Janac stood and watched as Hamnet dragged himself up on to legs and an ankle that would still barely carry him. Then he indicated for the others to follow, led them to an open Jeep and climbed into the front. General Lee sat next to him. Hamnet was helped into the back, with Tosh beside him. The three guards took a second vehicle. Hamnet hung on grimly as they drove quickly through the camp. He saw none of it, thought of nothing but his wife, his children. And the payment he might have to make.
They were soon at the other side of the base, where a collection of shacks clung untidily to the perimeter like a boil on a chin. The Jeeps pulled up outside the first of the huts. Janac stepped out and watched as Tosh yanked Hamnet to his feet and onto the ground. Then he waved Hamnet to a filthy cloth draped across the doorway of the hut. Hamnet stumbled forward and slowly pushed the rag aside. Light tumbled into the room and immediately a baby started to cry. It was a pitiful sound — not the healthy, full-throated cry of a baby that expected to be fed on demand, but a despairing whimper. As his eyes adjusted to the pattern of light and shadow cast across the room, Hamnet saw that it was empty save for a bamboo cot, in which the baby lay, and a mattress against the far wall. On the mattress sat a teenage girl dressed in a dirty T-shirt and shorts, an opium pipe beside her. She looked up listlessly, eyes dull and glazed, then lowered her stare back to the grubby floor.
Hamnet was beside the cot in a moment. His son — so tiny — was lying naked on damp, soiled grass, caked with his own excreta. Flies buzzed and crawled about his face, which was puckered and reddened with tiredness and hunger. Hamnet brushed the insects away, picked his baby up and held him, tears forming in his own eyes.
‘So you’ll be taking that one then?’ said Janac. ‘The other’s next door if you want to choose.’
Hamnet looked round. He could hear the other baby taking up his brother’s cause with a plaintive wail of sympathy. The smell of the room began to overpower him. The heat and the hum of flies swam around him. He knew he had to get out, away from this, away from the child he would leave behind. Away from the thought that he could choose, that there was a twin. He staggered to the door, out into the clear, clean sunlight, and limped off as quickly as he could. Janac fell in beside him, keeping pace with an easy stride. Hamnet had no words for the horror and pain. He could only think that he had to keep walking.
Then Janac said, ‘That’s far enough.’
The sharpness of his tone brought Hamnet up short. He stopped but didn’t turn. His tears mixing and muddying the grime on his face.
‘It’s simple enough,’ said Janac. ‘You will be taken back across the border and dropped off on a main road. You tell the authorities that the other kid died in childbirth. That I gave you this one out of some misguided sense of sympathy for their betrayal and the death of your wife. You play on their reaction and get yourself a job with one of the big shipping lines in Hong Kong or Singapore. It doesn’t matter which. Then you start feeding me information. I want to know about high-value, easily moveable loads — containerised computer chips are ideal. I want to know loading plans and routes, and I want updates on positions in particular areas. All the good shipping lines now have vessels transmitting position information to head office continuously, so you can hook into that and feed it to me. Without the GPS scam I need to be able to attack the right boats in the right places. And you’re going to help, Hamnet. You must find me four ships. The faster you provide the targets, the quicker you get your brat back. Fail to reach four targets and you will never see the kid again. Double cross me and it’ll die.’
Hamnet turned to him, holding tightly the fragile, precious figure of his son. Not wanting to negotiate, because that would make what was happening real. ‘You can’t do this,’ he murmured, almost to himself.
‘I can and I am. You can deal with it or let it die,’ retorted Janac.
‘But how do I know I can trust you? That you’ll give him back?’
‘You know nothing. My reassurances mean nothing. And there’s nothing either of us can do about that.’ The thin lips compressed.
Hamnet shook his head. ‘Even if you do, four ships will take too much time. You can’t leave him in that stinking hut under the care of some dope-addled child for that long.’
‘The sooner you provide the targets, the sooner you get the kid back. As an incentive I’ll improve the conditions each time you deliver me a boat satisfactorily. Someone to look after it, then a decent cot and a water supply to keep it clean. A third ship to get it out of the shack and into air conditioning. And finally, after the fourth ship has been raided successfully, it’ll be delivered safely to you.’ Janac shrugged. ‘I can’t do more. You’ve got till the end of June, the start of the typhoon season. Beyond that we can’t operate, and I don’t think the kid can be expected to survive in there much longer than that either. But I’ll ensure it gets through the two-and-a-half months.’ He reached into his shirt pocket for the ever-present Lucky Strike and Zippo. He lit a cigarette quickly and waved over Tosh, who handed Hamnet a large brown envelope. ‘That contains everything you need to know. Tosh here will take you across the border and then drop you off. You should probably read and destroy that before you get picked up. That’s all. I trust I’ll be hearing from you. Take him away, Tosh.’ Janac strode back to his Jeep, where General Lee was still sitting quietly in the passenger seat.
Hamnet was bundled into the back of the other vehicle, which took off in a belch of diesel. He struggled to turn, awkward with the baby in his arms, but just caught a last glimpse of the hut where his other son lay crying as they dropped into the valley he had walked up an age before.
Janac and General Lee watched his departure in silence, Janac drawing slowly on his cigarette. Finally Lee said, ‘I think this very bad idea. Too many boats out of Hong Kong and Singapore with drug shipment. You cross Hong Kong Triad like this and even I cannot help you any more.’
Janac dragged the cigarette down to the butt with one final pull, then flicked it into the dirt. ‘No choices left, General. How the hell else am I going to get the money to pay you?’
Lee shrugged. ‘Must be better way.’
Janac grunted. ‘Fuck the Triads. I’ve had enough of those bastards killing my people in Australia.’ He turned the key, slammed the Jeep into gear and took off. As the engine noise receded, the dust slowly settled. And the only sound was the faint crying of a lonely child.
Chapter 16
It was the tears of his other son that kept Hamnet preoccupied as the Jeep bumped and banged it’s way towards the border. They were tears of hunger and pain. And cuddle, hold and protect as he might, Hamnet couldn’t stop the dry, piercing howls. The vehicle travelled on, and occasionally off, a sequence of dirt roads and forest tracks, surrounded by trees with barely a glimpse of sky, let alone an open view. Hamnet saw none of this, only the anguished features of his son. Once, Tosh turned and lashed a sentence at him to make the crying stop. Hamnet returned a stare of such intense hatred that even Tosh thought twice about pursuing the matter. He returned in silence to whittling his piece of wood on the occasional smooth sections of road.
The Jeep came to a halt on a patch of open ground, and Tosh turned again. He met Hamnet’s glower with a smile. ‘Aye, this is where you get off, soldier. Walk straight ahead through the trees and you’ll come to a metalled road. You’re already in Thailand. Turn right and keep walking and there’s a village. From there you’re on your own.’
Hamnet nodded slowly and climbed carefully out of the Jeep, the baby cradled in his right arm. There was a soft thud as his backpack landed in the dirt behind him. He turned and picked it up, rolled it awkwardly onto his left shoulder and started to walk away.
‘Hey!’
The shout made him turn back, just in time to catch the piece of wood Tosh threw over to him. He looked down; it was a crude carving of a baby.
‘Till you get the real one,’ said Tosh with a smirk.
The driver revved the engine, slammed it into gear and sp
un the wheel. Hamnet watched them go, vowing silently that one day he would wipe that smirk away.
With the Jeep’s departure, the silence of the jungle descended on Hamnet like a first snowfall, a soft blanket of suffocating peace. He had stuck his head into the open mouth of the tiger, and the tiger had torn out his heart instead. He was free, but trapped. He sat down, crushed to the ground by the weight of experience. By the mass of what lay before him.
A choke and a whine from the baby broke his stupefaction. He laid the tiny child gently on a soft bed of mulch and rummaged in his pack. Nothing appeared to have been touched — he had money, the passport, food and water. He pulled out the water bottle and tore a strip of material from a T-shirt, then set about cleaning the baby, dabbing at him gingerly as though he were a fragile china ornament. The wide blue eyes followed his every move in ominous silence. Hamnet then wrapped him in the remains of the T-shirt, opened a tin of mixed fruit and dribbled the juice off the back of a spoon into his mouth. The eyes brightened, the baby’s appetite was quickly satisfied, and sleep followed even faster. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
Hamnet arranged the pack to form a rough bed and lay the baby back down. He used the last of the water to wash some of the dirt off his own face, and changed into the final spare shirt and shorts in the pack. Then he sat down, pulled the envelope from the trouser pocket he had stuffed it into and read the contents. There were coordinates for the geographical area the ships were to travel through, a list of high-value commodities he was to target, and an email address to which he was to send information. Finally, there were a couple of floppy discs that, according to the documentation, held an encryption program for any messages. He knew he couldn’t remember the list of latitudes and longitudes, so he kept that and the discs. The rest he tore into shreds, which he stuffed into an opening under a tree root.
The next thing was to start walking. He repacked the bag, slung it on his back, gingerly picked up the sleeping bundle and threaded his way through the trees until he came to the metalled road. Then, as instructed, he turned right. The village wasn’t far, and he didn’t attract any attention as he entered. He found a small roadside restaurant and ordered some food. He learned from the waiter that a bus to Chiang Mai was due to leave from right outside the door in a couple of hours. He finished his meal quickly and walked back out into the heat. It was early afternoon, and nothing moved on the dusty road. No mad dogs, just a single Englishman. He walked slowly up and down both sides of the street, and established that there was nowhere he could buy baby clothes, food or milk. He returned to the restaurant to wait out the hot, heavy hour or so that remained.
Against the oppressive silence of the village, the voices of a young American couple at the next table were bright and cheerful. The woman, dark hair falling around bare, tanned shoulders, smiled prettily at Hamnet and the baby. But neither her smile nor her fresh and lavish good looks penetrated the numbness that surrounded Hamnet. Which was unfortunate, because he could have been better prepared for what happened next. The woman finished her drink, stood up and moved the few short steps towards father and son, while her boyfriend looked on with that faint air of disapproval that young men can have for their partners’ broodiness.
She frowned, her nose wrinkling when she saw the ripped T-shirt the baby was lying on. ‘What’s his name?’ she asked, a trace of doubt in her voice, gently extending a slim finger towards a patch of bare tummy.
Hamnet had just noticed her presence when the question crashed in. A name? He’d argued with Anna about that. The matter was unresolved — they had been waiting on the children to see what felt right. The woman was looking at him strangely. Not surprising, really— how could he not know the name? He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘Ben. I mean Benjamin — I guess it’ll be Ben when he gets a bit older.’
Her doubt was more open now, fired by his hesitation. ‘How old is he? He’s tiny. Doesn’t look old enough . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Doesn’t look very old.’
‘A month,’ said Hamnet, then fell silent.
The woman bit her lip anxiously, unsure of her right to enquire further, but clearly disbelieving, worried about the baby. Hamnet’s shoulders were hunched over his drink, his body tight, his demeanour cold. In the end his bearing turned her away.
‘Well, nice to meet you,’ she said. And after one last tickle, to which the young Benjamin responded with a blank stare, she returned, reluctantly, to her seat.
Hamnet was left pondering the name. If they’d had a girl, ‘Anna’ would have been the only choice. But he knew Anna had favoured ‘Ben’, and that was as close to her memory as he could get. He stared at the dozing baby, suddenly conscious of the load he was already placing on those tiny, unformed shoulders. Ben was all he had now. How much pressure did that put on them both? It was another thought in a long list that had to be carefully placed to one side. Let’s just get home safely, he told himself. The false passport would get him back into Singapore. But what about Ben? Overland was his best chance — the train to start with, then a long-distance bus. Usually, the only check at the border was the driver presenting a pile of passports to the immigration officer. Rarely did the officer trouble to match passports to faces, or even bodies. Hamnet knew it would take a few dollars to get the driver to ignore Ben, but if that could be done, immigration need never know.
But getting home was only the beginning. He would have to report his return, deal with the authorities, find a job. And then there was Dubre — he had to settle with that bastard before anything else. He felt his heart thump at the thought, saw his knuckles whiten as he dug his nails into his palms. So much anger, so much fear and hate — but right now he had to clear his mind and concentrate on the journey.
The bus was a welcome distraction when it finally crawled up the street and stopped outside the restaurant. The heat shimmered off the square metre or so of orange roof that wasn’t covered with baggage. Hamnet, the American couple and two or three locals filed slowly on board, buying their tickets from the driver. Hamnet deliberately took a seat as far away from the couple as possible and settled down, Ben on his lap, to suffer the journey in silence. Which was more than Ben had in mind. Exhaustion had ensured he slept in the heat and quiet of the village, but on the jarring, roaring bus, fractious tiredness kept him awake. Hamnet could feel the tension rise around him as the crying began to make the other passengers edgy. He did his best, but his baby was tired and hot and wanted something Hamnet couldn’t even divine, much less provide. As the journey dragged on, the resentment around him grew ever more palpable.
Then he felt a change in the human field, and found himself looking up into the concerned face of the American woman. ‘Let me,’ she said simply, holding out her arms. Hamnet shuffled along the seat to the window and she sat down beside him. He handed Ben to her and watched anxiously, and to his eyes she did nothing different — more cuddling, more soft talk. But the effect was a transformation. Ben grew silent and finally fell asleep. Hamnet rubbed his tired eyes with his knuckles. He felt so damn useless. And the woman watched him, trying to figure him out, unsure what to do next.
‘I’m Jasmine,’ she said finally.
Hamnet looked up, and for the first time took note of her face — saw the concern, the innocent friendliness. And then he lied to her. ‘Toliver. Michael Toliver. Thanks for your help, Jasmine, I guess I’ve got a lot to learn.’
‘You look exhausted,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I just want to get us both home.’
‘He’ll be a lot easier when you’re not both tired.’ She smiled uncertainly before continuing. ‘Where’s home?’
‘Singapore.’
She nodded, turning back to the baby. ‘Long way.’
‘Yeah,’ said Phil. It was.
Jasmine stayed beside him for the rest of the journey to Chiang Mai. He just sat and stared at the sleeping baby, desperately aware for the first time of his lack of childcare knowledge. Of the gulf betwe
en his responsibilities and his ability to fulfil them. It was terrifying. More frightening than anything he had faced either at sea or on land. This tiny being was his to care for and protect. And he couldn’t even stop him crying.
The bus crawled into Chiang Mai in the late afternoon and rolled to a halt in a dusty concrete bus station. Jasmine led the way off, Ben still in her arms. Hamnet followed her, along with the rest of the grateful passengers. She returned the baby to him silently once he’d hoisted his pack on his back, her face serious.
‘Thank you,’ said Hamnet.
Jasmine smiled tightly. ‘Take care of him.’
Hamnet nodded, half turned to walk away, hesitated, then carried on. He felt guilty, but how could he ever explain? He walked to the taxi rank without looking back, Jasmine watching his every step.
The cab took him straight to the Suriwongse Hotel, where it took him only moments to discover Dubre had gone. There was little doubt he had returned to Singapore. And that was where Hamnet must follow.
He took a room for the night, and paid a maid to buy everything he needed for Ben, relieved at least that Dubre had made him keep the money. The maid helped him feed Ben and showed him how to change disposable nappies and prepare baby formula. It was a short lesson in the basics of childcare — not enough for the longer term, but at least once both of them were clean and fed, they slept for a while.
Ben woke Hamnet at six a.m., just minutes before the alarm call was due. It was the last decent sleep either of them would have for forty-eight hours. The journey was a long, painful nightmare: a two-day overland trip to and through Bangkok, then down the length of the Malay Peninsula. It would have been difficult enough with a ten-day old baby if Hamnet had known what he was doing. But he struggled with the feeding. He struggled with the nappies. He struggled to make Ben feel either comfortable or secure. And so the baby cried, for hour after hour, with extraordinary energy, until Hamnet was exhausted — physically, mentally and emotionally.
The Wrecking Crew (Janac's Games) Page 12