The Devil's Waters

CHAPTER 20





CMA CGN Valnea

Gulf of Aden

Yusuf left the wheelhouse with Drozdov, unarmed save for a flashlight and the onyx-handled blade tucked in the waistband under his khameez. They walked onto the wing past Suleiman’s gunman. The young guard started when they emerged, as if he’d been drowsy. Yusuf wondered if it might have been a mistake stopping the pirates from chewing qaat. The leaf would keep them awake. Dawn and Somalia were still six and a half hours away.

In starlight he led the Russian down the six metal staircases. Yusuf strode in front to prevent Drozdov from surprising any of Suleiman’s guards. He didn’t worry about the captain behind him; this man would do nothing heroic.

Reaching the deck, they walked the starboard rail. Yusuf was again taken by the size of the ship. Yusuf and Drozdov approached one guard, then another forty meters later, in the long and narrow companionway. Neither pirate heard them coming out of the dark. Both were caught gazing out to sea, weapons across their backs, elbows on the rail. The first snapped to a foolish, eager attention at Yusuf’s arrival. Clattering, he brought the RPG across his belly. Yusuf led Drozdov on. The second, a younger one, turned a slow glance to Yusuf’s advance. The boy slouched closer to the rail to make room for Yusuf and the Russian to get by.

Two-handed, Yusuf gripped the thin Darood by the tunic, lifting him out of one sandal. Yusuf bent the boy backward across the rail. The pirate’s white eyes flitted from Yusuf’s nose to the foaming wake three stories below.

“Stay awake,” Yusuf growled in Somali. “Watch the water.” He shook the boy, scooting him inches farther over the rail. “Or I’ll give you a closer look.”

Without hauling the pirate back in, Yusuf released his tunic. The boy scrabbled to gain his balance, windmilling to put his feet back on the deck.

Yusuf pivoted to the wall and the ladder. He climbed ahead of Drozdov up to the cargo deck. He’d never been on an empty freighter. While Drozdov clambered behind him, Yusuf admired the white expanse, the posts and cables to hold a thousand containers. He imagined the cranes loading and unloading this giant, the faraway places she and her crew had traveled and traded, the globe made small enough to view from such a life on board.

Yusuf Raage could never captain a vessel like this. He came from a land ruined by avarice and bloodshed, rained on them by outsiders. Yusuf wanted Drozdov, ashen under the half-light of constellations, to say he was sorry.

He said to the Russian, “Move.”

Drozdov led the way now, down an aisle between lashing bridges. He halted at a hatch in the deck plates, producing a key to open the padlock. The captain lifted the hatch door. Yusuf invited him down the ladder first by shining the flashlight onto the yellow rungs.

The two descended into the empty cargo hold. Drozdov proved nimble on the ladders and catwalks of the ship’s hidden interior. Yusuf directed the light mostly to guide his own steps; Drozdov seemed to know where he was going.

After six levels, they arrived at the hull’s bottom. Yusuf shone the beam along the open floor.

“This way,” Drozdov said. His words fled into the great chamber, echoing deeper than the light could reach. Yusuf followed toward the bow. They climbed across railings in their way like hurdles, passing beneath other tiers of catwalks. Yusuf shone the light in all directions, admiring the structure and expanse, imagining it filled with containers. Drozdov tramped in front, Yusuf strides behind. He fixed the light in the Russian’s path, leaving the darkness intact on the sides.

After two more tiers of catwalks and pillars, the beam fell on two ranks of nine railroad cars stretching the width of the hull. In the first row, the loads were irregularly shaped; the rest were large rectangles. All had been strapped down and covered by tarpaulins.

Yusuf led Drozdov closer. Quickly, his flashlight beam found a slit in the tarp of the first railcar. Someone had been here before them, probing under the covers. Slits were cut in every one. Who would have done this?

The two peered inside the loads. The cargo was all military hardware, aircraft and technology, marked as Israeli-made.

With his head beside Yusuf’s inside the last tarp, examining the ghostly wings of an oddly shaped aircraft, Drozdov mused.

“All these Israeli machines. Picked up in a corner of Russia, going to Lebanon. Why? And someone on my ship trying to stop it. Why?”

The riddles did not unravel for Yusuf any more than they did for Drozdov.

The saboteur knew the answers.

And Sheikh Robow. There was little chance the sheikh’s interest in hijacking these machines was only ransom. He must have known what the cargo was. Did he want this equipment for his own cause? Or was his purpose deeper?

“They are not going to Lebanon anymore, Captain. They are going to Somalia.”

The two withdrew their heads from the tarpaulin.

“This is illegal shipment,” Drozdov muttered. “Super secrets, armed guards, Iris Cherlina. Someone wrecked my ship. F*ck. This is big monkey business. I knew it.”

“Cherlina. Is that the passenger?”

“I don’t know what she is. Oslayob, I cannot believe I am captain of this ship.”

Yusuf stepped behind the flashlight, headed for the bow to see if any more cargo waited belowdecks. “I can’t believe I took it.”

They passed through another six-story tier of pillars and platforms. Yusuf quit imagining the vast hold packed with containers. He filled the void now only with himself, Drozdov, and whatever mysteries were down here with them.

Climbing over a railing, Yusuf walked into the open floor of another empty bay. Drozdov closed beside him, pointing.

“There is final tier. Beyond that is last bay, then bow.”

Shuffling across the empty floor, Yusuf cast the beam past the vertical structures ahead. On the other side, at the farthest reaches of the light, squatted one more long railroad car, loaded and masked by a tarp. Yusuf slowed. Drozdov bumped into him from behind.

They crossed the floor cautiously. Yusuf held the flashlight at arm’s length. Drozdov stayed to his rear, a hand on Yusuf’s back. Approaching the last tier, Yusuf halted before clambering over the rail into the final cargo bay. He cast the beam through the opening.

Twenty meters ahead, the light played over one more railcar, isolated here in the bow. Yusuf lifted himself over the rail, keeping the beam on this tarpaulin as he approached. The covering had been shredded more than the others.

Drozdov, never taking his hand from Yusuf’s back, followed.

“Someone is very curious,” Yusuf said. He whirled with the flashlight, casting past Drozdov. The jumble of steel in the hold gave up little, only more shadows.

Yusuf slid the onyx-handled knife from under his khameez. Drozdov spoke from behind.

Drozdov asked, “You could not bring a gun?”

“It seemed unnecessary.”

The Russian made a spitting noise. “Very confident.”

Yusuf drifted the light across Drozdov’s face. The captain’s features were as hard as his ship, no sign of fear. Yusuf considered turning around to come back with more than this knife, with a few extra men.

“Come,” the captain said. “I suspect that one is big secret.”

Yusuf followed the light forward. Drozdov moved to his shoulder, side by side.

The cargo strapped to this final railcar was a mystery. Yusuf hoisted himself up inside the cut-up tarp to climb over a crate wall painted with Cyrillic characters. Inside, the flashlight showed him nothing he could recognize, just a long block of steel plates bolted together. It could be anything.

Yusuf put his head outside one of the slices made by another’s knife. “Captain.”

“Yes.”

“Read the side of the crate.”

Drozdov inserted his head into the slit. Yusuf leaned the flashlight over the edge to light the wall for him.

“It is Molniya machine plant. In Moscow.”

“Do you know it?”

“No. Move over.”

Drozdov shimmied under the tarp to climb beside Yusuf over the unnamed device.

“Zdayus. What is it?”

Yusuf cared less about what the machine was than who’d made these cuts to look at it before him. What did Sheikh Robow want with it?

The thing was ugly. Yusuf leaned down to lay a hand on it. The machine felt terrible under his fingers, like a bone from the last man on earth. Suleiman would surely sense it to be a bad sign.