The Pirate Ship

by Peter Tonkin

  *

  It was the itching which aroused Sam Yung. He had not had the opportunity of showering before coming up on watch and the whole of his body seemed to be crawling as his perspiration dried. He looked up at the ship’s chronometer above the steersman’s head and noted dreamily that it was a little after 1 a.m. Scratching thoughtlessly and easing his clothing as he moved, he crossed to the side of the lone man at the helm and peered ahead. The limitless night gathered in front of him, gulping down the deck long before the furthest pile of cargo. There was just enough overcast to wipe away all trace of moon and stars. The quiet sea was not agitated or populated enough to give off any luminescence. Apart from the dully glowing bank of instruments below the clearview and the ghostly reflections in it, Sam might just as well have been blind. It was a lowering thought, and in the grip of an epic bout of post-coital depression, he wondered whether he was in fact losing his sight. ‘I’m going out onto the bridge wing,’ he informed the helmsman, and crossed to the door.

  The night wind outside was much warmer than the air-conditioned bridge, and his itching returned with a vengeance as his sweat glands became active again. He leaned up against the forward rail and strained to see ahead. Slowly, his eyes became more used to the near-absolute darkness and he began to make out the lines of the ship below. Idly, he wandered across to the observation post at the outer corner. Here there was a stand for a pair of night glasses. They were kept in a weather-proof pouch nearby. Sam pulled them out and clicked them home on the stand so that he could scan ahead. As soon as he put them to his eyes, everything for half a kilometre ahead became a kind of luminous green and even the heave of the waves became visible, though slightly out of focus. Little by little Sam extended the range, checking the figures of the range finder up the right edge of his magically enhanced vision, watching with lazy fascination as the green brightness of the multiplied light slowly surrendered to the cloudy black distances a full kilometre ahead. For a while, like a child with a new toy, he stood, trying to make out the detail of anything lying just on the visible edge of his vision.

  When the flare ignited almost exactly a kilometre ahead, according to the automatic range-finder, it was precisely in the middle of his vision and it blinded him for some moments while he hopped clumsily about, mumbling in agony and rubbing his eyes. Only when the discomfort began to subside did he realise what the signal must mean. He ran back to the night glasses and scanned ahead again. The flare had gone out while he had been dancing, swearing and rubbing his eyes, but as he peered past the bright area in the centre of his vision, he began to make out the outline of a half-submerged boat. It looked like a Vietnamese sampan but it was hard to tell because little more than the poop and the thatched house halfway along its length were showing above the sluggish green-black surface of the water.

  Captain Sin was obviously not best pleased at being woken, but he grudgingly agreed with the third officer that some kind of attempt should be made to check aboard the little craft. A flare obviously meant someone was alive down there, and everyone knew that when the Vietnamese fled, even the meanest of them were likely to come laden with a life’s collection of valuables and trade goods. ‘You had better wake up the first officer,’ commanded Captain Sin. ‘This sort of thing is her job; and in any case, she should have been on duty for the last hour.’ He went back to sleep, chuckling quietly to himself at his cunning, for he still had no idea that Robin had seen the native traders and their women come aboard.

  Neither the captain nor the third officer was particularly struck by the coincidence of two derelict boats being discovered by the two sister ships in more or less identical locations — there had been little reporting about the Vietnamese corpses on the Sulu Queen when there were so many other more interesting bodies to write about. There had been no logs recovered to record exactly where the first boat had been found and there had been no radio report of the discovery, for Sulu Queen’s equipment had began to malfunction almost immediately after the rescue.

  Sam Yung went down to the sickbay and knocked respectfully. There was no reply. Had he known the first officer better, he would have realised that the ‘1812 Overture’, the section where the cannons fire, played on quadraphonic equipment at 600 watts per channel, at full blast, would not make her stir now. Only word of an emergency or the smell of teak-dark breakfast tea could do that. He went in when there was no reply and found her curled on the sickbay cot, fully dressed and dead to the world. He shook her firmly by the shoulder. She snored. ‘Mrs Mariner,’ he called loudly. She wriggled over onto her other side and snuggled down. She presented a sight he would have enjoyed more had he not used up all of his libido earlier in the evening. ‘Number One,’ he said, quite quietly, ‘there’s a wreck ahead and I think there are some survivors aboard.’

  ‘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 a
s 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.