The Seventh Secret

Chapter 23 — Grotesque

The Aleayn Yam was braving the doldrums, hiding its secret cargo away from the eyes of the good gods as the crew of evil pirates played cards to kill time. They had recently passed Mozambique, making sure not to get too close to the coast out of fear of being questioned by authorities.

They looked forward to collecting a fresh bounty of humans for trade, ransom or merely the pleasure terrified hostages lent their pirate hearts. Ali was sleeping in his cabin while Manni and the other four men engaged in a drunken game of gambling that edged near murder. Had they not had a stake in each other’s ventures they probably would have killed each other long ago. Perhaps it was the prerogative of criminals with wicked souls to be happily cursed to keeping company with their kin.

“You cheated, bastard!” Eli complained as Manni laughed at his defeat.

“No, I did nothing wrong. You all saw me!” Manni defended himself, still smiling as he guzzled the second cup of moonshine. “You owe me a fifty! Come on!”

“I’ll win it back!” Eli protested. Eli was one of only five men left under Ali’s malevolent command. The others had perished when they had captured the Aleayn Yam, due to a tough and smart Egyptian crew that had refused to allow their salvage tug to be taken with ease. Apart from Ali and Manni, Eli was now left in the company of Isho, Benjamin, and Jonah, all men from the same town in Somalia where they had been nothing but criminals. The other ten members of their illegal operation had come from different parts around the Arabian Sea. It had only been logical that they ended up as pirates, but they had been far from under-qualified.

They had all been carpenters, welders, and sailors by trade, but their innate greed and readiness to conquer at all costs had turned them into pirates. The human trafficking trade had always been the most lucrative, but the hardest to perpetrate, even for the likes of Ali.

One advantage of recent times was that the world had become soft and these days, people were so afraid of being judged as racists, fascists or psychopaths that they had become reluctant to fight back against pirates Ali and his crew. The liberal world’s current forced diplomacy and pacifism only gave brutal killers the green light to rape and rampage at will on the seven seas, save for a few feeble attempts of some local governments to curb this scourge with secret task forces. These task forces were obliged to keep their operations covert. Otherwise, the majority of naive regimes would take action against them for the senseless murders of pirates. After all, thanks to the new laws of humanity, criminals had advanced from rightful execution to protected status. Ali was well aware of these task forces, undercover as fishing boats and pleasure cruisers, so he steered clear of territorial waters.

“You lost again!” Benjamin screamed in intoxicated amusement at Eli’s losing streak, provoking the sore loser to lunge forward and hit him upside the head without any reservation. Benjamin's red eyes flared, and he propelled himself across the table onto his adversary to get even. They were locked in a heated scuffle on the wet floor, rolling around in spilled rum and shattered glass to the cheers of their fellow crewmen.

Ali came storming in. “What the hell is going on here? Shut up and get your worthless carcasses up, for God’s sake! I have that German woman on the radio, you fucking imbeciles! How is she going to believe we are a salvage crew if she can hear you behaving like animals in the background, hey? Hey!”

The men instantly fell silent, and Jonah helped his two colleagues up from the nasty floor to appease Ali. He had to remind them of the price such a group could fetch.

"Once we have the German and her friends on the open seas, you can all claim your rewards. From what I believe, we will have four women on the boat. They should make us a good profit and those we cannot sell… you can have."

The men roared with lust and excitement. It was true that female hostages were extremely profitable goods, but sometimes governments or families refused to pay ransom for the unfortunate souls kidnapped by pirates and then these women suffered appalling fates at the hands of their devilish captors.

One of the drunken crew members smashed a bottle against the wall, howling in cruel exhilaration at the thought. Then suddenly they all perked up, listening to the distant bellow of a deep and cataclysmic sound approaching. A storm strength gale rolled in from the south and rocked the tug boat uncontrollably, surging from below and withdrawing rapidly, challenging the vessel’s buoyancy.

“Look what you’ve done! Acting like stray dogs! You have angered the Big Blue! We’re all gonna die!” Ali screamed at the top of his hoarse voice. It was a well-known fact among the seamen that Ali Shabat was extremely superstitious, but they would never have made fun of his beliefs. Firstly, he would have killed anybody mocking him. Ali had a homemade collection of daggers he could throw with acute accuracy at alarming distances.

Secondly, the pirate captain had almost never been wrong in his assessment of the wrath of the seven seas before. The crew had learned to trust his instincts, admittedly not believing much in their own.

“Ali, what did the woman say?” Manni asked after a few uncomfortable seconds.

“They are waiting for us. We have just come out of the Mozambique Channel, boys, and about to pass into their waters, so we do not need this kind of hostility among ourselves!” he rumbled again, delivering one of his passionate speeches.

“Yes, Ali,” came the collective obedience from the men.

The boat fell sideways, rolling in the savage waves that rose up like majestic aquatic walls all around them. It was a terrifying sight to the seasoned seamen; the stuff of nightmares. “The weather service hasn’t predicted any storms and no other ship has sent any warning over the radio either. This is the doing of the gods! We are being punished, and you have time to fight over a cursed card game, you idiots!"

Manni swallowed hard, nervous to address the volatile leader, but he had to say something. “Ali. Ali, I think maybe the sea is angry over the killing.”

Ali turned abruptly to his first mate. In his eyes, he looked furious, yet something in there was fearful and fraught with doubt. "What?"

“We killed that Egyptian while he prayed to the sea gods,” Manni reminded his captain. The other men stood shivering from the cold, occasionally coming off their feet from the fury of the waves. Ali had his arms wrapped tightly around the pipes protruding from the wall on the other side of the lavatories.

“Don’t say that, Manni.”

“It is true. I could not make out anything he said in that language, but I remember him saying the name of the boat while we drowned him, Ali. Ali, the boat… this… boat is named after the god of sea and rivers: Yam. That Egyptian died calling Yam, and that is what is happening here now," Manni implored. "Please, make amends or we will never make it to the German woman and her ship. We will die and walk the ocean floor for all eternity, Ali!”

Manni’s relentless begging, along with the worsening onslaught of the angry waters managed to instill an ungodly terror in the other men. They bemoaned their fate, compelled by the hand of alcohol and the evil they had been part of.

“You must take the helm, Manni,” Ali ordered. “I have to make a sacrifice for this God to release us. A storm that does not have clouds or lightning — that is the weaving of demons."

Under the blue sky, where only a few clouds were scattered on the vast expanse above the Southern African seas, the Aleayn Yam bobbed and plummeted from the ferocity of the unnatural waves. Manni and Benjamin manned the bridge. Manni took the steering wheel while Benjamin went to the radio. Faintly they could hear maydays that would ghost in and then dissipate as soon as they came. The two men exchanged looks of great concern.

Another channel revealed a conversation between the coastguard and a cargo hauler off the coast.

‘This is an anomaly. We have no idea where it came from. There is no record of earthquakes in the vicinity, not even as far down as the Dolphin Coast!’

“You hear that, Benjamin?” Manni whispered. “There is no reason for this cloudless storm. Where is the rain? Where are the thunder and the lightning?”

"I don't like it one bit," Benjamin murmured as his eyes sought the heavens for any sign of logic, just a small piece of atmospheric disturbance, but there was nothing to put him at ease. "Ali must hurry, or we're all dead."

‘The weather service has no idea what we are talking about,’ the coast guard frequency yielded. ‘Yet we have a freak tsunami on the coast of Africa! How absurd is that? We are not prone to cyclones or tsunamis. Do you have any explanation we can give the vessels out there? Because we are at a loss!’

Another voice answered from a more faint origin. ‘All I can think of is that a subterranean shift must have taken place. Not as large as a tectonic plate, but definitely some sort of quake. But how? There are no zones of tectonic friction, no fault line anywhere near the eastern coast to explain this phenomenon.’

While Manni and Benjamin awaited their heinous fate in the embrace of all superstitions ever cultivated on the mighty ocean, Ali was going resort to the vilest of rituals his home country ever taught him. With his culture firmly in the grasp of old traditions predating any form of civilization, he was no stranger to the dark practices of witch doctors. Not even the purity of the salt water could distance him from his family’s traditions in a situation as urgent as this one.

With laborious toil, he moved to the holding cell where he had left the last two original crewmen of the Aleayn Yam. It would be a disgraceful offering, but he had to use what he had — dead men instead of a living sacrifice. He had to make his offering with a despicable act of cannibalism. Ali struggled to open the door, not only because of the dreadful breakers crashing over the salvage tug but because something was blocking the door from the inside.

Finally, after the umpteenth shove with his shoulder, the door gave way, just enough for his skinny body to squeeze through. The bloated corpse of the dead Egyptian he had drowned tumbled at his feet from the violently rolling ship. Ali choked at the thick, sweet stench of death and water. He rolled the dead body over to cut out its heart. As the point of his crudely fashioned steel sank into the spongy flesh and the oily fluids of decomposition started seeping from the wound, Ali swung around to vomit.

"May the gods forgive me," he gasped. "I am a pirate, not a ghoul!”

Sick and repulsed by the cadaver, Ali stumbled to the door, hoping that the storm would soon subside and that his men would believe he had done the unthinkable. It would be his secret.