The Hunter From the Woods by Robert McCammon Read Free Book Online Page A

cargo of farm fertilizer in three hundred black oildrums and sixty crates of ball bearings had been loaded in the Sofia ’s hold, red dawn was beginning to break. The huge double diesel engines throbbed and knocked, making the old ship vibrate like a tuning-fork and moan like a busted fiddle. Orders were shouted along the deck. Lines were cast off. Brown water stirred up from the muddy bottom by the twin props boiled at the stern. The ship, born in 1921, gave a small lurch as it left the pierside like an elderly dame startled from her nap. The one-hundred-and-fourteen-meter length of Sofia swayed back and forth as she searched for her balance. Her central wheelhouse sat atop an ugly stack of port-holed steel. Two masts spider-webbed with cables and nettings stood fore and aft. Ventilation funnels had been riveted to the deck in no apparent rhyme nor reason; it was the triumph of some Nordic ship designer’s descent into a bottle of aquavit. Everything topside was painted a vaguely-spoiled yellow, mottled with patches of orange rust. The hull was smoke-gray, except for more rust streaks that streamed down from the anchors at the pier-dented bow and clung just above the waterline like a strange species of ivy. The Sofia , an undignified and much-abused mistress of the sea, was rocked by the most innocent of waves and caused to cry out at her joints and rivets and bulkheads and deckboards as if she dreaded any touch of the man she had once loved.
    The ship left the harbor in quiet shame.
    In the mess hall belowdeck, Michael Gallatin was looking askance at a plate of fried potatoes swimming in oil. His scrambled eggs, likewise, were about to slide off the plate in a greasy foam and what passed for bacon appeared to be made from fat and brown rubber.
    Thank God, he thought, for the memory of the chateaubriand.
    At least the ship’s coffee was palatable. Not necessarily good, but strong enough to make the teeth ache and the gut clench. Colonel Vivian had warned him that the food might not be up to the standards of a sidewalk kidney pie in Soho, but it was for the best during the first few days of the voyage until Michael got his sea-legs and sea-stomach. Those tramp freighters roll like a whore with bedbugs, Vivian had told him in undelicate terms. Best to do your puking from an empty bag.
    But breakfast was served, and Michael was hungry. He had to eat. The mess hall, even just past dawn, was full of cigarette smoke and men with cigarettes clenched between their teeth. Michael figured almost all of the forty-two crew were here, except for the first and second mates and a few other specialists on engine duty. The clatter and scrape of eating utensils on plates was a diabolic symphony. But the work had been hard and constant since midnight, and now that Sofia was underway—at about five knots per hour, it felt to him—and breakfast was piled up on the gray tables, the mood among the rough-hewn, rough-fleshed and rough-eyed men was definitely lighter.
    He hadn’t really met anyone yet. He’d been assigned to a loading detail, but everyone was a stranger. He was sitting at a table with a wiry, wrinkled man of about fifty who could eat around his cigarette by shifting the stick from side to side in his mouth. The second occupant of his table was a stout fellow with sandy-brown hair who wore a sweat-stained blue workshirt and giggled to himself at every opportunity, and the third was a lean black man around thirty or so who had a shaved head and was missing the right half of his nose. It had been carved away to the rippled pink flesh. A very sharp razor at work, Michael thought as he tried one of the bacon strips. The black man wore a necklace of cowrie shells, another necklace of ebony beads and a third with some kind of hexagonal blue stone hanging from it. He had deeply-sunken eyes that looked at no one directly but seemed to be seeing a lot.
    “Ah, ya !” boomed a voice behind Michael. “Here’s da sumabitch I wanna