Baghdad Without a Map

by Tony Horwitz

  Not that there was much of an audience. Except for a lonely coast guard boat swishing past us in the dark and a few container ships lying at anchor, we sighted no other traffic for the first two hours at sea. But the quiet was deceptive. The gunboats and missiles I'd watched on TV posed little danger to Kochrekar's small craft, a supply boat that provisioned tankers with spare parts and food. It was Iranian mines strewn haphazardly across the shipping lanes that threatened destruction.

  “A mine is like a snake,” Kochrekar said, peering over the wheel at a dark patch of water. “It does not think before striking.”

  The captain's engineer, Jesudasyn, appeared from below, munching a chapati and studying a nautical chart. On the map, the Persian Gulf was shaped like a headless figure, reclining comfortably in a La-Z-Boy chair. The Emirates formed the figure's buttocks and thighs, with Iran sitting heavily in its lap. The figure was covered in pencil marks stretching from Dubai to the Strait of Hormuz.

  “These dots are mines we have spotted before,” Jesu-daysn explained. “Of course, the Persians always put new ones.”

  I asked him what would happen if we hit a mine.

  “Like this,” he said, brushing chapati crumbs from his trouser leg.

  I decided to add my own eyes to the night watch. There was a momentary flare as gas burned off at a distant oilfield. Then black sea and black sky, stretching all the way to Iran. We could have been sailing through an inkwell.

  The last time Kochrekar had made this run from Dubai to Fujairah, just south of the Strait, the supply boat patrolling ahead of him struck a mine. Kochrekar reached the scene in time to haul his fellow captain out of the sea. “The man was not broken but he was swollen with water, like a fish,” he said. The others came ashore in pieces.

  Every war has them; little people, caught in the crossfire. But for Kochrekar and his crew, the Gulf conflict was especially cruel. Like other Gulf proletariat, they had come to Dubai in the vast subcontinental drift that brought millions of Indian workers to the oil-rich Arabian shores. The wage in the Emirates was three times laborer's pay in Bombay. But tending Arab gardens and grooming Arab camels was one thing; dying in someone else's war was quite another. In the three years since the tanker war had flared in earnest, Iran and Iraq had already destroyed a third of the merchant tonnage that went down in all of World War II. Most of the 350-odd dead were Indian, Pakistani, Korean or Filipino.

  “I chose the sea because it is a peaceful place,” Kochrekar said. A fifth-generation sailor, he'd shipped out of Bombay at eighteen and had been on the water for the thirty years since. “But this, this is—what do you call it? I believe it is Russia roulette.”

  To Lawrence of Goa it was mostly tedium. While his mates stood watch in the wheelhouse, the handsome bronze Goan shelled crabs in the galley, peppering them from makeshift spice jars with labels that read “Tang,” “Nescafe” and “Super Chunky Peanut Butter.” When he wasn't stirring curry, Lawrence added line after line to an already epic-length letter to his wife in Goa, on the west coast of India. “This is she,” he said, pointing to a picture taped at eye level, just above his writing table. It was a small, poorly focused snapshot of a sari-clad beauty in a tropical paradise of blue water, white sand and waving palm trees. “This is my dream, day and night,” he said.

  Like his mates, Lawrence squirreled away his earnings for the three months each year that he returned home to spend with his family. Even in port, the crew slept on board, cooking curry in the cabin, watching Indian movies on videotape and listening to sitar music on the radio. It was as though they'd never really landed in the Emirates at all.

  “I am not interested in these Arabs,” Lawrence said, returning to his Homeric letter. “Only in their money.”

  I asked him what he had to tell his wife about these long empty days at sea.

  “Nothing,” he said. “So I write how much I miss her and how I count the days until we are together in Goa again.”

  This day's count was 210.

  Above, on the bridge, Jesudasyn's imagination drifted along a parallel plane. He was an earnest dark Tamil, about forty-five, who spoke with the unflinching bluntness of a four-year-old.

  “There is something I must ask you,” he said after staring at the sea for several hours. “Is it true that men and women in America live together without marriage?”

  “Yes, that's true.”

  “How is it then that they are still virgins when they marry? Please explain.”

  “They aren't.”

  Jesudasyn pondered this for a moment, then shook his head. “This could not be in India. A woman must be a virgin.”

  We studied the water for a few minutes before he resumed his interrogation.

  “How is it then that they have no children when they marry?”

  “Some do,” I told him. “But mostly they use precautions. In marriage, too.”

  “And what precaution do you prefer? Please explain.”

  I paused. “Well, there are many options.”

  “Do you like the condom?” he interrupted. “Myself, I do not think it can be so effective.” Then he reached into a drawer and pulled out the previous day's newspaper from Dubai. He'd circled a story that told of an Arab man who had thirty-two children and three wives—and wanted more of both.

  “This man,” Jesudasyn said, “I think he needs a precaution.”

  Kochrekar, who had been silent till now, joined in the conversation. “A woman is not to be used up and then thrown away,” he said solemnly. “In India a man takes only one wife and they are one until the funeral pyre.”

  The conversation was wandering off course, but I was happy to go with the flow. It was taking my mind off the mines.

  “And what happens after the pyre?” I asked Kochrekar. My cartoon image of Hinduism showed a lot of people lined up to come back as cows.

  “Only the old still believe in reincarnation,” Kochrekar said, “because such things cannot be with science. After the pyre burns, what is left? Dust and ashes only.”

  It seemed a sad creed for a man who spent his life dodging mines in the Persian Gulf.

  “And what gods do you worship?” Jesudasyn asked.

  “I was raised as a Jew.”

  The two men turned to stare. For a moment there were no eyes at all on the water. In three hours at sea, we'd broached two topics—Judaism and sex—that could have remained untouched for a year on Arab land.

  “I have always wanted to meet this thing called Jew,” Jesudasyn said softly, “and to hear about your messiahs. Please explain.”

  At daybreak the Gulf became a whitish haze and we churned across it as if through a giant bowl of milk. As the mist cleared, the water turned a brilliant cobalt blue, the way a child paints ocean. And the sea remained astonishingly empty. I'd imagined the Gulf as a cluttered bathtub with ships packed so tightly that they barely had room for incoming missiles. The reality was an azure expanse, twice the size of New York State, stretching from the Hormuz Strait to the swampy confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq. There were a lot more sea turtles than frigates.

  The tension on board our craft eased with the passing of night. In the shimmering morning light, a mine would be obvious at one hundred yards or more. Jesudasyn closed his eyes and slumped against one corner of the wheelhouse. Lawrence's voice wafted up from below with the aroma of something cooking. “Captain,” he said, “how would you like your eggs?”

  Kochrekar tilted his head toward the cabin. “It is as you decide, Lawrence. A cook must be his own master.”

  When the breakfast was ready, Kochrekar peered through binoculars for a moment, then asked if I'd take the wheel and continue on the same course while he ducked below. It seemed easy enough. I grasped the wheel and trained my eyes on the island toward which the bow was pointing. Steady as she goes. When the boat shifted a little to starboard, I swung the wheel the other way. Now we were too far left. I swung again and the bow began bobbing like a compass needle. Suddenly the island w
as nowhere in sight. By the time Kochrekar finished his eggs, I was trying to pull us out of a skid straight toward the Iranian coast.

  Kochrekar allowed himself the first smile of the long boat ride. “You must let no current move you from the path you have chosen,” he said, taking the wheel. Even his simplest statements seemed lifted from the Upanishads.

  Nine o'clock was rush hour on the Persian Gulf. First one tanker and then a second and third sprouted on the horizon, followed soon after by another trio. The supertankers, some the size of several football fields, seemed indecently exposed in waters so open. Except that each convoy was tailed by a gray battleship bristling with cannons and radar. The scene reminded me of walking to kindergarten with my older brother.

  If tanker convoys and radar were new to the Persian Gulf, naval warfare certainly wasn't. For centuries the coastal sheiks had sent their fishing and pearling boats into the Gulf to plunder European ships bound for India and the Orient. By the nineteenth century, the entire shoreline of what is now the Emirates and Oman had become known as the Pirate Coast. The pirates took no prisoners.

  “After a ship was taken, she was purified with water and perfumes,” reported a British naval officer. “The crew was then led forward singly, their heads placed on the gunwale, and their throats cut, with the exclamation used in battle of Allah akbar!—God is great!”

  British gunboats eventually imposed treaties titled “Cessation of Plunder and Piracy by Land and Sea” and “Maritime Peace in Perpetuity.” On maps, the Pirate Coast became the Trucial States. But the truce was uneven, and peace in perpetuity lasted five years. When the British captain Felix Jones made his peacekeeping rounds in 1858, his business with one sheik included “restoration of a slave girl” stolen in battle and reparations for a British merchant “plundered of his whole venture.” Jones sailed out with no more than a “pledge” of future payment and returned a year later, only to become “a butt for the gun practice” of warring clans.

  A similar script was now being acted out with supertankers, destroyers, and Silkworm missiles.

  “This is U.S. warship 993,” came a Tennessee drawl on Kochrekar's radio. “Ship on starboard, please identify yourself and what are your intentions?”

  Another voice cut in, “Brown Hotel Roman Zebra. Supply vessel on port bow, please keep clear.”

  “Italian warship, this is Brother Charlie Gulf, do you read?”

  Nearby, one show-and-tell was concluding in more genial fashion. “British warship, this is Soviet warship. Thank you for identifying yourself. We wish you a ban voyage.”

  “Cheers,” a British voice replied. “A safe journey to you and your crew.”

  But the Tennessee drawl on warship 993 was still questioning its starboard stranger. “Who are you and what are your intentions? You have one-zero seconds to respond.”

  There was an uneasy silence. Then a high-pitched cackle screeched onto the radio waves.

  “It's the Fil-i-pino wo»-keeee. Who wants some of my Fil-i-peeeno ba-flfl-a?”

  Kochrekar laughed, nudging Jesudasyn awake. “It is our monkey friend,” he said, as the radio filled with screams. The voice belonged to a renegade radio hacker, code-named Filipino Monkey, who liked to break in at tense moments with obscenities and animal noises.

  “The monkey is horn-eeeeeeeeeee!!!! Who wants some bananaaaaaaaa!!!!”

  Another voice shouted, “Monkey, we will find you and you will die!”

  Shippers had been trying to trace the monkey for several years, without success. “I have given this matter much thought,” Kochrekar said, serious again. “I do believe there now may be more than one monkey.”

  When the warships passed, Kochrekar picked up the radio to chat with a few of his fellow captains, usually in Hindi. There were also captains from Korea, the Philippines and Pakistan. It was the same as on shore; everyone but Arabs was doing the Arabs' business.

  As the morning wore on, Kochrekar draped his arms across the wheel, staring lazily at the water. Lawrence came up from below and sat flipping through an Indian tabloid with a headline that read: “Housemaid Recalls Freud's Daily life.” And Jesudasyn, a recent convert to Christianity, studied a fundamentalist text, written in Tamil. The cover showed a crowd of copper-colored people moving toward a flaming pyre. A few survivors emerged on the far side of the blaze to ascend a tall flight of stairs toward a shimmering crown. Fire and brimstone, Hindu-coated.

  Jesudasyn began reading aloud, and Lawrence told him to stop. “Jesudasyn, please,” he said through clenched teeth. It was an old spat, deepened during long empty days at sea. Jesudasyn glanced up and said curtly, “Go to your curry, man.” Lawrence ducked below, and Jesudasyn resumed his reading. I closed my eyes, afraid he might ask me to “please explain” some aspect of Christian theology. We had spent the hour before dawn discussing whether Mary was a virgin, and why it was that Jews did not believe Jesus was one of the messiahs. The morning heat made me groggy, and I drifted off to the lilting cadences of Tamil.

  It was midday when Kochrekar shook me awake at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz. The captain knew this was the highlight of his passenger's journey. It was through this narrow channel that a third of Europe's oil passed, and half of Japan's. It was here, too, that Iranians held the West ransom, training their guns on passing tankers, laying mines and threatening to close the channel. On tense days, an armada of destroyers, minesweepers and gunboats lurked in and around the strait, waiting for trouble. Shippers had dubbed this end of the Gulf “Silkworm Alley.”

  Like every news story that drags on too long, the Strait of Hormuz was also angling for some kind of record in the cliche department. In one week, screaming headlines had told me that America was Engulfed, in Dire Straits and Steering into Rough Water because Iran might mine the Oil Chokepoint, Straitjacket Hormuz, Turn Off the Tap on the Free World's Energy Lifeline. The Strait of Hoummos, one colleague called it. I had to see the real thing before I drowned in the metaphorical one.

  What I saw, gazing into the brilliant midday sun, was an orange sea snake slithering past our bow and a dolphin poking its head above water. The rugged pink cliffs of Oman rose on one shore, the softer Iranian hills were shrouded in haze on the other. And in the thirty miles between lay an untroubled stretch of aquamarine.

  A lone gray supertanker chugged through the strait, spitting black smoke. Sandbags surrounded the bridge. Silhouetted against the tanker was an Omani fishing dhow with a rectangular white sail and an upturned prow, like a miniature Viking ship. As I watched through binoculars, six men in white robes and turbans draped hand-held fishing lines into the water and calmly hauled in one red snapper after another. Each time they reeled a fish in, they smacked its head against the wooden rail, unhooked it and dropped the newly baited line into the water again. The men smiled as they worked. It was the most contented labor I'd ever seen.

  “At night they burn paper fires in the stern so ships will not run them over,” Kochrekar said. Otherwise, the boats carried on as they had for centuries, oblivious to the turmoil around them. When I looked through the binoculars again, the boat had moved off and all I could see was a flash of white robe “and red fish against blue water.

  I stepped onto the open deck and unbuttoned my shirt. The breeze tasted fresh and salty, the sun was warm and soothing on my chest. The Gulf looked clear enough to drink. A sea gull circled overhead. And I felt a sudden urge to dive in and swim through the World's Most Dangerous Waterway.

  There was a shout from the bridge. I turned and saw Jesudasyn waving frantically at the water, just ahead. Koch-rekar swung the wheel hard left as Lawrence rushed to the starboard rail. A circle of light flashed just below the surface.

  “My God!” Lawrence cried. We were on top of it now. “Sardines, thousands of them! Oh what I'd give for a net!”

  We came ashore in Fujairah at dusk, just as a small fleet of fishing dhows headed out to sea. I ducked below when the coast guard pulled alongside and again as the harbormaster steered us in
to port. The Bombay agent hadn't included me in his paperwork, and the ship's log only listed three men having traveled through international waters.

  The crew tied up at the dock and settled in for another evening aboard their odd little capsule. Jesudasyn flicked through a collection of videos and chose The Ten Commandments. Lawrence put the finishing touches on the curry he'd been cooking all day. “Next time you are in Goa, you can meet my beautiful wife,” he said, spooning incendiary broth into my mouth.

  Kochrekar sat in the cabin, just as I'd found him the night before, studying charts beneath a twenty-watt bulb. In eight hours, after delivering supplies to a tanker due later that night, he would run the gauntlet again. “Another map for the shadows?” I asked. He smiled. “A man must be careful of the night.” There was much darkness and little light as I walked away from the water. Ahead lay a low concrete hut marked “Immigration” and another evasive chat with Arab officials. Then the long trip back overland to Dubai. It had been an oddly peaceful day on the water.

  I turned to watch the sun sink into the Gulf of Oman. In the gathering dark, the sea and sky washed together in an even canvas of blue. Then the last bit of light drained away. And one by one the fishing boats ignited their paper flames, fanning out like fireflies across the night.

  Two weeks later, back in Cairo, I came home to a message blinking on the telephone machine.

  “Tony, it's Jack. Great story. Just a couple suggestions. Gimme a buzz.”

  I let the sweet taste of success wash around in my mouth. Three thou and a glossy magazine spread. Freelancing, nothing to it. I dialed New York.

  “Jack, Tony.”

  “Tony! Hot stuff!”

  So hot it needed a rewrite. “Minor surgery,” he said. The problem was that the boat ride was a “tease”; sardines in the water weren't drama enough. “Not a lot actually happens out there,” he said.

  This was true. Of course, if something had happened—a missile strike, say, or a close encounter with a mine—I would have had a much better story, pieced together from whatever notes floated ashore. But I promised to punch the story up and have it to him in a few days.