by Greg Hunt
It was one of those ridiculous coincidences that you never want to happen. You go on holiday to a faraway destination to have some peace and quiet and you find that your neighbours, the loud family next door, have booked into the apartment adjacent to yours for the whole week. As Archie peered into the orange survival bag and took in the shape of the other young lad with the makeshift splint put together out of a ski pole and some cord, he also absorbed the figure, seemingly also dazed and partially conscious, of Emma.
Yes, it was clear that it was Emma, although he had just stopped and stared for possibly the last half a minute, waiting for his breathing to turn to near normal and to allow his brain to catch up and think clearly.
Archie was not a swearing man but what the f*** was Emma doing out here in a survival bag, barely conscious, with these two other young lads?
He was confident that both the young lad and Emma in the survival bag would never be aware of any visitors to their picturesque stop but this other lad who had just stumbled in the thick powder snow at Archie’s feet could cause trouble.
Archie radioed the French authorities and gave them the coordinates, as best he was able, to where they currently stood. He asked for an estimated time of arrival to which he was told one hour. Good, more than enough time for his whole team to be out of the area and back on track with their mission.
He then went back to the survival bag and made sure that each of the occupants had enough water and provided some snack bars and a further warm survival blanket from his pack and told the young lad who was now being pushed back into the survival bag by Jackie and Jo to wrap up his companions and himself with this further survival blanket.
With the snackbars, water and the start of a new day, the young adults would last for another hour until the French rescue teams saved them from their plight.
Chapter 30
David returned from the striking competition feeling great. He had not known that Archie was now ringing for the Portsmouth Cathedral band.
Whilst having invited Archie to his recent birthday party on the River Wye, David had not managed to talk to Archie and catch up. If he remembered rightly, Archie had had to leave in a hurry for some urgent issue. Well, in his view, that had just been rude.
David thought back to his birthday. It had gone well. The time spent Canadian canoeing on the River Wye had meant that he could spend more quality time with many of his friends, and that included the special time spent with Emma. David had grabbed the sleekest looking Canadian canoe and insisted that Emma sit in the front. David took the helm and enjoyed the view downstream, which then just happened to include Emma. Emma and David laughed and joked and struck up good conversation, even if David did like to talk about himself.
Originally, their friendship had started playing mixed hockey and this had developed over the last full year, during their time as students. It was only recently that Archie had met Emma and that had been a shame, David thought.
David was a natural sportsman. He had been at secondary school with Archie in East Anglia and they had both decided to go onto Portsmouth University. Whilst Archie had read oceanography, David had always been interested in how things worked, how they were made up and therefore he naturally fell for engineering. He had gone straight into a hall of residence on the seafront and joined all of the sports teams that he could. Competitive and with a will to win, he continued to excel at hockey but also played football and was a strong swimmer, competing for Portsmouth in the water polo team.
Surprisingly, David had had a difficult past and he kept this under wraps. There were very few people, apart from Archie and a couple of his previous teachers, who knew that David was brought up in a foster home. Both of his parents had died in a small plane crash when he was three years old. They had been on a romantic flight to see their local area from above. The grandparents caring for David whilst his parents flew above had passed away soon after and there were no other surviving relatives. Social Services had taken over David’s life.
Passed from home to home, David had suffered. He had found it difficult to confide in adults after earlier bad experiences. Ignored or, even worse, pulled to one side by a specialist counsellor, David just wanted to be allowed to be part of real society, to be free of his bonds, to do what he wanted to do.
There had been a number of other children prepared to play football and David naturally showed enough flair and ability to always be picked by the team leaders. In his young teens, he progressed to usually being one of the team captains. He would drive his team members on until his side won, or slump his shoulders in disgust if they had performed poorly.
He was bright, and despite being passed from home to home with different adults to care for him, David was naturally able. He was awarded a scholarship at the East Anglian secondary school and David was one of the minority of boarders who lived in dormitories at the school. At the beginning, the school saved him. With the opportunity to involve himself in all the sports available, football, hockey, swimming and athletics and enjoy maths, physics and chemistry, David went from strength to strength.
When David was in the sixth form he was allowed to walk into the town centre at lunchtime. He would catch up with the latest album and single releases in the music stores, walk along the river and stroll around the main market square.
It was in the market square that David and a couple of other fellow borders would have a quick smoke, out of the sight of any of the teachers or any other students.
It was also in the market square that he was offered his first real smoke. He was unsure of what he was being offered. David took the roll up and passed over much of his daily allowance. Unfortunately, he also never looked back. Starting with cannabis, David progressed to pills and harder drugs but he was skilled at disguising his hobby. He was sure that Archie did not know and Emma would never find out.
Chapter 31
David still lived in his hall of residence, away from Emma and Archie, based in the centre of Portsmouth near to the Guildhall.
There were a couple of hundred students there, and it served their purposes well. Located close to the central shopping district and within walking distance of all the student facilities, the lecture theatres, library, student union and nightlife meant that everything was in close proximity for the students to live a full life within the very centre of the city.
This was important as most students did not have a car. There was a strong contingent of cyclists but the majority used the buses if they needed to, or, to try and keep in check their student debt, they walked everywhere it was practically possible.
David did not have a car and this had helped him to become familiar with the town centre. Portsmouth’s core had a small and dense layout, with few landscaped areas. The main green, open space was Southsea Common, which extended to the seafront itself. The only park in the city centre, comprising a small aviary and plant house, was no substitute for the East Anglian fens where David had grown up.
David regularly walked through this central park on his way to or from his engineering block. He would stop and stare at the beautiful birds caught up within their large cages. The birds were quite a sight but many of the larger, colourful specimens were separated so that they were totally on their own. David thought to himself that he often felt how these birds must; trapped in their own surroundings and unable to fly away.
He had to get away from it all, he just needed to meet the right person and then they could move to another part of the country, start afresh, anew, put the past behind them. David would then be away from other activities that had distracted him over the last couple of years, which had embedded him in a tangled web of deceit and lies.
Money was an issue. The scholarship place had been funded by the school and allowed him to come to Portsmouth University to study engineering but David had no funds of his own.
He was now seriously in debt and all of the temporary student jobs in the cafes and bars really did not attract him
. The timing of the work always required a shift in the evening when David took part in his sporting activities or went bell-ringing. Other work, such as helping out in the library or turning up to be part of identification parades at the local police station, did not last long and again did not pay very well.
David was aware that he could obtain cocaine very cheaply, as Portsmouth seemed to be a major route into the UK for the drug, and sell it onto a network of contacts both within his hall of residence and throughout the wider Portsmouth city centre community. This would pay him extremely well for minimal work and as long as he kept his head down from the authorities, he would pay his debts off in no time. This was the direction that David chose.
Chapter 32
The freighter pulled slowly away from the Suez Canal, easing itself into the Atlantic Ocean. Natalia and her brothers had finished a light salad lunch and were playing cards together in the lounge, just a couple of metres behind the bridge.
The Captain was on watch and loved Cuban Havana cigars. He was a larger than life character with a blue cravat tied loosely around his wide neck. He wore brown chinos and a strong leather belt to ensure that his trousers stayed up around his ample girth. His feet were covered with strong walking boots to ensure that he had a trusted grip on all of the decks and he was excited by his forthcoming retirement.
Captain ‘Sharkey’ was so called because he had survived a shark attack. An extremely rare incident, he had the remains of the wounds to the side of his stomach to prove it, albeit it had happened over twenty years ago.
There was only a crew of seven for the boat and they all heralded from Lima. Brought up within the city, the sailors had sought to travel the world. A surprising amount of time was spent on the freighters, with weekends off being unheard of. Their ships would only be based at ports to load and dock containers for twelve or twenty four hours. Therefore the crew’s lives were spent onboard, experiencing the monotony of keeping the ship going and relaxing by playing cards, reading and the structure of the watches.
It was on the following night after leaving the Suez Canal that the two tribal stowaways put their plan into action.
It had been the Morales brothers who had inflicted the damage on their friends. The Morales’ Spanish lady did not bother them so much. Whilst she represented a family who were resented by many of the tribal peoples, she had provided a number of the Andean villages with a selling outlet for their wares. What the tribal villagers were angry about was how the brothers had taught their own village people a physically violent lesson. The fact that much of the delivery had not reached the Morales had been out of their control.
In the early hours of the following morning, the tribesmen lured the brothers out of their cabin by pouring diesel under the door and setting fire to it. The Morales brothers, dazed and confused from being woken mid-sleep, attempted to run down the corridor outside their cabin.
The diesel had set light to the wooden door frame extremely quickly and heavy smoke was billowing along the passageway. There were few lights on outside the cabin and the brothers were unsteady on their feet.
The tribal men had located themselves further down this outside gangway and, in the middle of the night, the freighter’s exterior railing led to a dark abyss beyond. There was the hum of the freighter’s generators and the swishing sound of the ocean below. All else was quiet.
As the brothers attempted to raise the alarm by shouting that their cabin was on fire, the tribal villagers approached the two men from their rear. As if they were preparing a goat for a feast, the men muffled the cries of the Morales brothers with one hand and slit their throats with the other.
Helping each other to lift the bodies – they were still warm and twitching – the tribesmen heaved with all their strength to move them to the railing of the freighter and then pushed them over the side. There was no remorse and they hugged each other after the bodies had slipped away into the waiting waves below.
Time had been spent over the sleepless, cold days and nights preparing their life-raft, located on the other side of the ship for departure. The fire alarm rang out at last and lights started to cascade the ship in an eerie glow as the tribesmen rapidly took the cover off the smaller boat, ensured that the stolen provisions and Global Positioning System was on board, and started to operate the electronic crane.
As expected, as the bridge realised that the fire alarm was sounding across the ship, the night watchman on shift lowered the power to the turbines. The freighter would take another mile to slow down to walking pace. The tribesmen were ready to take advantage of the slowly moving freighter. The life-raft would be brought to bear on the water so that it was facing in the same direction as the freighter and adjoining the mother ship. They would then sail away, back to the South American coastline.
Unfortunately for the tribal stowaways, Captain Sharkey had quickly toured as much of the outer walkway as practically possible. He noticed that the life-raft was being removed and grappled with the weathered controls to stop it leaving his ship. One of the vertical ropes managed to snag itself in the crane mechanism so that the life-raft lurched forward. The tribal men were holding on for their lives as neither of them could swim. They were manically seeking to cut through the crane ropes and release themselves from the ties that kept the small vessel dangling beside the freighter. Ultimately, the life-raft tipped up as the bow rope split and the stern rope took the entire weight of the boat. The craft dangled vertically downward and the tribesmen were catapulted into the Atlantic, swallowed by the dark seas. The crests of the waves glowed, lit by the fire burning on the freighter.
Chapter 33
The sound of the fire alarm stirred Natalia, who was sleeping in a neighbouring cabin to her brothers. What had caused it to go off at this time of the night? Probably a fault in the system or a clumsy oaf knocking one of the fire alarm break glass buttons, she thought from the comfort of her bed.
Then the Captain was knocking on her door. “Get up, get up!” he was shouting. “This is not a drill, everyone to the foredeck!”
The foredeck was located at the front of the ship, just behind the bow. The bridge looked out over the foredeck, much of which was covered in freight containers. There was a central vacant area that also held life vests and there was a fire alarm gathering point in the event of a real alarm sounding.
The Captain and seven crew had quickly ensured their few passengers, including Natalia, were safe after the alarm had been set off.
Natalia hurried to put on her dressing gown and grabbed a warm coat and sensible shoes. She slammed the door of her cabin, and the Captain seemed to sigh and grab her at the same time, forcing her to shuffle as fast as she was able, whilst still in semi-sleep, along the exterior walkway outside of her cabin and to the foredeck. She could smell burning and could not help herself from turning her head around to see where it was coming from.
The passageway was lit up further down the deck. The cabins next to Natalia’s were engulfed in flames that were licking and curling around the edges of their doors. A four man team of the seven man crew had found fire extinguishers and a hose. They were doing their best to stop the flames from spreading any further, although they had not managed to enter the rooms where the fire was raging and acting as a furnace.
Natalia fully woke up with a start. Where were her brothers? Had they stayed playing cards into the early hours of the morning in the games room located behind the bridge? Or had they returned to their cabins? She had to find out as she had just witnessed their cabin engulfed in flame and smoke.
She looked at the Captain and started to ask the question. Her eyes were huge and started to fill with tears. The Captain hugged her and said that he had to see to his men and put the fire out. Otherwise they were all in danger and might have to abandon the ship.
Natalia was frantic. The misty glow of the lights that were pouring off the freighter outlined her shadow. She was determined to hold it together. She was strong. She was goin
g to keep the business running and growing. This consignment was to reach the UK safe and well and make the Morales family a huge amount of money. She was to ensure that the supply routes and distribution network were as the family would want, and nothing would stop her from that.
Chapter 34
Whilst thinking about his young wife and teenage daughter, he had allowed himself a picture of them together by his main computer in his den of electronics, both the Woodcutter’s pager and his computer flashed their warning lights.
For both his computer and pager to be showing their alarm signals was extremely concerning and had not happened before. Before examining the information available to him, he concluded that there had to be a breakdown of security and if so, the whole operation was threatened.
Inputting the specific passwords to see exactly what the detail confirmed to him, he was quickly aware that the main freighter consignment currently crossing the Atlantic had slowed down and there was a fire on board. There was no further information.
The whole operation was potentially in jeopardy. He stared hard at the photograph of his family. It did not bear thinking of what might happen to his wife and soon to be grown up child, if the distribution of the precious cargo of The Islander did not go according to plan. This boat was the big one, and was destined to make them all their fortunes. It was his duty to report the position to his controllers and see what action they desired to take.
Having been overseeing the comings and goings of the different supply ships for a number of months, the Woodcutter was nervous. There had been no issues until the Alana Princess check, and now the main freighter was under threat. He did not believe in coincidences or unexpected surprises, and nor did his bosses.
It, therefore, was not a surprise when the Woodcutter received a coded response seven minutes after he had provided his warning update to his controllers. It was what he had dreaded. The signal came through as Code Red.