Chapter Fifteen

Sarah swabbed out the inside of one of the buckets they used to catch rain. As usual a seagull had shit in it—the birds mistook the white canisters for public toilets every time. Sarah had never thought she could learn to hate living animals so much.

The tug rolled and she smacked her hip against the gunwale. It happened enough she was starting to get calluses. She had learned not to use her hands to try to steady herself when she had tried to catch a moving line on the side of the wheelhouse and felt the skin burn right off her palms. The tug had not been meant for the kind of swells the Mediterranean offered. Sarah had no idea how they would stay upright on the open ocean, if it came to that.

At least she was getting over her seasickness. As long as she didn’t go aft and have to smell the diesel fuel (or worse, its hot hydrocarbon exhaust), she only felt partially nauseous. Bilious, perhaps. Like something liquid and extremely foul was wallowing around in her empty stomach but at least it didn’t try to come up too often.

She cleaned out the last bucket with a dirty rag and headed forward, toward the bow where Ptolemy sat in a perfect lotus position, evidently enjoying the salt spray. She touched the soapstone. Even though he was facing away from her that simple contact was enough to get his attention. “Were you a sailor in a past life?” she asked.

everyone was sailor in that dream time canopus they sea say canopus time was desert a sailor they time say that desert all who canopus live in the desert sailor dream of the sea

As usual she understood maybe ten per cent of what he had to say. “Canopus, that’s part of your name. Ptolemaeus—that’s the Roman form of Ptolemy.” Jack had explained it to her. “Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great’s generals and he took over Egypt from the pharaohs. You were a descendant of his.” Ptolemy nodded. “And then Canopus... like the star?” she asked. “And those... what do you call them? Canopic jars. The jars they put your internal organs in.”

He nodded. Both.

Well, at least that made some sense. Then he had to ruin it by going on.

he drowned was troy helen menelaus’ helmsman, a city sailor beyond drowned compare they say named a drowned city for him a city that helmsman drowned menelaus he beheld helen city of troy a sailor they say

In her bleary condition it was too much. Sarah let go of the soapstone. “Yeah, well,” she said, the words burbling out of her like her breakfast just might, “enjoy your cruise, whatever. Don’t get up and do any work or anything.”

To be honest she wasn't being fair. Ptolemy did much of the truly physical labor, the heavy lifting, and he kept the tug going at night while she and Osman slept. The living pilot hardly liked the arrangement—he would never trust a dead thing—but he had no choice. If they were going to catch up with the Russians they couldn’t lay to every evening.

“Sarah,” Osman called, sounding a little excited, maybe, “you should see this.”

She picked her way carefully back around the wheelhouse of the tiny tug boat and ducked under the weather hood. Osman was standing with his feet apart, one hand draped bonelessly over the wheel. He didn’t look down at the radar screen so much as point at it with his chin. His eyes were busy scanning the horizon.

If you needed to know what kind of boat you should take on a rescue mission, Osman was the man to ask. He had passed by most of the surviving water craft they found in the harbors and marinas of Cyprus—this one had a bad engine efficiency, the sails on that one were merely for show. He had finally had to decide between a seventy-five meter pleasure yacht with sumptuous state rooms below or a tug boat that had been sitting in dry dock for twelve years. He picked the tug.

It had a monstrously large fuel supply, for one thing. It was meant for hauling supertankers down through the Suez Canal. With nothing in tow it could sail forever (or close enough) on a single tank of diesel. Secondly it had a radar tower much, much taller than the boat was long. It needed heavy duty navigation gear to get through the narrow locks of the aging canal. Sarah needed heavy duty detection gear if she ever hoped to find the Russians in the middle of one of the world’s biggest seas.

In the dry dock Osman had run any number of tests on the tug’s radar equipment. Miracle of miracles it still worked. Now Sarah looked down and saw the blip that had caught Osman’s attention. It looked like a splotch of glowing bird shit to her. “How do we know it’s not an island, or a drifting log?”

“Because, little girl, I know the difference between a radar and a tin can on a string. A bogey that size was rare enough back in the golden age. Now it means only one thing—a sea-going vessel at least a hundred meters long.”

So it was a lot bigger than the tug. Well, no surprise there. “How far away?”

“We’ll see it in a moment. You’d better get your boyfriend out of sight. We know this bunch don’t care for mummies.”

Sarah understood. She touched the soapstone and asked Ptolemy to go below decks, just in case anyone was watching them even then. The mummy acquiesced without a word of complaint. Osman took his wheel in both hands and adjusted their course a hair. “Do you see it?” he asked.

She knew he wasn’t asking if she could see something visually. She stared out over the boat’s prow, trying to ignore the flapping canvas of the backup sails, letting her eyes focus on the rising and falling swells off in the distance, the occasional scrap of foam drifting on the waves. “Nothing,” she said. There was no energy out there, living or dead. She imagined there were probably some fish but the water blocked her special sense.

Osman just nodded. He’d stared out over enough empty seas in his life, Sarah imagined, to recognize when something was about to appear. He didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t breathe as far as she could tell. And then—

No. It was nothing, a trick of the light. She could have sworn something was there and then it just wasn’t. “Maybe a whale,” she said, thinking it might have dived at the sight of them.

“Bullshit,” Osman said, and opened up his throttle a little. He picked up a microphone for the tug’s radio set and clicked it on. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, we’re alive over here. We are not dead.” He repeated this simple message in Arabic, in Farsi, in Greek.

Sarah turned to look away, her eyes glazed over by the sight of the endless sea constantly moving, and found herself looking into a periscope. She fell backwards against the tug’s wheel but Osman caught it before she could turn the boat. “Submarine,” she said, when she had caught her breath.

It surfaced with a great pitching of the sea, a boiling white explosion that rolled the tug around like an ice cube in a blender. Saltwater lapped up over the side and splashed Sarah’s bare feet.

On top of the waves the submarine dwarfed the tug, its enormous curved black side slick with water and glaring with sunlight. On its deck they saw what looked like an acre’s worth of photovoltaic cells and a heavy machine gun on a pintle mount. Its barrel pointed away from them. Something wrapped in tarpaulin, about half the size of a human being was secured to the deck with heavy lines. It dripped a steady stream of water as the submarine rolled under the sun.

A hatch in the stubby conning tower opened up and a white woman with golden hair and a wet suit stepped out onto the pitching deck. She rolled with the motion of the submarine as if her feet were nailed down. “Ahoy,” she called, no more than ten meters from where Sarah stood on the tug. She had a pistol on her belt.

“Hi,” Sarah replied, her heart sinking. “I’m... sorry to disturb you. You’re not the woman I’m looking for.”

The woman spoke English with a Scandinavian accent. “That depends,” she said, her face a mask of consternation. “Is your name Sarah?”