Reamde

consequences of just letting the wind and current push them around would be landfall in Malaysia or Indonesia in a few weeks’ time. Tacking upwind, or even sailing at right angles to the wind, would be out of the question with what primitive rigging they could improvise from found objects on the boat. But the Engineer, who had done a bit of sailing on Lake Balaton, believed that by setting a sail at the correct angle and angling the rudder just so, they could use the northeasterly winds to drive them south and east toward the island of Luzon, and thereby shorten their voyage by one or two weeks. So they bent their course for the Philippines, and though the first day’s results were discouraging, they taught themselves over time to make Szelanya track south-southeast more often than not.

Then it was just waiting, and watching the sky, and wondering how it was all going to go down when the inevitable storm hit. It occurred to them—far too late, obviously—that they shouldn’t have run the fuel tanks completely dry, since it would be nice to be able to operate the generator that supplied power to the bilge pump. A battery system seemed to be keeping the GPS unit and other small electronic devices alive, but none of the energy-hungry stuff was available to them; when they had to haul on a line, they would use a hand-cranked winch, or, if none was in the right location, jury-rig strange aboriginal-looking snarls of cables and levers to get the job done. The entire vessel began to look as if it were lashed together with metal tourniquets.

They rode out a storm that, in retrospect, had not been a storm at all, but just a rainy day with large waves. For some reason the Pilot was least susceptible to seasickness; she tended to spend more time than anyone else up on the bridge, where the pitching and rolling and yawing ought to have been worse. When the sea was flat, the Skipper and the Engineer would go up there and visit her, but they had come to think of it as the Pilot’s own private wardroom and hesitated before entering. When the sea was rough, of course, they tended to be busy setting the sails and fixing things that had just broken. The Engineer’s response to seasickness was to expose himself to the weather, lying out on the foredeck staring fixedly at the horizon and letting rain and wave crests wash over him. The Skipper’s style was to retreat to his cabin where he could revel in his misery without being observed. Neither strategy would have been possible had it not been for the Pilot’s ability to stand planted in the bridge for many hours without letup, managing the wheel and keeping an eye on the compass and the GPS.

The rainy-day-with-waves had at least served as a sort of rehearsal for an actual storm. The Engineer, who had a vague recollection of his tiny sailboat being swamped by a motorboat’s wake on Lake Balaton, was fairly certain that the correct way to manage such situations was to keep the ship perpendicular to the wave crests. This made it less likely to get capsized when struck broadside. If they’d had engines, of course, they could have pointed Szelanya any direction they liked. As it was, the Engineer had reckoned, they’d have to put up a small sail, just enough to drag her downwind, not so large as to be ripped to shreds by thwarted winds. He had set to work crafting such an object out of tarps and nets and other junk that they hadn’t already used for other purposes. The mere act of doing this had seemed to revive very old buried memories, fragments of nautical lore that he had picked up when younger, reading Hungarian translations of books like Moby- Dick and Treasure Island. He woke up with the vague conviction solidifying in his mind that it might be a good idea to throw something big and draggy off the stern and tow it through the water behind them; as the wind pushed Szelanya along, this drogue would torque her stern backward and keep her aimed in a consistent direction, which in general should be perpendicular to the wave crests. He sacrificed a small table to the purpose, enveloping it in a cradle of ropes and then shoving it off the transom at the end of a cable. The initial trial, conducted in calmer conditions, suggested that the thing wouldn’t last very long in an actual storm and so he and the Skipper, who had come around to his way of thinking, devoted the better part of a day to reinforcing it.

They certainly had nothing else to do.

It had turned out that the calm day spent working on the drogue and the storm sail had been calm precisely in a calm-before-the-storm sense, and so the following couple of days had been spent in a condition of extreme misery. The storm sail and drogue had been deployed as soon as it became obvious what was about to happen. The Skipper and Engineer had scurried around and closed all hatches where it seemed water might get in, and then they had gone up to join the Pilot. The vessel’s steering gear consisted of a system of chains joining the wheel on the bridge to the actual rudder, and when things became rambunctious, it sometimes required more strength than the Pilot could muster—especially when she was exhausted from a long shift. At such times the Skipper would take over until such time as his arms wore out or the torque simply became too much, whereupon the Engineer would take the wheel and do battle, mano a mano, with the Mother of the Wind. There was no time during the storm when the Engineer was unable to supply the requisite amount of brute force. The problem lay in mixing it with intelligence. They could not see a thing. The bridge’s windows were sheeted with rain and windblown spume. The one that faced forward, just above the wheel, had a motorized disk set into it that was supposed to spin at great speed and throw off water, but they could not get it to work. So during the part of the storm when they most badly needed to see the waves, so as to make informed decisions about steering, they were blind and had to judge the shape of the sea by feeling the tilting and heaving and plummeting of the deck plates beneath their feet. By that time, of course, it was too late to effect any useful response. The best that the Engineer could do was assume that the next wave would be moving in roughly the same direction as the current one, and steer accordingly. He had just about convinced himself that all his efforts were a complete waste of time, based on sheer fantasy, when he lost concentration for a few moments and they got broadsided by a crest that laid Szelanya on her side for several moments. All three of them, and all the loose stuff in the bridge, telescoped into what had been the port bulkhead and was now the floor, and lay there like crumpled refuse for several moments until the vessel lazily rolled upright again. She was not beautiful but she was, apparently, well ballasted.

It abated and they discovered, to no one’s surprise, that the storm sail and the drogue were long gone.

It was six days after the storm that they sailed her into that bay on Luzon.

Giant water-skating insects had begun to clutter the flat, sparkling waters of the bay. Some of them made buzzing noises. Upon closer observation, these proved to be long slender boats with double outriggers. At first they tended to set parallel courses at a safe distance, but as it became evident that Szelanya was going to run aground, they began to draw in closer, apparently trying to make sense of what was happening. Each of them carried between one and half a dozen persons, lithe and brown and keenly interested, verging on celebratory.

CSONGOR HAD IMAGINED running her right up onto the beach, but she hissed to a stop in water a few meters deep, a stone’s throw from shore. This made it possible for the small boats, which drew much less water, to surround them. Within a few minutes, Szelanya had been girdled by a complex of rafted- together boats, and at least two dozen people had invited themselves aboard. They were all so cheerful, so well behaved in a certain sense, that it took a few minutes for him to understand that they were here to sack Szelanya. The GPS had disappeared before he even understood what was happening. The bridge was rapidly denuded of electronics, the mast of antennas, the galley of pots and pans. Hacksaw blades were droning all around, ratchet wrenches chirping like crickets. He experienced a welter of incompatible feelings: outrage that his stuff was being stolen, then the sheepish recollection that he and Marlon and Yuxia had stolen the entire vessel to begin with, committed piracy, killed a man. Giddy relief that they had finally reached dry land, combined with rapidly growing alarm that they had found themselves in a strange foreign place among larcenous, albeit polite, natives. Stabbing, paranoid fear that said people might be stealing his own personal possessions at this very moment, followed by the realization that he had no possessions other than what he was wearing on his body and carrying in his pockets.

Except for the shoulder bag. Ivanov’s leather man-purse.

He had been pacing about aimlessly on the deck but now turned on his heel and stormed to the cabin where he’d been sleeping, just in time to confront a young man who was just stepping over the threshold with the said bag slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. The youth twisted his body as if to dodge around Csongor, but as Csongor kept coming he blocked nearly the entire opening for a moment before suddenly going chest to chest with the interloper and body-slamming him back into the cabin. This was already drawing attention from passersby on the gangway outside, trafficking in coiled-up wire rope, plastic fish bins, MREs, and other goods they’d fetched up from the hold. Csongor pulled the hatch shut and dogged it, then turned around to see the young man clutching the bag possessively with one hand while brandishing a knife with the other.

He was better dressed than Csongor, in an immaculate Boston Celtics T-shirt and flower-patterned surfer