‘Shit.’ He’d been a fool not to think of it. They were monitoring the emergency channels from the pirate boat and were now transmitting a jamming signal.
‘It’s happening,’ snapped the VHF again — the recognisable voice of the American leader.
Hamnet looked in despair at the whining SSB. He could try another frequency, but no, that would be hopeless — the operator on the oil platform wouldn’t dare leave the emergency channel while waiting for his response. And he was all out of time. He just had to hope they had understood enough of his message to send help. He had to get off the bridge. He picked up the short-barrelled machine pistol and moved to a starboard-side window. With the unloading happening to leeward, the pirate contingent was focused on the port side of the ship. There was no one coming up the starboard ladder, no one on that wing deck. He slipped outside and shut the door. Wind and rain whipped at his clothing. Down on the cargo deck he could see things were proceeding as before — the cranes still working, his crew gathered in the same place. Richardson’s body remained where it had fallen. Hamnet slung the machine pistol across his back. They were going to get one hell of a surprise the next time they tried to shoot one of his crew.
He moved to the aft end of the wing deck, as far out of sight as he could get, and stepped up onto the railing. From the top of the bridge he would have a commanding view of the whole cargo deck. With his feet on the rail, one hand steadying himself on a pillar, he felt cautiously for a grip on the lip of the bridge roof. It was a dangerously exposed position — the wing deck was built out to the full beam of the ship. Apart from the risk of being spotted, the ocean churned violently fifteen metres below him as it threw itself against the hull. A fall wouldn’t kill him outright, but he would be pinned helplessly against the steel wall by the waves. Helpless in every sense. Unable to save himself — or Anna. Churned around in the washer until he drowned, while they killed his wife and crew.
His legs started to shake at the thought. He crouched, trying to take some weight off them, to return the muscles to conscious motor control; fighting for the composure to start the climb. He could find little purchase on the wet paintwork, and the wind and rain were lunging at his body, trying to tear it away. His hands felt along the roof edge; somewhere there had to be something to get a hold on. He moved carefully forwards, feet slipping on the railing, increasingly exposed to any casual glances to windward by the pirate crew. And anyone arriving on the bridge. There was a crash as the leading wave of a big set pounded into the hull. The railing hummed with the impact; spray licked up the side of the ship and doused him. He held on, white knuckled, blinking hard to clear stinging salt water from his eyes, as the next three waves did the same.
In the momentary lull that followed, his right hand finally located a support-wire fixing for the radio mast. He took a firm grip with both hands, kicked his feet clear and heaved. He got one elbow onto the edge but that was all. The wire felt like a cheese cutter, and the pain sliced into his palms. There was nothing to provide his feet with any support — they kicked uselessly in the air. Already his arms were feeling the strain, the pain spilling out from his hands, creeping up his forearms, tightening insidiously as it sought to break his hold.
Hamnet dug as deep as he could go, dredged the pits for that extra strength that came with desperation. He knew it was there — he’d been down there before. With a howl of pain and fear and anguish that was whipped away by the wind, he flung his body sideways. It was just enough — his right foot hooked over the roof edge. Immediately he could take the strain off his hands, slip the wire into the cradle of his elbow. He levered hard with his leg, shoe leather skidding on water-streaked steelwork. A final heave, and he threw himself onto the roof — and lay staring up at the bruised clouds, rain hammering his face and body, gasping for breath.
At the crash of a door below he rolled onto all fours. Someone had got to the bridge. Hamnet scuttled softly across to an air vent to listen. There were footsteps and loud curses from inside. One of the Americans — the one he’d seen first, he reckoned — had found the radioman. A quick command on the VHF to the support boat cleared the SSB of the blocking transmission. The oil platform immediately came crackling over the air. Hamnet had difficulty making out what was said next, but figured the American was trying to persuade the rig that its help wasn’t required. The crash of a weapon as it slammed lead into the radio indicated he had failed. Hamnet was motionless, rooted in place. The American’s voice grew louder as it moved from the radio room to beneath the air vent. ‘The oil installation has birds and armed security. We don’t have much time — they’ve already left. Get the barge away from here, fast, up the river and into the mangroves. Kill the crew, like I said, but not the wife — she’s coming with us. Get her in the inflatable with the boys.’ A pause, then: ‘He’s dead — forget him. Get on with it.’
Hamnet heard footsteps retreat to the stairs. He hesitated, still crouching by the air vent, grasping for a plan, some notion of how best to respond to the situation. The rain drummed down on the steel roof all around him, the wind sweeping it past him in rivers.
A sudden commotion on the cargo deck made him look up. The crane had stopped, diesel engines were revving hard. Then the Tannoy again. ‘Hamnet, hear me. We’re leaving now. With your wife. One single word reaches the authorities about how you ran your boat aground, and she dies.’
The words jolted him into action. He slithered quickly to the front of the bridge, keeping back from the edge, just in the shadow thrown by the light from the cargo deck. He fumbled the weapon off his back. The unlit barge was moving away to leeward, soon to be swallowed up by the rain. The high, whining revs of a pair of outboard engines reached him as a rigid inflatable boat pulled alongside in its place. The remaining pirates were gathering by the leeward rail, preparing to disembark. His crew were still by the crane, but now the guard was urging them forward, towards the edge of the hold. Hamnet could see what was coming. He had to take the guard out first to give them any sort of chance.
He lined up the sight. His experience of firearms being limited to fairgrounds and air pistols, he knew his chances of hitting anything were slim, but maybe some of his men would be able to get clear in the confusion. He breathed out, tried to settle his pounding heart. It wasn’t happening. Giving up the attempt, he tugged the trigger. Nothing. ‘Shit! Shit! Safety catch, the fucking safety catch. Where the hell is it?’ He fumbled with the unfamiliar weapon, found a switch by the trigger guard and snapped it down — two clicks.
As Hamnet took aim again, the gaunt figure of the American commander approached the prisoners, grabbed the guard’s machine pistol and pushed Anna to one side, towards the pirates by the rail. It would be harder now — he couldn’t turn his weapon on the main group for fear of hitting Anna.
But the American was already bringing up the machine pistol, and Hamnet stopped thinking and squeezed his trigger blindly. Unknowingly, he had set the Heckler and Koch MP5 on automatic. The barrage surprised him, he didn’t see where the burst went, but those on deck saw where it came from and their reaction was immediate. He heard the first rounds clang into the front of the bridge below him, and slammed his head down. Lead pelted the steelwork around him, a continuous clatter of death delivered at eight hundred kilometres an hour. Hamnet’s cheek pressed hard into the warm deck, rain puddling into his nostrils as he willed the racket to stop. For minutes it seemed to rage — then, suddenly, silence.
Cautiously, anxiously, he lifted his head. There was no one, nothing. No crew, no pirates. The sudden roar of outboard motors told him where the gang had gone, and he caught a brief glimpse of the rigid inflatable as it pulled out from the cover of the ship and disappeared into the murk. Nothing moved below him. He wondered briefly if any of his crew had survived, but his head told him that the pirates would have made sure there was no chance of that. And Anna had been swept off in the inflatable.
Then, through the ringing in his ears, came another noise — the distant b
ut unmistakable throb of helicopter rotor blades. The sound grew louder, approaching from the port side. With the cargo-deck lights ablaze, it wouldn’t take them long to find him.
Hamnet stood, dropping his weapon to the deck. He wiped the rain from his face, tried to think clearly. A foundered ship, a lost crew. How the hell was he going to explain all that without telling them about the GPS? And there would be an enquiry. He could remember the last time. Press, questions, tribunals. No where to hide from it all. And no one you could trust — he remembered that most of all. He knew then that he would have to find Anna himself. The beat of the helicopter blades was heavy on his ears. He only had seconds. The inflatable had pulled out to the east. He had to do it now. He stared at the leeward edge of the ship. How deep was it? She drew forty feet. There would be plenty of water. So he ran. Hamnet sprinted across the deck and launched himself into the air.
Hurtling downwards he whirled his arms to keep himself upright, pulling them in to protect his head the instant before he hit the water. The impact pounded the breath out of him in a blast of bubbles, and he plunged forever before remembering to spread his arms and legs to slow his descent. Then he started fighting, trying to pull himself back to the surface, as he realised how deep he was and how little air he seemed to have in his lungs. He could feel the turbulence all around him, and when he opened his eyes there was only white froth. His legs were kicking hard, his arms pulled in to his sides. But he had to breath. Automatic reflex kicked in and he sucked in a lungful of seawater even as he broke the surface. As the water went down it tore at the delicate tissue. He coughed and retched violently, unable to suck in the air he needed but expelling the seawater in one explosive heave. He thrashed at the surface, trying to draw breath, and oxygen slowly filtered into his racked lungs.
He bobbed in the waves, a dozen metres to leeward of the looming hull of his former command, still choking and coughing. He could hear the helicopter but not see it. It was circling somewhere in the rain and cloud above, testing the situation to see if it would draw fire. Hamnet rolled over and started to swim. The first forty metres, in the flat water that extended in the lee of the ship, were relatively easy. But as he swam beyond the illumination of the ship’s lights, he entered a maelstrom. The forty-knot winds had tortured the surface of the sea into a heaving morass. But Hamnet had spent his childhood on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach. A lifetime’s passion for surfing had made him supremely comfortable in the ocean. It was only panic or exhaustion that would kill him, and he wasn't about to panic.
A sudden explosion of light dazzled him. He rolled onto his back to look at the scene behind. He could just make out the chopper, hovering above a parachute flare. Below, all was bathed in an eerie glow. The stricken ship was now some four hundred metres away, cloud tumbling over the superstructure. Wind, current and his painfully slow swimming had allowed him to cover some ground. The helicopter crew would never see his head bobbing in such confused seas from that distance. He swivelled himself through a full circle to check his surroundings, fighting to keep his head clear as he popped up on waves, trying to see any sign of a shoreline. There was nothing. He looked back at the ship, and realised how fast he was being carried directly downwind. The current must be taking him out into the channel. He needed to swim across it, parallel to the ship, to stand any chance of reaching land. He struck out again, now across the waves rather than with them.
The light from the flare was dying slowly. He could hear the chopper descending close to the stricken vessel, the sound carrying on the wind. The crew had finally satisfied themselves that there was no danger from gunmen. But Hamnet was in no mood for further spectating. Energy was draining from him fast. The ocean rolled over and under him, in walls of green water or churning foam, determined to frustrate his progress. He ducked under the big waves, searching for the calm beneath the surface on his own terms, fighting the ocean’s effort to pull him under when he wasn’t ready.
Slowly, the sea started to change. The waves became steeper, pitching up, dropping and hurling him sideways so it was almost impossible to swim. But he knew what that meant. The bottom was shallowing beneath him. It might be possible to body-surf the breaking waves.
He changed his angle again, swimming down each wave as he felt it rise under him. It was a struggle to swim fast enough, but finally he caught one. He twisted hard to pull himself across the face, and suddenly he was rushing into clear water. The wave carried him a useful distance — forty, fifty, sixty effortless metres — before the white water sucked in his legs and slowly, inevitably, washed past him, leaving him floundering. Once again every metre was a battle.
He caught a second wave. Another. And one more. But exhaustion was biting hard and he could no longer summon the energy. The waves simply broke over him, tumbling him forwards, a whirligig of limbs. There was no point in fighting it. He let each foaming monster suck him in and throw him around until it was ready to spit him out. Or not. Maybe he would hit the beach first. Maybe he would die. There was little he could do in his weakened state except hope. And breathe when opportunity allowed.
As he dropped off the lip of one wave into a full somersault, crashing down unseeing, he felt something hard. Sand or mud scraped across his face, and energy returned. Floundering, uncoordinated energy, but energy all the same. He was bounced along the mud, and then hurled into the arms of a mangrove bush, which he grasped with the very last of his strength. Pulling, crawling, struggling out of the ocean’s reach as the wave receded, he was utterly drained, but alive.
Chapter 4
The rigid inflatable boat had pace on — too much pace. But the pirate captain paid no heed as it threw itself off the back of a wave and into the air. The twin engines howled as the propellers flew clear of the water. Anna braced herself. The RIB came down stern first with a smack, the engine note dropping to a stuttering moan. Water flushed from under the impacting hull, and the boat rolled wildly from gunwale to gunwale, spray rails throwing huge fantails into the rain. Anna had one hand wrapped round the lifeline; with the other she struggled desperately to steady her children’s passage. She jammed herself harder into the aft port corner, on the floor beside a petrol tank, her legs braced against the rear seats in front of her.
Three times so far the RIB had become airborne as it tore up the ocean away from the Shawould. The American was good. He wove across the wave pattern with a tight professionalism, using all two hundred horsepower available to him and some intelligent steering to avoid the breaking faces. But when forced to tackle the white water, he displayed a recklessness that verged on the psychotic. He hurled the boat off the waves with total disregard for the consequences. And all the passengers could do, captors and captive alike, was hang on. White-knuckled, grim-faced. Only the grace of whatever godless being was watching over these men had stopped their vessel from flipping.
Anna shut her eyes, ignoring the stinging salt that filled them. The driver had the hammer down still, tracking the smooth water on the back of a wave, heading up towards the breaking lip. Again the RIB was quicker than the peel of the wave, and the driver was faced with the drop. But this time he put the wheel down hard. The boat responded immediately, the stern slewing round so fast that it skipped and skidded, scattering chunks of wave into the air as the driver turned into the clean water of the unformed face behind. Anna clung on desperately, teeth clenched against the shuddering slide. But the turn had been too hard. The protesting outboards had had enough. They wailed at the cavitation, coughed on re-entry, and stopped.
The silence was instantaneous and ominous. As one, the passengers looked behind them. A gentle rolling slope was going vertical. The RIB had stalled in a trough before a massive breaking wave, which lurched up and towered over it. The boat started to slip down the wave face, slowly rolling sideways. A sinister, hissing roar filled the air, drowning the splutter of the engines as they turned over, once, and the cries of panic from the stricken passengers. The driver tried again — still nothing. Anna wasn’t sc
reaming — that was worse than pointless. She pulled herself onto the floor and lay sideways, breathing deep and hard, filling her lungs with air, ready for the inevitable roll.
Then the engines choked into life. The driver reacted with intuitive brilliance. Too heavy on the throttle and the still struggling motors would have cut out again. But he didn’t need that much power. The lip of the wave was toppling into the boat as he applied the revs. For a moment it seemed he was too late — water cascaded and sluiced around the crew, and the RIB lurched and staggered, pitching both sideways and forwards. Then, as the props found something to bite on, they pushed the boat with just enough speed to catch the wave. It was all that was needed. The boat accelerated down the face of its own accord, the driver applying power for steerage and control, until the engine note steadied and he hit the throttle hard. The RIB lunged through the curtain of spray to safety.
It was the last hurdle. That final monster wave had been pitched up by the shallows on the bar at the entrance to a river. The wave height dropped quickly as the boat slid into a power turn round a spit and headed towards the shelter of the windward shore. The engines cut as the water finally flattened out, and Anna eased herself off the floor into a sitting position. Branches rattled and tossed above them in the wind, and rain hissed through the leaves, bouncing off the hard rubber sides of the inflatable and splattering her as she tucked her knees against her belly. She pulled the sodden silk robe tight around her. Even as her muscles relaxed after bracing for the ride, she tensed in expectation of new dangers. Why had they stopped? Surrounded by the pirate crew, Anna felt naked to the core of her terrified soul. She could feel movement inside her too, could sense that her fear had been communicated to the tiny human beings growing there. She was no stranger to pain or fear or deprivation, but tonight she had seen things she had never imagined she would see. Things she would never forget.
The Wrecking Crew (Janac's Games) Page 3