The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  Both men watched the pale glimmer of their wake with ferocious attention for a full minute. They saw nothing at all, but they were thinking the same thing: the Malacca Strait was the most dangerous passage in the world, with more than fifty large freighters and tankers taken by pirates in the last three years alone. Although the navies of several local countries patrolled the Strait, half of these naval gun-boats moonlighted as pirates themselves, and not one of them could be trusted within a thousand yards of your ship. As for self-defense, the gun locker on the Mingo Dubai held several antique Lee-Enfield rifles and a wooden crate of dubious World War II .303 ammunition. This crate was currently half empty, since it was the consoling pleasure of their morose and chronically seasick Hindu cook to get himself weeping drunk on his own homemade screech and then stagger out on deck to blaze away at the terns and mollymawks. So far, he hadn’t hit a single bird, but he had managed to blow a fist-sized hole through one of the starboard lifeboats.

  “There anything on the narrowband radar, sir?”

  Wang went back to the ship’s radar and turned the gain down, reducing the arc but raising the strength of the return. They watched as the green line swept across their wake. Nothing. Just a smooth green emptiness. Wang and Fitch stood side by side and stared out into the night, seeing only their red reflections in the porthole glass.

  “Who’s got the stern watch?” asked Wang.

  “The Thai kid. Chiddy Monkut.”

  “He’s not answering his radio,” said Wang. “Go see how he’s doing.”

  “What about that?” said Fitch, nodding at the storm.

  Wang shrugged, put on a stoical mask.

  “I must make Port Moresby by next Friday. I have no choice.”

  Fitch looked at Wang for a while, real sympathy in his face. Wang was a good man, and Fitch, who had once been a good man himself, liked and admired him. Since both men understood each other completely, there was nothing to say.

  “Very good, sir. I’ll go do a walkabout.”

  Brendan Fitch pushed through the wheelhouse door and stepped out into a forty-mile-an-hour gale that was quartering across their port bow. The ship was lifting up and falling rhythmically; under the boom of the swells and the gusting wind, Fitch could hear the hull groaning. The ship’s running lights were ringed in misty halos and beyond their pale light the black night pressed in all around, a pall of darkness that seemed to weigh the ship down. He padded unsteadily down the gangway, his bare feet slipping on the ridged plates, and stopped for a moment at the middeck locker, fumbling with a key attached to a lanyard around his neck. He braced himself against the ship’s roll as he worked the dead bolt, got the lid off, and took out a small parcel wrapped in oilcloth. He unwrapped the stainless steel Colt Python, checked the cylinder, and shoved the huge revolver in his belt. Then he reached deeper into the locker and extracted a sterling silver hip flask with the phrase DEEDS NOT WORDS engraved on the sides.

  The battered old flask was reassuringly heavy with the last of his Southern Comfort. Fitch slipped it into his back pocket, remembering to button down the pocket flap. When he reached the main deck, he lifted a Maglite out of its sheath by the gangway gate, walked over to the starboard taffrail, and leaned out into the shrieking night. Thirty feet below him, the sea was running wild along the hull, a hissing tumult of broken black water and mountainous swells. He looked forward, his shaggy hair flying, and then aft, along the hull: he saw nothing but wild black ocean, and heard nothing but the sea howling back at him, a shrieking wail over the bass-organ groaning of the Mingo Dubai’s hull. The wind stank of sea rot and decay.

  Fitch worked his way around the stern, holding on to the rain-slick railing with his left hand, shielding his face from the spray that was flying back from the bow. He blinked away the salt tears and strained to see anything at all through the storm and the darkness that was out there.

  About a mile off to starboard, he could barely make out the pale blue pulse of a waypoint buoy—the Ten Mile Light—the buoy that marked Kepulauan Lingga Island. Beyond that, there was only the booming sea and the black vault of the sky.

  He came around the corner of the bridge and made his way out onto the stern deck, cantilevered out over the rudder. Thirty feet below him, the ocean was being churned into white foam by the ship’s twenty-foot-high propeller. The rumble of the ship’s wake was deafening, like standing too close to Niagara Falls. The air reeked of diesel and the sewage trail of the ship’s leaking bilge. It looked like Chiddy Monkut was nowhere around.

  And it was too damn dark back here.

  Fitch looked up. The stern light that was supposed to be shining at the top of a twenty-foot pole was out. He moved to check the in-line fuse box and his foot struck an object lying in the gangway—a plastic bottle. He picked it up and shook it; it was almost empty.

  He unscrewed the top and sniffed at the neck. The bitter smell of potato screech made his eyes weep. He considered the remains of the bottle for a while, trying to decide if the sticky black substance on the side of it was blood or grease. It smelled like a bit of both.

  He thought about taking a quick slug of the screech and decided against it, tossing it into the maelstrom of the wake below him. Fitch turned the Maglite on and swept it around the semicircle of the stern deck. It was empty. He started to get a very bad feeling about Chiddy Monkut’s welfare. He pulled his radio out of his shirt pocket and thumbed the CALL button.

  “Chiddy, this is Brendan Fitch. Come in?”

  Silence.

  Fitch stared at the empty deck and felt a stony-cold sobriety welling up inside him. He backed up against the wall of the bridge tower and pulled out the Colt Python, pressing the radio CALL button again.

  “Captain, this is Fitch. Chiddy’s nowhere—”

  The handset popped and crackled, as a burst of lightning sizzled across the night sky far astern, briefly illuminating the ship’s wake and showing him a long matte-gray shape running fifty yards off the stern, riding inside the ship’s wake. A yellow face with a thin black beard— frozen in the lightning flash—was staring up at the deck. Then it was gone, as the dark came rolling back and a peal of thunder shook the night. Seconds later, a torrent of rain swept across the deck, drenching Fitch to the bone and bringing the visibility down to a few feet. Fitch took out the radio handset, thumbed CALL.

  “Captain—we have boarders! Boarders! Lock down the wheelhouse!”

  Barely audible in the storm, Anson Wang’s voice came back on the handset, shredded in the driving rain, drowned by the steady churning of the prop. “Boarders? Where—?”

  Wang’s voice was cut off abruptly, but Fitch heard the eerie banshee wail of the ship’s siren winding up, a ghostly shriek that increased in volume and intensity until it was almost louder than the storm. Fitch heard the thudding of steel doors and the clatter of feet on the interior gangways as the crew ran for their stations, and muted voices calling out. Then a deep, rhythmic chatter that drove the last of the sake out of his head; semiauto fire—from the sound of it, an MP5—and the muffled screams of men.

  The siren shut off a second later.

  Light flickered from the bridge, and Fitch shoved himself back into the dark as a shape came tumbling down from the upper deck, arms flailing. The shape struck the taffrail with a dull clang and lay there—broken-backed and obscenely twisted—and Fitch stepped forward and saw the bloody face of the old Malay wheelman. Under the old man’s chin his slit throat gaped wide, ripped muscles still twitching like the mouth of a hooked trout.

  Fitch sensed movement to his left, turned, and fired into the mist, the muzzle flare of the big Colt reflected in the rain droplets, the sound slamming off the steel decking. A dim, plaid-shirted figure fell back into the dark, and something came clattering across the decking plates, a large parang with a wooden handle wrapped in bright green silk.

  No telling how many pirates were already on board. Fitch had only five rounds left. If he kept using the Colt, he’d be out of rounds in four se
conds. He tossed the Maglite against the wall, shoved the Colt into his belt, and scooped up the long wickedly curved machete just as a second figure rounded the other corner and ran at him, shrieking in Tagalog—an angry, falsetto howl—right arm raised high, holding a parang.

  Fitch parried the downstroke with the flat of his own parang and stepped in under the slicing horizontal return cut, feeling the thrumming rush of the parang as it passed through the air above his left shoulder. He caught a fistful of the figure’s shirt in his left hand and felt the swelling of breasts under the thin material. He jerked the slender girl sideways and she smacked down hard onto the steel decking, the air puffing out of her, as she twisted, snakelike and very fast, trying to regain her feet, her machete slicing sidelong at his left ankle.

  Fitch blocked the strike, and his automatic riposte split the young girl’s chest wide open from her chin to her belly, the force of the blow shuddering up Fitch’s arm all the way to his shoulder.

  She screamed and dropped the parang, bringing her hands up to her chest, her exposed ribs pink in the half-light, her body twisting and writhing as she hissed with pain and fear. Fitch brought the heavy blade down hard on her forehead, splitting her skull open, the tip of his parang striking red sparks off the decking underneath the girl’s head.

  Fitch turned away from the ruin of the girl, fumbled in the dark for the Maglite, found it but did not turn it on. He patted his waist belt to make sure of the Colt but did not draw it. If he was going to kill enough of these people to take the ship back, he was going to have to do it in silence.

  He kept the Maglite in his left hand, to parry with, and held the parang in his right as he walked barefoot along the deck and took a very cautious look around the corner. In the misty glow of the ship’s starboard running lights he saw a naked man dashing forward along the deck, closely pursued by three skinny figures, barefoot, in tan shorts and plaid shirts, wearing bright red head scarves. The glitter of their knives showed through the rain. The figures caught up with the naked man by the forward hatch plates and he fell to his knees, raising his hands in front of him—it was the hapless Hindu cook. The figures formed a tight circle around the cook as he knelt there. A brown arm went up and a silvery blade flashed down. Under the howl of the storm, Fitch heard a cry and the coconut crack of the man’s skull being split open.

  Fitch rounded the corner of the deck and went silently up the gangway as the figures on the foredeck set to work on what was left of the Hindu cook. At the turning of the third flight, he ran straight into a broad, squat, toadlike figure racketing down the stairs—the toad man bounced off Fitch with a breathy grunt, fell back against the steel stairs, and lifted a black pistol, which flew outward into the rain, along with ten inches of his forearm, as Fitch took the man’s lower arm off with the parang.

  He opened the man’s throat wide with the returning stroke, cutting off his hoarse cry, stepped over the man’s body, and went up the rest of the stairway in grim silence, his breath rasping in his chest, his lungs burning, his now-quite-sober mind filled with stone-cold murder. If these people got control of the ship, every man on board would die exactly like the Hindu cook. Brendan Fitch did not value his own life very highly anymore, but he had no intention of being butchered like a hog.

  He stopped just below the bridge deck and flattened against the steel wall as he heard voices—Malay? Dyak? No. It was English, but heavily accented—Serbian? Croatian? Two men at least, standing on the bridge deck just outside the cabin. A flare of red light as the wheelhouse door opened and closed again, and now only one man remained on the upper deck.

  The motion of the ship changed as the storm increased in force— Fitch felt the engines power up and the deck shifted under him—they were turning the ship out of the eye of the wind, turning her off course, veering her to port in a long, dangerous turn that would expose her entire starboard flank to the incoming seas. If the ship failed to come all the way about and take the storm on her stern, the seas would roll right over her exposed foredeck and drive her under in seconds. No real seaman would have put the old tanker through such a turn. Which meant Anson Wang was no longer at the wheel.

  But perhaps not dead. Not yet. They’d need Wang to tell them the ship’s private transponder codes and the location of her EPIRB emergency beacon. If they were taking the ship off course, they probably intended to do more than just off-load her cargo to another tanker. They’d dump the EPIRB in the sea, kill the transponder. The Singapore Coast Guard would think the ship had sunk. They’d stop looking when they located the EPIRB and come back for survivors when the storm subsided.

  But how many hijackers were on the ship?

  If they had all come from that single cigarette boat trailing her stern, not that many, and he had already killed three of them. Another three were down there on the forepeak four hundred feet away, still senselessly hacking the Hindu cook into curried chutney. Two more up here on the deck, one man outside, and another who had just stepped back into the wheelhouse. That meant two inside the wheelhouse, perhaps three.

  Someone on the stairs above him stepped up to the forward rail of the bridge and called out to the three men still mutilating the corpse at the bow, raising his voice to a hoarse bellow, to carry through the wind howling out of the night and the boom of the swells crashing over the ship’s side, speaking Tagalog with a European accent. An answering shout came from the bow: the three men crouched over the spreading puddle of flesh got to their feet and began to make their way back toward the stern of the ship.

  Brendan Fitch climbed the last of the stairs and stepped softly out onto the bridge deck just as the man at the railing turned around, a large white man in a black watch cap, a blue jean jacket, and military-looking pants.

  The man had a small gray pistol in his right hand and he pointed it at Fitch as soon as he saw him. Fitch threw the parang straight at the man’s head, as he drew out his Colt, and missed him completely, but, as the man ducked, his own first shot went wide. Fitch fired the Colt, the revolver bucking in his wet hands—a wild shot that spanged off the steel wall of the bridge house, struck the staircase railing a glancing blow, and slammed right back into Brendan Fitch’s rib cage.

  The impact of the slug threw Fitch backward against the pilothouse wall, a cold numbness spreading out from his rib cage, but, by then, he had fired the big Colt twice more, the weapon kicking like a mule in his right hand. The man in the watch cap lurched toward the pilothouse door, firing as he stumbled across the wet decking, the little gun popping like a toy and tinny rounds ticking off the steel plate next to Fitch’s head and zipping away into the darkness. Fitch fired the Colt again—that was four rounds out and one to go—and the watch-cap man flattened against the wheelhouse door with a large black crater in his temple.

  Fitch pivoted as he heard the slice-and-dice unit clattering up the gangway stairs, looked back toward the wheelhouse again, saw another white man inside the wheelhouse—short, black-haired, pale-eyed, with a well-trimmed black goatee, his narrow, sharp-featured face vividly defined by the red cabin light. He was shouting something at Fitch, but it was muffled by the glass and then carried away by the wind.

  The man with the goatee raised a black weapon—in the heightened intensity of the moment Fitch recognized it as an MP5. The man aimed it at Fitch through the glass. Anson Wang was standing at the wheel behind the man, his face battered and bloody, his mouth slack. And on Anson’s far side, holding one of the ship’s .303s, its muzzle hard up against Anson’s temple, was the third mate, Vigo Majiic.

  Fitch, in rage and desperation, fired his fifth and last round at the sharp-faced little man at exactly same time that the muzzle of the man’s MP5 filled up with sparkling blue fire and the glass window between them shattered into a blizzard of shards. When the broken glass fell away, the little man was still standing, but Anson Wang and Vigo Majiic were gone. Wonderful.

  Six rounds out, and Fitch had managed to shoot both himself and Anson Wang with two of them. Brilliant
. No rounds left in the Colt and caught between an MP5 and the salad chefs from Hell with only his hip flask to throw at them. Time to bail.

  Fitch stepped over the taffrail and launched himself outward into the storm just as the bearded man in the wheelhouse fired the MP5. Several rounds plucked at his billowing shirt as Fitch hurtled through the air, hoping he had enough arc to clear the main-deck rail and reach the open water sixty feet below him. The wind tore at him as he fell through the rain and the corrugated black wall of the ocean rose up before him. He sliced into the flank of a great sea roller as another spray of machine-gun rounds punched into the foamy chop all around him. Fitch sank rapidly, for a strangely silent time, dimly aware of the great wall of the ship’s hull sliding ponderously by him in the deep, and the rhythmic pounding of the ship’s propeller, a dull, concussive booming that was coming closer every second. He felt the salt ocean around him moving in perfect time to that terrible churning prop, so near now that he felt the pull of the undertow and the ocean pulsing like jelly all around him.

  He heard a muttering burble very close to his head and a long shape moved across the waves a few feet above him. His lungs aching, Fitch kicked hard for the surface, broke into the streaming air; his flailing hand struck a hard, slick surface. An angry face appeared in the air over his head, a staring yellow face with a black beard.

  Fitch put a hand on the ridge of the boat’s gunwale as the yellow face leaned over to hack at him. Fitch caught the man’s wrist and jerked him over the side into the ocean. The man slashed out at Fitch one last time, even as he slipped under the waves, missing Fitch but hacking a chunk out of the gunwale right next to his head. A gasp, a cry cut off in a choking bubble, and then Fitch was alone in the black water.

  The gray cigarette boat yawed crazily. The engine snarled and muttered as the long craft turned in a slow, driverless circle. Huge waves washed over the side, and the boat took on water. The storm rolled above him with a sound like a freight train crossing an iron bridge, but Brendan Fitch held on to that slick, hard ridge of the gunwale for a very long time.