The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  *

  Huuk crept up the companionway onto the lower bridge deck with every muscle taut, as controlled as a hunting cat. At the top of the stairway he hesitated, glancing left and right along the narrow alleyway on either side of which, he knew, the crew should have been housed. Everything was as silent and still as it had seemed when he first broke into the bridgehouse a mere ten minutes earlier. He paused again, calculating. He was certain that there was someone aboard, shadowing his men and watching. He was unsure what precisely was going on here. He didn’t entirely trust the information he had been given and in any case the situation as described had been all but incredible to begin with. That anyone would leave a fully-laden cargo ship of more than 20,000 tonnes adrift and abandoned just outside Hong Kong territorial waters, ripe for the picking, was more than even the most gullible of Huuk’s men could believe. And yet here it was, apparently exactly as described. It was all far too good to be true.

  ‘Tuan!’

  It was the first word which had been spoken since Huuk and his men came aboard and, in spite of the fact that it was whispered, it was enough to make Huuk’s lithe body lurch and jump with shock. The stubby black barrel swung towards the source of the sound and threatened one of his men who was frozen in the open doorway of the nearest cabin, his face the colour of old ivory, made pale with the depth of his shock. Huuk pulled the barrel of his new gun up until it was pointing at the deckhead immediately above him again. Once again he frowned, concerned that the tautness of his nerves should have frightened one of his men like that.

  But all too soon it became apparent that the man had not been frightened of the gun but had been sickened by what he had found. Huuk stepped through the door and found himself in a double cabin exactly of the sort he would have expected two crew to occupy or one officer to use as an office. And, indeed, just beyond the flip-flops of his own pale man there were the cabin’s occupants. They lay face down, side by side. Their hands were tied behind their backs. Huuk noticed this fact before he registered the pool of blood that they were lying in. The pool of blood congealed upon the linoleum flooring led Huuk to pay closer attention to the backs of the dead men’s heads. He hissed with shock and then at once, almost without thinking, he switched in his iron self-control. Three steps brought him to the edge of the black-red pool. Brutal brightness broke in through the forward-facing porthole with all the dramatic clarity of a spotlight. It played across the backs of the dead men’s heads, revealing the bullet holes, placed execution-style, dead centre. The power of the light was such that it penetrated the rough circles in the black matted hair and the sharp bone beneath to reveal bruise-black swells of ruptured brain looking as though the ravaged skulls had been packed with ripe black-berries. Without taking a conscious breath, Huuk stepped forward and placed his almost priceless Reebok into the red-black circle and reverently nudged the side of the nearest dead face. It rolled over just enough to reveal the horror beneath. As it lifted, there came the loudest noise to disturb the brooding air aboard the Sulu Queen so far — the long, clear sound of a cotton bedsheet being torn in two. It was the sound the dead man’s face made as it was lifted off the floor.

  Clearly the man had been placed face down on the linoleum and then been executed by the discharge of a heavy-calibre gun immediately behind his head. The bullet had smashed through the head, rupturing the man’s brain and exiting through his face exactly between his eyes, tearing off much of his visage, making the eyeballs themselves explode and shattering the bridge of his nose. The floor was made of steel, covered with linoleum. The bullet had exploded against the metal and released its terrible energy into heat. Shattering, it had bounced back in a perfectly circular wave of molten pieces which had brought the instantly liquefied linoleum with it. Around the edges of the crater which was all that was left of the crewman’s face above the jaw, long strings of rubbery linoleum were indistinguishable from the thickening threads of hair, skin and brain matter. The circle on the floor, lifted like risen dough by the bubbles within the half-melted material, was speckled with bits and pieces of various sizes and colours and covered with the thick red semi-liquid ooze of dried blood. The whole mess reminded Huuk irresistibly of an obscene pizza and he had to be very careful not to vomit. Instead he looked up, his narrow eyes almost invisible behind the slits of speculation. Standing opposite him, beyond the bodies, was his armaments expert Tse Ho.

  ‘What do you think did this?’ he asked in a scarcely audible whisper of Mandarin.

  ‘Something very big. Forty-four Magnum maybe. Something far bigger than anything we’re carrying.’

  Huuk’s hiss of indrawn breath was still lingering on the air when his radio spat into life. ‘Tuan.’

  *

  At least the Vietnamese corpses had faces, but that was more or less all that could be said for them. There were six of them — four women and two children — and they lay naked but reverently arranged in the cold storage. Except that, since the ship’s power was down, there was nothing to keep the cold storage cold. From nearby areas it was possible to smell putrefying meat of all sorts as the domain of the chief steward and the chief cook slowly went rancid and rotted away. The bodies were beginning to bloat quite badly but it was still possible to see that three of the women had been young and one had been middle-aged. One child had been a girl of about ten years and the other a baby. Without a close examination it was impossible to be sure, but it looked as though they had all been raped. In spite of the obvious care which had been taken to clean them before laying them out, there were certain signs which could not be overlooked, for the acts seemed to have been brutal — and repeated. There was no doubt that they had all been murdered: their throats were cut. The three younger women had been subjected to further mutilation — hopefully after death — and various pieces of them were missing.

  Huuk looked down on them, his mouth a thin line. He was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this; a very bad feeling indeed. His information had described a drifting derelict, ripe for piracy, heading into his waters; it had made no mention of corpses, and here were eight already. At least these six were innocent of the gaping wounds such as bullets from a .44 Magnum might make.

  His radio hissed. ‘Tuan!’

  *

  In the library on the boat deck immediately beneath the bridge were twenty more. They lay frozen in a disgusting shambles of blood and books, viscera and videotapes, seemingly covered in a soiled snowdrift of shredded paper. There had been, it seemed at first, no organised executions here — they had all been crowded in among the bookshelves and then hosed with automatic fire. High-velocity bullets had tumbled through jumping, writhing, spurting bodies and then torn through the volumes around the walls making everything explode as though tiny grenades had been detonated within. Bullets had ricocheted off the iron-hearted ceiling, bringing down showers of broken glass from the light fittings. Bones had shattered as the bullets passed, starting out through already cooling flesh; plastic had shattered, spewing long loops of brown. Everywhere was splattered with great gouts of blood. In each body had been eight pints of bright red liquid. In each body there had been a pint or so of urine. In each body there had also been at least a pint of faecal matter, made liquid in most cases by shock and terror. Careful observation made clear what a first glance might have missed, that most of these people were wearing only light sleeping attire. Certainly very few were clad in anything substantial enough to soak up or contain any of the various liquids.

  On the floor of the library, therefore, in amongst the wreckage of books and videotapes and half floating bodies, there lay nearly thirty gallons of liquid, most of it still fluid. For some reason best known to the naval architect who had designed the Sulu Queen, even the internal doors on the upper-deck corridors had sills as though they were bulkhead doors opening to the outer weather deck. In this instance that was fortunate. There was nearly a foot-deep of stinking liquid on the library floor which otherwise would have flooded down the alleyways and com
panionways — and out through the scuppers or down to the bilge.

  Huuk stood outside the door with the toes of his Reeboks pressed up against the sill looking in across the still sea of blood and body fluid at the corpses frozen like the companions of Captain Scott at the South Pole. Able and experienced commander though he was, it proved difficult for him to remain in control faced with this horror. Nevertheless, there was worse to come. As his vision cleared, he began to make out one or two larger craters amongst the smaller bullet wounds. He had been wrong. The .44 Magnum had been at work in here after all. He raised his right foot, preparing to sacrifice his Reeboks by wading in for an even closer look, but his Motorola stopped him.

  ‘Tuan!’ whispered his radio, and he knew at once from the sound of the voice that there was something even more terrible to see.

  *

  The rest of Sulu Queen’s crew were on the bridge but these men had not only been shot. Huuk’s wise eyes swept over the carnage allowing his mind to reconstruct what must have happened. What must have happened not just here but everywhere aboard.

  At least one man who had done this must have been amongst the crew already. There was no sign of anyone having come clandestinely aboard, though the corpses of the Vietnamese gave him cause to wonder. Whoever had done this, for whatever reason, there had been no attempt to take the crew captive, no thought, apparently, of holding officers or men while searches were made and questions asked. There had simply been a concerted, lethal attack whose objective had been to get rid of everyone aboard as swiftly as possible. An attack whose technique had varied only between frenzied assault, callous mass murder and cold execution.

  And, seemingly, it had all started here, on the bridge, in a silent rush. At least one man, armed with a pistol and a panga, had come silently onto the bridge. He had begun with the watch officer and he had used the panga in order to maintain silence and surprise. The first blow had opened the back of the man’s head and must have knocked him out but it may not have killed him for the frenzied chopping must have continued as he rolled onto his side, pulling himself into a foetal position, trying in vain to escape from the blade which was hacking through his chest and torso like an axe. At some time, probably later, to make assurance doubly sure, someone had put a pistol to his ear and pulled the trigger. That was probably why there was so much brain matter sprayed out across the floor behind him — with the clean outline of a pair of footprints in it. The steersman had been next, in all probability dispatched while the watch officer was dying. One blow had been enough for the steersman. A lateral one across the back of the neck. Now his body lay where it had fallen on the deck beneath the tiny helm and his head stood on the shelf above it, nose against the clearview, wide eyes keeping eternal watch forward down the deck.

  The dress of the corpses in the library had already told Huuk that this brutal attack must have happened in the middle of the night. Last night? The night before? There was no way of telling at the moment. Even so, in the middle of the night, there had been yet another man out on the bridge wing. On seeing or suspecting the attack, he had rushed in and actually caught hold of the murderer. There had obviously been a brief wrestling match but it was onesided and had come to an inevitable end. The murderer had been carrying a heavy panga and a gun. He had blown a hole in the unfortunate officer’s side. The entry wound was black-ringed with powder bum and the exit wound showed where a rib had been torn wide and a kidney blown free. The shock of impact had thrown the officer back into the watchkeeper’s chair by the bridge wing door and here he had tried unavailingly to protect his head and shoulders with his forearms from the panga. One hand lay on the floor, severed. It was the left and there was a pale band on the clean-cut flesh of the wrist where a watch should have been. But there was no watch. The left arm itself now hung down as though reaching to retrieve the hand. The right arm lay curled within the lap, a mass of chopped flesh and white splintered bone. The thorax, chest and shoulders were in the same state. Huuk found himself hoping with unusual piety that the victim had been unconscious at the very least before the brutal attack had finished.

  And yet here too, to make assurance doubly sure, some time after death, judging from the footprints in the blood beside the left hand on the deck, a heavy-calibre handgun — the .44 Magnum, he was sure — had been pressed to the dead man’s left breast and it had done to his heart what it had done to the watch officer’s brain.

  Perhaps to keep him a little distant from these atrocities, Huuk’s mind was still calculating — recreating the probable sequence of events. With the bridge taken, the ship was at the mercy of the madman with the gun and the panga. It would have been easy enough to surprise the rest of those aboard. Anyone who resisted would be tied up. The rest would be put in the library. The bound men were executed as soon as everyone was secure. And finally, those in the library were simply hosed with automatic fire. They would have stood no chance. Huuk had detected no sign of a concerted rush among the pyjama’d bodies but even had someone tried to get to the man at the door, any kind of automatic weapon, from the AK74 onwards, would have been pumping bullets into the confined space at such a rate that they would simply have been chopped down, blown backwards, destroyed with all the rest.

  No, concluded Huuk, turning away and beginning to prowl back down the corridor towards the companionway. One man could easily have achieved all this. Then it occurred to him to wonder why he was thinking in terms of one man in the first place.

  Because, he realised, he was convinced there was still one man alive aboard. One man who was moving from place to place concealed, silent as a ghost, coldly observing Huuk and his men, watching and waiting for his chance to act. The man with the .44 Magnum. Perhaps the man who had done all this. Huuk’s hair stirred at the thought and the hot, fetid air suddenly seemed to contain chilly little drafts.

  No one else seemed to suspect the presence of the mysterious observer, but Huuk was not concerned with what his men could or could not sense. That was why he was in command. A series of monosyllabic orders spat into his radio caused his teams to fan out and change the pattern of their search. Within moments they were all spread like beaters at a hunt, driving their quarry to the hunter, and Huuk himself was like a spider at the centre of the web of their careful movements. Or rather, not quite at the centre of the web; not here, not yet. Silent as a hunting tiger, he began to pace down the companionway. The only sounds he made were the whisper of his flak jacket against the painted panels of the walls and the occasional unavoidable squeak of his moulded Reebok soles upon the stair. He knew where the stranger would be. He had made the men guarding the black boxes join the other teams and he knew the silent watcher would be tempted to them. No matter how well armed, how calculatingly sane or how foamingly mad, the watcher would be tempted to check out the boxes.

  Huuk’s mouth stretched unconsciously wide as though he was screaming. His jaws ached but he didn’t notice. He concentrated on moving with absolute silence, breathing through the gape of his throat with utter voicelessness. He was a hunting cat. He was a soundless spectre. He was a shadow with a gun.

  Huuk swung round the corner of the companionway leading down from the lower bridge deck where the two dead crewmen lay, swinging the squat barrel of his big black gun into position as he moved. And there, crouching over the boxes, was the apparition he had been hunting. Huuk got the impression of a tall, thin body dressed in white overalls smeared with blood. Shod with blood and red to the knees. A burning glance from wild bloodshot eyes. A flash of movement in almost superhuman speed of reaction. A big square automatic coming up. Light grey and boxy. One of the new Smith and Wessons. A .44 Magnum, just as Tse Ho had said. It was the speed that caught Huuk by surprise. He had aimed his own gun at the centre of the scene — at the centre of the twisting body. He pulled the trigger at once, jerking the weapon sideways with such force that even the massive grip of the Reeboks gave way. Huuk slipped down on one knee as the gun bellowed. Like the hardened professional he was, Hu
uk did not blink in spite of all the sound and movement and so he saw the tall, blood-spattered figure flip backwards as the bullet took him not in the chest but on the temple. The wild figure spun away as the brutal impact added to his own twisting movement and as Huuk rolled clumsily down the half-flight of steps to land jarringly beside his precious boxes, the last living crewman of the Sulu Queen flew backwards down the next companionway, crashing away into the engineering sections.

  Huuk was at the fallen man’s side in seconds, thrusting his fingers under the angle of his jaw, feeling for a pulse. As he did so, he silently cursed his luck. The anti-personnel round should have hit the man in the chest, dropping him instantly but relatively safely. Instead the squat rubber bullet had hit him in the head doing heaven alone knew what damage. And this fall down two flights of stairs could all too easily have broken his neck or his back. After a frenzied search, however, Huuk found enough to satisfy him that the unconscious man was alive and so he called his men back and went on to the next stage of the carefully-prepared operation.

  He pulled the Motorola from the shoulder of his flak jacket and thumbed the open channel. ‘This is Captain Huuk here,’ he said. ‘I am on board the motor vessel Sulu Queen, currently adrift and without power in Hong Kong territorial waters.’

  He paused, but there was no reply. ‘I have one man down and thirty people dead,’ he continued, for he knew there were people monitoring his call. People in Prince of Wales building, in HMS Tamar on Stonecutter’s Island and in RAF Sek Kong at the very least. He gave the ship’s precise co-ordinates, and ordered, ‘Send in the choppers at once.’