by Peter Tonkin
But then behind them, another fusillade of magma bombs exploded across the burning city, half a dozen exploding into the water immediately aft of Tai Fun. As the great wave generated by their arrival surged the ship forward, so the racing headwind faltered. ‘NOW!’ shouted Richard. ‘Give it all you’ve got, Tom.’ His huge hand closed over Tom’s hand with crushing force and rammed the handle of the ancient telegraph hard against its brass cradle at max revs. The needles settled into the red. The engines span more fiercely than they had ever done before. The propellers churned wildly, thrashing the muddy water, and the pumice into a kind of coal-dust glue. Tai Fun surfed over the mud bank of the lahar and slid safely out into the Java Sea. As soon as he felt her slip free, Richard wrenched his hand back with enough force to make Tom gasp in pain, his hand still trapped on the handle. But they were too late. The needles on the engine monitors flickered once and fell back. There was, if not a silence, then a sudden relative failure of noise. No headwind, no motor; even the volcano seemed to quieten. Richard turned to le Chef. ‘Time for your diesel motors, Chief. I need power as quickly as you can give it to me, please. And bugger our carbon footprint.’
Fifteen minutes later, le Chef was in his engine room. The diesel motors were on line, switched in and delivering enough power to the main shaft to compensate for the loss of the electric motors. The Frenchman could feel Tai Fun’s long sleek hull gathering way again as she started to bash her way through the strange lumpy effluent that the volcano had rained down on them. The door behind him opened. ‘Hey, Chef,’ drawled Nic Greenbaum. ‘Captain Mariner says can you lower the hydraulic platform, please. We’ll need to take the Zodiac out for a little jaunt in a few minutes’ time.’
Chapter 28: Flow
Fifteen minutes later, Richard was sitting hunched in the stern of the Zodiac, trying to protect his head and face from the constant rain of hot pumice. At least they seemed to be out of range of the magma bombs, he thought grimly. For this was bad enough. It had filled his hair and invaded his shirt collar like a combination of burning sand and fire ants. And that was only the start of it. Larsen had found out the hard way that the stuff set like concrete almost instantly when it touched water. And this meant that anyone who breathed it in would find his nose and throat immediately coated with hard-set clinker. What it might do to your eyes just didn’t bear thinking about.
The Zodiac juddered forward over the thick, semi-solid heave of the surface. Richard risked a glance around. Nic Greenbaum sat midships opposite the Parang. They, like Richard, had the recently cleaned, checked, fully-loaded Colts immediately available. Richard also had the little task force’s only walkie-talkie, for he was in command. As if to emphasize the fact, he was also the only one with a torch.
Prince Sailendra himself sat in the prow. Like all of them, his head and face were swathed in sheeting to keep the pumice at bay as best they could. Richard almost literally cracked a smile, feeling pumice trickle down his chest. The grimy cloth made the three of them look like extras from a cut-price remake of The Mummy. Sailendra looked like the star of The Sheikh or Lawrence of Arabia.
‘Is he really going to be able to arrest this Councillor Kerian? He hasn’t even got a gun,’ Richard asked Parang.
‘He is Kerian’s prince. If he cannot, then no one can. But it is the prince’s royal duty to try...’
They had had a lot of discussion along these lines already. Sailendra looked like being more of a liability than a help on this extremely risky venture. He was in no way sea-wise. He had no knowledge of or expertise with weapons - except, perhaps, with traditional ones such as swords. In the face of Colt .45s, Browning High Powers and what-nots, he was likely to be simply outgunned. But as the surprising young Parang pointed out, the prince might be an effective wild card. He was the one man on earth who might make Kerian stop and think about what he was doing. And if that approach didn’t work, then there was the John Wayne approach to fall back on. And the rest of them were all well armed for that.
Parang was coming after Gabriella, as was Nic. An interesting situation, had anyone the leisure or the inclination to consider it, reckoned Richard. For Gabriella Cappaldi was involved with both men. She was Nic’s contact as he looked into the illegal doings of Luzon Logging in Pontianac and Tanjung Puting. And Parang was Gabriella’s contact as she did exactly the same thing on Pulau Baya. Parang’s brief, apparently, had been to find out who was working with the illegal loggers, get close to them and find out as many damning facts as possible. And, as that man was Councillor Kerian, both of Gabriella’s contacts had bones to pick with him independently of the fact that he had kidnapped her.
And those bones were due to be picked quite soon, for Kerian’s prau sat, mastless, mud-washed and apparently semi-derelict, in the seemingly solid water dead ahead. It was a miracle, thought Richard, easing the throttle open a little wider, that the timeless little pirate vessel hadn’t been beached on the sudden out-thrust of the muddy lahar like the Miyazaki Maru. For Luzon Logging’s freighter lay half on her side and helpless on the far shore of the slick new isthmus that had been a river mouth before the outcome of the volcano’s whim.
Because of the destruction of the Baya City hospital, Tai Fun was supplied with medical staff of all sorts well able to look after the hundreds of refugees now packed as safely as possible below. So Dr Hirai was able to put her medical responsibilities on the back burner for a while at least and concentrate on her secondary duties as volcano watcher. And, with her grandfather very firmly in her mind, she was glad to do so. The more likely it began to look that they might all survive this, the more detailed and accurate she wanted her account for the old man to be. As the sleek vessel sat motionless, bound in by rafts of floating pumice, like an ancient square-rigger in the grip of the fabled Sargasso Sea, she stood on the bridge deck in front of the bridge itself, therefore, right at the base of the foremast. She was dressed as though for the fiercest rainstorm in hooded yellow waterproofs, down which the pumice whispered like the voices of the dead. At which the wind seemed to tug with ghostly fingers. But she had long since stopped listening to the voices or paying much attention to the insistent touches, focused with absolute concentration on what she could see rather than what she could hear and feel. For her yellow-gloved fingers were tight-wrapped around the barrels of the most powerful pair of binoculars aboard. Like everything else aboard, they were state-of-the-art; electronically enhanced and laser-focused, presenting her with a broad field of vision like a wide-screen television, with digital readouts for light and range.
Dr Hirai’s vision was filled by the volcano’s crater. Its pulses of fire and explosions of gas, giving birth to the meteor showers of magma bombs, sent the light-sensitive readout off the scale until she found a way of adjusting it to the minimum. But by the time she did so, the brightness and the frequency of the eruptions seemed to be lessening in any case. She frowned, trying to remember what that might mean. She lowered the binoculars and looked with her naked eyes. Yes. The fires were dying back a little. The whispering and the tugging seemed less insistent. That meant that the pumice-fall was easing and the wind was dying too. It was as though a damper was being slowly closed upon the massive furnaces up there. She frowned, suddenly hesitant, the binoculars level with her lips. Abruptly her nostrils filled with the stench of a sulphur pit. Her eyes flooded, and channels in the pumice she hadn’t even realized was dusting her cheeks set into little levees as though the tears themselves were molten lava. The deathly stench came again, a little more strongly this time. The great red-streaked column of smoke above the crater seemed to settle, somehow. To lose something of its upward thrust. To gain weight - and a kind of middle-aged spread. Dr Hirai slammed the binoculars back against her face so hard she was lucky not to give herself two magnificent black eyes. But the wide-screen readout showed her all too clearly the full horror of what was going on. ‘Oh God,’ she said, turning to run back towards the bridgehouse, blaspheming in extremis, victim of too much Western cultu
re, although she was herself a devout and thoroughly Eastern Buddhist. ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God...’
* * *
Richard brought the Zodiac almost silently alongside the lower gunwale of the listing prau and cut the motor. Sailendra, with unexpected acuity for a landsman, caught the end of the snapped cable which had grappled the prau to Tai Fun’s stern until the lahar hit, and secured the inflatable in place. Nic and Parang were up on the deck like ghosts before he had finished. The instant Sailendra had secured the inflatable, he too climbed up on to the deck and Richard went up at his shoulder, with his big Colt ready, a .45-calibre bullet in the chamber, his thumb on the safety. His walkie-talkie was also at his belt but that seemed to be of thoroughly secondary importance at the moment.
It was impossible to cross the listing vessel’s deck silently. There was no Larsen here to wash the pumice away; on the contrary, there was a good thick covering of mud to hold it in place. The pumice was augmented by splinters of wood and shards of glass from the all-but-flattened wreck of the deckhouse that lay half hidden under the rags of the sail immediately in front of the square black gape of the main hatch. And so each footfall crunched as though they were walking on cornflakes. The sound was made more audible by the fact that the wind was faltering, Richard realized suddenly. He looked up past the sail-wrapped deckhouse and over the rail on the up-slope of the deck. Were the fires on the volcano dying down? The brightness and the distant thunder both seemed to have eased a little. Reminded by the sudden gathering of shadows, Richard pulled out his torch and flicked it on. He shook his head as he followed Sailendra down the weird slope of the main gangway. Thank God these men weren’t really under his command, he thought, or there would have to be some kind of reckoning. What kind of tactics dictate that the last man into a dangerous situation is the only one able to see?
Richard followed the bright gold puddle of the torch beam down the mud-crusted steps of the crazy gangway, frowning with thought, his gun at the ready in spite of the fact that he had heard no sound at all from down here. Then Prince Sailendra stepped out of his way and let him see. The main below-deck area of the prau was a mess. Everything Kerian had brought aboard lay scattered around, much of it covered with the thick mud that had washed down the open hatchway. A good deal of it was heaving sluggishly in the gathering wash of water leaking in through sprung and broken sides. The pillar of the mast seemed to have split - almost shattered - when the upper-works had carried away. Everything and everyone down here showed the most vivid evidence of having been thrown around by the wild movements of the lahar-stricken vessel. Ironically, the people who seemed to have suffered least were the three women lashed to the makeshift bunks. The rough rope bonds may have been designed as preparation for rape, but they worked as very effective safety belts. However, the fact that they had all been gagged and blindfolded must have made the experience almost unbearable.
Richard’s torch beam swept over the sopping, heaving mess on what had been the lower deck. It found out the pale, faces of the women, wide eyes filled with terror flooding with tearful relief as the blindfolds came off. And, safe in the knowledge that there was no one else down here besides the men from Tai Fun, he said, ‘It’s all right, ladies, we’ve come to rescue you.’
‘Where is Councillor Kerian?’ asked Sailendra at once, stooping to loosen the knots restraining Inge. He dropped her blindfold and her gag beside her head, swept his headdress back over his shoulder, uncovering his long, lean face, and gazing earnestly into the eyes of the beautiful Nordic blonde girl he was freeing. He picked up a Bugis sword from the foul wash on the deck at his feet and started sawing at the ropes with its razor edge. As he worked, he glanced up, looking around the constricted area, where Nic was releasing Gabriella and Parang was busy with Eva. ‘Do any of you know where Councillor Kerian has gone?’
But instead of an answer, Richard’s walkie-talkie shrilled. He placed his torch on the bunk beside Inge’s feet and pulled the radio transceiver from his belt. ‘Yes?’
‘You have to come back!’ ordered Nils Nordberg, his voice cracking with tension. ‘You’ve got to come back now!’
Richard knew better than to hesitate or start asking questions at a moment like this. ‘We go,’ he said, echoing Nils’s urgent orders. ‘We go now.’ He shoved his fist through the walkie-talkie’s wrist strap, grabbed his torch, turned and pounded up the gangway, exploding on to the deck just in time to see the lean silhouette of Councillor Kerian crouching over the line securing the Zodiac to the prau, busily untying it. Richard straightened, bringing the Colt up, left-handed. As he did so, one of Kerian’s crewmen lurched drunkenly out of the wreck of the bridgehouse, where Kerian himself had clearly been hiding. He was waving a Type 94 and as soon as he saw Richard he pulled the trigger. Miraculously, the gun went off. The bullet smashed into the stump of the mast by Richard’s head. Richard’s Colt bellowed back. The pirate span away, howling. Richard drew a bead on the crouching Kerian, slamming his torch up alongside his gun so that both beam and barrel centred on the frozen man. Kerian stopped his feverish fiddling with the rope and turned to face Richard, still in a half-crouch. I really do not have time for negotiation here, thought Richard grimly. His finger tightened on the trigger.
‘Councillor Kerian,’ bellowed Sailendra from behind Richard’s shoulder. ‘I arrest you in the name of the people of Pulau Baya...’
Kerian’s belly exploded in a tongue of red- gold flame. Sailendra staggered back with a shout of surprise. Richard shot once but the crouching figure with his half-concealed Browning still clutched to his stomach was gone over the side. ‘Into the Zephyr,’ shouted Richard. ‘No time to lose.’ He caught the reeling Sailendra and nearly sliced his leg open on the prince’s sword. Then Inge was at the other side and the three of them ran down the heaving deck, almost throwing the prince into the bottom of the sturdy inflatable. Inge leaped down beside him. Richard paused, raking the water’s strange solid surface with his torch and gun. The others came out in two pairs, slithering down past him and into the Zephyr. When he was certain that Kerian was not lurking somewhere nearby, armed and dangerous still, Richard himself stepped down into the Zephyr and gunned the motor. Sailendra cut the rope with one slice of his Bugis sword and they were powering off towards Tai Fun as fast as they could go.
Tai Fun was already making headway as Richard brought the Zephyr in against the hydraulic platform with enough force to half-beach it. Le Chef was there to hold the short-cut rope as they bundled urgently aboard. Then, as Richard, last, ran past him he simply let go of it and turned. Side by side they pounded up into the after section of the accommodation area. Le Chef turned and secured the door behind him. Richard was struck at once by the strange scene. It was as though he were in a seaside morgue after some terrible maritime disaster. Everyone here was wet. All the patients looked like corpses with damp sheets pulled up over their faces. The doctors and nurses also were wrapped up and masked, like Richard, Sailendra and the rest had been aboard Kerian’s prau. Sailendra was having a flesh-wound in his shoulder bandaged by a doctor with a bucket of water at his feet. But then Inge was there, replacing the doctor with quiet insistence. And Bambang appeared beside her, wide-eyed, with his parents in tow. ‘I will be a doctor,’ the boy decided, clearly at the end of a long discussion about his future.
Sailendra smiled and reached out with his good hand to ruffle the boy’s black hair. ‘I don’t know,’ said the prince, with a warm smile in his voice. ‘When I get back on to whatever is left of my island, I fear I’m going to need a new chief councillor. And I can’t think of anyone better qualified...’
‘On the bridge, Capitaine,’ said le Chef. ‘Monsieur Nic and Mam’zelle Gabriella have gone. But time is short! Run!’
Still smiling at the little exchange, Richard took off at full speed. He burst out of the lift on to the top deck and sprinted down to the bridge itself. As he ran he registered that the sails were set - but at barest minimum. The tiniest triangles of flameproof, heat-res
istant material were showing. Everything up here was awash with water, even the masts and sails themselves. The upper restaurant was as tightly closed as a seaside fish bar in February. Doors locked, shutters up. And the open bridge was no longer open either. Every opening that could be closed was closed. The instant he arrived and the last door shut - locked and bolted - behind him, a sopping mattress was wedged in place and he stood dumbfounded, looking at what suddenly looked like an undersea lunatic’s padded cell.
‘Richard! Take the helm,’ ordered Tom Olmeijer. Richard obeyed, gripping the ancient wheel like Mark Twain on the Mississippi. He looked ahead. Even the clearview had been padded - all but a little square which allowed him to see where he was going. But this padding was dry, for the instruments beneath it were electrical. Even the telegraph, which was set once again at full ahead.
‘Do we know when it will hit us?’ asked Richard, licking his lips. Although no one had said the words, he remembered all too clearly what Dr Hirai had told them about the Plinian eruption of Vesuvius. They had had the lahar. Now they were going to get the nuée ardente; the pyroclastic flow.
‘Any minute now,’ answered Robin and Dr Hirai at once.
‘We shouldn’t be facing into it?’
‘No time to turn,’ grated Tom. ‘The High Wind fleet designs have been tested up to two hundred knots of wind. But never for two hundred degrees of heat. We’re rigged for hurricane conditions and running away from the full force of the thing as best we can. Other than that, we pray.’
‘Two hundred knots! That’s superstorm stuff. Not even global warming has delivered speeds like that...’ blustered Larsen, awed.
‘Mount Washington, 1934, if memory serves,’ answered Richard. ‘Two hundred and thirty-five miles per hour. But that was a wind-gust. It can go faster, so they tell me, in tornadoes and in pyroclastic flows...’