by Shane Carrow
“What are you doing here?” Liana said, coming out of the engine room, helping a woozy-looking Colin. “How’d you get here?”
“Saw it happening from the shore,” I said. “We came across the sandbars. How many of them are there?”
“Look, we’re not going to hurt you…” the first captive said.
Geoff turned on him, smacked the butt of his newly-acquired rifle across the man’s head with a shocking brutality. It could easily have killed him – as it was, the man dropped to his knees on the deck, moaning. “Shut the fuck up!” Geoff snarled. He looked around at us – the five of us from the shore, Dr Lacer, Colin, Liana, Anthony, and the others who were even now emerging from the engine room.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Geoff said, checking the rifle’s clip. “They fucking shot me. They started this shit. How many of them are there?”
“We just asked you that,” I said.
“I mean how many of them are left? Outside the ship?”
We filled him in. They had three ships, we had one, with Alan and Jonas. As far as we knew, they didn’t know we were here yet.
And now we had two hostages.
“The bridge,” Anthony said. “They’ll be on the bridge.”
“Let’s go,” Geoff said.
We left the kids, the elderly, the wounded. In practice, what that meant was that our little landing party of five was bolstered only by Dr Lacer, Geoff, Anthony, Declan and Liana. But that was okay: we had two hostages, hands in the air, pushed upstairs with the barrels of our guns poking into their backs. And we had no reason to believe the people on the bridge knew we were coming.
They didn’t. They were standing at the windows as we emerged, staring out there, pointing at something excitedly. But as we moved forward – as we stepped out of the stairwell, pushing our hostages ahead of us – one of the hostages screamed “Look out, they got loose!” and dove forward to the deck.
Geoff, Len and Simon were in the front row. They opened fire out of reflex. The second hostage hadn’t realised what his mate was about to do – he dove forward in confusion a few seconds later, and maybe one second too late, sine he copped a bullet in the back of the head. The entire bridge was lit up with gunfire. I scrambled to the side, behind a console, swearing and chambering a round into the Glock. Some of the windows shattered and the rain and howling wind came in. It all only lasted a few seconds; by the time the three of them had stopped firing and I poked my head above cover, the bridge was a mess.
Nobody was left alive. The three men by the windows were lying on the floor. One of them was choking what would clearly be his last. One of our hostages was dead with a bullet in his skull; the other, the one who’d tried to warn them, was huddled under a console with his hands over his head.
Geoff dragged him out of there and started beating him around the head. “You stupid asshole!” he screamed. “You stupid fucking asshole!” Liana and Dr Lacer pulled him off a moment later. “You just got your mates killed!” he said, stabbing a finger at the hostage.
The hostage himself – who didn’t look much older than me – was staring numbly at the carnage, blinking in shock.
We took stock. They’d had a respectable few weapons – two pump action shotguns and another police Glock. Liana and Anthony, who’d been weaponless, took the shotguns. “So what the fuck do we do now?” I said. We couldn’t see them through the overcast night and the rain, but we knew that the two tugboats were still out there, patiently pulling us along, with the other trawler lurking around too. “How do we take the rest of them out?”
“We get some answers, first,” Geoff said, squatting down in front of our hostage.
We didn’t even need to threaten him much. He was sitting amongst the bloodsoaked remnants of his friends, terrified, watching on as Len took a fire extinguisher from the wall and slowly stove in their heads so they didn’t reanimate. His name was Trent, he said. They came from another island, not far from here. They’d seen the Maersk from afar, drifting along the horizon, and so they’d tailed it – attacking during the storm under cover of darkness, to tow it back home. A prize, an incalculable treasure trove, just as we’d thought when it had washed up in Eucla. There were about six of the others left, he thought – three on each tugboat.
“This island,” Geoff said. “How long will it take to get there?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how fast we’re going. It’s only about seventy, maybe eight kays away. Off the tip of the Yorke Peninsula.”
“How many of you back there?”
Trent hesitated for a fraction of a second. “More than a hundred. And we’ve got guns from the Army, and…”
Geoff chambered a round into the Glock he’d taken from the dead men, and pressed it against Trent’s head. “Try again.”
“Ten or fifteen,” he said weakly. “And another thirty of the others, but…” He trailed off.
“Others?” Geoff said. “What others?”
“Other people,” Trent said. “Not fighters.”
“Kids, old people that sort of thing?”
“No…” Trent said. “Like… workers.”
I was looking at Matt, squatting down next to Geoff, clutching his Browning. I looked at the ugly black numbers tattooed on Matt’s right hand, and then looked down at my own.
“Slaves,” I said. “He’s talking about slaves.”
“No, it’s not like that!”
“Yes it is,” I said. “Isn’t it? Why else would you take everyone here alive? You had the drop on them. Why not just gun them down? People would kill for the Maersk. People have killed for the Maersk.” I looked over at Geoff. “They wanted you as slaves.”
Trent looked down at the floor, breathing very heavily.
“Geoff,” Liana said. “He’s just a kid.”
“We’ll take him down to the others,” Geoff said. “Let them keep an eye on him. Then let’s go pay a visit to our friends in the tugboats.”
Out on the deck, after dropping Trent off with Colin and the others, we moved towards the front of the ship. The rain had eased, but it was still coming, and we were all cold and wet and freezing. Jonas and Alan’s trawler was riding a few hundred yards off to port, a beacon of light ploughing through dark and choppy waves. No way of signalling them – we couldn’t radio them without tipping off the tugboats as well.
We came to the bow, where up ahead of us, patiently towing the Maersk through the void, were a pair of lit-up tugboats. They’d attached tough-looking polyfibre ropes to the machinery at the bow, and each trailed a line out in a V-shape, so that they were about a hundred metres ahead and about the same distance abreast of each other. We could vaguely catch glimpses of movement through the bright windows of the wheelhouses, but it was still raining and they were far away and it was hard to get an accurate count. Trent had said three in each boat, but could we trust him?
“We can cut the ropes,” Len said. “Anyone got a knife?”
“No, no,” Geoff said. “Don’t do that. They’re not going to sail off and not realise they’ve left the ship behind.”
“No, but what can they do about it? There’s only one way up on deck, and we can cover that.”
“There’s only one way down, too,” Geoff pointed out. “We’ve got the element of surprise here. We can take them out. Then we’ve got all the boats, and the Maersk.”
“How the fuck do we take them out?” Matt said.
Geoff chewed his lip. He had both hands on the prow, rifle slung over his back. “Fucking hell,” he said. “I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but…”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“We go down the ropes. We’ve got the element of surprise. They don’t know we’re here. It’s all downhill. We go down the ropes and we can get the drop on them.”
“You’re fucking kidding,” Dr Lacer said.
“Got a better idea? We cut the ropes and let them come around and shoot at us while we try to get down to Jonas and Alan? No. Fuck that. We
go down the ropes, we take them now. We get this done now. Who’s with me?”
He turned to face our motley band: soaked wet, bleeding, exhausted, adrenaline-flushed. There was no way Declan was going to go. Dr Lacer was our only doctor. Ash looked terrified at the very prospect. Liana had Colin to think about…
“Fuck it,” Matt said. “All right, let’s do it, let’s go.”
“I’ll go,” I said. I couldn’t quite grasp what my mouth was saying.
“God help me,” Anthony said. “Let’s get this over and done with.”
We swapped some weapons around. The boats were a hundred metres away in shifting seas, but if things went pear-shaped then maybe the others could cover us from up here with the rifles. Liana tried to give me her shotgun, but I turned her down. I didn’t want to go into a situation with a kind of gun I’d never used before; neither was I thrilled about dangling from a rope with a heavy piece of metal hanging off my back. I had my Glock. That would have to be enough.
Geoff went first. We held onto his arms and shoulders as he backed out onto the rope – then, with a stomach-churning drop, he swung upside down and began shimmying down.
“You’re next,” I said to Matt. Over on the other rope, Len was carefully picking his way down.
Matt climbed backwards onto the rope, looking stone-faced, and a moment later he swung and dropped as well.
Then it was my turn.
It wasn’t so bad. I can tell myself that now, writing it down. At the time it was one of the more terrifying experiences I’ve had since all this started. A good eight metres above a churning, pitch-black ocean, staring up at an equally pitch-black sky with rain splotching down on my screwed-up face, slick on the rope beneath my palms. Wondering what it would feel like to drop – the stomach-jerking moment of horror, the fall, the icy smack of the water, and then churned up beneath the hull of the Maersk, a cold and painful and blinding death down there, all alone…
And all the while, wondering if anyone on the tugboats might glance back and see us, a trio of sitting ducks shuffling down their cable.
The ropes weren’t taut, either – with the swell and the waves and the pull of the tugs they slackened and grew taut again, a horrible queasy motion that constantly made me feel as though they were about to snap entirely and plunge us into the ocean. Don’t think about it. Shuffle down. Slip and slide down, rather, with the polyfibre ropes slick with rainwater. A few time I went too fast and my legs bumped into Matt’s head. “Slow down!” he hissed up at me, unseen in the darkness – I was staring straight up at the blank dark sky, too terrified to look down. The whole thing seemed ludicrous. Why were we alive? Why were all of us still alive? Surely we should have died by now, surely our luck was going to run out…
We reached the tug. Matt and Geoff helped me aboard, unstretching aching muscles, ducking down at the spooling machinery at the rear of the boat. Rain was still drumming down on the deck around us, the occasional wave spray washing over the boat. Up ahead, through the tangled devices of the tug’s machinery, I could see the bright glow of the wheelhouse and the shape of at least one man by the wheel inside.
“We get the drop on them we can try to take them alive,” Geoff said. “But no chances, alright? Safeties off.”
We were creeping up towards the wheelhouse when we heard the gunshots. Our heads whipped to starboard. Even across a hundred metres of storm-soaked water, we could hear the gunshots aboard the other tug.
And so could our targets.
Geoff darted forward, taking shelter underneath the narrow steel steps that led up to the wheelhouse. Matt darted back behind the winch mechanism. I was caught for a moment, and dropped to the ground behind the poor shelter of a few strapped-down storage crates.
Two men had come rushing out of the wheelhouse; I could see a third still inside, staying at the wheel but ducking to peer out the window. The other two had stayed on the upper deck, together at the starboard railing, looking out across the water. “Fucking hell, what are they playing at?” one of them said. It was too dark and rainy still for them to actually make out any movement of battle; all they could hear were the gunshots.
The tug’s pilot was already cutting to starboard, heading towards the other boat to aid their friends. It was then that Geoff crept up the stairs, poked his shotgun between the railing and aimed it squarely in the back of one of the men. He’d abandoned any notion of taking them alive. Just as one of them began to turn, he squeezed the trigger.
It jammed. An evening in the rain and salt hadn’t been kind to it. Geoff swore, and swung the shotgun out like a club, hitting one of the men in the ankles and knocking him to the ground. He was reaching for the Glock holstered at his hip but the other man, the one still standing, was quicker – he darted across the upper deck and swung his foot out, connecting with Geoff’s jaw, knocking him backwards off the stairs. And a moment later he was vaulting down from the upper deck himself, scrambling to take Geoff while he was still down…
All of this had taken place over about three seconds, and it was as he jumped down and landed with a clump on the lower deck that I realised neither of them had guns. That was why he was keen to cover the distance so quick. In any case, I was already bursting from behind the crates, levelling my Glock at him, squeezing the trigger a few quick times and seeing his eyes go wide in disbelief as he was plugged right through the chest. We were only a few metres apart, Geoff tangled on the deck between us, and as he toppled forward he actually fell into my arms.
And a good thing, too, because I’d been wrong. The man Geoff had knocked off his feet had had a gun, and he was firing in panic down at us – I caught only a glimpse of him, still on the deck, one hand pulling himself up by the railing and the other levelled towards me with a pistol. I held his friend’s body before me, even as the momentum carried us back, feeling the bullets thud into the corpse. And Geoff, down on the deck in front of us, had recovered his Glock and was still on his back, shooting upwards between his own knees, bullets whining off the steel walls of the wheelhouse before one of them drilled into the man’s skull.
Again, that was a couple of seconds – Geoff had returned fire and killed the man even as the momentum of the dead body of the other bore me down onto the deck. I scrambled to get out from under it, a tangle of limp limbs and my own rapidly motoring arms and legs, and I was just in time to see the pilot of the boat emerge from the wheelhouse with a shotgun cradled under his arm.
A moment later there was another gunshot and he fell back through the doorway of the wheelhouse, the bulkhead behind him suddenly splattered with blood. Matt, behind the winching mechanism, had propped his gun up and aimed very carefully and saved our lives.
And that was it - about five or six seconds in total - and sudden the tug was ours, three dead bodies scattered across the deck.
Matt took a boathook and went about the grisly business of making sure they didn’t come back. Geoff limped up to the wheelhouse, and I followed him, wanting to get out of the rain and the wind and the constant spray of seawater coming over the prow. “Anthony, you copy?” he said into the radio. “Anthony, Len, Simon? You guys all right?”
“That you, Geoff? You okay?” It was Simon.
“We’re fine, we took them out, we’re okay. What about you guys?”
“They saw us coming, they’re down. Len’s been hit in the shoulder. Anthony…”
A pause. A feeling of dread.
“Anthony’s dead.”
“Fucking hell,” Geoff said, staring out the window at the other tug for a moment. Then he slammed the console, scattering papers, sending a coffee mug bouncing out of its holder, rolling across the console, shattering on the floor. “Fuck!”
I sat weakly in the pilot’s chair. It had been too good, I’d known that. We’d come too far, too easily. Attacked in the night, and we’d given chase, we’d saved our people. We weren’t getting out of that without blood. Without a price to pay.
Or maybe that’s bullshit. Maybe there’s no
reason behind anything. Maybe Anthony just got unlucky.
We dropped the Maersk’s anchors, released the tug line, radioed Jonas and Alan. We had to get Len back up to the ladder, which wasn’t easy; a bullet had struck him in the armpit and he was losing a lot of blood. Fortunately he knew his blood type, and it was the same as Dr Lacer’s. The doctor rolled his own sleeve up and began cleaning and patching the wound while he and Len were connected elbow to elbow with a long, thin snake of red tubing.
After that we held a quick debrief in the mess. Every single one of us was exhausted, drained by that adrenaline comedown - energy borrowed in advance, paid back at loan shark rates. But it wasn’t over. Geoff was very clear on that.
“They’ve got an island,” he said, stabbing a finger down on a chart he’d taken from the tug – a much better chart than the broader ones on the Maersk. This was a laminated map of the Spencer Gulf stamped with the logo of something called Geoscience Australia, complete with depth markings and navigational hazards and shipping channels and all kinds of things I could never hope to understand. It had been marked and annotated by the men we’d just wiped out, whom Matt had started calling “pirates,” which I suspected was going to stick. Judging from the marks, one of the islands was very clearly their home base.
“They’ve got an island, and we’re going to take it,” Geoff said. “Tonight.”
“You’re fucking joking,” Matt said. “Ellie and everyone are still stuck back in Kingscote!”
Amazingly, it was only eight o’clock; a couple of hours since we’d left. It felt like much longer. I wanted very much to lie down on the mess’ couch and go to sleep, soaking wet clothes and bloodstains and all.
“And we’ll get them,” Geoff said. “We can send the trawler back and it should just about fit everyone on. A couple of people, pick them up, come back to the Maersk.”