The Tears of Dark Water (11 page)

“Not long,” he replied, climbing into the low-slung sports car.

“Perfect,” she said and gunned the engine.

The dossiers arrived by encrypted email just before Derrick boarded the South African flight to Johannesburg. Frazier promised to send the piracy memo during the layover at OR Tambo. Derrick saved the profiles on his laptop and walked down the jetway to the plane. His seat was in the last row, but he had the cluster all to himself, which meant that no one would bother him.

The plane took off on time and climbed into the cerulean sky. Derrick put a pair of noise-cancelling headphones over his ears, turned on Mendelssohn’s
Songs Without Words
, and opened the dossier of Captain Gabriel Masters, the commander of the USS
Gettysburg
.

Masters had been in command of the guided-missile cruiser for eighteen months. It was his first sea tour after being promoted to the rank of captain. Derrick skimmed his resume and focused on the nuances that revealed the man behind the uniform. Masters was a scholar as well as a surface warfare officer, holding a bachelor’s degree in history from the Naval Academy and a master’s in strategic studies from the Naval War College. He had also published a book called
The Weinberger Doctrine: Military Strategy and Democratic Consensus
. After perusing the introduction, which Frazier had included, Derrick inferred that Masters was a warrior with a conscience, a man who saw force as a counterbalance to the plethora of threats in the post-Cold War environment but who understood the perils of favoring military solutions over diplomacy. Derrick liked him already.

He opened the second dossier—that of Captain Frank Redman, the SEAL team commander—and regarded it in annoyance. It was under a page in length, a highly redacted summary of Redman’s pedigree.
I have the clearances
, Derrick thought.
They just didn’t want to give it to me.
He read the document carefully, searching for clues. An ROTC candidate at VMI, Redman had entered the Navy and gone straight to SEAL training. After a sniper tour with SEAL Team Four, he completed the Green Course and joined DEVGRU, working his way up the ranks until he took command of Red Squadron. It was clear to Derrick that Redman was a superlative soldier. But his personality remained a mystery. What kind of heartbeat animated this man-turned-lethal-weapon? How did he think about his adversaries? What perspective did he have of his role in the wider world?

The third dossier was for Rear Admiral Jonathan Prince. It was even leaner than Redman’s, setting forth only his education, a few career highlights, a carefully packaged sound bite about his history in the teams, and his current commission as commander of DEVGRU. Derrick shook his head, feeling like Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road. Redman might command the boots on the ground, but Prince was the Wizard of Oz. Unfortunately, the dossier revealed nothing about the man behind the magic, and that was a problem. “Appearances are like used car deals,” John Derrick had taught his son, holding up an article about John Anthony Walker, the Navy Warrant Officer turned Soviet spy. “The only way to test a man’s character is to get under the hood.” It was one of the few truths Derrick regarded as gospel. He had learned it from Dr. Jekyll himself.

As the plane flew over the arid expanse of the Karoo, Derrick turned his attention to Daniel and Quentin Parker. Ordinarily, kidnapping victims were prisoners of the hostage bubble with little say in their fate. Occasionally, however, they played a larger role, improving their chances by connecting with their captors or endangering themselves by being cavalier. Everything in Daniel Parker’s background suggested that he would play it safe. As a young man, he had followed the trail his father and grandfather had blazed with only a single deviation—his decision to study philosophy at Boston College. But there was a discontinuity in his profile: the brute fact of the circumnavigation. Sailing around the world was hardly an adventure for the risk-averse.

The
Capital Gazette
, a local Annapolis paper, had done a feature on the Parkers before they set sail. It was short on insight and long on romanticisms, but Derrick read between the lines and saw things the reporter missed. Chief among them was the timing of the voyage. According to the story, Quentin had attended Annapolis public schools since kindergarten. Why then had his parents suddenly removed him from the system in the middle of high school? If he wanted to sail around the world, he could have taken a gap year after graduation. In Derrick’s experience, abrupt changes in long-standing patterns weren’t compelled by deliberation. They were compelled by crisis.

Also, what did it say about the state of Daniel Parker’s marriage that he had left on a seventeen-month voyage without his wife? According to the story, Vanessa wasn’t a fan of offshore sailing and had a busy medical practice—both sensible excuses but illuminating for what they omitted. Wouldn’t a wife and mother saddened by the prospect of such a long separation have planned to meet up with her husband and son at least once in a year and a half? Yet she mentioned no such plans to the reporter. Her only quote in the story was remarkably detached: “Of course I’ll miss them, but Daniel and Quentin are exceptional sailors. I have no doubt they’ll make it home again.”

Derrick looked out the window at the desert far below and imagined Daniel Parker aboard the
Renaissance
, the shock of the hijacking giving way to the vacuum of captivity, the unknowns of the future as haunting as ships’ bells in the fog of submerged fear.
You’ve been running from something
, Derrick surmised,
something big enough that it inspired you to leave your cloister and live on the edge
.
But you’ve also been running toward something—the inevitable homecoming. Who’s waiting for you there? Is Vanessa keeping the candle burning? Or is it your father and your firm? How far will you go to get back to them?

These were the questions Daniel had to answer to keep his hope—and his son—alive.

Ismail

The Indian Ocean

06°56´32˝S, 55°41´57˝E

November 9, 2011

On the morning after the hijacking, Ismail stood in the cockpit of the
Renaissance
, scanning the horizon with his binoculars. The equatorial sun was high in the sky, and its rays were sizzling his skin. The sea stretched before him into the trackless distance, the line drawn by the planet’s curve unbroken by the shadow of a ship. But a ship was coming. About this he had no doubt.

It was almost noon, nearly five hours after the coast guard plane from the Seychelles had appeared overhead and attempted radio contact. The overflight had terrified his men and thrown Ismail into a silent rage. His oversight was inexcusable. In his exhaustion after the hijacking, he had allowed himself the luxury of sleep before checking the sailboat’s instruments. If he had turned off the AIS beacon earlier, the pilot probably wouldn’t have found them. But he had no idea that the Captain had gotten a warning out or that the authorities would mobilize so quickly.

He had held it together well enough to deceive his companions. With emphasis from his gun, he’d forced the Captain to confess to sending out the secret message and then added an embellishment to the translation. His men thought the
message
had led the plane to the sailboat, not AIS, and had thus poured out their invective on the Captain. Ismail had stepped in to restrain them, winning points with the Captain and his son—Guray had nicknamed him “Timaha” because of his long hair. But it didn’t change the fact that they had been discovered.

They were 850 nautical miles from Somalia and cruising at a speed of six knots with the skiff under tow. Even if the weather held and the seas remained manageable, they wouldn’t reach the coast for six days. The ocean was vast, but navy ships traveled fast. It was only a matter of time before one arrived. And when it did, the game would change dramatically. If the Captain and Timaha had been European, the situation would be different. The EU ships almost never intervened. But America was like a leopard in the bush. Their snipers would kill them if they got the chance.

Suddenly, he heard shouts coming from below. He dropped the binoculars and slid down the companionway. He saw the Captain and Timaha huddling in the booth with their hands in the air while Mas glowered at them from behind his gun. The air in the saloon smelled faintly of human waste.

“
Daanyeer foosha xun!
” Mas was cursing at the Captain. “Ugly monkey!”

“Put your gun down!” Ismail barked in Somali.

“He poisoned our food!” Mas exclaimed.

“I didn’t do anything!” the Captain said in English, his voice an octave higher than normal.

Ismail placed his hand on the barrel of Mas’s Kalashnikov and forced him to lower it. “Calm down,” he ordered in Somali. “What are you talking about?”

He heard a groan and saw that the door to the head was open. He peered in and saw Osman straddling the toilet, facing the wrong direction. “What’s wrong with him?”

“That’s what I mean!” Mas yelled. “The Captain poisoned our food!”

Ignoring Mas, Ismail asked Liban, “What happened?”

His friend pointed at a box of peanut butter sandwich crackers on the dining table. “Osman said he was hungry, and the Captain gave him those.”

Ismail picked up one of the plastic-wrapped packages and waved it at Mas. “Haven’t you ever seen these before? They’re made in a factory.”

Mas’s anger turned into confusion. “Then what’s wrong with Osman?”

“He must be allergic to peanuts,” Ismail replied. It was astonishing how little his crew knew about the world. He turned to the Captain. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding,” he said in English.

“Your men are animals,” the Captain hissed. “If you don’t control them, you’ll never get what you want.”

Ismail put on his best disarming smile. “Don’t worry about that. They listen to me.” He wrinkled his nose at the stench coming from the head. “Do the windows open?”

The Captain shook his head. “The hatches do.”

“Good. Please open them. Then you can make us lunch.”

After the altercation, Ismail cleared out the saloon and sent everyone but Liban topside to keep watch. When Osman finally emerged from the head, Ismail gave him a lecture about how to use a toilet and ordered him to clean up his mess. Then he sent him on deck with the others. Once the hatches were open, a fresh breeze swept in and cleansed the fetid air. Ismail reclined at the table and watched the Captain and Timaha move around the galley, fixing the midday meal.

“You are making spaghetti?” he asked when he saw the Captain put noodles in a pot.

The Captain nodded. “Isn’t that what Somalis eat?”

Ismail was fascinated. “You know our culture?”

“I read it in a book somewhere.”

Soon, Ismail grew bored of sitting and decided to survey the cabin. It was the first time he had been on a sailboat, and he was astonished by the craftsmanship. Almost all of the surfaces outside the galley were finished with brown wood that gleamed beneath the recessed lights in the coachroof. The portholes were fitted with curtains that diffused the sunlight. The head was outfitted with a sink and a shower as well as a toilet. And the bulkheads were studded with bookshelves filled with tomes ranging from Jules Verne’s
Ten Thousand Leagues under the Sea
to Thomas Merton’s
The Seven Storey Mountain
.

Ismail felt a faint echo of grief. His father had been an avid book collector, spending all his spare earnings from the University of Nairobi on rare books. When he moved the family back to Somalia, he had left the bulk of his collection with a cousin. But he had taken his best titles with him to start a library at the secondary school he founded in Mogadishu. It was Adan’s conceit and connections that had convinced him he could shield the school and his family from the strife afflicting the city. The warlords had played along for a fee. But then the Shabaab came and everything changed.

Ismail turned away from the books and opened the door to the front berth. It was stuffed with supplies and gear—bins of toilet paper and paper towels, stores of clothing, packages of dried fruit and pasta, stacks of spare canvas, and sailbags marked with tags that read “Spinnaker” and “Spare Mainsail.” The walls of the berth were lined with charts in protective sheaths, and the floor was covered with boxes of fresh vegetables and tropical fruit. Ismail removed three papayas from a mesh bag and returned to the galley, placing them on the countertop.

“The men will enjoy these,” he said to the Captain.

The Captain gave him an exasperated look. “Any other requests?”

Ismail shook his head. “That’s all.”

“Can we play some music?” the Captain said, pointing at speakers embedded in the coachroof. “We usually have it on when we’re sailing.”

The request took Ismail aback. He hadn’t listened to Western music since the attack. The Shabaab had banned it and taken a bullwhip to anyone who defied the prohibition. The beatings were more draconian among the recruits. The Amniyat—Shabaab intelligence—had spies everywhere in the ranks, and Ismail had seen a soldier lashed until he could barely stand for allowing a girl to keep a cell phone with a Western ringtone. In the towns and pirate camps of Galmudug, he had occasionally heard Western songs piped out of ancient boom boxes or computer speakers, but they had still carried the taint of the forbidden. For some reason, he felt differently now.