The Devil's Waters

by David L. Robbins

  LB held open the infirmary door for Grisha to follow into the hall, to talk without waking the injured.

  “I’ll be staying on board with you to Djibouti. That all right?”

  “Yes. That is excellent news.”

  “So, how’d this happen?”

  The first mate rubbed the bridge of his nose, tired. “This morning before breakfast, Nikita inspected engine with cadet. On catwalk along the pistons. No warning, cylinder seven blew. The boy was closest, burned by steam from gasket, then blown into Nikita, who hit rail with his back. And derr`mo, here we are.”

  “I heard the chief say he didn’t know what caused it.”

  “I do not know this Razvan much. He is Romanian. Shipping company normally puts Russian officers together. He seems clever. I think he will find. He is always in engine room. Go ask him. But you know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “Eto piz`dets.” This is fucked up.

  In the elevator, LB punched the button for the engine control room. The doors opened into a room without windows, only rows of computer screens above a lengthy desk and a massive bank of fuse panels, switches, gauges, and LCD readouts. Chief Razvan sat chin in hand, staring into one screen, a sheaf of computer printouts in front of him. The room pulsed with a low, droning burr from the great engine behind the walls.

  “Chief. May I come in?”

  “Enter.”

  LB took the swivel chair beside him. The Romanian worked off three computer screens at once, each with different schematics. The one in front of LB depicted the eight pistons of the ship’s engine, all rising and falling in rhythm except for number seven, which stood inert and bathed in red.

  Razvan made notations on his papers. The information on all sides of LB was indecipherable. He sat in the belly of a modern cargo ship, a miracle of electronics, mechanics, girth, and power. The chief engineer on this freighter had to be a whiz kid in several fields.

  LB waited until Razvan finished his scrutinizing and note taking.

  The chief looked up. “The second engineer and cadet. Their condition.”

  “We’ve got the cadet on fluids; he’s stable but in and out of consciousness. Nikita’s on steroids. We’ll have to wait and see where things go.”

  “The boy. He looked bad.” The Romanian shook his gray head, tongue stuck behind his lips. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  LB tapped the image of the dead cylinder seven on the screen in front of him.

  “That why we’re going twelve knots?”

  Razvan blew out his cheeks. “Pfff. This captain. He would go twenty-five if I turn my back.”

  “Why?”

  “These are pirate waters. You are soldier; you know this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We are sitting like ducks going this speed. Drozdov is nervous. But we cannot go faster. Seven pistons cannot balance. Vibration will damage bearings, shaft, other pistons.”

  “What about the guards?”

  “Ah, yes. You may sleep well being guarded by Serbs. I do not.”

  LB didn’t inquire; the antagonisms of Central Europe were ancient and as inscrutable to an outsider as the machines around him.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “What do you know about engines?”

  “Compared to you, or a kid from Sacramento?”

  “Me.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Good. I don’t like opinions.”

  “I’m the same. My motto is, when in doubt, I go with me.”

  Razvan cracked his first grin. “Okay. This accident. It was an untimed injection.”

  “I’ve done that before.”

  “You can stop now, Sergeant.”

  LB raised a hand to yield. Chief continued.

  “The engine runs on heavy fuel oil. In normal operation, piston comes up, goes down. Every second revolution, at specific point, fuel is injected into top of cylinder. Pressure increases as piston rises, until fuel ignites. At this exact moment, when piston is pushed back down by explosion, exhaust portal at top of cylinder opens to release waste gases. But…”

  Chief laid a long finger to the screen in front of LB, where an animation showed seven of the eight pistons still pumping. He selected one tall cylinder.

  “If fuel comes into cylinder at wrong time…” Chief knocked the computerized image. “Now! When the piston is in wrong place, explosion happens too soon. Exhaust portal is not open. Too much pressure builds up in cylinder, and boom.”

  LB had worked on enough engines to know what boom meant. “The head gasket blows.”

  “Yes. Cylinder cracks. Water flows into cylinder.”

  “Steam.”

  “Then accident. Two men standing in front of discharge from broken gasket.”

  “The call goes out, and here I am.”

  “With our happy crew.”

  “What time did it happen?”

  Chief flipped to find the proper computer sheet. “Oh-four-forty-eight hours, thirty-five-point-oh-nine seconds.”

  “Exact.”

  “Right now, time is all I know. Cause is not so easy. I am compiling data. Voltage records, alarms, pressure, injector rates.” Razvan flopped a hand on the stack of papers. “Duten pula calului.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Go to horse dick.”

  “Man. I love how you guys cuss.”

  “An odd thing to love.”

  “Can you show me where it happened?”

  Chief cocked an eyebrow, quickly suspicious. LB wondered if growing up under secret police had made the crew on this boat itchy. Or if this unexplained voyage from Vladivostok to Beirut was doing it.

  “You are investigator now?”

  “No. I’m stuck on this ship for two days. What else is there to do?”

  Chief hunched. “Okay.”

  He handed LB ear protection headgear. Sliding on his own muffs, he opened a thick door. A fleet, warm gush of air greeted them on a suspended platform. They looked down over a massive room, a collection of steel blocks, rods, trusses, pipes, every hard bit of it adding its bawl and whine to stir the roar rattling LB’s chest, rapping on the pads blocking his ears. He lifted one earpiece for a moment to hear the real, deafening din.

  Razvan led him down the stairwell. The floor under this hive of machines did not tremble as LB thought it might. It felt concrete. Even with a ruined piston, Chief’s engine ran balanced and tuned, just as he said.

  Without turning to see if LB followed, Chief strode purposefully through a warren of equipment and apparatuses, all interconnected by cables, ducts, and miles of electric wire. The primary color was a mute yellow, with interruptions of battleship gray. The bolts and nuts holding everything together were the size of LB’s fists. He recognized nothing; not a piece resembled anything in a regular car or boat motor. The scale of the freighter’s engine beggared any machine LB had seen, even on naval ships. The Valnea’s engine was dazzling, even chugging at half speed.

  Razvan ducked into the maze, beneath a web of catwalks and beams, conducting the tour at a long-legged gait without pause or explanations. Along the way, LB stayed lost. He could not find his way out if Razvan took a powder on him down here. He made out only one recognizable thing: a spinning black shaft the size of a tree trunk, horizontal, disappearing into the hull. Attached to the other end must have been the gargantuan propeller to push this ship.

  Rounding a final corner, Chief mounted a platform running beside the heart of the engine, the row of oversize pistons. He strode down the line of chrome and copper cylinder housings, setting a hand to some to feel for the enemy in this room, vibration. At the seventh, he finally faced LB. Beneath the raging sounds of the engine room, he mouthed, “Each one weighs four tons.” Then, unexpectedly, he playacted the moment of injury for the second engineer Nikita, slamming himself into the railing in slow motion.

  The quiet piston casing was not blackened or warped by the incident, though its housing, gears, cables, dials sat motionl
ess. Razvan laid hands on the casing to draw forth the sense of its failure. Chief showed no disdain or anger for piston seven; nothing in his engine room lost value just because it was out of order. LB, who saved broken men, admired this.

  Chapter 9

  Somali dhow

  Gulf of Aden

  In late afternoon, a helicopter flew their way to investigate the dhow.

  Yusuf shouted for his crew to look like fishermen. The men quickly dropped lines without lures, climbed into the skiffs to cast and trail nets; one-eared Deg Deg steered a wide circle as if trawling. By the time the copter arrived, bearing the markings of the Chinese navy, Yusuf and his pirates looked engaged and innocent. They waved madly and stupidly until the hovering copter and its guns veered away.

  Within the hour, a convoy of freighters and low-riding tankers appeared over the horizon. Six ships in a line, all making fifteen knots, filed past Yusuf’s dhow two miles away. Like a herding dog, the brute Chinese warship kept a steady distance from the ships. Deg Deg slowed the dhow; they would drift here on the rim of the transit corridor and watch the parade of commercial freighters and their bristling escort.

  Six hours remained to sundown. Bobbing on gentle swells, ready to take up make-believe fishing at a moment’s notice, Yusuf and the crew marked the passing of every vessel plying the path to and from Suez. Gigantic container ships more than three hundred meters long scudded past, loaded with mountains of cargo. From miles away, Yusuf and Suleiman could read the company names painted in huge letters across their hulls: Maersk from Denmark, Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, Switzerland’s MSC, COSCO of China, Israel’s ZIM. These ships employed the latest designs—bulbous bows, immense length, and tremendous engines. They sailed without the protection and bother of convoys, lone fortresses made impregnable by their speed and high freeboard.

  Automobile haulers cruised by, leviathans from Korea and Japan headed to European or Saudi markets. Ponderous, high-walled, and ungainly as they looked, with all their cargo shielded belowdecks, they were nevertheless among the fastest freighters on the water.

  Humbler ships, flagged out of Liberia, Panama, the Marshall Islands, Portugal, were more common on the gulf—brown-hulled chemical and oil tankers, rust-bucket cargo ships, commercial fishing vessels with arms spread wide, trawlers, net seiners, longliners swarmed by gulls when catching. Indian or Pakistani dhows, trawlers manned by Yemeni smugglers. Even a sailboat in the far distance, likely some insane and intrepid white people trying to sneak through these dangerous waters.

  Yusuf and Suleiman sat alone on the rolling bow, sipping cool tea, bearing down through binoculars on every freighter as soon as it grew visible in the distance. Yusuf lifted his black-and-white-checked keffiyeh to hood his head from the sun. Over five hours, they let three dozen westbound ships slip by; the same number headed east. Whenever a likely vessel passed too far away to be identified, Deg Deg steered them closer, until Yusuf waved him off; not the right ship.

  The cousins watched until two more hours of sunlight remained on the gulf. If their target did not appear in the next sixty minutes, the plan was to turn west and motor through the night at top speed toward Bab-el-Mandeb, that mile-and-a-half-wide passage connecting the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, a 350-mile sprint. That way they could stay ahead of the coming traffic, wait for their prey at the narrow strait through which every ship going to or from Suez had to pass.

  Sheikh Robow’s description of the freighter made Suleiman and Yusuf expect she would not be part of a guarded convoy; those clusters were for older, slower boats. She’d be off on her own, running twenty-plus knots. Her captain wouldn’t feel the need for naval protection or a gaggle of other ships around her, not with that kind of speed and guns aboard.

  With an hour left, eyes worn down by binoculars and the water’s late-day glare, Yusuf stood from his wooden crate. His knees ached. In the west, the sun lowered onto a cushion of fiery clouds. Light polished the water as the day eased away and the low-lying mists melted. The bending horizon grew razor sharp against the sky.

  From belowdecks, the smell of fried meat and maraq soup wafted to the bow. The rest of the crew had eaten earlier. Bowls of food sat untouched beside both cousins. Yusuf stuffed a cold slice of seasoned goat into his mouth. Chewing, he picked at a bit of gourd dipped in yoghurt.

  Suleiman did not lower his binoculars from the east. Yusuf spoke to the black top of his head.

  “Eat. I’m going to tell Deg Deg we’re moving.”

  Suleiman had elbows on his knees, steadying the glasses. “Wait.”

  Yusuf licked his fingers. “Why? What do you see?”

  “I can’t be certain. Dolphins. We have luck coming. Good or bad, I can’t tell. But luck.”

  “We have night coming. We need to go.”

  “Sit.”

  Yusuf wanted to raise his own binoculars, but he left this to Suleiman, who seemed to be trying to conjure the freighter.

  Long ago Yusuf had learned to trust Suleiman’s instincts. His older cousin studied the ways of spirits and animals and their signs. Dolphins were indeed an omen of change approaching, like clouds. There was magic on the earth, a strangeness outside man’s world. Suleiman could put his finger on it. But this was not magic; this was the sea, where nature ruled alone. The two of them were searching for one ship out of a passing hundred on a wide water, on the word of an Islamist who’d threatened them, a man not of their clan. Their best chance now was to hurry to Bab-el-Mandeb, arrive at noon tomorrow, and wait there. Even then they couldn’t be sure their target wouldn’t pass them in the night, or that it hadn’t already come through here and they’d simply missed it.

  Yusuf lowered his weight again to the crate. He set the cold dinner plate across his lap. He thought of Hoodo across his lap instead, warmer than this goat and curd, surer than this goose chase for al-Shabaab.

  Without pulling his eyes from the glasses, Suleiman asked, “Do you remember what you said before we took our first ship? Seven years ago?”

  Yusuf swallowed tea. He gazed toward the stern, where the crew smoked along the rails or watched the setting sun. Some toyed with the cat. Inside the wheelhouse, Deg Deg needed a decision. Instead, Suleiman wanted a memory.

  Yusuf tamped down his impatience. He spoke to the side of Suleiman’s narrow face.

  “Of course.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I said that you and I would die on the same day.”

  Suleiman nodded behind the glasses. Twenty minutes earlier, a convoy had passed the dhow, plowing to Bab-el-Mandeb. The eight vessels, European and Asian, guarded by a German war cruiser, had not yet sailed out of sight. Yusuf eyed the fading ships and their trail of smudges in the air.

  Suleiman lowered the binoculars. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I said that out of loyalty. It was not a prediction.”

  “Do you want to do this?”

  “Yes.”

  Suleiman handed Yusuf the binoculars. He aimed a hand due east, at a white sliver alone on the blue rim of the world.

  “I believe it may be this day, cousin.”

  Yusuf bore down through the lenses. Quickly he found the ship. Even seven or eight miles out, in the slanting light of the failing sun, he read the tall, pale letters writ across the blue hull: CMA CGM.

  A French ship, moving west on her own.

  Not a single container stood on deck below her three cranes. She skipped high over the water, the brown skirt of her bottom paint visible. She sailed where, when, and how Sheik Robow had said she would.

  Her name: Valnea.

  Chapter 10

  CMA CGN Valnea

  Gulf of Aden

  The engineer Nikita wiggled a big toe.

  He could not shift his strapped-down head to see. He groped for LB on the stool beside him.

  “Vot edo da! Did you see? Look! Look, Sergeant! Is moving?”

  LB confirmed the toe did flinch.

  “I am not cripple! Gospodi! Sergeant, I am not c
ripple!”

  Nikita spread both arms to celebrate in a hug. LB hung back; the man would not stop shouting. On the next bed, the cadet groaned, waking to find pain. To quiet the engineer, LB bent over him for a quick embrace but could not wrap his arms around the board or the cot. Nikita clamped him tight, pounding the back of LB’s rib cage. He sobbed, “Spasibo, bolshoe spasibo.”

  LB wriggled loose. “Okay, okay. That’s great.” He patted Nikita on the chest. “Let’s keep it down; the kid needs to sleep.”

  “Da, da,” the engineer panted, sniffing back tears. “But this is good, yes?”

  “It’s a good sign. The anti-inflams are working. You still might have a break in your spine, but it doesn’t look like paralysis. We’ll know more in Djibouti. And you’re staying on that board till we get there.”

  “Of course, of course.” Nikita kept his voice from climbing again. “Go. Find Grisha. I will wiggle for him.”

  LB checked the cadet’s bandages for moistness. He headed for the door. Behind him Nikita whispered, “Thank you, svóloch.”

  “You’re welcome, hui.”

  The first mate Grisha was not in the wheelhouse, the only place LB knew to look for him. He found Drozdov in his captain’s chair. To the rear, the third officer sat at the map table, filling in the logbook.

  LB told Drozdov of Nikita’s progress and the request to see Grisha. The Russian captain received the news with a long sigh of relief. Picking up the intercom phone, he found the first mate in his quarters.

  “Nikita has moved a toe.”

  Drozdov set down the receiver. LB imagined chubby Grisha bolting for the stairs.

  LB climbed into the empty leather chair beside Drozdov, facing the broad tempered-glass windshield. Far ahead, a convoy steamed toward Suez. The Valnea sailed into an afternoon that had aged while LB kept vigil in the infirmary. The dropping sun shone into the ship’s westbound face.