Dark Oceans

by Mark Macrossan

27. 22° 56' 35" S 14° 30' 9" E

  (Walvis Bay, Namibia)

  Two months earlier. Wednesday, 14 August

  The Diamond Moon had been docked in Walvis Bay when Ishiko had executed her chosen course of action. And that was the way she thought of it too – it wasn’t killing Bertrand and stealing the Decagon, it was executing the plan. Her plan, because she’d been given a choice. She was to do whatever it took to get the Decagon and herself off the Diamond Moon, out of Namibia and down to Cape Town in one piece. And “whatever it took”, she’d been expressly told, included the elimination of any potential threat to the successful carrying out of her orders. “Elimination” was to be interpreted widely. And she knew these people, her bosses. She had little doubt they’d carried out countless eliminations in their time and that all of them had been carried out for the same purpose, to ensure the success of the operation. And the goal of the operation was never to be questioned. It was a matter of faith, no different from any religion, and she had no problem with that. So if ever she found her mind straying into difficult territory – such as what happened with Bertrand on the boat that day – she’d extract herself, think of something else. She counted herself lucky she was the type of person who could do that. She saw it as a skill. A mental skill, more important to her wellbeing than any physical skill she possessed – there was no doubt about that.

  And she had to use all her skills – both mental and physical – from the moment she left the Diamond Moon. As soon as her feet touched dry land in the waterfront area of Walvis Bay, with its faceless merchant vessels and its handful of pleasure cruisers, she was working on a calculation of around thirty minutes for the likely time it would take for Drayle to be told Bertrand was missing or dead. Give or take thirty. So she quickly scurried off past the shipping company offices and warehouses and into the streets of the town in search of a taxi. But instead of doing the obvious and heading straight for the airport and boarding the only flight to Cape Town that day (because on her reading of it, doing the obvious would in all probability get her killed), she instructed the driver to take her half an hour up the coast to the next town – Swakopmund – and the bus station there.

  It was crazy because Swakopmund was in the wrong direction, but being crazy was her only chance. Namibia was an empty, desolate place, hard enough for a lizard to find a place to hide, let alone an orphan girl from Tokyo with an angry team of seasoned criminals on her trail. Hungry too, without their Decagon.

  On the way in, they drove through Palm Beach, a name which made Ishiko smile for the first time that day – it was too funny, Palm Beach, here! – even though there were indeed palm trees planted along the seafront, kept alive, presumably, with litres of water and pride. In Swakopmund she boarded a bus that was headed inland, to Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. There, after a long and dusty six hour bus journey in a metal coffin on wheels, she got to spend a sleepless night in the cabin of a crane on a building site off Independence Avenue, a name which appealed to her.

  The next day, Thursday, she did her next crazy thing, which was board a bus not for the South African border (about twelve hours away) and Cape Town, but rather for Lüderitz, eleven hours drive to the west, back on the coast, well off her quickest escape route.

  It would prove to be her first mistake.

  28. 26° 38' 59" S 15° 9' 8" E

  (Lüderitz, Namibia)

  Friday, 16 August

  Lüderitz was a harbour town about four hundred kilometres (as the seagull flies) south of Walvis Bay. Compared to its competition at least, it was a pretty town, mainly due to an abundance of colonial architecture dating from its diamond rush days in the early 1900s. Ishiko’s plan was to lie low there for a week before heading off again, in the hope that it would place her behind the forward momentum of the set of pulsing waves that would inevitably follow the discovery of her escape. As it happened, she didn’t last two days there.

  On the day after her arrival in Lüderitz she foolishly visited an old church on a hill with a view of the sea. The church was built from the same grey rock of the surrounding landscape. She arrived in the morning and with the August sun in the east coaxing a rich, deep, blue from the ocean backdrop, she was overcome with a feeling of warmth and belonging. A feeling of peace and contentment. She stayed there all morning and into the afternoon, outside the church in the shade of a small tree, staring and lost in thought, and marvelling at the contrasting colours. And when the sun had crossed the sky sufficiently to turn the deep blue of the sea to bright silver, she entered the church and looked around for a time. When she walked out again it was late afternoon and the sun was low over the sea.

  And they were waiting for her.

  They were just standing there, in front of an imposing, yellow, heavy duty tow truck. There was no-one else around and there was nowhere for her to run. There was nothing to say and nothing was said. There were three of them, three men and not once did they speak. They looked, to Ishiko, like they could have been European, possibly Eastern European, maybe Russian. She expected them to be Russian, given Drayle’s connections. But without hearing their voices, there was no way to tell. They frisked her thoroughly, then bundled her into the cabin of their tow truck with her in the middle. They tied her hands to a metal cage behind her head and pulled her jeans down to her ankles as an added precaution. And even though, once they got going, she could tell that one of the men next to her, the short one, was staring at her crotch and growing hard under his trousers, she had no doubt about the singular nature of her intended fate. She knew they were there to kill her, and that she was there to be killed.

  She might have been tempted to curse herself for not getting the taxi driver to take her to the airport and for not flying to Cape Town from Walvis Bay instead of this crazy scheme of hers, but she refused to do so and steadfastly kept her mind on the beautiful church in Lüderitz with the deep blue sea behind it which she never would have seen if she had taken that flight, and how thankful she should be, if only for the reason that if life wasn’t about those rare and unexpected moments of beauty what was it about?

  They drove out of town, away from the glistening sea. The colonial buildings disappeared, and then the houses, until eventually there was only desert. After about ten minutes they took a right turn off the bitumen highway onto a dirt road. They passed silently through Kolmanskop, an old mining town now deserted – a ghost truck passing through a ghost town.

  They continued on, and the sun disappeared, sinking below the ridgeline to their right. There wasn’t a tree in sight – from the look of the landscape they may as well have been in the middle of the driest desert on earth – but it wasn’t long before Ishiko caught glimpses of her precious sea again and even though it was now blue-black with the approaching night, the sight of it gladdened her heart. They passed a mountain of sand with a pipeline running from its summit to its base. They passed workers’ cabins, apparently empty. They bounced their way ever onwards – first crossing a railway line and then travelling parallel with it – towards what looked like a bay that was opening up ahead. And it was a bay, and it was soon on their left-hand side as they skirted its edges. Past abandoned machinery, and a loading pier with a dormant conveyor belt jutting out into the water where small arcing swell lines gently swept around into the bay and broke along a low rocky shore.

  And then, finally, a dead end loomed up ahead, but Ishiko stayed focused on the bay and what sounded like distant booming waves coming from their right, from the other side of the small peninsula.

  The rail line ended at the same place as the dirt road, next to the pier and a cluster of demountable metal sheds, and that was where their truck pulled up. The place was obviously some kind of mine site, currently abandoned – although whether this was temporary or permanent, Ishiko couldn’t tell.

  The driver got out, and when the man on the passenger’s side opened his door too, a sea breeze began to whistle through the cabin and with the taste of salt on her tongue and the sudden roaring so
und of the nearby Atlantic surf in her ears, Ishiko felt her resources replenishing. And the cawing of a gull! She wondered if it made her crazy, the fact that she could think and feel these things at a time like this. The fact that they’d said nothing to her, asked her nothing about the Decagon, must have meant, she assumed, that they’d found the Decagon in her Lüderitz hotel room and that she was about to die.

  The driver – who looked to be about forty and was tall, with a solid build and blond hair, a caesar haircut – unlocked the shed door with a large set of keys and slid it open. The metal rollers clattered and screeched before the door loudly slammed to a halt. The man who’d been sitting on her left, next to the passenger-side door – about forty as well, skinny, wearing too many clothes for the conditions (it may have been the middle of winter, August, but it had to have been at least twenty-five degrees that day) – was by now standing a short distance away, just past the shed and looking out over the bay. The third man, the short one who’d been sitting in the middle and staring at Ishiko’s legs, looked about thirty, was round and sweaty and black-haired with a beard, and wore a black t-shirt and cargo pants. With obvious pleasure he removed her jeans from around her ankles and then untied her hands and roughly pulled her out of the cabin. She stood there for a moment, barefoot, wearing only her panties and top, before he guided her and pushed her towards the shed.

  The driver didn’t follow them, but chose, instead, to walk over to where the skinny man was standing. Ishiko saw that he’d pulled out a handgun and was fondling it as he strolled across the dusty turning circle. It looked like a Sig Mosquito semi-automatic without a noise suppressor (but then who needed to be silent in a place like this?).

  As soon as she entered the shed and her eyes adjusted to the gloom inside, she saw a sight that she hadn’t been expecting. Slumped against the back wall, gagged and bound, naked and bloodied, with his legs full of bullet holes, was a fellow passenger from the Diamond Moon, the dockworker from Marseilles. Arnaud. At first she couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead because his eyes were closed and his mouth was open. And then his eyes opened. They were dead eyes (and Ishiko had seen her fair share of them), but after a moment of trying to focus on her, they widened with recognition – just slightly – and they did something else too. It may have been involuntary or it may have been intentional, but his dark eyes darted to the left and back again. Ishiko’s eyes followed his, to her right, and there, at the side of the shed, was a narrow opening.

  And a narrow opening was exactly what she had.

  It was also what the short man had in mind too, by the looks of things, because after checking on Arnaud and then noting that the other two were still outside, he came up to Ishiko, and thrust a thick, hairy hand down the front of her panties. This turned out to be the last thing he ever did and his biggest ever mistake because Ishiko had, moments earlier, picked up an industrial-sized screwdriver that someone had carelessly left lying on the ground. She swiftly plunged it into the neck of her hapless assailant, instantly paralysing him and slowly killing him – with eyes wide open, his compact, hirsute body crumpled to the ground, spasming. Ishiko marvelled at how this man could have been so stupid, turning his back on her with weapons lying around and then attempting to have his clumsy way with her for a bit of quick and pointless gratification, but she concluded it was easy to underestimate people, and everyone makes mistakes, and these mistakes frequently occur at the most disadvantageous of moments.

  The chances of her surviving had, however, only improved marginally: in the slow-motion environment that usually took over in these situations, she could see that the skinny man, about forty metres away, had just spotted his colleague with the screwdriver in his neck twitching on the floor of the shed. He was in the process of beginning to run, and at the same time he was alerting the driver, who had been standing facing him with his back to the shed. Time was clearly in short supply. Luckily, Ishiko wasn’t scared. She was saving that for later because at this particular moment she had a series of decisions and manoeuvres to accomplish in order to stay alive, none of which could happen if she gave her fear any oxygen.

  Instinct was an amazing thing. It allowed for a huge number of experienced-based calculations to be packed into a fraction of a second. If there’d been time to reason it through, Ishiko’s thought process would have gone something like this: she’d already seen that the driver was carrying a Sig in his hand, and she had to assume the skinny man had one too. The dying man had no obvious gun for her to grab and she had no time to find out (and it went without saying, she certainly had no time to help Arnaud, let alone the inclination). Her best chance – and, really, her only chance – was to exit the shed through the opening behind her and gamble on the two men outside both coming into the shed through the open door. She knew they wouldn’t be able to follow her through the opening and would have to leave the shed again the same way they came in, buying her valuable seconds…

  In little more than an instant, she’d slithered out through the slit in the wall like an eel – was there a look of triumph in Arnaud’s eyes as she looked back? was there a look of lust still in Shorty’s? – and then she scuttled nimbly on all fours over the rocks outside and down to the water’s edge like a crab. At this time of year, on this part of the south-west coast of Africa with its cold current, the sea temperature was a chilly fourteen degrees, but she went straight in, sliding into the cold, dark waters of the bay like a returned fish. Ishiko’s given name might have meant “little stone”, but her surname, Mizushima meant “water, island” and she’d always seen herself as a sea creature of one type or another. The cold water took her breath away but she ignored it and slipped out of her top and panties. She was now as naked as a fish and she started thinking like one. She’d become a Blacktail. Instead of swimming to the left through the safer waters of the bay and towards the beach about twenty metres away (which was what they’d expect), she swam right, towards the headland, through the churned and restless waters there, and out towards the crashing waves and the heavy swells of the open sea, the mighty Atlantic ocean, coming up for air only when she had to. The surface of the water was windblown enough, the evening dark enough, the whitewater from the surf zone extensive enough, and her lungs big enough for Ishiko the Blacktail to round the rocky point without being spotted.

  The last time she looked, the two remaining men were running along the water’s edge but in the opposite direction, towards the beach.

  She managed to make it around to the ocean side of the headland and find a break in the ten metre cliff wall – a cove protected enough for her to be able to get ashore without being smashed against the rocks. Avoiding, on the way in, some rocks that were jutting out of the water like chimney stacks, the naked girl from Tokyo turned into a land creature again: after waiting for the right moment, she allowed the back of a wave to wash her up onto a rock platform and then she quickly clambered up the cliff face before the next set of waves arrived.

  At the top of the cliff there was an abandoned, roofless building and she hid in it while she listened for voices and footsteps and planned her next move.

  Her best chance was the highway, but it was probably too far to walk – how long had they been driving? – and anyway, if she started walking there was every chance they’d pick her up on their way back. There was nowhere to hide in this country. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around either (although that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: what were the chances of them being well-intentioned? and well-intentioned towards a pale-skinned young woman with no clothes on?) It was Friday evening – almost night, now – and there were, it would seem, only murderers left.

  So after satisfying herself the men weren’t close by (at one point, despite the overwhelming roar of the ocean, she thought she might have heard distant voices), and that it was dark enough, she left her hiding place. Following a low curving trench which seemed to run roughly parallel with the outer edge of the headland, she cautiously made her way back towards where they
’d parked the truck. Towards it, because she had a plan.

  It was still there, the large yellow tow truck with its phallic-looking hydraulic boom winch. And just as she remembered, it had a high ground clearance. Plenty of room, in other words, for someone to hide themselves underneath it. She listened for the voices one last time – she needed to know where they were before she ran out into the open. At first she heard nothing, just the sound of the Atlantic surf behind her. But then she heard them again, the voices, more distinct this time, and she thought they sounded Russian (so no surprise there) but she couldn’t be sure. They obviously weren’t far away, but knowledge was everything and her instinct told her she had time, so she ran across the grey, truck-flattened gravel of the cul-de-sac, feeling no pain now from the sharp stones on the soles of her feet and scrambled under the truck. She thought like an eel again, and found an open cavity with a horizontal metal rod to wrap herself around. And so she curled her small, ivory-coloured body around it, cold skin on cold metal, and clung to it so tightly she as good as tied herself into a knot around it.

  A set of footsteps crunched over the gravel towards the truck. At the same time, she heard the sound of the large sliding door clanging shut and being locked – was Arnaud still in there? – and then a second set of footsteps following the first. Nothing was said. The steps were slow but not carefree; she could tell these men were still looking for her…

  And then nothing. Just the sound of the sea. If she hadn’t wedged herself as high as she could into the bowels of the truck, she guessed she probably could have seen their shoes, because she knew they were right there. She didn’t breathe, like all hiding prey that knows its life hangs in the balance. The men were metres away, centimetres, looking and listening, but facing which way she didn’t know and she hoped they weren’t looking at the truck. So she kept holding her breath and imagined she was at the bottom of a very deep, dark ocean. Which in a way, she was.