by Philip Roy
At first I thought maybe I was dreaming. I couldn’t figure out how he could possibly have snuck inside. Then I realized that he must have run past me in the dark of the warehouse and I never heard him. No wonder he hadn’t been too upset about us leaving him behind; he had no intention of being left behind.
“Radji!” He didn’t move. “Radji! I can see your foot.” The foot disappeared beneath the potatoes. I was about to give him a blast. I was about to tell him how he should never have come because it was too dangerous, and how I couldn’t look after him and what was he hoping to find by coming with us anyway? And I wondered how to take him back. But I sure didn’t want to go back there now. Then I remembered telling him not to let anyone stand in the way of his dreams. As I stood and stared at the pile of potatoes concealing him, I realized that he hadn’t, and I had to smile. Radji had done to me exactly what I was trying to do to the India navy. He had outsmarted me.
Chapter Eight
“CAN YOU SWIM?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Can you hold your breath under water?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe ten minutes.”
“Nobody can do that. See how long you can hold it now. Take a deep breath.”
Radji took a deep breath, shut his mouth and shut his eyes. I watched the clock. His face slowly turned red and started to shake. Then his mouth burst open. “How long was that?” he asked, gasping.
I could understand him now if I stared at his mouth when he spoke. “Not bad. Forty-seven seconds. It’s harder under water.”
“I do it better under water.”
“Hmmm. Radji, the reason I didn’t take you in my sub is because it really is dangerous.”
“I know. I am not afraid.”
“I know you are not afraid. That’s not the point. I have a rule about not taking passengers because it’s so dangerous. Right now the Indian navy is searching for us. That’s why I can’t hear properly—they found us once before and shot explosives at us and almost killed us.”
“But you escaped them.”
“Yes, we escaped them, but we almost didn’t.”
“But you did. You will always escape them. And now I can help you.”
I stared into his determined face and he stared back at me. For a moment, all we did was stare. Then I took a deep breath. So he took a deep breath. I took another one and sighed. “Oh man . . . do you want some tea?”
We had a cup of tea and shared an orange. Then I climbed up on the bike and continued pedalling while Radji sat with Hollie and patted him. I pedalled for two hours and watched Radji fall asleep. It was the middle of the night. But now I wanted to surface to see if we had been followed. If we hadn’t, we could continue on battery power, which would be so much faster. And then, when we were further away, I could go to sleep too. But I couldn’t turn on the batteries if anyone was close enough to listen with sonar. And I was nervous about surfacing in the path of a ship. Normally I would hear the engines of a ship before we were too close, but I couldn’t hear them now unless they were about to run us over. So, I stood over Radji and considered waking him. I hated to wake him, but this is what he was asking for. He should see it for what it was. I reached down and shook him. “Radji! Radji!”
He opened his eyes, raised his head in confusion and looked around as if he had forgotten where he was. I knew that feeling. “Radji, I need your ears. We’re going to surface. I need you to listen for engine sounds. Can you do that?”
He rubbed his eyes and nodded.
“Good. We have to be very quiet, okay? All you have to do is listen. If you hear anything, nod your head. If you don’t hear anything when I raise my hand like this, shake your head. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
I pumped air into the tanks and we started up. If there were ships up there waiting for us I wanted Radji to be awake anyway. This was exactly the kind of danger I never wanted to share with anyone else, but that decision had been taken out of my hands.
I stared at the depth gauge, watched Radji’s face, and kept my hand on the dive switch. He was listening carefully. When we reached seventy-five feet I let some water into the tanks and we stopped rising. I raised my hand. Radji shook his head. “Are you sure?” I whispered. He nodded. I pumped more air into the tanks and we came closer to the surface and I raised the periscope and looked. There was nothing there. I turned it 360 degrees, twice, and saw nothing. What a relief. I was about to surface and turn on radar when Radji asked if he could look.
“Sure.”
I grabbed a coil of rope for him to stand on and showed him where to hold his hands and how to look. He stared into the periscope the same way he stared at chess pieces, with complete concentration. Slowly he turned it around. He had to stand on his tiptoes to hang onto it.
“There’s nothing to see now because it’s dark and there’s nothing out there, but in the morning you’ll be able to see waves and the horizon, and maybe a passing ship.”
Then he said something but I couldn’t hear it.
“What?”
He turned to me and said, “What’s that shadow out there?”
“Shadow? What shadow? I didn’t see a shadow. Let me look.”
He jumped down and I looked. As I traced along the dark line of the horizon I saw where the line was broken and the darkness was a little darker. It looked like a shadow but was actually the silhouette of a ship. It was probably five or six miles away. Its lights were out, which was illegal of course, and was only happening because it was a navy ship hoping to catch us. If I had broken the surface with the portal and turned on our radar, they would have located us instantly, and the chase would be on again. But Radji had spotted them. I pulled the periscope down and let water into the tanks. We went back down to three hundred feet and I climbed back onto the bicycle. Radji curled up on the sleeping bag with Hollie.
“Good job, Radji.”
“Thank you.”
Two hours later I woke him to do it all over again. This time there were no ships. Radar confirmed it. I opened the hatch, turned on the engine and cranked it up. I wanted to get as far from here as we could while the going was good. The sun was coming up. Seaweed climbed the ladder and jumped into the air. Radji asked if he could come up too.
“Of course. But you must never climb out of the portal without putting on this harness first, okay? Will you promise?”
“I promise.”
“Good. Here, take the binoculars. You can look around. If you see any ships, let me know right away, okay?”
“Okay.”
I went back inside. It was strange having Radji on board. I didn’t know what to think of it really. He had certainly saved us a lot of trouble spotting that ship. And he was great company for Hollie. But what was I going to do with him? I really had no idea. I’d have to ask Ziegfried and Sheba. Maybe they would know. Gosh, I was sleepy now. Hot chocolate would go down well. “Hey, Radji? Do you want some hot chocolate? . . . Radji? . . . Radji?”
There was no answer. I figured I couldn’t hear him. I waited for a second for him to come down. He didn’t. I went to the bottom of the ladder and looked up. He wasn’t there. “Radji?” I bolted up the ladder. But he was gone.
I rushed inside and shut off the engine. I flew up the ladder and scanned the water in our wake but didn’t see anything. “Radji! . . . Radji!” I yelled as loudly as I could and listened hard but couldn’t hear anything. I had to think fast. How long had he been up here by himself? Five minutes? Ten minutes? No, not that long. It was maybe only a minute or two. Should I turn on the engine and go back or just dive in the water and swim for him? The sun was just clearing the horizon and the water was dark blue. I couldn’t see much below the surface. “Act!” I yelled at myself. I jumped down inside, flipped the engine switch on, turned the sub around and headed back. I found our wake and steered into t
he center of it. “Radji!”
I climbed down onto the hull and leaned over the bow as we cut through the water. I stared at the water, looking for anything, any bubbles or slight discolouring. Then, about twenty-five feet in front of us I saw one of Radji’s white sneakers. I jumped inside and shut off the engine, flew up the ladder and dove over the side. I found him about ten feet under. He wasn’t moving but his eyes were open and staring at me. He was concentrating on holding his breath. I grabbed him and pulled him to the surface. The sub bumped into us as it drifted by. Radji gasped for air and started coughing up water. I held onto him with one arm and swam after the sub. It took a long time to catch it.
“I’m sorry,” Radji said as I carried him through the water.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I thought you said you could swim.”
“I can, when my feet are touching the bottom.”
I laughed nervously. Inside I was fighting back my tears. He had almost drowned. If he had drowned . . . well, I just didn’t think I could have lived with that. “Why did you go out without the harness?”
“I dropped your binoculars. I tried to reach them but they sank. I thought you would be angry with me.”
He looked at me. “Are you angry with me?”
“No. No, I am not angry.”
“I held my breath a really long time.”
“I know.”
Chapter Nine
I MADE HOT CHOCOLATE and we sat on the floor by the observation window and drank it. Radji was wrapped up in the sleeping bag and Hollie was on his lap. He wasn’t cold, he was frightened. I could tell, even though he was good at hiding what he was feeling.
“Where did you come from, Radji?”
He stared over the edge of his cup and the little steam rising out of it. “It’s a secret.”
“But you must have some family somewhere? Somebody must be worried about you?”
He started breathing heavily. “I can tell you my secret if you promise you will never tell anyone.”
“I promise I will never tell anyone. I wouldn’t anyway.”
“I ran away.”
“Why did you run away?”
“Because my father beat me.”
“Oh.”
He said it so matter-of-factly. “But what about your mother? Doesn’t she miss you?”
“My father beat my mother too, but she could not run away. I think maybe because I ran away he will not beat her so much. I was the one who made him angry all the time. Then he beat everybody.”
He stared at the floor, lost in his thoughts. “When I am older I will go back. Then I will stop my father.”
“That’s what I would do too.”
“But first I need to go to Varanasi.”
“Varanasi? Why do you want to go there?”
He looked at me as if I should know why. “Because it is a holy city. The river Ganges flows there. The river is a great goddess. When I bathe in the river, I will be cleansed of my sins and my life will change.”
“But Radji, you are only ten. What sins could you have?”
He looked at me strangely. For a moment I felt as if I were talking to an old man. It was weird. He looked down. “It is another secret. But I cannot tell you this one.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t need to know.”
What sins could a ten-year-old boy have that would weigh on him so heavily? I couldn’t imagine.
We sailed close enough to shore to settle on the bottom at a hundred and fifty feet, shut everything off and went to sleep for the day. As tired as I was, it took me a little while to fall asleep because Radji was crying out in his sleep. I couldn’t understand what he was saying but it sounded like he was pleading with someone, as if he were trying to make them stop. It was disturbing.
It was almost twelve hours later when we woke, rose to the surface and opened the hatch. The moon was full and close to the earth. It looked like a giant yellow saucer. The radar screen was clear. My guidebook said the southwest coast of India was famous for long, sandy beaches. I figured we could all use a good run on the beach in the middle of the night. So I cranked up the engine and headed east.
Seventy-five feet from shore, I tossed the anchor in twenty feet and inflated the rubber kayak. We jumped in and paddled the short distance to shore. I used to have a rubber dinghy but lost it in a typhoon. I seemed to have a habit of losing dinghies.
The beach was empty and vast. If there were lights on the water we would see them right away. I told Radji not to leave my side. He was still my ears. Hollie took off like lightning and we chased after him. This, I told Radji, was the nice part of the life of a submariner—going where nobody else could go and waking when everyone else was sleeping. He must have thought anything was better than living in a hole in a wall, or living with a father who beat him. I didn’t know why but I had always thought of India as a land of gentle people. I realized now it was a lot more complicated than that. Everywhere was more complicated than that.
When the sun came up we were back in the sub and approaching Goa, where my friend Cinnamon was from. She had been trapped on a ship and taken far away and ended up joining a circus in the Pacific. She had asked me to take her back here so that she could look for her brother who was also lost, but I said no. I didn’t feel confident I could protect her. Now that I was here, I felt badly. But what if she had panicked when we were attacked by the navy? What if her hearing had been damaged forever? I just couldn’t handle that responsibility. But I wondered where her brother was now. There weren’t just a few kids lost and abandoned in India like Radji, there were probably millions.
Goa had a humongous harbour, like Kochi, and was jam-packed with ships. This time I looked much more carefully for navy ships. We came in right behind a huge tanker, at periscope depth, so we could see but wouldn’t appear separately on sonar. Her engines were so loud the vibration made our teeth chatter and we laughed out loud. Radji said it sounded like someone put a bucket over his head and beat it with sticks. We had to endure it only for half an hour or so.
Once we were inside the harbour there were many other vessels to hide beneath. There wasn’t a naval base here but there was a navy destroyer sitting right in the centre of the harbour like an eagle on top of a tree. Yikes! We had a really good look at her through the periscope as we passed and she made me nervous. I kept so close to the tanker I thought my eyeballs were going to shake out of my head. Radji kept shaking his whole body on purpose—to counteract the shaking from the engines. Then the tanker was met by tugboats and she cut her engines. What a relief!
With the tanker between us and the destroyer I scooted close to the banks of the waterfront. There was a giant barge terminal here. The tanker wasn’t coming in for oil but for some kind of mineral. It was really interesting—there were hundreds of self-propelled barges bringing the mineral to the terminal, where it was being loaded onto gigantic tankers. They were then taking it somewhere else, probably around the world.
The whole production made me think of ants. There were carrying ants, loading ants and unloading ants: giant ants for the bigger jobs and smaller ants for the smaller jobs. But I was curious about where the barges were coming from. They weren’t going to sea; they were going inland, so there must have been a big river. And why was that destroyer sitting in the middle of the harbour like a big, fat bully? The whole situation gave me that kind of curiosity that just wouldn’t go away, and I couldn’t think of anything else. I wanted to follow a barge upriver.
I figured it was a good idea anyway: Seaweed wanted out; we needed a place to hide; and I was dying to see what India looked like inland from the coast. So, I steered in under the barges and waited for one to leave. What a bizarre feeling having so many barges overhead, like giant beetles floating on a pond. Each barge was about a hundred feet long. They were old and beaten up. I saw blue smoke spewing from one just before we pulled the periscope down. From underneath the water they sounded like a bunch of sick old men coughing a
nd throwing up.
While waiting we had tea, beans, bread and oranges. I studied the map of India and Radji studied the chess board. He put all the players on and practised moving them around. It made me a tiny bit nervous, which was silly. He was so darned determined and clever, and I didn’t want him to beat me. The map showed a couple of rivers emptying into the harbour at Goa. The rivers looked like snakes on the map, the way snakes curve when they slither across the sand.
I wondered how far upriver the barges went. I knew that once we left the harbour and were on a river, there would be no question of anyone tracking us with sonar or radar, and that would be a nice break. But sailing up a river can be tricky, as I had learned a year ago on the St. Lawrence River. On the other hand, anywhere these old barges could go, we could go.
Once I had figured out the routine of how the barges came in, unloaded, then lined up to leave, I moved underneath the first one in line. When it started up like a grumpy old troll and pushed its way out of the terminal, we followed it out.
Chapter Ten
IT AMAZED ME TO NO end that you could make an iron boat—heavy enough to flatten a house if you were to drop it on one—fill it to the brim with rocks and it would still float. But if you threw a single stone into the water it would go straight to the bottom. This was the mystery of displacement. Ziegfried explained it to me many times but I never truly understood the theory. I could sense when something was going to float or sink; that was enough for me.
The barge was as slow as molasses but it cut across the water to where the harbour shrank from massive to small. As the barge disappeared up a river, like a mouse into a hole, we were right behind.
Radji watched through the periscope and I watched on sonar. I trusted him because he did everything with intense concentration. I was guessing the river was flowing against us at a gentle three knots, which shouldn’t have been much for a barge to plough through, especially empty, but it went very slowly. Maybe they were trying to save fuel. Or maybe they were just not in a hurry. I think we could have walked faster along the bank.