With the sailor safely sleeping in the external bay, Syfax slipped inside and locked the hatch. The corridor was narrow and brightly lit, and everything seemed to be made of steel. The walls, the decks, and especially the intestinal mass of pipes and tubes winding along the ceiling.
He dropped his dripping shirt on the deck and started down the nearest stair. In the distance he could hear footsteps and voices echoing, but none seemed close or urgent so he pushed them to the back of his mind and focused on the walls and doors, and the numbers labeling everything. Occasionally someone would come down a nearby corridor and the major would slip back around a corner, or into a doorway, or up a stair, and each time the sailor would wander past showing no sign that the intruder had been detected.
So, where is it? The great big, breakable heart of this pile of junk?
Down.
His stairwell ended two decks down where the lights were dimmer and sounds of human activity were drowned out by the regular roaring, huffing, and clacking of machines.
Bingo.
Syfax jogged down the narrow gray hall to a closed hatch. The engine noises grew louder as he pressed his ear to the door. He grabbed the wheel in the center of the hatch, jerked it loose with a sharp clang, and spun it open. The hatch swung aside and Syfax stepped through with his knife in his hand.
“Damn.”
He was standing in a long, low-ceilinged room with two massive boilers along the right and left walls stretching down into the distance. The network of overhead pipes here completely obscured the ceiling, glass-faced gauges and brass-handled valves studded the pipes at irregular intervals, and blocky workstations stood at the ends of the boilers, and clustered in a central console, and along the back walls.
Twenty grim-faced engineers looked up from their work. Some stood over the consoles, some were holding clipboards, some held toolboxes, some lay on the floor inspecting their precious machines, and one older man was sipping a cup of tea. This older officer stood just inside the hatch and turned to see the huge Mazigh step into the engine room beside him and say, “Damn.”
The officer raised an eyebrow. “Who are you?”
Syfax froze. He glanced up at the dozen faces half-turned toward him, and the enormousness of the engines, and he pointed up at nothing in particular. “Yeah, they sent me down to have a quick look at the, eh, you know…thing.” He shoved the officer back into the wall and charged into the room. There were a hundred things he could break, but he knew he needed more than half a second to open a valve or smash an instrument panel and the engineers were already running toward him, most wielding wrenches, screwdrivers, and hammers.
The major caught the first sailor’s wrist, smashed him in the nose, and stripped the hammer from his hand. The hammer flew into a glass-faced board of waving needles, and a shower of sparks flew out. In the last moment before the tide of sailors crashed into him, Syfax drove his knife into the panel right near the switch marked electrico and hoped he’d hit something important.
The first three men to reach him all got a fist in the face or a boot in the stomach, and then the major lifted one bodily and hurled him back into the oncoming sailors. Wrenches and hammers were flying, men were hollering in Espani, and suddenly red lights were flashing and a klaxon was wailing. Syfax hunkered down in his boxer’s stance with his back to the corner and focused on pummeling the men one at a time. There was no way to reach the hatch now, not through the press of sweaty, greasy bodies.
A hammer smashed his left wrist and he paid back the engineer with an elbow through his jaw that left the Espani unconscious on the floor to be trampled by his comrades.
A glass jar full of washers shattered against his right temple and he squeezed his right eye shut in case some fragments of glass trickled into it with the veil of blood that spilled down over the side of his face.
A small man dashed in close and got his arms around Syfax’s legs. The major bent down to tear the engineer away and that was all the opening the others needed. They fell on him like a pack of wolves and the last thing that Syfax saw before his head struck the bulkhead was a line of armed men streaming in through the open hatch.
Chapter 27. Shifrah
“What the hell does he think he’s going to accomplish?” Shifrah watched the major swim away toward the warship.
“Who knows?” Kenan was looking the other way, out to sea. “Captain, are Espani channel markers the same as Mazigh ones?”
“They are.” The fisherman exhaled slowly and a thin haze of smoke rippled away from his pipe. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, you may have noticed that ship back there. It’s a warship.”
“Looks like.” The fisherman nodded.
“It means that Prince Valero is getting ready to start the holiday season just a bit early this year. A ship that size is meant to terrify, to control, and to kill.” Kenan ran his thumb along his lip. “It means he’s going back to the good old days when the Middle Sea ran red every summer with the blood of Espani, Italians, Numidians, Mazighs, and Hellans.”
“Could be.”
“And do you remember what would happen every autumn?”
The fisherman nodded. “The Persians came.”
“Yes, they did. And they would take whatever they wanted, and they would stay as long as they liked,” Kenan said. “My mother said it was always bad for business when the Persians came through, back in Port Chellah.”
“It was bad in Italia, very bad indeed,” Nicola said quietly.
“Bad in Malaga, too.” The fisherman shifted his foot on the winch to let out a bit of line and the sail swung out a bit farther.
Shifrah smiled. This boy is smart, and not just clever in the way that some angry young men could be, but really smart. He understands people. He doesn’t have to lie to get what he wants. That’s a child’s game. No, this boy tells the truth. No lies to remember, no lies to get caught in. And that’s why he’s going to live a very long time.
“I think we should do something about this ship, captain,” Kenan said. “You and I both know that the major is just going to get himself killed.”
“Most like.” The fisherman nodded. “That’s why I let him go. I’m no traitor.”
“I know you’re not. I’m not asking you to kill anyone or even to damage that ship back there, but I do need your help.”
The old man reached down and tightened his winch line again. “How?”
“The channel markers.” Kenan pointed at the buoy rocking on the rough waves at the mouth of harbor. A small bell clanged on top of it, and just below the below the bell was a ring of mirrors to reflect search lights and starlight. “They’re damaged by rough weather all the time. Waves. Lightning. Driftwood.”
“True.” The fisherman turned the tiller slightly.
“I think some of these markers here are due for a little damage.”
The fisherman shook his head. “We all need the markers. If we muck about with them, then the fishermen start running aground, losing traps, crossing lines, tearing nets. That’s a lot of good men losing their livelihoods for you. No, sir. I’ll take you to Tingis and you can have your blockade. That’s more than fair.”
Kenan frowned, then leaned down to paw through the major’s discarded coat. He sat up a moment later with a tiny Italian two-shot revolver in his hand, pointed at the captain. “I’m sorry about this. You’re a good man and you don’t deserve this, and I don’t want to hurt you. But I will if I have to. So now you’re going to help me break those markers, or I’ll kill you and then break them by myself.”
The fisherman’s eyes narrowed. He chewed his pipe for a moment. “All right then.”
His tone was as flat as ever. It might have meant he was willing to help, or that he was willing to die. But he nudged the tiller and the little sailboat swung toward the first marker buoy.