“I don’t see anything,” Mohammad replied, squinting up at the sky.
“Give me your plastic bottle,” Doaa commanded. When he handed it over, she held it up and angled it so that it reflected against the sun and the plane could see them. The plane started flying lower, and as it did, all three of them waved their arms, shouting, “Help! Save us!”
But then the plane suddenly disappeared and the sun fell slowly into the horizon. Doaa prayed, Please, God, they must have seen us, panicked at the idea of spending another night in the pitch-black water.
The sun was in her eyes now and its rays were blinding her vision, but she still kept scanning the horizon in hope. When she spotted a massive ship off in the distance, she pleaded to Mohammad, who was close by, “Stay with me, please, help me reach the ship.” Doaa knew that she couldn’t swim while holding the two babies.
“I can’t tread water any longer,” Mohammad told her, “I’m too tired. I’ll swim to the ship and tell them to come here and get you.”
The two men set off and Doaa watched them struggle to swim toward the boat until she could no longer see Mohammad. But the African man was still visible, and she wondered why he’d stopped all of a sudden when he was so close to being rescued, until she realized that he wasn’t moving at all. He’d died just when he was about to be saved.
Night fell and Doaa could no longer see the ship or anything else in the darkness. The sea was choppy, and something crashed into the side of her ring. She turned and saw it was the corpse of the African man. His face was swollen and his eyes were open wide. Doaa screamed and pushed the body away, but the force of the current kept moving it back, smashing it into her again and again. She moved the babies to the center of her torso. Clutching them with one arm, she used all her remaining strength to paddle her free hand in the direction she last saw the boat.
But she felt that she was getting nowhere. She turned around and looked behind her. Off in the distance, she saw the lights of another big ship. She scooped some water to splash over the babies’ faces to keep them awake.
How will I reach that ship? she wondered. It is so far away. Dear God, I have the will to get there, but please give me the strength.
She began paddling toward the boat with one hand, the other wrapped around the two little girls. She didn’t care what happened to her, but if Malak and Masa lived, she felt that her life would mean something. She would last long enough to know that she had saved the little girls, then she could finally stop struggling and be with Bassem again.
TEN
Rescue at the Dying Hour
The chemical tanker CPO Japan was sailing across the Mediterranean toward Gibraltar when a distress call came in from the Maltese coast guard: a boat carrying refugees had sunk and all available ships were requested to provide assistance. International law requires that all ships must “render assistance to any person found at sea in danger of being lost.” The captain of the Japan heard the call and changed course. He assigned extra lookouts to take up positions all around the cargo deck. Ship crews throughout the region regularly kept watch for refugees and migrants that had risked crossing the Mediterranean, knowing how often such attempts ended in death. The crew of the Japan would do whatever they could to save any survivors. But when they reached the coordinates given in the distress call, all they saw were scores of bloated corpses floating in the sea.
The ship slowed to avoid hitting the bodies. They heard from a container ship that was already at the scene that their crew had saved five people but were about to end their rescue operation since it was getting dark. Trying to search for more bodies in the dark would be futile.
Since the start of the European refugee crisis in 2014, merchant ships had been playing an indispensable role in saving lives as unprecedented numbers of refugees and migrants attempted the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean Sea. In the year of Doaa’s shipwreck, commercial vessels rescued an estimated forty thousand people. However, they are ill-equipped to operate as search-and-rescue ships, and every attempted rescue costs the shipping company time and resources.
The captain of the CPO Japan thought that he had done his part. He had answered the distress call, and no one would blame him for turning his ship around and continuing on course. But as he looked at the dead bodies floating around him, he decided to order the crew to release their lifeboat into the sea. If the other boat found five people alive, perhaps there might be others, he thought. He couldn’t bear to give up when all he could see in the fading light was corpses.