The Killing Sea (2 page)

Sarah was asleep
in her forward cabin, dreaming she was back home celebrating her sixteenth birthday with friends in a deliciously cold, air-conditioned mall, when a pounding on the door woke her. It was already morning, with a warm blue sky pressing against the porthole's glass. Despite the cabin's whirring fan, sweat filmed her skin.

Another bang on the door. It was her brother, Peter. “Sarah, Sarah, wake up.”

“Shut up! Go away!”

“Surf Cat's climbed up the mast and won't come down.”

Sarah groaned and put her pillow over her head.

Why, oh why, had she let her dad talk her into this crazy idea for a family vacation? So far the chartered sailboat cruise from Malaysia to Bali had hardly been the grand adventure he had promised. All she'd done was stew in the heat and squabble with her brother and fight with her mother about everything, from the water rationing to the use of the satellite phone to call her friends. And then, to top it all off, yesterday morning's big blowup about the stupid head scarf. On Christmas Day, no less, spent in some grotty, filthy town because of a broken engine. She and her mom still weren't speaking to each other.

Peter pounded on the door again. “Something's wrong. I don't know what, but Surf Cat's real scared.”

Surf Cat was Peter's new pet, a half-grown kitten he'd rescued from a gutter at the Malaysia marina where they'd started the trip. Sarah lifted her pillow. From high above she could hear Surf Cat's agitated meowing. This wasn't the cat's usual begging for food or a rub. She glanced out the porthole. They'd already anchored here the other day, before the engine had broken, necessitating the detour. The bay's pastel water, the empty golden beach, and the hilly green jungle looked the same. The full-moon tide had washed away part of the sand castle she and
her brother had built in the shade of an overhanging tree. Building a sandcastle for entertainment! If only her friends could have seen her.

Meow, meow, meow.
God, that cat sure had big lungs.

Sarah pulled on a T-shirt over the black bikini bottoms she'd slept in and opened the door to Peter's scrawny, worried face.

“You are so annoying,” she said, “that if a T. rex ate you, it would have indigestion for a week.”

“You got to help me get Surf Cat down.”

“Can I use the bathroom first?”

“It's called a head.”

“It's still a bathroom.”

“But Surf Cat—”

“Shut. Up. Go try a can of tuna.”

In the tiny bathroom she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She studied her nails. They needed a manicure. New polish, too. She'd do that later. The day's big event. Give her something to look forward to.

She exited the bathroom. The stupid cat was still meowing. She sidled through the
Dreamcatcher
's cramped saloon and galley. The door to the master cabin was partially open, and she could see her mom and dad sprawled on the bed, sound asleep. After they had left the town's harbor, her parents
had decided to postpone Christmas dinner for a day, but they'd gotten into the Christmas wine. They rarely drank more than a glass or two, but they'd polished off a bottle on the sunset sail back to the island, and then another bottle after they had anchored, followed by a cognac nightcap.

Up on deck Peter held up an open can of tuna fish, trying to tempt Surf Cat down from the mast. The orange kitten squatted precariously on one of the upper rungs, mewing nonstop. How on earth had he managed to climb so high?

“Come on, Surf Cat, this is real tuna. Human tuna.” Peter tossed a chunk up into the air. “Yum, yum. Come on down. You can have the whole can.”

Surf Cat ignored the offering and clawed up another rung, almost losing his footing.

Sarah looked uneasily around her at the sea and the island. Tiger Island, it was called. The guidebook said there was still a small herd of wild Sumatran elephants living in the jungle, but it reassured readers that a Dutch hunter had killed the last remaining tiger seventy years ago. How could anybody know for sure, though? Maybe Surf Cat had spotted one. Maybe a tiger was eyeing Sarah's tasty, sun-toasted flesh from behind the dense wall of jungle, which seemed just a hop, skip, and a pounce away. Could tigers swim?

“I guess I'll have to climb up and get you,” Peter announced to Surf Cat. He slipped into his sneakers and began to climb the metal rungs.

A loud trumpeting broke the jungle's morning quiet. Sarah spun and caught sight of two adult elephants and a juvenile running up a ravine on their stumpy legs. Monkeys began screeching, racing through treetops to higher ground. Across the bay, hundreds of birds exploded out of the jungle. All kinds of birds, small black swallows, big white storky ones, green parrots, all squawking and chirping and cawing.

The hoarse voice of Sarah's father rose out of the master cabin's open hatch. “Good God, who's stirred up the zoo?”

For a moment everything seemed to quiet down. Even Surf Cat stopped meowing.

Then there came a dull but powerful thud, which Sarah not only heard but also felt in her bones, as though a primal sound had risen from a deep place in the earth. The bay's placid water erupted in shivering, swirling patterns. The clear depths turned instantly cloudy. A tremendous force slammed into the sailboat's hull. The
Dreamcatcher
shuddered violently, rocking with a hard jerk on its anchor chain. The dinghy tied off to the side broke its line with a whip-snap. Sarah went
sprawling onto the deck. Peter, reaching out a hand for Surf Cat, twirled around the mast and nearly fell before catching hold of a rung again. Surf Cat managed to hang on with his claws.

Sarah's father rocketed out of the hatch, wearing only his boxers. “What the hell?” he said, looking around him. He glanced up at the mast. “Peter! Get down from there!”

Peter climbed down, Surf Cat cradled in one arm.

Sarah's mother poked her head up from the hatch. Her hair was a complete mess, but her bleary eyes were clearing quickly. “What's all the commotion?”

The boat shuddered with another jolt. Across the bay, the top half of a steep cliff broke away and tumbled in a cloud of dust. Boulders rolled off a ridge and plowed into the lower jungle.

“I'll be a Richter,” Sarah's father said in awe. “It's an earthquake, a big one. I think we'd better get out of here.”

Sarah's mouth went dry. Her heart kicked against her ribs. But they were safe, weren't they? After all, there was no ground underneath to crack open, and there was nothing to fall down on top of them.

“Hey, the dinghy's loose,” Peter said, pointing to it as it swiftly drifted away.

Sarah's father dove into the water and swam after the inflatable with long, urgent strokes. He had to row hard to get back to the
Dreamcatcher
, putting his back into it, digging deep with the oar paddles. “That's one hell of a current,” he said as he tied the dinghy off to the stern. “Let's get going.”

In the cockpit he turned the ignition switch. From below came a horrible whirring sound. The engine wouldn't catch. He crawled into the engine room with a flashlight as Sarah watched from the hatchway, biting her lip hard.
Hurry, hurry, hurry.

“Starter's broken off its mounting,” he said. “We'll have to sail out.”

From up top came Peter's excited cry. “Hey, the reef's drying up! There's fish flopping around!”

Sarah's father jerked his head, banging it against a deck beam. He roared, “Betty, get the anchor up. Sarah, go help your mother.”

Peter was already up on the bow helping their mother, who was still in her nightie. The anchor winch's electric motor whined as it hoisted the clanking chain. Sarah untied the mainsail cover with trembling fingers. Something was very, very wrong. Behind them live coral that yesterday had been underwater even during low tide now rose out of the surface, anemones and soft grasses
drooped and wilted. A school of minnows flopped around one brain coral head like a silvery cloud.

Sarah's father hoisted the sail. He always remained calm in an emergency, and his actions were smooth and deliberate, but Sarah had never seen his jaw so rigid. A blood vessel pulsed in his neck. The sail caught the slight offshore breeze, and the
Dreamcatcher
began to inch forward toward the open sea.

Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Coral heads appeared out of the water all around them. Sarah's father had anchored the boat in the good holding ground of a deep sandy hole. Now the bowl of water was rapidly draining through crevasses in the reef. The
Dreamcatcher
was trapped.

In the garage
below Ruslan's bedroom, the Ford's temperamental engine banged and chugged to life. Ruslan opened an eye and peeked at the window. Stars still twinkled in the predawn sky. The Ford coughed once or twice more before settling down to a hum. The old car was his father's favorite. “Keeps me on my toes,” he always said. Ruslan yawned into his pillow, wondering why his father was taking his car and not his scooter the short distance to the oil terminal.

But that curiosity vanished when he realized that for the first time in a week he hadn't had his drowning nightmare. He was sated with sleep. It felt delicious. No, more than delicious. He felt like
a conqueror, full of a conqueror's courage. Today nothing would be impossible for him.

He glanced at the sketch of the Western girl taped to his bedroom wall, her features barely visible in the glow of the streetlamp outside his window. Too bad he hadn't been like this yesterday. She would have noticed him then for sure, a strong and handsome hero who had the courage and strength to rescue her from all dangers.

Well, there were other girls to impress. Tjut Sari, for example, a flashing-eyed beauty who worked at the photocopy shop. Today he'd saunter in with some document to copy. He'd hand it to her. “Two copies, please,” he'd say in his assured and commanding voice, and she would look at him with startled wonder.

His reverie was broken as mosque speakers all over town burst to life, summoning the faithful to dawn prayers. After washing, he prayed in the second-floor prayer room. Then, with the clear dawn sky filling with blue, he hurried downstairs and across the lane to buy several hot banana fritters from Ibu Ramly's stand. Of all the neighborhood ibus, the mothers and grandmothers, she was his favorite. The burner roared, fritters sizzling in the wok of hot oil.

“Such a handsome boy you're turning out to be,”
Ibu Ramly said, handing him two extra-large fritters wrapped in newspaper. “Your mother would be proud.”

Ibu Ramly had grown up in the same hill village of Ie Mameh as Ruslan's mother. Ruslan had been three when his mother was killed during a firefight between jungle rebels and the military. He remembered nothing of her, and his father rarely spoke of her.

He went up to his bedroom to change his sarong for a pair of jeans to wear to work, but he didn't put on his shirt. He munched his warm fritters, thinking of the Western girl's mother and the fight they'd had. Western girls were clearly different from Acehnese girls, but were Western mothers different from Acehnese mothers? He didn't think so. Mothers were mothers. But then again, how would he know? He hadn't had one.

He fell onto his back on the bed, thinking. How different would his life be now if his mother hadn't been killed? How different would
he
be as a person if he'd had a mother as well as a father?

A curious ache that he'd never felt before stole into his heart.

And then he fell asleep again.

It seemed only a moment later that a tremendous shaking of his bed jerked him back to consciousness.
His first crazy thought was that he was late for work and that his angry boss was waking him. But no one was in the room.

His bed bounced. His wardrobe skittered across the floor. The whole house shook and rattled. One large pane of his window shattered.

Neighbors screamed, some shouting in incoherent fright, others bellowing out,
“Allahu Akbar!”

The bed was really bouncing now. Ruslan jumped out of the broken window into the small side yard. The ground rolled underneath him. He couldn't keep his balance and had to crouch on all fours. Tiles fell from the house. One nearly hit his head, smashing to bits beside his feet. In the garage a tool cabinet toppled onto the motor scooter, smashing it to the floor. The air itself seemed to shudder and roar. Nothing in his vision remained stable, everything that should have been level and steady bounced and wavered. He closed his eyes to fend off nausea. Over the rattle and cracking Ruslan could hear his neighbor Ibu Ramly reciting Qur'an verses to soothe her frightened five-year-old boy.

At last the earth calmed, with only minor hiccups. Ruslan cautiously stood. Apart from several shattered windows and a few fallen roof tiles, the house looked okay, but all he could think about
was his father, out on the oil tanker. Once before, a severed fuel hose had burst into flame, killing a handful of sailors. As Ruslan ran to the waterfront, he noticed that the shanties and houses on Ujung Karang had ridden out the earthquake with little damage. People milled around in shock at the powerful quake, grateful for their survival. Many began streaming to the mosque to pray, several women putting on their white robes as they hurried.

The Pertamina tanker was high on the water, its fuel already pumped to storage tanks on shore. Men moved around on the ship's deck.

The café owner saw Ruslan on the jetty and put him to immediate work, even though he was shirtless and shoeless. Excited customers packed the café—nothing like an earthquake to get people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, quacking to one another like ducks about the morning's moving experience.

One of the customers perked his head up and pointed to the ocean. “Hey, shouldn't the tide be
rising
?”

The tide not only dropped, it rushed out to sea, drying out the fringing coral and exposing the mucky bottom beyond for hundreds of yards. People flocked down to the seawall to watch. Many gleefully chased stranded fish. A grinning man held
up a red snapper to his wife. “We'll eat well for free tonight!” he said, laughing.

Ruslan slopped a glass of coffee in front of the wrong man. Ignoring the boss's annoyed shout, he stared at the distant sea.

Out in the harbor the tanker's anchor lifted clear of the water as billows of smoke poured from its exhaust stack. Black water roiled off the stern, the propeller churning up sand from the seafloor as the ship made an ungainly turn toward the horizon.

Ruslan slipped away from the café and the curious onlookers. He began to run, not knowing exactly why, but instinct making him head away from the sea. His bare feet hurt, so he stopped at the house for a pair of sandals and snatched a yellow shirt from the front table as well.

He almost overlooked the letter on the table that he had already missed seeing once that morning. It was addressed to him in his father's handwriting. He stuffed the envelope into the shirt pocket.

And in the distance, along the seafront of Ujung Karang, screams rose from a hundred, a thousand, mouths.