The vehemence of Cody’s reaction and my own feelings of guilt and shame had triggered a familiar craving. I took a deep breath and tried to sound casual. ‘Where’s the stuff now?’ Cody pointed with a shaking finger over the side. I was stunned . . . a couple of grand’s worth of prime pharma down the gurgler.
He came up close to me: ‘We’ve been mates for a long time, otherwise I’d head to the airport right now. But I said I’d get you to Singapore and I’ll do it. But don’t even think about getting any more of that shit. You don’t put one foot off this boat before we set sail tomorrow. And when we get to Singapore, I’m getting on the first plane back to Sydney. You hear me? You’re on your bloody own after that.’
6
ANNIE GRAPPLED with two Louis Vuitton suitcases and a matching handbag as she stepped off the pier onto the luxury catamaran. It looked bigger and swankier than she had expected. She noted the name emblazoned on the side – the Lady Vesper.
Shedding her gold sandals as she boarded, Annie was dressed in white skinny jeans and a taupe sleeveless silk blouse that laboured to mute her curves. A simple gold necklace and matching earrings rounded off her understated elegance. Martin followed close behind, laden with more luggage, sweating and swearing. ‘Where’s the bloody charter chap?’ he moaned through heavy breaths. ‘We shouldn’t have to carry these sodding bags ourselves.’
She ignored him, dropped her bags and went straight up the short flight of fibreglass steps to the open flybridge. There she did a slow 360-degree twirl taking in the sights and sounds of the Sentosa Cove marina in Singapore. She clasped her hands in front of her as if in prayer. Sleek glass-tinted buildings framed even sleeker yachts moving lazily in the glittering expanse of water below. What looked to her to be a squadron of super-yachts sat majestically at the larger berths, while the smaller craft, from weekend runabouts to dangerous-looking cigarette boats and expensive charter vessels strained at their moorings as the sea caressed their keels. Stunning, she thought. Maybe Martin was right: maybe this is just what we need after all.
Annie looked over at her husband busying himself with the luggage. He wasn’t a bad catch: quite tall, he dressed well, if conservatively; handsome enough, but could lose a few pounds. His hair was still lush and longish with a boyish lick over his forehead, although she thought he was rather too proud of it. He’s ridiculously excited about this adventure, she thought with a smile. It’s good to see a glimpse of the old Martin I fell in love with. But do I still love him? More to the point, do I want to have children with him?
Her pulse quickened as she remembered what he had said about having kids. Did he mean it? She felt ready; the alarm on her biological clock had gone off a few times lately. Maybe we could use this trip to start working on a baby? But the problem with that idea, she thought wryly, is that we are parked in a sexual cul-de-sac. About once every couple of months, if we’re lucky. Even then it’s routine, clinical – what she had once seen described in a women’s magazine as ‘subsistence sex’. Like scratching an itch, quick and efficient but devoid of creativity, joy or passion. Ah, well, for richer or poorer. She smiled at the sudden thought. Let’s see if we can do something about that.
Annie’s reverie was interrupted by shouts of greeting from the jetty below. She looked over and saw Martin hugging a younger couple, laughing and making lavish sounds of welcome.
‘Annie, darling, they’ve arrived! Come down and say hello.’
She sighed, the moment spoiled. Behave, she scolded herself. You have to make the most of this trip. Putting her sunnies back on, she went down to meet the strangers. They weren’t married, Martin had explained. But they had been together, off and on, for several months.
Danielle Johnston, or Dani as she preferred to be called, worked as PA to one of Martin’s senior colleagues. Annie could see that she was a pretty, elfin-faced woman with short, spiky blonde hair gelled into resin-like rigidity. In her mid-twenties, she was wearing a simple but sexy short floral print dress and high heels that flattered her petite, toned, boyish figure. She’s not exactly appropriately dressed for boating, Annie thought. And she has that awful nasal Sydney twang and annoying upward inflection that makes every comment sound like a question. Stop it, she scolded herself, the poor girl is probably perfectly nice.
The man, Gary Schwarz, was a little older: nearer my age, she thought. He was a muscular, broad-shouldered American who obviously enjoyed working out. Hollywood handsome but he knows it, Annie thought. Unlike Dani, he was casually dressed. His loose grey tank top and cargo shorts revealed bulging biceps and strong calves. Under the obligatory Yankees baseball cap, his light brown hair was cut short and several days of darker growth dappled a broad, tanned face with strong white teeth. ‘Gary works for a competitor,’ Martin had explained. ‘Similar job to mine. We met at a conference and discovered that we share a love of sailing.’
I wonder what else they discovered a love of at the conference? The unspoken question just flitted into Annie’s head. Gary had the look of a predator. Shrugging, she smiled brightly and said: ‘Great to meet you guys.’
Less than thirty minutes later, they all gathered on the upper deck.
Annie had found a bottle of half-decent champagne in the fridge and they toasted each other: ‘Here’s to a voyage of fun and exploration,’ said Martin with an exaggerated wink at Dani. Annie frowned but raised the glass to her lips and enjoyed the cool fizzy bubbles on her tongue. Lunch platters had been supplied by the charter company: Asian beef salad, chilli prawns and Rojak, a delicious local dish that included beansprouts, greens, pineapple, peanuts and cucumber. There was also a large bowl of fresh fruit salad of mango, lychees and dragon fruit. They ate in the cool, spacious saloon with the shimmering images of the distant glass buildings glinting and moving in time with the boat as it swayed gently in its mooring.
7
‘I FUCKING love this job.’ Bambang Budiman paused to take a drag from his kretek, a foul-smelling clove cigarette. ‘And I’m fucking good at it,’ he said, pounding his barrel chest with a meaty fist. He was in the wheelhouse of his crew’s mother ship, the Pasang Merah or Crimson Tide, talking to the old Malaysian helmsman, Mamat, whose wrinkled skin was the colour of nicotine. They were heading away from an island off the west coast of Sumatra. ‘I know the crew think I’m a ruthless violent bastard, but you know what? Those are just my good points!’ The pirate boss laughed, revealing his large gold incisor.
Bambang’s criminal colleagues had quickly nicknamed him ‘BangBang’. Some said it was because of his love of automatic assault rifles, while others thought it was because his head had the same shape and texture as a grenade and he would explode if anyone pissed him off. They told him he was the spitting image of General Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian dictator convicted of drug trafficking, money laundering and racketeering. Like ‘Old Pineapple Face’, BangBang was broad-faced, low-browed, dark-skinned and heavily pockmarked. He wore mirrored Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses that screened sly, hooded eyes, each a curious dark yellow colour punctured by a shard of anthracite. A former crew member had once unwisely called them lizard eyes. The pirate boss had stuck a knife in that man’s eye and then tossed him overboard for the sharks to feed on.
BangBang was not normally given to introspection but today he was in a curious, reflective mood. I’ve come a long way from the fishers’ kampong where I was born, he thought. The kampong, near Cilegon city on the coast a hundred kilometres north-west of Jakarta, gazed out towards Panjang Island and beyond to the Java Sea.
‘I had to grow up fast,’ he told Mamat, who often thought that his boss’s curious sing-song voice belied his brutal appearance. ‘My old man was a bastard. A steelworker, used to beat me every day. But my uncle was worse . . . when he got drunk on his fishing boat, he used to try to stick his dirty cock in my mouth. Eventually, when I was about thirteen, I got away. But not before I fixed him good.’ He smacked his lips at the memory.
‘How did you do that?’ asked the helmsm
an.
‘Heh. One time he was rat-arsed on palm wine, I stuck a fucking fishing hook through his dick. “Use that for fish bait, you fucker,” I told him.’
BangBang was quiet for a moment, remembering his life after that, living in the notorious Jembatan Besi slum in Jakarta. Fuck, that was a dark, dense place. He remembered the tightly packed buildings, made of rough wood, dried mud and scrap metal, rising up uneasily in narrow lanes and rat-infested alleys, blocking the daylight as the top storeys teetered towards each other. He could still see the sagging lines of grey washing and smell the stench of rancid garlic, sewage and rotting refuse that added to the stale, hazy miasma shrouding the slum and its five thousand impoverished inhabitants. BangBang shivered as he recalled his time there.
He had worked his arse off for five dollars a day in a makeshift T-shirt factory, one of many sweatshops in the slum. He slept in a derelict house in Venus Alley with twenty others, including an older cousin, Yuda. There was no toilet. He supplemented his income as one of hundreds of pint-sized pickpockets that polluted the sprawling metropolis.
Ironically, the Jembatan Besi slum sat, brooding and malodorous, opposite the upmarket Seasons City shopping mall and three grand-looking apartment blocks. Every day, the young BangBang would look up at the world of wealth and opulence and brood. He once bragged to Yuda: ‘You’ll see, one day I’ll live in that place, or one like it. Whatever it takes.’
‘Yeah right.’ Yuda had laughed. ‘In your dreams.’
‘No, you wait, I’ll get there whatever it takes . . . or whoever I have to kill.’
A year later, he was an enthusiastic and energetic member of the Margonda machete gang that specialised in mugging other teenagers on motorcycles. He graduated to snatching tourists’ handbags from the pillion seat of a motor scooter driven by Yuda.
‘My big breakthrough came when I was eighteen,’ he told Mamat now. ‘I became a preman, working for one of the city’s main crime syndicates. Then I graduated to robbing banks, drug running and working as an enforcer in the syndicate’s prostitution business. It was a great life! But not as good as this.’
‘So how did you end up here?’ asked the helmsman.
‘Shit happened,’ said BangBang with a sneer. ‘I did a seven-year stretch in Cipinang jail for assault and armed robbery. But when I got out, the syndicate looked after me. Put me into this pirate business.’
BangBang loved being a bajak laut, a modern-day pirate. There was endless sunlight, the freshest of air and, despite the cramped quarters of his boat, he didn’t feel he was living on an anthill as he had back in the slum. He had patiently served his apprenticeship on the skiffs that raced after and boarded target vessels, before finally becoming a nakhoda, a captain. Now he and his crew of cut-throats attacked scores of vessels, from large commercial vessels to smaller pleasure boats, raping, robbing and ransacking. The Strait of Malacca is just like a shopping mall, or, in our case, a shipping mall, he would often joke to his men. We go there to shop for loot!
BangBang stubbed out his cigarette. He did not need to tell Mamat that he liked working for the Chinese crime syndicate or about the high he got from boarding target vessels with an assault rifle and machete in his fists. All the crew knew he loved killing people. He had a special talent for it. And that propensity for violence, allied to his strength and willingness to go all the way, helped keep the men in line as they prowled the high sea looking for prey.
Lighting another kretek, BangBang’s mind turned to his share of the spoils from the last heist. He had hidden it along with his other accumulated loot in a secret cave on the island they had just left. And that’s just the start, he told himself. With a bit of luck, I’ll have that luxury apartment at Seasons City before too long. He suddenly gave a shrill laugh, startling the old helmsman, who was unused to seeing his captain in such good humour.
8
WE DIDN’T make it to Singapore. A sailing boat is no place for two people at loggerheads, even one as luxurious and spacious as The Scoop. Sooner or later, things were going to come to a head. It was inevitable.
We left Bali the day after we had our bust-up, easing out of the berth with a mixture of relief and angst. Relief that we hadn’t got into any trouble with the authorities, and angst because the atmosphere between Cody and me was toxic. He hadn’t said anything more to me, apart from occasionally barking out staccato commands relating to the sailing of the boat.
Using the remote gear, we cranked up the powered Harken winches and unfurled the mainsail and the self-tacking jib. Nudged by a friendly trade wind pushing up from the south-east, we entered the Java Sea and hugged the eastern Java coastline.
Behind the helm, Cody continued to simmer and stew. And the next day, when he thought (rightly) that I was high on something, he blew up.
‘You had more stuff stashed, you bloody moron!’ he shouted as he stood, arms crossed and legs braced against the pilothouse’s solid teak table to offset the rocking rhythm of the boat. ‘You bloody lied to me. Again.’
It was true, I did have another small cache of coke salted away in a different spot. Some reptilian part of my brain had planned for the possibility of running out.
I was mightily pissed off that Cody had chucked my main supply in the ocean and it must have shown on my face because, suddenly and ferociously, Cody spat the dummy: ‘You know what? That’s bloody it! I’m done. I’m getting off at the next decent-sized port.’
And with that, he laid out some charts on the table, studied them for a moment and stabbed a finger on one of them. ‘Look here. I’ll take you to Jakarta and then I’m buggering off.’
By his estimate, that meant just another few hundred nautical miles and two to three days sailing. I was gutted but didn’t bother to try to change his mind. I was too angry and ashamed. So he was Fletcher Christian after all, I mused, deserting his captain and leaving him to unknown terrors.
We sailed almost nonstop, until a tropical storm slowly, inexorably built up over our heads, complete with massive amounts of rain, spectacular lightning and boat-shaking thunder.
Soaked to the skin despite our wet weather gear, both a tad scared and emitting waves of mutual hatred, Cody and I still managed to work the boat as a team. We took both the main and headsails down, using the handy electro-hydraulic system. The turbo diesel engine took over, its dull bass roar oddly comforting in the high-pitched crescendo of crashing wind and rain.
We helmed the boat from the spacious cockpit aft, although we could have used the more sheltered starboard helm station set forward of the main saloon. But the feeling of being out in the open, of being connected to the wild elements, kept us sharp and focused. Besides, the roar of the wind and the ocean drowned out the deafening silence between us.
The grey, Kevlar-coated hull showed remarkable stability in the conditions. In fact, The Scoop matched the elements with a confidence that Cody and I did not totally share. The solid, secure sloop seemed to be telling us: ‘Don’t worry, I can handle this.’
At one point I sat in a semi-bewildered state in the clammy gloom, surrounded by a heaving, boiling sea, buffeted by the howling gale, and besieged by swirling thoughts of what the future might now hold. I’m not usually superstitious but that malevolent maelstrom seemed portentous. Am I going to get out of this alive? And if I do, what is there for me afterwards?
The next morning we sailed into Semarang, tails between our sea legs. Cody wouldn’t let me leave the boat; presumably he thought I’d try and score more dope. He was right. Instead, I lay in my cabin feeling sorry for myself and calming my jitters with some of the rapidly dwindling white powder. I alternated between feelings of guilt and resentment. Okay, I was a dick for bringing the dope but Cody had totally overreacted. After all, who was paying for all this five-star travel? He should be bloody grateful that he’d had the opportunity to sail a boat like The Scoop. I’ll be better off without him, I thought as the coke smoothed away my anxiety. I don’t need anyone interfering with my life. Look at w
hat I have achieved on my own. An Oscar, for fuck’s sake. Why should I put up with crap from anyone? The sooner he fucks off, the better. I could sail the damn thing myself.
The final leg to Jakarta was happily uneventful. Apart from the frosty face and stormy looks emanating from Cody, the heavy weather had been left behind. I enjoyed the feel of the boat and steered her for much of the way. I might not be in Cody’s class as a skipper but I’d learnt a lot since we’d left Hammo.
Cody took over as we neared Jakarta. It was challenging, even for him: we were motoring into a building breeze, with the tide against us. We had to navigate through thousands of boats: tugs, tankers, ferries, fishing boats and a myriad of smaller craft. After our time at sea, it was overwhelming to be so close to a metropolis of ten million souls. The smell: brine, garlic, cooking oil and diesel. The noise: hundreds of engines, hooters, the chop-chop of overhead helicopters. It was both exhilarating and exhausting.
We tied up at the Pantai Mutiara marina in Jakarta’s north shore and, after we’d attended to the usual arrival process, Cody silently packed up his kitbag, tidied up the pilothouse and then walked off The Scoop and onto the floating jetty. There he stopped and shaded his eyes as he turned to look up at me standing in the cockpit.
‘Mate, I don’t know what’s happened to you. I used to love you like a brother. But you’ve become a . . . a bloody junkie or something. You’re dangerous to be around. You need help. Call me when you sort yourself out.’
And, with that, he hoisted his bag onto his shoulder, gave a last gentle caress of The Scoop’s hull and walked away.
9
BUGGER CODY! To underscore my defiance, I immediately set about getting pissed before starting on some lines of coke. Later, I headed unsteadily to one of the bars that fringed the marina. The next thing I knew I was waking up with a sore head and a sleeping girl. The headache was familiar, the girl was not. A rather scruffy young backpacker from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, I dimly remembered.
The Scoop Page 3