“Yeah, well,” Sebastian continued. “The first I knew of it was when one of the sons-of-bitches came burstin’ in through the saloon door with one of them long-handled knives, them cane knives, and leapt down into the fo’c’sle. Judy started screamin’ and all hell broke loose.”
I looked at Judy.
“Well,” she said petulantly. “I didn’t know what they were after, did I?”
Nobody bothered to reply.
“Well, what else would they be after?” she continued. “I’m damned if I’m going to be raped by a gang of those black bastards!”
From the tone of her voice it sounded as though the colour of their skin was the main stumbling block, not their number.
“You were no bloody help!” she snarled at Sebastian, and then turned back to me. “They kept slapping me across the face and yelling at me to keep quiet. He just sat there, staring at the shotgun as though he had lost his best friend.”
“What did you expect him to do?” Rick asked. “Commit bloody suicide?”
“Well,” she snapped again. “The dumb son-of-a-bitch could’ve done something.” She spun round on one heel, eyes blazing, temper flaring. “Jesus, Sebastian! You always were bloody useless. All prick and no brain!”
As those words reached into his heart, something died a little.
“Did they rape you?” Henry asked, eyes wide.
It would have been a bloody quick gang-bang if they had. They’d had the hatch cover unlocked and Judy and Sebastian pushed down with us five minutes after they had jumped on board.
“No!” she snapped back, as though angry at the denial of her right to be a martyr.
“Why can’t we still cut our way out of here?” Sebastian asked in the pause that followed, eyes fixed on the floor, his voice low, almost defeated.
“We can cut around the lock,” I replied. “But there’s a forty-four gallon drum of diesel sitting on top.”
“I could lift that,” he said sullenly.
“No doubt,” I replied. “But don’t you think it might just make the teeniest sound when it falls over on to the deck? There’s a very angry man with a shotgun out there somewhere, and I don’t think these guys are going to get stuck into the claret and fall asleep.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh,” Rick tossed in, rubbing it in some more.
“All right,” Judy said. “If they weren’t after me, then what the hell are they after, the Sally May?”
“What the hell do you think they are after?” Rick snarled. “The bloody chest of course, you stupid bitch!”
Sebastian jerked himself up off the coil of rope, his fist raised threateningly, flinching with agony as his shoulder twisted, but willing to suffer that pain to protect his woman.
Was she his woman? By mid-morning, or whenever the chest finally hit the back deck, she would be making eyes at whichever of the Indians she had decided was the leader, or whichever one she reckoned she could twist around to her way of thinking.
“Settle down, Sebastian,” I said wearily. “Save your strength. You might need it before the day is out.”
He gave Rick an ugly scowl and leant back against the rope. I could see he was in pain, but he wasn’t admitting it to anyone. His pride had been damaged too much already.
I stood up and reached for the light switch.
“Leave it, Andy!” Judy snapped. “I haven’t finished yet.”
I shrugged my shoulders and sat down. Another half an hour without sleep wasn’t going to make that much of a difference.
She looked at Sebastian again and spat out the question which had been troubling her. “How did they find out about the chest?” She knew we wouldn’t have been stupid enough to have told anybody.
“I don’t know,” he answered, shrinking back into the corner away from the venom. “I didn’t tell anyone, honest, Jude!”
“Don’t give me that shit, you big clown!” she hissed. “Christ, you make me sick!”
“If you must know, Jude,” I interrupted quietly. “It wasn’t Sebastian.”
“Then who?” she demanded.
“Me,” I replied.
“No it wasn’t,” Henry said in a soft voice. “It was me.”
“Well, make up your bloody minds!” she yelled. “Who the hell was it?”
“It was Henry,” I said. “But it’s water under the bridge now. What we’ve got to figure out is how we can get out of this mess. These guys are deadly serious. They’ll take whatever is in the chest, and then probably kill us.”
Her face blanched. “What happened?” she asked, suddenly deflated as she found herself on the other end of the scales.
I told them about the two Indians coming out to the Bay of Islands, about how they had talked of killing me, and what they had done with the cord around my neck; but I twisted the ending, telling them that I had broken free and scared them off. She got back some of her colour then.
“You scare too easy, Andy,” she said. “They probably only meant to frighten you. Looks like they succeeded.”
I didn’t bother to answer. What was the use? As I looked away, I caught a glance from Sebastian, a glance that said that he knew there was more to the story, more than I had told. He smelt the danger, and the terror to come.
“Put the bloody light out,” Rick yawned from his corner. “It’s after bloody one o’clock.”
I reached up and hit the switch, but not before I saw Judy slide over towards Sebastian. She knew she had no other friend that night.
******
I shouldn’t have slept knowing that Baiya’s three friends were on board, but I did. I slept like a log, woken by Judy crawling across my legs.
“What the hell do you want?” I asked.
“I can’t breathe in here. I need air.”
“You’ll just have to wait until they let us out,” Rick said from the other side of the hold.
“But my head!” she moaned. “It keeps throbbing; and my chest hurts. It’s those damned petrol fumes!”
“You’ll get used to it,” I said. “After a few days.”
“Oh, no!”
There was a thump from above and the sound of the drum being moved. I looked at my watch: seven-thirty.
The dazzling sunlight outlined two men: black-skinned; both wearing dirty shorts and one an even dirtier shirt, the sleeves long, hanging down past his wrists, buttons missing from frayed cuffs; the other one with a woollen sweater over his shirt, holes in both elbows; the smell of fish drifting down; both bare-footed.
A thin hand-rolled cigarette was passed from one to the other as they exchanged weapons, a cane-knife for a shotgun. The cigarette smoker must have been standing guard. They both stepped back a pace, taking the smell of fish with them.
“You,” the voice behind the shotgun called. “The big one. Come up.”
Sebastian raised himself off the coiled rope, his stiffened limbs causing him to stumble and fall.
“I’ll kill those bastards,” he muttered.
“Cool it, friend,” I said. “You’ll get us all killed if you try anything on your own.”
He looked across at Judy, and nodded.
I could see it pained him to climb the short steel ladder, but he wouldn’t take any help and pushed Henry’s arm away. We watched as they tied his wrists together, the one crossed over the other, palms downwards so that he could still use his hands for climbing, but not much else. The Indian holding the cane knife ordered him to move, pushing him in the small of the back towards the saloon.
They ordered us out of the hold in turn, binding our wrists and leading us along to the saloon like pigs to the slaughter, making us climb down into the fo’c’sle under the watchful eye of the third Indian, dressed like the others, but with shirtsleeves rolled up to the shoulder. We went quietly, each of us believing that a better chance would come.
I looked up as Henry climbed down the steps and glanced across at the food cupboard under the bunk.
“Forget it, Henry,” I said. “D
on’t even talk about what you’re thinking.” I flicked my eyes up towards Judy’s approaching footsteps. “Tell me later.”
He nodded. The less Judy knew what we had up our sleeve, the better. If she knew about the gun she would only goad Sebastian into doing something stupid.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that we had missed our one opportunity. I shouldn’t have stopped Sebastian from springing up out of the hold and charging both Indians. The shotgun only held two cartridges and the Indian, caught by surprise, might have missed with the first. He wouldn’t have missed with the second, but Sebastian would have got that one, not me. They wouldn’t have been able to stop us then. There were plenty of weapons to hand in the hold: a crowbar, chipping hammers, the axe.
It would have been a short fight, but bloody: three of us against the two on deck and then turning to face the third as he raced from the saloon.
The one with holes in the sleeves of his sweater leaned down through the fo’c’sle hatchway, much the same as Baiya had done, but there was no length of cord to snatch at this time. His confederate cradling the shotgun stood a pace or two further back and stared at the five helpless Australians. I could see the third over by the saloon door, a cane knife in his hand.
“Where are Ashok and Kumar?” the black face above the dirty sweater demanded.
“Who?” Rick asked, the voice of complete innocence.
“Ashok and Kumar! My cousins!”
“We don’t know any Indians,” I replied, hoping he couldn’t hear the pounding in my chest.
I remembered the look of absolute hatred on T-shirt’s face as we had fought on the back deck, a look that had frozen even in death, the silent eyes still glaring their vengeance as he had joined his brother in the deep.
The Indian’s scowling eyes flicked from mine to the other three male faces. “Which one of you is called Henry?”
“Me,” Henry answered in a low voice.
“You know them!” he growled.
“No!” Henry said.
“You drank with them in La Tropicale!”
“I didn’t know their names,” Henry murmured. “I never saw them after they dropped me back at the Tradewinds!”
“You!” He thrust a dark finger at Rick. “You and that man.” He inclined his head in Henry’s direction. “You came back to the boat after the Golden Dragon. Ashok and Kumar were still out there. I didn’t see them come back.” He was becoming more agitated, hands and fingers jerking and pointing at each separate word; and then he yelled. “Where are they?”
He must have waited on shore for his cousins to come back in the stolen dinghy. It was just as well the girls had stayed the night. If we had sent them straight back to shore as I had wanted, and then sailed off in the darkness, he would have known for certain that something serious had happened to Baiya and his brother.
“We don’t know anything about any cousins of yours,” I said firmly. “Now why don’t you three bugger off and leave us alone before you really end up in trouble.”
For a brief moment his faced showed doubt and the bluff almost worked; but it was at that instant, as he turned to one of his companions and asked a question in Hindi, that Judy chose to vent her anger. The bitch spat out her venom, too long kept quiet.
“He knows!” she yelled, pointing at me with bound hands, fingers hooked, claw-like. “He knows! He told me that they came on board! He saw them! They tied him up!” She got up off the bunk, moving forward, her voice now pleading, softer. “Please, I’ve got nothing to do with them. They picked me up after my yacht sank. Let me go. Please! I won’t tell anybody.”
The scowling face ignored her pleas and turned to me.
“Okay,” I said. “They came on board, just the two of them. They caught me sleeping. We had a fight and they won. They tied a noose around my neck and forced me to tell them where the map was. They took it and one of the outboards and headed off across the harbour towards the main wharf; and that’s the last I ever saw of them.”
“Towards the main wharf?” he asked.
“Right.”
“Away from the Tradewinds?”
“Right.”
There was a rapid spate of Hindi between the three of them, and then he turned back.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” he asked.
“What, and tell them that we were here to steal von Luckner’s treasure?”
“Hassan!” one of the others called from behind his back, and then started rattling off in Hindi. Hassan looked at me again.
“How did you know where to come for the treasure if you had given them the map?”
“I gave them the wrong map. I told them that the treasure wasn’t really on Wakaya. I said that I had been keeping the true location from my partners. The map they took was an ordinary marine chart of Makogai with the location of an old wreck marked on it in pencil. We’d planned to dive on it if we couldn’t find von Luckner’s chest.”
He turned to the others again, translating what I had said. One of them laughed at the thought of their cousins chasing an old wreck; but the other one wasn’t so sure. It sounded too pat even to me, but what they really had to decide was whether their cousins would do the dirty on them, wanting the treasure for themselves.
Maybe they believed me, and maybe they didn’t, but whatever they believed they would want the chest first and seek revenge afterwards. Nobody could fault my story; except T-shirt and Baiya. I gave thanks that I hadn’t told everything to Judy. The hurricane lent support. Perhaps the brothers had gone down in the storm.
“Thanks, Jude,” I said. “You’re a real bitch!”
“Drop dead, Andy. If none of you bastards are going to look after me, I’ll have to do it myself.”
“If you stuff us up, Judy,” Rick snarled. “So help me, I’ll bloody drown you!”
Sebastian started to shift, the air becoming electric once more.
“Cool it, you fools!” I snapped. “Just cool it. We’ll get nowhere fighting amongst ourselves.”
Hassan returned from the huddle with his companions. “Have you found the chest?” he asked.
My head jerked from side to side, but it was a wasted effort.
“Yes!” Judy yelled, triumphant.
There was no longer any use in lying about anything that Judy was aware of. The bitch would sell her soul for a dollar, and her body for a ten-cent piece.
I nodded to our jailer. “You know we’ve found it, so why bother to ask? We saw you go past this afternoon. You were probably watching us from the top of the cliff when we went down.”
He smiled for the first time. I think I preferred the scowl.
“Is it ready to be brought up?” he asked.
I had my eyes on Judy as she nodded her head.
“Yes,” I said. “Almost, but I’m stuffed if I’m going down for it.”
He called something in Hindi to one of the others and a cane knife was passed forward, then he stepped carefully down into the fo’c’sle, his eyes flicking from side to side. One of the others stepped forward and took Hassan’s place at the top of the fo’c’sle steps, the shotgun pointed at my head. I had been the last one to see Ashok and Kumar: Baiya and T-shirt; the last person to see them alive that is. Their lives had ended on the Sally May, and their bodies had gone down to the deep, but their hatred had never left.
Hassan laid the sharp edge of the cane knife across Judy’s smooth cheek as she tried to force herself back into the steel of the hull, eyes fixed to the knife pressing against her honey-tanned skin.
“The lady will not look so pretty with a scar down her face,” he said mockingly. “Such a terrible thing. So much pain. So ugly. But perhaps it would be better if we enjoyed her first though, isn’t it!”
It was all Rick and I could do to hold Sebastian back down on the other bunk, his face almost purple at the thought of what they would do to the beauty he worshipped and with the body he regarded as his own.
“No!” he screamed. “No!”
/>
It was a useless show of fury. He didn’t have a hope in hell of doing anything to protect her. Hassan would have sliced his throat before he was half-way off the bunk, and even if he failed to stop the big man’s charge with that first quick blow of the cane knife, the shotgun now aimed at Sebastian’s head would have delivered the coup de grace. Sebastian was expendable. It was Rick, or Henry, or me who would raise the black iron chest for him.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. You’ve made your point. I’ll go down.”
Why I felt pity for the shallow bitch I couldn’t for the life of me understand. I tried to tell myself that it was for Sebastian, but to this day I still don’t know why I agreed.
“No he won’t,” Rick interrupted. “I will. Henry and I’ll go down.” He turned to me. “We shifted it twenty yards or so. You wouldn’t know where to find it.”
I knew they hadn’t shifted the chest, so he must have some scheme in mind; but we had to get away from Judy long enough for him to tell me what he was planning. We needed time.
“Go now then!” Hassan ordered as he climbed back out of the fo’c’sle.
“What?” Rick asked. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“We can’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s too early,” Rick replied, playing for that time we needed. “We can’t go down until at least ten o’clock. There’s not enough sunlight in the bay yet.”
“Now!”
The rasping tone of his voice said that there would be no more argument, no more delay. Rick pulled himself upright, turning to me as he walked to the ladder.
“I tried, mate,” he whispered. “Just hang in there.”
“And do not forget, you white bastard,” Hassan snarled at Rick, as his bound hands reached the top of the ladder. “The first sign of trouble from you or your drunken friend here.” He leant forward and tapped Henry on the top of the head with the flat blade of the cane knife. “And we start slitting throats.”
There was a whimper from Judy. She pushed herself up off the bunk and looked towards the saloon, eyes wide, pleading. She finally believed what I had told them in the hold. These men would kill.
The Stone Dog Page 27