We made way toward the Arabian Sea, a longer journey than before. I have worked for other pirate gangs; it is a job, this working as an interpreter. In fact, it is the only job that pays any kind of good money. But times change. Despite their bragging, they all knew the days of ships drifting past in the Gulf of Aden were gone. The warships patrolled now, sending us further out.

  We traveled with five hundred liters of petrol. Five hundred is a large number. It is not, however, enough fuel. Not for a return to land. All pirate gangs travel this way—minimal food, minimal petrol, minimal water. What difference? If one ship doesn’t arrive, another will.

  We chewed from the old batch of khat to bring back yesterday’s high. The acidity burned my throat, and the 7-UP was warm and cloying and did nothing to chase away the bitter taste that sat in my mouth like dread. My thoughts ran to ugly places. What if no ship arrives? If we send a distress call, who would come? Would the warships save us, we who terrorize the gulf and force them to carry out their endless patrol? Would the Yemeni fishermen, whose boats we steal? We could radio to land, but there we live on credit. We cultivate debt and resentment and little else. No one sails for pirates with no ransom.

  Finally, the ship appeared at the horizon, heavy and long, like any other freighter. It was gray, resembling a warship in color, if not shape, its deck busy with smoke stacks and masts. Relief washed over me; no false information had appeared on Old Boy’s Google. My worries were the product of a mind troubled by sleeplessness and khat withdrawal and the tricks the sea plays on unwary eyes.

  The radio crackled. A series of blips followed, syncopated like the French hip-hop we play at the parties that follow a raid. Fareed ran his hand over his jaw. Old Boy strapped his gun across his chest despite our distance from the cargo ship. I chewed a stalk of khat, although it was stale and would do nothing. Old Boy gestured to me.

  “It’s Morse code,” I said.

  “Ridiculous. No one uses that anymore,” Old Boy scoffed. The others joined in. Bolstered by day-old jitters and bravado, there is little they wouldn’t have poked fun at.

  A voice cut through the static. It was disjointed, hard to comprehend. Then it came clear.

  “I die.”

  I looked at Old Boy. That much English he understood. He waited to see what I would say. We stared at each other for a long time. I glanced at Mohammed and Jamal to see if they heard it, but nothing registered. It was too hot, they had been awake too many hours, the ship was too close. Old Boy laughed again, tight, not big and full like it should be coming from a man like him.

  “It’s a distress call,” he said.

  The men slapped each other’s palms, a gesture they learned from the American marines.

  Did the voice really say I die? Maybe he said the engine died. That would make sense. But an eerie calm ran through the man’s voice. He sounded as though he had already faced the worst and death came as a relief.

  * * *

  Fareed threw down the anchor. We gathered our weapons and the rope ladders. The men drew in the skiffs and jumped on. I stood on deck, feet rooted like plants. Jamal slapped my back.

  “What are you waiting for, Clever Boy?” They use this nickname like it’s an insult, which it is.

  I jumped in the skiff. It rocked under my weight then shot off, throwing me back. We approached the freighter, aiming toward its middle, where it sat lowest. The motors rattled and, briefly, it felt like we were heading toward a moment when everything would change.

  The ship was empty.

  A freighter carries freight. Cargo boxes stacked one on top of another, from the depths of the hold up to its masts. And a cargo ship, like any other, has a crew. When we hijack a ship, the sailors move to the deck, ready to fight or surrender. Usually it is the latter because who would fight for a ship that is not one’s own? Besides, everyone knows we want our hostages alive.

  Perhaps, despite the low morning light and our swift approach, the mariners saw us and fled to their quarters. Or this could be one of the ships we’ve heard about, on which the company stations armed guards. The mercenaries instruct the sailors to barricade themselves and they lie in wait. But guards on this broken, ancient freighter? Never.

  There was no crew, there was no cargo. It was that simple.

  The vessel was quiet. Other than the complaint of the metal, it made no sound. No whir of the engine, no rumble of ventilators, no splash of water from the dischargers. Its paint was blistered from the assault of the sun, and the white lettering on its side was overlaid in dirt, words sullied by ocean air and debris. I saw it as clear as anything. This ship was damaged in some vital way. Drifting in the current, it did not move of its own accord.

  I said nothing. The others knew ships better than me. They were fishermen before they were pirates, and they had worked in a real coast guard when we had one. They will probably do both of those things again if anyone creates a new coast guard, which they will, or launches another incentive to reform the pirates, which they will. And, of course, both those schemes will fall apart. Everyone will return to piracy and it will just keep going. On and on. Forever.

  Jamal touched his gun barrel. Fareed and Mohammed scanned the navigation bridge. Old Boy turned toward us but didn’t speak. They understood but no one said it aloud: let this one pass. There will be another.

  “Throw the ladder.” Old Boy never has to say this. The men fight to get the ladder thrown. After all, the first to board gets double pay.

  Before I couldn’t move when I wanted to. Now, I couldn’t stop myself. I grabbed the rope ladder. I swung. It cleared the edge.

  “Ah, Clever Boy,” Mohammed hissed. I felt a moment’s pride until I remembered I had to step on those twists of rope and up over the gunwale onto the deck we couldn’t see.

  I stepped into the space between boat and skiff, yawning like a ravine.

  “Hurry up, Clever Boy.” That was mere bluster. They said it because it was expected of them. They were in no rush to mount this steed.

  I moved too fast. I put too much effort into clearing the gunwale and tumbled over its edge. The deck seared my bare arms. For a moment, I thought the sun had heated the metal to the burning point. But this was a brittle, shocking sensation, a cold so intense I was slow to recognize it.

  My legs fought my attempt to stand. The flesh on my calf stuck to the frigid steel. It tore, bringing blood to the surface. If I moved again, the skin of my hands and forearms would rip open too. If I remained, the cold would overtake me, freezing me as I lay beneath the African sun. I braced myself and pushed the deck away.

  When the others saw my head and torso, they shouted, voices weak in the open space. They made their way up the ladder because they knew they had to. I wanted to call out to them. I wanted to tell them to head for shore, although I knew they wouldn’t make it. Or back to the gulf. Anywhere but here. But the words tangled up in my mouth. Fareed held my gaze as he stood. I longed to tell him of the dread I felt. But I would not admit fear among these men and, anyway, there was nothing I could name, other than the cold that wounded my skin and seeped through my sandals.

  Old Boy was the last up. He didn’t speak as Mohammed tied off the skiffs. There was nothing to say on this silent boat with the burning sun and the freezing deck.

  I moved toward the bridge. I would find no mariners there. I knew this. But something called me, as clearly as if it spoke aloud. I opened the door to the navigation room. Cold air rushed past. If I had stopped to ponder it, I would have assumed one adjusted to cold as one did to heat. But cold is a different sort of force. It threatens in a way that heat does not.

  I walked in before the others. I saw it first.

  I come from a country that destroyed itself as the world stood by. I was born into a land torn apart by war and starvation. I witnessed its horrors. My cousins’ eyes dull from hunger. Neighbors cast from their homes, walking until thirst claimed them, dead before they hit the ground. I have seen bodies torn apart by bullets and left to rot in the sun because no one dares retrieve them. I have seen barbarity that, I suspect, you can only imagine.

  I should have been able to endure what appeared before me.

  Corpses lay upon the navigation room floor. There were five of them, Westerners, white men. They were not crumpled in heaps like those struck down in battle. They had not dropped limply like victims of hunger. These bodies were stiff, but this is not what was strange. It was their position. They each lay in a similar pose, hands extended as though to repel something loathsome. Faces frozen in terror. I know well the grimace of fear. I know the expression a face takes on as a person falls in violent death, but I have never seen that look remain once life passes from the body. Yet, here they were, sneering so hard it was a cruel, twisted smile. And most bizarre, next to them, a dead dog, its lip curled, teeth bared. It leaned forward, haunches flexed, front leg raised, ready to attack, hesitating, trapped in that moment of horrified indecision—its terror all the more vivid for its animal realization.

  I turned from the bodies and scanned the communication deck. The deck was cluttered with objects I didn’t recognize. The equipment had knobs and dials, not screens and keyboards. There was no satellite phone, no VHF radio, only an old-style radiotelephone. One of the crew lay slumped before it, reaching for the handset the way a drowning man yearns for the flotsam of a wreck.

  Without thinking, I touched his flesh. He was cold, his skin hard. The radio operator, like the others, wore clothes from another era. Wool coats and blazers, ties, the kinds of things Westerners wear, but wrong, dated in a way I couldn’t name.

  How long had these bodies lain on this ship?

  When I was in school in India, I read of corpses on Mount Everest. Remains that would never decompose because of the cold. So that might be why these bodies endured for decades. Assuming a frozen ship adrift at the equator is an explanation of any kind.

  Besides, we received a distress call. It came from this ship. If someone lived yet upon this boat, and he had made the call, he would have knocked this stiff body from its position. If death had truly been close at hand, he would lie here among the others, a new corpse, dressed in modern clothes.

  I felt with a sickening certainty that it had to have been this man—this corpse from another era—who I had heard speak. And he had said clearly, “I die.”

  * * *

  We made our way to the crew’s quarters, Old Boy still nurturing the fantasy that we would find living mariners barricaded in their rooms. You daft man, I thought, would the ship’s hands leave dead people here? Would they tend to minor jobs as the freighter limped in the current?

  We circled around from the bridge. The sun was still hot, the deck cold. We entered a hall, dark, as we knew it would be. I hesitated, blinded by the sudden gloom. A screech filled the corridor. The others flinched behind me. There was no more swagger. Fear was our common state. Fear held us together.

  My eyes burned and my gut ached. I searched my pockets for a khat stem. I had nothing. We had made our way through most of the stash yesterday. We chewed the remainder on the boat. My palms leaked sweat and my heart pounded. We would face the worst of our comedown—alongside the hallucinations of insomnia—caught on this cold, desolate vessel.

  Metal shrieked again, shrill like the brakes of an out of control truck. I turned on my torch, shining its light onto one wall, then another. The hall was bare. I made my way down its length. At its end, a door stood open. Gently, following the list of the ship, it creaked on its hinges.

  “It’s the door,” I said. No one answered.

  I entered the room, steeling myself for more bodies, more expressions frozen in horror. The room was empty, no trace of anyone having spent months floating through waters rough and calm, circling the planet, this small space their world.

  It was the same in the next room we checked and the ones after that. Vacant. Quiet.

  “The crew is dead,” Fareed said.

  “The ship is ours.” Old Boy tried to make it sound like a triumph. It rang as hollow as our footsteps on the deserted ship.

  What good to us was a freighter? What use a ship like this, even if it wasn’t disabled, its engine stalled or dead? What would we do with it? Sail it back to Eyl and sell it for scrap, as we waited for the SPF or the National Army to descend upon us?

  This ship was old and, no doubt, assumed missing. The shipping company, should it still exist, would pay nothing for a boat it lost long ago.

  A ghost ship yields no ransom.

  Jamal suggested we go to the hold and search the storerooms for supplies. I wanted to object. Why would there be food, water or fuel below an empty deck? What good were provisions on a dead ship? I peered into the gaping wound of a hold. There were shipping containers after all. They lay cluttered, off-kilter as though dropped from a great height, the discarded toys of a giant. Enough to cast shadows, enough to turn the hold into a maze, but not enough to suggest any kind of order. That sprawling space filled me with a terror that had nothing to do with my certainty that it held no supplies.

  “Find the engine,” Old Boy said.

  He was right. Our only hope was getting the engine started. And I knew, we all knew, we had to go into the hold to reach the engine room.

  The stairwell was dark, its shadow deep. I struggled to see even as we turned on our torches. A shiver ran through me, and I wished desperately for something to cover my singlet and sarong. If anything, it felt colder here. I wondered if I would die, wrapped in frigid air. The thought was nearly a relief.

  A whispering filled the stairway, rushing past like wind. I heard voices but couldn’t decipher their words. Were they speaking Yemeni, English, Arabic? I drove the question away. This isn’t real, this is withdrawal, sleeplessness. It doesn’t matter what language they speak because they do not exist.

  The others’ footsteps sounded a heavy bass, even though they are slender men, even though they wore sandals. Light from their torches bounced around in the shadows, their voices carried. Jamal and Mohammed loud—as if their shouts were a protection—Fareed and Old Boy quieter. Follow them, I told myself. But I lagged behind, reluctant to descend into that pit.

  I stepped into a pocket of warmth. Hot and cold ran alongside each other down here, like currents in the sea. I wanted a chew so badly. Inshallah, when I got off this ship, the first thing I would do was get a batch of khat. Once I made my way through this, I would sleep long and undisturbed. Then I would stop for good. I would remember this awful feeling and I would make certain never to endure it again.

  I called out for Fareed. My voice bounced back to me. In the darkness, I sensed how vast the hold was. My torch showed me hollow compartments, catwalks and rows of alcoves, none of them familiar.

  I was lost. The realization settled, hard and brutal. The hold was dark and sprawling, cold surrounded me, and I had no idea how to get out.

  I ran. Without knowing, without caring where I headed, I darted down one corridor after the next. The cold air burned my throat and bile rose from my gut. I swallowed, pushing down the sick along with my fear. I picked a direction, fore or aft, I couldn’t determine. I ran and hoped I’d find my way to the others. I swung my gun back and forth. My gun. They should call me Foolish Boy. What good is a gun in hunting things I have imagined?

  I moved into a narrow hallway. It was warm. Relief rushed through me. Perhaps whatever horror filled the rest of the ship was absent here. Then I saw what surrounded me.

  Heavy, dark piping cluttered the passageway. Its mass seethed. The pipes breathed as one and slithered around each another—a nest of mambas. An insistent hiss filled the hall. The warmth turned suffocating, sweat poured from my face and hands. My heart pushed against my throat.

  I reprimanded myself. This was a hallucination, nothing more. I turned away and walked forward. When I finally glanced out of the corner of my eye, the serpents had become pipes once again.

  The hallway opened out into the engine room and another rush of cold. I was almost used to the biting sensation now, although my skin burned where it had torn and my fingers were stiff. I cast my torch over the massive engine, as high as a small building. Ringed with catwalks and punctuated by ladders, the structure, with its dark boilers and heavy gauges, was decades old. It was also covered in ice.

  I turned back. My thoughts slowed even as my breath came in jagged gasps. I stopped in the darkness, my every exhale creating a cloud of mist. My legs buckled and I slumped against the wall of a shipping container. Its ridged, cold metal pressed into my back. Exhaustion washed over me, weakening my limbs. I fought an urgent cry in my head to do something. What was it? Find the others? Yes. But what would I do when I found them?

  Something approached. I sensed it before I heard it. And I heard it long before I saw its form. It wasn’t one of the others. They would call out, they would shine a light toward me. Someone else, some thing else, was here. I heard its footfall, heavy, nothing like the patters of whatever ran through the hold. Also nothing like the steps of Fareed, Old Boy and the others. The sound was solid, belonging to a body well fed and muscular in the way of the West.

  I flashed my torch in his face. The man—if I can call him that—was bigger than me, as I imagined, body broad with flesh privation never shrunk. Heavy clothes covered a body that no longer needed warmth. White skin ghastly in death, thin lips blue, mouth caught in its terrified grin, even as he was predator and not prey. His eyes glinted with a dead sheen.

  Hands touched my neck. Their cold was devastating, turning me inside out, exposing my organs to a piercing frigid wind. Worse, it showed me what I would become if I did not resist—dead and caught on this accursed ship.

  In a moment of hope, anger, or sheer animal resistance, I slapped the hands away. I pivoted and ran, weaving through the pathways created by the metal boxes, massive and looming in the darkness, my torch offering only the dimmest light. Panic rose and fell in me like breath. I wound my way deeper into the labyrinth of shipping containers, hoping speed could save me.