John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

Back on deck, Hasan led them to a kind of alleyway between the containers, where it was possible to walk to the bow. If they wanted to do this, they must first inform him and report back when they returned.

At the rail, they looked down at the chop and churn of the water. It was a cold, damp day and the sight of the roiling sea made Wilson uneasy. Under them, the ship moved as if it were alive.

“It require more than one kilometer to stop the ship,” Hasan said, “so don’t falling overboard.” Zero instinctively shrank away from the rail, as Khalid translated.

“Is two days to Istanbul, one day in port there, and then another three days to Odessa. You don’t get off in Istanbul?”

Wilson nodded. “We don’t have visas for that.”

“Hasan regrets. A great city.”

Wilson nodded again.

“Is it possible to check e-mail?” Wilson asked.

“Oh yes. Hasan gives you half hour per day, this is okay?”

Wilson smiled and raised his arms at this unexpected generosity and Hasan volleyed back his golden smile.

“The best time you come after dinner, yes? But,” he cautioned, “computer work from satellite. Sometimes signal good, sometimes not so good.” He shrugged. “Hasan cannot guarantee.”

Zero and Khalid were soon bored and spent almost all of their time in the game room playing foosball. For Wilson, after all those years in Supermax, boredom did not exist. He easily fell into the rhythm of being at sea: the air, the gulls, the vast expanse of water, the regular meals, his daily walk to the bow in the canyon amid the containers.

He liked the bow, where it was quiet. If he looked over the edge of the deck, he could just see the bulbous front of the ship where it met the water. For centuries, the bows of ships had been like knives. But not any longer. Wilson pondered the change until he understood. A bulbous prow would raise the bow. This would make the ship more efficient by reducing the impact of the bow-wave. He wondered about the man whose insight it was, and if he’d gotten credit for it.

Zero and Khalid.

Wilson had little real interest in his companions, but during his long years in captivity, he’d become quite skilled at extracting information from those whose lives intersected with his. He was a good listener. That’s what made people think they liked him. He was willing to endure orgies of self-pity and jailhouse rationalizations with what seemed to be an empathetic ear.

The truth was, it was a defensive skill. He paid attention to the other inmates – as well as to the guards – because it gave him an edge.

So it was that without consciously drawing them out, he’d learned quite a bit about his sidekicks. Zero was twenty-two, Khalid twenty-four. They had both grown up in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut. Khalid, the English-speaker, had a bit of a mean streak. Zero was a happy-go-lucky kid with a signature high-pitched giggle. It interested Wilson that neither were zealots. They worked for “the cause” because they had virtually no marketable skills. One thing they could handle was trouble. Neither would hesitate to pull the trigger. Khalid had few illusions about where his life was headed. “I’ll die in some checkpoint fuckup, something stupid like that.”

It wasn’t the lure of the martyr’s afterlife – the renewable virgins, the wine, and the honey – that made them soldiers in a dangerous cause. It was, instead, a reaction to the squalor and boredom of Shatila, and a recognition that soldiering was the only work available for young men with little education and fewer prospects.

If, God forbid, they should be killed in the struggle, they’d be martyrs. This, at least, would earn them the respect of everyone who mattered. Their families would be compensated, and their pictures would be posted on the walls of streets in West Beirut. For a week or two, they’d be celebrities. Until it rained, or until someone else was killed.

Meanwhile, they dreamed of emigrating to Canada or America, the very places to whose destruction they were dedicated (if only in word). A likable kid, Zero had a crush on Jennifer Aniston, and insisted that if he could just get to Hollywood, she would be his. Khalid was more complex. His father was an engineer, his mother a pharmacist. Neither had worked at their professions in years. Khalid’s own education had been hit-and-run, at best. Prior to casting his lot with the Coalition, he’d worked as a baggage handler at the airport. Since then, he’d fought in Chechnya, where a barber had removed his appendix in the back of an abandoned bus. When Wilson asked him why he worked for the Coalition, Khalid shrugged and said, “It’s a job. And Abu Hakim is good to us.”

Three nights after departure, the ship sat at anchor in the Sea of Marmara, Istanbul twinkling on every side. Two dozen ships strung with lights gave a festive look to the scene, although they were all freighters, waiting to make their way east or west, to the Black Sea or the Aegean.

It was almost funny how much Wilson missed the thrum of the engines. The city, with its smoky fog, mosques, and minarets was spectacular, and he was sorry he could not go ashore.

As they did every morning, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer over loudspeakers crackling with static and howling with feedback. The effect was at once industrial and strangely romantic.

After breakfast, Hasan tapped on Wilson’s cabin door. He looked unhappy. “Dock strike in Istanbul.”

“Dock strike?”

“Hasan can report that many voyages, dock strike. Dock strike Piraeus. Dock strike Naples. Dock strike – this time – Istanbul.”

“How long will we be here?” Wilson was alarmed.

“No way to know. Maybe… few days. Hasan regrets.”

Wilson asked if he could use the computer to get a message to his “business contacts in Odessa.” Then he went to tell Zero and Khalid the bad news. They shrugged and turned back to the television. They had the TV tuned to al-Jazeera and Wilson realized he was watching some kind of bust: A man with a hood over his head was being shoved into the backseat of a black Hummer.

“What’s this?” Wilson asked.

“Malaysia,” Khalid replied. “They say he’s al-Qaeda.”

On the screen, the Hummer was moving slowly through a crowd of cops and soldiers. They parted slowly, as if reluctant to let the man go.

Khalid turned away from the TV. “Anybody they bust, he’s always ‘Qaeda.’ Look at how many cops they have.”

A few minutes later, Hasan returned and told Wilson it was okay to use the computer. Wilson immediately walked to the bridge to do so.

He maneuvered into the Yahoo! account that he and Bo used to communicate, and tapped in the password. There were a few e-mail messages, all of them spam. Wilson deleted a couple, then went into the Draft folder. No messages waited. He typed his own:

It’s very quiet here. Dock strike will delay arrival. Don’t know for how many days. Please advise party waiting for me that I will be late.

He left the message in the Draft folder, signed out, then walked to the bow. Everything was fine, he told himself. Nothing was wrong, it was just a delay. But what if the man in Odessa could not accommodate the change in schedule? What would Wilson then do with his “molasses”? Hakim was on some kind of trip; if he was unavailable, who would reorganize the transaction in Odessa?

And beyond Odessa, Wilson had his own deadlines. He had to be back in the States with the money by April. Even then, it would take some luck and a lot of hard work if he was to have the device ready by June 22, the day of the Sun Dance.

He told himself there was nothing he could do to alter the situation. Worrying about it was like turbulence in a physics equation, a dissipation of energy. Still, he felt the uneasiness as a kind of physical discomfort.