As he climbed, he saw that this ship was clearly not one of the fifty-thousand-ton behemoths that cruised the Caribbean and the Greek islands. It was a lot smaller, a lot dirtier, and had a lot more places in its paint job where chipping indicated the need for a new coat. At the head of the gangway a large black-bearded man in a white ship’s uniform stood before a badge reader and a little gate. Next to him, however, stood the presumed George Kanakaratnam, who said something in the man’s ear and then spoke welcomingly to Ranjit. “Come aboard, come aboard! It’s grand to meet you, Mr. Subramanian. The kids have had so much to say about you! Now—this way, please—we’ll go down and have a word with Dot, and you can see what a nice stateroom the children have, all their own! And I’m getting good pay, and it looks like they’ll find a job for Dot, too. It’s just the luckiest break we ever had!”
“Well,” Ranjit said, “I guess you were pretty lucky—”
Kanakaratnam wasn’t slowing down for interruptions, especially ambiguous ones that could refer to a jailbreak. “You bet,” he said. “Good pay, too! Now we just go down these steps—”
They did, and walked through another passage, and down more steps, with Kirthis (or George) Kanakaratnam never stopping his recital of how lucky his family was and how fond his children were of Ranjit Subramanian. They passed through seven or eight doors, all of the kind that would spring irrevocably closed in an emergency, and most marked NO ADMITTANCE. Until at last they came to a door of a quite different kind, a kind that Kanakaratnam stopped before and knocked on. It was opened by a large bearded man. “He’s Somalian,” Kanakaratnam told Ranjit. “They all look like that, pretty much.”
And he gave the bearded man a nod, and the man nodded back. Then, in a quite different tone, Kanakaratnam said, “Now sit down. You’re going to have to stay here for a day or two. You don’t want to make any loud noises or try to leave, because if you do, he’ll kill you.”
He gestured at the Somalian. Evidently the man understood enough of what was going on, because he patted a wide-bladed kind of knife that he carried thrust into his belt.
“Have you got all that?” Kanakaratnam asked. “No noise, don’t try to leave, you stay here until somebody tells you it’s all right to leave. So don’t make trouble and you’ll turn out to have an interesting trip—after we take over the ship.”
11
PIRATE LIFE
It was a little longer than Kanakaratnam had suggested before Ranjit was freed. It took long enough, anyway, for him to be fed several times—quite well, actually, because the kitchen was after all on a cruise ship. At least twice Ranjit fell restlessly asleep on the hard cot that stood against the wall. The Somalian left him alone several times, but not without locking the door behind him. Ranjit thought it over carefully before taking the risk of trying it; it was thoroughly locked. Kanakaratnam looked in a couple of times, apparently just to be sociable. He was quite willing to explain to Ranjit what was going on. On the second day the pirates—that was the word Kanakaratnam himself used, “pirates”—stormed the bridge, disarmed those of the crew who were not actually already colleagues, and announced that the ship was changing course for the port of Bosaso in, yes, Somalia. Before Ranjit was released, the pirates looted everything of value from the ship’s strong room and everything easily portable from the staterooms of the passengers—who, they were informed, would fairly soon be on their way home, unharmed, provided only that their families or friends came up with the appropriate ransom money. (“You would be surprised,” Kanakaratnam told Ranjit, “what some people will pay to get Grandma back.”) And then there was the ship itself. If they got it safely to the right port in Somalia, a paint job and some decent false papers could make it the most saleable item of all.
It was all very businesslike. It was, in fact, Kanakaratnam explained, pretty much like any other commercial enterprise. Since the beginnings of the twenty-first century, piracy had become a fairly big business on its own, with established brokerage houses prepared to collect a ransom and pass it on to those demanding it, in return for which they guaranteed the safe return of captives. “In fact,” Kanakaratnam told Ranjit with satisfaction, “getting caught with that stolen junk was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. My cell mate at Batticaloa was supposed to be in on this, but he got picked up for something else. But he told me all about it, and when I got a chance to get away, I knew just where to go.”
Even businesslike piracy did, of course, sometimes have its unpleasant side. One bad side, Ranjit was pretty sure, was what the pirates did with any crew members who resisted them too vigorously. (Ranjit asked Kanakaratnam, but he simply didn’t answer. Which was answer enough for Ranjit.)
When Kanakaratnam told Ranjit that the takeover was complete and he could come out of his cell, Ranjit found out there had been at least one unsavory occurrence. It was because of the ship’s captain, who had possessed an excessive sense of duty. He hadn’t wanted to turn over the keys to the strong room. Of course, that problem had been readily solved. The pirates had shot the captain on the shuffleboard court and promoted the much more cooperative first officer, who himself had pulled the keys out of the deceased man’s pocket and handed them over.
Ranjit had never been on a cruise ship before. Despite the grim circumstances, this one still offered all sorts of absurd amenities. There was a swimming pool on the top deck (though not conveniently usable when there was any significant wave action, which was almost always). The kitchen produced quite good meals, even if the actual passengers were clumped despondently together on one side of the dining room, watched over by pirates with assault rifles. The casino was closed, but that made little difference since all the passengers had already been relieved of the cash and credit cards they might have gambled with. The bars were closed, too, and there was no nightly show in the barroom theater. But there were canned movies on the TV screens in every stateroom, and the weather was balmy.
Too balmy, according to Kanakaratnam. “I’d rather have more clouds,” he said. “You don’t know how many eyes are up there, watching us. Satellites,” he clarified, when Ranjit looked puzzled. “Of course, they don’t pay much attention to an old rust bucket like this, but you never know. Oh,” he added, reminding himself of an obligation, “and Tiffany’s looking for you. Wants to know if you’ll help her with the kids up on the sundeck.”
“Why not?” Ranjit said agreeably, in fact rather looking forward to seeing his four playmates again. He was miserable, yes, but doing everything he could to hide it. When he came out of the stairwell into the bright tropical daylight of the sundeck, he couldn’t help casting a quick look at the sky.
Of course he couldn’t see any of those eyes in the sky. He hadn’t expected to but could not help wondering just who it might be whose eyes were staring down at them at that moment….
And, of course, he had no idea of what totally nonhuman eyes some of them were.
There turned out to be about twenty children among the ship’s passengers, ranging from six or seven up to about fourteen. Most of them spoke reasonable approximations of English, and what Tiffany wanted Ranjit to do—of course—was tell them stories so that they would forget having seen the murdered captain’s body exposed all day near the shuffleboard courts.
That turned out to be a tall order. Two of the ten-year-olds never stopped crying, and several of the others could not seem to take their eyes off the rifle-carrying pirate who patrolled the deck. It may have been that Ranjit made it even harder on himself, because rather than doing the simple and never-failing Russian multiplication thing again, he decided to show the children how to count on their fingers, binary style.
It was not a success. Clearly none of the passenger children had ever heard of binary numbers before. When Ranjit informed them that if you wanted to say you had one of something in binary, you could just write the old familiar one, but if you had two, you had to write it as one-zero, and three as one-one, the incomprehension was palpable.
He press
ed on gamely. “Now we come to the counting-on-your-fingers part,” he told them, holding up his two hands. “What you have to do now is assume that every one of your fingers represents a numeral—and, yes, Tiffany, I know what you’re going to ask. Yes, we do count the thumb as a finger.” (Tiffany hadn’t said anything, but cheerfully nodded.) “Each numeral has to be a one or a zero because that’s all you have to work with in binary arithmetic. When the fingers are retracted”—he made two fists—“each finger is a zero. So now look here.” He laid his two fists on the table-top before him. “In binary these ten retracted fingers represent the number zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero. Which is just another way of saying that zero is the number all ten of the zeros represent, because no matter how many zeros you write down, it’s still just zero. But now look at this.”
He stuck out all the fingers on both hands. “Now they’re all ones, and the binary number I’m displaying is one one one one one one one one one one. And that means, if you want to express it in the decimal equivalent, that you’re writing a one for the last numeral one in the line, plus a two for the numeral one next to it. Plus a four for the one next to that—doubling each time, you see, all the way up to five hundred and twelve for the last numeral one at the end of the left hand. And so you have written—”
He did the arithmetic with a crayon on a scrap of paper:
“And if you add them all up together you get—”
“And so you’ve counted on your fingers all the way up to one thousand and twenty-three!”
Ranjit paused to look around at his audience. What he got back was not what he had hoped for. The number of weepers had risen to four or five, and the expressions on the other faces ranged from simple confusion to resentful bafflement.
Then, tardily, questions did begin.
“Do you mean—”
“Wait a minute, Ranjit, are you trying to say—”
And finally, rewardingly, “Oh, let’s see if I got it right. Let’s say we’re counting fish. So what that numeral one at the right-hand edge means is that there’s one pile of fish that has only one fish in it, and the numeral one next to it means there’s another pile that has two fish, and piles with four fish and eight fish, all the way up to the pile—that’s the numeral one at the other end—that has five hundred and twelve fish in it. And you add all the piles together, and altogether you’ve got one thousand and twenty-three fish. Is that it?”
“It is,” Ranjit said, gratified in spite of himself. Gratified despite the fact that the only children who had responded at all were Dot and Kirthis Kanakaratnam’s kids, and the one who had really understood was, of course, Tiffany.
Kanakaratnam himself didn’t seem to worry about Ranjit’s poor reception. When he joined Ranjit for lunch—two kinds of soup, three different salads, and at least half a dozen entrées on the menu—he said approvingly, “You did yourself some good today.” He did not say in what way, though Ranjit—who had also caught a glimpse of the late captain’s splayed and riddled corpse—had a pretty good idea of what it was.
When Kanakaratnam returned, an hour later, he made it explicit. “You need to keep on showing my friends that you’re cooperating with us,” he told Ranjit. “There’s been questions. So look, here’s the thing. We need to get biographical information about every passenger—to know how high to set the ransom—and most of our guys don’t speak any language the passengers can understand. So you can help us out that way, right?”
There was a question in the tone of Kanakaratnam’s voice, but in the realities of the situation Ranjit faced, there was none. It was clear to him that his best hope of survival was to be useful to the pirates, so he spent a few hours of each of the next two days questioning elderly couples—sometimes terrified, more often belligerent—about their bank accounts, pensions, real-estate holdings, and possibly wealthy relatives.
That only lasted for a couple of days, though, just until the trouble struck.
It was still dark when a change in the ship’s noise level woke Ranjit. The comforting sound of the ship’s engines was no longer the languid kerplum, kerplum but had become a fast and frantic beggabegga! beggabegga! Even louder was the yelling back and forth that came from the passage outside his room. When he peered out, he saw members of the original crew trotting as fast as they could toward the exits. Each of the men was carrying two or three suitcases, obviously purloined from the passengers’ staterooms—and, Ranjit was quite sure, stuffed full of passengers’ stolen valuables. Most of the yelling came from one of the pirates, urging the crew members along with a rope’s end. The pirates looked angry and worried. The captive crew members looked scared to death.
Once again it seemed to Ranjit that it would be a good idea to make himself useful. He backtracked the bag carriers to one of the ship’s stairwells, where other crewmen were throwing stolen bags down to his level. As Ranjit was about to pick up a couple of the bags to carry, he heard a childish voice calling his name, and when he looked up, Dot Kanakaratnam and her brood were coming down the steps toward him. All of them, even the tiny Betsy, were carrying a share of the loot, and Tiffany was full of information. An hour or two earlier, one of the pirates had spotted what looked like ship’s lights far astern. “But nothing showed on the radar,” Tiffany informed him excitedly, “so you know what that means?”
Ranjit didn’t, but he was capable of a decent guess. “A naval vessel with stealth antiradar?”
“Exactly! We’re being followed by some destroyer or something! That means we can’t make it to Somalia anymore, so we’re going to have to beach this ship somewhere—I guess it’ll be India or Pakistan, probably—and then just disappear into the woods. Up on the bridge they’re working the radio now, trying to arrange for one of the local gangs to help us.”
“And why would a local gang of crooks want to do that, when they can just take the loot away from us?” Ranjit asked.
But the children didn’t even try to answer that, and Dot said only, “Come on. Let’s get some of this stuff down to the departure place.”
Once everything worth stealing had been lugged to the B deck exit, there was nothing useful for any of the pirates to do. They mostly wound up on one of the outside decks, worriedly scanning the horizon for some trace of their radar-blind pursuer, or even more worriedly studying the horizon ahead for a glimpse of where the ship would be run aground.
There wasn’t actually much to see but water. If there was another craft or point of land anywhere near them, it did not reveal itself to Ranjit. Around noon he tired of the sport, went down to find something for lunch, and then returned to throw himself onto his bed. He was asleep in minutes….
And then awakened again when a violent metallic screeching and a rocking and bouncing motion that almost threw him to the floor told Ranjit they had arrived.
Then the ship was at rest, though tilted a half dozen degrees from the vertical. Ranjit looked around to make sure there was nothing for him to take—there wasn’t—and then, clutching the safety rails, made his way to the exit port. Nearly all of the spoils were already off the ship and being licked by wavelets from the sea behind them. So were most of the people—pirates, passengers, and captive crew alike. Some of the pirates were, quite ungently, ordering the crew and the passengers to carry the wet suitcases above the high-water mark.
Ranjit cast one look around, found no human beings on the shore, and let himself down into the warm calf-deep water.
Humans had been on that shore at one time. They had left unmistakable signs of their presence. This was one of those deserted Indian Ocean beaches that once had been used for low-cost (and low-safety) ship breaking. The whole place stank of oil and rust. All up and down the edge of the water were fragments of old hulls, or of discarded bits of ship’s furnishings—chairs, beds, tables—too old and damaged to be worth removing. What was nowhere in sight, though Ranjit knew they had once been there, was any trace of the desperately poor men who had taken the jobs of cutting up the hul
ls and separating out the commercially profitable sections of engines and drive shafts…the men who had died on that beach, as often as not, from the toxic substances that would have made the job too expensive on any better-policed stretch of coast. How much of those trapped poisons and carcinogens might remain in the sands and waters around him, Ranjit could not guess.
The best way to deal with that problem, Ranjit knew, was to get off that beach as quickly as possible.
There didn’t seem to be any good way of doing that. If there was to be help from local gangs, Ranjit could see no signs of it. Well, there might have been something—a quick glimpse of some shadowy something half-concealed by the brush, but when he looked again, nothing was there.
Wading just behind Ranjit, Dot Kanakaratnam was doing her best to keep hold of four little hands at once without letting go of her loot bags. Finally she gave up and shoved one of the bags at Ranjit. “Here,” she said. “It’s George’s spare clothes. You hang on to them until he shows up; I want to get these kids out of the water.”
She didn’t wait for his consent. Kids attached, she shuffled through the hot sands to the high-water mark, where she stood and looked all around for her husband. Ranjit himself was suddenly the target of one of the pirates, waving his gun approximately at a cluster of the captive crew but clearly shouting at Ranjit. Who wasn’t sure what the man was ordering but thought it was not likely to be anything he wanted to do. So he bobbed his head as though in agreement, while turning and running, as fast as he could, around the stern of the beached ship. He didn’t stop until he was out of sight of the pirate….
That was when he heard the first distant, mournful hooting.