The Devil's Waters

CHAPTER 9





Somali dhow

Gulf of Aden

In late afternoon, a helicopter flew their way to investigate the dhow.

Yusuf shouted for his crew to look like fishermen. The men quickly dropped lines without lures, climbed into the skiffs to cast and trail nets; one-eared Deg Deg steered a wide circle as if trawling. By the time the copter arrived, bearing the markings of the Chinese navy, Yusuf and his pirates looked engaged and innocent. They waved madly and stupidly until the hovering copter and its guns veered away.

Within the hour, a convoy of freighters and low-riding tankers appeared over the horizon. Six ships in a line, all making fifteen knots, filed past Yusuf’s dhow two miles away. Like a herding dog, the brute Chinese warship kept a steady distance from the ships. Deg Deg slowed the dhow; they would drift here on the rim of the transit corridor and watch the parade of commercial freighters and their bristling escort.

Six hours remained to sundown. Bobbing on gentle swells, ready to take up make-believe fishing at a moment’s notice, Yusuf and the crew marked the passing of every vessel plying the path to and from Suez. Gigantic container ships more than three hundred meters long scudded past, loaded with mountains of cargo. From miles away, Yusuf and Suleiman could read the company names painted in huge letters across their hulls: Maersk from Denmark, Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, Switzerland’s MSC, COSCO of China, Israel’s ZIM. These ships employed the latest designs—bulbous bows, immense length, and tremendous engines. They sailed without the protection and bother of convoys, lone fortresses made impregnable by their speed and high freeboard.

Automobile haulers cruised by, leviathans from Korea and Japan headed to European or Saudi markets. Ponderous, high-walled, and ungainly as they looked, with all their cargo shielded belowdecks, they were nevertheless among the fastest freighters on the water.

Humbler ships, flagged out of Liberia, Panama, the Marshall Islands, Portugal, were more common on the gulf—brown-hulled chemical and oil tankers, rust-bucket cargo ships, commercial fishing vessels with arms spread wide, trawlers, net seiners, longliners swarmed by gulls when catching. Indian or Pakistani dhows, trawlers manned by Yemeni smugglers. Even a sailboat in the far distance, likely some insane and intrepid white people trying to sneak through these dangerous waters.

Yusuf and Suleiman sat alone on the rolling bow, sipping cool tea, bearing down through binoculars on every freighter as soon as it grew visible in the distance. Yusuf lifted his black-and-white-checked keffiyeh to hood his head from the sun. Over five hours, they let three dozen westbound ships slip by; the same number headed east. Whenever a likely vessel passed too far away to be identified, Deg Deg steered them closer, until Yusuf waved him off; not the right ship.

The cousins watched until two more hours of sunlight remained on the gulf. If their target did not appear in the next sixty minutes, the plan was to turn west and motor through the night at top speed toward Bab-el-Mandeb, that mile-and-a-half-wide passage connecting the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, a 350-mile sprint. That way they could stay ahead of the coming traffic, wait for their prey at the narrow strait through which every ship going to or from Suez had to pass.

Sheikh Robow’s description of the freighter made Suleiman and Yusuf expect she would not be part of a guarded convoy; those clusters were for older, slower boats. She’d be off on her own, running twenty-plus knots. Her captain wouldn’t feel the need for naval protection or a gaggle of other ships around her, not with that kind of speed and guns aboard.

With an hour left, eyes worn down by binoculars and the water’s late-day glare, Yusuf stood from his wooden crate. His knees ached. In the west, the sun lowered onto a cushion of fiery clouds. Light polished the water as the day eased away and the low-lying mists melted. The bending horizon grew razor sharp against the sky.

From belowdecks, the smell of fried meat and maraq soup wafted to the bow. The rest of the crew had eaten earlier. Bowls of food sat untouched beside both cousins. Yusuf stuffed a cold slice of seasoned goat into his mouth. Chewing, he picked at a bit of gourd dipped in yoghurt.

Suleiman did not lower his binoculars from the east. Yusuf spoke to the black top of his head.

“Eat. I’m going to tell Deg Deg we’re moving.”

Suleiman had elbows on his knees, steadying the glasses. “Wait.”

Yusuf licked his fingers. “Why? What do you see?”

“I can’t be certain. Dolphins. We have luck coming. Good or bad, I can’t tell. But luck.”

“We have night coming. We need to go.”

“Sit.”

Yusuf wanted to raise his own binoculars, but he left this to Suleiman, who seemed to be trying to conjure the freighter.

Long ago Yusuf had learned to trust Suleiman’s instincts. His older cousin studied the ways of spirits and animals and their signs. Dolphins were indeed an omen of change approaching, like clouds. There was magic on the earth, a strangeness outside man’s world. Suleiman could put his finger on it. But this was not magic; this was the sea, where nature ruled alone. The two of them were searching for one ship out of a passing hundred on a wide water, on the word of an Islamist who’d threatened them, a man not of their clan. Their best chance now was to hurry to Bab-el-Mandeb, arrive at noon tomorrow, and wait there. Even then they couldn’t be sure their target wouldn’t pass them in the night, or that it hadn’t already come through here and they’d simply missed it.

Yusuf lowered his weight again to the crate. He set the cold dinner plate across his lap. He thought of Hoodo across his lap instead, warmer than this goat and curd, surer than this goose chase for al-Shabaab.

Without pulling his eyes from the glasses, Suleiman asked, “Do you remember what you said before we took our first ship? Seven years ago?”

Yusuf swallowed tea. He gazed toward the stern, where the crew smoked along the rails or watched the setting sun. Some toyed with the cat. Inside the wheelhouse, Deg Deg needed a decision. Instead, Suleiman wanted a memory.

Yusuf tamped down his impatience. He spoke to the side of Suleiman’s narrow face.

“Of course.”

“Tell me now.”

“I said that you and I would die on the same day.”

Suleiman nodded behind the glasses. Twenty minutes earlier, a convoy had passed the dhow, plowing to Bab-el-Mandeb. The eight vessels, European and Asian, guarded by a German war cruiser, had not yet sailed out of sight. Yusuf eyed the fading ships and their trail of smudges in the air.

Suleiman lowered the binoculars. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I said that out of loyalty. It was not a prediction.”

“Do you want to do this?”

“Yes.”

Suleiman handed Yusuf the binoculars. He aimed a hand due east, at a white sliver alone on the blue rim of the world.

“I believe it may be this day, cousin.”

Yusuf bore down through the lenses. Quickly he found the ship. Even seven or eight miles out, in the slanting light of the failing sun, he read the tall, pale letters writ across the blue hull: CMA CGM.

A French ship, moving west on her own.

Not a single container stood on deck below her three cranes. She skipped high over the water, the brown skirt of her bottom paint visible. She sailed where, when, and how Sheik Robow had said she would.

Her name: Valnea.