Blindfold Game

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.