by Shane Carrow
“We don’t know that,” Len said. “Don’t know how many people. Don’t know if they’re armed.”
It looked to me, in the rain-blurred glow of their distant spotlights, like they were attaching lines and chains to the Maersk. I could see figures moving about on the deck.
“If they weren’t armed, Geoff and everyone wouldn’t have let them just walk aboard,” I said.
“What do you want me to say?” Len spat. “We have to do something. Come on!”
We ran on through the rain, along the beach, blood pounding and lungs burning. We came to the beginning of the long stretch of estuary, the rockpools and the wet sandbars and the tidal flats, the lights from the other boats glimmering and stretching across it. Matt had plunged knee deep into wet, sucking sand. He managed to pull himself out before I got there but he’d lost a boot. “Fucking hell,” he hissed. “Be careful! Quicksand everywhere!”
“Spread out,” Len said. “Watch your step.”
In the darkness, in the rain, it was almost impossible to tell where it was safe to walk. We tried to stick to the higher ground, the little wet funnels and ridges, but it was mostly guesswork, and we inched along desperately. All the while we could see the light of the boats ahead, even hear the rumble of their struggling engines as they tried to haul the Maersk free of the sandbar. We were only a few kilometres away now, and our speed was ruined. Before long Jonas and Alan and Simon and Ash had caught up, right behind us, picking their way across the littoral.
We hurried along – splashing, tripping, falling, getting stuck in wet sand. All of us drenched already from the rain. The seawater, when a wave surged around our knees, felt surprisingly warm in comparison.
“Shit,” Len said, stopping dead in his tracks just ahead of me. “They’ve got it.”
All I could hear was thunder and rain, but up ahead, in the glow of the spotlights, I could see the Maersk shifting backwards off the sandbar. They had two tugboats hooked up to it, and the great blue bulk of the container ship was moving inexorably back towards the sea.
“No, no, no…” I said.
“Keep moving!” Jonas shouted.
We pushed on, scrambling across the sandbars, across stretches of water where we were waist or even chest deep. The Maersk was being moved out with surprising speed; once she was free of the sandbar they’d attached new lines to the bow, and were bringing her around, ready to tow her back out into the ocean. To where? Who the hell were these people?
I felt total anguish set in as we came within a kilometre of the site – the site where the Maersk had once been, that was. She was already back out at sea, being towed away further with every passing minute, her abductors alongside her.
But there was one boat left. The tugboats were pulling the ship out, but there was the third boat, the fishing trawler. It had been on the bay side of the sandbar, not on the open ocean side, with a crew out on the sand. I could see them from their flashlights. One, two three. Maybe more still on the trawler. Dark figures moving about on the sand, their flashlight beams lighting up tiny rainswept cones of light, emphasising the greater darkness beyond them. The night, the clouds, the torrential rain.
They had no idea we were coming. We burst out of the dark like monsters, soaking wet, blood pounding, opening fire before they realised what was happening. I aimed my Glock at the points of light and squeezed the trigger over and over, the clatter of semi-automatic fire around me as Jonas and Alan and Simon opened up with their rifles. The flashlight beams dropped down into the sand. Len and Matt were hurrying to the boat itself, a thirty-foot fishing trawler anchored in waist-deep water at the edge of the sandbar, and as they pulled themselves over the edges I was right behind them. The wheelhouse was blazing bright with electric light, two figures inside, both of them already dashing out onto the deck. They hadn’t seen us, they didn’t know what was happening. Len caught one of them in the chest with a full blast of the shotgun and he toppled forward with his own momentum, down the wheelhouse stairs. Matt and I shot the second, quick and wild shots, some of the bullets ricocheting off the bulkhead behind him, others clipping him in the chest and the shoulder. He staggered down onto the deck, on his hands and knees for a moment before they buckled too. He’d been reaching for a revolver but Len covered the distance between them quickly, placed one soggy boot down onto the man’s hand, pressed the barrel of the shotgun against his head.
And that was it. The rain lashed down across the deck; on the other side of the sandbar, out in the open sea, I could see the distant lights of the tugboats hauling the Maersk. The flashlights on the sandbar were moving again, retrieved by the others, and they’d tossed the line in from the ground anchor before climbing up over the side. “Get that other fucking anchor up, come on!” Jonas barked.
I fumbled around at the back of the boat. Ash helped me find it – a winch mechanism, amongst the great mix of the trawler’s net mechanism. “I got it, I got it,” he said. I walked back up the deck in time to see Matt take some fishing implement, some iron spike, and sink it into the head of the man Len had shot. Even in the rain the boards of the trawler were slick with blood. Len and Simon were lifting the injured man up, carrying him inside, where even now Jonas stood in the bridge of the wheelhouse and turned on the engines. He wheeled, turned, nosed the trawler out into the bay, out towards the edge of the spit of the sandbar. Out towards the open sea.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said, teeth shivering. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off I felt drenched and cold and terribly unhappy.
“What do you think?” he said. “Going after the fucking Maersk.”
“But we… what about the others?” I said, looking back across the bay at the darkness of Kingscote.
“They’ll be fine for now,” Jonas said. “We need to go after the Maersk.”
“But there’s only seven of us…”
“Fucking hell, Aaron,” Jonas said, squinting through the rainwater coming down the windows of the wheelhouse. “We turn back now – we let them go – we’ll never see them again. You understand that? Geoff and Colin and Liana and everyone we left on that fucking ship. They’ll be gone. Forever. So yeah, mate, we’re fucking going after them.”
They might already be dead, I thought. But they might not. Jonas was right. We couldn’t abandon them now.
Len and Simon had taken the wounded man down to the ship’s tiny galley, sat him in a chair, pulled his shirt off and were bandaging his wounds. It didn’t look good to me – he’d been hit in the stomach, right near the bully button, and there was a terrible smell of shit, which suggested his bowels had been hit. Alan was sitting in a chair opposite him, slapping his face, trying to keep him conscious. “Hey! I asked you a question! Where are they going? Where are they taking that ship?”
“Fuck you,” the wounded man said. He was in his fifties, an outdoors worker, tanned arms but pale torso, middle-aged paunch turned trim again over the past few months of apocalyptic hardship. “You killed my friends. Fuck you.”
“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have done the same to us,” Alan said. “Where are you based? Where are they taking the ship?”
“We wouldn’t have,” the man croaked. “We don’t kill people. We don’t hurt people unless we have to. Fuck you.”
“So what’d you do to our people?” Alan said. “On the ship?”
“We didn’t hurt them.”
“They were happy for you to rock up and take it, huh?”
“We didn’t hurt them,” he repeated stubbornly. But weakly. His eyes were glazing over. Despite the bandages, blood had soaked down through his pants, dripping from the chair, pooling on the floor. I felt sick. That had been me, that had shot him. Me or Matt. It didn’t matter.
I stumbled outside, back onto the deck, and was almost knocked off my feet by a wave crashing over the bow. We’d come around the spit, out into the open sea, and the storm was still blowing a near-gale in the terrifying darkness of a night-time cloudburst.
I climbed
unsteadily back up the wheelhouse steps, back inside the light and warmth of the bridge. Jonas was standing at the wheel with his legs braced to take the swell; Ash and Matt were both clinging to handholds on the ceiling The radio was crackling. “Robert I, do you copy… Robert I, do you copy…”
Jonas lifted the receiver, and kept tapping his thumb against the PTT button as he spoke, to garble the response. “Copy,” he said. “We’re having radio problems. All fine, over and out.”
“Think that’ll fool them?” Matt said.
“It better.”
We hadn’t delayed long. And the other boats couldn’t have heard the gunshots – not that far away, not in the storm. Had the two on the Robert I managed to get off a distress signal? It hadn’t looked like it, not from the way they’d come running out of the wheelhouse.
It seemed like we were going to find out. We were catching up to the Maersk, the tugboats patiently pulling it through the choppy waves. Out on the deck of the trawler, Len and Simon carried up the body of the wounded man – the dead man, now – and heaved him overboard. I looked away, back at the Maersk, up ahead. We don’t hurt people, he’d said. Had he been lying?
The others joined us in the wheelhouse. “I reckon we go straight for the Maersk,” Jonas said. “We can get onboard before the others realise what’s happening. They’ve got two tugs, by the look of it, both hitched up to the bow. We get onboard, pull the ladder up, deal with whoever’s there. Then we’re in a more defensible position.”
“Then what?” Simon said. “Say we get up there and take the Maersk. Say everyone else is still alive, even, and we set them free. Then fucking what? We’re up there, the Maersk still has no fuel, we can’t move anywhere or do anything. Sitting ducks.”
Jonas hesitated. “All right. So I’ll stay with the boat. Drop you off.”
“They’ll notice that,” Alan said. “They’ll notice you’re not answering the radio. They’ll try to come aboard you.”
“I’ll keep moving, then,” Jonas said. “Fuck, anybody got any better ideas?”
“We could go back,” Matt said. Not as something he advocated; just something he was putting on the table.
“No,” Jonas said. “We’re not going back. This is our only chance.”
“My daughter is on that ship,” Alan said. “My grandkids are on that ship. We’re not going back.”
And so we approached.
Our boarding ladders were on the port side – still dangling there, trailing down to the waterline, after that long voyage across the Bight. We made a decision. Jonas and Alan would stay on the trawler – the better to defend it, if the tugboats realised what had happened and came to attack them – and me, Matt, Simon, Len and Ash would scale the Maersk’s hull for the hundredth time. Only this time we were in the middle of a thunderstorm, in unknown seas, with an unknown presence up on board.
Jonas brought the trawler as close as he dared. It wasn’t exactly a hurricane, but the seas were rough and when you dialled it down into that exact little moment – small boat, big boat, dangling polyfibre ladder and rain lashing down on all of us – it became a very queasy exercise in physics. Matt went first, jumping from the railing of the trawler, across the gap, onto the ladder – grasped it – a wave surged up between the two boats, enveloped him entirely, and my heart shot into my mouth as I thought he’d be washed away. But the wave subsided and he was still there, climbing up the ladder.
Len went next, shotgun dangling from his back. Jonas had gunned the trawler too close, and it crumped against the hull of the Maersk, a bone-jarring crunch that threw all of us off balance. If Len had been a metre lower, or the swell a metre higher, it would have crushed his legs below the knee. But he was lucky, and he climbed up after Matt.
“Me next,” I shouted over the storm. I couldn’t watch it any longer. Simon helped me up on the rail, I gripped the trawler’s inexplicable net mechanism above my head for balance, waited for Jonas to bring it closer…
Jumped, lurching across that horrible gap, that dark swell of salt water below me. Gripped the polyfibre in one hand, salt residue scraping across my skin, grasped desperately with the other hand for the next rung. As soon as I had my grip I began to climb the rope ladder, ignoring what was going on down below, not caring what might be lurking for us up there. I wanted off the trawler. I wanted the calm stability of the Maersk again.
The deck was bare when I hauled myself over. Nothing stirred; there was a weird sense of deja vu from when I’d first climbed up aboard the Maersk, at this very same spot, all those weeks ago. I felt adrenaline flare again before Matt hissed at me from the cover of an opened container. He and Len were crouched in the shadows, hiding, keeping an eye on the walkway leading to the superstructure.
“Nothing yet,” Matt whispered. “Nothing yet.”
The deck around us was an absolute mess, scattered with tumbled cardboard boxes and broken glass jars and split-open packets of nuts. We’d developed an immense bottleneck of goods back at Eucla, waiting to be shipped to shore, and in the calm seas since we’d left nobody had thought to shift them inside. Now they were a victim of the storm, scattered across the deck. The Maersk was far more stable than a little thing like the trawler but even up here I could feel the queasy motion of the sea.
Simon was next over the railing. Ash came last. Tucked into the back of his belt was the revolver the dead man on the trawler had been carrying. I didn’t like the idea of him having a gun but he seemed to have pretty firmly thrown his lot in with us at this point. Besides, like Jonas had told me back in Kingscote – we needed every man we could get.
“So what now?” I said, as we knelt in the darkness among the scattered foodstuffs. “We take the superstructure?”
“That’s where I would be, if I was them,” Simon said. He went and looked over the railing. Jonas and Alan had pulled away, off into the darkness. With any luck the other boats would see nothing amiss; the tugs were well ahead of us, their rear vision blocked by the bulk of the Maersk itself. But if there’d been anyone up on the bridge…
In the soaking chaos of a thunderstorm, somewhere in an unknown sea, with a handful of guns and no idea what we might face, the five of us crept towards the superstructure of the Regina Maersk.
The ship was as deserted as the first day we’d discovered it – less than a month ago, though it felt much longer than that. I was gripped with dread, convinced that at any moment we were about to stumble across the massacred bodies of our friends. But there was nothing.
We came to the superstructure, looming dark at the stern of the ship. Twisted the valve handle open, entered those dark corridors we’d been in so many times before, out of the maelstrom and into the relative warmth and quiet.
And here, for the first time, we could hear voices. Raised voices, further down the corridor, bouncing and echoing around the metal walls, the words warbled. We crept forward silently, not risking the flashlights, hands gripped around our guns.
There was a flickering light at the end of the hall. A Tilley lamp. The medical bay was on the ground floor, and as we approached I could tell one of the voices was Dr Lacer’s. “…do more harm than good. It could kill him.”
“But I’m O-type…”
“It doesn’t matter. O-type is ballpark, it’s not a panacea. If he deteriorates any further then I’ll take some of your blood, but otherwise…”
“You’d fucking better. I’ve told you. If he dies, you die.”
A weary tone to Lacer’s voice. “I’m a doctor. You’re not going to kill me, so don’t embarrass yourself with empty threats.”
“We got a doctor back home. We don’t need you. If he dies, you die…”
We emerged into the room, blinking in the light, guns brandished. There were three men in the sick bay: Dr Lacer, a wounded and half-stripped man unconscious on a sick bed, and another bearded man in a Driza-Bone coat, sitting in a chair with a Glock pointed at Lacer. His jaw dropped. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Drop it!” L
en hissed, levelling the shotgun at his face. “Drop that fucking gun!”
He dropped the Glock, Matt darting forward and retrieving it. Simon had forced him up, made him turn around to face the wall. Lacer’s expression had gone from disbelief to relief. “Jesus Christ,” he breathed. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“Where are the others?” Matt urged, handing him the Glock. “What did they do to the others?”
“They… they’re downstairs,” Lacer said, looking down at the Glock like he wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“What about these fuckers?” Simon said, his rifle in the man’s back. “How many of them?”
“I don’t know who you are, but you can’t…”
“Shut the fuck up,” Simon growled.
“There’s, I don’t know,” Lacer said. “Lots when they came on, ten or twenty or something, I think some of them went back to the other boats. There was a bit of back and forth, that’s how this bloke got shot, none of ours seriously hurt. We had to surrender, they got the drop on us. I think they’re up on the bridge now…”
“Downstairs,” Len said. “The others. Let’s go.”
We moved back out into the corridors, Simon pushing the captive ahead of him. We had the flashlights on now, beams of light dancing along the halls, and then down the stairwell – down, down, down to the engine room. There was another one of them sitting on an upturned box who looked up as we approached, but he couldn’t see beyond the glare of the flashlights. “Dan?” he said, shielding his eyes. “Fuck are you doing?”
“Hands in the air,” Len said, coming out of the glare with his shotgun raised. “Hands in the fucking air!”
So now we had two hostages. And we opened the door to the engine room to release our friends, blinking and recoiling in the sudden light.
Geoff was ropeable. He’d been shot in the assault, clipped in the leg when they’d come swarming up the ladders, and although Dr Lacer had been allowed to dress the wound his bandages were crusted with blood. “Give me that fucking gun,” he said, pushing past us, grabbing the bolt-action that had been lying on the floor next to the guard. He looked just about ready to shoot the guy in the head, but Simon stepped in front of him. “Don’t!” he said. “We need the hostages.”