by Peter Tonkin
‘How far ahead?’ Her eyes opened as she asked the question.
‘Less than a kilometre.’
‘Tell the captain.’ She was sitting up now, her steady grey eyes firmly on his own.
‘The captain sent me to get you. It’s your watch.’ At his word she looked down at her wrist. The movement of her head made her wince and her hand came up to the gauze bandage.
‘It’s been my watch for more than an hour.’
‘We were going to let you sleep. You had a nasty bang on the head.’
‘Who patched me up? The second officer?’
‘Fat Chow. He’s ship’s medic.’
‘He seems to have done a good job.’ She heaved herself to her feet and tottered. ‘Get back onto the bridge and bring the speed down. I’ll follow you up in a minute. In the meantime, we’ll need a dead stop as soon as possible and the ship’s cutter crewed and over the side. If you’re on the bridge, I’ll want Wai Chan with me. And get Fat Chow too; we may need a good medic.’
In the sickbay’s tiny head, Robin tried to organise her thoughts and rationalise her priorities as she allowed her bladder to catch up with more than twelve hours since her last visit. She would have to confront Captain Sin, but she expected little more than a series of more or less plausible excuses for what had gone on during the last twelve hours — nubile natives and all. She would let it ride for a little while and see what had actually resulted from the exploits before risking a confrontation. And she would discuss it with Richard, of course, when …
She flinched as though struck. Richard! She would be lucky to be discussing anything with Richard for a good long time to come. Perhaps the bash on her head had knocked her memory loose too. It was as though she had forgotten Richard’s plight and was learning of it for the first time now. That indeed caused her to reassess her priorities.
Christ! How long had it been since she last called in? Her watch informed her that it was after 1 a.m. on the morning of Friday the 20th. She had last checked with Hong Kong at noon on Wednesday. Anything could have happened! She took a deep breath and focused on the job at hand, her thoughts lent urgency by the change in the engine note vibrating through every surface around her.
Her first port of call was the bridge to check what Sam Yung had told her, and sure enough, there, gleaming with a ghostly light, was the sampan floating in the night glasses’ range. She checked the figures at the side of the display. Half a kilometre out. ‘You did well to see it a kilometre away, Sam,’ she said to the young officer at her side.
‘There was a bright light, some kind of a flare, I think. It nearly burned my eyes out.’
‘Really? That’s unusual. Isn’t it?’
‘You can never be sure out here. There’s never any telling what will come out of Vietnam. There’s so much stuff buried in there still, even twenty years and more after the end of the war, that there’s no way of guessing what will come out next. I understand there is a healthy trade even now in mines, ammunition, all sorts of materiel, left behind or just left buried.’
‘Even so,’ she said, ‘you still did well to spot it. Let’s hope that whoever lit the flare has the strength to hang on until we can get to them.’
‘Right,’ said Sam, following her back as she strode across to the bridge proper. ‘But take care, please, missy. You be very careful, yah?’
Sam Yung’s words reawoke her concern about her position here, especially after what she had seen last night. But, typically, she would not let her nervousness slow her down. She would meet each problem as it arose — no sense crossing bridges until she came to them. So, thrusting aside all paranoid suspicions that this might be some elaborate way of getting rid of her, she hurried back down to the weather deck, slipped on the lifejacket waiting for her by the rail and then clambered handily over the side, swarming down the Jacob’s ladder and into the waiting cutter with a minimum waste of time. Wai Chan and Fat Chow were both waiting for her in the bow and neither of them looked particularly happy with the duty she had handed them. But she was in no mood to put up with ill temper; the pair of them had better jump when she ordered them to move or they would get the rough side of her tongue.
As the cutter pounded out towards the distant derelict, Wai Chan peered ahead through another pair of night glasses and kept up a desultory conversation with Sam Yung who had a better overall view from fifteen metres up on the bridge wing and could guide them to their goal. As she watched and listened, Robin tightened the straps on her life jacket and then lashed a line securely round her waist. Then she took the walkie-talkie and spoke to Sam herself, discussing the circumstances with him and agreeing a course of action. They worked well together. The young third officer was unexpectedly competent in a crisis. Robin handed the radio back to Wai Chan, hoping the lugubrious second officer would prove as reliable.
The current was taking the sinking sampan across the bow of the Seram Queen and away to the east. They would never be able to get a light on her from the ship’s deck, so whoever went in after the survivors would have to do so in the dark. Robin reached back and caught up a powerful electric lantern. That meant her, of course, and alone at first, until she had discovered the lie of the land, so to speak. Once she was happy that the lantern was working properly, she gave a concise series of orders to the men holding the rope looped round her waist, then a supplementary set of directions to Wai Chan and Fat Chow.
As they came up behind the sampan, Robin shone her lantern onto the dark wood of her waterlogged poop, wondering inconsequentially whether Richard had done the same thing six weeks earlier. It was an idle thought, no more than that; none of them had any idea of the importance Richard’s damaged memory attached to his experience of this incident. In fact, it was with no sense of foreboding at all that Robin leaped aboard the little sampan. With nothing beyond an inevitable nervousness about going into a dangerous situation full of imponderable possibilities, she slithered down the deck into the ramshackle shelter amidships. It was typical of her to go charging in, for she believed in confronting fear when she felt it; lingering on the poop would only draw out the inevitable and make the whole thing worse.
The warm water came very nearly up to her waist, but she was too busy with the job in hand to worry about any shark or barracuda which might be cruising close by within it. The lantern’s orange beam showed a basic construction of shelves on the walls on either hand and, between the forward part of them, a simple net. On the shelves stretched along their full lengths lay two figures. On the net, caught like fish half out of the water, lay two more. It was immediately obvious that the two figures on the net were dead. They were both women, and they seemed to have suffered some violence. Both were staring fixedly and one of them had her face half under the surface of the water. Robin took a deep breath and started retching as the fetid sweetness of putrefaction washed into her nostrils. Then she turned her lantern onto the nearest figure lying on the right-hand shelf.
It was a man of indeterminate age, lying face down. His arm reached off the wooden platform and trailed across the netting. The position gave mute but moving testimony to a failed attempt to support the nearest woman, the one with her face in the water. Robin did not touch the still figure, but thrust her ear close to the half-turned head, hoping to catch the sound of breathing, or the cool draught of a breath upon her cheek. There was nothing. With a sinking heart, she crossed to the fourth figure, the one on the left. This, too, was a man, a young one, scarcely more than a boy. He lay on his back, apparently as lifeless as the others. His face was swollen, as though it had been punched repeatedly. His cheeks were full, but their skin was pale, waterlogged. His nose was flat. His mouth thrust out like a monkey’s, the lips encrusted with salt sores. But there was telltale black on his half-closed fist which told of a flare, held until it burned him and he dropped it. His eyes were closed, but in the sudden brightness of the beam, they flickered.
Robin put the walkie-talkie to her lips and said, ‘Please come aboard, Mr Chow.
You have some work to do here.’
It was 03:00 before the dead women had been respectfully put in the cold store which some practical ship’s architect had designed to sit behind the main refrigeration unit but to open into the back of the sickbay. The two men, at death’s door but still just alive, were safely in that same sickbay so recently vacated by the watch officer herself. Fat Chow was indeed a good medic and the sun-scorched, salt-burned, dehydrated bodies had been bathed and dressed. Their dry, parched, salt-raw mouths had been rinsed with distilled water, but they had been allowed only the tiniest amount to drink for fear of inducing vomiting. They were on glucose and saline drips, resting securely as their bodies soaked up liquid and nourishment directly through their veins.
The captain, informed formally by Robin that they were safely aboard and informally by Fat Chow that there had been no valuables worth salvaging, suggested that the morning would be soon enough to try pan-medic calls though Robin doubted it would come to that. If they lasted the night, then the emergency would be past; if they did not then it was too late to bother with a doctor anyway. She made up the logs, wondering whether to be vexed with Captain Sin or not. Pan-medic calls could come very expensive indeed, and the survivors showed no sign of having insurance. Robin was all too well aware that Seram Queen’s insurance was unlikely to cover a call-out under these circumstances — Sin could well have saved the company many thousands of pounds. But the exercise was not cynically Thatcherite. She had heard Fat Chow reporting his belief that the men, miraculously, would pull through; and she was inclined to believe him. They both seemed to have been beaten up and subjected to many days without food and water, and they both were suffering from severe exposure, but their hearts seemed strong and neither of them was having any trouble breathing.
What had happened to the women, however, she did not wish to guess. Their physical state was very much worse and as she arranged the bodies, she could not help noticing several deep wounds which no doubt explained the almost total lack of blood in the bodies. This was unusual and it triggered another association in her memory. The Vietnamese women on Sulu Queen had been virtually bloodless as well. But it was only an association, not an alarm. The state of the women’s bodies was so unpleasant, it spoke so graphically of an agonising and protracted end, that their bloodlessness seemed relatively unimportant.
Fat Chow agreed to keep checking on the patients and to post a permanent nursing watch if need be. Robin went up onto the bridge and made up the logs. Somnolent with the shock of finding and handling two corpses and with latent concussion as well as the effects of Fat Chow’s drugs, she kept her watch until Wai Chung relieved her, as agreed, at 06:00. Then, with the morning watches dogged instead of the evening ones, she went to bed and slept like the dead until 10:00.
It was during this sleep that Captain Sin himself oversaw the morning radio report to head office in Hong Kong and ensured that nothing untoward was recorded, although Radio Officer Yuk Tso warned him that, because of his interference, the broadcast was going out half an hour behind schedule. Captain Sin calculated that if he established that everything — apart from the temporary breakdown in the Paracels, already written up in the engine room log as water contamination in the fuel jets — had gone quite normally, then even if Mrs Mariner had noticed anything yesterday evening, he could always say it was some kind of hallucination. He and Fat Chow had discussed this and it seemed like a good idea.
Such was the captain’s desire to establish absolute normality of progress, therefore, that he decided four Vietnamese boat people could wait to be reported too, especially as two were obviously dead and the other two seemed very little more than dead — though both men had survived so far. Of all the mistakes he made on the voyage as a whole, this, seemingly the slightest, was by far the most disastrous.
Robin awoke at 10 a.m., clear-headed, though with a lingering headache which centred itself on the crown of her skull whenever she moved too quickly. She showered and dressed, then for some reason she would never understand, she checked that the gun Edgar Tan had given her was still safely in place. Having done so, she washed her hands assiduously, twice, fearing that the odour of gun oil might give the game away. She was hungry as a horse, and so she reported to the galley first, on the lookout for some late breakfast. The ship was run to a clear timetable. Breakfast was long past. But it would take a brave chief catering officer to argue with a first mate as determined and as ravenous as Robin. And, for once, the chief steward was not around to back him up.
By 10:45 local time, with her tummy full of fried egg sandwiches and her temper in better repair, Robin went in search of the captain. He was not on the bridge. Sam Yung was, however, sound asleep in the watchkeeper’s chair and alone as, with daylight, the captain had ordered the automatic steering gear switched in. Robin shook the young officer increasingly fiercely until he roused, sleepy and grumpy, trying to scratch his crotch without making it too obvious. Robin promised to relieve the third officer in due course and plunged below to see the captain. She had half expected to be greeted by Fat Chow’s snarling face at the door, but no. Captain Sin was in his day room, and he did not have the fortitude to keep his first officer out without his chief steward’s support.
‘What is it that you require, Number One?’
‘Tell me about yesterday evening, Captain.’
‘What you mean?’
‘You know very well what I mean. By sunset last night this ship was awash with natives from the Paracel Islands. They were wearing very little and making a lot of very close friends amongst your crew.’
‘I do not know what you mean. This was, I am sure, some kind of an hallucination. From the blow to your head.’
‘Oh, come on, Captain!’
‘Or from the painkilling drugs with which you were treated. You ask Fat Chow. He warned me something like this might happen.’
‘You mean to tell me that Fat Chow said, “I’m just going to give the first officer some painkillers now, Captain, but don’t be surprised if she suddenly thinks the ship is full of naked Paracel islanders bonking the brains out of the crew”?’
‘You find Fat Chow; you ask him, missy!’
‘Well, Captain Sin, I think I shall do just that!’
But Fat Chow was not so easily found. After a cursory search for the chief steward, Robin became sucked into first officer duties and by midday she was back up on the bridge, relieving Sam Yung for the afternoon watch. It was only after he had thundered down to get some lunch that Robin realised the obvious: if Fat Chow was nowhere to be found in his usual haunts, then perhaps he was still tending the Vietnamese men. Perhaps he had even set up his own nursing watch on them.
Robin at once called the sickbay on the internal phone but there was no reply. She stood the first hour of her watch, brooding over the fact that she might have misjudged the grumpy little chief steward and the fact that she had definitely been derelict in her duty. As first officer it was she, and not the chief steward, who was ship’s medical officer. She should have been in charge of the treatment of the sick men, or at the very least fully apprised of what was happening to them. She should have arranged a round-the-clock watch on the sick men herself and a regular pattern of reports on their welfare.
By 13:00 Robin was so restless that when the unfortunate Sam Yung, also unable to find Fat Chow, came onto the bridge to ask a question about personal itching, she handed over to him instead of answering him, and vanished below. But Fat Chow was nowhere to be found in the sickbay.
Now that she was here, Robin thought to salve her conscience a little and check the patients for vital signs. Although they both remained comatose, their heartbeats were strong, their respiration seemed normal and their dark eyes reacted to light when the lids were rolled gently back. The only thing which seemed to have gone wrong was that the young one, the one with the burned hand, had pulled his drips loose. Although he was lying perfectly still now, he had obviously been restless at some time. She reinserted the needl
es into his arm and fastened the tape over them. Then, with a glance around the little room, she went about her business again.
Sam Yung obviously wanted to chat about something but she gave him no chance. As soon as she reached the bridge again, she sent him below with the specific mission of finding Fat Chow and setting up with him a regular watch on the Vietnamese. Or, if the chief steward remained hard to find, to select six sensible sailors and arrange a watch himself. The third officer went with an ill grace, and Robin served out the rest of his watch. There was a lot to do. She made up the logs, leaving a space in which she would in due course insert the goings-on in the Paracels; detailing the rescue of the Vietnamese, and describing the condition of the two survivors. She wrote up their position and their progress since the engines had been fixed. She plotted their exact position at noon, and duly assumed her own proper watch. And, now that normality was re-established, she crossed to the radio shack at 12:10 precisely to put through a call to Hong Kong and find out how her beloved husband was.
By 12:15 Robin began to suspect that there was something wrong with the radio, but it was nothing as simple as a loss of power. The set seemed to be on and to be operating normally; had she not been trying to use it she would probably have noticed nothing untoward. But no matter what combination of buttons her practised fingers pushed, no matter what dials and displays she checked and reset, the radio would not respond to her. Doggedly, increasingly irritably, she kept this up until 12:30 when she gave in and sent for Radio Officer Yuk Tso.