by Peter Tonkin
‘What do you think did this?’ he asked in a scarcely audible whisper of Mandarin.
‘Something very big. Forty-four Magnum maybe. Something far bigger than anything we’re carrying.’
Huuk’s hiss of indrawn breath was still lingering on the air when his radio spat into life. ‘Tuan.’
*
At least the Vietnamese corpses had faces, but that was more or less all that could be said for them. There were six of them — four women and two children — and they lay naked but reverently arranged in the cold storage. Except that, since the ship’s power was down, there was nothing to keep the cold storage cold. From nearby areas it was possible to smell putrefying meat of all sorts as the domain of the chief steward and the chief cook slowly went rancid and rotted away. The bodies were beginning to bloat quite badly but it was still possible to see that three of the women had been young and one had been middle-aged. One child had been a girl of about ten years and the other a baby. Without a close examination it was impossible to be sure, but it looked as though they had all been raped. In spite of the obvious care which had been taken to clean them before laying them out, there were certain signs which could not be overlooked, for the acts seemed to have been brutal — and repeated. There was no doubt that they had all been murdered: their throats were cut. The three younger women had been subjected to further mutilation — hopefully after death — and various pieces of them were missing.
Huuk looked down on them, his mouth a thin line. He was beginning to get a very bad feeling about this; a very bad feeling indeed. His information had described a drifting derelict, ripe for piracy, heading into his waters; it had made no mention of corpses, and here were eight already. At least these six were innocent of the gaping wounds such as bullets from a .44 Magnum might make.
His radio hissed. ‘Tuan!’
*
In the library on the boat deck immediately beneath the bridge were twenty more. They lay frozen in a disgusting shambles of blood and books, viscera and videotapes, seemingly covered in a soiled snowdrift of shredded paper. There had been, it seemed at first, no organised executions here — they had all been crowded in among the bookshelves and then hosed with automatic fire. High-velocity bullets had tumbled through jumping, writhing, spurting bodies and then torn through the volumes around the walls making everything explode as though tiny grenades had been detonated within. Bullets had ricocheted off the iron-hearted ceiling, bringing down showers of broken glass from the light fittings. Bones had shattered as the bullets passed, starting out through already cooling flesh; plastic had shattered, spewing long loops of brown. Everywhere was splattered with great gouts of blood. In each body had been eight pints of bright red liquid. In each body there had been a pint or so of urine. In each body there had also been at least a pint of faecal matter, made liquid in most cases by shock and terror. Careful observation made clear what a first glance might have missed, that most of these people were wearing only light sleeping attire. Certainly very few were clad in anything substantial enough to soak up or contain any of the various liquids.
On the floor of the library, therefore, in amongst the wreckage of books and videotapes and half floating bodies, there lay nearly thirty gallons of liquid, most of it still fluid. For some reason best known to the naval architect who had designed the Sulu Queen, even the internal doors on the upper-deck corridors had sills as though they were bulkhead doors opening to the outer weather deck. In this instance that was fortunate. There was nearly a foot-deep of stinking liquid on the library floor which otherwise would have flooded down the alleyways and companionways — and out through the scuppers or down to the bilge.
Huuk stood outside the door with the toes of his Reeboks pressed up against the sill looking in across the still sea of blood and body fluid at the corpses frozen like the companions of Captain Scott at the South Pole. Able and experienced commander though he was, it proved difficult for him to remain in control faced with this horror. Nevertheless, there was worse to come. As his vision cleared, he began to make out one or two larger craters amongst the smaller bullet wounds. He had been wrong. The .44 Magnum had been at work in here after all. He raised his right foot, preparing to sacrifice his Reeboks by wading in for an even closer look, but his Motorola stopped him.
‘Tuan!’ whispered his radio, and he knew at once from the sound of the voice that there was something even more terrible to see.
*
The rest of Sulu Queen’s crew were on the bridge but these men had not only been shot. Huuk’s wise eyes swept over the carnage allowing his mind to reconstruct what must have happened. What must have happened not just here but everywhere aboard.
At least one man who had done this must have been amongst the crew already. There was no sign of anyone having come clandestinely aboard, though the corpses of the Vietnamese gave him cause to wonder. Whoever had done this, for whatever reason, there had been no attempt to take the crew captive, no thought, apparently, of holding officers or men while searches were made and questions asked. There had simply been a concerted, lethal attack whose objective had been to get rid of everyone aboard as swiftly as possible. An attack whose technique had varied only between frenzied assault, callous mass murder and cold execution.
And, seemingly, it had all started here, on the bridge, in a silent rush. At least one man, armed with a pistol and a panga, had come silently onto the bridge. He had begun with the watch officer and he had used the panga in order to maintain silence and surprise. The first blow had opened the back of the man’s head and must have knocked him out but it may not have killed him for the frenzied chopping must have continued as he rolled onto his side, pulling himself into a foetal position, trying in vain to escape from the blade which was hacking through his chest and torso like an axe. At some time, probably later, to make assurance doubly sure, someone had put a pistol to his ear and pulled the trigger. That was probably why there was so much brain matter sprayed out across the floor behind him — with the clean outline of a pair of footprints in it. The steersman had been next, in all probability dispatched while the watch officer was dying. One blow had been enough for the steersman. A lateral one across the back of the neck. Now his body lay where it had fallen on the deck beneath the tiny helm and his head stood on the shelf above it, nose against the clearview, wide eyes keeping eternal watch forward down the deck.
The dress of the corpses in the library had already told Huuk that this brutal attack must have happened in the middle of the night. Last night? The night before? There was no way of telling at the moment. Even so, in the middle of the night, there had been yet another man out on the bridge wing. On seeing or suspecting the attack, he had rushed in and actually caught hold of the murderer. There had obviously been a brief wrestling match but it was onesided and had come to an inevitable end. The murderer had been carrying a heavy panga and a gun. He had blown a hole in the unfortunate officer’s side. The entry wound was black-ringed with powder bum and the exit wound showed where a rib had been torn wide and a kidney blown free. The shock of impact had thrown the officer back into the watchkeeper’s chair by the bridge wing door and here he had tried unavailingly to protect his head and shoulders with his forearms from the panga. One hand lay on the floor, severed. It was the left and there was a pale band on the clean-cut flesh of the wrist where a watch should have been. But there was no watch. The left arm itself now hung down as though reaching to retrieve the hand. The right arm lay curled within the lap, a mass of chopped flesh and white splintered bone. The thorax, chest and shoulders were in the same state. Huuk found himself hoping with unusual piety that the victim had been unconscious at the very least before the brutal attack had finished.
And yet here too, to make assurance doubly sure, some time after death, judging from the footprints in the blood beside the left hand on the deck, a heavy-calibre handgun — the .44 Magnum, he was sure — had been pressed to the dead man’s left breast and it had done to his heart what it had done to the
watch officer’s brain.
Perhaps to keep him a little distant from these atrocities, Huuk’s mind was still calculating — recreating the probable sequence of events. With the bridge taken, the ship was at the mercy of the madman with the gun and the panga. It would have been easy enough to surprise the rest of those aboard. Anyone who resisted would be tied up. The rest would be put in the library. The bound men were executed as soon as everyone was secure. And finally, those in the library were simply hosed with automatic fire. They would have stood no chance. Huuk had detected no sign of a concerted rush among the pyjama’d bodies but even had someone tried to get to the man at the door, any kind of automatic weapon, from the AK74 onwards, would have been pumping bullets into the confined space at such a rate that they would simply have been chopped down, blown backwards, destroyed with all the rest.
No, concluded Huuk, turning away and beginning to prowl back down the corridor towards the companionway. One man could easily have achieved all this. Then it occurred to him to wonder why he was thinking in terms of one man in the first place.
Because, he realised, he was convinced there was still one man alive aboard. One man who was moving from place to place concealed, silent as a ghost, coldly observing Huuk and his men, watching and waiting for his chance to act. The man with the .44 Magnum. Perhaps the man who had done all this. Huuk’s hair stirred at the thought and the hot, fetid air suddenly seemed to contain chilly little drafts.
No one else seemed to suspect the presence of the mysterious observer, but Huuk was not concerned with what his men could or could not sense. That was why he was in command. A series of monosyllabic orders spat into his radio caused his teams to fan out and change the pattern of their search. Within moments they were all spread like beaters at a hunt, driving their quarry to the hunter, and Huuk himself was like a spider at the centre of the web of their careful movements. Or rather, not quite at the centre of the web; not here, not yet. Silent as a hunting tiger, he began to pace down the companionway. The only sounds he made were the whisper of his flak jacket against the painted panels of the walls and the occasional unavoidable squeak of his moulded Reebok soles upon the stair. He knew where the stranger would be. He had made the men guarding the black boxes join the other teams and he knew the silent watcher would be tempted to them. No matter how well armed, how calculatingly sane or how foamingly mad, the watcher would be tempted to check out the boxes.
Huuk’s mouth stretched unconsciously wide as though he was screaming. His jaws ached but he didn’t notice. He concentrated on moving with absolute silence, breathing through the gape of his throat with utter voicelessness. He was a hunting cat. He was a soundless spectre. He was a shadow with a gun.
Huuk swung round the corner of the companionway leading down from the lower bridge deck where the two dead crewmen lay, swinging the squat barrel of his big black gun into position as he moved. And there, crouching over the boxes, was the apparition he had been hunting. Huuk got the impression of a tall, thin body dressed in white overalls smeared with blood. Shod with blood and red to the knees. A burning glance from wild bloodshot eyes. A flash of movement in almost superhuman speed of reaction. A big square automatic coming up. Light grey and boxy. One of the new Smith and Wessons. A .44 Magnum, just as Tse Ho had said. It was the speed that caught Huuk by surprise. He had aimed his own gun at the centre of the scene — at the centre of the twisting body. He pulled the trigger at once, jerking the weapon sideways with such force that even the massive grip of the Reeboks gave way. Huuk slipped down on one knee as the gun bellowed. Like the hardened professional he was, Huuk did not blink in spite of all the sound and movement and so he saw the tall, blood-spattered figure flip backwards as the bullet took him not in the chest but on the temple. The wild figure spun away as the brutal impact added to his own twisting movement and as Huuk rolled clumsily down the half-flight of steps to land jarringly beside his precious boxes, the last living crewman of the Sulu Queen flew backwards down the next companionway, crashing away into the engineering sections.
Huuk was at the fallen man’s side in seconds, thrusting his fingers under the angle of his jaw, feeling for a pulse. As he did so, he silently cursed his luck. The anti-personnel round should have hit the man in the chest, dropping him instantly but relatively safely. Instead the squat rubber bullet had hit him in the head doing heaven alone knew what damage. And this fall down two flights of stairs could all too easily have broken his neck or his back. After a frenzied search, however, Huuk found enough to satisfy him that the unconscious man was alive and so he called his men back and went on to the next stage of the carefully-prepared operation.
He pulled the Motorola from the shoulder of his flak jacket and thumbed the open channel. ‘This is Captain Huuk here,’ he said. ‘I am on board the motor vessel Sulu Queen, currently adrift and without power in Hong Kong territorial waters.’
He paused, but there was no reply. ‘I have one man down and thirty people dead,’ he continued, for he knew there were people monitoring his call. People in Prince of Wales building, in HMS Tamar on Stonecutter’s Island and in RAF Sek Kong at the very least. He gave the ship’s precise co-ordinates, and ordered, ‘Send in the choppers at once.’
Chapter Two
The lone survivor from the Sulu Queen opened his eyes. He was lying on his back and he looked straight up at a featureless white ceiling. The fact that it was a ceiling seemed important, somehow. Now, why was that?
His head hurt.
He lay for a little while before allowing his gaze to wander further. He was thinking about dreams. He decided he had not had any before he woke up and he wondered about that. And he wondered, in a vague way, about the pain in the side of his head.
After a few moments, he moved his gaze a little down and left. A long fluorescent light fitting came into view. It was switched on and the ceiling was very bright. It was a brightness intensified by the fact that everything was painted white. This in turn gave the room an atmosphere which was pleasantly cool against the sensitive flesh of his cheeks and forearms. Cool enough to make him grateful for the slight weight of the blanket covering him from his chest to his toes.
Idly, he rolled his aching head to one side, allowing his gaze to follow the light across the ceiling to a Venetian blind whose edges were etched with an absolute darkness which spoke of a window open to black night. The fact that it was a window seemed important too.
But the movement made the pain in his head intensify until the room swam as though it had suddenly been plunged underwater. He blinked his eyes for the first time and felt hot tears trickle down his cool temples towards his ears. Before they moved more than an inch or two, they soaked into the bandage binding his head.
A bandage! It came as a terrible shock to realise that his head was bandaged and yet, somehow, he felt that he had known about it all along. Certainly, the pain in his temple was intense enough to warrant a bandage. Still, the surprise was powerful enough to jerk his right hand up to his forehead and his lingers explored the padded gauze. The movement of one hand seemed to liberate the other one as well. He lifted it and brought it close to his face. At first he simply examined the back of it, noting tanned flesh, skin containing patterns of veins and lightly furred with black hair. The fingers were long and broad-knuckled, beginning to peak here and there with incipient arthritis. The nails were strong and square cut. Round the wrist there was a band of paler flesh where a watch had protected the skin from the sun but there was no watch to be seen. He turned the hand and continued to examine what he saw like a trainee palm-reader. The palm was paler than the back but still pink-hued. There were yellowish callouses at the bases of fingers and thumb. The lines were manifold and meandering but they defined strong, muscular areas. He tensed the muscles, turning his fingers into fiercely hooked claws, watching the way the skin behaved and the play of muscles beneath. Then he let the hand fall back listlessly onto the counterpane at his side as his eyes explored the rest of the room.
I
ndividual impressions fell into patterns now as though the shock he had given himself about the bandage had kicked his brain into gear. He was lying on a white-painted, iron-framed bed. There were big, soft, crisp-starched pillows under his head and shoulders. Beyond the foot of the bed there was a plain white wall with a picture on it and a door in it. The picture showed three tigers romping in snow. The door was made of wood. It looked solid and it was shut.
At the other end of the wall was a chair of moulded grey plastic, which occupied a corner. The second wall which made the corner behind the plastic chair was the wall which had the window in it. The Venetian blind covering the window had been adjusted to exclude whatever view there might have been. On the wall opposite the window there was a second picture, this time of a fearsome dragon. The reflection of the Venetian blind in the picture glass made it seem that the dragon had been put in a cage with thick white lateral bars.
The man in the bed wondered whether the strong teak door was locked. Slowly, thoughtfully, he lowered his hand from the bandage to the crisp, starched linen sheet on his chest and lay for a moment more, deep in thought.
Of course this was a hospital room. He had known that right from the start. He didn’t need to examine the standard hospital equipment all around the bed-head behind and beside him to realise that. The whole room could only be a hospital room. Everything about it spoke of hospitals. There was even, on the still, silent air, that smell of disinfectant which you find in hospitals anywhere in the world.
Anywhere in the world, he thought. Where in the world? He found he had no idea at all. He frowned.
He glanced across at the bedside cupboard on his left side, looking for clues. There was water, there were plastic bowls, jugs and beakers. Nothing else. He moved his left hand, twisting his arm and shoulder almost painfully until he could pull open the cupboard itself. It was empty apart from a book. He picked the book up and examined it, opening it. It was a Bible, in English. It seemed new, unused.