly slowed. I cupped my hands against the porthole glass and strained to see something more than darkness. When I couldn’t, I gave up and went back to the cabin. Rita was waiting for me.

“Did you feel it?”

“We’ve dropped anchor,” I told her. I looked out the porthole. I figured we had to be somewhere inside the mouth of the Congo. If we’d dropped anchor, we were also somewhere near a dock. But there were no lights out there, and no sign of land. I left the cabin and went along to the heads on the starboard side. When I looked out the starboard porthole, my heart leapt. A string of yellow lights, a mile or two away across the water.

Rita looked over my shoulder. “Is that it?” she said. I nodded, then she grabbed my arm and pointed to the right. “What’s that?”

To the right of the dock, and a little higher, a bright white light drifted down through the darkness. A flare. It drifted slowly, then two staccato lines of broken light appeared from high on the right, streaming into the docks. Four bursts, five seconds apiece, then the flare went out and night-darkness came down again.

“Tracers.” I stared out toward the yellow lights of the dock. “The first one was a flare. Someone trying to get a fix on someone else’s position.”

“Like a battle?”

“A skirmish.” We waited, but there were no more flares or tracers. “If Damienenko saw that, he’ll be wary.”

“Should we be reconsidering? I mean, is out there any safer than here?”

“Out there we can take our own chances. If we stay here, what happens to us is up to Damienenko and Bosnitch.” I turned to her. “You want to stay?”

She grimaced, then shook her head.

I decided on the lifeboat near the stern. Up on the bridge, all eyes would be turned away from us, landward. We could lower the stern lifeboat on the seaward side and make a wide looping run astern of the ship.

Back in our cabin, I explained the plan to Rita. “Give me five minutes,” I told her finally, “then come up and go straight back to the lifeboat. If anyone sees you, you just went up on deck for some air. Don’t fight it. If you’re not with me inside ten minutes, I’ll come back down, we’ll forget the whole thing.” I went to the doorway, then looked back. “You’re really okay with this?”

“Just go,” she said. “Before I change my tiny mind.”

I went along toward the heads, then mounted the first ladder I came to and climbed up, emerging by several deep piles of folded tarpaulins. There were coils of rope nearby, and barrels of paint, and row after row of steel lockers. It was a storage room with a door out to the deck, the place smelled of tar. I stayed low and peered through the windows aft. The deck was clear. I went out, crouching as I made my way to the stern. Outside, it was warm and still. There was a smell of vegetation and mud in the air, the fresh saltiness of the sea was gone. I moved from a derrick to an air vent, then across the open deck to the lifeboat. I went around between the lifeboat and the railing, then set to work on the lifeboat gantry. The only light came from the sliver of moon directly overhead, but it was enough to work by. It took me a minute to release the chain holding the first swinging arm in place, then I moved up to the bow of the lifeboat and started on the other arm.

I hit trouble immediately. There was a padlock on the holding chain. I stared at the padlock, momentarily chilled by the sudden wild thought that the padlock had been fixed there to stop us from getting off the ship. But the padlock, when I touched it, was rusty. Someone had simply snapped it on, against every safety regulation in the book, to hold the lifeboat secure. I glanced up the deck toward the other lifeboats. They were too close to the bridge for me to even consider. It was the stern lifeboat or nothing.

I made a crouching dash back to the storage room. After searching awhile, I found a hammer and a bolt. I was crossing back to the door when I heard footsteps on the ladder behind me, and I spun around with the hammer raised. Another step, then Rita’s head appeared. She gave a start when she saw me. I lowered my arm and beckoned her up.

“Couldn’t you get out?” she whispered. “What went wrong?”

I told her about the padlock. There were voices from below, and we fell quiet till the voices passed on. I beckoned her on, and Rita followed me onto the deck and back to the lifeboat.

I positioned the chain and padlock again, then I held the bolt against the padlock barrel and drove the bolt hard, like a nail, with the hammer. The chain slipped, there was a loud jangle. We stood absolutely still, the noise echoing in our ears. Finally I reached down for the padlock. It remained securely fastened. I repositioned the chain, lined up the bolt, and swung the hammer again. Instant replay. The slipped chain, the noise, and the padlock that remained securely fastened to the goddamn chain. I twisted the chain back into place to try again.

Then Rita reached over, grabbed the chain in one hand, and held the padlock in position with her thumb and forefinger. I looked at her. If I missed, her finger or her thumb would be crushed.

“Just do it,” she said.

“Hold still.”

I gave it one sharp blow. There was a single retort, no jangle of a slipped chain, but the padlock held. I repositioned the bolt, then looked at her. When she nodded, I struck again. The padlock broke open this time. Rita’s head dropped in relief.

Uncoiling the chain, I pushed the gantry arm, and the lifeboat swung out. I climbed up on the ship’s rail, leaned across the lifeboat gunnel, and released the rubber ties holding the canvas canopy in place. After flicking open the canopy, I got down.

“I’m going to swing it out and lower it. Once it’s down to the ship’s rails, I’ll get in. You wait till I run it down another few feet, then you get in.”

She glanced over the side, at the long drop to the water. “I could get in now.”

“Not till I’ve checked the winches.” I reached under the lifeboat, grabbed the keel, and pulled. The boat swung smoothly, I ducked as it passed over my head then out over the ship’s rail. Once it was out there, I locked the arms in place.

Rita whispered my name. When I turned, she was pointing landward. Halfway between us and the docks, a boat was coming our way. A small red light shone from its cabin.

“The pilot?” said Rita.

I grabbed the control line to the lifeboat pulleys with my right hand. With my left, I got hold of the rope-brake. I eased off the brake and played the rope out slowly as the lifeboat started down. Then the bow pulley snagged. I got Rita to reach over the rails and give the lifeboat keel a shove. She did that, and the thing moved again. When the lifeboat gunnel reached the ship’s top rail, I secured the brake on the control rope. I passed the rope to Rita, then climbed up and scrambled into the lifeboat’s stern. I loosed a few more rubber ties, pulled the canopy right open, then signaled for Rita to pass me the control rope and brake. As she handed them across, the lifeboat swayed sickeningly beneath me.