The Orpheus Deception Read Free Page B

Kepulauan Lightship and cruised out into the broad reaches of the South China Sea. The heel and pitch of the big tanker increased dramatically, and Chiddy honored the transition to wide-open water with another pull at his plastic jug of pilfered screech. In short, and from his rather narrow point of view, Buddha was in his heaven, and all was right in Chiddy Monkut’s world.

    Chiddy stood and stretched out a cramp in his left thigh. As he did so, he heard the big prop change its rhythm, begin to drive deeper, harder. He reached out to brace himself on the stern rail as, sixty feet above him on the towering bridge, the captain gave orders and the wheelman increased the speed of the Mingo Dubai to twenty knots. The deck began to heave as the ship butted hard into a broad, big-shouldered ocean that was running very high, with a jagged, white surface chop that looked like shark’s teeth, tips wind-whipped and streaming with yellow foam. Seabirds—mollymawks, terns, and frigate birds—shrieked and wheeled over the waves, riding the gusts like surfers carving a run out of the Pipeline.

    Underneath the chop, there was a rolling groundswell that lifted the Mingo Dubai ’s bow, and the tanker began to heave slowly from port to starboard, her hull plates audibly groaning with the strain. Thirty thousand tons of liquid caustic soda and Bunker C oil began to roll in their holding tanks. Sixty feet above her waterline, the Malay seaman on the rusty bridge fought the wheel to hold his course.

    The captain, a sixty-three-year-old mainland Chinese named Anson Wang, stood in a wide-legged brace behind the elderly Malay at the wheel with one hand on the binnacle and watched the Mingo Dubai ’s high-flaring bow as it lifted up to meet the oncoming swells. The steel decking rose and fell ponderously under his feet. As the bow slammed into a wall of glassy green water, a torrent of white spray rolled over the starboard rail and spread out across the forepeak, foaming and churning around the rectangular steel hatches lined up along her deck.

    Bracing a hip on the back of the pilot chair, Wang turned his binoculars onto the shining spires of Singapore City nine miles off his port side, thought briefly of his ex-wife and his ex-children who lived there and whom he had not seen in six years.

    Then, as always, he put them out of his mind. When he looked eastward again, he could see the darkness rising up out of Borneo, the leading edge of a large tropical storm coming in out of the South Pacific. He glanced at the weather radar long enough to watch the luminous green line sweep through three hundred and sixty degrees, filling ninety degrees of the screen dead ahead of the ship with a shapeless mass of red light. The Malay at the helm gave him a nervous glance.

    Wang put a prematurely arthritic hand on the old man’s bony shoulder, patted him gently—they were longtime shipmates—and turned on the intercom. Three decks down, in the cluttered wardroom, the eleven men of the evening watch—a mixed crew of Malays, Dyaks, Filipinos, Thais, and a few rookie Serbians making their first passage—were watching a bootleg DVD of The Poseidon Adventure remake for the twelfth time and sipping tin mugs of tepid green tea when the intercom buzzer cut through the floating blue clouds of clove cigarette smoke. The third mate, Vigo Majiic, a tall, rail-thin, and rather gloomy Serbian with a skimpy black goatee that failed to strengthen an underslung jaw, picked up the receiver.

    “Vigo, Captain.”

    “Let me talk to Mr. Fitch.”

    “He isn’t here, sir.”

    “Where is he?”

    Vigo didn’t want to answer that question. Brendan Fitch, the first mate and the current front-runner in the Mingo Dubai ’s informal competition for the Most Dangerous Drunk of the Voyage award, had put away a fifth of lukewarm sake and gone staggering down the companionway toward the sleeping cabins a half an hour ago. He was now snoring in the dim red light of a