Stephen Coonts - Combat

Over the salads, Medler gave his story without editorializing, deferential to us, more so to Dana, in a soft baritone all the more masculine for discarding machismo. “The Ras Ormara is a C-1 motorship under Liberian registry,” he said, “chartered by the Sonmiani Tramp Service of Karachi, Pakistan.” He recited carefully, as if speaking for a recorder. Which he was, though I didn’t say so. What the hell, people forget things.

“Some of these multinational vessels just beg for close inspection, the current foreign political situation being what it is,” Medler went on. He didn’t need to mention the nuke found by a French airport security team the previous month, on an Arab prince’s Learjet at Charles De Gaulle terminal. “We did a walk-through. The vessel was out of Lima with a cargo of balsa logs and nontoxic plant extract slurry, bound for Richmond. Crew was the usual polyglot bunch, in this case chiefly Pakis and Koreans. They stay aboard in port unless they have the right papers.”

At this point Medler abruptly began talking about how abalone poachers work, a second before the waitress arrived to serve our entrées. Quent nodded appreciatively and I toasted Medler’s coolth with my beer.

Once we’d attacked our meals he resumed. Maybe the editorial came with the main course. “You know about Asian working-class people and eye contact — with apologies, Mr. Kim. But one young Korean in the crew was boring holes in my corneas. I decided to interview three men, one at a time, on the fo’c’sle deck. At random, naturally.”

“Random as loaded dice.” I winked.

“With their skipper right there? Affirmative, and I started with the ship’s medic. When I escorted this young third engineer, Park Soon, on deck the poor guy was shaking. His English wasn’t that fluent, and he didn’t say much, even to direct questions, but he did say we had to talk ashore. ‘Must talk,’ was the phrase. He had his papers to go ashore.

“I gave him a time and place later that day, a coffeehouse in Berkeley every taxi driver knows. I thought he was going to cry with relief, but he went back to the Ras Ormara’ s bridge with his jaw set like he was marching toward a firing squad. I went belowdecks.

“A lot of tramps look pretty trampy, but it actually just means it’s not a regularly scheduled vessel. This one was spitshine spotless, and I found no reason to doubt the manifest or squawk about conditions in the holds.

“Fast forward to roughly sixteen hundred hours. Park shows at the coffeehouse, jumpy as Kermit, but now he’s full of dire warnings. He doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong about the Ras Ormara, but he knows he’s aboard only for window dressing. The reason he shipped on at Lima was, Park had met the previous third engineer in Lima at a dockside bar, some Chinese who spoke enough English to say he was afraid to go back aboard. Park was on the beach, as they say, and he wangled the job for himself.”

Quent stopped shoveling spicy sausage in, and asked, “The Chinese was afraid? Of what?”

“According to Park, the man’s exact English words were ‘Death ship.’ Park thought he had misunderstood at first and put the Chinese engineer’s fear down to superstition. But a day or so en route here, he began to get spooked.”

“Every culture has its superstitions,” Quent said. “And crew members must pass them on. I’m told an old ship can carry enough legends to sink it.” When Medler frowned, Quent said, “Remember Joseph Conrad’s story, ‘The Brute’? The Apse Family was a death ship. Well, it was just a story,” he said, seeing Dana’s look of abused patience.

Medler again: “A classic. Who hasn’t read it?” Dana gave a knowing nod. Pissed me off; I hadn’t read it. “But I doubt anyone aboard told sea stories to Park. He implied they all seemed to be appreciating some vast, unspoken serious joke. No one would talk to him at all except for his duties. And he didn’t have a lot to do because the ship was a dream, he said. She had been converted somewhere to cargo from a small fast transport, so the crew accommodations were nifty. She displaces maybe two thousand tons, twenty-four knots. Fast,” he said again. “Originally she must’ve been someone’s decommissioned D.E. — destroyer escort. Not at all like a lot of those rustbuckets in tramp service.”

Quent toyed with his food. “It’s fairly common, isn’t it, for several conversions to be made over the life of a ship?”

“Exigencies of trade.” Medler nodded. “Hard to say where it was done, but Pakistan has a shipbreaking industry and rerolling mills in Karachi.” He shook his head and grinned. “I think they could cobble you up a new ship from the stuff they salvage. We’ve refused to allow some old buckets into the bay; they’re rusted out so far, you step in the wrong place on deck and your foot will go right through. But not the Ras Ormara; I’d serve on her myself, if her bottom’s anything like her topside.”

“I thought you did an, uh, inspection,” said Dana.

“Walk-through. We didn’t do it as thoroughly as we might if we’d found anything abovedecks. She’s so clean I understand why Park became nervous. Barring the military — one of our cutters, for instance — you just don’t find that kind of sterile environment in maritime service. Not even a converted D.E.”

“No,” Dana insisted, and made a delicate twirl with her fork. “I meant afterward.”

Medler blinked. “If you want to talk about it, go ahead. I can’t. You know that.”

Dana, whom I’d once thought of as a teen mascot, patted his forearm like a den mother. I didn’t know which of them I wanted more to kick under the table. “I go way back with these two, Reuben, and they’re under contract with confidentiality. But this may not be the place.”

I was already under contract? Well, only if I were working under Quent’s license, and if he’d told her so. Still, I was getting fed up with how little I knew. “For God’s sake,” I said, “just the short form, okay?”

“For twenty years we’ve had ways to search sea floors for aircraft flight recorders,” Dana told me. “Don’t you think the Coast Guard might have similar gadgets to look at a hull?”

“For what?”

“Whatever,” Medler replied, uneasy about it. “I ordered it after the Park interview. When you know how Hughes built the CIA’s Glomar Explorer , you know a ship can have a lot of purposes that aren’t obvious at the waterline. Figure it out for yourself,” he urged.

That spook ship Hughes’s people built had been designed to be flooded and to float vertically, sticking up from the water like a fisherman’s bobbin. Even the tabloids had exploited it. I thought about secret hatches for underwater demolition teams, torpedo tubes—“Got it,” I said. “Any and every unfriendly use I can dream up. Can I ask what they found?”

“Not a blessed thing,” said Reuben Medler. “If it weren’t for D — Agent Martin here, I’d be writing reports on why I insisted.”

“He insisted because the Bureau did,” Dana put in. “We’ve had some vague tips about a major event, planned by nice folks with the same traditions as those who, uh, bugged Tel Aviv.”

The Tel Aviv Bug had been anthrax. If the woman who’d smuggled it into Israel hadn’t somehow flunked basic hygiene and collapsed with a skinful of the damned bacilli, it would’ve caused more deaths than it did. “So you found nothing, but you want a follow-up with this Park guy. He’s probably catting around and will show up with a hangover when the ship’s ready to sail,” I said. “I thought crew members had to keep in touch with the charter service.”

“They do,” said Dana. “And with a full complement of two dozen, only a few of the crew went ashore. But Park has vanished. Sonmiani claims they’ll have still another third engineer when the slurry tanks are cleaned and the new cargo’s pumped aboard.”