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Kaohsiung to Manila? A man who spent his days weaving through the reefs and islands and his nights occasionally fighting off stolen fishing boats full of Abu Sayyaf terrorists or MILF fanatics waving RPG rocket launchers and Chinese AK-47S. Not to mention driving the ancient converted World War Two corvette through the odd typhoon, monsoon, or tsunami?
    The answer to that was relatively simple. He didn’t like herring. He didn’t like how they looked, tasted, or smelled, especially pickled, and he certainly didn’t want to spend his lifetime catching them like his father. He’d always been in favor of a simple live-and-let-live philosophy; he’d stay away from the herring and the herring would stay away from him.
    After that the rest of the unraveling was easy. Five years in the Royal Danish Navy right out of high school, three in icebreakers, two in supply ships, able seaman in the Danish Merchant Marine, mostly on cargo ships and livestock carriers, working his way up steadily through the ranks until he had his master’s papers, then losing everything in a drunken knife fight in Kowloon. Waking up in a Manila flophouse having his pocket picked by a ten-year-old boy, a conversation in a waterfront bar with the leather-faced captain, Nick Lumbera, signing on with him as mate aboard the
Batavia Queen
, then replacing him when dear old Nicomedes died of a stroke in the midst of a force-nine gale in the Malacca Strait. The
Queen
was carrying a bellyful of mentholated cough drops to Bombay, the whole ship smelling like a bad cold.
    He’d brought the ship through the gale and the strait with Lumbera safely stowed away in the hold’s cold room and delivered the cough drops to Bombay on schedule. Pleased, the ship’s owner, the Shanghai-Sumatra Shipping Corporation, a tiny subsidiary of the Boegart maritime empire, asked Briney if he’d like to stay on as the ship’s master without too many questions being asked. After all it wasn’t easy to find qualified people willing to endure the grueling backwater tramp through two dozen primitive shallow water ports. He’d taken the job with almost no hesitation since it was unlikely he’d ever be offered anything better.
    That was a decade ago. In a few years from now, he’d be able to call himself middle-aged. He had nothing saved, no pension, no family. The
Batavia Queen
was almost seventy and reaching the end of her useful life. Without a prohibitively expensive refit, it was only a matter of time before Hanson was given the order to take the old girl to her grave at Alang, that bleak spot on the Indian coast known as the Beach of Doom. It would be the end of his useful life as well. His own wrecking beach would most likely be at the bottom of a bottle in a sweltering room above a Rangoonbar. He butted another cigarette in the sand can. It was amazing how easy it was to get from there to here, from then to now.
    “Jakolin mo ako!”
The watertight manhole on the portside of the main deck directly below the flying bridge crashed open and McSeveney appeared, the narrow, darkly freckled face streaked with grease, his hair bunched in a nylon net made out of one leg of a woman’s panty hose.
“Putang inang trabaho ito! Ya wee houghmagandie Jockbrit! Ya bluidy ming mowdiewark sasunnach sheepshagging shiteskitter!”
He hawked and spit a gob of something semisolid over the side of the ship. “
Cack-arse hamshanker!
Gives me the
diareaky
, it do,
tam-tit fannybawz
thing!” He kicked the mushroom vent at the base of the deckhouse.
“Yah Hoor! Yah pok-pok Ang okie mo amoy ang pussit!”
He paused.
“Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai!”
he added in Mandarin, just in case there was any doubt.
    Hanson knew that Willy could curse for an hour without repeating himself. “Problem, Scottie?” he called.
    McSeveney peered up at him, his beady black eyes squinting. He looked like an enraged gopher in an ancient pair of striped coveralls. “I hate being called that, as you well know!”