by Peter Tonkin
And there beyond, on the slope of the island hilltop where an open area still stood just as Sindbad’s steersman Ali had observed it, all the ground-animals huddled together, adding their voices to the screams of the primates in the trees. There, in the distance, young John Drake saw among the milling herds of black backed peccaries and giant forest pigs, the largest, most powerful, brightest-coated and most terrifying tigers he had ever seen. But the tigers stood among the tender little piglets of the black backed peccaries and the tiny, juicy tapirs and did them no harm at all, like the lions in the scriptures destined to lie down with the lambs.
But stranger things were to happen still. Even as that moment passed — and with it the hissing crest of the first, smaller tsunami wave born of a distant earthquake in Japan — so the water level began to fall almost as rapidly as it had gathered in the first place.
Just as the whole of the sea in that region had gathered itself up into that first tsunami, so there followed behind the wave a trough almost equally deep. And, behind the trough, another wave even taller than the first. So, as the Hind pulled back round the outer reaches of the bank one day to be called the Rifleman, what had been a reef now rose as firm ground. What had been the sharp shoal which snagged their keel now stood as a spire high above. And the island, named already for the tigers John Drake had pointed out to his uncle, towered like a distant mountain on the horizon, beyond a five-mile desert of gleaming, weed-infested coral.
To most of the men who saw it, this was close to a miracle. Seamen Cook and Flood, however, were busy with more worldly thoughts. With young John in tow, they sidled up to the captain general. If they could borrow the long-boat, they suggested, it would be possible for them to row across to that coral bank and look there for some of the items cast overboard when the Hind was wedged up there on that spire of rock.
‘Items of weight, such as the ordnance,’ insinuated Cook, ‘may lie directly below the point at which they were cast overboard. It would be a God-given chance, Captain Francis, to recover some of these valuable items.’
His words rang across the suddenly silent deck — and all the men there knew he was certainly not talking about cannon or cannonballs. Captain Francis also thought of that good round chest full of treasure and sealed with his seal. ‘Take my kinsman with you and you may go,’ he agreed at last. ‘But if trouble comes then you may look to God for help — for you may none of you look to me.’
And so it was done. The Hind lay out to sea and the three rowed swiftly to the coral crag uncovered for them by the trough between the waves. Up they scrambled on to the running rocks, overwhelmed by the tinkling chuckle and the silvery tintinnabulation all around. They found one of the cannonballs first, then another, swept along in a straight line towards the distant island by the power of the first wave. In a trice they found a third — then a fourth. Like pearls cast across the surface of the reef, the cannonballs led the three men across the rocks towards Tiger Island and the promise of Captain Francis’s treasure chest.
Again, it was young John who found it, more than halfway in towards the beach. This time, however, his grim companions from the cutter let him take none of the glory of discovery. Instead, they took a handle each and swung the chest high. It was only fear of the captain general which saved the boy’s throat. He knew it — and yet he put the thought aside.
‘The land is nearer,’ John said. ‘Let us take it to the island and await my uncle there.’
‘There’s them gert great tigers,’ wheezed Cook.
‘Aye, like enough,’ agreed Flood. ‘But the boy’s right. It’s nearer and it’s safer and this ton of treasure tears my arms like an Inquisition strappado.’
‘Where the treasure is, Captain Francis will come. Mark my words,’ insisted John.
‘Aye, like enough,’ growled Cook, and the decision was made.
Side by side they stumbled across the reef. Time seemed to slow, but the leagues stole past beneath their slipping, stumbling feet.
John was swept into a dream-state, back to his childhood near Bristol and his visits to the Severn River. Why such thoughts should have come at such a time, the boy would never know, but come they did, and with them vivid memories of that great river’s tidal mouth and the huge bore wave which swept up and down it according to laws of nature far beyond any computation then.
The dream memory and the strange reality met then, in the whisper of that roar, rumbling down the years and in from the horizon. All of a sudden, young John went cold. He stopped. He looked around. The surface of the nearest rock-pool trembled. The very ground was a-shake. Fearfully, John looked back across the reef, his eyes straining. In the instant of that action, the sound had grown.
‘Run!’ yelled the boy, and, heeding his own advice, he took to his heels. Cook and Flood paused not an instant, varied not one whit the steady plodding of their steps. ‘Boy’s possessed,’ mumbled Cook.
‘Ay, like enough; but pay ’im no mind,’ suggested Flood. Neither man had any intention of following John’s advice or his flight. To do so would have meant letting go the treasure chest.
And so, when the great wave swept over the reef, Flood and Cook were stamped down like flies beneath the heel of a careless god; and young John watched it as it seethed wildly over the shoulder of the reef and over the distant specks of his companions. He watched it, breathless after his wild dash inwards and upwards across the wet white sand, between the wrecked stumps of the palm trees and through the deserted, dripping jungle. He watched it standing up on the rocky plateau he had seen from the mast-head that afternoon, surrounded by screaming peccaries and pigs. And giant, silent tigers, lying down miraculously, as in the scriptures themselves.
And that was where his uncle found him next dawn, though by then the tigers, like the tsunami waves, had gone.
2
Richard Mariner guided the big green Jaguar out through Sham Shui Po towards Kwai Chung and, eventually, the bridge over Tsing Yi on to Lan Tao Island and Chek Lap Kok. As he drove through the slow, Saturday morning traffic, he seethed with impatience bordering on rage. His thunderous mood was to do with more than the traffic conditions; more than the fact that he was sending his little family home and would not see the twins until Christmas at the earliest; more than the fact that they were running late at the end of a disastrous morning. Richard was a sensitive man, by no means unintelligent, but he had no idea of the impact that his increasingly frequent black moods could have on those around him.
Robin, Richard’s wife, glanced across from the passenger seat at his darkly brooding profile. She had worries of her own, not least the prospect of dragging two wilful, discontented, occasionally impossible eight-year-olds halfway round the world and getting them settled into school on her own. She was in no mood to whisper, ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ and start to put him in a better frame of mind. And yet, her better nature prompted, he was going to be on his own for the next couple of weeks at least and she would be happier in her mind if she could leave him smiling. She opened her mouth to speak but just as she did so the simmering war between her offspring on the back seat burst into renewed battle. ‘Will you two for heaven’s sake be quiet!’ snarled Richard, swinging round to send a fulminating glance over his shoulder and nearly knocking a cyclist into the wall outside the Kwai Chung container terminal as he did so.
‘Richard!’ snapped Robin.
‘We’ll be lucky to make the flight at this rate!’
‘We’ll be fine.’
‘And you know I can’t hang around.’ Richard glanced across at Kwai Chung again. He was due to meet an official from the Port Authority there at midday — on his way back from Chek Lap Kok with any luck. But luck had all been bad today. God! How much money they had wasted on that wretched fung shui man with his octagonal mirrors and his luck dogs. They had had nothing but bad luck in the two years they had been here. The two years and two months since the Treaty had run out and Hong Kong had reverted to Chinese rule.
‘Don’
t forget, you’re meeting Gerry Stephenson for lunch,’ Robin reminded him, knowing he was all too likely to get sidetracked by his meeting with the port official and forget his social duties. Robin was relying on Gerry and his wife Dottie to keep an eye on Richard while she was away. It was the Stephensons’ last duty before they returned to England and welcome retirement, leaving Richard and Robin very isolated out here. Gerry’s partner in the firm of solicitors Balfour Stephenson, the red-haired Scot Andrew Atherton Balfour, had already left. He was currently in his second year of married bliss and interesting partnership with the London silk Margharita DaSilva and living in Windsor. Andrew had by no means been alone in shaking the ex-Crown Colony’s dust from his shoes during the last two years or so. Western faces and Western businesses had become increasingly rare, particularly over the last eighteen months.
A large part of Richard’s brooding discontentment, Robin knew, lay in the fact that he would have given almost anything to be coming home on the plane with them — and staying there. But the price of such a dream was too high to pay. It would cost them everything and, quite apart from the other people for whom they were responsible, Richard and Robin themselves were getting too old to throw up everything they had built and start all over again. They had been very unwise not to separate the China Queens Company, Hong Kong, from the rest of Heritage Mariner. If the little foreign-based concern went down now, it would certainly take the parent company with it. And keeping the China Queens afloat, literally as well as financially, was tearing them both apart.
Heritage Mariner was that tiger of the sea — impressive, rare, and endangered — a British independent shipping company. Its main income was generated from bulk oil movement, a slowly failing enterprise. The leisure boating market which they led with their Katapult series of multihulls was also nearly moribund. The waste disposal market, in which they were almost sole players, was slow, racked with controversy and undermined by double-dealing and official lethargy. The China Queens Company, two elderly but sound freighters moving cargo in containers between the economies of the Pacific rim, looked to be a sound investment. At first it had generated life-giving income to the strapped parent company, so much so that Richard and Robin moved their family out to Hong Kong and left the running of Heritage Mariner to Helen DuFour and Charles Lee, the chief executives in London, under the eye of Sir William Heritage, Robin’s father. Sir William was retired now and well into his eighties but he was still honorary chairman of the board of the company which he had founded when he came out of the Royal Navy after the war. They had managed to keep the one remaining arm of Heritage Mariner independent; Crewfinders, the world-famous shipping agency, shared the upper floors of Heritage House but financially stood alone. Why could they not have done the same with the China Queens and saved themselves so much grief?
‘It’ll be smuggling,’ said Richard, still thinking about his appointment with the Port Authority man later that morning. ‘It’s always bloody smuggling.’ He swung the green Jaguar on to the roundabout leading to the Tsing Yi bridge.
It had been smuggling that had got them into this. The newly purchased China Queens vessels had been involved in smuggling thirty months ago when Richard had been accused of murdering the crew of Sulu Queen and Robin had become involved in Hong Kong, its mystery and romance, as she, Andrew Balfour, Maggie DaSilva and Gerry Stephenson all fought to defend him in court. She thought all the scars from that incident, mental and physical, had healed long ago.
‘Small-scale smuggling is endemic among those crews,’ Richard went on, and he was not talking about the past but the present — the future. ‘You know we can’t get first-rate people on to haunted ships; the people we can get all have a little something going on the side. It’ll be some fool trying to smuggle cigarettes out of the Philippines — that’s what it was last time, at any rate. And every time we refuse to pay the Triad squeeze, some poor sucker aboard one of our vessels gets handed in so that we have yet more paperwork and delays. At the same time, we can’t actually fill the holds and make a decent profit on our legitimate business because every water-Triad Tom, Dick or Harry in the godforsaken place will smuggle their cargo for them cut-rate wherever they want it to go. Ye gods! It’ll be the death of me!’
‘If your driving doesn’t kill us all first!’ retorted Robin as yet another cyclist nearly met his maker. ‘Richard, you must calm down. Everyone else has to handle these problems. Every other legitimate business, at least.’
‘And they’re dying out quicker than the dinosaurs in this neck of the woods.’
‘All right!’ snapped Robin. Then she remembered the twins in the back seat and moderated her tone. ‘All right, darling, but let’s not talk about that now, please. We have to get more immediate things sorted out before the twins and I get on the plane. And anyway, if things are that bad, you ought to go to the police.’
‘The police! The only one of them I had any time for was Daniel Huuk and what’s happened to him?’
Robin forbore to point out that Huuk had been a coastguard captain in the Hong Kong naval contingent and not actually a policeman. But the point was well made. Like all the people involved in the Western systems of justice and law enforcement, Huuk and his men had simply disappeared soon after handback and neither Richard nor she had seen the young Hong Kong Chinese officer in eighteen months.
The pair of them with the blonde-haired twins in tow made quite a startling sight in the Chek Lap Kok main concourse. Richard was very tall — more than six foot four. He bore himself unusually upright for such a tall man, with not the slightest hint of a slouch. His swept-back hair was thick and so dark as to contain a hint of blue, except for the wings of white above his ears. His eyes were blazingly blue, like the ice at the heart of an iceberg; and his resolutely square chin bore more than a hint of blue shadow as well, even when immaculately shaven. Robin on the other hand was all blonde glow — colouring passed on to the twins, together with Richard’s disturbing eyes. She was nine years his junior and was approaching her late forties with the same restless energy she undertook everything. She was also tall — five foot nine — and her gold curls topped his shoulder. She disdained the use of hair colorants and so the threads of white among the riot of gold simply made the whole lighter and more dazzling. Her reed-straight figure was the envy of all her friends and Dottie Stephenson for one would have promised any price for the secret. But there was no secret beyond genes and lifestyle; certainly, Robin had never worked at her figure and never proposed to do so.
The twins, William and Mary, had declared a sulky peace. At eight years old, they were tall and slim, fiercely intelligent and stormily temperamental. They had all the charm of their mother and all the brooding temperament of their father. The last two years had been hard on them also for they had found it difficult to make friends in school and outside it. They had suffered almost absentee parents, and an increasingly bitter atmosphere at home. It was no wonder they were hard to handle. But they were looking forward to going home, even though they were actually off to boarding school.
The big local time display showed that it was 10.55 on Saturday, 4 September 1999. ‘There,’ chided Robin gently. ‘Plenty of time.’ The check-in time on their tickets was 11.00.
Richard handed the tickets over to the receptionist at the British Airways desk who received them with a smile and began to process them at once. ‘Your flight will depart in one hour,’ she said quietly. Like Kai Tak, Chek Lap Kok had no public address system to disturb the airwaves, and the bustle was kept to a minimum by the largely Oriental passengers around them. ‘You must go through into the departure lounge at once, however. There will be lengthy security checks.’
Realising that he was on the verge of heaving a sigh of relief, Richard caught himself and crouched down. ‘Now you look after Mummy for me, will you?’ he said, meeting each pair of dazzling eyes in turn. He was shocked to find both his children were in tears at the prospect of leaving him. He had rather fancied they would be quite
pleased to get away from his constant ill-temper. His own eyes began to prickle. ‘And not too many midnight feasts at that boarding school, you hear?’
He opened his arms and they both fell in for fierce hugs and wet kisses. They nearly toppled him over, but the wiry strength in their little bodies kept him upright. After a moment he broke their grip and rose.
‘I’ll miss you,’ he said quietly.
‘You won’t notice we’ve gone,’ Robin teased. ‘And I’ll be back in a couple of weeks or so.’ They had not booked a definite return date because she wanted to see how the twins settled; she wanted to visit her father, drop in on her beloved parents-in-law, pop into Heritage House — she was a director of the company, after all — and give an airing to their big old house Ashenden on the cliffs of East Sussex. And, somewhere along the line, she proposed to fit in a little shopping too. Big businesses and small solicitors were not the only institutions to pull out of Hong Kong since it had become Xianggang; Western clothes shops were also becoming few and far between.
‘Remember,’ she said finally, gazing earnestly up into his icy eyes. ‘You promised. No matter what.’
The one thing he was sure would rebuild their fortunes was if he could go out on Sulu Queen or Seram Queen himself, one round trip as captain sorting out the crews and shaking down all their contacts. But after the terrible incidents aboard the Sulu Queen in May 1997, he had promised never to go to sea again. And he had stuck to the promise in spite of everything, largely because she had held him to it. Deep in her heart she was certain that if he went to sea again he would die. It was as simple and absolute as that. He had cheated death so often in the past, always aboard or beside ships, that she had at last given in to a superstition she could not shake off. There was something in the deep sea which wanted her Richard dead and the next time he went out into blue water it would kill him.