The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  It was a hard climb, the weather had hardly moderated, though it was difficult to imagine that it could possibly maintain this fearsome intensity for very much longer. As she ran, sure-footed, along the slippery deck, hurrying to catch up with the little group formed by the pilot and the officer sent to welcome them aboard, she nevertheless took the opportunity to glance around. She was in the lee of the containers, though she could hear the wind screaming through the gaps between them like an army of banshees. The containers seemed perfectly loaded and well secured. Certainly, she had no sense of danger as the weather crashed against their far side, trying to blow the whole lot over on top of her.

  The two men waited for her in the shelter of the port bridge wing and then they all stepped through the big door, over the high sill, into the relative tranquillity of the A-deck corridor.

  The pilot bustled on ahead, shaking off the water as though it had personally insulted him. Robin found herself walking alongside a tall, spare man of indeterminate Eastern origin. He could have originated from anywhere — Malaya, the Philippines, Vietnam; it was impossible to tell. Robin looked up into the slightly woebegone skull of his face and smiled. ‘I’m the owner,’ she said firmly. ‘And you are?’

  He could have been any crew member; beneath his black oilskin, his white overall was innocent of badges of rank or responsibility. ‘Wai Chan,’ he said. ‘Secor roffis, Sera Quee. You berra comalomg, missy see captir now.’

  ‘After you, Second Officer Chan,’ she said.

  As they waited for the lift to return from delivering the pilot to the bridge, Robin took the opportunity to ask, ‘Is the first officer better now? I understand he had malaria.’

  ‘For roffis worsa naow. Maybe send hospitar. Captir say. Afir turraroun Singapore.’

  I hope the captain’s English is better than this, thought Robin as the lift came.

  His English was; his temper was not. ‘Mrs Mariner, what are you doing aboard here uninvited?’ demanded Captain Sin as she crossed the bridgehouse towards him. He was a fat little man, hardly taller than the pilot but without Seth’s rubber-ball hardness. Captain Sin seemed soft, self-indulgent. There were big black bags under his eyes and his skin was ivory-pale. He affected a small moustache. Designed no doubt to bristle and swagger, it drooped like a black caterpillar which had crawled there and died. He gave an impression of slight oiliness and sloppy dissidence, even though he wore a well-pressed uniform of dark blue cloth and a white-crowned captain’s cap. ‘I’m sorry to hear your lading officer is so unwell,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘That will be inconvenient. It may even slow you down.’

  Sin disregarded her hand. ‘First Officer Lau has malaria. It is an old ailment. He will be up and about in time for turnaround.’

  ‘I can go down and take a look at him if you like. I have treated many cases of malaria. I have served as medical officer on several ships and my first aid certificates are all up to date. Is he on penicillin?’

  ‘I …’ Captain Sin stopped speaking. His face grew rigid as his mind all too obviously raced. Then he turned towards her and reached for her hand after all. Close to he had a personal odour compounded of sweat, cinnamon and Old Spice. His breath smelt of something minty when he spoke. ‘I would be very pleased if you would take this trouble, Mrs Mariner. We have put up a day bed in his office to save him dragging himself up and down all the time.’ He smiled his most charming smile. The gesture revealed two gold canine teeth of unusual length and brightness, separated by a range of uneven greyish incisors, and did not have the effect he clearly intended.

  Robin smiled back, disengaged her hand and glanced around the bridge one last time. Pilot Captain Ram Seth was quietly in command and they were moving towards the distant lights of the city through the still whirling heart of the storm. As she looked, entranced by the beauty of Singapore’s waterfront illumination, bright even beyond the columns of the lightning bolts, she saw the riding lights of the pilot cutter pulling away ahead, bouncing up and down as the little vessel dashed from one wave crest to the next. Poor old Edgar Tan, she thought. Another rough ride home. But the thought was an automatic one, far at the back of her mind, for her eyes were searching for something other than the distant gleam of the lights. And she found it. A computer monitor. It stood in precisely the same place as the one on Sulu Queen’s bridge and looked to be of exactly the same type. Great. She was really in business now.

  Concentrating on taking the main chance and getting the little disk into the first officer’s computer at the earliest opportunity, she ran lightly down the stairs towards his day room. But she was distracted at once by the obvious weakness of the first officer himself. He was tossing feverishly on the narrow little cot that had been set up for him. His skin was like rice paper stretched over the angular bones of his unexpectedly youthful face. So much like rice paper was his skin, in fact, that it seemed as though his very flesh was dissolving in the perspiration that was soaking him.

  Robin had not been lying to the captain when she told him of her qualifications. And she had taken in more information during her visits to this room in the Seram Queen’s sister than she had realised. One look at the man in the truckle bed sent her striding purposefully across to the cupboard which she knew would contain the first officer’s first aid box. She took out the feverscan first, not wishing to chance a thermometer stem between those chattering teeth and reluctant on such slight acquaintance to check his temperature by any other means. She had some difficulty holding the plastic strip in place, however, and needed to pin him like a wrestler in order to keep his head still. She hardly had time to pray that Captain Sin’s diagnosis of malaria was correct and she was not dealing with a plague victim here when the 40°C band lit up and she knew that no matter what was wrong with Chin Lau, she had better act fast if she was going to save him. She cursed Captain Sin, shocked that he had not sent this man back in the cutter and surprised that he had not even sent out a pan-medic warning. But the cutter was gone and there was no chance of getting a helicopter out to them in this, so she was the best hope the officer had.

  It was kill or cure to begin with — no one seemed to have kept a treatment log so she had no idea whether he had been given anything and, if so, how much or when. She gave him the biggest dose of penicillin she dared. If it damaged any of his internal organs they would have to arrange repairs later on. Then she began to work on getting his temperature down. All she had to help her there was paracetamol. But it was good enough. By the time the Seram Queen came out of the storm and into the Singapore roads, he was quietly asleep, well tucked in and running a temperature of only 102°F according to the old-fashioned thermometer in his mouth. She called the bridge on the first officer’s phone, however, and warned the captain that Chin Lau should be ashore and in hospital. The captain was courteous, but he didn’t sound all that impressed or convinced. Then Robin turned at last to the computer.

  She took the book-shaped parcel out of her pocket and placed it on the table beside the computer itself. The machine was on and the screen was in that familiar bright format. With her eyes on the picture, she pushed the disk across beneath the wrapping paper until she could pull it free. With her heart in her mouth, she popped it into drive A and pressed ENTER.

  The following files are available for general access, it told her. Please use your F keys to select and then press ENTER to proceed.

  Against F10 it said Enter company code to proceed. ‘Yes!’ she said, thumping the desk top, too excited to remember what a hard time she gave young William when he did just that.

  Within a very few moments she was back at that same point, with her breathing shallow and her mouth dry. PLEASE SAVE THIS FILE AND SEND IT DIRECTLY TO MRS MARINER.

  She placed her fingers against each other as though she was going to pray, and bent them back until her joints cracked. She took in a breath and held it while she tried to clear her mind. She separated her hands and held them as though she was a magician performing a spell. Then, with the ind
ex finger of her right hand, she pressed ENTER.

  Robin — Disregard what I wrote in my letter and said in my last phone call. I’m aboard Sulu Queen and will be taking her on the next leg of her voyage as acting captain. Poor Wally has just been taken very ill and I’m sending him ashore with the pilot. I’ll send this message on a disk ashore with him, with a handwritten note asking Anna Leung to send it on at once via the Internet directly to Helen DuFour’s desk in Heritage house. Hence the EYES ONLY message at the top. It should get to you as soon as you return from Skye. A useful insurance. By the time you get back though I should be just about pulling into Hong Kong. I’ll call from there at the earliest opportunity of course. But you must take action at once. There’s something wrong here. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. I sense it but I haven’t really had time to look properly. It was good of Charles Lee to send word that the China Queens were under police surveillance but I haven’t been able to get back in contact with him since I arrived. Apparently lines to Beijing are not quite as open as we had expected.

  In any case I want you to find some way of keeping the CLOSEST EYE POSSIBLE on Seram Queen. You may need to pull head office rank and put someone we can trust aboard her — I don’t know. You will certainly have your work cut out dealing with Captain Sin — a nasty piece of work by all accounts. I hope Anna Leung doesn’t read this before she sends it. She has a soft spot for both of her captains, she tells me! Love to the twins.

  RICHARD.

  With her mind a whirl, Robin glanced through the screen full of type then she checked the printer and pressed ESCAPE: PRINT, craning across to see that it was in fact coming out onto the roll of continuous-feed paper. It was. She sat back, to think. But even as she did so, her eye fell on the parcel destined for Brian Jordan’s daughter. The wrapping paper was dirty, bedraggled and soaking. In her hurry to take the computer disk out, she had torn a hole in the side. Tutting at her clumsiness she picked the thing up and pulled the mined wrapping paper off it. At the earliest opportunity she would get some more and re-wrap it. But as she stripped the paper away, her movements became slower and slower and her attention was pulled away from the computer towards the video case in her numb hands.

  ‘Walt Disney’s classic SINBAD,’ it said. ‘Featuring the voice of Sir Anthony Hopkins in his Oscar-nominated performance as the Sultan of Deriabar.’

  As she looked, she remembered a couple of things. She remembered that the vendor in the Cat Street market had said that these videotapes were only just beginning to arrive when she had bought that guilty present for the twins. If that were so, how had Brian Jordan got hold of a copy for his daughter at least a fortnight earlier? And she remembered the tiny strip of paper taken from the inside of the empty container in the cave on Ping Chau Island. She remembered the colour of that piece of paper perfectly. It was exactly the same, unique, fluorescent aquamarine as the cartoon-bright seascape beneath Sinbad’s sea-booted, pirated, feet.

  *

  The last survivor of the Sulu Queen was picking his way slowly through the carnage of the stricken ship’s bridgehouse. Wherever he looked there were bodies, frozen in their eternal, never-changing positions. But the survivor was aware of a disquieting tension in his mind, a tension tightened inexorably and agonisingly, by the slow passage of time. Time was a problem to him in all sorts of ways, as a matter of fact. He kept bumping into bits of it which were running backwards. That was a problem which no one else around him seemed to be having and it added to his worries. But the people around him were all caught up in different bits of time in any case. And that was more worrying still. Take that naval man for instance. Huuk. He was there, the survivor knew, with the two uniformed guards close behind his back. And yet the same man, dressed in shirt and jeans and Reebok trainers with that massive gun on his hip beneath the open flak jacket was running down the last few steps towards him! He jumped back as the phantom Huuk swung the huge gun down, colliding with the real Huuk behind him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Tom Fowler, taking a firmer grip on his arm. ‘There’s nothing there. Come on.’

  And, when the survivor looked up, he saw that Tom was right. There was nothing there now after all. He went on up the stairs, moving forward with his guide and inexorably backwards through time.

  BANG! BANG! He looked round. Not even Maggie had flinched at the overpowering concussion of those shots. They came round onto the B-deck corridor. The whole corridor was a mirror with himself fleeing along towards his own staring face! How could they not realise what was going on? His phantom self flattened his back against the far side of Brian Jordan’s office door. The survivor did the same on this side. ‘We’ve been through this, surely,’ said Andrew Balfour’s voice distantly. How could he be so unconcerned? thought the survivor. Didn’t he know what was in there? His phantom dived in through the doorway. The survivor did the same, tearing himself out of Tom’s grasp. Overlapping with that other version of himself, he dived into the day room and froze. Brian Jordan and Chas Macallan lay trussed up and face down, a combination of steam and smoke wafting delicately upwards from the gaping backs of their heads. There! Just beyond them!

  ‘Look out!’ he screamed at the top of his voice, warning Tom and the others. The noise he made seemed to jerk the two images of himself apart. The phantom image stumbled forward, falling to its knees. The other person in the cabin swung round, crouching, his yellow shirt wide across his yellow chest, his face a mask of shocked surprise and his long arm ending in that great square box of the Smith & Wesson automatic. Then the phantom self was up again, hurling forward across the bodies of his crew mates, squelching through the matter gushing out of them, reaching wildly for the gun.

  Only Tom’s firm grip upon his arm stopped the survivor hurling himself forward to help his phantom self. So the survivor stood and watched the ghostly body in the blood-spattered overalls swiftly prove more than a match for his wiry opponent. And, as he did so, the survivor realised that when the man in the yellow shirt screamed for help he was by no means the only one to do so. All around the bridgehouse rang with the most horrific cacophony of yells and screams and shots. The sound built up and up in his head until that one place, deep down in the very centre, began to hurt again. The deepest spot in all his reeling brain. The spot where Richard was imprisoned. ‘Richard hurts!’ he warned, watching the tall figure in the overall wrestle the yellow-shirted man round so that he could hold him safely, arm across a yellow throat, gun against a blackhaired temple. ‘Come along, you orang lout,’ said the phantom figure to his captive.

  ‘Orang laut,’ echoed the survivor, turning to follow his ghostly self, his hands copying the hands that he could see. Right hand gripping the gun while the left folded tight across a scrawny throat.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tom.

  ‘Andrew, did you recognise what he said?’

  ‘Sorry, Maggie,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Orang laut,’ said Huuk. ‘It’s Malay. It means a seafarer. A pirate.’

  ‘What’s he doing now?’ asked Maggie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tom.

  The whole conversation was far less real to the survivor than the sounds of slaughter going on all around him. Imitating their every movement he followed his ghostly self and the captive along the corridor. Light kept coming and going. He knew that the alternators were going down. He would have to go down there and check them later. If he survived. He had to keep light and power at all costs.

  ‘One thing at a time,’ he told himself. ‘Sort this bloody mess out first.’

  Now which one of him had said that?

  The orang laut in the yellow shirt broke away at the foot of the companionway. The phantom in the boiler suit was far too slow to stop him. The survivor watched himself swing round and mirrored the motion, bringing up the great gun, aiming down the stairwell where the man had gone and hanging there frustrated. Too late. ‘Too late,’ he said sadly. The man in the ye
llow shirt was gone.

  The Smith & Wesson dropped to his side, almost tumbled to the floor, so unbearably heavy had it become. Step by step by step they started climbing to the bridge.

  All of them, phantom and real, almost came to a dead stop at the bridge door. The survivor watched himself hesitate on the threshold, summoning up the will to proceed, then, together, bound like body and shadow, they stepped forward.

  The bridge was a mess. Wing Chau the helmsman lay in a crumpled heap on the deck but it was the impact of what he saw above which caused the survivor to stagger back. ‘The head,’ he gasped. ‘The …’

  And young Trev Latham groaned. It was the most terrible sound that the survivor had ever heard in his life. He ran to the third officer’s huddled body where it lay twitching on the deck. ‘How can he not be dead?’ yelled the survivor. He knew which one of him had said this for the phantom had been silent as he crouched over the poor boy’s hacked and mangled body, looking into the eyes which refused to die, and mindlessly tried to tend him.

  The survivor crashed onto the deck, pulling Tom down too, and his hands moved almost helplessly. Only in his own mind did the survivor see himself lay the automatic on the floor and try to put some part of the poor boy back together again.

  ‘Tom,’ said Maggie’s voice from very far away, ‘whatever he’s doing, I don’t like it. Jesus …’

  ‘Huuk,’ said Tom, from an equal distance, ‘what was here?’

  ‘One of the bodies. Third Officer Trevor Latham. Second Officer John Tong was over there by the door.’

  ‘John,’ gasped the survivor. ‘God, where’s John? It’s all right Trev,’ he said. ‘I’ll find John Tong. He studied to be a doctor. He’ll know what to … John! John!’