on the casing to draw forth the sense of its failure. Chief showed no disdain or anger for piston seven; nothing in his engine room lost value just because it was out of order. LB, who saved broken men, admired this.
Chapter 9
Somali dhow
Gulf of Aden
In late afternoon, a helicopter flew their way to investigate the dhow.
Yusuf shouted for his crew to look like fishermen. The men quickly dropped lines without lures, climbed into the skiffs to cast and trail nets; one-eared Deg Deg steered a wide circle as if trawling. By the time the copter arrived, bearing the markings of the Chinese navy, Yusuf and his pirates looked engaged and innocent. They waved madly and stupidly until the hovering copter and its guns veered away.
Within the hour, a convoy of freighters and low-riding tankers appeared over the horizon. Six ships in a line, all making fifteen knots, filed past Yusuf’s dhow two miles away. Like a herding dog, the brute Chinese warship kept a steady distance from the ships. Deg Deg slowed the dhow; they would drift here on the rim of the transit corridor and watch the parade of commercial freighters and their bristling escort.
Six hours remained to sundown. Bobbing on gentle swells, ready to take up make-believe fishing at a moment’s notice, Yusuf and the crew marked the passing of every vessel plying the path to and from Suez. Gigantic container ships more than three hundred meters long scudded past, loaded with mountains of cargo. From miles away, Yusuf and Suleiman could read the company names painted in huge letters across their hulls: Maersk from Denmark, Hapag-Lloyd of Germany, Switzerland’s MSC, COSCO of China, Israel’s ZIM. These ships employed the latest designs—bulbous bows, immense length, and tremendous engines. They sailed without the protection and bother of convoys, lone fortresses made impregnable by their speed and high freeboard.
Automobile haulers cruised by, leviathans from Korea and Japan headed to European or Saudi markets. Ponderous, high-walled, and ungainly as they looked, with all their cargo shielded belowdecks, they were nevertheless among the fastest freighters on the water.
Humbler ships, flagged out of Liberia, Panama, the Marshall Islands, Portugal, were more common on the gulf—brown-hulled chemical and oil tankers, rust-bucket cargo ships, commercial fishing vessels with arms spread wide, trawlers, net seiners, longliners swarmed by gulls when catching. Indian or Pakistani dhows, trawlers manned by Yemeni smugglers. Even a sailboat in the far distance, likely some insane and intrepid white people trying to sneak through these dangerous waters.
Yusuf and Suleiman sat alone on the rolling bow, sipping cool tea, bearing down through binoculars on every freighter as soon as it grew visible in the distance. Yusuf lifted his black-and-white-checked keffiyeh to hood his head from the sun. Over five hours, they let three dozen westbound ships slip by; the same number headed east. Whenever a likely vessel passed too far away to be identified, Deg Deg steered them closer, until Yusuf waved him off; not the right ship.
The cousins watched until two more hours of sunlight remained on the gulf. If their target did not appear in the next sixty minutes, the plan was to turn west and motor through the night at top speed toward Bab-el-Mandeb, that mile-and-a-half-wide passage connecting the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, a 350-mile sprint. That way they could stay ahead of the coming traffic, wait for their prey at the narrow strait through which every ship going to or from Suez had to pass.
Sheikh Robow’s description of the freighter made Suleiman and Yusuf expect she would not be part of a guarded convoy; those clusters were for older, slower boats. She’d be off on her own, running twenty-plus knots. Her captain wouldn’t feel the need for naval protection or a gaggle of other ships around her, not with that kind of speed and guns aboard.
With an hour left, eyes worn down by binoculars and the water’s late-day glare, Yusuf stood from his wooden crate. His knees ached. In the west, the sun lowered onto a cushion of fiery clouds. Light polished the water as the day eased away and the low-lying mists melted. The bending horizon grew razor sharp against the sky.
From belowdecks, the smell of fried meat and maraq soup wafted to the bow. The rest of the crew had eaten earlier. Bowls of food sat untouched beside both cousins. Yusuf stuffed a cold slice of seasoned goat into his mouth. Chewing, he picked at a bit of gourd dipped in yoghurt.
Suleiman did not