ShipLog Story: Shadow in the Bab el-Mandeb (Part 2)
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This is entry is a continuation from Shadow: In the El-Mandeb Part 1
Ship Universe Note
- This post is part of our Wednesday ShipLog Stories series at Ship Universe
- We spotlight the human side of the maritime industry through fiction that is based on real-world scenarios.
- For questions, feedback, or to share your own story, please get in touch with us
They pulled him over the rail and onto the deck. His boots scraped steel, and he let himself drop to his knees.
No one reached to help him stand.
Water dripped from his sleeves. He shivered just enough to be convincing.
Footsteps circled him, but he didn’t look up. Just the motion of the ship, the cold fog clinging to his skin, and the hum of power somewhere beneath the deck. Familiar sounds. Almost comforting.
Someone finally spoke.
“Get him inside. Carefully.”
They lifted him under the arms. One hand slipped under his ribs, pressing on the bruise from earlier. Real pain. It helped.
As they guided him forward, Adem let his eyes drift, just a glance here, a scan there.
Crew passage. Port stairwell. Electrical panel. And just ahead, by a worn bulkhead, a small diagnostic terminal. Mounted waist-high, screen flickering.
Status: Idle
Access: Unlocked
Network Link: Local only
Port: USB-C (active)
He barely looked at it. Didn’t need to. One second was enough. They turned him down a narrow hallway. Mira trailed behind, quiet, always watching. Her steps matched his.
Two decks down from here, he thought. Backtrack from the stairwell, five minutes alone.
Elias waited in the companionway, arms folded. He gave no welcome, just a nod to the crew.
“Get him checked out. We'll talk after.”
Adem nodded once, slowly. Then let his head sag again.
I’ll be ready by then, he thought. And already done.
Adem sat on the edge of the bunk in the med station, wrapped in a blanket that smelled faintly of bleach and diesel. The medic had given him water and walked out ten minutes ago. No one had come back. He had planned to wait until nightfall, maybe slip out during a shift change. But the setup was too clean. Too quiet. Sometimes the window opens, and if you hesitate, it closes forever.
No guards. No eyes. Just timing and the time is now.
He stood, quiet as breath, and moved toward the corridor. His wet shirt clung to his back. Boots muffled on rubber matting. He didn’t rush. The ship creaked and hummed around him. A passing conversation, Rafiq’s voice, filtered from the galley two compartments away.
Clear.
He reached the small junction he’d noted earlier. The diagnostic terminal sat just where he left it, idling, forgotten.
He pulled a thin device from under his waistband, black, matte, shaped like a flattened key fob. Heart pumping fast, he slipped it into the port without looking.
The screen blinked once.
Uplink: Active
Transfer Packet: 01 of 03
Encryption: Engaged
ETA: 2m 48s
Adem kept one hand on the edge of the bulkhead, listening.
Each packet was small metadata, credential chains, route logs, and encrypted crew profiles. It wouldn’t trip the main systems. He’d tested the build three times in a Jakarta hotel.
The second bar ticked over.
Almost there.
The hallway behind him creaked.
Not the ship. A footstep.
Adem pulled the device mid-transfer. The terminal flickered once, then returned to idle. He slipped the unit into his boot and turned. Mira stood five paces back. No expression on her face. Just eyes locked on his.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t blink.
Then he ran.
His boots hit the grating hard as he cleared the engine corridor, Mira’s voice screaming behind him.
“Stop! Stop right now!”
Adem didn’t look back.
He took the port-side stairs two at a time and burst out into the open air. Fog poured in from the sea, muting the ship's motion and giving him cover. He ran aft, staying close to the hull, ducking behind a crane arm and slipping under a safety rail. The stern was just ahead. Quiet. No one posted. For now. He reached the final gate and stepped up to the ledge out onto the aft port corner.
Then stopped.
Oh shit.
It looked like twenty feet when he’d visualized it from the med bunk. From the edge, in the moment, it looked like fifty. The swell below heaved dark and slow, the distance alive and dangerous.
You hesitate, you lose. You're already away from the prop zone.
Jump clean. Curl on impact.
He climbed the rail.
Behind him were panicking shouts. “Stop! You won't survive!” Mira yelled. She was closer than he expected. Two deckhands scrambled behind her, boots slamming metal, maybe ten feet back.
He didn’t have time to hesitate and knew her comment was bullshit. Seconds before he was within arms reach, Adem jumped.
Cold slammed into his spine like steel. The impact knocked the air from his lungs. He kicked, twisted, surfaced. His ears rang.
The Nereid steamed on, its hull looming above him, then receding. No alarms. No horn. No rope tossed from the rail. They weren’t turning back.
Good.
He reached beneath the collar of his soaked shirt, fingers trembling, and peeled away the waterproof patch. Inside: a small, single-use GPS beacon. He pressed it once. A dull red light blinked.
Location Beacon: Active
Status: Signal Sent
Estimated Response: 6–10 minutes
He floated on his back, lungs burning, watching the lights of the Nereid vanish into the fog. No one shouted after him. No warning lights.
That’s it, he thought. All they care about is what I left behind.
Somewhere out there, a small fishing boat with a decades old Mercury 150 was already turning toward the signal. His body shook from cold, but his grin was steady.
Done. Payment inbound. All clean.
Adem floated on his back in the chop, blinking against the fog. The Nereid was already gone, her wake a fraying trail in the distance. His limbs burned. Every breath hurt. He forced himself to stay still. Movements wasted energy. Movement drew eyes.
Then, there. A light.
Low. Small. Steady.
A boat.
He reached into the collar of his soaked shirt and pulled the strobe.
Click. Flash.
Click. Flash.
The response came in kind: a green blink. Starboard bow. The small trawler was ancient. Rusted blue paint peeled at the rails. A single man stood at the helm, face hidden behind a scarf and mirrored glasses. He didn’t wave. Just slowed to idle and let the net ramp drop.
Adem clawed his way aboard, collapsed over the edge, then rolled to his back, gasping. The boat turned.
No words.
Just heading.
South.
Twenty minutes later, he sat below deck on a storage crate, wrapped in a thermal jacket.
He pulled out the secure satlink. The signal held. He tapped the encrypted token and watched the connection hand off.
Uplink stable. Routing clean.
He opened the account.
Amount: $140,000 USD
Transaction ID: 4FF9-23C8-777X
Account: *****4298
Status: Settled – Offshore Holdings (Malta)
He smiled. Not wide. Just enough. One last job. And he hadn’t even had to fake the limp this time. The old sailor gave him a nod from the wheelhouse and tossed back a thermos of hot tea.
Tayana 42, he thought. Someplace warm. Someplace far.
Rain ticked against the windows.
They crossed into open water.
And ahead of him, the horizon.
Aboard the Nereid
24 hours later. Off Port Sudan, Red Sea
The mess was silent. Rafiq sat with his hands locked together, staring at the edge of his untouched coffee. Across from him, Mira tapped through the last security logs, frame by frame.
“That’s where he turns,” she said. “Pauses at the door to Comms. Seven seconds. Looks around. Goes in. He was never cleared for that side of the ship.”
Jero leaned in. “Seven seconds is all it takes if you know the node.”
“That’s assuming he got into the uplink directly,” Mira replied. “What if he just inserted code into the scheduled traffic? An override. Something timed.”
Rafiq stood. “We didn’t bring aboard a survivor. We brought in a breach.”
In the bridge, the captain's report was already being drafted.
Ship logs cross-checked. Internal diagnostics rerun.
Nothing outwardly broken. Nothing tampered with.
But something felt... off.
Down in Engineering, isolated systems rebooted without prompts. In the Comms bay, three outgoing satellite pings had routed through unfamiliar relays before disappearing into encryption fog.
Mira knew the patterns. That wasn’t improvisation.
That was professional.
Timestamp: 03:27 UTC
Uplink: Comms Node C7
Data Payload: 33MB
Trace Status: Unresolved
Flagged: Critical – Notify Shore Operations
By the time they made port, half the crew had already been interviewed.
The company issued a formal statement:
“We are cooperating fully with authorities and treating the breach with utmost seriousness.”
By the end of the week, three officers were suspended. One technician was fired. And Mira? She submitted her resignation.
“I saw it in his eyes,” she told no one. “I just didn’t know what I was seeing.”
Three weeks later
Southern Arabian Sea
The ocean was calm for once.
Adem stood barefoot on the bow of the Indigo Trace, wind tugging at his shirt, hand resting on the polished rail. The Tayana 42 was his now, hull cleaned, rigging tuned, new electronics humming with precision. He’d named her after a reef he’d never seen but always imagined.
Below deck, the kettle was whistling. On deck, a gentle swell rolled beneath him, slow and rhythmic like breath. He’d spent the last hour trimming the sails for a reach toward the Seychelles. No AIS. No pings. Just wind and current.
It was the kind of quiet he used to think didn’t exist anymore. Behind him, thunder cracked.
He looked up.
A curtain of cloud was moving in from the northwest. No warning squall, no weather flag. Just a sudden wall of gray pushing the sky shut. His eyes traced a dark vein across it, then everything went white. He had survived raids, betrayals, and plenty of things that should’ve killed him. But as life can be random and cruel, this was the moment.
No sound.
Just light.
For one half-second, the sky turned silver. The mast took it first. Then the static raced through the stays, into the rail, and into him.
He was still reaching for the helm when his body hit the deck.
The Indigo Trace drifted on.
Wind in her sails.
No hand on the wheel.
🔍 ShipLog Debrief
This fictional but plausible scenario reflects emerging risks in maritime operations where crew trust, protocol fatigue, and digital systems intersect. It only takes one unvetted moment, one unsecured terminal, for a vessel to become compromised. Blindside in the Storm reminds us: in today's maritime landscape, the most dangerous stowaway might not be armed with a weapon… but a flash drive.
