by Greg Egan
He said, “I thought that by going south, we’d get away from the violence: all the thugs would be fighting it out for a place where they actually wanted to be.”
“Looks like they crowded each other out up there,” Aaron replied. “So we got the worst of the weather, and the dregs of the criminals.”
“Maybe the weakest?” Matt suggested.
“Maybe. But if they’ve been cheated of what they thought they were entitled to, they might be the angriest as well.”
* * *
It was late afternoon when the Sereia rejoined the flotilla and the Mandjet came into sight. Thiru, Matt and Aaron took turns with the ship’s one pair of binoculars, scrawling notes about what little they could observe.
There was always one lookout with a gun standing on the deck above the docking pen, and another on the far side of the ring. They had water with them, and weren’t shy about urinating into the ocean without leaving their posts. For more than an hour, no one else could be seen, but then as the sun was setting Matt spotted Yuki being escorted from the control room to the fly hut. He couldn’t see her face, but at least her captor was neither pointing his weapon at her nor manhandling her. Fifteen minutes later, they returned to the control room. Matt hoped Arun and Jožka were in there with the fourth hijacker, doing their bit to educate the new owners. He believed Arun would have stayed calm, but he didn’t want to think about what might have happened if one of these men had been rough with Jožka in his presence.
Once night fell, there was even less to see; the Mandjet’s navigation lights came on, and the weaker illumination on the decks could barely compete with the glare.
Eduardo came and sat with them. “I asked around, and between all the boats we have a few handguns and a couple of rifles,” he said.
Matt was taken aback. “You talked about weapons, over the radio?”
Eduardo was amused. “No one outside Timor speaks Tetum . . . apart from the Australian spies who eavesdropped on our politicians when they were negotiating the maritime boundary.”
“Ouch. So do you have any snipers who can pick off four targets in rapid succession in a ten-meter swell?”
“No.”
Thiru looked to Matt. “This is your boat. You built it yourself, you know every corner of it.”
Matt shrugged. “That’s true, but what is there to use against them?” He’d never thought to include remote-controlled trapdoors that could dispose of unwanted intruders one by one.
Aaron said, “They’re not watching the cobia. If we came up from inside the ring, they wouldn’t be expecting that.”
Matt pictured it: the four of them emerging from the water, two on each side of the pond, climbing the ladders and crossing the decks so quietly and with such perfect timing that they could surprise both lookouts from behind, seizing their guns before tossing the hapless men into the ocean. But even if that Bond-movie fantasy came true, what about the other two hijackers?
“Is there scuba gear on any of the boats?” he asked Eduardo.
“No, all the diving gear’s surface-supplied.”
Aaron was defiant. “If I can make it across without scuba gear . . .”
Matt said, “They didn’t have lookouts then.”
“So we do it with snorkels. Stay below the surface. You really think the lookouts would spot a tiny plastic tube against these waves?”
“Probably not,” Matt conceded. “But even if we made it there unseen, and no one’s watching the cobia pond, once we’re out of the water we’d still be easy targets.”
Eduardo’s son, Murilo, approached the group shyly and whispered something to his father. “I need to read him his story,” Eduardo said. He scooped the boy up and carried him away, making a game of rocking him in his arms to keep him level as the deck swayed.
In the silence, Matt could hear the ship groaning from the stress of the waves. If they gave up on the Mandjet and lost the Golfinho, there would be no room left for a single mistake, or a moment of bad luck. Whatever else went wrong would kill people.
He turned to Thiru. “What do we do?”
Thiru said, “We take turns sleeping, and keep up the watch.”
* * *
When Matt woke, the clouds in the east were turning pink with the dawn. He rolled off his blanket and staggered over to the port side of the deck.
“Anything interesting?” he asked Aaron.
“Both of the lookouts changed shifts,” Aaron replied. “After they were relieved, they walked around to the toilet.”
That wasn’t much of a surprise. Whatever they’d grown accustomed to on their own boat—and despite their willingness to piss over the side when they were required to remain at their posts—why wouldn’t they avail themselves of the most comfortable facilities, whenever possible?
“That’s got to be something we can use,” Aaron insisted. “Maybe if we wait down in the pond until the shift changes, we can lock one of them in. Power tools and bolts would be too slow and noisy, but maybe someone has superglue.”
Matt said, “Lock someone in and they’ll just make a noise and attract attention.”
“They’re still out of the fight, though, aren’t they?”
“If the first thing they do is scream ‘kill the hostages,’ then no, they’re not out of the fight.”
“Okay.” But Aaron wasn’t giving up. “Then we go in before they do, and ambush them. Make sure they can’t make a noise.”
Matt felt sick: this almost sounded like a real plan. An assailant waiting beside the door could certainly surprise someone entering the toilet, though since none of the guns they could obtain would have silencers, the only thing that would work would be a very fast and determined garroting.
And all of it relied on a prior miracle. “Getting up there from the pond would still be too dangerous.”
Aaron wasn’t happy with this verdict, but he didn’t argue. He waited while Matt went to answer his own call of nature, then handed over the binoculars.
Matt settled into position, lying on his belly propped up with his elbows, sweeping the binoculars back and forth until he’d located both of the new lookouts. When they went off shift, would they be expected somewhere?
“Were the two of them relieved at different times?” he called out to Aaron.
“Yes. About an hour apart.”
“And where did they go, after the toilet?”
“To the mess. Then to their cabins.”
“Cabins, plural? They all have one each?”
“Well, these two guys went to different ones. I can’t swear that no one else ever uses them.”
Matt stopped asking questions and tried to concentrate on the Mandjet, but Aaron’s scenario kept playing out in his head. If each hijacker silently vanished precisely when their comrades expected them to be lying asleep in a cabin all their own, how long would it take the dwindling group of survivors to realize what was happening? Creeping up unnoticed from the cobia pond was wishful thinking, but there was another way.
He didn’t want to be a killer; he didn’t even want to risk his own life in the attempt. But if it was a choice between that and Selena and his mother on a lifeboat, Eduardo’s family on a lifeboat, Thiru’s nieces and nephews drowning as the overcrowded trawler capsized, it would be monstrous to stay silent and pretend that he had no idea how to fix Aaron’s flawed plan.
He waited for Thiru to wake and join them. Then he put down the binoculars and told Aaron to repeat what he’d seen.
Thiru was unimpressed.
Matt said, “The thing is, I think we can get into the toilet without anyone seeing us. But we don’t go through the cobia pond. We go through the inside of the pontoon.”
They both got his meaning at once, but he sketched out the details. There was a service hatch on the underside of every pontoon, and though it wasn’t intended to be opened while the thing was immersed, it would just be a matter of someone unscrewing a few bolts, moving the panel away to let the team through, then replacing ever
ything so the water didn’t keep sloshing in.
There was also a hatch in the toilet that was meant to grant access to the plumbing if anything went wrong—and when he’d been completing the design, Matt had been claustrophobic enough to ensure that it could be opened from either side. He’d had no intention of ending up trapped among the sewage pipes because the thing had swung shut from the rocking of the Mandjet.
Thiru said, “It’s not going to be simple to work on the pontoon while it’s moving.” He gestured at the waves. “You can undo a bolt in these conditions?”
Matt had thought about that as he was speaking. “Maybe, maybe not.” He wasn’t going to make extravagant claims for himself on the basis of welding the Sophia’s propeller, when he’d been strapped to a wooden frame that was rigidly locked to the hull. “Maybe no one can. But I know someone who came close.”
Eduardo was already up, cooking breakfast for his wife and kids, but it took Matt a while to work up the courage to bring him in on the plan and make a request.
“Will you ask Luís if he’ll help us?”
Eduardo thought for a while. Luís had young children, but if he joined the team he would not be coming on board the Mandjet; he just had to open the access panel, then close it behind them. “You’re sure he can do this?”
Matt said, “I think he has a good chance. There might be someone better, but I wouldn’t know who.”
“What if I describe the job to everyone, and see who volunteers?”
“Now you want to give away the whole plan over the radio?” Matt joked.
Eduardo said, “I’ll take that as a yes. I’ll get you an answer within an hour.”
Matt went back to the observation post, where Thiru was taking his turn with the binoculars.
“So this guy Luís is joining us?” Aaron asked.
“We’ll know in a little while,” Matt replied. The more the pieces came together, the sicker he felt. They could plan, and they could argue, and they could joke, but it would all amount to nothing unless it ended with the right four people dead. He could understand if the men had been desperate, but why couldn’t they have approached the flotilla and asked for help, like the Sri Lankans? “Maybe we can just gag them,” he said.
Thiru was listening. “Don’t be crazy. You think the three of us can keep a man with an automatic weapon silent one hundred percent while we shove a sock in his mouth?”
“Have you ever killed someone?” Matt asked him.
“No.” Thiru put down the binoculars and turned to him. “And I’d keep it that way if I could. But if these men make one sound, what do their associates do? Slit my mother’s throat, my sister’s throat? Maybe kill your three friends?”
Matt walked over to the side of the boat and threw up.
Thiru took this as a lesson. “We should fast until it’s done. Nothing but water. Vomit when you’re trying to swim, and you could drown. Do it when you’re trying to take one of these fuckers by surprise, and we could all get killed.”
* * *
Eduardo received offers from three volunteers; Luís was one of them. He talked it over with Matt, and they agreed that he’d be the best choice.
“Now we have to get him to the Sereia without attracting too much attention,” Eduardo fretted. “Maybe we need to fall behind again; the Sophia is already lagging.”
Matt had no idea what the lookouts on the Mandjet would make of the shifting positions of the individual boats in the flotilla. He just hoped there’d already been enough random shuffling from the vagaries of the currents that the Sereia’s deliberate trajectory seemed no different.
They fell back beside the Sophia and brought Luís on board, the way Matt and Thiru had come. He greeted Matt enthusiastically. “This is a good plan. We can do it.”
“Do you need a rehearsal?” Matt asked. “Maybe we could build something here to practice on.”
“No, no, no! I had the rehearsal. We need to do this tonight.”
The four of them sat with Eduardo, trying to map out each step of the plan. Between the Sophia and the Sereia they had already assembled enough face masks, snorkels, tools and rope—or at least the rope Luís would need to help hold him to the bottom of the pontoon.
“So what do we use on the hijackers?” Matt wondered, miming the fatal action. “What thickness would work best?”
No one offered suggestions.
“Is there someone we can call who might know?” he asked Eduardo. “João, Martinho . . . ?”
Eduardo was baffled. “Why would they know that?”
“They lived through the occupation, didn’t they?”
“Yes. But they were just fishermen. They weren’t Fretilin assassins, sneaking through the jungle taking out Indonesian soldiers.”
Matt was past caring about making a fool of himself. “Okay, so we’ve got no experienced killers around except for the four on the Mandjet. We’ll just have to work it out for ourselves. I’m guessing about five millimeters: that’s thick enough not to break under the strain, and thin enough to cut deep into the windpipe. And I’m pretty sure most versions came with wooden hand grips.”
Everyone was silent for a while, then Eduardo said, “We have some fishing line like that, and I think I can adapt the grips from a couple of power drills.”
* * *
When night fell, Eduardo began moving the Sereia into position, then he and Matt worked together to take account of every factor they could think of, so that the team would be transported from their starting point to the Mandjet with a minimum of effort.
“I’m impressed that you can still remember the formula for Stokes drift,” Matt confessed. “I don’t think I’ve ever used that since my final fluid dynamics exam.”
“What’s to remember? It’s just dimensional analysis: if you screwed up the formula, the units would make no sense.”
“Yeah, but one form has factors of two pi in it, and one doesn’t. How do you know which is which?”
Eduardo said, “Please stop talking, before I start wondering if I’ve got that the wrong way around.”
He made the final adjustments, then radioed the Polvo with the course they’d need to follow in order to pick up Luís—or maybe the whole team, if they missed their target.
Matt left the wheelhouse and joined the others on deck. Eduardo had got everyone else out of sight, sparing the team the distraction of onlookers. In the starlight, the towering waves appeared to be rolling away toward the Mandjet with the speed of a fast car, but it was mostly just the pattern of peaks and troughs that was moving, not the water itself, and the final calculations had predicted something more like a slow jog overall—or a fast jog with frequent reversals.
“Don’t fight the water,” Matt stressed. “When you go backward, it’ll only be temporary. Save all your energy for controlling your depth and making sure you can breathe when you need to.”
“Okay,” Aaron replied. Thiru and Luís just looked impatient. Matt put on his face mask, clipped the snorkel to its side, and bit down on the mouthpiece. The first time he’d been snorkeling he’d been twelve years old, on a family trip to Queensland. He tried to calm himself with the memory of placid turquoise water and bright tropical fish, but the whole reef would be gone now, a skeleton crumbling into white powder.
Luís climbed up onto the side of the boat, facing the deck, and back-flipped into the water. Matt followed, afraid that if he hung back he’d be paralyzed. Submerged, in the dark, his body struck the hull, battering his left shoulder, but as he swam to the surface and blew air out of the snorkel, he looked back and saw that he was already five or six meters away from the Sereia. He waited until he’d seen both Thiru and Aaron emerge, then he put his face down and surrendered to the waves.
When he tried to rise again to breathe, he felt himself being dragged down, however forcefully he swam upward. He stopped struggling and waited, counting slowly in his head; nothing could persist, everything was cyclic. Five. Six. Seven. Right on cue, the column of water in th
e snorkel yielded to his cautious attempt at exhalation. He emptied his lungs and refilled them quickly, then the water pulled him down.
The next time he ascended he was better prepared, and he raised his head high enough to catch a glimpse of the lights from the Mandjet in the distance, more or less where he’d expected them to be. He was high on a wave, just ahead of the crest—then he was plunged beneath the surface again.
Five minutes. If the pattern persisted, he could keep this up for five minutes. He counted and exhaled, but then took in a mouthful of seawater and spluttered as he went down. He coughed the water out of his airway and tried to swallow it, just to be rid of it, but some pressure gradient between his organs refused to accept the tactic, and the more he pushed the more it felt like a threat to his eardrums, or worse.
He stroked upward, hit the surface, spat out the mouthpiece and the water behind it, then drew in clear air before the churning dragged him down. In the depths, he got the mouthpiece back in without swallowing more water, just in time to take another breath when he rose again.
His confidence was shaken, but he felt his way back into the rhythm. He could still feel salt water sloshing around in his sinuses, but if he sneezed into his faceplate it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Better him than Luís.
The more time passed, the stronger the temptation grew to surface fully again to check his progress, but he forced himself to take the danger of being spotted seriously. The lookouts might be bored witless, and expecting a boat if they were expecting anything, but if he stuck his head out of the water into the beam of one of the navigation lights, he would not be inconspicuous.
A minute later he saw the lights anyway, penetrating the water. Eduardo had not mislaid any factors of pi: he’d put the team right on target.
The light intensified, then retreated, then disappeared completely behind the fiberglass of the pontoon. Matt swam down hard then stretched his arms out; he collided with the net and dug his fingers into the holes. The waves wanted to keep playing their dunking game, but he clung on tightly until he’d shifted into a new rhythm, dampened by the inertia of the net.