Stealth of the Ninja

by Roy, Philip;

  STEALTH OF THE NINJA

  OTHER BOOKS BY

  PHILIP ROY

  The Kingdom of No Worries (2017)

  Mouse Vacation (2016)

  Mouse Pet (2015)

  Eco Warrior (2015)

  Jellybean Mouse (2014)

  Mouse Tales (2014)

  Me & Mr. Bell (2013)

  Seas of South Africa (2013)

  Frères de sang à Louisbourg (2013)

  Blood Brothers in Louisbourg (2012)

  Outlaw in India (2012)

  Ghosts of the Pacific (2011)

  River Odyssey (2010)

  Journey to Atlantis (2009)

  Submarine Outlaw (2008)

  Stealth

  of the Ninja

  Philip Roy

  STEALTH OF THE NINJA

  Copyright © 2017 Philip Roy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency).

  RONSDALE PRESS

  3350 West 21st Avenue, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6S 1G7

  www.ronsdalepress.com

  Typesetting: Julie Cochrane, in Minion 12 pt on 16

  Cover Art & Design: Nancy de Brouwer, Massive Graphic Design

  Paper: Ancient Forest Friendly “Silva” (FSC)—100% post-consumer waste, totally chlorine-free and acid-free

  Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the following for their support of its publishing program: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Book Publishing Tax Credit program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Roy, Philip, 1960–, author

  Stealth of the ninja / Philip Roy.

  (The submarine outlaw series; 8)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55380-490-1 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-1-55380-491-8 (ebook) / ISBN 978-1-55380-492-5 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Roy, Philip, 1960–. Submarine outlaw series; 8.

  PS8635.O91144S74 2017 jC813’.6 C2017-901133-2 C2017-901134-0

  At Ronsdale Press we are committed to protecting the environment. To this end we are working with Canopy and printers to phase out our use of paper produced from ancient forests. This book is one step towards that goal.

  Printed in Canada by Marquis Printing, Quebec

  for Leila

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Once again I would like to thank Ron and Veronica Hatch for their continued guidance in the creation of this series. I always strive to do my best, but they continue to show me how to do my best. Thanks also to Meagan and Julie, and everyone else at Ronsdale. A special thanks to my dear wife Leila, to whom this book is dedicated, and without whose love and steadfast support it simply would not have been written. Thanks to all my wonderful kids: Julia, Petra, Thomas, Julian, and Eva, who inspire me constantly to reach higher. Thanks to my wonderful mom Ellen for her undying love and open ear, and to my sister Angela, for her wonderful spirit and generous heart. Thanks to my great friends, Chris, Natasha, and Chiara, and also to the many readers of the series, especially those who take the time to share their ideas with me. Lastly, thanks to the teachers and librarians who invite me to speak with students in the schools. It remains by far my favourite part of being an author.

  “Ninjutsu concerns two ends, namely life and death.

  To be able to destroy but also have the capacity to

  cure—life and death are intimate aspects of the essence

  of ninjutsu, because it concerns survival.”

  — DR. KACEM ZOUGHARI,

  The Ninja: Ancient Shadow Warriors of Japan

  Chapter One

  There are places in the world where the sea flows in gigantic wide circles, like slowly spinning merry-go-rounds. You will find the strangest things drifting on the surface there, or just beneath it: messages in bottles, spiders in coffee cups; sea buoys, sea mines, fishing nets, fishing lines; living things, dead things, and plastic—endless, unsinkable, indestructible plastic.

  Most of it is just thrown into the sea, or dumped from ships, or carried down rivers, but sometimes the sea reaches up and takes it, along with boats, cottages, animals, and people. All of this stuff drifts around and around until it collides with a passing ship, or a whale, or becomes waterlogged and sinks. But some of it, especially the plastic, will float forever.

  Plastic never becomes part of the sea. Fish eat it, sharks eat it, whales, turtles, dolphins, and seabirds eat it. And it kills them. Then, when their bodies decompose, or get torn apart by other creatures, the plastic re-emerges to float on the sea again. Imagine if you swallowed Lego pieces when you were three years old, and they were still in your stomach when you were ninety. And a thousand years later, when archeologists stumbled upon your grave and picked through your bones … they found Lego.

  I dream of a ship that gobbles plastic the way minesweepers picked up sea mines during the wars. I dream of it every day as I watch the plastic drift by. I know that the sea is dying. I mean, the water will always be there, of course, but the life in it won’t. And even though there are still days when whales breach in front of my sub, and dolphins race playfully past, and flying fish soar over my head with the funny whispering of their fins, there are much longer stretches when I see nothing on the water but garbage and torn nets with rotting sea animals, as if the sea were nothing but one humongous human garbage patch.

  Recently, about six hundred miles southeast of Japan, I met a remarkable man who was doing what I want to do—cleaning up the plastic. He was an odd sailor for sure—very old and very ingenious, and his story is bizarre to tell. And yet, in the oddest way, he has filled me with new hope for the sea.

  I saw her for the first time through the periscope. From her markings I could tell she was a small freighter out of East Asia, with a sharp pointy bow and pointy stern, but she sagged in the middle like a deep-sea fishing trawler. She was reddened with rust, and as the late sun fell down on her, she looked almost more like a painting than a ship on the sea. As we drew near, I wondered if she had been abandoned. There were no lights, no flags, no visible cargo or people on board, and she was drifting sideways in the current. Barnacles and sea coral had grown into a grotesque skirt three feet wide at her waterline. She looked as if she had been dragged up from the bottom of the sea.

  I circled her twice, cried “Ahoy!” half a dozen times, and banged on her crimson hul
l with a gaff. Half an hour later I threw a rope onto her deck. It took four tries to hook it. I tied one end to a handle on the portal and moored the sub. Then, with a flashlight in my pocket, I shinnied my way up the rope and climbed onto her deck.

  Ships are like people in a way: they die young or they die old. They might get sick, or damaged, or even filled with holes, but still sail for a while if the sea decides that’s how it’s going to be. If this ship was truly abandoned, then by the law of the sea I had the right to claim her. I could tie a rope to her bow and tow her away, except that … there was nowhere to go.

  It would be impossible anyway. The barnacle skirt made her a dead weight to tow. And my sub was tiny in comparison. She was probably two hundred and fifty feet long. My sub was twenty-five. It would be like a minnow towing a whale.

  And what would I do with her if I could take her? She was just a shell of her former self; I knew that the moment I stepped aboard and began to explore. I could feel it and smell it—the smell of metal that has lost its strength.

  Oddly, I had a strong sense of being watched. I kept turning my head, expecting to find someone behind me. But I scoured every inch of her and never found so much as an empty can of beans. If there were somebody here, I would have seen a sign of it, something. Yet every time I turned a corner into a passageway, or climbed a ladder, or poked my head into a cabin; and every time I found myself back on deck, I felt someone’s eyes on me.

  And there were suspicious smells. On the deck in my rubber sneakers I’d smell the usual odours of an old ship: rust, salt, rope, and tar. But then, when I wasn’t thinking about it, I’d catch the scent of grilled fish, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. I’d look around and try to follow those smells, but they would disappear as soon as I turned a corner.

  And there were sounds. The wind blew across the bow, lifted a metal flap on the bridge, and dropped it against the steel wall. But that was a predictable sound, the kind you stop hearing after a while, even though it clangs like a bell. Down in the engine room, where the only light was the light of my flashlight, and where I had to brush spiderwebs out of my hair because spiders in this part of the world can be poisonous, the hull creaked and moaned like cows in a barn.

  But those were identifiable sounds. What spooked me were the smaller, sharper sounds, like a dropped wrench, or a tin can kicked by a foot. Those were the sounds I couldn’t identify, and they always came from the opposite end of the ship, and sounded as though they were caused by someone.

  And then I heard something that stopped me dead in my tracks: someone laughing. It sounded like a girl, but it was thin and far away. I heard it as clearly as my own breath, and yet I wondered if it could have been the wind, except that I had never heard the wind sound like that before. It echoed through the halls and walls of the ship and curled my toes in my sneakers.

  And then there were shadows: the ones created by my flashlight, and the ones that appeared out of nowhere. They spooked me at least half a dozen times, but were probably caused by my movement through the ship. There simply was no one here.

  I had seen so many things drift on the sea in two and a half years, but I had never seen a whole ship rusted out so badly, and so full of dents and holes that she should have settled on the bottom long before I was born. Here she was sitting on the water like a turtle on its back, as red as an apple, as lonely as the wind that stuck to her. Never had I seen a ship that looked and sounded so much like a living creature.

  I spent three hours exploring every inch of her, except for the holds. They were rusted shut. But they must have been empty, because they had sounded hollow when I banged on the ship’s side with the gaff. And the ship wasn’t sitting low in the water; she was about midway, which was probably only because she was carrying water. Why she hadn’t sunk yet was a mystery to me.

  At first hint of twilight, I shinnied down the rope, swung it free from the deck, climbed into the sub, and motored away.

  Half a mile north, I took a quick peek through the periscope. I wanted to see her one last time before the sun went down. Already her redness had faded to brown. Darkness was about to engulf her. There, standing on the bow as if he were standing on top of the world, was an old man watching us sail away.

  Chapter Two

  Night fell. I didn’t want to return to the ship in the dark. Neither did I want to leave. Normally I’d dive to a hundred feet, shut everything off and go to sleep. But I couldn’t do that or the ship would drift away in the night, and I might not see her again. I needed to find out what the old man was doing on her.

  And so, about a quarter of a mile away, I sealed the hatch—far enough away from the ship that we wouldn’t bang into each other, but close enough that we would drift in the same current. It was extremely unlikely anything would run into us during the night. Any other ship would pick us up on radar and veer away to avoid a collision. Still, I left the radar on, trusting that its beeping would wake me. I was a pretty light sleeper.

  I shut everything else off, shared a snack with Hollie and Seaweed, my dog and seagull crew, climbed into bed, and closed my eyes. But it was hard to sleep. I drifted in and out of dreams that the old man was a ghost. In the middle of the night I was sure of it, and it gave me chills knowing that all the time I had explored the ship he had been watching me. When the morning sun brightened the window in the floor of the sub and flashed flecks of gold through the surface, I decided to moor to the ship again, climb the rope, and find the old man.

  This time I considered carrying the gaff. What if the old man was crazy? What if he attacked me? I’d be safer if I carried a weapon.

  I thought about it while I ate a pot of porridge and drank a cup of tea. Hollie and Seaweed shared dog biscuits and water. They ate quickly and then stared at me as if they were starving. Nobody can watch you eat like a seagull and a dog.

  In the end, I decided against carrying a weapon. I was turning seventeen in a few days, and pretty strong. What chance would an old man stand against me?

  Seaweed came out of the portal while I climbed the rope and flew to the top of the bridge. That was good because I knew that if he saw so much as a mosquito twitch, he would squawk his head off. Seaweed was extremely attentive and probably the toughest seagull that ever lived. He could be absolutely ferocious on occasion, especially to crabs, which he liked to rip apart for fun and eat. Hollie was the opposite. He liked everybody and didn’t have an aggressive bone in his body.

  As soon as I stepped onto the deck, I knew I was being watched. I could feel it in my bones. There was somebody here for sure, hiding in the shadows. I pretended I didn’t know and went down the deck as if I didn’t have a care in the world, whistling a song to show that I thought I was alone.

  But it didn’t make any difference. I walked the entire ship again and found nothing. There was nobody here, unless they were inside the holds. And that didn’t seem possible.

  Then I wondered, was I just trying too slowly? What if I moved faster: would I catch the old man in the act of running from place to place? I would surely be faster than him, so perhaps that was all I needed to do—run around the ship as fast as I could, and catch him in the act.

  So I tried.

  I crouched down behind a railing on the stern and counted to a hundred in my head. Then, I burst from behind the railing, bolted down the starboard side of the deck, turned around, and bolted back on the port side. But my sneaker caught on the edge of a metal plate, and I went headfirst onto the deck, rolled a few times, and banged into the stern railing. It hurt so much that I cried out. I raised my head and scanned the bridge. Seaweed was still sitting on top, quietly watching me. He must have thought I was nuts.

  Obviously the old man was not on deck. So I went inside, rubbing my shoulder, and ran around as quickly as I could, which wasn’t easy. In the first place, it was dark, and the doorway between each room rose a foot above the floor, so I had to jump over them. Then there were ladders between the floors, and going up and down them as quickly as I could did
n’t take long to exhaust me. “This is ridiculous!” I said to myself, bending over to catch my breath. “There’s no one here!” If there were, I would have found him. There was no way an old man could outrun me.

  Down in the engine room it was too dark to run around, and the walkway was just an iron platform raised above the floor, which made it easy to trip and fall. I crept through as quietly as I could, listening to the strange moaning of the hull. And then I felt the gentle tap of a finger come down on my shoulder. I yelled, jumped out of the way, and spun around. There wasn’t anything there. I pointed my flashlight, but all I saw were shadows dancing on the walls. Then I felt the finger on my shoulder again, and I bolted out of there as fast as I could go, banging into the walls on my way.

  Back out on deck, I was sweaty, bruised, and seriously spooked. I had been touched by somebody, or something, and yet hadn’t seen a single thing. An old man couldn’t outrun me, hide from me, and tap my shoulder without my even seeing him, unless there was something supernatural about him. And that was unnerving. Before going back inside, or looking any further, I decided to get some water from the sub. I was dying of thirst and wanted to check on Hollie. The moment I took a step towards the rope, Seaweed started squawking loudly. I turned my head to look up at him, and nearly jumped two feet off the ground. The old man was right behind me.

  I jumped so high, and made such a frightened shout, the old man bent over in laughter, and his laugh was high-pitched, like a girl’s.

  He was a small man, but his hands were large and rough, like bear claws. He reminded me of my grandfather in that way, except that he didn’t look like a fisherman. His eyes were glassy like the fishermen who spent their lives on the water and grew an extra protective film over their eyes, like seals, but he looked more like a monk, or a priest. His face was gentle, kind, and wise. It was cut with laugh wrinkles, which meant he had probably spent most of his life laughing. And yet there was something about him that was sad, as if he carried happiness on the outside, but sadness on the inside.