Year Zero (19 page)

M
ARCH
, T
HE
S
AME
M
ONTH

T
hey thought the gaunt American was damned. Nathan Lee thought the same of them, his fellow passengers on this fishing trawler, the
Ichotski.
But they were damned for opposite reasons. Where his eyes were dark with excommunication, theirs shone with faith. And it was going to kill them.

There were forty-three Chinese and Russian refugees. Most were families. Like him, they had paid small fortunes to the captain and his crew. What none seemed to understand was that the
Ichotski
was a trap. They had shipped aboard a slaughterhouse. Not that there was much choice. The coastal cities were polyglot nightmares jammed with Asians and Russians frantic for passage to North America. You paid or you stayed.

Nathan Lee counted nineteen children among the passengers. He counted the women. He counted the men and compared them to the crew, who were few but carried guns. Maybe if there had been more men among the refugees…but there were not. Their fate was sealed. After deciding that, Nathan Lee stayed to himself and refused to speak with anyone, even when they tried a few words in English. They began to treat at him as an omen huddled at the prow.

The March sea was gray and choppy. To make room for more passengers, the trawler was towing its lifeboat behind on a fifty-foot line. It was a mere skiff, as shabby as the trawler. A sheet of stretched canvas held out the waves. Overhead the mackerel sky was slashed with gangrene and black.

The crew waited a few days before starting in on them, letting the bad food and cold and seasickness deplete their prey. Three women were taken below deck. Everyone could hear their cries, but even their husbands kept stony faces and did not move to rescue them. Nathan Lee saw the awful shock as the refugees realized they were captives. Just the same, they seemed to believe everything would still turn out all right, that the raping would satisfy the sailors. The Alaskan coast lay just three days away.

In the morning, only two of the women were returned to the open deck. The husband of the missing woman stood up to protest, but a giant, scarred sailor struck him across the face. Again the refugees found hope. After all, the sailor had merely struck the husband, not killed him. Three other women were herded down the stairs.

Every hour, Nathan Lee secretly checked his compass. The trawler was still moving due east, beneath the Arctic Circle. Soon enough it would surely circle back to the Russian coast. The turn would be wide and imperceptible. The passengers would never even know they had reversed direction. That was when he would make his escape.

In the afternoon, the pirates robbed them in a drunken pack. The terrified passengers opened suitcases and crates and handed over their last valuables. Nathan Lee gave up everything but a knife taped to his ankle and his compass, tucked under the prow railing in anticipation of this very thing, and his book, which he had sealed in plastic bags to protect against the sea spray. “It’s a book, nothing but a book,” he said in English.

The sailor took it and eyed the handwritten pages with his sketches and watercolors. He outweighed Nathan Lee by fifty pounds, and carried himself loosely like a street fighter. There was nothing to do but wait. The pirate flipped a few pages and they fell open to the prayer flag from Tibet. He held up the square of fabric and squinted at the horse and prayer script. For whatever reason, he kept the flag and gave the book back to Nathan Lee.

As they left, the sailors pistol-whipped some of the men and started to take another woman away. Her little boy clung to her. No one intervened. No one, including Nathan Lee, tried to save the child. The boy would not let go of his mother. Abruptly, without a word, one of the pirates grabbed him and threw him into the sea. The mother howled and flailed and beat at the sailors, but all they did was laugh and pull her into the black hold.

The refugees watched the little boy in the sea. His stamina was amazing to them. After five minutes, he disappeared from sight. Then, far away, the boy’s little head lifted on a swell. He was still facing the boat, waiting politely.

Nathan Lee slid down against the prow.
What if that had been Grace?
What if her final hope depended on the compassion of a stranger? And yet interfering would have cost his own life. All night long he saw the image of that boy rolling upon the waves.

Alaska was two days distant when the trawler began its turn. Nathan Lee didn’t try to alert any of his fellow refugees. The charade of passage was coming to an end. It was much too late to save anyone but himself. There was a good chance it was too late for even that.

The sailors reappeared just before nightfall. This time they had blood on them, and none of the women came up. Nathan Lee saw the ball peen hammer in one butcher’s hand. The man did nothing to hide it as he walked to the back of the trawler. A sailor in a striped T-shirt gestured for three of the men to follow him to the stern. They filed meekly around the cabin and out of sight.

It took only a few minutes. There was no yelling, no gunshots, no splash of water. The sailor returned and picked out three more. He was very pleasant about it. Nathan Lee looked at the sky and despaired. The sun was not falling fast enough.

The sailor came back and ushered a family around the cabin. Some of the refugees began to cry, but very quietly, as if it were a breach of courtesy. Families embraced. They held hands when it was their turn to walk around to the back. A mother carried her infant, a bundle of quilt.

The pirates nibbled away at their numbers. It was all done with great order. The sailor beckoned, another batch would go. Soon the deck held only twenty people. It was now or never. The night be damned.

Nathan Lee shucked his quilt jacket and knelt to untie his boots and untape the knife along his shin. The refugees had their eyes fixed on the back of the boat. No one saw him slide over the rail with his satchel over one shoulder and the knife in his teeth. He lowered himself to the bottom rung. His feet skipped along the crest of waves. He let go.

He went under, then came up, jolted by the cold. One-one thousand, he counted, and clenched his teeth hard upon the knife. The trawler loomed enormous above him, a prehistoric whale. Its sides flashed past him.

He had expected the frigid water, and the sting of salt in his eyes, and the awful, sucking tonnage of wet clothing. Still, he was surprised. His calculations were off. The satchel had twisted behind his back and was strangling him. The trawler sped past. The tether rope to the skiff was much too high to grab. His slowness stunned him.

For an awful moment it seemed the skiff was going to pass him by. There was no time for correction. He’d missed the bus.

Then the sea twitched. Nathan Lee sank into the trough of a wave. The skiff rose overhead. It squeezed slightly closer toward the trawler, and for an instant, the rope slackened. The skiff slabbed to the left, and dove down the swell. The bow torqued.

It was all Nathan Lee needed. The hull crashed against his left shoulder, but he managed to grab the edge.

The canvas cover was hard as wood. His fingers slipped. He pawed at the cover. He raked it with his nails. It was like trying to ride a rhinoceros. The skiff pulled and tossed him about.

He plunged underwater. The satchel dragged at his throat. The knife cut his lips. He clung to the beast. Finally he got the knife into one hand and made a wild stab at the canvas. It ripped open and he wrestled into the bowels of it.

He lay on his back, crumpled among the oars and seat struts. His whole struggle had lasted no more than a minute. He looked up through the tear in the canvas and dragged in great lungfuls of air. His palm was bleeding from the knife blade. His bare feet were blue. The skiff beat up and down on the rapid sea.

Turning onto his belly, he crawled to the front and edged up for a glance at the trawler. He was sure the pirates would be gathered at the railing, guns drawn. Instead, they were quietly killing a woman.

Her head was extended over the sea, where it wouldn’t make a mess. The sailor with the hammer reached out and rapped her skull with the ball peen end. There was nothing vicious about his act. He was not unkind. In his mind, perhaps, he was an angel of mercy, sparing them from suffering in the sea.

The woman slumped. Two sailors lifted her over the edge and she slithered into the dark water. There was a line of girls and boys. Nathan Lee counted seven of them, waiting like naughty children for their punishment. The man with the hammer motioned for the child in front to come forward.

Nathan Lee ducked his head under the canvas.
How could they have failed to see him?
His struggle had seemed thunderous and epic. He had thrashed through the waves and knifed his way into the skiff beneath their noses. But some veil had made him invisible.

He crouched under his ceiling of torn canvas. The tow rope had to be cut before they registered his absence. With luck, the skiff would vanish so gradually they wouldn’t notice. A night might pass before someone saw the slack rope, and he doubted the captain would waste time searching for a missing rowboat. With a stroke of the knife then, his escape was complete.

And yet there were those children.

Soaked to the skin, he shuddered violently.

They were nothing to him. Since beginning the sea voyage, he’d made sure the children kept their distance. He had gone to lengths not to hear their names or look in their eyes or hear their songs. Anyway, even if he wanted to, how could he save them? He was not their father. He had a child of his own waiting for him.

His teeth chattered. He looked at the knife.
Was he so dead?

He searched the lifeboat for something, a weapon, an idea, anything to spur him into action. A rubber bag held cans of food and some bottles of water, but no pistol or flare gun. He was nearly as helpless as the children. Now what? Throw cans of food at the pirates? It was absurd.

There was a splash in the water. Nathan Lee felt a bump against the skiff’s wooden bottom. He trembled, caught between extremes, survival or martyrdom.

There was another splash.

Nathan Lee couldn’t bear to listen to the killing anymore. This was obscene, his lurking in the wake. He couldn’t help. He couldn’t listen. Rearing up through the slit canvas, he leaned for the bucking prow and laid his knife against the rope. He told himself not to look up. But he looked.

Unbelievably, the pirates still did not see him. But the children did. There were only three remaining. At the sight of him, their heads perked up. They blinked as if a jack-in-the-box had sprung out of nowhere.

On an impulse, he beckoned to them.
Jump,
he thought. That was their salvation. He would cut loose and fish them from the water, one by one. The sailors wouldn’t see him. It was possible. All the children had to do was make the leap.

He waved again, not a broad gesture, but a clear one.
Come with me.
The notion filled him with sudden joy. A boatload of children! He pictured them reaching the shores of America together.

Jump!
He motioned again. They understood. Their eyes grew bigger…but not with hope.

Believe in me,
he thought. But they recognized him. He was the lone wolf from the front of the trawler, the man who had snarled at them when their games strayed too close. Their parents had scolded them if they went near him. And now, for all they knew, he was part of their punishment, a monstrous blackbearded fisherman waiting to do more dreadful things once the sailors threw them into the water. At least the sailors were smiling at them.

So, of course they did not jump.

Nathan Lee could not bear to watch the pirates finish. He slid back beneath the canvas, shuddering with cold, and lay heaped among the mess of gear, too weak to move, not even caring if the sailors found him.

Darkness seeped over him. Night or despair, it was all the same. Even in his worst hours in Tibet, he had never felt so alone. He did not believe in God. It was not a matter of doubt. He did not believe. And yet—strangely—he had only God as a culprit. From the plague to this slaughter of innocents, the evil went beyond human wickedness, beyond the workings of an indifferent universe. Maybe the French woman was right, God was simply hitting the delete key and starting over from scratch.

The waves hammered his little boat, beating him against the wood struts. They were dragging him back to the graveyard of Asia. He tried to summon up the face of his daughter, but she was hiding from him. He remembered the looks of horror on the children’s faces. At last, Nathan Lee remembered the knife. He crawled up through the canvas covering and cut the rope, and the sea grew still. He was alone.

*  *  *

H
E DRIFTED ALL NIGHT
, shivering, legs stuck in the emptied rubber bag, shoulders and head wrapped in sailcloth. Slowly his warmth returned, enough of it to function. In the morning, he figured out the mast. It was only two feet taller than he was. The pole fit into a socket and had a crosspiece. The sail was little more than what he’d already used it for, a bedsheet. But once he got the parts assembled, it caught the wind.

He was no sailor. He obeyed his little compass, due east. When the wind grew too boisterous, he pulled the sail down and rowed. When the air calmed, he put the sail up again. Three days passed.