“He's with them, huh?” Captain Snow said, meaning Everett. She turned the wheel about ten degrees. The sheet of fog yawned before us, its lower edge absolutely sharp against the black water.
“And we're with us,” I said, eyeing the white curtain in front of us.
“Getting aboard isn't going to be easy,” she said, and the prow of the boat punched a hole in the curtain. I couldn't see anything. The sound of our engines suddenly sounded like something a mile away.
“Back there,” she said, “toward the stern, is a grappling hook. It's wrapped in rags to kill the noise.” I had to squint to make her out. “I'll throw it, unless your friend there is with the NBA. Can you climb a rope?”
“If I have to.” It didn't sound like fun.
“Gimme those boots. My feet are freezing. And when I say quiet, be quiet.”
“Quiet?” I said. “They're going to hear the engines.”
“Lots of engines out here, all night long.” Dexter came out of the cabin, wrapped in fog. “You guys throw those tires over the side.”
Right. Throw the tires over the side. Tran, Dexter, and I bumped into each other like a bunch of drunks as we pitched the tires over a railing that was much too low for my comfort. The tires had ropes attached to them, and they dangled just inches below the deck level. Like the grapple, they were wrapped in rags.
“You do a lot of this?” I asked, happy to be back behind the wheel. The wind was weaker there.
“Once in a while.” She was peering over the wheel, face wet with fog and the cigarette burning itself down between her teeth. “Can't tote dope anymore. The War on Drugs gets real about a year before an election. So it's the occasional stuff off a freighter-furniture, furs, car parts-whatever happens to fall into the water. Problem is, not much stuff falls into the water.”
And if it did," I ventured, it'd be all wet."
She grinned at me over the coal of the cigarette. “Give the man his weight in fish.”
“Still, it must be risky.”
“Not so bad. They don't guard them much because we don't take much. And we come in way below them, you know? They're all way up there on the upper decks. Gets real cold on a freighter anywhere near the waterline. And then, they're usually drunk.”
We motored through the fog, mostly southward as far as I could tell, for almost thirty minutes. Tran curled himself into a ball near the stern and closed his eyes, perhaps viewing private movies of the South China Sea. I watched Captain Snow take her bearings on a small green radar screen, with only occasional glances at the real world. Twenty-eight minutes out, Captain Snow pulled up on a lever I'd come to recognize as the throttle, and the engines died back.
There was nothing but fog. It condensed on our clothes, making little sparkles, and it sat like foam on the dark, oily water. We were running without lights, but Captain Snow seemed to know exactly where we were.
“We should be-” she said, sounding puzzled. And then she smiled. “They don't call me deadeye for nothing.”
A cliff loomed before us, maybe twenty yards away, maybe twenty feet high. Darker than the fog, darker than the night, it rose from the water like a rock wall. I suddenly heard music.
“Hang on,” Captain Snow said, cutting the wheel to put us on a course that would make us sideswipe the ship. “Sit down, for Chrissakes.” I sat, and the cliff got nearer and nearer, and then our little boat bounced like a walnut shell on the water, and the rags around the tires let out a wet, muffled little squeal.
Even sitting, I fell sideways, toward the ship, and Tran landed on top of me. Dexter rode it out, looking grim. We began to float away from it.
“Grapple,” Captain Snow whispered. “Quick.”
I extricated myself from beneath Tran and grabbed it. She had it out of my hand before I could even reach up, and I concentrated on the coils of rope below it, making sure they weren't fouled.
“Duck,” Captain Snow snapped, and whirled the grapple around her head. It whistled through the air in larger and larger circles as she paid out rope, and then she bent her knees, looked up, and let it go.
The grapple arched up through the fog, trailing rope behind it, hung for a heart-stopping moment at the top of its arc, and then fell. It touched the top of the iron cliff, twisted, and dropped like a stone.
“Shit,” Dexter hissed. The grapple plummeted to the water between us and the freighter, and hit with a deafening splash.
“Don't move,” Captain Snow whispered. “Not a sound.”
We all froze, bobbing up and down in the shadow of the freighter's sides, and the music resolved itself into Taiwanese pop, a squeaky-voiced girl singer and an all-string orchestra doing a Chinese version of “Feelings.”
We listened to an entire verse before Captain Snow said, “Bring it in.”
I was closest to the rope, so I pulled it in, cold and wet, hand over hand. It seemed like I'd brought a mile's worth aboard before the grapple bumped against the side of the boat, and I reached down and grasped it and pulled it onto the deck. My hands were cold enough to be getting numb. I flexed my fingers, thinking about climbing the rope.
Captain Snow took the grapple and held up an index finger. One more time is what it said. She did the grapple-twirl arc again and threw it, a lot harder this time, grunting with the effort of tossing the extra weight of the wet rope, and it streaked upward, splashing us all with clammy seawater, turned two or three times at the top of its parabola, and started to come down.
And then it stopped, snagged itself against the side of the freighter with a soft thump, and hung there.
“Jesus,” Dexter said, blinking fast.
“We don't know yet.” Captain Snow put both hands around the rope and tugged. It held. “Grab my legs,” she said, and I did. She lifted both feet from the deck. She immediately began to swing toward the ship. I threw both arms around her calves, and our boat drifted toward the freighter until her feet touched down again.
“It's fast,” she said, sounding pleased with herself. “You can let go now.” I did, and she went back to the wheel. “There's a knife in the center of the rope coil. Cut it if anyone comes to the railing.” I picked it up with dead fingers.
We waited again, staring upward. “Feelings" ended and turned into a Chinese duet of "Sounds of Silence.” No silhouette appeared above us.
“Okay.” Captain Snow wiped her hands on her jeans. “You got fifteen minutes. You guys go up the rope, check things out, and come down again. Anything happens, shots or anything, I'm outta here, you got that?”
Dexter and I nodded.
“And one of you has to jump off.”
“Say what?” That was Dexter.
“Can't leave the grapple,” she said. “One of you comes down the rope, and the other one gets the grapple free and jumps off, feet first, not too much splash. We'll pull you aboard with the grapple rope.”
“Who gives a fuck about the grapple?” Dexter whispered. “Buy you a new one.”
“They'll know we were here,” I said.
“Be my guest,” Dexter said to me. “Water don't look too cold.”
“No,” Captain Snow said. “You.”
“Why's that?” Dexter demanded.
She smiled at him. “He's wearing my shoes. I don't want them to get wet.”
“We change, then,” Dexter said to me.
“You're way too big,” Captain Snow said, batting her lashes.
“This a fix,” Dexter muttered. Tran made a little whisk-broom sound that could have been a snicker. “Okay, shit,” Dexter said. He pulled off his high-tops and then his jacket, shirt, and pants, and stood before us in a pair of baggy boxer shorts covered with something that looked like lipstick imprints. “One word,” he said, glowering at me. Then he took the rope in his big hands, tugged on it once, and said, “Here goes.”