by Peter Tonkin
‘You mad woman! You make this all up. I have you clapped in iron.’
‘Come on, Captain! This isn’t the Bounty! What have you got hidden aboard? I’m not talking about the smalltime stuff you smuggle into the Paracels and then trade with the local moneymen while the crew here are getting screwed in all sorts of ways. I’m talking about the big stuff. What have you got in the two ghost containers, Captain? What’s hidden in your deck cargo? Have you any idea at all? Something from the White Powder Triad, perhaps? Something scary enough to frighten First Officer Chin Lau off the ship and into hospital?’ She had gone far beyond anything she was certain about, she was just guessing desperately, throwing out some of the ideas which had been spinning around in her head and some of the names given to her by Twelvetoes Ho two weeks ago before she had come south to Singapore. But she hit the mark.
‘What you mean, missy?’ Captain Sin’s voice was horrorstruck.
‘Don’t bluster, Captain. Your men know. There’s something aboard worth stealing and there’s a fleet of pirate ships pulling up behind us now who will stop at nothing to get it. We have to organise and we have to do it fast or we’ll all end up like the crew of the Sulu Queen!’
The crew of the Sulu Queen. Robin’s words echoed like doom in the ears of the crew of the Seram Queen. They didn’t like them, they didn’t get on with them, they didn’t socialise with them, but they all knew what had happened to them.
‘First off, are there any arms aboard?’
Shit! she thought as she asked the question. She had forgotten Edgar Tan’s gun! All this and pirates coming aboard and she had forgotten the bloody, bloody gun. You stupid bloody woman! ‘This is no time to be coy,’ she added. ‘No one’s going to take your name or dock your pay. Quite the reverse, in fact. If you can get a gun or a knife or a club up here we’ll all stand a much better chance of staying alive. Just as soon as we stop talking here I’m going to get my gun!’
She looked across the range of frightened, intensely concentrated faces until her eyes met those of Captain Sin. His mouth was working, but no sound was coming out of it. She felt a stirring of sympathy. ‘Captain. Have you anything to add, sir?’
‘Radios?’ he suggested.
‘Aye aye, sir! I’ll take a team at once and see whether we can liberate a lifeboat radio before anyone comes aboard.’ Before anyone else comes aboard, she thought, thinking of the so-called Vietnamese fifth columnists already working to clear the way for the rest of the pirates.
‘In the meantime, is there anyone here who has arms aboard?’
There was some shamefaced, hangdog shuffling which she took to be the affirmative. ‘If you have any weapons aboard, go and get them now, please. Catering Officer, go down to the galley and get all your biggest knives, and while you are down there, you should get all the food and drink you can carry just in case this thing becomes protracted. Captain, have you no ship’s weapons aboard?’
‘There is a strongbox in my cabin. One pistol. One rifle. I have key here in my pocket.’
‘Wai Chan, can you go and get them, please. And don’t forget the ammunition. Remember, all of you,’ she said as the men began to move, ‘there are two spies aboard who have probably disguised themselves to look like you and who have probably killed three people already. Take care.’
They would have to keep an eye out for those two even if the main force had not boarded yet, Robin thought as she prepared herself for action. It was not likely that people capable of planning something like this would send aboard anything other then their best, most dangerous men. And these men would have been as fully alerted as the rest of the crew by her sounding of the alarm. Indeed, the whole fleet of pirate ships so close behind the Seram Queen might have been alerted. But there was no help for that now. The most likely results on the pirate strategy would be to hurry the fleet up, bring the boarding closer, and pressure the spies into taking a closer look at what was going on. The spies had already proved their reliance on disguise; a successful stratagem was likely to be repeated. She had better choose a team of men whose faces she knew well, therefore. She did not want a spy in a boiler suit joining her team without her knowledge.
Robin was not standing still as she entertained these thoughts. She was pushing through the milling crew, picking out men as she went. The last team member she selected was Sam Yung and when he joined in behind her there were five of them in all. Thinking feverishly, she stopped an instant after Sam fell in behind her. ‘Pop out onto the bridge wing and get me the night glasses, please, Sam,’ she ordered sotto voce. He nodded and was gone. Then she was in motion again.
At the door Robin turned and paused, waiting for Sam to come back with the night glasses. She was close to Captain Sin now and she did not have to raise her voice, but even so her words carried clearly as she tried to motivate the stunned man into rapid and decisive action. ‘Captain we have to assume that the ship will be invaded by a large number of men who will stop at nothing. If we are going to survive, we must make the bridge here our defensive position. You need to do two things immediately while waiting for the others to come back with their armaments. You need to check that there are only bona fide crewmen here and that every face is familiar before you let anyone back in here. Secondly, you must put up some kind of barricades at the points where attacks could be mounted and post watches at those points. With my team, I will go and get my gun. Then I will try and get a lifeboat radio and any flares I can get hold of too. Finally I will go and spy out the after sections with the night glasses and a walkie-talkie so that I can warn you when the pirates begin to come aboard. The more we know, the safer we will be. Do you agree?’ Inconsequentially, she wondered whether Captain Sin had read Sun Tsu. The more people among the crew who knew about The Art of War the better.
‘Yes,’ acceded Captain Sin. ‘If you are correct and we are about to be boarded, then we must make our defences.’
‘Good. I will stay out for as long as I can and pass on as much information as possible. But I won’t be taking any silly risks. Neither should you. Anyone coming aboard will simply be looking to steal whatever they can either from the accommodation areas or from the cargo. No one is going to want to risk a pitched battle. If you are all safely barricaded in, then it is highly unlikely that you will even be attacked.’
As she said these bracing words, Robin was joined by a breathless Sam Yung. She took the glasses from him and led her little team out onto the first stairwell. As the five of them, with herself and Sam in the lead, went down the stairs on tiptoe, her mind was full of tactical considerations so that as she moved, with every sense concentrating on what was immediately around her, her thoughts remained preoccupied with the layout of the bridge above their heads. On the face of it, the crew should have no trouble barricading themselves safely in the navigating bridge. The bridge itself was a long room with a wide window forward overlooking the deck and another aft looking out into the main lateral corridor. At each end of this corridor were massive iron doors out onto the external companionways. Once these were secured shut, there was no way in through them. On either side of the bridge itself were two slightly lighter doors leading out onto the bridge wings. They, too, were capable of being secured and, once closed, would keep any invaders safely outside. Even the glass panels in their upper sections were double-strengthened and effectively unbreakable.
Leading aft from the bridge on the port side were the chart room with the captain’s watch cabin behind it — scarcely more than a cupboard with a bunk — but it was secure. On the other side was the radio room, out of order but also secure. Aft of the lateral corridor were two internal companionways and a lift shaft going down. All they had to do was to jam the lift and barricade the top of the companionways and they were impregnable. Especially if they had enough weapons to put a protracted wave of fire down the steel-walled, steep and narrow companionway wells. It would be a classic siege situation. The pirates could stop the engines and cut the power, but unless they had some skilfu
l big-ship men working with them, they could not turn the ship off her course, so their time would be severely limited. Even drifting, Seram Queen would start to attract official attention early tomorrow morning and the Hong Kong coastguards would probably be aboard by noon.
By the time they were at the foot of the second set of steps, the team had formed itself into a line of overlapping pairs, as though they were all carrying guns with which to protect each other’s backs. They proceeded silently down the corridor towards Robin’s cabin, three against one wall, two against the other, eyes everywhere, ears on full alert. Although she did not clearly recognise the fact, all the men were keeping a special watch on her, each one tensed, coiled, like a steel spring, ready to run to her aid. But the corridors through which they were creeping, the com-panionways down which they were tiptoeing like a patrol in enemy territory were empty and, apart from the sullen grumble of the slow-revving engine, silent.
But in a siege situation Robin was thinking, with two sets of forces in an intractable position, it was likely that intelligence would be of the first importance. In order to ensure their survival, Robin’s crew would need to have as clear an idea as possible what the pirates wanted, how far they would go in order to get it, how they would react to the unexpected situation, and what sort of timescale they would allow themselves to get the situation resolved. The pirates had put two spies aboard. Robin could not hope to put any spies in the pirates’ camp but she could try to overlook their positions and report back with some idea as to what they were doing. Mentally, she began to list all the highest points aboard which would allow an observer to watch without being seen. At the back of her mind, however, sat Sun Tsu’s heartening observation, ‘ … he who occupies the field of battle first and awaits his enemy is at ease …’
At the door to her cabin, she stopped and signalled the three crewmen to keep watch, then she unlocked the door and, with Sam Yung at her back, she went into the dark room. All the curtains had been drawn at sunset, as was standard practice, but even so, Robin did not want to risk turning on the light. In the shaft of brightness from the open door she pulled the briefcase from under her bed and knelt beside it, opening it and turning it so the broad beam showed the contents. Under the papers and documents, the little moulded foam compartment lay snugly filled with cold metal. With a silent sigh of relief, Robin pulled out the weighty little gun and held it in the brightness so that she could see what she was doing. It was the work of an instant to push both the switches forward, and a bright red dot appeared on the wall above her rumpled bunk.
Robin moved like a ghost through the shadows to the back of her office beyond. Here she caught up the walkie-talkie on her desk, knowing where it was even in the absolute darkness back here. She pressed it to her lips and pressed SEND.
‘Wai?’ The answer was loud enough to make her jump and shorten the heart-lives of her men by quite a bit.
‘First officer, Captain. Proceeding to the second leg now. Will contact you in due course.’
That red dot led the way downwards through the bright, silent bridgehouse as she took her team on the next leg of their mission. They had no time to hang about. She kept a close eye on the slowly elapsing minutes although she had no way of estimating whether the main body of the pirates could be expected in five, ten, or fifteen minutes. At the very most, she reckoned, they had twenty minutes’ grace, and seven had elapsed already. But she would not hurry. The red dot went round every corner and swept along every corridor, probed every stairwell, before the rest of them followed it.
At last they came to the A-deck door out onto the main deck. Behind here where the corridor came to a dead end, there was a secure weatherproof box. And in that box, checked every day, fully charged up and ready to go, was an emergency radio. On either side of the radio was a set of flares. On top of it were two big battery-powered lamps such as she had used on the sampan last night. Robin undid the security lock and opened the front. The flares slid out silently and were handed back to the nearest seaman. The lamps came out also and were handed to the next. The radio she handed to Sam Yung. This was neither the time nor the place to test it, so she simply motioned with her hand and took point position again.
They made it back up to C deck before fifteen minutes in all had elapsed. Here, the team broke up. Robin gestured that Sam should take the radio on up towards the navigation bridge from where the sound of barricade building was coming. Another gesture informed him that she herself was going out onto the exterior companionway here. As he understood that she was proposing to go out onto the deck behind the funnel which overlooked the poop and set up her observation there, Sam shook his head and handed the radio to the nearest of his men. Then in pantomime he informed the first officer that he would accompany her on this foolhardy mission. She nodded and gave a tight smile at once. Of all the crew, Sam was the man she would most like to have watching her back in a tight spot. Two final gestures directed the men with the flares and the radio upwards and ordered her deputy observer to follow her outside.
The door onto the exterior companionway was open for only an instant as the two of them slipped out into the night, but even so, Robin was intensely aware of how much of a signal it would be to anyone watching the bridgehouse. They did not linger but ran as fast as was safe down the metal steps of the open companionway and onto the decking on the port side of the funnel. Keeping in the darkest shadows, regretting poignantly that they had not had an opportunity to change out of their white boiler suits, Robin led Sam back towards the aft rail overlooking the poop deck two decks below. Here they cast themselves down on their stomachs and looked downwards. Everything was absolutely quiet and still. So still, in fact, that Robin found herself wondering whether she had panicked needlessly after all. The two piles of containers stood immediately below them, so close as to be a seemingly easy jump away. Beyond these, it was just possible to see the pale end of the company flag fluttering maybe a metre out beyond the aft rail. But the rail itself was hidden by the tops of the containers. A whole army could pull itself aboard over the after rail and they would see nothing. That much was obvious even without resorting to the glasses. Hissing with irritation, Robin turned to look at Sam and explain the problem to him when she saw the shadow just behind him rise into a human shape. Without thought, Robin rolled back, putting the glasses and the neck they were slung round severely at risk. She was holding the gun in two hands and she pointed it by instinct up towards the charging shape. The limbs of the shadowy shape waved and worked distractingly — it was only on cold reflection later than she realised the man was swinging a panga — and for a horrific moment she could see no dot at all. The gun was unexpectedly heavy and even though she held it in both her hands, it began to pull her arms down at once. Sam, seeing what she was doing, reacted physically, beginning to rise, and it was on his shoulder that she first saw the dot. ‘Down!’ she spat and, on her word, he flattened. She saw the dot leap out over Sam’s prostrate body onto the attacking pirate. The dot was more or less in the middle of his charging shadow and wavering downwards as the weight of the gun caused her hands to sink, so she pulled the trigger with all her might. The explosion of the shot was shatteringly loud. The muzzle flash in the darkness was blindingly bright. She did not see what happened to the man she had shot but when she blinked her eyes clear, he was gone. Sam rolled away for a moment, then, before she could bring herself to move he was back. Now he was holding a panga. ‘Thank you, missy,’ he whispered.
The leap out onto the top of the containers was as easy as it looked and that was as well, for Robin’s legs were none too steady as the impact of her first killing hit her system. Not only was standing difficult, an urgent visit to the toilet seemed to be called for. And — if her respiration and heart rate were anything to go by — an iron lung. With her stomach cramping, threatening to squeeze all sorts of liquids out of either end of her, Robin crawled forward over the rough, ridged surface of the container top until she had a clear view of the after rail. He
re with Sam keeping close watch with the panga, she at last put the night glasses to her eyes. And as she did so she caught her breath.
It was worse than she had supposed. Out there, bobbing in the wake of the Seram Queen, there were at least ten boats, all clustering in under the overhang of the counter, like leeches ready to fasten onto the ship’s lifeblood. Working feverishly, given extra impetus by the sound of the shot no doubt, one figure was throwing ropes over and out. And even as Robin got the glasses focused and brought the green-tinged scene into proper perspective, the first of the pirates swarmed aboard. She continued to observe closely, until the first figure on the poop, with a growing group around him, turned and gestured with uncanny accuracy towards the exact spot where Robin and Sam were hiding. As the men moved to obey his directive, Robin saw all too many metallic gleams. Knives, pangas, handguns — perhaps the odd rifle. It was not a pretty sight.
‘They’re coming up to check on the shot,’ she breathed. ‘I think it’s time to go.’
‘How many are coming aboard?’ asked Sam, his voice little more than a breath.
‘Ten boatloads.’
‘That could be more than a hundred!’
‘Too true.’ Robin pulled the walkie-talkie out of her pocket and pressed the SEND button.
‘Wai?’
‘First officer here. There may be as many as one hundred pirates and they are coming aboard now. I suggest you get your defences ready and your sentries out as soon as possible.’
‘All done, missy. You come back now.’
‘Aye aye, Captain!’ She lifted her thumb and spat at Sam, ‘Let’s move!’
