Morgan Stone - The Russian Factor

The wind-swept isthmus we’d seen from above was a desert at ground level; an improbable expanse of gravel, canopied by row upon row of yachts propped up on flimsy looking stands: tree limbs, boards, oil drums, or even stones. Up close, the boats were surrealistic behemoths. They towered overhead like the huge stone heads of Easter Island. Winter storms had sand blasted the upside-down dorsal fin keels where the concentrated weight of vessel meets Earth. Cloudbursts and flash floods had spackled them with mud. Dust was everywhere. It was not an inspiring sight.

From a pile of wreckage, Erdem located and extracted a homemade ladder. Half a dozen or so feral cats scattered. He didn’t notice them, but Anna did. The junk pile was home to a number of cats and their kittens. Anna crouched down, held out a hand and mewled, “Koshka, kotichka… kiss-kiss-kiss.”

Erdem shook his head slowly then propped the ladder against one of the delicately balanced boats. After a couple of good, reassuring shoves, he invited us aboard.

Anna preferred the wild kittens. She hung back by their junk pile dens. I called her over, but hearing a lot of hissing, snarling, shrieking, and the occasional Russian expletive, left her alone.

Erdem climbed the rickety ladder with carefree abandon and called me up to join him. The deck was easily as high off the ground as the roof of a single story house. The difference being, houses are rarely propped up with sticks. Staring down at a sun blasted desert landscape from the deck of a sailboat was deeply disturbing.

On deck, I was hyper-aware of every vibration and nuance of angle throughout the delicately balanced monstrosity. I actively concentrated on Erdem’s patter. “Rigged with such and such steel, so and so pulley things, Kevlar — bulletproof? — rope.” I knew what most of the stuff did. Saturdays at the yacht club with friends hadn’t been a total waste. I just didn’t know the nomenclature. I gleaned what I could from Erdem’s performance, guessing at components, like life rafts and things I’d seen before.

The sheer size of the components was nearly beyond my comprehension. The boat was only twice the length of what I’d sailed on back home, but parts more than doubled in size. It was obviously not a simple factoring of length that determined the size of parts. These were orders of magnitude bigger and heavier. I reminded myself, the Vendee Globe racers sailed boats like this around the world all alone. Hell, we had only half the distance to go and there were two of us! Yeah — a piece of cake.

Looking up, the towering mast did nothing to alleviate my anxiety, gastric reflux or sudden hypoxia. The rigging was filthy, neglected and worn out. It was nothing like the carefully tuned and maintained day-sailor, racing boats at the club. Down below, however, was a completely different story: curtains, cabinetry, furniture, toilets with doors, sinks, shelves. Now we’re talking. It was a miniature, deluxe chalet compared to the fiberglass crawlspace I was used to. I was dreaming about sailing that baby into the Vancouver yacht club when Erdem intruded on my reverie. He wanted to make sure I knew about the non-romantic stuff. Things I was truly unfamiliar with: on board electrical, refrigeration, septic systems, inboard engines, and navigation equipment rivaling aircraft I’d flown.

The charter, cruising yacht I salivated over moments before was a complicated beast that not only had to sail, but accommodate the people on board — in style. Kind of a weird combination of sailboat and bungalow. I had experience with both, but never in a million years thought the skill sets required for either would intersect.

The next boat we shinnied aboard was much like the first, dirty and worn out, but with a heavier, more seaworthy, look to it. One thing in its favor was its make, Beneteau — a brand I’d heard spoken of around the yacht club in those same hushed reverent tones reserved for prestige automobiles. Anna, her arms and legs covered with nasty bites, scratches and welts, joined us on that one. Erdem asked if she’d enjoyed the kittens. Anna didn’t want to talk about it. She peered down below deck from the cockpit and asked, “Is that all there is?”

Never having been on or near a sailboat in her life, Anna maneuvered awkwardly down the companionway — sort of a deluxe ladder into the living area below deck — and looked around. She went through the cabins, sticking her head into closets, tapping on walls like a termite inspector. She seismically explored the area below the floor, tapping her foot with greater intensity when the sound was particularly hollow.

“Ah, she’s an engineer.” I excused her behavior to Erdem when I saw him looking at her, puzzled. Then, to Anna, I whispered, “What are you doing? This isn’t a building.”

“I’m looking for places to hide.”

“Hide what?” I flashed a beatific smile in Erdem’s direction.

“My body. To hide me. You’ve said it yourself, we’re going through the waters of countries where I’ll be illegal. I don’t want to get caught. Who knows what they will do to me?”

“What? You’re going to hide in a hole or under the floor and hope not to get caught?”

“How much room is there under the floor?”

“I don’t know. I’ll come up with a way to ask Erdem. Meantime don’t be so obvious. We’re coming across like smugglers. Oh and something else I know about from flying airplanes and clearing customs; they have dogs trained to sniff for more than drugs.”

“What are we going to do then?”

“For one, we’re going to stay as far away from countries as possible.”

Erdem looked more than a little concerned. We canned the furtive whispering and he transitioned smoothly back into boat broker mode. “The cabin layout and storage space this boat provides is truly the best in its class.”

“Yeah, great. A little more room would be nice. What about storing stuff below the floor, blankets, provisions, a bean-bag chair, that sort of thing?” I asked.

He didn’t see why not, and using embedded finger pulls, lifted a floor panel to reveal the space below it. Not much room, barely a crawlspace and it was divided by structural bulkheads. Provisions — maybe, a living human body — not a chance.

At Omar’s brokerage, Erdem and I presented an offer on the French built Beneteau. Considering the years of wear and tear in the charter circuit and the sorry state it was in, Erdem suggested an offer well below the astronomical asking price. Tea was served, phone calls were made, and the offer was not only rejected, but countered higher than the asking price. I was undeterred. It was still within the half million I could borrow against my house, and I wanted that Beneteau. Erdem tried to educate me on business — Turkish style, explaining how the seller’s honor had likely been bruised by the low-ball offer.

I wasn’t placated. “Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about so called honor, and I want — no, I need — that boat, Erdem. If you knew the seller would be offended, why did you let me make the offer?”

Erdem called in his uncle Omar for reinforcement. Omar’s presence and imposing manner commanded complete control of any situation. He was one of those guys you just knew was in charge. Within minutes, Omar engineered a deal on a boat of his own, a French built Beneteau Oceanis called Shadow . Recently outfitted for a no-show charter season, he was happy to unload it.

“Oceanis… Anna, it’s an Oceanis!” I whispered when Omar stepped out to grab an incoming fax.

“ Nu ee shto — so what?”

“Don’t you get it? A model called, ‘Oceanis,’ has just got to be for crossing oceans.”

“You know this model of yacht?”

I didn’t, but Omar returned, preempting my need to respond. His voice boomed, “You, my friends, are in luck!”