by Peter Tonkin
The flow hit then as though Richard had summoned it like a genie out of a bottle. It hit from behind at full-on hurricane speed. But it had come like the lahar along the river valley, and so it was dissipating its force already out across the big new mud-topped isthmus that had once been an estuary. Tai Fun was on the edge of it in any case, heading very slightly out of the main line of its colossal flow. It still picked up the ship and tore her forward, threatening to rip her sails to shreds and burn them like oil-soaked rags - flame-resistant, super-strong Kevlar woven with heat-exchangers though they were. It tried to tear the masts out of their sockets like some monstrous cousin of the Doctor wind of southern Africa - the Java Dentist. It hurled the miasma of red-hot dust particles against the rearmost sections of the vessel, stripping away fire-retardant paint that had shrugged off blazing jet-skis, pitting her imperishable fibreglass and plastic sections, setting all her soaking wood to steaming and smouldering. It forced its blazing breath, still in excess of two hundred degrees Celsius, into every tiny nook and cranny - until only the most incalculable of good fortune saved her. The blazing pumice dust that the deathly wind was hurling forward almost as fast as wind had ever travelled across the face of the globe was set solid by the soaking planes and runnels of the ship. A coating of lightweight black concrete formed all across the after sections. Formed and held and set hard. Shutting out the worst of it at last.
Tai Fun heaved, as the great jet-engine roaring enveloped her. She rolled increasingly wildly as the concrete formed even on her masts and sails. She pitched and heaved, all but tearing the Mississippi paddle-steamer’s wheel out of Richard’s hand. The mattresses rounded, like the sides of balloons, shivered and steamed, filling the bridge with foul-smelling, sulphurous steam until everyone was choking and coughing, faces red and eyes streaming. The air pressure within the bridgehouse rose and fell, flexing their eardrums until they screamed. Coughed and choked and screamed again. The clearview, stressed and strengthened coated glass that it was, starred in front of Richard’s eyes like a windscreen hit by a stone.
But then it was gone.
Tai Fun was riding more easily. The battered, blackened ship was still alive.
They were all still alive.
Richard slapped the wheel with his open hand. ‘I love this ship!’ he cried. ‘Nils. I want her. Like Nic says, MNO. I love her so much I’ll take the whole damn fleet.’
‘I’m sure we can cut a deal,’ answered Nils. He sank into the pilot’s chair, shaking a little.
‘If that’s all right with Nic,’ warned Robin. ‘He could still be after High Wind.’
‘Naaw,’ drawled Nic at his most Texan. ‘I was only ever after Luzon Logging. And what Gabriella’s told me, and what we learned in Pontianac, and Tanjung Puting, combined with what Parang’s got, signed, sealed and delivered, I reckon it’s a done deal there all right.’
‘Then it’s a done deal here.’ Richard opened his right arm and Robin hugged his massive chest.
‘Mind you...’ said Nic. And paused, hanging on the silence as they all watched him suspiciously. ‘If Heritage Mariner ever needs a friendly partner, then Greenberg International and Texas Oil are just at the end of the phone. You’ve got my private number, Richard. You be sure to use it.’
‘I will,’ said Richard cheerfully. Then he turned to Tom Olmeijer. ‘Where away, Captain? What course shall we set?’
Tom looked at Eva Gruber.
And Eva, as unruffled as if they had just been safely boating on the Zuyder Zee, said, ‘We will head due east, I think, and then due south. The nearest landfall is Java, and the nearest port is Surabaya. But we must go round the volcano to get there.’
Councillor Kerian pulled himself up the long rope left dangling when Sailendra cut the Zodiac free. He had lost the Browning in the water but he still counted himself pretty lucky not to have got trapped beneath the floating pumice like a swimmer under ice. The briefcase he had been planning to smuggle aboard the inflatable still lay on the deck precisely where he left it as he dived backwards to avoid being shot by the prince’s massive friend. He picked it up and opened it, reassuring himself that the wads and wads of US$500 and $1,000 bills were still all safely there. He glanced across at Miyazaki Maru, trying to work out his best way of getting across to her. At least his prau was still afloat, sprung and leaky though she was. There must be a way in which a man as determined and ingenious as himself could work her over to the grounded ship before she actually sank. He looked a little wistfully the other way. The Zodiac was up with the tall ship now. She was so beautiful. It had almost been like ravishment to board her and strip her of her finery. A pity he hadn’t had the opportunity to practise a more physical type of ravishment upon the women he had kidnapped. The blonde woman had been the most tempting, of course. But he had felt the darkest compulsion to make the dark one suffer, almost as though he owed her a debt of agony. Well, they had had a lucky escape. Now it was up to him to arrange his own escape. And to invest some of the fortune in his briefcase in evening the score with some screaming girls in Bangkok after all.
A hellish stench of sulphur and brimstone filled his nostrils, as though he had become in fact the Devil that his desires made him seem. His eardrums seemed to flex. He looked up at the volcano, more with a spirit of enquiry than with any kind of premonition or realization. There was a kind of glowing cloud rolling sedately down the river valley there. It gleamed and glittered, numberless points of whiteness seething against an almost crystal heart that made him think of rubies. The sea heaved massively beneath the creaking prau, pushing her out, away from the great slick hump of mud that lay like the back of some huge sea serpent between him and the Miyazaki Maru. He was surprised to see how far out he had drifted, how far inland the listing, grounded hulk seemed to be. It was almost as though there was an offshore wind building up, he thought. That would be good. Better a southerly breeze pushing him out to give him some sea room than the relentless northerly gales that had made this a lee shore for the last few days. He looked up again and saw that the strangely attractive blood-red brightness seemed to have spread right across the north shore before him, seemed to be spreading out along the smooth back of the mud bank as he watched. He frowned. In simple wonder rather than in fear or comprehension. It was certainly moving at a fair speed, whatever it was! He reached into his briefcase and took out a bundle of bills, then he snapped it shut. Right, he thought, fanning himself with US$100,000 - the better part of ten million rupiahs in that one bundle alone - it was time to get busy. How was he going to get across to Miyazaki Maru? He looked across at her on the thought. Just as the pretty red mist swept over her. She seemed to lie there, all aglow at the heart of it for an instant. Then the helicopter still secured to her forward deck exploded, a huge gout of yellow fire, expanded instantly by the barrels of fuel kept ready at hand. Before Kerian could blink, he saw that the whole of her deck was on fire. Every trunk of teak and mahogany ripped from the slopes of Guanung Surat ablaze like the merest kindling. Every stick of ramin torn out of Tanjung Puting National Park alight like a box of matches. Then the oil in the bunkers went up and blew the whole vessel apart.
All this happened so swiftly that Kerian hardly had time to register the vessel’s terrible death, let alone associate it with himself. He never even really understood that the red cloud had crossed the mud bank in the moment it took the Luzon Logging freighter to die. But so it did.
A wall of superheated steam whipped over Kerian’s head, driven by a wind moving well in excess of two hundred and fifty knots. A wind armed with grains of pumice that trembled on the edge of melting. The deck of his prau tilted up and he staggered back across it. He fell into the sea, but he was dead long before he hit the pumice-crusted water, choked and suffocated, boiled and burned all in a heartbeat. The prau turned over but it too was burned to charcoal before it could sink. It was all over in an instant; but that instant lasted a lifetime, like instants in Hell are said to do.
The steam was so supe
rheated it seared Kerian’s skin off his face and body before he could fall, let alone die. He gasped and the red-hot pumice, already driving like a million needles into his naked flesh, coated the wet planes of his nose, mouth, throat and lungs, filling his head and chest with boiling black cement. The skinless flesh was seared off his face, torso and arms, as though by the blast from the hottest of furnaces. The bundle of notes in his hand exploded into flames but the nerves in his hand and arm were burned away before he could feel it. The tendons clenched and set the naked bones like stone. His fingernails and toenails boiled away. His eyes were poached blind in his head before he could see the brightness of ten million rupiahs burning. And his brain was boiled by the blast of nearly three hundred degrees Celsius before he could even realize it. The top of his skull exploded and the boiling matter spayed out into the wind. The barbecued muscles of his legs kicked spasmodically as his skin rolled down like stockings and vapourized - under the cotton of his sarong that remained moulded against him, apparently untouched. Then it simply burst into flames like the banknotes. The deck all around him steamed, split, splintered, dried and kindled in an instant. The briefcase full of money melted, its steel skeleton heated to cherry red and it all burst into flames.
What little was left of Councillor Kerian fell back into the boiling water. The charred sticks of his prau rolled over on top of him. The black rafts of pumice closed over them like floating gravestones. The pyroclastic flow caught up with Tai Fun, lifting her Zodiac into the air and bursting it like a toy balloon in a blast furnace before closing its ruby grip around her.
Then the burning, blazing, breath of the volcano passed over her like the highest of high winds; blew her and everyone aboard her safely away northwards into the heaving, steaming heart of the Java Sea.