I got the starboard net out, then felt the fishing boat lose way. We were being sucked into the Santa Cristina’s sea-space, the displaced water sheering off the bigger vessel’s hull heaving beneath our keel. Seconds later, we were just where we didn’t want to be: a boat’s length behind the long ridge of the Santa Cristina’s prow and rolling violently in the glistening hump of her bow wave. If I hadn’t got immediately down on all fours and found a handhold, I’d’ve been tossed overboard. Anna gunned the engine and our prop churned the water. We edged thirty yards ahead of the Santa Cristina, while Anna fought to keep us from slipping under her bows.
I pulled the knife and looked up at the wheelhouse. She was braced over the helm, struggling to control the bucking wheel. She shouted something, I don’t know what, and I crawled over and cut the line that kept the port net furled. Maybe Haclan’s men had worked out what we were doing, because bullets now whisked and hummed through the rigging like a swarm of furious insects. I yanked the release lever on the winch and watched the net flop into the sea, then hauled myself across the deck and released the starboard net. The winches clattered as the net-lines raced out through the blocks, and the row of weights at the leading edge of the nets drew them quickly down towards deep water.
There were barely twenty yards between the two vessels when Anna swung the wheel to take us across Santa Cristina’s bows. But the fishing boat wasn’t responding to the helm any more, only to the powerful turbulence around the cargo ship’s hull. We skated chaotically towards the poised axehead of her prow, the deck shuddering beneath me. Now we’d be pulverised, sucked down into the churning brown water with the splintered remains of the fishing boat somersaulting around us.
It didn’t happen quite like that. The boat took a sudden lurch and her wheelhouse ducked beneath the looming bows. The two net-lines snaked back over the starboard rail, then slapped against the base of the wheelhouse and jammed fast. Seawater spattered from the heavy cables as their fibres torqued under the tremendous strain. The boat pitched sharply and I was slung like a rag doll into one of the stanchions that supported the gantry. We slammed against the Santa Cristina’s hull. The fishing boat shivered along her keel, then gave a long-drawn-out groan and her deck cracked open from wheelhouse to bows. The arm of the starboard outrigger popped the glass from a row of portholes as we scraped along the cargo ship’s hull. The seaward rail tipped up through forty-five degrees and a foot of water sluiced across the deck. I slid with it, dazed. . . But not so dazed that I couldn’t see how I was going to be crushed between the two boats.
Then came the sound I’d been waiting for. A clunk, muffled but immense – the Santa Cristina’s propeller fouled by the half-acre of densely knotted fishing net we’d dragged beneath her keel. Her engines died with an ugly cough. She pitched slowly into her bows and started to drift. Our engine was silent, too, and all I could hear in the vacated air was the intermittent screeching of the outrigger and the silky, slurping sound of a ton of water sliding back along the Santa Cristina’s flanks.
Even drifting, the ship could drag us under, but the implacable force of her progress had slackened and the fishing boat didn’t seem to be sinking. The gantry had been torn half off the deck, but the outrigger was still clanging against the last of the line of portholes. It was no more than a couple of yards above my head, and it was open. If I was quick, I could get aboard the Santa Cristina. I looked up for Anna, couldn’t see her. But even if she was hurt, she’d want me to find Katarina first, protect her and the other girls until help arrived.
I kicked open the hatch-bolt so the man I’d locked in the hold could escape, then stepped over to the gantry. I climbed fast, the ironwork cold and sharp in my hands. The outrigger flailed back and forth across the Santa Cristina’s hull – if any part of me got trapped between the two. . . Well, it wouldn’t be part of me for long. Shouts from above, gunshots behind me. Anna? I grabbed the frame of the porthole as the outrigger swung past, then hauled myself inside before it could swing back and take my legs off at the shins.
I rolled upright in a cramped cabin, drew the Sauer and ran for the door. A low passage outside. I made it to the forward end and started up a set of steel steps. Shouts behind me, then the crack of a handgun and my hand was stung by a bullet striking the rail. I doubled back along the passage on the deck above, kicking open doors. Half way along I heard boots on the steps. I knelt in a doorway, turned and saw the head and shoulders of a man emerging through the hatch. I fired. The bullet took him in the shoulder and he gave a cry of distress as he slumped back and slid down the steps.
I ran on to the end of the passage and arrived at a gangway that led up to a storeroom with rows of lockers and oilskins hanging from the walls. I was in the base of the superstructure at the ship’s stern, with further cabins and the bridge above me. Through a glass panel in the door at the rear, I saw a steep staircase that gave access to the upper decks, but the door itself was locked.
In the opposite wall was a pair of heavy steel doors, one of which was ajar. Beyond was an area of open deck, three men looking down over the port rail at the fishing boat lashed by her net-lines to the Santa Cristina’s hull. Unarmed – probably crew. Another two were grappling with the anchor in her bows. I ran out on deck and round to the far side of the bridge. Someone saw me, shouted.
I heard three rounds snap out and felt a hot jangle of torn flesh along my upper thigh. I stumbled, managed to keep my feet. Another steel door to my left. I flattened myself alongside it and looked back: two men, tucked in behind the loading crane, one of them raising a rifle to his shoulder. I shot at him twice, then tried the door, but whether it was locked or just stiff, I couldn’t open it without moving right out into the line of fire. I ran on, hugging the wall and trying not to let the wound in my thigh disrupt my steps. I reached the corner and took cover behind the superstructure of the bridge. I’d arrived at the rounded stern of the ship, looking out at a small area of deck ahead of me.
Dead end. No steps, no gangway. Nothing to hide behind when they came for me except a fat coil of mooring rope next to a bollard. A hatch clamped shut in the middle of the deck, but that would access a storage area, most likely separated from the main hold by a steel bulwark running right across the hull. Even fewer options than I had up here, which was saying something. . . Already there’d be men either side of the superstructure I was sheltering behind, taking their own sweet time to work their way up to the corners to my left and right. If I made my stand behind the rope and the bollard, I’d be picked off by a rifle fired from the bridge.
The wound in my thigh wasn’t disabling – yet. But already blood was slopping from my shoe. I crossed to the other side of the bridge, got low and looked round. Just one of them, hunched at the far end. The crewmen at the rail had gone. Haclan’s man hadn’t seen me, so I pulled back and took a few deep breaths. I’d deal with him first, then find a better place to take on the rest. . .
I came out fast and for a second he was startled. I fired, but the bullet clanged harmlessly off a bulkhead light by his ear. My second shot coincided with his first. I saw him drop the gun, clutch at his throat, tip forward. Nerves screeched in my ribcage and my vision went dim. The deck came up and crunched against my jaw. I humped it away and my head fell forward. Sticky hands. Redness at my feet. I’d lost more blood than I’d realised. So much red down there. Sickened, swaying. Well, you would be, out at sea. Get up. Stand.
Swaying, pitching. Me? Or the ship?
Hold onto the rail. Hold it tight. Find Anna. The fishing boat is somewhere below. Lean over the rail, focus. The freighter’s hull is a white plane, rising sheer from the shapeless sea. Lean further.
Cold not air. Dark not day.
Anna
42
The policeman reaches out to take you in his arms. He’s going to carry you down the wet steel ladder and into the police launch. I watch you recoil and my heart fills with misgivings. Is this the reaction of a traumatised girl to being reached for by a pa
ir of hairy forearms? Or of a stroppy teenager who wants to show she can descend a ladder by herself? Would you have it in you to be stroppy, after all you’ve been through? What have you been through?
The Katya I left at Grandmama’s would not have drawn back. She was trusting and eager for life. But children change so quickly at that age. I want to know if you’ve been damaged, and it’s a mother’s thought, freighted with every possible emotion: anguish, solicitude, fright, fury, vengefulness. Selfishness. I want my treasure to be just as she was when I lost her, an untarnished tribute to my disapproved-of adventure as wife and mother. Can she be?
I mean to call out your name, because I don’t think you even know your mother is sitting in the back of the police launch, heart so swollen she can hardly breathe. But when I see you, my voice isn’t there. She’s not mine any more, is what I think. She was never yours! She is Katarina Corochai. Katarina Corochai, who survived kidnapping by child traffickers. You are her mother, who rescued her. We are neither of us the same. These events which destroyed our lives we did not experience together, but apart. The apartness cannot be undone.
I expel these stupid, pointless thoughts from my wretched, restless head and lunge across the open deck to the foot of the ladder. Men lean on ropes at bow and stern, haunches braced against the tugging waves. Fenders squeak between the bouncing hulls. Seagulls sway on their thick wings and cock a greedy eye at the goings-on below. A gust of reeking sea air presses the hood of your hoodie over your face and you cannot move it aside because the descent is perilous and you have wrapped your arms around the policeman’s neck. I’ve not seen that hoodie before, where did you get it? A man on deck holds out his arm to stop me getting too close to the edge, and I surprise him by seizing it and clinging on. He wants to pull it away again, but doesn’t know how.
You’ve lost weight, Katya. Or maybe not. Pale – well, it’s daybreak at sea after a long journey at night. Last proper meal? Last successful campaign for a takeaway supper? Last evening of American sitcoms with Magda and Sofia? Last night between clean sheets with her mother to kiss her goodnight?
Your saviour’s boots clump dependably down the thickly painted rungs, your little bottom sticks out over his big arm. Don’t even think of looking at her like that, anyone, or I’ll tear your fucking eyes out. And then. . . Oh Katya, Katya, you are in my arms, and the contours of your body do still fold into the angle of my hip, your cheek finds the scoop of my neck, your hair tickles my nose. I croon consolations into your ear and my heart goes haywire, my mind flails at speculations too vile to enumerate. Beaten or spared? The body does not lie and you feel fragile, my darling Katya, you feel spent. Humiliated, shamed, defiled? Your small frame has the brittle lightness of a discarded shell. Where is the supple, rubber-jointed strength I felt in you before?
It doesn’t matter. We’ll start again, starting now. I’ll never let you go, not until you’re thirty or forty at least. It’s good to start again. Nothing ever stays the same anyway, no matter how much you want it to. Children grow apart from their mothers one way or another and for now it’s enough that I’m holding you in my arms again.
I look up and there are five other girls of around your age perched along the benches bolted to the iron walls of the cabin. The launch wallows, the air stinks of diesel, old varnish and salt. How ill they look. Not one of them is crying. Behind their worried faces, the windows run with salty smears. Time has started again. The future pours out its soul.
43
Here is what happened.
From my station in the wheelhouse, I saw bits of rope flip up, rigging twitch, a red-handled tool sent scudding across the deck. It wasn’t until I saw the grim set of James’s face as he stepped over to release the nets that I realised I was watching bullets. I screamed at him not to. Go back! I shouted, over and over. Then the nets were down and I heaved on the wheel and opened the throttle lever to full.
The boat started shuddering and skimming weirdly over the water. It made no difference what I did with the wheel so I just clung on and waited for it to be over. We spun under the Santa Cristina’s bows, so close that for a moment all I could see was a huge sheet of painted iron sliding by. Then it was as if we’d been sucked into a whirlpool. We banged against the side of the Santa Cristina. There was a violent noise of croaking metal, like sheets of corrugated iron being ripped apart, then the wheelhouse tilted on its side and all the glass from the windows smashed on the floor. I fell against a steel cupboard and bits and pieces from the wheelhouse crashed into me, mugs and biros and chart books and a radio handset that hit me in the stomach and winded me.
The Santa Cristina’s propeller got caught in our nets and she stopped. That was when I started to hope again. Real hope, not just pretending.
Our little boat was half capsized and the deck had burst open, leaving a crack wide enough to fit your hand. But we weren’t sinking because somehow we’d become lashed to the cargo ship by various ropes and cables and were stuck there. The poor old man whose boat we had stolen was staring at the wrecked wheelhouse with his mouth open. I crawled over and untied him, but he was too groggy to move.
James was climbing the bit of machinery that controlled the nets, swinging wildly from side to side so I was sure he must fall into the sea and be crushed between the boats. Haclan’s men were running around on the Santa Cristina’s deck, working out the best place to fire at him. I felt such hatred for those men. I took the Excam from the drawer where James had left it and fired until it ran out of bullets. James dived in through the open porthole. They turned their fire on me instead, so I hid below the window frame. I stayed there for many minutes, listening to the grinding, snapping sounds made by the stricken fishing boat. There were more shots, from different parts of the cargo ship. I looked out again but couldn’t see what was going on. I was terribly afraid that they would threaten to hurt Katya and the other children, and James would lay down his gun and they would kill him in some dark corner.
About this time I heard a siren out at sea. I raised my head into the opening where the side window had been and saw a police launch entering the bay, going very fast. The fisherman James had locked in the hold was sitting on a hatch-cover with his head in his hands, so I shouted at him to come up and help his father. Then suddenly I felt so frightened that I tipped forwards onto my knees and started to shiver. I’d had everything clamped up and shut down while I looked for Katya. I’d never allowed myself either to believe or to despair. So when it really did seem that I might soon be holding her in my arms again, my body could not cope. My hands went white, my limbs like dough, my heart forgot to beat. My knees had been cut to shreds by the broken glass, but I couldn’t do anything except stare at the blood trickling across the floor.
Eleni had driven the Mitsubishi camper van into Thessaloniki and alerted the police. At first, she said, they accused her of talking nonsense and agreed only to send a patrol car when they could spare one. Then they heard on their radio that distress flares had been fired in the bay to the east of town. That settled it. The police boat was launched and they drove out to the bay in a state of excitement, shouting at their control for backup and discussing with each other how they intended to deal with this gang of child traffickers who had made the once-in-a-lifetime error of allowing their filthy trade to spill over into the area controlled by the Thessaloniki Police Department (without paying their dues, one might have added in a moment of cynicism).
The police launch circled the Santa Cristina in a not wholly convincing display of maritime authority, its commander balancing on the foredeck and booming orders through a megaphone. Santa Cristina, lay down your weapons, lay down your weapons! We are coming aboard! A second launch arrived, and that freed them to rescue me and the old man and his son from the fishing boat. There followed a farcical scene in the course of which they tried to arrest me while I screamed at them to take me to the Santa Cristina so I could see my kidnapped daughter, also to search for James, also not to dare push me around or tie my h
ands or even touch me.
They took us aboard and we rocked around beneath the open doors of the Santa Cristina’s loading bay. More high-decibel loud-hailings, then three of them boarded the cargo ship, while the crew of the second police launch aimed rifles and a water cannon at her upper decks. But Haclan’s men had hidden somewhere, and the Santa Cristina’s crew had climbed into a lifeboat and were already half way to the shore. Their story in court was that they knew next to nothing about the assignment. Yes, they surmised that smuggling was involved, but child trafficking? No! As soon as they discovered what Adjani’s men were about, they protested that they wanted nothing more to do with it, but the evil band of paedophiles held them at gunpoint. They risked their lives to escape – a project they insisted had been initiated well before they heard sirens out in the bay. The police had noticed, surely, how they had left the starboard loading bay open and the gear deployed? In this fashion, they made themselves victims rather than accomplices and all were acquitted.
Later, the officer in command informed me that a ship with captives aboard is the most challenging and hazardous hostage situation in the manual, and success is far from guaranteed. Boarding the Santa Cristina without receiving any indication that the gang had surrendered was a serious breach of standard operating procedure, and he’d be grateful if I would plead confusion on this point if questioned in court.
‘You were in such a state, Mrs Galica,’ he concluded, looking himself rather confused as to whether his actions had been primarily unprofessional or primarily gallant. ‘I simply had to do what you said, even though it was so dangerous.’
Say A Little Prayer (A James Palatine Novel Book 2) Page 30