Even those of the “crew” who had been kidnapped without knowing a word of English—the two Malays captured drifting in a life raft the month before, for example—learned the basics quickly. It was a matter of survival.

In fact, Eiko didn’t think English was the native language of anyone on board. But it was one of the only things all of them had in common.

The Sea Wolf, trying to pick up speed, rolled heavily. The hammocks in the barracks swung.

“No,” Son said, “she doesn’t handle the weather well at all.”

She. Interesting. He never would have thought of the Sea Wolf as a she. But in the English language all vessels, he now remembered from a high school class, were traditionally she. How arbitrary. Eiko imagined the cruel mind that lurked behind the armored steel door of the wheelhouse as an it. A force. A thing.

The Klaxon continued. Outside the locked barracks, down on the main deck, Eiko heard shouting, just audible over the groaning of the ship in the heavy sea.

Then a sound came that could be heard above all else: the firing of the Sea Wolf’s recoilless rifle. Crew were getting out of their hammocks now. Son and Eiko joined the curious at the bars of the small windows, jostling for a view.

The deck was awash in foaming sea that poured over the gunwales. The recoilless rifle, mounted on a swivel on the fo’c’sle, could not be seen from the barracks: those forward-facing windows were welded shut with steel plates. But it was not far from the barracks bulkhead, and when it fired again it resounded like a hammer on steel plate.

“A rescue?”

What they could see down on the main deck was a chaos of mercenary activity: Figures darkly cowled, moving about between the trawling machinery under the gantry tower. Two of them were crouched along the gunwale on the port side.

The Sea Wolf’s spotlights crawled across the chop. And then Eiko saw it: a gray ship, prow cutting through the water, a few hundred meters off the port side. The ship was twenty meters or so long, its deck filled with dark shapes and spiked with at least three swivel-mounted weapons. As it swung into view, tracer bullets arced from its bow toward the Sea Wolf.

“Alaskan pirates,” the man standing next to Son said. One of the crew who had been there when Eiko was taken—an Indonesian who prayed five times a day on a tattered blue tarp. “They must know our hold is full of—”

His head ceased to exist in a cloud of bone splinters, blood, and brain matter.