by Wilbur Smith
If he’d done so he’d have seen that I was awake and panic-rummaging.
But a much louder wallop distracted him.
It shocked me too. I felt the noise as well as heard it, and briefly wondered whether we’d struck something in the water. But the noise was in fact Mo hitting the actual deck. He’d rolled off the bench. Now he was groggily sitting up.
Barrel-man fixed on him.
Mo, still rubbing his head, murmured something apologetic.
At that Barrel-man swung around in his chair and lifted his feet up next to the steering wheel again.
Had the noise of the stupid canister rolling on the deck disturbed Mo as well as the psychotic pirate? Possibly. Amelia would have come out with something about probability, decibel levels and heightened states of awareness, I imagine, but I preferred to trust my gut.
It told me the boy had fallen off his bench deliberately, to create a distraction. As in, to help me. That would mean that he’d seen what I was up to and not done anything to make me stop. He’d just covered for me when it looked like Barrel-man might rumble my act of sabotage.
The trouble with having a reliable gut instinct is that you learn over time it’s foolish to ignore it. If Mo really was meaning to help me – us – that was a good thing. Why did it niggle me then? Possibly it was the thought that he’d want something in return that set me on edge. I was in his debt now, and I didn’t particularly like it. That said, I’d have liked it a lot less if the maniac in Pete’s chair had caught me.
Over the next few minutes I eased my way along the bench seat until I was abreast of Mo, close enough to whisper, ‘That was no accident.’
‘Go back to sleep,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t asleep and neither were you.’
‘Whatever. Sleep now.’
‘You’re not denying it then.’
‘Nobody has to deny anything,’ he whispered, before repeating, ‘Go back to sleep.’
‘What do you want from me?’ I muttered under my breath.
‘Eh?’ He sounded genuinely incredulous.
‘Why cover for me if you don’t want something in return?’
‘Surely you see,’ he said at length, ‘that I want exactly the same thing as you. I’m literally in the same boat. Just because they stole me from my village in Somalia, not from some luxury holiday resort, doesn’t mean I don’t want to escape from these people every bit as much as you do. The only difference is that I’ve wanted to for longer, and I know them much better than you, which maybe makes me more cautious. But if I can see the point in a plan and think you can get away with it, why wouldn’t I want to help?’
Surely it was better to admit the truth of what he was saying and take him on as an ally. It wasn’t as if I had lots of other avenues of hope.
‘You want further proof?’ he went on. ‘Your mobile phone. Where is it?’
The truth was, I’d forgotten I didn’t know. After I used it to contact Mum, I’d fallen asleep with it beneath me and woken to find it gone. Then in the upheaval of the storm and everything since I’d not thought of it.
‘I saw you fetch it from your bag, use it, and fail to hide it properly.’
‘I hid it beneath the life jackets.’
‘You dislodged it while you slept. When I woke up, before you, it was in plain view on the bottom of the boat.’
‘Where the hell is it now then?’
‘Your phone is back where it was before you took the risk of using it. Much less hazardous for me to be seen looking through your stuff than it would have been if they’d spotted you returning it. They’ll probably take it from you anyway. But for now, your phone is back in your bag, where I put it.’
23.
I took ages to drift off after Mo told me that. I’m not a great believer in the relevance of dreams – I mean, I’ve had some pretty stupid ones – but that night, when I did eventually sleep, it was only in bursts. I kept jerking awake from a dream in which the frayed end of a rope had slipped from my hand, dropping me into a vast emptiness. That horrible lurching sensation. Where would I land? Ugh.
I must have found deep sleep at some point, however, as I woke to the thin light of just-before-dawn. Opening one eye, I saw Mo fiddling about with something in the stern. What was that there, in full view, at his feet? Only one of Pete’s empty fuel canisters. With weary deliberation he picked the can up, looked over his shoulder at Barrel-man, who was still asleep in his chair, and plonked the thing down again loudly. Then he screwed the cap tight, or pretended to at least.
I was about to protest when he repeated the operation. Barrel-man hadn’t woken at the first ‘plonk’, but he did now. Far from trying to cover anything up, Mo made it perfectly obvious that he’d just filled up the tank, securing the fuel cap and tightening the lid of the canister and returning it to where I’d stored it – along with the other one, both of them completely empty – in the forward compartment.
Barrel-man looked on idly, one hand under his T-shirt, scratching his washboard stomach. Bored and bleary, the pirate watched Mo stow the canister without comment, then hawked up a lump of phlegm and spat it overboard.
‘What the hell were you doing?’ I muttered when he came back to the boat’s stern.
‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’
It wasn’t, not to me, and I didn’t like that one bit.
Mo smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s all part of the plan.’
‘What plan?’
‘Your plan!’ he said, a you-really-don’t-get-it? glint in his eye.
We were still tethered to the battered cruiser, which tugged us along gently. The water was silver this morning. We were headed north again. I tried to work out how far we would have travelled overnight. Twelve hours at what, eight or so miles an hour? About a hundred miles, give or take. Not knowing where we’d turned around meant I couldn’t accurately predict how far up the coast we’d come. It was tempting to ask Mo if he knew, but I didn’t. I was still trying to figure out what his messing about with the fuel canisters could have contributed to my sabotaging the dive boat.
I soon found out. Before the sun had risen high enough to turn the sea its rightful blue the cruiser slackened its pace ahead of us, the captain expertly bringing us alongside.
The pirates conferred. Their conversation sounded urgent. It turned out – Mo told me later – that Flip-flops had intercepted another radio message, this one from a nearby catamaran with a sick crew member. The captain thought there could be tasty pickings aboard. He wanted Barrel-man to give chase, and, with Flip-flops and his gun aboard, ordered us to get going.
Mo immediately untied the rope tethering us to the cruiser and Barrel-man hit the ignition. The outboards roared to life. I was surprised for a nanosecond, then realised that there would of course have been clean fuel in the pipe connecting them to the fuel tank.
Once they’d sucked in a shot of my gas-and-seawater cocktail the engines started coughing hard enough to make the fibreglass hull shiver. That shivering quickly became the death rattle of a soon-to-be corpse, before both engines cut out completely.
The boat hadn’t made it more than a couple of hundred yards. The captain in his cruiser quickly caught up with us again. It turned out that the wounded Bear was the team’s best mechanic. He was hampered by the sling supporting his injured arm, but soon worked out what was wrong, and within minutes he and Barrel-man were examining the canister Mo had – apparently openly – tipped into the boat’s fuel tank.
Interrogating the boy, Barrel-man’s voice had a menacing edge to it. Mo, palms up, was the picture of innocence. ‘I was just trying to be helpful!’ his pleading eyes said. He sniffed at the empty fuel can himself and spoke insistently. I could tell he was pointing out that the canister smelled strongly of petrol. And it did. There was probably still a dribble of the stuff in the bottom.
Barrel-man couldn’t dispute the smell, but that didn’t mean much: something must have been wrong with whatever Mo had added t
o the fuel tank. He looked angry enough to toss Mo overboard. But the Bear, more perplexed than cross, was perhaps secretly pleased to have to cut the trip short. From the sweat on his brow and the way he was gritting his teeth I could tell his arm was hurting more than his tough-guy status would let him admit.
He said something to Mo that made the boy scuttle off to re-tether us to the cruiser, and gave Barrel-man an it-can-be-fixed-but-not-here shrug.
If it was a mistake to smile in that moment, the bigger one was to let Barrel-man see. He’s the sort of person whose anger doesn’t fade. He needs to let it out.
I don’t think he thought I was responsible for the fuel contamination. As far as he was concerned, Mo had been the one to add spoiled fuel to the mix, not me.
But he didn’t like the look of me in that moment, and he didn’t give me the chance to wipe the grin off my face myself. He did it for me himself. He closed the gap between us in two quick steps and hit me across the cheek and temple with a lightning-quick open palm.
It was as if a firework had gone off right next to my ear. I reeled sideways, my head ringing. He was jabbering at me furiously. I couldn’t have made sense of English in that moment, much less Somali. The ringing in my ears was jet-engine loud. I thought he’d burst my eardrum.
I kept a malevolent eye on the pirate all morning, thinking it had been worth it. The bastard could slap me all he liked: it wouldn’t bring the outboards back to life.
24.
A slice of coastline came into view while we were eating our lunch, which today was a single hardboiled egg. The yolk of mine was edged the exact same pale grey colour as the distant sliver of whichever country it was – Kenya or Somalia, I presumed – seen through the haze.
We made for the land mass obliquely as the afternoon wore on. Its contours darkened. By about four o’clock we were close enough to see the detail of the coastline, bays and headlands and stretches of scrub and sand, an occasional village, even the fringes of trees.
Seeing the palm trees made me think of Mum back on Zanzibar. I prayed her tough streak would see her through this ordeal. Like me, Mum’s idea of a nightmare is being powerless. If there’s a problem, she has to sort it. The odds don’t matter. She’s tenacious. That’s why she’s such an effective activist. But what, realistically, could she be doing to help us now? Unable to do anything, the worry would be eating her alive.
For some reason I assumed we would hold off landing until nightfall, that the pirates would want to return under the cover of darkness, spiriting us away without risk of detection. But I was wrong. Late in the afternoon with the sun still a good hour or two above the horizon, we veered landward and sailed straight into a scabby little harbour backed by a mess of corrugated sheds, with both boats in plain view.
The captain pulled the cruiser up to the ramshackle pontoon – made out of concrete and piled-up packing crates – next to a decent-sized boat that smelled of rotting fish. Nobody aboard it seemed to mind, and the pirates were instantly embroiled in a loud and cheerful conversation with a man on deck who paused in what he was doing – mending some sort of winch, it looked like – to shout equally happily back at him. At one point the captain went as far as to pull Amelia and Xander from the cabin so he could show them off to his friend. He also jerked his thumb at me, laughing.
A group of men gathered on the dock to look at Pete’s boat, which Mo had skipped ashore to tie up. I have to hand it to him, he’s good at knots. Barrel-man made it clear I should join him. I gathered our three dry-bags from the bulkhead, half thinking he’d scream at me to put them back, or worse still show me the palm of his hand uncomfortably quickly again, but he didn’t seem to care. He was more interested in greeting the men gathering on the quay, who seemed good friends with all the pirate crew.
The atmosphere felt a bit like I imagine it would when soldiers return from war. More men showed up as news of our arrival quickly spread. If everyone hadn’t been so happy to see the captain, Barrel-man, the wounded Bear and Flip-flops, I’d have been worried: looked at one way the crowd seemed hyper enough to be dangerous, but the mood was in fact more festive than angry.
Though nobody laid a finger on us I was frightened that they might, and suddenly very aware that Amelia was the only girl in sight. Whether or not she’d clocked that too I don’t know, but her face, bowed to the dusty dock, was pretty ashen.
Mo hovered close to us, to one side of me one minute and the other side of Amelia the next. It seemed he was doing his best to form a one-man wall around us. ‘When we move off, stick close together, with me, yes,’ he said.
Why he thought we might do anything other than that, I don’t know. I’d already ruled out trying to make a run for it. There were too many eyes on us, and in any case which way would we go? No, there’d be a better opportunity sooner or later, and when it came I’d make sure we were ready for it.
‘Keep your heads down, and stay close together,’ I said to Xander and Amelia.
Instantly I wished I hadn’t when she replied, ‘Why repeat stuff Mo’s already said?’
I understood; when Amelia is stressed, she finds it even harder than usual not to point out things like repetition, superstition or lapses of logic. ‘Nice to be back on dry land anyway,’ I said in a lame attempt to calm her.
‘Lovely,’ said Xander.
‘I’d hardly call it that,’ said Amelia.
Ignoring this literal take on his sarcasm, Xander asked Mo what he thought would happen next.
‘They’ll take us to a safe house for the night, I expect,’ he answered, adding, ‘Don’t worry, nothing’s changed. You’re still very valuable to them.’
The words ‘safe’ and ‘valuable’ were comforting, I suppose. We had little choice but to hope they were true.
Leaving the boats in the hands of the men who had gathered to greet them – one of whom was already at work bleeding the contaminated fuel from the dive boat’s outboards – the pirates steered us away from the quay and into the little town behind it.
The sun was in our faces. It made the moving figures ahead of us silhouettes. A dog missing one of its front legs hopped out of our way, disappearing behind a half-built wall.
We moved in among the buildings. I tried to take it all in. One thing was for sure, this place was poor. We’re not talking mud huts with grass roofs, but all the buildings were basic, a hotch-potch of breeze blocks and corrugated metal overlain in places with bits of plastic tarpaulin.
That wall there was braced with three logs; one end of each was jammed in the ground with the other angled up towards the roofline. The wall itself still looked like it was about to fall over. It would kill that chicken pecking at its base if it did.
The street was unpaved; dust rose around us as we moved forward. A filthy white car stood in the lee of the next building we passed. It had no windscreen.
The first children I’d seen, younger than us by far, were playing on a bit of scrub near where we turned left. They were using a plastic bottle as a football, kicking it about without much enthusiasm.
Spotting us, they stopped to watch us pass. One of the littlest broke from the group and ran in among our legs, hand outstretched, asking for something.
I’ve no idea what he was after, but I do know what he got: a cuff round the head from Barrel-man not much softer than the one he’d given me on the boat. The kid can’t have been more than four but instead of squealing or bursting into tears he just ran away laughing.
Though we’d only ventured inland a few hundred metres, the heat had already intensified, prickly and dry. Sweat ran down my face. I tried to keep track of the route we’d taken. As we rounded the next corner, still at the centre of an excited throng, one building stood out. It was painted that intense blue colour you see on Greek islands. A woman in a brilliant orange headscarf leaned in its doorway. Her face, framed by the scarf, was completely set; I stared at it until we were marched out of sight and didn’t see it flicker, much less move.
Xander had
noticed her too. ‘Nice welcoming smile,’ he muttered.
‘We’re not here as guests,’ said Amelia.
‘Fair point,’ he replied. ‘But still.’
Eventually we came to another beaten-up-looking building with a rusted metal door set in a low frame. I had to duck as we went through it. A guy with a squint so pronounced it almost made me overlook the AK-47 he had slung over his shoulder welcomed Flip-flops – and us – with a smile.
The clamour of voices in the street behind us dropped a notch after he clanged the door shut behind us, but didn’t disappear entirely. At one remove, the chatter sounded celebratory.
What little light there was in the shack’s front section took a moment to see by, and the inner room Flip-flops and Squint ushered us into beyond that hallway was darker still. I was still trying to figure out what – and who – was in it with us when I heard the metallic grinding of a bolt sliding shut.
A second lock clunked immediately after the first.
My eyes gradually adjusted to the gloom.
I made out two narrow beds pushed up against the walls of a room about half the size of mine back home. Either they were punishing Mo for his mistake with the fuel or they simply didn’t trust him not to run away on land, for here he was, walled up with us.
We stood in silence a moment. I for one felt suddenly exhausted, and Amelia was swaying on her feet. Xander guided her to sit down, and seeing her take the weight off her feet made me want to do the same so badly I think I let out a groan.
‘Four people, two beds,’ said Mo. He looked from me to Xander and said, ‘Jack was up most of the night. We can cope on the floor for now, yes?’
I sat down on the dusty concrete floor immediately, with my back pressed to the bare wall. ‘One of you guys take the first turn,’ I said. ‘I’m fine here.’
25.
As it turned out, none of us actually slept, or not to begin with at least. Nobody spoke for a few moments, and the quiet of this new room asserted itself, made all the more obvious by the faint chatter filtering in from outside. As before, the hubbub sounded cheerful.