The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  Almost the whole of the harbour now stood between them and the far pier. They would be pulling in to Tsimshatsui in a moment. ‘Is that all you wanted to tell me?’ she asked. ‘Trust Balfour?’

  ‘The messenger was also the message,’ he said.

  ‘God, I’d forgotten how you love to be cryptic. Is he your son?’

  ‘We are related.’

  ‘And everyone must know.’

  ‘They know what they choose to know and believe what they choose to believe.’ He stirred as the ferry slowed, ready to come into its Kowloonside berth. And she knew that now would come the true point of their meeting. ‘Would it amuse you to see over Sulu Queen!’ he asked.

  ‘When? How?’

  ‘The last sailing tonight is at eleven thirty. Be there one hour earlier. This time come alone.’ He stepped away from her and she turned, looking down the length of the boat as she pulled into the terminal. His tall form hesitated. ‘Wear something dark,’ he said almost inaudibly and then moved on.

  As Ho reached the foot of the companionway, Andrew came down it at a rush. Their shoulders almost touched, then the lawyer came puffing down the deck obviously relieved to have Robin in plain sight again. He had not even noticed the tall old Oriental in his traditional black clothing with his pink newspaper tucked under his arm. She switched on a dazzling smile and walked up the deck to take his arm. Solicitously listening to his affronted story about importunate American tourists, she led him back up the companionway and off onto the Kowloonside dock. When she was in a position to look for Twelvetoes again, he had vanished, one old Chinese invisible amid the milling crowd streaming up the pier towards the bus station.

  ‘Well, that’s that. No mysterious Twelvetoes Ho after all. What do we do now?’ he said when they reached the ticket office with no further incident.

  She looked up at him, pleased that the adventure with his American tourists had so perfectly disguised her own adventure. So perfectly, it made her wonder … ‘If you’ve got another three dollars, we ride back,’ she said. ‘If you haven’t, then I’m afraid we’ll have to swim.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  There was only a skeleton command at HMS Tamar that night because the Prince of Wales, for whom the barracks and the great broad-shouldered building beside it were named, was entertaining the command aboard the Royal Yacht, currently moored off the new base on Stonecutter’s Island. The senior service stretched to the normal guard at the entrance, supplemented by two of the colony’s shrinking Gurkha contingent, but no guard at all on the good ship Sulu Queen moored well out in the roads. It seemed that no one either at Tamar or at police headquarters was worried about the number of people in the harbours close by who might be expected to come aboard her for a little clandestine exploration, for they had even left the accommodation ladder down. This apparent carelessness was less stupid than at first it might have seemed, for it was taken for granted among the authorities that the events on the ship would have given her such a fearsome reputation among the notoriously superstitious Orientals that only the most foolish would dare go aboard.

  Only the most foolish — or the most desperate.

  It was just approaching 11 p.m. when the long prow of Twelvetoes’ sampan nudged silently against the metal hull beneath the ladder’s bottom step. Robin would have gone up first given half a chance but she was in the waist of the boat beneath the little thatched shelter with Twelvetoes himself and there were two strapping young men crouching in the bow as well as the two oarsmen in the stem with the long oar held between them.

  ‘We go slowly, with dignity,’ said Twelvetoes in a voice softer than the flutter of a moth’s wing. ‘And with flashlights, among other things,’ he added drily.

  She did not ask about the ‘other things’, but took a torch when it was offered.

  They did not switch the torches on at once. Sulu Queen might be unguarded but she was unlikely to be unobserved. They crept up the rocking sampan and clambered up onto the first step. Here they paused until a tiny flash of movement above summoned them onwards and upwards. They could hardly go side by side and so Robin went first and Twelvetoes came up close behind her. One of his men was waiting for them at the top of the ladder. He waved Robin inboard as Twelvetoes came silently up beside her and then he motioned them onwards.

  Up on deck here, even beside the high-piled deck cargo, there was more than enough light to see by. The moon was almost full and hung like a lantern above the Peak. The stars were low in the clear sky, and the only thing which kept them from adding many candlepowers of light themselves was the overpowering glow which came from every side, multiplied by the quiet water all around. Such was the brightness that the bridgehouse seemed to glimmer as though it was luminous. Somehow Robin was surprised and vaguely offended that there was no barrier against their entry to the A-deck corridor. Perhaps she had seen too many American police films, but she had expected to find yellow-and-black striped tape with ‘POLICE: NO ENTRY’ written on it. It was as though the lack of such an injunction was an insult to Richard: were they taking this case as seriously as they ought to do?

  Such thoughts were driven out of her mind the instant she entered the bridgehouse itself. It was the smell that did this. Not so much the smell, as the stench. After the cool, stormy Saturday, today had been summer-hot and obviously all the doors and portholes had been left closed, if not locked. The atmosphere in the bridgehouse was so fetid that at first it was difficult to breathe. The darkness itself seemed to wrap round her face and try to suffocate her. She started to cough but choked herself into a wheezing silence and breathed through clenched teeth from then on, trying to let no air onto the sensitive planes behind her nose. Even so, the air in the rooms and corridors seemed to coat the back of her tongue with rancid fat.

  As soon as she stopped choking, she switched on her torch and, as though they had been waiting for her with some obscure Oriental gentility, the others switched theirs on too. There were three others now: Twelvetoes and his two young men. Each of them had a torch, and Twelvetoes at least also had a personal radio. One of his array of ‘other things’, Robin supposed. Like a cast of extras from a kung fu movie, the three black-dressed men and the indigo-attired woman in white training shoes moved off into the shadows. It would have been laughable had it not been for the slaughter-house stench on the air and the absolute seriousness of the situation.

  During the next half-hour the four of them unknowingly retraced the steps of Huuk and his men. They found everything that Huuk found except the bodies. The first thing they found was the pizza-like linoleum in the first officer’s day room. Speechlessly, they knelt beside the little volcano shapes, frowning until they worked out what they were, then flashing their lights briefly around the rest of the little room and pushing on. The library was next, awash with congealing slime. Then they found the chopped wreckage on the bridge, the crisp trail of congealed blood on the shelf above the helm where the helmsman’s severed head had stood.

  But no clues. No leads. Nothing at all worth adding to the defence’s case; or nothing obvious, at least. It was hard, disgusting work, checking through all the blood-soaked areas with nothing but torches and fingertips and Robin was in a blind fury at so much terrible risk and wasted time, and all of it for nothing, when they arrived up on the bridge. They were there when Twelvetoes’ walkie-talkie buzzed.

  Standing by the helm, as though he was going to guide the stricken ship to some safe haven himself, he raised it to his ear and answered, ‘Wai!’

  The walkie-talkie yammered in an unintelligible jabber of static-bound Cantonese.

  But Twelvetoes understood: ‘Haih’

  Again, the overpowering torrent of Chinese words. Robin thought she understood ‘Deui mjyuh’ — I’m sorry. But she could have been mistaken.

  ‘Bin-douh?’ he demanded.

  Where? she translated numbly.

  The walkie-talkie screamed.

  ‘Gei yuhn?’ he asked tensely — how far?’

 
; Again, the babble. No words made sense to her, but her pulses were beginning to race by now.

  ‘Gei-do?’ How many?

  Again the babble, but this time, this last time, she thought she heard ‘Bou ging?’ Report to the police?

  ‘Mhaih,’ spat Twelvetoes. No!

  The walkie-talkie whispered; the channel open and empty.

  Twelvetoes turned to Robin, his face a mixture of angular planes and deep shadows. ‘There is a launch coming out towards us,’ he said calmly. ‘It seems to be full of officials of some sort.’

  ‘We’d better get off,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m afraid it is too late for that. The launch will be here in a matter of moments. And there are quite a few people aboard it.’

  ‘What do you think is going on?’ asked Robin, although she had already come to a firm conclusion herself.

  ‘I think they are going to move the ship,’ answered Twelvetoes.

  ‘That’s what I think. That means they have a skeleton crew of trained seamen aboard whatever is coming out.’

  Twelvetoes gave a nod of agreement, although there was little that an ex-chief steward was likely to know that a practising ship’s captain did not in the matter of skeleton crews and moving freighters.

  ‘They won’t move her with less than ten men. They need deck officers and engineers; proper watchkeepers in this lot. And they’ll all come out from Tamar, so they’ll be Navy men.’

  Twelvetoes nodded again, with just the faintest sign of regret, and Robin suddenly realised that he might be planning to make a fight of it.

  ‘Send away the sampan,’ she hissed. ‘We have to hide.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘The bridgehouse is huge,’ she insisted. ‘And they’ll only have a skeleton crew, I’m sure. They’ll never even know we’re here.’

  ‘But we won’t know where the ship is going to!’

  ‘They can’t be moving her far. Just to somewhere they can tie her up in a dock so the forensic teams can come and go easily, and maybe where they can get the cargo off.’

  ‘Kwai Chung!’

  ‘That’s where I’d take her, especially if they have a secure dock there so that they can impound her and hold her safely until the trial. Yes. It has to be. The container terminal at Kwai Chung.’

  As though the realisation of a likely destination was a spur to action, they were off at once. They split into two pairs. Ho spat some orders in Cantonese which Robin could not translate but she guessed that the two young men were being directed to remove all traces of their entry here before hiding. All four of them set off at once, the younger two moving quickly and purposefully, she and Ho staying together, with Robin very slightly in the lead.

  She was not running aimlessly. She had an idea. It was nothing advanced enough to be called a plan, but it was a combination of suppositions which suggested an outcome which would kill several birds with one stone. She was heading for the first officer’s day room. First, she had noted that they had stopped at the craters of expanded linoleum on the floor as though they were some kind of a barrier — and she suspected that anyone else would too. And that was important, because the standard layout of the bridgehouse dictated that, just beyond that psychological barrier, the room went into an L shape which was not obvious from the door. At the foot of that L shape, invisible unless you came right into the room and looked round the corner, would be the first officer’s work area. If they could get there, she estimated, they might well find something worthwhile.

  In order to move the ship, the skeleton crew would have to start up the alternators. The alternators would restore light and power. Light would allow them to search the first officer’s desk. Power might do even more, for Robin had noticed that Sulu Queen was well supplied with computer equipment, not just on the bridge but dotted all around the bridgehouse. It would be strange, therefore, if the first officer did not have a computer in his work area. With a computer and a little luck, Robin could access almost all the ship’s records, for the first officer was the lading officer and would hold detailed records of the cargo; he was the ship’s medical officer and would hold medical files on all the crew. If they were very lucky, the computers were in a network and the network would hold all the ship’s information including restricted access logs and records; perhaps even the captain’s private logs. And if the codewords were company standard and current, then Robin knew them all.

  With light and power, a computer terminal and a little time, Robin reckoned she could find out everything there was to know about the last cruise of the stricken Sulu Queen.

  They arrived at the door to the first officer’s day room at a flat run, all too aware of the sounds one deck below made by men coming up the weather deck and preparing to enter the bridgehouse. The voices were speaking English so individual words and phrases could be distinguished without too much trouble and complete conversations were audible as the skeleton crew came into the A-deck corridor and split into watchkeepers and engineers. The watchkeepers came up the companion-ways towards the bridge, some of them actually going past the door into the day room unaware that it had closed silently just the instant before it came into their view.

  They were complaining bitterly about the hour, the duty and especially about the smell. It was by no means only those who spoke with Chinese accents who were worried about ghosts and curses. But it was a pair of Chinese-accented voices that complained most poignantly — the others were the ship handlers, these two were the permanent watch.

  Among the rising and falling of the English voices came two Chinese words which gave the secret listeners cause to smile with relief: Kwai Chung. When she was powered up and under way, the ship would be going to the container port, just as they had predicted.

  Using their flashlights with care, the pair of them crept round the corner into the first officer’s work area. It was bigger than might have at first been supposed. As well as a table laden with a computer and a printer, a number of books, files and folders, there was a comfortable sofa, a drinks fridge and a bookcase with family photographs on the top of it. Above the bookcase, all along the wall itself, were more bookshelves, piled with a higgledy-piggledy range of things. There was nothing else to do until the lights came on so they sat side by side on the sofa, switched off their flashlights and waited.

  They did not have to wait long.

  It was the sound which came first, a distant, apparently subterranean rumbling. The sound translated itself into a vibration which gave birth to a series of little whisperings all around them as things which had sat still for so long began to stir to the rhythmic pulse. ‘Not long now,’ whispered Robin.

  The air-conditioning coughed into action and draughts like ghosts crept over them, adding to the stirring and whispering, rumbling and fluttering. Then the lights blinked on and dazzled them for a moment or two. Finally, over all the restless noise around them, came a crackle and a hum as the computer sprang to life. Robin was half out of the seat heading across towards it when the tannoy system barked, ‘All hands to position please. All hands,’ and nearly gave her a heart attack.

  She pulled out the chair and sat, her hands poised over the keyboard and her eyes on the screen.

  Looking for an operating system, it said. So much for the network, then, she thought. Unless the network crashed when the power went off. Which was quite likely if, like this machine, it had been switched on at the time.

  ‘All right,’ she said, talking to the terminal as though it were alive and conversing with her. ‘Let’s get your operating system.’

  There were two disk-drive ports labelled A and B, for little 3.25-inch disks. The left port, A, was empty, but there was a disk in port B. It was in there, but it was not engaged. She pulled it out and looked at its label. ‘Bingo,’ she told the machine. She put the disk back in port B and pushed it until it clicked. There was a whirring noise and the machine took over.

  Loading … it said, and then the screen went blank for a second before lighting
up again, displaying a series of boxes.

  ‘Good girl,’ purred Robin. ‘Now, let’s get down to business.’ She hit the keys needed to open some text files. The word-processing function came up. But there were no text files on the disk. Leaving it on WP, she popped the first disk out and reached across with the merest glance for the next one.

  ‘Let’s start with the cargo,’ she suggested to the machine as she slid the disk into the port and hit the keys.

  CREW said the screen.

  ‘Hello,’ said Robin, quietly to herself. She popped the disk out and reached for the next. ‘This one should be Crew …’ She pushed it in as she spoke. The machine whirred.

  STORES said the screen. Robin reached out automatically, still lost in thought, but then she hesitated and sat back. ‘Twelvetoes,’ she whispered, ‘take a look at this.’

  The desk was not that of a tidy man, yet everything seemed to have its place. Robin’s experienced eyes swept over the piles of books and papers, noting the dead officer’s simple system. It seemed to her to be the desk of an untidy man imposing on himself rigid rules about organisation. Or, more likely, an extremely busy man too often run off his feet for fetishistic neatness who nevertheless needed to know where to put his hands on things at a moment’s notice. Richard’s desk was a lot like this, she remembered, her eyes prickling dangerously. ‘You see his system?’ she asked, her voice husky.

  ‘Yes. It’s very consistent.’

  ‘Then why, do you think, does it break down here?’

  Between the grey box of the computer and the pile of fat black files labelled CARGO was a small fan-file designed to contain computer disks. It was wide, and the little pockets gaped, each labelled in neat English writing. From back to front, the pockets were labelled in the same order as the piles of papers on the desk, clockwise, starting with the machine itself.

  But the disks were not in their right places.

  ‘Do you think it’s important?’ mused Robin.