Dead Water (40 page)

Nageen has another half-hour in which to brood before visiting the bridge again. He sits at his desk and flicks through the lever-arch file containing the ship’s paperwork. The crew are a worry. The same Spanish manning agents who’ve been providing him with strong motormen and oilers for over a year – and Croatian officers, conscientious and accustomed to low pay – have this time saddled him with a bunch of untested Bangladeshis. Their paperwork suggests experience but Nageen has a nose for these things. It could be worse: the
Ka-Bham
is heading north and west this month, towards well-policed Indian waters, and this gives him time to bring the crew up to snuff in time for Malacca in November. Still, it annoys him that in a few weeks he’ll be expected to nursemaid this bunch of itinerants through the world’s busiest narrows.

Suniti comes in brandishing a carrier bag: ‘I got us a fish.’ ‘Good God, where did you find that?’

‘You should get out more. There’s an entire village living under the pilings not three hundred yards from where we were berthed.’

Nageen is appalled. ‘In Gangavaram? You left the ship? We might have sailed without you!’

Suniti kisses the top of his head. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have gone hungry.’ She opens the bag. This fish is big enough to feed most of the bridge crew. An old hand, she knows how to charm her way into the mess room. Nageen pulls beers out of their refrigerator, making room, and puts the fish inside.

Sabir comes in, wanting to know all about the ship. ‘I’ll show you round,’ Nageen promises him, but the boy’s curiosity isn’t so easily sated. ‘What’s it done? Where’s it been?’

What’s Nageen to say to this? That the MV
Ka-Bham
is flagged in Tonga and mortgaged – through a Maltese holding company that exists only on paper as a mailing address in the capital, Valletta – to a Shanghai branch of Germany’s Bayerische Landesbank? That it’s operated by a company registered in Albania and Delaware, and maintained through layers of corporations in Austria and Liechtenstein? This much is evidenced by the papers in the lever-arch file on his desk.

‘We’re carrying ingots to Chennai!’

Admittedly, ingots of aluminium reclaimed from old drinks cans – but let the boy dream a little longer.

Covering 28 million square miles, the Indian Ocean is big: nearly thirty times the size of India. Run into trouble here and even the satellites may not be able to find you. Anyway, satellites provide only the most illusory reassurance. Providing real aid to a distressed ship involves more than mere intelligence. It takes ships and men. It takes guns.

Suppose you run into trouble at a point somewhere between the Maldives and the Strait of Hormuz. Who are you going to call? There are plenty of navies to choose from. Indian. Chinese. NATO. America has its Fifth and Seventh Fleets stationed here. It doesn’t make any difference. Look at the map. The big blue void. Your nearest warship is, on average, half an India away.

Time was, the Strait of Malacca, several days to the south-east, presented the greatest threat to the world’s shipping. Look at a map and you’ll see why: a full third of the world’s commerce passes between Indonesia and Malaya through a channel that’s only a mile and a half wide. Since 9/11, while resisting the US’s urging to militarize the zone, the region’s governments have banded together to provide effective piracy suppression around the Strait. The most you get round there these days is a little thieving from the anchorages; the syndicates have moved their operations elsewhere.

That, of course, is the problem. Since the syndicates started operating phantom ships they have no need of a land base and can appear out of nowhere, anywhere on the Indian Ocean. The ocean is big and empty and boring. The chance of one particular boat falling victim to a pirate attack in the middle of such a vast, featureless expanse is remote. Staring into all that emptiness, it’s easy to forget that on board a ship like the
Ka-Bham
the horizon is only about ten miles away. It’s easy to forget how quickly you can be taken by surprise.

It is a captain’s thankless task to remember these things and to infect his men with a certain amount of painfully manufactured paranoia. Ever since they manoeuvred clear of the Sittwe Deep Water Facility, Egaz Nageen has been playing the tartar, readying his inexperienced crew for the realities of the Indian Ocean. He has had the crew of the
Ka-Bham
on alternating six-hour watches since they left Sittwe, six days ago. They were exhausted when he arrived on board and he figures to get them into their new routine while sleeplessness and weariness are an ordinary condition of life. The ABs have responded better than he expected. His stern lectures and new routines have reminded them – after sixteenhour shifts spent stacking crates and weeks at sea slumped in front of Bollywood videos – that the ocean should be an adventurous place.

Nageen’s chief concern now is that they should sleep when they have the chance. Since they went full ahead, every fixture, fitting and door in the iron house has been softly, insistently rattling. Ghatak, the second engineer, reckons there’s a problem with the cooling system.

Twin coastlines, Sri Lanka to port and Tamil Nadu to starboard, are thin veins on a mist-blue horizon.

‘Port thirty.’

‘Port thirty, sir.’

They are steering south, around Sri Lanka. No big boats can sail between Sri Lanka and India. The waters of Palk Strait are shallow enough that there was once a bridge joining the two lands. (A bridge built by monkeys and palm squirrels, if you believe the
Ramayana
.)

Nageen has time for a shower before he’s needed again.

Sabir’s in his room, wrestling with his Xbox.

‘Problems?’

‘I think I have to tune it in.’

‘What?’

‘The TV. Only there’s nothing on the remote.’

‘Let me shower and I’ll take a look.’

He’s in his dressing gown, forty minutes later, still trying to persuade the cabin TV that it’s got a games console hung off the back of it, when the telephone rings.

‘Captain, bridge.’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

It is Kamal’s voice, high with tension: ‘Sir, we have a companion.’

A pale blue lozenge slips quickly and obliquely across the radar screen. Incredible as it seems, this close to the Sri Lankan mainland, they are being stalked.

‘How long have you been watching this?’

‘About an hour, sir.’ Second Officer Bose is hesitant: he thinks he’s done something wrong.

‘Very good, Mr Bose,’ Nageen reassures him. This is a busy, heavily policed coastline. No point in sounding the general alarm every time a fishing boat happens to shadow their course.

Egaz Nageen raises his head, his eyes filling with purple light as the sun sets over Trincomalee and sea the colour of wine. It will be night in less than twenty minutes: the pitifully short evening of the tropics.

If they are wolves, they will wait till dark before they close in.

Nageen throws on a windcheater and steps on to the balcony overlooking the starboard side. He lights a clove cigarette. He sees buoys and channel markers and nubbins of coastline, blued by distance. He sees sampans and fishing boats, sand barges and ferries. He cannot pick out his pursuers and he won’t waste his time trying. Their boat – an RIB most likely, with a couple of 100 hp motors hung off the back – is picking its moment, just out of radar range, low in the water. Invisible. There’s a fair chop this evening: waves high enough to obscure a low-riding boat. The wave action means that, even at this height, the horizon’s only about five miles away: you could row there and back. The
Ka-Bham
is high-sided for a cargo vessel but the transom rides pitifully low – a height any reasonably athletic man might leap for. (The pirates of Malacca used bamboo poles; they would shimmy barefoot up their poles on to the decks of ships that rode ten, even twenty metres out of the water. Strange, Nageen thinks, that he should feel almost nostalgic for this and for so many sleepless nights.)

It occurs to Nageen to make this a drill. Old hands might sneer, but there are no old hands on this ship. He fancies some fun. He goes inside and picks up the phone. The alarm system is old and scratchy and makes a boring nee-naw sound. With painful slowness, still half-asleep, Nageen’s men gather themselves into something approaching a watch.

Nageen patrols the platform. On the deck below two tiny men in white overalls and red hard hats are wrestling with a fire hose, a simple job made hard by exhaustion. For years the owners have insisted on operating with skeleton crews. Nageen has a dozen on board a ship built for twenty-nine.

The purple light of evening turns grey, then gutters out. Second Officer Bose wheels the ship’s Aldis lamp, lighting up the ocean with long, majestic sweeps as though watering a garden. Nageen barks at him to slow down: ‘Look what you’re doing!’

It is coming. It is really coming. Riding the waves. No running lights: a rigid-hulled inflatable crowded with men. The deck officer’s arc light sweeps, loses them, wobbles, finds them again. Impossible, at this distance, to make out how they are armed. Light artillery is common. Strafed by a Bofors gun for hours, an unprepared crew is quickly demoralized. A modified anti-aircraft rocket fired across the bows or into the side of its iron house has brought more than one ship to a full stop. The pickings are so rich these days, and the vessels so poorly protected, most ambushes are carried off with nothing more than
bolo
swords and box-cutters.

They know they’ve been spotted. They fall back. Nageen walks back to the bridge and orders evasive manoeuvres. The
Ka-Bham
cannot outrun the pirates but heeling over sharply enough, often enough, creates a hell of a wake.

Back outside, twin navigation lights spark in the darkness and now they return, more confident than before. They are waving, making an open approach. What possible difference do they think this will make?

The deck officer yells into his phone. Over the tremble of the ship, Nageen feels the shudder of auxiliary motors springing to life. Fire hoses spray the ocean wildly as the men fight to control them. It’s not an easy job and they’ve had no training in it. The men in the boat are professionals. They rev forward, over the
Ka-Bham
’s first mighty swell, and topple in under the light, and vanish.

Nageen yells a warning. Miraculously the hoses begin to converge.

It’s too late. There are men on deck. Too many men.
There is more than one boat
.

Nageen runs back to the bridge, slaps the big red panic button and sounds the call to muster.

He bursts into his cabin and Suniti shrieks, tightening her grip around their son Sabir. The alarm has woken them. They are still in their nightclothes. ‘Get back to your room. Now.’ He pulls the wardrobe open and yanks the clothes to the floor. The ship’s safe is built into the back wall of the wardrobe. It is vital that he makes it easy for frightened men to find. The sooner his attackers get a little of what they came for – papers and passports, a little money, US and Japanese bills, a wristwatch or two – the sooner they can be persuaded to leave. Even better, he should open the safe before the attackers get here. The keys are...

The keys are in his coat, in the wheelhouse. He feels the pit of his stomach fall away. He turns, sees his wife still standing there, their boy cowering against her. ‘For God’s sake, get in the other room! Don’t lock the door.’ Locked doors make frantic men more crazed.

There’s shouting in the corridor. Someone forgot to secure a door. More likely, the pirates have broken in through the windows. He cannot make out words. Please God no one’s stupid enough to fight them. The bridge gleams blue in radar-screen light. Gauges and switches twinkle: the grotto of an expensive Mumbai department store. The helm’s at full stop.
Why?
Where is Kamal? Where’s the bloody navigator? Where is Third Officer Waddedar? The bridge is abandoned. Nageen retrieves his coat, grabs his keys, and runs back to his cabin. Not much further. There are footsteps, the slap of bare feet on texturized rubber, and there they are, in the corridor, before him. They have ski masks. They have guns: knock-off AKs. One wields a cheater pipe. Another carries a sword.

Are they locals? They look like locals. Ragged. Feet that have never seen shoes. Please God they’re locals. Nageen and this crew can afford to lose their watches, their wages, their passports, a trinket or two. (‘Look! MP3!’)

If only the pirates’ AKs weren’t so shiny...

Nageen forces himself to breathe, to rid his muscles of every heroic impulse. What this situation requires, above all, is man-management. He holds up the keys. ‘In here.’ He walks calmly to his cabin. The room is empty. His wife and child have hidden themselves in the other room. The wardrobe is open. The safe is clearly visible. Good. Nageen crosses the cabin in three strides and stands in front of the door leading to the bedroom, and his family.

Half a dozen nervous men edge after him into the cabin.

‘The keys.’ Nageen makes to toss the bunch at their feet – and freezes. There’s a deafening commotion in the corridor. The pirates turn and turn about, trying not to point their weapons at one another. The youngest of them, a boy hardly into his teens, runs forward and digs the muzzle of his weapon into Nageen’s midriff. Nageen falls back against the connecting door, staring at the barrel.

There’s fighting in the corridor outside. There’s a gunshot, the first, and the kid jumps half out of his skin and leans the barrel into Nageen’s belly, and it occurs to Nageen, blinking with pain, that the kid wants him to get out of the way. He’s trying to get through the connecting door to the other room. He’s trying to hide.

It’s too late. The battle has reached the door of the cabin. Nageen glimpses a fire axe, rising. It buries itself in the false ceiling and sticks there, hopelessly tangled. The lights flicker but stay on. The intruders move as a body away from the door, yelling, brandishing their guns. It is a stand-off.

Nageen can hardly draw breath. The kid has winded him and it comes out as a scream: ‘The key –’

The kid, seeing the key in Nageen’s hand, pulls the gun from his belly. The axe, tangled in the roof, falls to the ground. Nageen glimpses Bose, his navigator. There are others with him. The idiots have armed themselves. Knives from the galley. Twist-locks from the deck. Bright steel glitters in the poor fluorescent light. Children! Amateurs! Bunglers! He is, in spite of their foolishness, extraordinarily proud of them.