by Peter Tonkin
Abruptly she rose. ‘That’s all very good, then,’ she said brightly. Only John Shaw knew her well enough to hear the incipient hysteria in her tone. Had the Chinese clerk been wiser or more widely experienced, he might have been on the lookout for a massive reaction when Robin discovered that no matter how much she rushed around, no matter how busily she worked or how well she did, nothing was going to make any real difference now. She had lived too much for her husband and not enough for her children. For him she had dropped them off, passed them round; left them with parents and parents-in-law, with nannies and with schoolteachers only so that she could be with him and help him and guard him and love him and he was gone.
And, for Robin, the moment of that terrible realisation was at hand. And it had come in the worst possible place at the worst possible time.
The men rose with her. Their faces might have worn any expression from sympathetic concern to psychopathic insanity; she would not have seen. As self-absorbed as a drunkard trying to walk a straight line, she came out from behind the table and crossed the room. John Shaw followed her. The others hesitated, more than a little bemused. With a feeling of nausea increasingly urgently claiming her attention, Robin made it to the door and out into the corridor.
Here she was betrayed by her welling panic and the fact that the architect of the sister ships had reversed the position of the heads and the officers’ video lounge on the two ships. Searching for somewhere she could be sick in safety, Robin walked into the video room, just in the middle of the most perverse, and popular, part of Fuk’s squeeze to the crew; his little sample of what they would be secretly carrying to Japan. Only the fact that it was animated rather than acted made it physically possible but it was still mind-numbingly pornographic.
Robin stood, simply stunned by what she was seeing. Captain So and his men from the top table crowded in behind her. She felt naked and besmirched as they looked at her; diminished and dirtied by their thoughts. Typically, even in this extremis, she acted with decisiveness and courage. ‘This is neither legal or decent,’ she snapped. She crossed to the machine and pressed the button. The audience was too stunned and embarrassed to react. She tore the tape out and hurled it with all her force through the open widow.
‘When this ship sails,’ she said, ‘if this ship sails, most of you will be very lucky indeed still to be aboard her. When my husband — ’
She stopped dead, as though she had been struck.
John Shaw switched on the light then and she stood, white as a sheet, her eyes framed with black rings, tears streaming down her chalky cheeks.
‘If my husband Richard could have … ’
She walked out of the room while she could still walk. She pushed past John Shaw and the rest in the doorway and they let her go.
Blindly, shocked out of the nausea but without any real idea of where she would go or what she would do alone and friendless in the back end of Xianggang in the middle of the night of the hungry ghosts, she staggered out of the bridgehouse and on to the deck. Like a ghost herself under the sodium yellow of the lighting, beginning to gulp on great sobs of agony, she ran down the length of the deck. Stumbling, weak-kneed, she tripped down the ship’s companionway and pitched head first on to the dock.
She would have fallen flat on her face and done heaven knows what damage, but a pair of strong arms caught her. Held her safe and sure. ‘Well met by moonlight, proud Titania,’ whispered a gently mocking voice.
She was set on her feet. She steadied. A tall figure turned towards her and the face was illuminated by a weird combination of the high-security lighting and the low full moon. It was the stranger who had helped her set out the stuff she had burned in the gutter. And yet he was no stranger at all. She knew him if she could only just …
He looked down at her quizzically. ‘I’ve been trying to give you this all afternoon,’ he said, holding something out towards her. ‘I almost slipped it into your bag when you tripped on the escalator. I did put it in there when we were together on the MTR but I took it out again when we were burning the offerings. I was ordered to give it to you in person.’
The ship’s deck lights came on then and lit them both up clearly. He was holding out the Black Spot. A white square of paper with a black circle on it. The Pirate’s death sentence which had haunted her childhood dreams for years after she read Treasure Island. The Black Spot.
But no. What seemed like a black circle was a printed chop. A Chinese identification signature. And she recognised it. It was the hieroglyph for foot with a number of dots round it. The dots were toes and she didn’t need to count them to know there would be twelve of them.
The sound of someone coming out on to the deck above and behind her made her raise her voice. ‘What is it?’ she said.
‘A message.’
She raised her eyes to that disturbingly familiar face.
‘And I believe I am part of the message too. Certainly I am more than a translator, I think.’ His drily ironic tone, the literate banter of it, was familiar too, yet he was one of the destitute men she had pitied on the train.
With trembling fingers Robin unfolded the white square of paper and looked down once again.
‘Captain Mariner?’ called a voice. The messenger flinched away. ‘You all right?’ came the voice from above. It was John Shaw.
Inside the paper there was one Chinese character. That was all. One beautifully brushed hieroglyph in dead black ink, impossible for her to understand without the aid of the messenger.
‘What does it say?’ asked Robin, hope like a hummingbird trapped in her throat. ‘What does Twelvetoes’ message say?’
‘It says “He’s alive”,’ whispered Daniel Huuk.
11
Sergeant (E9) Sybelle Alabaster, of the First Battalion, First Special Forces Group (Airborne), US Army, came through the doorway of the sinking jetcat in a textbook regulation roll. She bounced forward with her head down and her knees bent as though she was landing from a parachute jump. She had been trained to understand that this position would protect her most vital organs from a whole range of possible harm. Whether the position would protect her from lightning strike, shark attack or simple drowning she doubted. But it was the best she could do under the circumstances.
She crashed into the safety rail just as the first wave broke over it. She unrolled and fought her way to her feet, hands automatically busy with the ties of her life jacket. Apart from a hump like the back of a pale whale diving on her right, the jetcat was effectively gone. All around her was the enormity of the stormy afternoon. As far as the eye could see, black clouds kissed the black wavetops, and where they met there was a confusion of white foam, driven spume, torrential rain and short, thick bolts of lightning.
And there, immediately in front of her, framed by the wild power of that roiling windswept wasteland, stood the Englishman, Richard Mariner. In his left hand he clutched the last solid upright on the jetcat’s superstructure. In his right hand he held the bright orange line of a life raft. Sally could not begin to calculate the simple strength needed to hold on to these things. Or to make his voice carry over the thunder of the wind. ‘Jump!’ he ordered. And just like any grunt on his first day at Fort Benning, she did what she was told.
The water was cold and strangely thick. Sally’s life preserver slammed her upright and popped her head up above the surface with brutal efficiency, but even so, there was an instantaneous impression of having dived into quicksand. It was very unsettling. She wrenched herself forward through the water, not really swimming, more like a frog leaping from pad to pad. Her floundering arms flung themselves over the line and she pulled it to her with all her might. The great orange side of the life raft came over and down upon her like a space station docking with a shuttle. A planet-sized space station. A very small, scared shuttle. The great, cold slippery side slammed into her. Squashed her down under the water, as if trying to ride over her to drown her. With increasing panic she felt like screaming at it, hey! You’r
e supposed to be on my side!
Strong hands fastened on the back of her life preserver and pulled her upright. She found herself face in against the side again, but this time the wall of orange rubber was crested by the torso of a man. The Englishman’s sidekick. The slant who had been so pissed at her for sitting in his buddy’s seat. She reached up. They locked arms, hand to wrist like performers on the high trapeze. He pulled her in. Full of gratitude and relief, she vowed to try and stop thinking of him as a slant. After Bangkok that would be a challenge.
Side by side they knelt, looking out. Their torsos, still with preservers inflated, filled the narrow opening in the inflatable’s tent-like cover. Behind them, still holding tight to the far end of the rope, Richard Mariner stood, up to his knees in stormy water. As they watched him he stepped forward off the edge. The side of the jetcat gave a heave and was gone. For some reason Sally was reminded not of Moby Dick but of that tale from The Arabian Nights where Sindbad found an island only to discover that it was actually the back of a sea monster. Richard Mariner’s island was heading for the bottom of the South China Sea as fast as a monster sounding, that was for sure.
Sally was by no means sitting idle as she entertained these thoughts. She, like the man she did not yet know as Lawkeeper Ho, was pulling in the line hand over hand as hard as ever she could. With the black chop foaming against him, Richard was pulling himself towards them too. In a matter of moments, he was crushed against the side of the life raft. He reached up and each one of them took an arm. The whole side of the life raft seemed to sink and he slid over the side like a seal on a little wash of dirty surf. One of his shoes was gone, but he didn’t seem to notice. He slopped across the floor of the raft until the weight of his body balanced theirs. Sally reached back automatically and zipped the side shut, turning the raft into a big orange rubber ball. If it didn’t burst, it ought to be unsinkable. That’s what they had told her during training with the SEALS at Little Creek, anyway.
The three of them sat like spokes on a wheel, backs to the trembling rubberised walls and spread feet meeting in the middle in a gathering pool of water. There was a moment of silence among them, then Richard raised his left wrist and looked down at a battered old Rolex. ‘That was just about the busiest five minutes of my life,’ he said. ‘What about you two?’
Richard’s tone as he asked the question was dry, but that was just about the only dry thing there. They were all wringing wet, and had brought a good deal of water into the life raft with them. There was nothing they could do about it, however, and in any case their highest priority had to be heat. Here the designers of the life raft had been forward thinking. The tent section, supported by four hollow ribs which had inflated with the rest of the raft, was wind-proof as well as waterproof. It was damn near light-proof too except that there were clear panels right at the very top. Its thickness had a carefully calculated insulating effect, and, even when wet and in mild shock, each of their bodies was giving off as much heat as a two-bar electric fire.
Within half an hour, the air temperature in the life raft was quite cosy and even the puddle in the bottom felt like a tepid footbath. And that was just as well, for the conditions outside had deteriorated swiftly and severely. The little vessel-Sally had to keep reminding herself that it was unsinkable-was thrown all over the place with increasing ferocity like a ping-pong ball in a millrace. Conversation was difficult unless they yelled at the top of their voices. And they had little to say that was not depressing in any case.
Then Richard thought he heard a plane. They all strained to listen but there was nothing. They listened on tenterhooks, each one aware that this was just about the time the jetcat should have arrived in Macau. Richard’s eyes were narrow. He was calculating whether it would be worthwhile to open the side of the tent and try some kind of signal. But that would only let heat out and water in. And in any case, they had a little distress beacon on the top which sent out an emergency signal on the emergency band. But that would really only come into its own when people started looking for distress signals instead of jetcats.
‘May just have been a trick of the wind,’ he admitted at last. And he had to yell to make his words carry. After that the weather closed down and things became very, very rough indeed. Just sitting there while the whole craft was thrown this way and that, hurled to impossible heights and abyssal depths in an instant, was very tiring. And not just tiring, either.
Sally broke first. She was an intrepid sailor but the amount of water slopping around outside her seemed somehow to call irresistibly to the liquids within her and she was sitting in a puddle anyway. She thought no one would notice. Her nose was just beginning to warn her that she might have miscalculated when Lawkeeper heaved and a whole new range of odours hit the air as a whole new range of colours hit the deck. It was always the same, thought Richard. Grim and grimy. If the weather didn’t moderate they would all get to know each other very well indeed before this little adventure was over.
But, even on his thought, as though by magic, the wind did seem to moderate. And the nasty storm swell calmed. A great shadow loomed over the clearviews at the top of the tent, something much more substantial than the storm clouds but about the same colour. Now just what in heaven’s name was a ship doing out in a full typhoon? wondered Richard, even as his heart swelled with gratitude that it should be so.
At the very top of the little life raft, just beside the distress beacon, was a handling loop. As the ship crowded down upon the little orange vessel, one of the deck cranes swung out and a particularly intrepid crew member cinched himself to it and rode the hook down into the wind shadow like a winch man on a rescue helicopter. With practised ease, in spite of his thick gloves and his bright yellow wet-weather gear, he stooped and pushed the hook through the loop, checked the safety catch and gave a slow, careful signal. The line jumped into motion and he nearly lost his footing — only his safety harness saved him. Once the crane’s winch took the weight of the life raft, things progressed at a more sedate pace. Looking for all the world like a bright orange re-entry capsule from deep space, the intrepid little vessel was hoist aloft. Up over the safety rails it went, briefly even above the wind shadow of the low-piled deck cargo, terrifyingly into the teeth of the wind again. It swung back out again over the boiling black water. Only the deft hands at the crane’s controls saved them from falling back into the sea. Everything seemed to stop for a moment then, until the power of the blast faltered and the raft swung back like a pendulum. The instant it did so, the operator let slip and it settled down on to the deck. At once the man who had gone over the side uncinched his safety harness and jumped down.
The side of the tent opened and a strange face peered in at the three inside. Their rescue had been so sudden, so unlooked-for, that really only Richard had any kind of a grasp on the situation. He fought to get up and cross to their rescuer but his legs and feet were bound by agonising cramps and he doubted he could even stand yet. Heroically, he fought to bend his knees, grunting with a combination of frustration and agony. ‘Mgoi!’ he yelled. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
The yellow, weather-geared head nodded. All Richard could see was the hood and a lick of black hair.
‘Neih hou mah?’ came a light, tenor voice; almost treble. Had they been rescued by a child?
‘We’re fine! Fine. Mgoi.’
‘Hou wah,’ said their rescuer. Then in English, ‘You’re welcome. Can you move? We need to hurry.’
A big wind thundered and it was obvious to Richard that the captain had had enough of presenting his beam to the storm and was turning to face it. This was no time to linger on the deck, but still he could not make his cramp-chained legs obey him. ‘I can’t make my legs move,’ he said. ‘Deui mjyuh!’
‘Are you injured?’ asked the rescuer, looking up suddenly, face full of concern. And Richard realised it was a woman.
‘Cramp,’ he grated. He turned to the other two who were just sitting there, stunned. ‘Hurry,’ he snarled. ‘
The ship’s turning into the wind. This whole thing is going to go by the board in a minute!’
Richard’s words, backed by another battering gust of wind, galvanised Sally but it was the sight of their slight rescuer’s face that moved Lawkeeper. The three of them, with varying levels of grace, in varying states of disrepair, tumbled out on to the dull red metal of the ship’s deck. And they were not a moment too soon. The instant the small craft was relieved of their weight, it surrendered to the brute force of the wind. Like a child’s balloon it was snatched aloft. Instead of a string, it had the steel cable of a ship’s crane attached to it. The ball of rubberised canvas, snatched aloft, jerked to a halt high above. The crane’s jib jerked round, bent like matchwood.
The driver with the delicate hands proved that he also had a clear head and swift feet for he was out of the crane in a twinkling.
The four on the deck, three of them kneeling or lying and the fourth crouching over them as though offering the protection of her slight body, watched awestruck as the crane leaned to the side. The whole ship seemed to slew a little, as though the straining balloon would lift her out of the water and carry her aloft. But then the crane’s cable parted and just as it did so, the life raft, inflated far beyond its design specifications, simply exploded into a thousand bright rags and whirled away down the wind.
They all flinched as the line parted but it simply crashed back against the deck cargo and fell lifeless on to the deck. The crane driver ran back to the leaning tower of his crane and engaged the winch. That robust little machine was still working well enough to pull the rest of the cable on to its drum — but for the sake of neatness, that was all. As a crane, it would never work again.