by Peter Tonkin
‘And when you awake next day, day three, we will be cruising down to the Tanjung Puting National Park,’ continued Eva, her voice raised slightly against the interruption. Her Singapore noodles waved colourfully at the end of chopsticks that set the beat of her words as though she were conducting what she said.
But once more Gabriella inserted her tourist-guide information. ‘We have arranged to register our park visit for everyone aboard at Pontianac instead of Pangkalanbun. For the adventurous wildlife enthusiast the Tanjung Puting National Park is heaven on earth. Unspoilt virgin rainforest. Orang-utan, especially at Camp Leakey; owa-owa, proboscis monkeys. All manner of snakes and reptiles. Monitors. Three-metre crocodiles in the rivers. Some say five-metre ones have been seen and even larger than that. And the bird life...’
Eva reasserted herself again. At the point of her chopsticks she had impaled a chunk of lamb as though it were the heart of her opponent across the table. ‘That night we will head due east across the Java Sea, once again enjoy a full day’s sailing on day four and overnight aboard, so that you will awake upon your fifth morning as we come into port at Makassar.’
But Eva stood no chance against Gabriella, whose nostrils flared at the mention of Makassar like those of a thoroughbred at the off. ‘We will spend the day here allowing our historically orientated guests to explore Fort Rotterdam and the old city. Those who are missing Singapore already will go through the Chinese Quarter. Anyone wishing to acquire more expensive souvenirs at reasonable prices can immerse themselves in the gold markets of Jalan Somba Opu district. We have arranged in particular pete-pete transport for everyone up to Paotere harbour so that we can prepare you for later sections of the voyage by introducing you to the Bugis native islanders and their great ocean-going praus, once upon a time the most feared pirate vessels of the Java Seas. Now, alas, simple trading boats. Finally, for those who wish to linger, and crave a little night life, there is Pantai Losari. The roadside food stalls must be experienced to be believed. Then we sleep aboard, of course...’
As Gabriella set out her plans for Makassar, the plates were cleared away again and great bowls of fruit were placed on the table. There were sorbets and ice creams flavoured with local delicacies - mango, pawpaw, pomegranate. And, inevitably, thought Robin, coffee. And there was, of course, more coffee still to drink. Thick and black and as fragrant as perfume. This was, near as dammit, Java, after all...
‘Before departing with the morning tide of our sixth full day,’ Eva completed brusquely, lifting a fragrant cup to her lips, ‘to sail south round the isthmus of Pulau Selayar and away again eastwards into the legendary Banda Sea. After that it’s up to you.’ She glanced across at Captain Olmeijer, suddenly aware that she had become a little carried away; emphasizing yet again how new and unfamiliar all this was to her. ‘The winds and the currents will influence things too, of course.’ A final, almost furtive glance at the owner sitting immediately to her right. ‘And there will, naturally, be input from Stockholm.’ Then she turned back to Richard and Robin, her face still aglow with the romance of what she was promising. ‘But we have the freedom of the sea after Makassar.’
‘What about this place Pulau Baya that Captain Olmeijer was telling us about?’ asked Robin. ‘That sounds like it’s well worth a visit.’
‘That’s south across the Java Sea from Makassar,’ said Olmeijer. ‘And we’d normally call in on the way back on a round trip. I don’t know what Mr Nordberg has planned after Makassar, but we can certainly keep Pulau Baya in mind. The Moluccas, the Ceram Islands, even Irian Jaya, all lie only a few days’ sailing further east...’
‘And Prince Sailendra,’ said Robin dreamily. ‘He sounds like someone I’d very much like to meet.’
‘It does sound romantic, darling,’ admitted Robin half an hour later in their suite. ‘I haven’t even heard names like those outside the works of Joseph Conrad. And look at this!’ She gestured grandly if not absolutely soberly towards the windows at the end of their accommodation. The tall double-glazed panes were full of velvet blue-black sky strewn with massive, pearly stars.
‘But do you think it’ll sound romantic to the average cruising enthusiast? Is the romance as saleable as the eco-friendly message?’
‘Well, let’s get this conversation over and done with. I don’t want it hanging over the promise of all the rest of our cruise together. I’d say so. Yes. It should appeal to all those people who loved The Beach - book and film. All those who want to come to Indonesia but are worried about the bombs in Manila and whatnot. Tai Fun’s a wonderful environment, though it could do with less organizing in my opinion. I don’t know what the fares are like, but if you could offer something to the backpackers as well as the more mature adventure seekers, then I think you’d have cracked it. Why isn’t Nils Nordberg coining it in, though? He seems to be pretty fast on his feet. And he can see the potential for these vessels just as clearly as you can. As clearly as Nic Greenberg. What’s gone wrong for poor old Nils?’
‘For a start, he seems to have been too much too soon. He’s timed it badly and had a bit of bad luck. He’s got the goods all right but he’s over-extended himself financially and can’t afford to go the extra mile that’d move it into the main stream. And from what I can see, the loss of Chinook in San Francisco hit him really hard. Lost him the two big American markets he was after - up to Alaska and out to Hawaii. And he had insured his own bottom, so the loss was absolute. He’s hard against the wall and looking for help.’
‘But what he’s got is you and Nic Greenberg in something between a bidding war and a feeding frenzy.’
‘Yup. That about sums it up, all right.’
‘Would you rather bargain or buy?’
‘If Nic wasn’t here, I’d be cutting a deal. Heritage Mariner would want it all long term if we felt it was right for us. But short term, it’d be like it was with the Katapult series. Rights and royalties to the designers and original builders, with us moving in eventually and running it lock, stock and barrel. Nils could hang on to as much as he wanted for as long as he wanted, and vary the price accordingly. But Nic is a wild card. I don’t know what he’s up to.’
‘At first glance he’s not likely to be up to a hell of a lot, is he?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I know we do things differently to most. We still think small business rather than corporate giant. We go in, take a look and make up our own minds. Like we’re doing now. But I can’t see Nic Goldberg doing that. Richard Branson probably wouldn’t and I’d bet my bottom dollar Bill Gates wouldn’t. If they were even thinking of being serious, there’d be corporate lawyers from here to Honolulu, there’d be accountants, advisors, industrial-enquiry agents...’
‘Good point. But I still think Nic’s up to something...’
‘He’s as far up that Gabriella Cappaldi as she’ll let him get.’
‘Robin!’
‘And I hope he’s brought a ladder, ’cause I don’t see her slapping him down at all.’
Robin collapsed almost spectacularly on to the big, crisp cotton-sheeted bed. ‘I shouldn’t have had so much coffee,’ she announced. ‘I don’t feel sleepy at all.’ She wriggled a little and her skirt slid almost magically up over her thighs.
‘It isn’t coffee you’ve had too much of,’ Richard countered teasingly. Slipping off his jacket and easing his tie, he crossed to the star-packed French windows at the rear of their suite and slid them open. At once the atmosphere changed. The clinical calm of the air-conditioning was washed away by a wave of tropical humidity. The new wind was full of sea smells and spice. It heaved more restlessly than the waves over which it was running. It breathed, it whispered, it sang.
‘Robin!’ called Richard, turning. ‘Quick. Your surprise!’
‘There’s more?’ Robin sat up and slid forward, revealing even more underwear - much of it silkier and briefer - than Inge had done in the rainstorm.
‘Quick!’ Richard was at her side and reaching down.
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‘Oh all right,’ she huffed, allowing him to pull her erect so that gravity could dress her properly again.
Side by side they hurried through the door and out into the short passage that joined the three uppermost suites. Richard almost ran Robin through to the nearest door and, through it, on to the uppermost outer deck. Several metres in front of them was the bistro, a more casual dining area that housed any overflow from the restaurant below. The bistro opened on to an open deck area which in turn came up against the aft of the open bridgehouse.
At this time of night, only the bridgehouse was still occupied. The last sleepy waiter had piled the last bistro chair on the last bistro table. The final pair of casual diners had drifted below to sample the dregs of Gabriella’s entertainment for the night. Apart from Richard and Robin, it seemed, only the stars were out. Apart from the pair of them, it seemed, only the wind was up. Robin found the restlessness of the tropic night more powerfully romantic than anything she could have imagined. Had she been lazily aroused before, now she was almost afire. All in an instant. God! He knows me so well, she thought, and swung towards him, reaching out for him almost blindly. ‘Richard!’ she whispered, scarcely louder than the wind.
‘Sssssshhhhhh!’
‘What?’
‘SSSSSHHHHH!’
His arms closed around her, but not in an embrace. He did not hug her, or kiss her or take her there and then as she had somehow most poignantly hoped he would. He bundled her across the deck into the shadow of one of Tai Fun’s tall masts. For, she suddenly began to realize they were not alone after all.
The ship heeled a little as the warm, fragrant wind intensified. In the brightness of the starlight two more figures were revealed. Nic Greenberg and Gabriella Cappaldi stood so close to each other that their heads were joined by one shadow. What they were whispering was lost beneath the growing business of the night breeze. And, had Richard and Robin felt like eavesdropping, they had no chance, for the other couple parted almost instantly and walked in opposite directions - one to port and forward towards the bridge, the other starboard and aft into the bistro.
‘Richard...’ Robin was still very willing to be overwhelmed by the utter beauty of the night. But even as she spoke, he took her in his arms precisely as she had desired.
‘Darling...’ She closed her eyes and pouted her lips and raised her face to his like a flower seeking sun.
‘Wait!’ he hissed. ‘Watch. It gets better. Your surprise!’
Robin opened her eyes and blinked. Immediately above her towered the second of Tai Fun’s four huge masts. It had been these tall white spears that had robbed her of her breath in Singapore’s anchorage. That the ship they had come aboard could have the grace of an old-time clipper ship as well as all the modern conveniences of a cruise liner seemed just wonderful to her. It combined the luxury of modern cruising with the elegance of old-time sailing. But until now the masts had been bare. The diesel motors had chugged her off her moorings and the electric motors powered her since then. But now, as Richard had known they would, at the first sign of a steady wind, the sails themselves unfurled. Somewhere in the bridgehouse forward beyond the bistro, immediately behind the first of the four great masts, the sailing master pressed the button of his computerized sail controls. And with eerie speed, superhuman precision and breathtaking elegance, the four great sails spread out across the wind and snapped home. At once the whine of the electric motors stilled, the long hull leaned over like the Cutty Sark, and sped like an albatross across the Sunda Strait. The only sounds audible were the whisper of the wind, the snap of the sails and the rumble of the surf at her cutwater.
And the passionate gasping of Robin’s breath. ‘If you don’t get me back to our cabin pretty quickly, buster,’ she whispered, almost perfectly ecstatically, ‘then you’ll probably be too late!’
Chapter 6: Pulau Baya
Prince Sailendra was concentrating on the new map of his island so completely that he did not notice that the ground was shaking until the publicity photograph of himself and Johnny Depp on the white-sand, palm-fringed expanse of Bandar Laut beach toppled off his desk. No sooner had the sound of it shattering on the floor jerked the young prince out of his reverie than the door burst open.
‘What is it, Parang?’ demanded Sailendra. ‘Some kind of earth tremor?’
‘No, sir. I believe it is something worse. You must come.’ Sailendra’s secretary Parang was, like himself, young and Western-educated. He wore the same basic Western outfit as his employer, a silk shirt, cotton trousers and leather sandals. He had been appointed to his post because he was university-educated, son of a local family and utterly unflappable, and yet he was clearly shaken now. And not just by the movement of the ground. No sooner had the thought entered the young prince’s head than a distant echoing rumbling began. Sailendra left the vision of Mr Depp and himself in sarong and turban looking very much like brothers among the shards of shattered glass and ran for the door.
The two men ran out of the prince’s palace and into the compound outside. This took almost no time at all, for the palace was a one-storey building of traditional design, rendered palatial mainly by the acreage it covered. Palatial also in the position it had occupied since time immemorial, on a ledge of the mountain foothills that legend said had been carved by hand out of the living rock. Certainly, the ledge had been perfectly fashioned or wisely chosen. The palace looked over the tops of the tallest rainforest trees which still crowded the slopes below, commanding a view on the one hand of the lower mountain slopes and coast right round to the ancient but burgeoning city of Baya and on the other the lower, flatter teardrop tail of Pulau Baya over the banana groves, fruit farms and lower rice paddies towards Bandar Laut bay. Here, of course, Johnny Depp’s film had been shot so cleverly that there was never any suspicion that the waters were actually an enormous prawn-fishery.
In the compound behind the palace sat Sailendra’s current earthbound pride and joy, a massive Toyota four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle. No mere SUV, this was designed for genuinely hard off-road driving. Which was fortunate - the roads in Pulau Baya were still largely designed for use by men on foot or bicycle herding animals of various kinds. It had only been during the Second World War that wheeled vehicles powered by anything stronger than bullocks had come to Pulau Baya. Almost all the important routes for trade and communication here still had to cross the Java Sea. Sailendra was planning to take the Toyota up into the remoter areas of his island, looking for yet more ways of dragging Pulau Baya further into the twenty-first century, but that was something for the future. In the meantime, there was yet another crisis to overcome. And at least a part of it hit Sailendra in the face as soon as he raced outside like a challenging slap from a duellist. Solid though the big Toyota was, its outline was blurred by the shattering downpour all around. It was a tropical storm of truly epic proportions and utterly overwhelming power. Not only was the rain threatening to strip the paint off the Toyota’s chassis, noted Sailendra grimly, it was tearing at the hard mud of the compound and threatening to rip it away. Then he was out in the full force of it himself and was all but knocked unconscious by the icy, agonizing weight of the water on his head and shoulders.
In the days of Sailendra’s father, there would have been guards here - a ceremonial contingent at least. But Sailendra was of the opinion that his island princedom could ill afford such luxuries at the present time. In the absence of an actual army of any sort, honour guards were better employed in more productive ventures. Or in strengthening the island’s little police force and emergency service contingent at least. But he had a driver, and he too was pounding across the compound, alerted by his prince’s sudden appearance in the thunderous downpour.
‘Where are we going, Parang?’ demanded Sailendra, swinging open the nearest door - the rear one on the driver’s side - and clambering in.
‘The heliport,’ called the secretary, following him. ‘I’ll give you more details as we go. The cellphones a
re down, for some reason. I know what I know from the radio.’
The third man leaped into the big Toyota. He was built like a Japanese Sumo wrestler but he had the dark skin of a Bandar Laut - a seafarer burned by the sun through countless generations. His sarong was sopping and his turban dripped rivulets down the back of the seat. But his driving boots were made by Doc Marten and they were heavy on the pedals. The driver gunned the motor and they were off down the hill from the palace towards the coast. ‘Where?’ he bellowed with a traditional island lack of subservience.
‘The heliport,’ Sailendra answered. To my other new toy, he added in a cynical afterthought.
Like the Toyota, the helicopter and the facility needed to fly and maintain it were a present from Luzon Logging, one of the few business ventures Sailendra was hesitant about inviting into his island paradise. One of the few businesses that felt the need to try a little low-key bribery, to get a foothold on the island, therefore. He was as well aware as anyone of the commercial value of the huge stands of mahogany and other, rarer and more valuable woods in the virgin rainforests up on the mountain slopes. But he was also aware of the speed with which neighbouring islands - far bigger and more powerful than Pulau Baya - had been stripped of their forests in the final years of the last millennium of Western time so that once-green ridges stood grey and naked now. For, by its very nature, virgin forest was almost impossible to renew. Sailendra had no firm grasp on how uncontrolled logging up on the peaks of his own princedom would damage the island’s environment. And until the arrival of the chopper and the Toyota, there had seemed precious little practical chance of finding out. It seemed ironic that the men he refused so absolutely to allow on his island had sent him the means of exploring it further. It never occurred to him that by sending him driver and pilot as well as the vehicles they controlled, Luzon Logging could also keep some kind of control over where he went and what he saw. Such as the high forest, for instance.