Stealth of the Ninja

by Philip Roy

  I thought about all of this as I sat across from Sensei on top of the bridge under the early morning sun. I knew I wasn’t supposed to think about anything when we were meditating. Meditating was all about getting away from your thoughts, your self, he had told me. “Don’t think. Meditate.” But I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t a tremendously good meditator. When we meditated, I mostly just pretended I was meditating. I couldn’t help wondering if his need to escape his thoughts came from a need to avoid the sadness that haunted him.

  Afterwards, when we did our exercises, I watched to see if he was noticing my growing strength. If he was, he didn’t say so. He seemed impossible to impress, and that was an attitude that just made me work harder.

  When it was time to eat, I was always starving. My appetite had doubled, and I probably would have eaten anything he put in front of me now: sea worms, slugs, bottom feeders … anything. I began to savour the taste of jellyfish. I was beginning to understand him better. When we tended the garden in the late morning, I held a ripe tomato in my hands and thought how perfect it was, and how beautiful. And my respect for the wisdom of the old man who had created this garden grew immensely.

  But a little later that afternoon, we were back at fighting with the sticks, and the cuts on my elbows were starting to bleed, and the bumps on my head were hot, and my ears were ringing.

  “Give up?” Sensei said. He never gave up saying it.

  “No. I don’t give up.”

  I took a peek over the edge of the ship, because sometimes I thought I might just jump over and swim to the sub for a rest. I would never do it, of course, even though the temptation was always there, to escape from a fight that I was always losing.

  And yet I was also striking him more, and hitting harder, and leaving welts, which only made him more determined to punish me. It was a battle that I couldn’t win, and yet couldn’t quit.

  But I never had to. Fate had something else in store for both of us.

  We had reached a moment when we were both taking a breather. I had managed to overwhelm Sensei’s aerobic capacity once again, but it had taken me longer to do it, and so instead of rushing in and striking him, I had to bend over and catch my own breath. There was a lull in our combat then, and I even wondered if maybe he had had enough, too. Oddly, when I raised my head to look at him, I noticed a strange line on the horizon behind him. The horizon wasn’t as still as before. I mean, it was level, but it wasn’t as calm. Something had changed. That was odd. I wondered if things just looked different because I had been hit so many times.

  I didn’t think so. Sensei raised his stick. He intended to continue. So I raised mine, but I couldn’t take my eyes away from the horizon. Sensei took advantage of my trance, reached over, and struck my ear. Oh, how it stung! “No!” I said. “Wait! Wait a second! Look!” I pointed out to sea. But Sensei would never fall for what he believed was a simple trick. Instead, he swung his stick and struck my foot. “Ouch! Stop! Stop for a second, will you? Look!” I pointed to the horizon. Sensei saw the true alarm on my face, stepped back, and took a very quick glance. Then we both just stood and stared.

  The horizon was vibrating now. I couldn’t figure it out. It was vibrating, and … it was growing! Oh my Lord, suddenly I knew what it was! It was a gigantic wave!

  “Tsunami! Sensei! It’s a tsunami! Hurry! We’ve got to get inside the sub! Come!” I gestured with my arm frantically. “We have to go … now!” But he shook his head. He shouted something in Japanese, and gestured for me to follow him into the stairwell that led to the holds.

  “No! That’s crazy! Come with me! The sub is our only chance!”

  But he wouldn’t. I grabbed Hollie and ran to the railing. “Sensei, please! Come with us!”

  But he just shook his head and gestured for me to follow him. That was suicide. The wave was going to hit the ship on the starboard side. Judging from the distance, I was guessing it was a hundred feet high. There was no way any ship could survive such a wave striking on its side, and there was no time to turn the bow. She was going to capsize. Our only hope was to climb inside the sub and dive. I didn’t even know if we had enough time to do that, but if we did, we’d survive. We’d be thrown around, but we’d survive. Staying on the ship was death.

  But Sensei wouldn’t come. So I held Hollie tightly and jumped over the side. The fall knocked him out of my arms, and when I came up, he was swimming in a circle ten feet away. He swam towards me, and I grabbed him and swam to the sub. We could hear the wave above us now, roaring like an avalanche. As I climbed onto the hull, the wave blocked out the sun. In a panic I jumped inside, dropped Hollie onto the floor, rushed back up the portal, and sealed the hatch. The sub began to rise, as the wave picked us up. I grabbed Hollie once more and dived for my cot, squashing him beneath me. I held onto both sides of the bed with all my might as the sub went up and up and up. It seemed endless. Then we rolled upside down. Still I held onto the cot with Hollie beneath me.

  On the crest of the wave we rolled once again until we were almost upright. But the ship was in our path. I knew that. And I knew that the wave would throw us against it, so I braced myself for the collision. When it came, it knocked me free of my grip, and Hollie and I were thrown around inside, banging off the walls and tumbling around and around as the sub rolled over the ship, bounced off, and rolled over it again. I feared the worst. If I saw water spilling inside, I would reach for Hollie, climb the portal, spin the hatch, and pull him out. There was no chance to take the dinghy, only the lifebuoy. Without the dinghy we wouldn’t survive at sea for long.

  But after we rolled over the ship the second time, the sub was thrown into the trough of the wave. It spun around and around in a whirlpool. I pulled myself over to the control panel and hit the dive switch. The sub was tossing and pitching like crazy, but once it righted itself it began to suck water into the ballast tanks and we started to submerge. Outside the hull there was a horrible sound—the twisting, bending, and tearing of metal as the sea ripped the ship apart.

  Chapter Ten

  There was blood on the floor. Most of it was mine. Some of it was Hollie’s. But we were alive. More waves passed above our heads. I felt them tug at the sub as they went over, but they could not take us with them. Outside the hull, the sounds of the old freighter were horrible. I knew she was just a ship, built in a shipyard, and not a living thing, yet the sounds she made as the sea destroyed her were cries and wails of the greatest horror. I didn’t think any dying animals’ cries could sound worse.

  And yet she didn’t go down as fast as I thought she would. What was it about this ship that kept her away from the bottom of the sea?

  But sinking she was; there was no mistaking that. We listened for hours as the wails went slowly from just beside us, to beneath us, to very slowly dropping farther and farther down. I pulled out the first aid kit and washed my wounds with hydrogen peroxide and bandaged them. There was a cut on my arm where I had once been shot, and the old scar was torn open. There were more bumps on my head. Seeing that Hollie was bleeding from his mouth, I examined him closely to discover if he was bleeding internally or from a cut in his mouth. He was very good at sitting still while I examined him and found the cut in his mouth. He licked it constantly. I looked him over and found a few more bumps, but he seemed pretty good otherwise.

  Then I inspected the sub. Other than my things having been thrown around, with spilled oats, sugar, spices, and tea, the sub seemed all right. Ziegfried had designed and built the sub to withstand the worst, and it had. I was amazed and immensely grateful for his foresight.

  Only after I had done all these things and settled quietly on my cot, with Hollie on my lap, did I turn my mind to Sensei. I guess I didn’t want to think about it. Perhaps I should have rushed back to the surface and searched for him on the water. But I had seen him disappear into the stairwell just seconds before the wave hit. He had probably put his faith in the stability of the ship, which had never failed him before. Whatever the case, I knew I
had to accept that he was probably dead. I just didn’t want to think about it.

  I did have to surface to find Seaweed. He had been outside when the tsunami struck, but a gigantic wave was not the threat to him that it was to us because he could fly out of its way. I was confident we would find him either flying high in the sky, trying to spot us beneath the surface, or sitting on the water, impatiently wondering where his supper was.

  A few hours after the wave struck, we rose to the surface and took a look. The waves were still high, but the tsunami had passed. There was no sign of the ship, not even an oil spill or any debris, which was strange. I opened the hatch. Seaweed dropped out of the sky immediately, gave me one of his displeased looks, and came inside. I raised the binoculars and scanned the water for half an hour but did not find so much as a stick of wood or a plastic cup. Neither were there bubbles coming up from where the ship had gone down. When a ship sinks, water fills her hull and pushes the air out, and the air rises in bubbles to the surface. So I looked for those bubbles, but found none. That made no sense.

  I went to the control panel, sat in front of the sonar screen, and searched for the ship. There she was, 133 feet below us. I was surprised she hadn’t fallen farther. Her shape was odd because she was upside down. She was level though, not higher in the bow or stern. She must have rolled right over without breaking up. The terrible sounds she had been making were the twisting and bending of metal, but not the tearing. Otherwise she would have filled with water and plummeted to the bottom like a stone.

  I stared at the screen hardly blinking; I just couldn’t take my eyes away. I wondered if I would watch until she had reached the bottom, two miles down. But the numbers on the screen showed that her depth hadn’t changed. Well, it changed a little. It went from 133 feet to 137, to 134, and back to 133. That was unbelievable. It was as if she had hit a floor, and was bouncing. She couldn’t be rising; that was a certainty. But why wasn’t she sinking?

  I watched the screen for an hour. The ship never fell below 137 feet. I made another reconnaissance of the surface directly above her. No bubbles showed. How bizarre. I had to conclude that the plastic Sensei had collected over the years was giving her a neutral buoyancy at around 135 feet, preventing her from falling any deeper. How long could that last? Surely water would find its way inside the holds and everywhere else? Surely it was only a matter of time before she flooded and plunged to the bottom?

  Two hours later she was still holding her own at 137 feet below the surface. I didn’t know what to think, except for the one thought that kept forcing itself into my head: if the ship had trapped air inside, and Sensei was still on board, then there was a chance he was still alive.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized he probably was. Having hung around him for two weeks, and having observed his extraordinary way of keeping the ship afloat, his amazing garden, his incredible attention to detail, his talent for stealth, and his remarkable ingenuity, it only made sense that he would have anticipated the eventual sinking of the ship. He would have prepared for that by sealing the holds for such an emergency, perhaps even the inner passageways. I didn’t know, I was only guessing, but what else could account for the fact that she was not filling with water, as she ought to have?

  Yet preventing her from sinking to the bottom was one thing; the point was that she had sunk to 137 feet, and there was no way on earth he could bring her back up, no matter how ingenious he was. So what was his plan? Would he open a door, squeeze out through the water rushing in, and swim up to the surface? It was a long way; he’d have to be able to hold his breath for several minutes. That was possible, I supposed, though I had never seen him holding his breath, just as I had never seen him swim.

  But the fact that this was a real possibility created a dilemma for me. On one hand, I wanted to sail to the nearest point of land and go for help. I didn’t know how realistic that was either, for lots of reasons, but that was my first thought. On the other hand, if he was going to come out of the ship and swim to the surface, then I needed to stay around to be here for him. Otherwise he’d simply swim around and around in circles until he drowned, that is, if he could even swim. I supposed he could have surfaced with some sort of buoy that would keep him afloat, but unless it was a dinghy in which he could properly rest, and unless it was outfitted with food and water, he’d die of exposure within a week or so.

  What should I do: go for help, or stay and wait for him to show up on the surface? I couldn’t decide, but it was decided for me simply because I found it impossible to leave. I stayed on the surface, and waited and waited and waited. I searched the water continually for his little head to come bobbing up. But it never did.

  As the hours went by, I became less confident that he would ever surface. But why would he wait? Was he preparing something to help him reach the surface? Did he have air tanks hidden somewhere on the ship? I doubted that very much. How would he have filled them? Could he have hidden air compressors where I couldn’t find them? That seemed impossible. Besides, he’d need an energy source to fill them.

  No, as clever as he was, he just couldn’t have hidden a whole bunch of things like that. He would have had to keep a secret room somewhere. Had he? The thought that maybe he had, haunted me. I couldn’t know for sure. So I stayed on the surface directly above the ship for nearly a day, a day that could have been spent sailing for help. I did try to reach the Japanese coast guard by shortwave, but kept getting only Japanese voices, all sounding terribly frantic, and I was beginning to wonder if the tsunami had continued all the way to Japan and caused damage there, too. That was a frightening thought.

  It was an agonizing day. It kept running through my mind that Sensei was only 137 feet away, less than the length of the ship, and yet we were separated by water, and there was no way I could reach him. It was tantalizing because I could actually reach the ship with the sub, but once we were there, I couldn’t get out. My absolute maximum free diving depth was one hundred feet, which was pretty hard to do at the best of times, and a depth where I couldn’t stay for more than a few seconds. I could hold my breath for four minutes, but it took more than a minute to get that deep, and the same to swim back up. The pressure was so heavy down there it was like an elephant sitting on your chest. Basically, I could only go down and come back up; I couldn’t go down and stay. And one hundred feet wasn’t nearly deep enough anyway.

  Then I wondered if I could drop a wrench tied to a rope onto the hull of the ship, and maybe bang it in a pattern using Morse code. Did Sensei know Morse code? He might. So I gathered up my rope, but altogether I could only reach 122 feet. Then I realized I could touch the hull of the ship with the rope if I swam below fifteen feet.

  So I tried that. I tied all my rope together into one piece, tied it to my heaviest wrench, and went into the water directly below the sub. I swam down and lowered the rope until I felt it stop dropping. It had hit the hull of the ship. I could feel it but I couldn’t hear it. I could still hear sounds from the ship though, moaning and groaning as if she were in pain. I raised the rope and tried to lower it, but it dropped too slowly. I raised it again, hoping to give Sensei the message, “Help is coming.” But it took too long to get even the first word out and I had to surface to grab air. Had Sensei heard the wrench over the sounds of the ship? I doubted it. It was unlikely he would know from all the other sounds that one of them was me.

  And so, one day after the ship went down, I decided my only hope of rescuing Sensei was to go for help. And the closest place to do that was on the mainland of Japan.

  Chapter Eleven

  There was one huge problem in leaving to go for help: how would I ever find the ship again? I racked my brain trying to figure it out. Of course I could write down our navigational coordinates, and I did. But the sea is always moving. Mostly the surface travels at about three knots, allowing for wind, which can either push it as fast as five knots, or slow it down. Beneath the surface, the water is also moving, although more slowly. At 1
37 feet, the sea might be moving at only one or two knots, but it is still moving. To complicate things even more, the water beneath the surface is sometimes moving in a different direction from the water on top.

  If a capsized ship drifts at two knots for twenty-four hours, for five days, it will have moved roughly two hundred and fifty nautical miles, which is about two hundred and seventy-five miles on land. And so, even if I came back to the same spot, five days later, the ship would not be here, not even close. And if it took me ten days, she would be twice as far away. But if it took me ten days, Sensei would likely be dead for lack of oxygen. That was another question for which I had no answer: how long could he last on the air he had trapped down there?

  If I had enough rope to reach, I could attach some sort of buoy that would drift along with the ship, but the only thing I could think of using for a buoy was the rubber dinghy, which, as big and bright as it seemed to me, would become pretty much invisible once we were out of sight. Trying to find a rubber dinghy, even a bright orange one, on the surface of the ocean, when you are looking at sea level, would be like trying to find a jellybean on a sandy beach. Besides, not only did I not have enough rope to reach, I had no way to tie it to the hull of the ship.

  If only I had some sort of tracking device, like the kind they put on sea turtles and whales. But I didn’t, so I sat and pondered the problem for hours, unable to help Sensei where we were, yet unable to leave.

  The solution finally came, not from me, but from Sensei. And now I knew for sure that he was still alive.

  While I was sitting on the hull, staring at the water and wishing I could go down there, I saw something come up. Like ghostly faces, three yellow plastic bottles tied together made their way to the surface. They didn’t come up as fast as buoys normally would because they were attached to a rope. The other end of the rope was attached to the ship. Sensei had somehow opened a door and let this makeshift buoy out. And now I knew that he was alive.