The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘ … Chinese coastguard cutters still in position …’

  ‘ … Cutters not responding …’

  ‘Come in, Chinese coastguard. You are in Hong Kong waters …’

  ‘ … I have to inform you that you are in Crown Colony jurisdiction. Please reply or we will be forced to board you, over.’

  ‘Last container being winched into place …’

  ‘ … Men in uniform coming off the freighter now, sir …’

  ‘ … First cutter pulling away now, sir …’

  ‘Chinese coastguard cutter, heave to, please. I have to inform you that you are under arrest …’

  ‘Second cutter pulling away now, sir …’

  Then a familiar voice, tough and decisive. ‘This is Commander Lee. All Crown Colony vessels pursue Chinese coastguard cutters. I say again, all Crown Colony vessels pursue Chinese coastguard cutters. These vessels must not be allowed to escape!’

  The group of stunned listeners on the sampan looked away to the right as the arrowhead of official vessels swung away to the starboard and began to pursue the vanishing Chinese boats. And, dead ahead, the good ship Seram Queen lay dead in the water. Dead and, to all intents and purposes, deserted.

  They were all out on the forecastle by the time the sampan came in under the high counter of the quiet ship and began to nose in towards the lowered accommodation ladder, gently pushing its way through the first of the floating corpses as it went. It was lucky that the sampan was substantial and the accommodation ladder was fully extended, for the water was heaving. It would not have taken the sharks long to find the bodies of the stricken ship’s crew even had they not been chopped about by the blades of the fleeing cutters’ propellers. The presence of the boats and the activity going on around them had kept the ravening fish away until a few minutes ago and there were no large numbers yet and nothing like a feeding frenzy so far — but the water was clearly a lethally dangerous place to be and everybody aboard the sampan was well aware that they would have to be extremely careful how they moved.

  ‘Had we better do one full circle before we go aboard, just to scout things out?’ asked Wally, harking back to his long-past Navy days.

  His answer came in the sound of a single shot from high above. They all looked up as though their heads were moved by a single impulse. And as they did so, the port side of the sampan slid up against the platform at the bottom of the accommodation ladder. Twelvetoes leaned down into the long cabin and spat an order. At once the forecastle of the long boat was full of his soldiers. They held the boat in place as the first team of five went over and up, moving like a jungle patrol with swift, silent, shadowy liquidity, forming overlapping pairs and vanishing onto the deck. Another order was called, another patrol vanished upwards. ‘We go next,’ said Twelvetoes. ‘They take the point but we lead the main attack. We will not rush along the deck, however. We will form up at the head of the accommodation ladder until we are joined by the other two contingents, and wait for each wu to report. We will not proceed without intelligence.’

  ‘That sounds sensible to me,’ said Tom.

  ‘Like hell it does,’ said Andrew. ‘It sounds like that man is getting ready to go to war. We’re all going to get arrested. If we’re lucky enough to survive until the police get back.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ said Wally. ‘You want to live for ever?’

  Andrew thought about all the things he wanted to say to — and do with — Maggie DaSilva. ‘Yes,’ he said feelingly. ‘Yes, I bloody well do!’

  But this conversation was being continued as they all hurried down the length of the sampan and by the time Andrew came to his heartfelt conclusion, he was stepping across onto the platform at the foot of the accommodation ladder.

  Then, in silence, they all ran up the ladder and tumbled over onto the deck in a group, except that Richard and Twelvetoes somehow seemed to be in the lead. Andrew and Wally followed, and Tom came up behind them. Although Tom was no military strategist and had no idea he was listening to the precepts of Sun Tsu, Twelvetoes’ words had made it sound as though things would be well-organised and relatively safe up here. And one look at what was happening in the water beside the ship had put the psychologist off any ideas of staying below.

  The deck was littered. The Chinese coastguard had not been too particular about the way in which they unloaded the containers and, although some had been dumped over the side, others had been dropped onto the deck, leaving a jumbled terrain of smashed wood and wildly spewed contents.

  The command team ran forward half a dozen steps into the shelter of a half-container with a jagged top. Then, while the others crouched hard against the reassuring solidity of the wooden wall, Richard and Twelvetoes looked between the pointed crenellations as though over a castle wall. All the way up the length of the deck there was a mess of ruined, burst containers — plenty of cover. But, what was cover for them was also cover for their enemies.

  As they watched, they saw the ten Triad soldiers working their way swiftly up towards the bridge — a series of shadowy movements, no more — surveying the terrain as they went.

  ‘If it is clear between here and the bridge then we will move forward and re-form in the A-deck corridor,’ said Twelvetoes gently.

  ‘We’re not likely to be dealing with a well-organised force,’ agreed Richard, ‘but it wouldn’t take much of a general to let your first wu past and then blast us from the upper decks of the bridge when we begin to follow them up the deck.’

  ‘In difficult ground, we will press on. It is conceivable but I would not base my calculations upon such a remote possibility.’

  As he finished speaking, there came a brief buzzing sound and from the pocket of his black tunic the old man pulled a tiny walkie-talkie. He pressed it to his ear. There was a gabble of sound. ‘We go,’ he said at once.

  Side by side, with two more groups of five running beside and behind them, the group of men went up the deck. Breathlessly, they jumped in through the open door into the A-deck corridor. Immediately in front of them the two teams of five were waiting, keeping the area safe until they arrived. At the instant of their arrival, the two forward teams were off again. ‘I’d send one team at least aft,’ said Richard, his voice low. ‘If there are many pirates aboard, they’ll be grouping on the poop.’

  No sooner had he stopped speaking than Twelvetoes gestured and one of the two remaining teams of five vanished to check Richard’s suggestion. No sooner had they gone, however, than a shot rang out just above their heads. It was followed by a loud, wavering scream which was abruptly terminated by a second shot.

  ‘We have contact,’ said Richard. He swung round. ‘Right, you three. It’s make up your mind time. I’m going up there. I have to find Robin if she’s aboard and this is the best place to start looking. Twelvetoes is a good general. He will check ahead and progress from citadel to citadel. It should be as safe a way of getting around this ship as there is. You can come with me or stay with him and his staff here.’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ said Tom at once.

  ‘Me too,’ said Andrew.

  ‘Very wise. Wally?’

  ‘I’m with you, Richard.’ The old man cocked the Smith & Wesson to show that he meant business.

  ‘Right,’ said Richard. ‘Got a spare walkie-talkie, Twelvetoes?’

  Twelvetoes gestured at the leader of the last five-man unit and the young man handed over his walkie-talkie without question. As Richard took it, he realised with a slight shock that the young warrior was not a man at all but a woman, little more than a girl.

  Richard checked the tiny, state-of-the-art instrument and slipped it in his breast pocket. At no time did it strike him as incongruous that he was embarking on what was to all intents and purposes a guerrilla war dressed in the white shirt, paisley tie, dark pinstripe suit and suede shoes purchased by Robin in Cat Street market for his court appearance. He checked that the boxy grey Smith & Wesson automatic he was carrying was cocked. He patted his left-hand pocket like
a man checking his keys before leaving the house. But it was not keys that he was interested in, it was spare magazines. ‘Do you remember how to do this?’ he asked Wally quietly.

  ‘Navy days seem a long way away now but I trained with Special Forces for Korea,’ admitted Wally. ‘Standard high and low?’

  ‘I’ll go high and I’ll go first.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  The conversation had hardly risen above a monotone and was over within seconds but when the two men vanished into the stairwell moving upwards, they left behind a telling effect.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ muttered Andrew. ‘Maybe we’d have been safer with those two.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Tom feelingly. ‘No, I think not.’

  *

  Robin had seen the Chinese coastguards load the containers onto their boats with increasingly frenetic haste. In spite of the heat, which was giving her the mother and father of all headaches, she had seen the chevron of official-looking boats come speeding over the horizon and she’d seen them peel away like a squadron of fighters in pursuit of the fleeing, container-laden cutters. She had seen the long black sampan come nosing through the carnage in the water but had not recognised it as the one which had taken her out to Sulu Queen all those weeks back. Frankly, she had not liked the look of it, and this jaundiced first impression had been compounded by the fact that, no sooner had it come nosing under the flare of the forecastle head than a pirate had rushed wildly across the deck below her and started to try and climb up the radio mast.

  At first, when the top of his head, shaded with a bright headcloth, had appeared at the bottom of the ladder, she had been stricken with indecision. He did not seem to know she was there. He was simply climbing up to hide, the same as she herself had done. But then, by sheer good luck from her point of view and bad luck from his, he had looked up. Their eyes had met. Twisted by surprise, anger, some terrifyingly powerful emotion, he had snarled at her. Actually snarled, like a fierce animal. She had shot him without a second thought then, sending a bullet through the red dot on the upper slope of his chest to knock him down and away like a fly being swatted. Her only real regret was that the body lying immediately below her on the deck gave her position away to anyone who wanted to do a little thinking. But thought was a commodity in short supply aboard the Seram Queen, she thought bitterly.

  She saw a surge of movement up over the edge of the distant main deck, then a dark ripple of movement along its littered length. Then she stopped paying attention, for a series of much closer sounds began. She wondered whether it was worth the risk to climb down from her safe haven and move the body away. But that lack of thought apparently saved her from further molestation for the moment. A small group of men, apparently friends of the deceased, came scurrying across the green deck below her and, finding him stretched out there, made quite a pantomime of looking for the source of the shot. Right and left then fore and aft they looked, but none of them looked upwards. Then, a couple of decks further below, there came a shot and a heartrending scream followed by another shot. The little group of pirates jabbered excitedly to each other and then fled away across the deck again, heading down into the bridgehouse. More in order to ease the unutterable tension of her neck and shoulder muscles, Robin sat back and looked around. So it was that she saw the Chinese coastguard cutters surging away towards the northern horizon with the three white Crown Colony cutters close in their wake. And she saw that the blue-sided police launch had turned away from the chase and was heading back towards the Seram Queen.

  *

  Richard and Wally came across the first corpse in the middle of the B-deck corridor. It was the corpse of a Chinese coastguard, dressed in white uniform, complete with starched shorts. He had been shot messily through the belly, just above the groin, and neatly through the heart. Whispers of movement all around them told of black-clad figures searching the wrecked rooms and clearing the decks one by one going up, so that Twelvetoes and his command centre could move upwards one step at a time without fearing attack, if they chose to. But Richard particularly wanted to proceed a little more quickly than that, no matter about the increased risk. He had a private mission and would not be satisfied until it was fulfilled in one way or another. The two men danced past the dead Chinese and whirled into the next companionway, vanishing upwards like wraiths, Richard going high and Wally going low at every turn.

  Richard and Robin often teased each other that they were psychically linked. They would start conversations together, pick up each other’s meanings halfway through phrases. On at least one occasion, only the knowledge that if one died they both would die had kept the pair of them alive. But if they had really shared any kind of psychic link, Richard would have picked up the lingering warnings that Robin had left on C deck, knowing as she did that the C-deck door out onto the companionway and the rear deck beside the funnel was the pirates’ favourite method of ingress and egress. As it was, Richard picked up no warnings at all as he and Wally whirled round the corner, high and low, scanning the corridor. It was all quiet. They moved, dancing out into the corridor itself and preparing to ran on up towards the navigation bridge. Just as they did so, in that moment while both of their guns were pointing up the stairwell towards the next landing, the door at the end of the corridor burst open and half a dozen pirates spilled in. Both men spun round, their guns levelled. There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. Neither Richard nor Wally wanted to start a gunfight and the pirates in all probability could not believe that they were confronted by a couple of men dressed in dark suits, as though on their way to a funeral. But the hesitation lasted only a split second and then the pirate nearest the back, protected by the bodies of his crew mates, shot first. His bullet went wide and sang away down the corridor, ricocheting off the steel walls, but the sound of the shot was enough and the ricochet was lost in the hail of fire which followed. Richard, going high, was half in the stairwell with his left shoulder behind the steel wall. Wally was half a body’s width in front of him so that Richard’s right side was behind his old friend’s left. Richard shot and shot and shot over Wally’s shoulder, not really picking his targets, and certainly not trying for the double-tap he had been taught in the Gulf, but emptying his magazine into the mass of enemies at head height, blasting them backwards as hard as he could, trying to give them no real opportunity to reply.

  Wally, too, was firing as fast as he could but the old revolver was a very different weapon to Richard’s automatic and he found it hard to get the double action flowing smoothly. There was a great deal of shouting and screaming going on here, he thought, and he hoped he wasn’t doing any of it himself. And then there came the most God-awful pain in his side and he found himself sitting down suddenly. He couldn’t focus his eyes and his gun grew terribly heavy. Richard stepped over and past him, the remorseless hammering of his pistol never letting up as he walked towards the men crouching — no, lying — at the door. At least the screaming seemed to be dying down, thought Wally; that was something to be thankful for.

  Then there was silence, though Wally still had the strangest ringing in his ears. A sort of hissing, whistling ringing. And he couldn’t catch his breath because of the pain in his side. Richard loomed over him suddenly and he realised he must have slipped from sitting to lying without noticing the change in position. God, his side hurt. And he knew exactly why, of course. He had always feared it and now it had happened. How ironic, he thought. ‘Sorry, old man,’ he said. ‘My bloody appendix has exploded. Always knew it would. No use to you any more, I’m afraid. No use at all.’

  Richard looked down into the great ragged wound left by the makeshift dum-dum round fired by the dead pirate. He couldn’t even see a way to staunch the blood hissing out onto the floor because the wound was so enormous. That’s all right,’ he said gently. ‘Just you wait here. Twelvetoes’ people will be up to check us out in a moment. You’ll get sorted out then.’

  He had hardly finished speaking before they arrived in
a silent rush. Five of them all at once. Calm-eyed, intense, terrifyingly efficient. Armed to the teeth. All girls. Richard hadn’t realised that they were all girls. Wally pulled convulsively at his sleeve. ‘I say, if I don’t make it to hospital this time, just tell the old girl that I love her, would you? And the boy. Mustn’t forget the boy.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Richard automatically, then he opened his lips to ask a question, but as he did so he saw the light die in Wally’s eyes and he knew he was too late, and he didn’t know which old girl Wally was talking about.

  Richard took a deep breath, breathing in until his ribs felt as though they were going to burst apart. ‘Do any of you speak English?’ he asked the girls, only just managing to keep his voice under control.

  ‘We all do,’ said one of them so quietly he had to strain to hear.

  ‘Are you the leader?’ He dropped his voice to echo her tone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you spare me one of your team? I need another partner.’

  The calm eyes regarded him from under the deep lids and the high black arches of the eyebrows rose just the tiniest of fractions.

  ‘You know where you’re going, Captain?’ she asked. He was asking to borrow one of her soldiers — it was a reasonable question.

  ‘I’m going up,’ he answered. ‘You and the others are checking deck by deck, I know, so if my wife is in any of the rooms in the bridgehouse you will find her and you will tell Twelvetoes and he will tell me. But I need to go first into the places you might not be searching and I need to go quickly. Time may be limited. The only shots we have heard since we came aboard that you or I did not fire came from up there. I must go up!’

  The leader’s eyes narrowed until they were invisible behind the thickness of her black lashes. And she nodded once. ‘Su-zi,’ she said.