Dead Water

by Ings, Simon

  ‘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 a
t 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.

  The kid throws the key to one of his fellows, who stoops to pick it up. His gun goes off. The bullet punctures the false ceiling, bounces off a steel joist, and enters Bose’s skull through his left eye. Second Officer Bose falls, stiff as a tree, his knife cleaving a complex path through the intruders.

  The boy threatening Nageen drops his gun and grapples him, pulling him away from the door. Nageen lets himself be hauled aside. The kid is too strong for his own good. He tugs the handle and it comes away in his hand. He kicks the door and it slams wide open, and, as he steps through, Nageen grabs the gun, raises it and fires, point-blank, into the boy’s back.

  TWENTY

  On the same day, Havard Moyse, sixty-year-old adopted son of Eric Moyse, founder of the Moyse Line, flies into London’s City Airport. It’s rush hour, not worth the bother of booking a driver, and by 09:30 he’s riding the dinky elevated Docklands Light Railway into town like any ageing salaryman. As usual, the interchange at Bank is a screaming nightmare and he has to stand on the Tube all the way to Bond Street, where he ascends to street level. He walks east towards Oxford Circus and fetches up in what used to be a dowdy Italian sandwich shop. Now the breakfast menu declares: ‘Respect for the Sussex landscape and wildlife is a central part of the ethos of our Breakfast, featuring Milk from local small dairies, free-range Plymouth Rock eggs, Gloucestershire Old Spot sausages and dry cured bacon, Cox’s apple juice, seasonal fruit, and tasty Local jams, mustards and Marmalades!’

  Marmalades! With a ‘!’ for God’s sake.

  Over breakfast he phones Lyndon Ferry: ‘I’m downstairs.’ ‘I’m on a call. Come up.’

  As usual, Lyndon has forgotten that Havard doesn’t have the code for the door. As usual, he won’t give it out. ‘Buzz me, I’ll let you in.’

  The office is a large, featureless white room above a milliner’s shop. Ferry has filled it with large fibreboard tables, the latest Apple computers, and a couple of cheap bouncy armchairs from Ikea. Outwardly it cannot be distinguished from any of the hundreds of other PR firms, Internet start-ups and would-be production companies that look, from their third- and fourth-floor eyries, over the relentless commodification of Soho.

  Lyndon Ferry’s own appearance and behaviour maintain the illusion: Ted Baker suit, candy-stripe shirt, no tie. Shoes that want to be anything but shoes. For Ferry and his generation industrial intelligence is simply another digital commodity: stuff to be mined, filleted, mashed up, repackaged. Everyone is in the intelligence business now.

  Lyndon’screw–hecallsthemhis‘crew’–areattendinganOSINTconference in Cambridge. ‘Open Source Intelligence.’ Today, anyone with a broadband connection and half an ounce of sense can drill down to information once considered the prerogative of CIA analysts. Games designers, TV producers and TED junkies are the new intelligence elite. Most of Lyndon’s operation consists of mashing up public data: everything from port plans to airborne imagery to LIDAR.

  ‘It’s a 120-metre unbadged Japanese cargo vessel called the Ka-Bham.

  Tongan registry, Valletta on the stern.’

  Havard studies the paper cup he brought up from the cafe: ‘1066’, cyan print on magenta. A cup that wants to be noticed. The coffee’s a sight more drinkable than anything the Italians ever slopped out.

  ‘Mitsubishi rolled it out of the Nagasaki shipyard in 1987.’ Lyndon is still proffering the factsheet, insisting that Havard engage. It is, after all, his ship. Havard, president of Moyse Line, the world’s third-largest container company, drains his cup and reads.

  The Ka-Bham’s dead weight is 12,000 tonnes. A single screw powered by a 1,740 kW Wärtsilä, swallowing 480 litres of engine fuel per hour. It has its own gear: three wire-luffing MacGregor Navires. These cranes, if well maintained, are worth a good fraction of the boat.

  ‘Well, we can write off the ship.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s the cargo?’

  ‘In terms of value, aluminium. Running at US$1970 a tonne, we’re talking just under the eight.’

  Eight million dollars. Havard works this through. ‘Which leaves a lot of cargo space.’

  Lyndon nods, bouncing slightly in his Ikea chair. These chairs are, Havard decides, with distaste, a sort of adult baby bouncer. ‘Five holds. B to D are tween-decked and over the containers we’ve got consignments of razor wire, paint pigment, hardwood bundles and mixed recyclables: nothing over a thousand dollars a tonne. There’s copper. We’ve fifty bundles of ingots, each bundle weighs a metric tonne. At today’s price that’s about US$360,000. The rest is –’ He turns and reads from his screen.

  ‘Well, shit, basically.’

  ‘Let me see.’

  The printer next to Havard’s chair whines into motion.

  Baby Cycle Toy US$40.8544/unit 8 PCS

  Toy Friction Car US$47.9953 288 PCS

  Toy Clock Mk0043263 US$126.853 24 DOZ

  Tin Bowl [3 Pcs Sets] enamel Storage Bowl US$19.33/DOZ 79 CTN

  Ceramic Mug 110z US$331.603/DOZ 2736 PCS

  Coloured Lamb Skin Leather For Garment (Finished Leather) US$692.5 SQF 324 SQF

  Filteration Ceramic Media Ring Ball (72pcs/Ctn) (Fish Farming Accessories) US$7.46247 2 CTN

  Seaweed Extract Powder (Bio-fertilizer) US$1828.24 500 KGS

  Ceramic Tiles China US$5039.05 1 LOT

  ‘Have we had a demand?’

  ‘It came through while you were in the air. I haven’t had time to assess it.’ ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘Fifty for the safe return of ship and crew.’ Lyndon pauses to let this sink in. ‘The ship, I’d say, is worth two.’

  ‘What’s the complement?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Feed them to the sharks.’

  No reaction from Lyndon.

  ‘I’m kidding.’

  ‘There’s a complication. The captain has his wife and son on board.’ Havard picks up his coffee cup, discovers it’s empty, puts it down.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Do you want –?’

  ‘Let’s finish this.’ Havard mulls over the ransom demand. ‘Fifty million.

  Is it a typo?’

  ‘Say what you’re thinking.’

  ‘ Five million for boat and crew.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But –’ Havard hunkers forward in his chair. ‘ What’s wrong with the boat?’ A ship like the Ka-Bham is an ideal mothership. So why don’t they just take it? Lyndon smiles. ‘My first thought is: these are local lads on a spree. They want the cargo for resale but they’ve neither the money nor the organization to operate a mothership. They’re not professionals. They’re fishermen. Only then I saw this.’ He scrolls back through his browser’s history and beckons Havard over to the screen. ‘I’ve been staring at this since you left Schiphol and I still can’t make sense of it. Look where the Ka-Bham was taken.’ He taps the screen.

  ‘B
loody Sri Lanka?’

  ‘I rang up a friend in Kuala Lumpur: the Piracy Reporting Centre has a list of harbour thefts in Sri Lanka as long as your arm, but in the last five years only a couple of half-hearted attempts at boarding a vessel in territorial waters. The country’s on a war footing, for heaven’s sake. Its navy cut its teeth on the Tamil Eelam. They have their coastline buttoned up. Or they thought they did.’

  ‘Are we off the IMB radar?’

  ‘The demand came through other channels.’

  ‘So it is a professional job, after all.’

  ‘Overpowering a ship a couple of miles outside Sri Lankan waters? I don’t know, is that professional or just incredibly stupid?’

  Absently, Havard casts around for his cup again. Cyan on magenta... ‘They want to be noticed.’

  Lyndon cycles further through his browser’s history. ‘They want you to notice. Who else would be interested? They’re not going to earn themselves any headlines seizing the Ka-Bham. The Indian Ocean equivalent of a Tesco home delivery van. If it had been a VLCC or a Suezmax I could understand it... There.’

  A crude sales graphic fills the screen.

  ‘This is the only image we have of her.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘I’ll get one of the interns to trawl for a tourist snap.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘Reverse searching an image of the Ka-Bham ? If there’s a photograph anywhere google-able, a couple of minutes. Then half a day chucking out the false-positives. Ka-Bham in public sources we can forget because I tried that over breakfast.’ He gestures at the cup: ‘Did you try their Old Spot bacon when you were down there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Flickr has a Ka-Bhum flagged Mongolia treading virtually the same waters, which is borderline annoying. For the deep net a mod_oai will take about twenty minutes. At worst we can have a 3D schematic by the end of the day and deploy Navy Seals by midnight GMT.’

  ‘Don’t bother.’

  ‘We won’t.’