Endangered Species

by Richard Woodman

  ‘That’s the real pay-off, isn’t it? The thing that buys me out, eh?’

  Sparks gave him a rueful grin. ‘I rather think that’s what’s intended, yes.’

  Both men stared down at the pink slip: Mrs Mackinnon will await her husband’s arrival at the Mandarin Hotel at company expense stop Dentco stop

  By a supreme effort on the part of most of the Matthew Flinders’s crew an air of normality had returned to the ship by six o’clock that evening. No one was summoned to duty, they came voluntarily: prostrated seamen to the mess-room; Chinese stewards and cooks to the galley; Chinese greasers to the engine-room. Men began to clean up, to shovel the mess of water, food and filth out of the main deck alleyways, to brew tea and think about a meal.

  In the galley, Freddie Thorpe and the Chinese cooks tossed omelettes through into the mess-room and men rinsed their hands in sequence, devoured the omelettes, and turned to again without thought of a full meal break. Unable still to reach his workshop, the Carpenter ‘borrowed’ a sheet of plywood from the engine-room and fitted it in the empty door-frame, sealing the accommodation off again from the ingress of the sea.

  In the after fridge locker, Stevenson, Braddock and Pritchard, the latter in breathing apparatus, lashed the bodies of the Vietnamese woman and the Chief Engineer. When they had finished, Braddock stood for a moment beside them and crossed himself.

  With a rough but not unkind solicitude, the Bosun swabbed out the saloon and the male refugees were persuaded to shower themselves. In the smoke-room Thorpe shook Tam into full consciousness and explained the women could use the shower reserved normally for himself.

  ‘You get all bodies clean like number one special,’ he said with tactless condescension, ‘and I fix chow-chow very soon. Okay? Savvy?’

  Recalled to the present beyond which stretched a dreadful future, Tam, her eyes swollen and lacklustre, looking worse than when she had climbed from the lifeboat, acknowledged him.

  ‘Sure. I savvy.’

  By midnight the ship’s routine had been re-established. The only difference was that instead of Third Officer Taylor, Captain Mackinnon would stand the morning eight-to-twelve watch. By then he would have had a night in his bunk.

  Shortly after four the following morning, when Able Seaman Macgregor judged the relieved men of the middle watch had turned in and Scum-bag Rawlings was scratching his arse over his third cup of tea in the chart-room, he put his two fingers in his mouth and gave a low whistle.

  * ‘Flash-bang’ – the name the Japanese gave the atomic bomb

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mutiny

  They had promised Macgregor the girl. There were three of them, led by Phan Van Nui, unscrupulous gangsters, men who had each run their ‘girls’ in down-town Saigon and cleared out when their attempts to live under Communist rule proved impossible. They were either related to the other refugees, owed them favours or had sold them places on the junk at extortionate prices. Tam was a distant cousin of Phan’s, but he nevertheless bartered her with the same facility as he had traded his sister with the American military, back during the ‘good times’.

  Macgregor was a type he was familiar with, an unconscionable man, a survivor, cunning and street-wise, but unintelligent enough to be ultimately outwitted. They had had dollars as well as the girl, and Macgregor took the bait with enthusiasm. It was his big chance. He could quietly bank the dollars in Hong Kong and screwing the girl to cheat Stevenson would be pleasure enough, while screwing her for himself would be seventh heaven!

  His own part in the affair would, he had been promised, be covered up. They wanted some hiding places, routes of access and inside information as to certain procedures on board ship that would enable them to seize control with the minimum of disturbance.

  Macgregor held out his hand to shake theirs as though some chivalric purpose existed between them. ‘It’ll be a piece o’piss,’ he had promised. And so it proved.

  The key to the enterprise was the taking of hostages. Chief Officer Rawlings was secured, gagged with rigging tape and with his hands tied behind his back forced to sit in a damp locker-cum-urinal abaft the chart-room.

  As he divined the purpose of the sudden appearance of the three Vietnamese men, he shouted for Macgregor, his duty lookout man, on the bridge-wing. But his cry was cut short, sounding no more than a cough to anyone below curious enough to be listening at that dead hour of the night.

  With Rawlings immobilised Macgregor satisfied his aching and inchoate lust for revenge. The conspirators’ next targets were the Radio Officer and the radio-room. Five minutes with a handy fire axe was sufficient for Macgregor to render the tall, stacked medium-frequency sets a wreck. The auxiliary VHF sets soon followed. Macgregor lowered the axe and wiped the sweat from his forehead, a lupine grin illuminating his face. As he went out he swung the axe at the light bulb. The glass shattered and the arcing axe split the top of Sparks’s neat desk.

  Meanwhile, with Phan Van Nui on the bridge, shortly rejoined by Macgregor, the two other Vietnamese first gagged and then dragged from his bunk a struggling Sparks. Forcing him chest down on his cabin carpet, they wrenched his hands behind his back and tied them with flag halliard provided by Macgregor. Then they forced him to sit beside Rawlings in the locked bridge urinal. Both men had seen the muzzle of Phan Van Nui’s machine pistol.

  The seizure of the ship had taken less than twenty minutes.

  In the chart-room, out of sight of the two bound officers, Macgregor stared at the chart. Rawlings had been unable to secure a stellar observation at evening twilight, but the dead-reckoning positions were neatly marked for 2000, midnight and 0400. To Macgregor’s untutored eye they were absolutes; he had no idea of the misgivings privately assailing the officers who had marked them. He found Hong Kong on the chart, laid the long parallel rulers between the 0400 position and the magenta flash denoting Wang Lan lighthouse, and inscribed a pencil line. Then, as he had seen the officers do, he ‘walked’ the rules to the nearest compass rose and read off the course.

  Captain Mackinnon had decided to maintain a course that took them out of the baleful influence of Typhoon David with the greatest possible speed until the overcast broke sufficiently for a star sight. This, he hoped, would occur about 0630. The fact, therefore, that Macgregor found the Matthew Flinders on a course of north-north-east gave him the impression of their heading for the Taiwan Strait and Shanghai.

  Cocksure, Macgregor marched into the wheelhouse. The dull gleam of the binnacle and telegraph light reflected off Phan’s weapon as the man stood in the unfamiliar darkness.

  ‘You fix?’ he asked.

  ‘I fix real good,’ said Macgregor, bending to the Arkas auto-pilot and altering the course as he had seen done. ‘A piece o’ piss,’ he affirmed.

  ‘How long before we get Hong Kong?’

  ‘Don’t you worry, mate. We’ll be there tomorrow night. We’ll get Mackinnon or Stevenson tae take her in an’ then you can vanish. By the time a pilot gets off tae the ship an’ the arguin’ starts, you’ll be awa’, ah’ll be twa blocks up that bit o’ stuff wi’ ma pillow stuffed fu’ o’ dollars.’

  The fantastical prospect made Macgregor relapse into his native vernacular, mystifying Phan Van Nui who shrugged impassively in the darkness. He knew disappearing into the teeming streets of Hong Kong would not be as easy as Macgregor naively insisted, but he knew, too, of the lubricating power of money. Besides, while he held the machine pistol, he could eliminate any opposition; even that of his friends.

  ‘Tomorrow night, eh?’ he asked in confirmation.

  ‘Yes,’ grinned Macgregor, who had been at sea long enough to know how many days it took to steam from Singapore to Hong Kong. ‘Tomorrow night.’

  ‘Okay, you go now.’ Phan looked at his watch. They had agreed it was unnecessary to disturb too many people prematurely. Besides, Phan Van Nui wanted to secure the allegiance of his ally. ‘Come back one hour.’

  And suppressing a wild and triumphant yelp, Macgre
gor withdrew like a shadow.

  Before midnight, Stevenson had slept like a log. He had relieved Rawlings (who, by himself relieving Mackinnon, was compelled to stand the evening eight-to-twelve before being called for the morning four-to-eight) and kept his watch in a strange, disembodied sense of achievement. It was not elation, for the horrible death of Charles Taylor whose mangled corpse still lay in Number Two ’tween deck, had affected him deeply. But he could not deny a feeling of having stood his ground undaunted in the face of death, of having come through a test satisfactorily. His short, deep sleep had left him full of energy and this feeling of having been tested and proved worthy made the forthcoming arrival at Hong Kong less a termination of his career than the start of something new.

  In the wild darkness of the night he attempted no rationalisation of these feelings. In his imagination he wrote mental drafts of letters to Caroline Taylor, letters that praised her husband and slighted her own trivial existence and spoke of her unworthiness; accusatory letters which made of her faithlessness a cause of Taylor’s heroic death. Finally, he chose one of tragic content and mixed metaphor: of her neglect and Taylor’s misery, drowned in the arms of a beautiful whore, of his conscience and immolation in losing his life to save his ship,

  It was all nonsense, a product of Stevenson’s hyped-up state. In the cold light of day when, he knew, he would have to retrieve Taylor’s body from the ’tween deck, the whole train of thought would be anathema to him, but in the graveyard hours he indulged in a savage, misogynistic reaction.

  Finally relieved by a grumbling Rawlings, he had gone below in no mood for sleep. Instead he had found his way to the lower alleyway and met the Third Engineer coming out of the engine-room.

  ‘Getting better,’ the Third remarked as they enjoyed a companionable chat, referring to the easing of the ship’s motion. ‘I’m for my pit,’ he said after they had gossiped. ‘Got to get my strength back for Hong Kong.’

  As he bade the Third good night, Stevenson realised Mackinnon had not yet broadcast the change of destination to the ship’s company.

  A moment later he was quietly opening the door of the smoke-room. It lay in darkness, apart from the splash of light from the open door and a faint gleam filtering through the jalousies pulled up against the windows. Tam lay among the sleeping women. Her face was toward him, no more than an indistinct oval. He could not understand what drew him back to look at her like a middle-aged voyeur. Even a plain woman, they said, grew beautiful in proportion to the number of days you were at sea, but that was insufficient explanation.

  She possessed none of the allure of Cathy, yet Cathy had not had the power to hold him. Had he truly loved Cathy, would he have been able to make the grand, reasonable gesture, bowed to the pragmatic and let her go? If he had truly loved her, would he not have fought for her? Remonstrated, pleaded, cajoled, even accepted the infidelity he knew was a concomitant risk of his prolonged absence?

  Yet here he was, like a thief in the night, without the excuse of the typhoon to explain his prowling among these sleeping women. It was, he realised with a start, a situation that would be hard to justify if discovered. Yet, unwilling to end it, wanting only somehow mitigate the ordeal he knew she must face in Shanghai, to explain to her he had nothing to do with the change of orders, that none of them did, being almost as powerless as the refugees themselves when it came to challenging the authorities, he stepped inside and stood in bizarre communion with her in the darkness.

  Then as if to echo his fear of discovery he heard the outer door of the alleyway open and felt the rush of cold air die as someone closed it behind them. He drew back, shrinking against the bulkhead, his heart thundering in his chest. The steps did not go on down the alleyway: they had stopped outside the door and the very stopping alarmed Stevenson. A man with an innocent purpose would scarcely pause like that.

  Slowly, as the door cracked to admit a sliver of light from the solitary bulb in the alleyway, Stevenson slid his back down the bulkhead until he squatted against it, almost indistinguishable from the other exhausted, breathing shapes about him.

  A torch beam zig-zagged across the deck, stopped on a face, moved on, stopped again and then went out as a muttering stirred the recumbent forms. The door closed as the figure entered the room and Stevenson had trouble distinguishing what was happening. His first guilty fear of discovery kept him from jumping up immediately. Part-guessing that the target of the intrusion was Tam, the most desirable of the female refugees, part-fearful of the intruder being one of her boyfriends and this whole thing being nothing to do with him, he kept still. At first he thought this course of action justified, for though overwhelmed by disappointment at her apparent acquiescence, she appeared to rise in conspiratorial silence, embracing the stranger, to step over her neighbours and leave with him.

  It was only when the door was pulled open that he saw he had misinterpreted the intimate configuration of the entwined bodies. The dark slash of the sticky rigging tape gagged her and the arm twisted up between her shoulder blades kept her close to her abductor. Then he saw the light fall briefly upon Macgregor’s triumphant features as he forced the writhing girl swiftly through the door.

  Stevenson rose in pursuit. Macgregor was struggling forward with the girl ten yards away when Stevenson slipped into the alleyway. Behind him in the smoke-room the women slept undisturbed. Occupied with the girl, Macgregor was unaware of Stevenson’s presence, muttering obscenities into her ear, shaking her so that her feet left the deck. The two of them slammed into the bulkhead as she resisted. Drawing back, Macgregor hefted her a second time into the steel wall, driving the wind from her. A moment later Stevenson caught his shoulder and pulled him round.

  Macgregor’s astonishment faded quickly, and was replaced with an expression of feral savagery. He thrust the girl aside so hard that she fell and, unable to draw sufficient air into her gasping lungs, fainted.

  Stevenson drove his right fist into Macgregor’s face, but the seaman parried it with his left forearm. Stevenson’s fist struck the bulkhead and the next instant he was reeling back. Macgregor hit him first on the jaw, then in his gut and Stevenson doubled up. The Glaswegian’s upthrust knee caught his bruised shoulder and he sagged uselessly to his knees.

  Macgregor had not finished yet. He caught Stevenson’s hair and cracked his head into the steel bulkhead so hard Stevenson saw stars and fell full length.

  For a moment he thought he would pass out, but Macgregor had let him go and he was dimly aware of the seaman leaving him and bending over the girl. As the breath rasped in Stevenson’s throat, Macgregor hove the unconscious girl on his shoulder and turned aft. Instinctively Stevenson drew his knees up to his belly, spoiling the kick Macgregor aimed at him in passing. A moment later a cool draft of air and then the bang of the alleyway door marked Macgregor’s exit.

  For a moment Stevenson lay where he was, overcome by nausea, the pain in his shoulder and his split head which bled copiously. Something beyond his pain stirred in him and very slowly, using the alleyway handrail, he groped his way to his feet and staggered aft.

  He had been so sure, so Goddamned sure . . . the test . . .

  And now this . . . humiliation . . .

  On the after deck the sting of salt-laden air partly revived him. Despite the hiss of the sea, the rumble of the engine and the keen of the wind, a noise above him galvanised him to further action.

  ‘Come on you fuckin’ whore!’ A door banged and Stevenson began to climb towards the radio-room as quickly as his shaking limbs would allow.

  Tam was naked by the time he tore open the door. Under the dim twenty-watt bulb of the emergency lighting her slender body was the ivory colour of the dead woman’s corpse except for the red weals where Macgregor had ripped her rotten clothing from her and lashed her shoulders to the chromed handles on the wrecked radio stacks with lengths of flex from the head and hand sets. With eager lust he had already parted her legs and his own jeans were round his ankles.

  �
�Come on,’ he insisted through gritted teeth, thrusting forward, ‘you’d better get used tae it!’

  ‘No!’

  As Macgregor swung round his rigid member bounced obscenely from his loins. Stevenson’s right hand flicked out, finger extended, and it was Macgregor’s turn to double up. Snarling with fury, Stevenson was on him. Seizing the handset from which Macgregor had torn the flex, Stevenson repeatedly swiped it back and forth across the seaman’s face in a frenzy of rage, reducing Macgregor to a sobbing supplicant kneeling, half-naked, at his feet.

  Breathless and unable to lift his extempore weapon any more, Stevenson leant back and fell through the opening door, the sea step catching him behind the knees. For a moment no one moved, then Stevenson got slowly to his feet and stepped towards Tam. She had come round as Macgregor stripped her and remained rigid with shock, the ugly rectangle of the metallic rigging tape disfiguring her stricken face, her eyes like dark holes in her skull. Stevenson peeled back a corner of the tape and roughly pulled it from her skin. She gasped with pain and relief as she dragged air into her lungs. He tore at the wires securing her arms, whimpering in his own pain and inability to release her fast enough.

  There was an old stained duffle coat on a hook beside the door. Grabbing it from him she pulled it round her and appeared to shrink away from him.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he gasped, trying to soothe her, ‘it’s okay . . .’

  He realised she was staring in horror at Macgregor and he slowly drew her past him and out on deck. He put his arm tentatively round her. He could feel her shaking as they edged forward towards his cabin. Halfway along the deck she stopped. Like a frightened mule, she would go neither one way nor the other.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Is it me? I won’t hurt you! God, I couldn’t hurt you . . .’

  She muttered something, the syllables chattering incoherently through her uncontrollable sobbing.