Prologue

February 10, 2013   •   12° 53’ 36.32” North, 61° 10’ 57.53” West
50 meters off the northern shores of Mustique, St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Alexander Rybak could not believe what he had just heard on the radio. In Nischnjaja Tura, a small town of twenty thousand souls in the central Urals, 10.4 degrees Celsius outside temperature had been reported.

There were three things Rybak found hard to believe. For starters, the temperature was unreasonably high for this season. Actually, the temperature was high for any season. The second unusual thing was, that in the nearly fifty years he had daily tuned in to the weather reports, Nischnjaja Tura had not been mentioned a single time. The third was, what happened the day before: The weather girl had stated a temeperature of 10.4 degrees in Lukojanow, an equally small town in eastern Russia. This, however, had been incorrectly reported, as she stated this day, and was actually a freezing minus 10.4 degrees.

Rybak turned his shortwave radio off, the static fell silent and he was once again surrounded by the tranquility to which he had become so accustomed. He heard only the gentle lapping of the waves on his boat’s hull. 10.4 degrees, thought Rybak. He opened the bar compartment on the port side . He took a bottle of rum out, went to the opposite side of the ship and opened another cubbyhole to take out a glass. 10.4 degrees, he repeated in his thoughts, and decided to pass on the glass. After almost 50 years it really has happened.

He climbed the old but solid staircase made of freshly oiled larch upwards. Rybak sat down in the cockpit. He needed air. He had to breathe. With the first sunrise of the day he took a large gulp from the bottle. It was an excellent Caribbean Rhum Agricole from Martinique. But he didn’t really care about that at the moment.

The boat, which had been his home for forty-nine years, suddenly seemed small and cramped. With the second sip of rum he saw the orange glowing co-rona of the sun appear above the orange-brown sea. This sunrise changed his world. But not only Rybak's world, he mused. Sooner or later this sunrise would change the entire world. 10.4 degrees, the radio presenter had said.

•

"Sir Alexander," Rybak heard from behind him, from someone on the water. It was a familiar voice, but this early? He looked at his wristwatch, an aged Breitling Navitimer, which still ran as precise as it had on the first day he bought it in Zurich. At the beginning of his journey, the maritime chronograph had been an indispensable tool to navigate the seas. Today he used the clock as most other people did: to tell the time. Ten minutes before seven a.m. - Luis was not early, in fact he was five minutes late. But, thinking about it, Luis was never too late - how long had he been calling out? How far from this world had Rybak been, he wondered. How could he have missed that the dinghy of the young Luis Ceasar, a smart young businessman, had been approaching his boat? A look at the bottle of rum explained a lot - half of it was missing.

10.4 degrees, he thought once more. "Good morning, Luis," he said to the sixteen-year-old, dark-skinned islander, who approached his boat every morning at 6.45 sharp. He thanked him unusually short and grumpy as the young man handed him a thin plastic bag with foodstuffs.

A gentle breeze drove the scent of cooked bananas on the boat. The island seemed to wake up. Food, Rybak thought, is probably better than alcohol in the current situation, and took a banana from the plastic bag. Bananas were in his eyes the only downside to the Grenadines - the farmers on the island had apparently developed a lively enthusiasm for the yellow fruits and largely ignored that other fruits were also farmable. But the bananas tasted wonderful, especially in conjunction with a sip of rum.

A view of the bay showed him that Luis was busy with the next yacht, a brand new catamaran certainly priced at far over a half a million dollars. It had arrived the night before and the crew kept partying until well after midnight. Loudly. French, Rybak thought, they will surely be in a hurry and be gone soon, so that he would have his heavenly peace back quickly, as would the nice old British couple on the old ketch.

Looking at the British ship he saw the Swiss flag on his own boat barely moving, hanging down from its flagpole. The British, he thought, was much nicer - the flag, not the boat. The boat, an about twenty-five years old Swan, one of the finest and most expensive sailing boats around, was in a pitiful state. Not so his forty-nine years old, sixteen feet long and perfectly shiny Nikita. But to be honest, his Nikita would not be ship-shapey were it not for the the financial means he had been given. 10.4 degrees, he thought again. Very expensive 10.4 degrees.

February 11, 2013   •   12° 53’ 36.32” North, 61° 10’ 57.49” West
49 meters off the northern shores of Mustique, St. Vincent and the Grenadines

As Rybak awoke the next morning, he could not remember how the last day had passed. He saw only a small sip left in the bottle of rum on the coffee table next to where he had fallen asleep. And another empty bottle was rolling on the floor. He emptied the other bottle as he turned on the radio just in time.

"This is Anna Schein with the weather," the news spokeswoman announced four minutes past six o’clock in the morning. She followed the greeting by announcing the temperatures of the largest and most important cities on the planet. "New York minus ten, Paris minus two degrees. Moscow minus eighteen, Beijing zero degrees. Tokyo plus three, Sydney plus eighteen. Werchneuralsk ... " - a completely insignificant small town in the Urals - " ... 10.4 degrees. And we apologize for a mishap yesterday - in Nischnjaja Tura the current temperature is minus 10.4 degrees, as it was yesterday. "

Alexander Rybak turned off the radio and looked at it, aghast, for a few minutes. Out of sheer routine he pressed down a control switch three times on, which responded by flashing three times. At least it is working fine, he thought to himself.

He went to the bow, into the shower. In the mirror he saw his face. For his age, being seventy-four years old, he still looked excellent. He was not as slim and athletic as back in 1963, when his life had changed so abruptly, so intense, from one second to the next. But, he had aged in dignity. The sea air had made his face rough in the unique way only sea air can. In his full white hair were tiny flakes of salt. The full beard he used to wear like most old seamen did needed a trim.

Five minutes later he took a towel from the cubbyhole under the sink, dried himself off, turned the bilge pump on briefly, which flushed the sloshing shower water under the floorboards outside, and went into the cockpit. It was time for breakfast, and with that thought he saw Luis run his dinghy ashore.

Luis arrived aft of the ship after a few seconds and greeted Rybak with a friendly and cheerful "Good Morning, Sir Alexander." Luis adressed all of his customers with “Sir”, and he almost always got a decent tip. He then asked, clinging with one hand reaching out of the small boat to the small wooden platform on the transom of the Nikita, for permission to come aboard, like he did every morning.

During his time in the Navy, Rybak would have never entered a boat without asking for permission - especially on a military ship it carried the risk to be shot. At the present time, however, the meaning of seamanship degenerated more and more, and except on American boats no one was allowed to shoot intruders anyway. And even the Americans couldn’t shoot people just for coming aboard. Thus, Luis had well earned the lush tip, which he received that day.

•

Drinking the juice of a fresh coconut, this day’s surprise that Luis had included with the breakfast, Alexander Rybak was noticeably less horrified than an hour before, when he had heard on the radio that Nischnjaja Tura was cooler than indicated on the previous day. Forty-nine years ago he had left his home country with a mission, a mission he had always hoped not to have to carry out. But now he had heard it, twice already, that his mission was commanded, and he had to act.

Or at least, he thought, he had to decide how he should act. Refusal did not actually come to his mind. But to carry out this mission , some things had to be done. He had plenty of time, more than half a year. Thus, he saw no reason to hurry. Rather, he saw a good reason for another glass of rum – his liver would surely make it until fall.

One hour later, the sun had almost heated the air to the usual thirty degrees of the day, Rybak felt ready to follow protocol. He went back down into the ships’ salon and knelt down on the floor. He flipped up a floorboard in front of him and saw the old safe. The synthetic resin used in 1963 by the best shipbuilders of his country to laminate the steel safe to the hull of the aluminum boat was solid as concrete. In order to steal the safe you would need a jackhammer, and you would likely rather sink the boat than get it out.

The vault door, however, was not constructed by the best engineers in his country. Or at least not the best metal casters, because the rotating device for adjusting the combination stuck the largest part of the last twenty years. The inner wheels seemed to be made of better material, but it was no pleasure to open the safe. Though, there was a solution for this problem, as was the solution for many problems on a boat with metal parts in salt water: multifunctional lubricating oil.

Rybak sprayed an unreasonably large amount of the chemical on the lock and took off the gold chain he always wore around his neck. Attached to the chain was a steel key, worn smooth by forty-nine years of friction on Rybak's skin. But it still fit into the lock, as if it were new.

A few minutes later, after the oil had done its job and everything seemed to run smoothly again, Rybak turned the combination lock a few times around, until it was not stuck at any point anymore. Then he dialed the first number: three turns clockwise to 09. Two turns counterclockwise to 05. One clockwise to 63.

Next Chapter: index