And the top bunk was, of course, filled with books. Books to do with the sea and sailors, naturally. Hugh was pretty certain that Sara owned a copy of every sea story ever written. She kept a fair representation on board, he saw now, one of the Hornblowers, one of the Aubrey-Maturins, a history of the Coast Guard, a biography of Frank Worsley, Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember, a book on knot tying, and a collection of sea shanties. Between How to Build a Wooden Boat and a one-volume collection of biographies of woman pirates he found Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz. He pulled it down and thumbed through it, to find that she had done her usual thorough job of reading, with massive amounts of underlining, highlighting, dog-earing, and marginal notations.
“XO? Oh. Excuse me, Mr. Rincon.”
Hugh replaced the book and stepped into the passageway, closing Sara’s door firmly behind him. “Yes?” he said to Ops.
Ops looked uncertain. “I need to speak to the XO about something.”
“Listen, Ops-What is your name anyway? No one has called you anything but Ops in my hearing since I came on board.”
Diverted, Ops smiled. “Yeah, Coastie custom. We call each other by our job title instead of our name. Ops. XO. Supply. EO. Like that. Probably due to the continuous rotation of crew. Easier than learning everyone’s names.”
“So what is your name?”
“Oh. Clifford Skulstad. Cliff.”
Hugh stuck out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Cliff. I’m Hugh Rincon.”
Ops took Hugh’s hand and felt himself being steered firmly away from the XO’s cabin. He looked back over his shoulder at her door and said, “But I have to talk to the XO about-”
“Tell me something, Cliff,” Hugh said. “Who’s third in command on board the Sojourner Truth?”
Ops looked startled. “Uh, I am.”
“I thought so. Your commanding officer needs some sleep if she’s going to be worth a shit when we catch up to the Star of Bali. Why don’t you see if you can’t handle any problems that come up over the next six or eight hours?”
Ops looked horrified. “What if there is an emergency?”
“If there is an emergency,” Hugh said gravely, “I think she would expect you to wake her up. However,” he added, “just for today, why don’t you set the gold standard for emergencies a little higher than usual?”
He smiled again when he said it, but Ops had the uncanny feeling he was speaking not to a pleasant man with an engaging manner, but a very alert Doberman with very sharp teeth. “Good idea,” he said. “I’ll just take care of any problems myself.”
“Excellent,” Hugh said. “Here’s your first. Where do I sleep?”
JANUARY
SOME ROMANTIC WITH A severe case of myopia had named her the Star of Bali. Five hundred fifty feet in length, steel hull, single screw, best speed in ideal circumstances eleven knots. In less than ideal circumstances she could probably make seven or eight, and in a storm such as this Fang hoped she would have enough power to keep her stern to the storm. Built in Italy in 1973, she was old for a cargo ship and the reason she was a tramp steamer now. At her age it was all she was fit for, that or hauling molasses, traditionally the last job of the elderly cargo vessel before she was retired to the scrap yard.
Ten miles short of Unimak Pass, something went wrong with the engine. Their best speed was cut in half, with a nasty front squeezing through the narrow gap between Unimak Island and the Krenitzin Islands at fifty knots an hour, pushing them relentlessly back in the direction from which they had come.
They knew this because Smith was watching their progress on a handheld GPS. Before that, he’d been talking a lot on the satellite phone. Then calls had suddenly ceased. He gave no explanation as to why, but he looked cold with fury.
Fang was just cold.
He looked around the container in the half-light provided by the gas lanterns. Most of the men looked numb with discomfort. They’d stopped playing mah-jongg when the ship began pitching so heavily that the tiles would no longer stay on the board. Mostly they just stayed in their hammocks now, rolling out only to pee. Fang had to force them to eat.
They were well trained and disciplined and they had been ready to hold out until the time came. Now the schedule was delayed and they would have to remain in their hammocks for however long it took the ship’s crew to fix the problem and get the ship back on course. Fang didn’t like some of the looks he was getting, and halfway to seasick himself he didn’t like the extra effort he had to put into keeping them in line. It didn’t help when they could listen in on the crew’s shouted conversations on deck. They were speaking Tagalog, of which none of Fang’s men knew more than a few words, but it wasn’t hard to identify the trace of panic.
The draft through the soft top was constant and bitter cold. Ice was forming on the insides of the container and the outsides of their sleeping bags. The irregular thudding sounds they heard from the deck, thuds followed by crunches and splintering cracks, was outside their experience and therefore more cause for alarm. It had started two days before, had continued almost without stop, and was interfering with everyone’s sleep. Because of the continual activity on deck, they hadn’t been able to reconnoiter to discover what the sounds were.
The problem was that when something went wrong here there was nowhere to go and no one to ask for help, even if they could have without fear of immediate arrest and imprisonment. If they had been in Singapore Strait there were a hundred little bays and inlets and islands they could hide in, living off the coastal fishermen in their tiny villages until the problem was fixed.
Fang wanted to go back to those tiny villages, to the Malacca Strait, to the South China Sea. He wanted to seek out that plump little woman upon whom he would father many sons, he wanted that snug little house in a Shanghai suburb. He had decided on a house instead of an apartment because it was his intention to take up gardening, exotic flowers in incandescent colors to brighten the view as he looked through the windows. And his children-he would father only sons, naturally, but a tiny daughter would not be unwelcome, someone he could spoil, because of course his sons would be raised to be hardworking and self-sufficient, just like their father.
Something intruded on this rosy picture of his future life. For a moment he couldn’t identify it, and then his head jerked up. The dull rumble of the freighter’s engine had changed. It was running very roughly, missing beats, almost clacking out its distress.
Smith noticed. “What is it?”
Fang held up his hand, palm out. “Can’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
At that moment the freighter’s engine coughed, spluttered, and died.