Erique Sarpong and his fourteen-year-old son, Emmanuel, stared across the small wooden table for a full second before dropping their playing cards and running to the back of the boat, both of their folding chairs tumbling to the deck. This was the general direction of the scream, but no one was visible, so they weren’t sure who had called out. Five years ago, when the tourist industry began to boom in North Africa, Erique had converted his fishing operation along the crowded beaches of Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, into a charter business, taking rich foreign tourists out scuba diving. He cleaned up his old twenty-five-foot boat, added a fresh coat of paint, refinished the decking, and gave her a name: The Blue Horizon. It proved to be a smart move, as the money he made doing this far outweighed what he squeezed out of the local fish market. It was much easier work, and he could actually take days off to enjoy time with his family. But in all those years, this was the first time he had ever heard this word.
