by Peter Tonkin
Suddenly cold as ice, she said, ‘What emergency, Twelvetoes?’
‘They are gone. Vanished. Down near the Rifleman. It happened last night. One minute they were there and the next … ’
‘Who? What?’ But she knew the answer well enough — or most of it.
‘My ship. My daughter. Richard.’
*
A bad day became a black day then. Dressed in a baggy boiler suit and hoping it was not too obvious that this was all she had on, Robin talked things through with Twelvetoes and then with First Officer Li. Within the hour she knew where she needed to be if she was going to help Richard and she knew that she could not go there because she did not have the men to crew the ship. Wild with frustration, she called John Shaw but that worthy had left the office. She called the international exchange and tried to get through to Crewfinders in London, but even if they could get permission to supply a crew to a Chinese port, it would still be at least a day before they arrived and Twelvetoes made it abundantly plain that instant action was what was required.
The afternoon gathered in and the typhoon continued to build. Unable to think of anything else to do, Robin completed the crewing lists and set up watches ready to put to sea but neither she nor Twelvetoes, nor any of the foot soldiers he had brought with him, could think of what to do next. Nobody could, until Daniel showed up.
At seventeen hundred, local time, the lights of a taxi shone through the rain-murky security lighting of the dock. Like some deep-water research vessel, the vehicle nosed its way between the square-shouldered reefs of the containers. Not one but two men ran up the gangplank and sprinted side by side across the storm-lashed deck. They stepped through the bulkhead door and into the A-deck corridor. They both squeezed into the tiny lift and rose to the navigation bridge. By seventeen ten they stood shoulder to shoulder before the fizzing captain of the Sulu Queen and Daniel handed her the suitcase which was instantly, carelessly, cast aside.
With her eyes on the bland, middle-aged face of the stranger, Robin told Daniel in a few well-chosen words that there was an extremely influential guest in her accommodation, his news and her frustration.
Daniel gave his little half-smile, half-nod. ‘It is as I had feared,’ he said. ‘So it is as well I have brought our friend with me.’
Like a magician producing a very special rabbit from his hat, he said, ‘My friend tells me you already know his wife Rose. She sends her best wishes and her prayers. This is Shipchandler Hip. He can supply, at two hours’ notice, the best crews in Xianggang. And he is here to serve you in this matter at once.’
And so, as the storm continued to gather and the whole of Kwai Chung seemed to be sinking deeper and deeper into the abyssal depths, taxi after taxi followed its headlight beams between the black containers and one man after another ran up the gangplank and into the wind-shaken bridgehouse. Robin made her announcement as promised at eighteen hundred and she warned them to prepare to put to sea. By nineteen hundred she was saying goodbye to Twelvetoes and to Shipchandler Hip and reaching for the tannoy again.
At nineteen thirty on the nose, Radio Officer Lai, still dripping over his equipment, informed the harbourmaster in Aberdeen that Sulu Queen was setting sail.
A lively discussion as to legality ensued but there was no stopping Robin now. She was owner and commander and master under God of the good ship Sulu Queen. Hurricane winds, full typhoons, and Number Eight warnings were as nothing to her except that they meant the shipping lanes would be quiet. Commanded by herself, crewed by volunteers from her own company, officered by the men supplied by Shipchandler Hip and piloted — less than legally, perhaps — by Daniel Huuk, late of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, the battered old freighter eased out of the port, away past Stonecutter’s Island, past Tsing Yi and under the great span of the bridge to Lan Tao and the airport, round into the Brothers Separation Zone and past Castle Peak into the hurricane-riven wasteland of the South China Sea.
14
In common with most Cantonese, Leading Seaman Ang had many names. His milk name had been Little Frog — common enough; his young mother called him that the night she left him in Signal Hill Gardens behind the Mariners Club with a simple note pinned to his shawl and never came back. His Christian name, given to him after he had come to the foundling section of the orphanage, was Andrew. His social name, which he took on leaving that august establishment sixteen years later, was Yuk-tong. His friends aboard Twelvetoes Ho’s Invisible Power Triad ship Luck Voyager all called him Flat-nose because of an accident with a bottle in a Shanghai brawl. He called himself White Powder Ang, however, to keep his allegiances clear in his mind.
During the three days after Richard’s interview with Captain Song, Flat-nose Ang kept an increasingly close eye on the gweilo giant and his red-haired witch of a bed partner. Although by nature, training and current employment a spy, Ang was also an avid member of his chosen Triad and he knew as well as any that the man had cost the White Powder a great sum of money in the past while the witch had more recently helped the Thai police destroy a full year’s shipment of raw opium as it came south from the Golden Triangle. He knew that his own Dragon Head would grant much face, at the very least, to the soldier who destroyed this pair and only one or two inconvenient details kept him from taking action. Firstly, he could see no way of destroying them without unmasking himself. And this he had sworn never to do. Secondly, he hesitated to take direct action without permission from a higher source and no other White Powder men were working aboard Luck Voyager as far as he knew. Thirdly, he was ambitious and intelligent; he wished to perform such an important action in such a way as would allow the White Powder Dragon Head to know of his actions, and of their author, so that reward could the more easily be forthcoming. So White Powder Ang bided his time and watched his victims and made his plans. And, as the days went past, he saw that the pair of gweilo prisoners were being allowed more and more freedom, which made them more and more accessible to him.
Captain Song Sun-wah saw himself as a man of subtlety. He knew very well that there would be among his crewmen who had been placed there by other Triads. He did not much mind about spies from 14K or Sun Yee On being aboard but he did worry about White Powder men. White Powder had scores to settle with the Invisible Power Triad and its Dragon Head, as well as with his friends and associates. Having Richard Mariner and Sybelle Alabaster aboard gave the captain a unique chance to do a little hunting and in the days after his talk with Richard he allowed them more and more freedom so that they could be staked out like a couple of goats in a tiger hunt. And he watched his crew to see who would make a move against them first.
‘It’s like being Miss September,’ fumed Sally. ‘I mean I’ve been in men-only environments before — hell, I’m used to being the only round-eye broad in a nest of chauvinist slants but this really ticks me off. No matter where I go all these eyes are trying to see up my skirt or down my top. Sometimes I think I ought to go out there buck naked with “Come and get it” tattooed on my ass.’
‘That would certainly focus things,’ conceded Richard. ‘But I’m surprised, I must admit. This bunch seem pretty well-disciplined to me. I’d be happy with them on any of my own ships.’
‘You ask your Robin sometime. See what she thinks about all these busy little eyes trying to see through her knickers all the time. This damn overall doesn’t help either. I thought overalls were supposed to be loose and sexless. This just seems to squeeze things together and firm things up all on its own. I ain’t got a crack or a cleave but it shows it off or works right up into it.’
‘It’s too small, Sally. That’s all there is to it.’
‘You’re lucky yours hasn’t castrated you.’
‘Cheer up. At least we got our own underwear back.’
‘Well, you might have. Some nasty little Oriental pervert’s got mine under his pillow somewhere. And I don’t believe they couldn’t have done something to retrieve that silk suit of mine. That was one hell of a suit. It should have st
ood up to a soaking and some ship’s laundry work! I am sick at heart about that suit.’
Richard sat quietly and watched Sally as she tugged at the restricting, revealing clothing she wore. Being closeted with her in this mood was dangerously distracting. Being enclosed in such close proximity with her was disturbing in any case. It was impossible not to stray into unusual — unacceptable — intimacy, and while he was a fiercely loyal husband with a beautiful wife, who saw himself as being the soul of equality in all things, Sally Alabaster would occasionally shock him into seeing that on occasion he had no more self-control than the most self-indulgent chauvinist.
To be fair, he was judging himself by his usual impossibly high standards — and Sally herself had been secretly impressed by the space he had managed to give her. At least in these quarters she had no creepy feeling of personal intrusion, of sneaky eyes trying to see just that little bit more all the time. Indeed, Sally had an uneasy feeling that she had become rather more deeply acquainted with his lanky, muscular, lightly furred and interestingly scarred body than was absolutely necessary.
But things were really beginning to get to her now, especially the fact that they could not even turn their lights off at night — the first thing that had alerted them to the probability that they were under constant observation. They could turn them down on dimmer switches so that there was not too much interference with their sleep, but even so, absolute darkness was forbidden them — a stark reminder of their status as prisoners here. And this had been further underlined by the fact that they were not even included in the regular emergency lifeboat drills they had heard going on around them yesterday. After four days and nights of this, there was no doubt that Sally’s explosive mood was becoming dangerous.
The long, searching, personal discussions they had enjoyed during the last few days had explored every aspect of their past and their experience. Sally was a fascinating — not a little disturbing — combination. An army brat, only offspring of a professional non-com, she had been dragged to tomboy maturity in the all-male environments of Fort Bragg, Fort Banning and the rest. Her hobbies were shooting, riding and body-building. She had handled a Bren before buying a Barbie and was adept at stripping both by her sixth birthday. She had joined the US Army herself as soon as she was able. Although she had demonstrated that her true skills lay in the fields of unarmed combat, jungle warfare and counter-terrorism, because of her sex she had been trained as a nurse. Now she was fortunate in having found a niche which suited her perfectly and allowed her to demonstrate the wider range of skills which nature, fate and army prejudice had equipped her with. She was currently a sergeant, grade E9, designated as the Medical NCO with an ‘A’ Team of the First Battalion of the First Special Forces Group (Airborne) of the United States Army. She was stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington, but on forward deployment to Torii Station on Okinawa Island, Japan.
She and the rest of her team had been seconded as part of an advisory unit working with the Thai police in their anti-drug smuggling activities. Her unfortunate and intimate wounding had led to brief hospitalisation in Bangkok and some furlough which she had elected to take in Xianggang and Macau.
For Richard to treat such a person as a kind of daughter would be ridiculous. English avuncularity seemed out of place as well. He settled on a sort of Colditz companionship as though they were both men and longtime chums held in a prisoner-of-war camp together. This kept the inevitable intimacy and familiarity out of his dreams and his libido. He called her Sergeant more often than Sally. She called him Captain and rarely Richard. And every time she addressed him by his rank, she thought how happy she would be if he really was her commanding officer. He was the best officer she had ever come across, and she really wanted to see him in action again. The glimpse she had caught during the sinking and the storm had promised much.
‘Come here, Sergeant,’ he said now. ‘Sit down and let me massage your shoulders. It will take some of the tension out. The alternative is that you’ll end up taking it out on someone else, which is exactly what we don’t want now that they’re beginning to give us a little more freedom.’
Sally crossed the cabin and sat between Richard’s ankles with her square shoulders parting his knees. She saw herself reflected in the glass doors of a little cupboard which sat on the floor exactly opposite. They made a striking couple, with her curled on the floor between his feet and his hands working at her like a puppet master with his marionette. It was a disturbing picture, like something out of du Maurier; like Trilby under the thumb of her hypnotic master.
Letting Richard ease one sort of tension with those strong fingers of his was all very well, Sally thought wryly, languorously, but it complicated things further down and deep within her body. Her darkly-reflected Svengali was in fact the one man aboard she would have enjoyed to have watching her. His English reserve, however, did not even allow him to watch her morning work-out. He always retired into the strange privacy of the Virtuality machine then, which was an effective way to keep some distance between them. Her routine was vigorous and testing, a variation of the Canadian Air Force exercises, designed to keep her in the peak of physical form. It was far too energetic and testing to be performed in the Pygmy seaman’s outfit which was all she had to wear and so she did it wearing nothing at all. As she worked, she would glance across and see him sitting on the end of the bed with his face lost in the strange headset, those long hands moving as he adjusted the controls of whatever machine he was learning about today. That sight gave her strength and courage. And she needed it, for they knew there was a microphone hidden in their cabin and suspected there was a surveillance camera, though they had found neither. It was a mark of Sally’s extraordinary personal quality that, feeling as she did and all too aware of the eyes upon her, she nevertheless worked out regularly and fiercely — and probably on video.
The routines of exercise and Virtuality continued morning and evening even when Captain Song decreed they should be allowed an increasing freedom. As a result, Richard became more closely acquainted with the Virtuality machine than otherwise he would have done. He was a tinkerer. He could not sit back and accept things, he loved to fiddle. He was never satisfied until he knew how things worked. He had been loath to take his big VI2 E-type Jaguar on to the road before he had learned how to strip and re-assemble the engine. Now he had discovered that it was possible to re-programme some of the displays in the Virtuality machine; possible and, indeed, relatively easy. The headset had its own little drive which could be called up and varied by a kind of 3D on-screen tool bar which hovered in the air before him and allowed him to grasp and pull down whole scrolls of instructions which the machine was eager to obey. Robin was the more computer-literate of the two of them but Richard was no slouch with machines of all sorts and he was a confident, efficient basic programmer. Fundamentally, there was no difference between this system and any other of the Microsoft systems he was used to — though Mr Gates and his corporation were unlikely to have had anything whatever to do with the pirated systems in the machine he was currently using.
As he eased the anger out of the long muscles in Sally’s shoulders, Richard’s mind was casually adrift, speculating on how he might use this newly acquired skill to help them. Under normal circumstances he would have discussed things with Sally, but the hidden microphone meant that within the disturbing physical intimacy they remained mentally isolated on most important subjects. They had invented little codes and a kind of ‘secret speak’ to try to foil the men who listened to them, but only in the direst of emergencies would they try direct communication. And so their isolation from each other had grown, little by little. And right now this was perhaps as well, for his expert ministrations had released in their subject a flood of pure sensuality so intense that she would have gone straight through to the bedroom with him at once and without a second thought had he asked her.
Instead, he said the last thing she expected him to say. ‘Sally, could you move your morning and evening rou
tines around the rooms?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, her mind — and her diction — slowed by the sensuality flooding through her. ‘Why?’
His fingers stopped moving and tapped her hard. She pricked up her ears at once. He was going into that half-code with which they communicated the occasional thought too important to be contained in their heads — or shared with their hosts. ‘It occurred to me,’ he said, ‘that you might be overlooked, from the outside companionway, for instance. I know you’ve been worried about that … ’ He let his voice trail off, alerting her to a change in tactics and communication. Then he moved and in the glass-fronted cupboard on the floor opposite she saw the reflection of his gaunt head fall towards hers like a stooping eagle.
He spoke rapidly, very close to her. ‘If they’re watching us then that’ll be something no one will want to miss. If you move out of camera range for your work-out then they’ll move the camera. If they move it then we’ll know where it is. If we know that then we might be able to do something about it.’
He pulled back as the cascade of words was still rippling down her imagination like cold chills down her spine. It was typical of Richard’s leadership, she thought inconsequentially as she digested what he had said. Somehow he had turned everything on its head. He made the voyeurs the potential victims of his half-articulated plan. He would make her body and their obscene fascination with it the bait in a trap. And that made all the ogling and the invasion of her privacy worthwhile. Her muscles relaxed under this revelation more completely even than under his hands.
This conversation took place early on the morning of the fourth day, Thursday the 16th. No sooner had they had it than Sally gamely stripped off and performed her exercises in a place far removed from her accustomed position while Richard watched the virtual figure of the girl who had attracted Twelvetoes Ho so much in Macau. Richard watched the disturbingly realistic graphical nude not for gratification — a far more vivid form could have been had without the use of the headset in any case — but because he was wondering about his half-formed plan.