The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ yelled Tom.

  Richard told him.

  ‘You must be mad!’ said the psychologist.

  ‘You should know. Do you want to come?’

  ‘Think, man! How can you hope to pull this off? You’re just out of custody. You have no money, no identification. No friends, no influence. You haven’t even got a proper memory. Where will you go? What will you do?’

  ‘Tamar first. That’s where Huuk and Lee will be going. Not the new one out on Stonecutter’s Island, the dock down by the Prince of Wales’s building. They might give me a lift. They owe me a favour or two, I think.’

  ‘They won’t. You know it!’

  ‘You never know till you ask. Coming?’ Richard was holding open the Aston’s passenger door. He was sparking with frenetic energy and the psychologist was suddenly put in mind of someone leaping from brain damage to complete nervous breakdown by way of wild hyperactivity. It was all too common in his experience. The sudden access of partial memory making the patient bum all too brightly, like a bulb about to fuse. ‘Come on!’ bellowed Richard. The psychologist climbed aboard. Richard folded himself into the front seat and Andrew hit the starter.

  Once they were free of the traffic round the courthouse, they had a relatively clear run down the hill and they were pulling in beside the Prince of Wales’s building within twenty minutes. As Richard had surmised, Huuk’s powerful-looking coastguard cutter was sitting at the bottom of the steps and as the three men hurried across the road, the two officers clambered aboard her. Richard skidded to a halt at the top of the steps. Huuk looked upwards and their eyes met. The white-uniformed figure shook his head and yelled an order. The powerful boat surged forward and out into the open waterway. Richard slapped his open hand against the bollard at the top of the steps and turned, racked by frustration, momentarily at a loss. Up on the roadway behind, a taxi pulled up and a tall, white-haired figure pulled himself out of the back. Hurrying down the side of the Prince of Wales’s building, the figure came close to a run. ‘What do you want here, Wally?’ called Richard as he recognised the anxious face of his erstwhile friend.

  ‘Richard,’ the old captain panted, ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea, I swear. My God, I …’ He came up beside Richard, his open face marked by sorrow and his open hand held out.

  After a moment, Richard took the open hand. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Wally. You were only trying for a little happiness. Phyl’s going to have your guts for garters, though.’

  ‘How can you be remembering all this?’ called Tom, overcome by the knowledge his patient was suddenly displaying.

  ‘God knows,’ answered Richard. ‘What I still don’t know, however, is just how the hell we’re going to get out to the Seram Queen!’

  But even as he spoke, the answer came nosing up to the bottom of the steps in the shape of a long, black sampan. The door at the back of the low, coffin-shaped house amidships opened and Richard found himself looking into the calm, still face of another old friend. ‘Going my way, Twelvetoes?’ he asked.

  ‘I have an account to settle with the men on the Seram Queen,’ said Twelvetoes quietly. ‘And I believe you do too, old friend.’

  ‘Coming?’ Richard asked the others, throwing the question over his shoulder as he sprang into action; but Andrew and Tom held back. ‘Fair enough,’ snapped Richard, acting as though all the slow hesitancy which had marked his demeanour during the last weeks had just invested more and more vigour to be held against this moment.

  Halfway down the steps, he turned and looked up again. ‘Wally? You have some scores to settle out here too.’

  Wally nodded once and was in motion.

  ‘Aw, what the hell,’ said Andrew. ‘It can’t be any worse than rugger.’

  Halfway down the steps he turned. ‘If I don’t get back,’ he said theatrically to Tom, ‘tell Maggie I died with her name on my lips.’

  ‘Tell her yourself,’ said the psychologist, and followed the solicitor and his patient down onto the sinister-looking boat.

  The sampan looked to be old and battered but its lines were lean and aquadynamic. What seemed to be a venerable, lethargic transport was actually anything but. The sides were high and the keel narrow and deep. There was a deep step down into the body of the boat and a right turn into another deep step down past a tiny but hyper-efficient wheelhouse packed with enough instrumentation to guide a destroyer into battle. Beyond the wheelhouse, down in the depths of the coffin-like cabin, was a long open space with benches on either hand and high, wide ports which let in lots of light.

  As soon as the four Englishmen had stepped aboard, the vessel surged forward with a thoroughly deceptive access of naked power. ‘Good God!’ said Andrew, as the full impact of the acceleration hit his system. ‘This thing pulls away like my Aston. What do you think, Tom?’

  ‘I think I ought to make an appointment to examine the pair of us. This is utter lunacy,’ he said bitterly as he followed the rest of them down past the wheelhouse into the depths of the cabin.

  But no one was paying any attention to him. Twelvetoes and Richard were crouching over a long box which stood open along the middle of the narrow cabin, made narrower by the fact that a round dozen of fiercely-armed young men and women were seated down each side with their knees pointing inwards. Richard glanced up from what he and Twelvetoes were doing. ‘Want a gun, Wally?’

  ‘Got a Webley? That’s about my speed.’

  ‘Not by the look of it. Smith and Wesson revolver any good?’

  ‘Richard,’ said Andrew urgently. ‘This is all terribly illegal. If you don’t get killed, you really are running the risk of ending up back in prison. And not in any cushy hospital room this time, either. Stanley, Shek Pik or even Sieu Lam. Bad news. You don’t want to think about it, believe me.’

  Richard looked up at him, blue eyes dazzling. ‘It’s like this, you see, Andrew. My wife Robin is on the Seram Queen. You’ve met her. You know what she’s like. I still only remember bits and pieces about the life we had before I went on the Sulu Queen but since I met her six weeks ago, I’ve fallen in love with her all over again. I know that she will have found a way of staying alive if there was a way to be found. She’ll probably be waiting and hoping for help. And I’m going to help her the best way I can no matter what. I won’t hang about and I won’t hesitate. I won’t go in unarmed and I don’t care who I have to kill. I’m going in to get her and I’m going to bring her out, if I can, no matter what it costs. Do you understand that?’

  As a matter of fact, Andrew had understood relatively little, up to now. But now he understood all too well. And what he understood was this: he was trapped aboard a high-powered, probably unregistered sampan with a small army of Triad soldiers, a considerable and certainly illegal arsenal, a senior Triad man and a lunatic. And the only person he could ask for help was caressing a Smith & Wesson revolver and looking fiercely ahead across the water. Suddenly the bravado of his last words to Tom struck him like a lead balloon coming down on his head as he realised that, with or without Maggie’s name on his lips, he might well die here. Really and genuinely die here. Perhaps he should take a gun after all, just to be on the safe side.

  Andrew ended up with a gun not dissimilar to Robin’s, equipped with a red-dot laser sight. It was the best gun Twelvetoes could supply for a man who had never shot. Then, after he had accepted it, Andrew followed Richard up out of the doors at the front of the long cabin and up onto a pointed forecastle head. Here, with the air thudding past them and the spray sheeting up on either hand as the lean vessel powered forwards at the better part of thirty knots, Andrew spent the better part of half an hour trying to hit bottles and cans which were thrown over the side as target practice. To begin with he missed everything, but by the time the half-hour had passed, he was hitting one in three. He was quite elated when he went back down below.

  They could not convince Tom, however. ‘I’m a doctor, for heaven’s sake, Richard! I know we don’t actua
lly take the Hippocratic oath, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to ran around slaughtering people!’

  ‘That isn’t the point,’ said Richard steadily, his eyes almost white with intensity. ‘The point is that when we get on board the Seram Queen —’

  ‘If we get aboard.’

  ‘All right, if we get aboard, then we will in all probability find a small army of men who will not think twice about killing us. All of them will be armed with pangas at the very least. Many of them will have handguns and some of them will have automatic weapons. I … I …’ but the wild certainty died. Richard had run hard up against the edge of his damaged memory.

  ‘There’s something else?’ asked Tom, overtaken by professional curiosity. ‘Something else important?’

  ‘Where do pirates get automatic weapons?’ grumbled Andrew.

  ‘From the Philippines,’ supplied Twelvetoes.

  ‘What are Filipino pirates doing this far north?’ demanded Wally, deeply offended by the unsporting nature demonstrated by Filipino pirates hunting outside their proper territory. ‘Surely …’ his voice tailed off, and he frowned.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Richard, his eyes narrow. ‘There’s a good reason for it, I just can’t remember what it is.’

  ‘You will, old friend,’ said Twelvetoes quietly.

  The sampan was raging along at near full speed but not quite at full throttle, for, as the lawyer in particular was all too well aware, it was following in the wake of a flotilla of much more official vessels. Ahead of them and on the right — ‘Starboard!’ bellowed Richard — raced an arrowhead of three white naval launches from HMS Tamar and a bluesided police cutter. ‘They’re never going to let us get involved anyway,’ said Andrew with considerable satisfaction as forty-five minutes of the wild voyage ticked by and noon came up on his watch.

  ‘That will depend upon what they are doing themselves, will it not?’ asked Twelvetoes and Andrew found himself running out of charity with the Chinese’s cryptic observations pretty quickly. But that might have been something to do with the tension he could feel cranking itself up towards terror in his breast.

  He opened his mouth to say something cutting to Twelvetoes but just as he did so, the young man in the wheelhouse leaned down into the cabin and yelled something to Twelvetoes instead. The Chinese looked across at Richard for an instant, but Richard was unaware of the calculating gaze. ‘OK,’ yelled Twelvetoes in reply and the young man disappeared again.

  ‘Are you going to stay aboard the sampan, Tom?’ Andrew asked conversationally.

  ‘I’ll plan to be wherever I think it’s safest,’ said the psychologist.

  ‘Wise move. Except that you left the safest places far behind when you got on board this boat,’ observed Andrew drily.

  ‘Must have been a rush of blood,’ admitted Tom. ‘And I wanted to be with Richard when he burnt out.’

  ‘I’m not going to bum out,’ said Richard.

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  ‘But then I bet you’re not a betting man, Tom.’

  ‘That’s true, Richard.’ Tom forced himself to keep his tone neutral, accommodating. It was a standard phase of treatment that the subject should start to experience negative thoughts towards the psychologist but Richard was going through too many standard phases in too rapid a succession for Tom’s peace of mind. Still, when you came right down to it, all he could do was watch and wait.

  ‘How much longer?’ asked Andrew, really beginning to regret his bravado now.

  ‘Not long. You should try some more target practice. One hit in three isn’t really good enough,’ said Richard.

  ‘It is if you’re going to avoid shooting at anybody.’

  ‘True.’

  On Richard’s slightly mocking monosyllable, the young man in the wheelhouse leaned down and called through to Twelvetoes in an impenetrable babble of Cantonese.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ said Twelvetoes. ‘The man says there are three boats there, the Seram Queen and two smaller ones.’

  ‘Is he sure he’s got the right ship?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Oh yes. We have been following the beam of a ship’s emergency beacon for some time now. Since noon, in fact. The beacon broadcasts Seram Queen’s call signal.’

  ‘Two other boats,’ mused Richard. ‘Big boats?’

  ‘Large cutters, perhaps,’ suggested Twelvetoes calculatingly.

  Richard’s face went blank and for a moment Tom feared that all his worst fears had come true and Richard had burned out.

  But no. ‘Cutters!’ said Richard, his voice scarcely more than a breath. ‘Coastguard cutters!’ His eyes ignited. Tom had never seen anything like it in his life. It was as though a pair of magnesium flares had gone off behind panes of deep sapphire. It was as though beams of brightness shone out of the lean, angular face. The effect was most unsettling. But that was nothing as compared with the tone of his voice. ‘Of course! That was it!’ His spread hand came up to slap his forehead with stunning force. Tom winced, but Richard did not seem to have hurt himself. That terrible, hate-filled voice grated on. ‘The pirates set us up and the coastguards all but wiped us out, then the pirates came back and finished the job. The Chinese coastguards.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Andrew. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘They have an arrangement! An agreement. The pirates send out a half-wrecked sampan full of corpses with a couple of their men apparently at death’s door in among the genuine Vietnamese. The two men shut down the radio and any other equipment they can and help the pirates aboard. The pirates go through the ship but the crew as likely as not makes a bit of a fight of it. Then next morning, bright and early, the Chinese coastguards show up and drive the pirates away. The crew comes out and the coastguards arrest them. Lock them away. Any argument and the coastguards kill them. Then the coastguards load whatever they want onto their cutters and leave the last pickings to the pirates. It was so … so … neat. We didn’t stand a chance, Wally. And when they discovered the containers weren’t carrying what they wanted, they all just went mad. Pirates, coastguards, the lot. I’ve never seen … I’ve never seen … And, God, Robin will fall for it all the way down the line. Robin will fall for it all …’ Richard’s voice faded away, and Tom realised with a visceral shock that his patient was actually remembering. Actually remembering everything which had happened on the ill-fated Sulu Queen. Facing everything he had run away from for the last seven weeks. Remembering because to do so was the only way he could hope to help his wife if she was trapped in the same situation now. It was a massive act of will, far in excess of anything Tom had ever considered possible. But, then, Tom had never actually been in love.

  Much struck by this melancholy thought, Tom went out onto the forward deck to have a word with the one other man aboard who he knew to be deeply in love: Andrew.

  As soon as the psychiatrist was gone, Richard swung round to focus his blazing glare on Twelvetoes. ‘And I think I can see where you fit into all this, too,’ he spat. His tone was cool enough to render the Chinaman’s still gaze faintly speculative.

  ‘Indeed. I said to Robin that you would be the first to see the whole pattern as soon as your memory returned.’

  That gave Richard pause. ‘You talked to Robin?’

  ‘Twice. And to Miss Patel. I offered such help as I could and such information as I knew. As much as was safe.’

  Richard’s lips narrowed; so did his eyes until they were as deeply slitted as the Oriental’s — the bright pupils still burning behind them like the last of the sky beneath the storm clouds off Singapore in that instant before the lightning struck. ‘Do these people speak English?’

  ‘Perfectly, all of them; but you need not hesitate to talk in front of them. They are my sons and daughters.’ Richard did not even hesitate to consider whether Twelvetoes meant that literally. He plunged on, pulled by the power of his awakening reason, adding what he had heard in evidence during his trial to what he had known before Huuk had
shot him, carried away by it all like a novice astride a runaway horse. ‘It was all yours, wasn’t it? You have a Triad of your own and you concentrate on smuggling pirated goods, discs, CD Roms, software, videos. The White Powder Triad let it be known that the ghost containers were full of cocaine in order to cover the fact that it was the next shipment which would contain it. In the meantime the containers were really full of your goods. All those videos of Disney’s Sinbad; they were coming to you. You!’

  ‘And if it is true?’ whispered Twelvetoes.

  Richard hardly seemed to have heard his old friend. He plunged on, his words falling over each other, scarcely making sense at all. ‘And they took it all. They went through the containers until they found the marked ones — up on the top right out in the open — and then they went mad. They were expecting cocaine and they found Sinbad instead. Of course they went mad, But they took the containers nevertheless. And it was your shipment all along.’

  ‘I admit nothing, of course,’ said Twelvetoes more firmly. ‘But if it were true, then what?’

  ‘Then you have some scores to settle too. My God do you have some scores to settle.’

  Twelvetoes nodded once, a precise, chopping movement of the head — uncharacteristic in a man whose movements were always so fluid. ‘Hai,’ he said. ‘Then let us find the Little Mistress and settle our scores shoulder to shoulder, old friend.’

  There was a moment of silence while the two of them remained face to face, mere centimetres apart; then Richard pulled back with a bark of laughter. ‘Tell me you haven’t planned this, right from the start!’ he said. ‘As soon as you heard what had happened to your shipment and discovered what had happened to me, it all became part of your plan!’

  And Twelvetoes gave the ghost of a smile.

  The helmsman leaned in again and yelled, ‘Ngah fan!’: five minutes. Richard and Twelvetoes climbed back up into the wheelhouse, and as they did so, a gabble of conversation through the radio became audible. There were no familiar voices but the overlapping conversations were all in English and it was plain at once that they were coming from transmissions aboard the cutters and launches to starboard.