by Peter Tonkin
Providentially, Sailendra had begun to clear the port area starting with the levee side. It was a logical decision, given the amount of work still going on around the warehouses on the opposite side. And, while one ship had just left the outer area of Berth 1, its passengers safely below out of the burning pumice hailstorm, the replacement vessel was still manoeuvring into position. So both vessels sat between the levee and the last few hundred Berth 1 refugees lined up on the dock. Because these were the last refugees this far along the dock itself, Sailendra had come down in person to see them off. When the lahar itself arrived, he was standing beside the main fire point with a bundle of umbrellas, torn between handing them out and putting them down to pull the hose out of its brackets to try and wash some of the burning pumice off the dock. The old man beside him made up his mind for him. ‘Hey,’ he snarled, with the lack of ceremony granted to old age in extremis, ‘are you going to give me one of those or are you just going to stand there gawping?’
Sailendra opened the umbrella, but as he did so he heard a sound like an express train hitting the buffers at full speed. A great wash of darkness reared above the levee, only vaguely visible in the dull red glow of the eruption. The darkness seemed to leap up against the red-bellied burning smoke clouds above, then it fell like a breaking wave. Most of it seemed to tumble back beyond the quaking wall of the levee, but not all. The two ships out on the water so close at hand were suddenly soiled by a great rain of thick mud, filled with steaming debris. It spattered into the foaming water which seemed to start boiling from the first foul touch. And some of it spattered across the berth itself. Fortunately all the heavy debris fell into the water and it was only the outwash of mud itself which made it this far. Sailendra, standing foolishly frozen in the act of offering the golf umbrella to the impatient old man, felt the impact of the falling mud all but tear it from his grip. He staggered back and watched in horror as the man was beaten to the ground by a deluge of steaming mud as thick as molasses. In an instant the orderly line was reduced to filthy, shrieking anarchy. And it was only when he stepped forward and actually felt the heat of the mud like napalm on his leg that he fully understood. In an instant he had thrown down the useless ruin of the golf umbrella and grabbed the hose after all. He turned on the water and began to hose the burning mud off the people and off the dock. As he did so, the second ship pulled in and dropped its gangways into place. Sailors came running, slipping and sliding on to the dockside and started pulling the scalded refugees up into relative safety. Sailendra continued to wash the steaming, sulphur-stinking mud off everything and everyone nearby. It was only when he turned the water off at last that he realized his walkie-talkie was sounding urgently. He put it to his face. ‘Yes?’
‘Your Highness, we have to move as many as we can over to the warehouse side. Whatever it was that came down the river course has destroyed that whole section of the old river mouth approaches. It’s ripped the outer end of the old levee right off. It’s put a new isthmus out into the bay for the better part of half a kilometre and it’s still growing. And it sent a wave outwards that some ships are reporting to have reached ten metres in height. And that’s still going as well; it may even be still growing, I don’t know. We won’t find out until it reaches Kalimantan. In the meantime, it has caused mayhem out there. I think we may even have lost some ships.’
‘We will meet with the Miyazaki Maru here, off the mouth of the Sungai Baya River,’ said Councillor Kerian. ‘He will wait for us there.’ That was as much of the councillor’s plan as they were to know. And during the next hours Tai Fun deviated from her planned course just enough to take her out of the main armada, and away towards the river mouth. The pirates may have been inexperienced and nowhere near as well armed as they supposed, but they were terrified and very watchful. And their prisoners could see that watchfulness and the nervousness. They had no way of knowing about the inexperience of the men nor the inefficiency of their weapons. So the stand-off stayed in place as the two ships drew closer to each other, to the island and to their rendezvous.
Richard breathed deeply and evenly, trying to keep the tension under control so that he could think clearly and predict what Kerian’s plan might be. If he could guess it with any accuracy, he could plan his own countermeasures more efficiently. And the more he considered their position, the more vital it seemed to him that they would have to take countermeasures, no matter what the risks. Because they were not going to be allowed to walk away from this alive. They knew who Kerian was. Even if they hadn’t known that, they still knew what he and his men looked like. And even if the old pirate was hesitant, Richard guessed that the men aboard the Miyazaki Maru wouldn’t be. For, as the TV announcer had informed them earlier, Miyazaki Maru belonged to Luzon Logging. Nic and Gabriella had told them all about men who worked for Luzon Logging. Richard reckoned men and women would mean no more to them than orang-utans did.
Practically, thought Richard grimly, the best idea for the pirates and their ship-board fences would be to kill everyone aboard, and tow Tai Fun with her priceless cargo somewhere they could transfer whatever they thought they could sell, then scuttle her. The only imponderable Richard could see was the question of whether anyone involved would be clever enough to work out that if they kept them alive until they scuttled the vessel, they might get away with a simple loss at sea - and no comebacks. Not even for someone as notable as Nic Greenbaum. After all, there had been no great furore when Robert Maxwell went down. Bad things happen at sea - everyone knows that. But of course, under the current circumstances, it would be even easier to kill them all, strip Tai Fun and then bomb or burn her, blaming her loss with all hands on the volcano. But to get away with that, they’d have to move the cargo while they were still close to the island and safely under the deadly pall of smoke. Whatever way it was all supposed to pan out, everyone on Tai Fun was due to die. Richard decided to take that as a given and draw up his own plans accordingly.
The first hope of an edge Richard and the others got arose out of Kerian’s greed. With his prisoners apparently cowed and quiet, the old pirate took the opportunity of scouting round the vessel in much more detail. And he soon discovered that there was jewellery in many of the cabins. Expensive watches. Loose currency. It didn’t take him long to realize that the ship might have a safe, also. And that the safe on a ship with a large casino aboard might well be full of gambling money on top of everything else. And he didn’t need to use Captain Nakatomi or his friends at Luzon Logging to fence watches and jewellery or to spend a fortune in good hard cash. Any hesitation that the owner or his captain might have felt to giving away the combination of the ship’s safe was easily overcome by a simple threat to rape the captive women. Something he was looking forward to doing in any case. He didn’t even need to use his fall-back of shooting the red-bearded sailing master in the head. Something he would also do later, before shooting the aggressive American in several slightly less fatal, infinitely more painful, places and feeding his bleeding body to the sharks.
The crew of Kerian’s prau were suddenly no longer in evidence as they moved Kerian’s personal plunder aboard. Then the magnanimous leader allowed Bukit and his men to make their selection of the remaining baubles and put them aboard the second prau. But Kerian was no fool and Bukit was scared of failing his uncle. They had discussed the American’s fate and Bukit didn’t want to share it. So the young man was especially careful when the old man was away. And so the night proceeded.
Tai Fun sailed out of the last of the rising moonlight and under the strange spreading cloud of ash and smoke with its seemingly abyssal black sections bounded by ridges of fierce and threatening red. And the red intensified sufficiently to give some real light. And that light throbbed, sometimes brighter, sometimes darker, according to how the eruption was going. But it seemed that each blast of brightness burned lighter and lingered longer the closer to Port Baya they came. It was exactly as though they were sailing into Hell itself, thought Richard.
&n
bsp; As they came close enough to the burning island to receive the harbour master’s signal, so Kerian came back on to the bridge and stayed. At first, he simply ordered Tom Olmeijer to remain silent. This was easier than trying to come up with some elaborate reason for the course they were following. Richard reckoned that Kerian would have to soon, however, or simply switch off the radio and swear - if it ever came to an enquiry - that the thing was malfunctioning. While Kerian was wrestling with this conundrum, the others joined him, one by one, until Richard was certain that all the guns were there. The chef was still missing, however, and Richard thought he must probably be down below with the rest of the crew, all tied up sufficiently to be left.
The light was not the only thing that intensified as they drew near the volcano, however. The fearsome up-welling of so much blazing matter set up its own microclimate. And as the red light gathered, so the wind strengthened, blowing steadily - then strongly - then fiercely - from the north, sucked ever more powerfully into the inferno above the mountain. The sea echoed the restlessness of the lighter element, boiling up into increasingly restless swells. But it lacked the wind’s sense of purpose and instead set up a steep-sided, unpredictable chop that threw Tai Fun’s hull about quite brutally while her sails seemed set hard above her heaving deck. Soon, Captain Olmeijer was demanding the services of his sailing master. But even Larsen could not be expected to trim the sails for these conditions. So, at last, as they came down towards their rendezvous with Miyazaki Maru, they had to furl the sails altogether and motor in.
Through the clearview, Richard could see the top of the volcano, well defined by outpourings of molten lava now, the unrelenting column of burning smoke occasionally brightened by what looked like showers of meteors sailing up in ballistic arches to bomb the slopes and the town below. There was a sulphurous stench, alleviated only by the fact that the wind was coming steadily from astern, over the fresh cool sea. Through the open door of the bridgehouse, he was able to see the lower slopes, the edge of the harbour, the levee stretching out into a groyne, and the width of the river mouth beyond. Over on the far side sat the dark bulk of a vessel riding apparently at anchor and without lights. Oddly, that was the only other vessel he could see, though he knew there must be others very close by.
Continuing to ignore the harbour master, Kerian ordered the radio operator to raise Miyazaki Maru and as soon as Captain Nakatomi came on, the Councillor began his final negotiations. But these did not run smoothly; and, fatally for many of those concerned, they were conducted at lull-scream pitch by two angry men gabbling a mixture of Japanese and Indonesian baha Indonesia, but communicating mostly in English, for each was clearly ignorant of the other’s native tongue. It was a combination that the men and women imprisoned on the bridge could follow quite clearly. Richard, as always, focused on the conversation with fierce attention, still looking for a way to use anything he heard to the advantage of himself and his shipmates.
Captain Nakatomi was increasingly nervous, it seemed. He wanted to be gone. He clearly understood the worth of Tai Fun and her contents but his own command was at serious risk. Either Kerian brought her alongside, threw him a rope and sat still while Miyazaki Maru pulled Tai Fun somewhere a good deal safer, or he could forget it.
Fine, decided the incandescent pirate, in the most basic and insulting terms. He had a sound ship, packed to the gunwales with priceless treasures, and two praus - all well crewed. The cowardly, double-dealing, motherless, fatherless Captain Nakatomi could take his precious Miyazaki Maru and dock her where the sun didn’t shine.
Captain Nakatomi answered with actions rather than words. Miyazaki Maru’s propellers suddenly began to thrash the red water under her counter into a kind of bloody foam. Infinitely slowly, the big freighter began to turn away across the wide mouth of the river. Kerian replied by directing Tom Olmeijer to take Tai Fun back out to sea, but slowly - and cross by the end of the levee and into the harbour mouth. They would lose themselves amongst the shipping there.
‘Up! Up all mans!’ howled Kerian as soon as Tai Fun began to answer to his orders. He waved the Browning for emphasis.
Richard, Nic and Larsen obeyed. Richard at least did so with less trepidation than he had felt in a while. If Kerian planned to sail Tai Fun, then he would need all of them to do so. With any luck, they were going to Kerian’s prau to release the three women. Even Kerian must see that what they needed here was a navigator like Eva Gruber. Such was Kerian’s rage and excitement that he took his nephew and six men as guards for the three prisoners, leaving only a skeleton guard on the bridge. A skeleton guard all armed with US Army Colt .45s.
They were going to Kerian’s prau all right, but not to get the women. The three stood on the heaving hydraulic platform in the steady blast of the wind under the guns of Bukit and two of his crew armed with Type 94 Japanese pistols as Kerian and a couple of his men, the Walther PPK and the Makarov, rushed up and down, gathering the most precious of the pirate’s treasure. If Kerian was staying aboard Tai Fun for the time being, so were his ill-gotten gains.
Richard was standing on the outer edge of the platform, closest to a young guard armed with a Type 94, who was standing at the point where Kerian’s prau was tied. Nic was beside him, with Larsen closest to Bukit in the middle of the platform. The third guard, with a Makarov, was on the deck of the prau itself, his gun wavering somewhere in the middle of the line of prisoners.
As Richard waited to be loaded with the bags and cases Kerian was piling on the deck of the prau, he had the opportunity to look around for the sight away to his left was one of awesome splendour. Tai Fun was moving past the point of the levee now, the concrete groyne reaching out into the restless water, spiked with shattered flood debris. The harbour mouth beyond the groyne was still hidden behind his shoulder but his view to the left was widened by the fact that the prau was pulling back against her tow rope as Tai Fun motored forward. The river mouth was wide and shallow, backed by the wild wreckage of the landslide that had obliterated half the city. Above this, the mountain slopes were walls of blackness festooned increasingly intensely by blazing fires, which were being added to minute by minute as individual magma bombs burst upon them. The upper slopes were already well covered with lava, what forest was left after the landslide, well ablaze.
But then Richard’s attention was claimed by something so unutterably strange, he found himself blinking. There was a kind of brightness in the river valley. A spectral glowing that seemed to leap and pulse so wildly it made his eyes water. He rubbed his face with his hands and looked again. In the second his eyes had been closed, the brightness had leaped much closer. He blinked, still trying to comprehend what he was seeing. Closer still. Following the Sungai Baya’s valley. Even out here, he could hear a throbbing that instantly became a rumbling, which was at once a roaring. And the roaring gathered with the awesome speed of an approaching super-train. Following the river down. Down towards Tai Fun.
‘Get DOWN!’ Richard threw himself at the nearest guard. His movement was so unexpected that the man had no time to react. Richard’s shoulder hit him on the belly and he flipped backwards over the prau’s rope and was gone. As he went, he threw up his hands and his Type 94 pistol described a ballistic arc on to the deck beside Richard’s hand. He scrabbled at it, already starting to roll. Nic and Larsen were equally quick. The three men sprawled on to the deck, Richard on his side, the gun at arm’s length, thumb seeking the safety. There was an instant of stasis. Then Bukit pulled the trigger of his CZ52. And the gun blew up in his hands. The bullet in the chamber was the wrong size for the barrel and it wedged in place. The explosion tore apart the back of the weapon, sending the shell-case and the firing pin back at bullet speed. As Bukit had been aiming down the barrel at Larsen, that was where the flying metal hit him, right between the eyes. Richard stopped looking for the Type 94’s safety catch. He released his pressure on the trigger.
The noise the CZ made as it exploded was so shocking to the man on the prau’s deck
that he jumped and closed his fist. The Makarov he was holding rattled into automatic fire, its safety almost as seriously defective as its trigger mechanism. But because the boy was looking at the source of the gunshot that had surprised him so, that was where the eight bullets went, reducing the already deceased Bukit to a bullet-riddled mess.
The lahar hit the ocean then. All Richard knew of the event was a great surge of scalding water that washed up over Tai Fun’s stern as the game ship heaved up in a wild attempt to ride the wave the lahar threw out. The ropes securing the praus snapped loose and both vessels were whirled away by the wave. As the pirate vessels broke free, Tai Fun’s stern whipped up again in a wild action that seemed to glue the three splayed bodies on the platform into place while at the same time shrugging off the weight of the water that had washed aboard her.
So that Richard, one minute drowning in hot mud, found himself the next minute rolling over to look up. Where the river mouth had been there was now a massive mud-bank, awash with restless, steaming water. On the farthest edge, almost on her side and crazily aground, lay the Miyazaki Maru. And there, on the outermost edge of that great black tongue of destruction, but seemingly in reach of the wildly writhing water, were the two praus, mastless, half wrecked, half drifting, half aground.