‘Thank God. I hate this damn boat,’ said Hamnet with some feeling, returning to his seat.
‘You’ve earned the holiday, and your new ship,’ replied Anna.
Hamnet picked up the wine and took a long sip. He sighed heavily again, but the tension in his body eased visibly. He looked at Anna. ‘It’s coming right, isn’t it?’ he asked, with a hesitant smile.
Anna nodded.
‘Thanks.’ The smile was looser; he offered the glass. ‘To us,’ he toasted. The glass had little resonance. There wasn’t the full, fruity hum of Waterford crystal on Waterford crystal, just the cheap chink of cheap glasses. Hamnet drained his of the not-so-chilled white regardless.
‘The four of us,’ replied Anna. Her chocolate-brown eyes flickered warmly, gazing through the loose fringe of her black, bobbed hair as she sipped at her iced water. Hamnet had a vague suspicion that it was bad luck to toast with anything other than alcohol, but couldn’t be sure. Perhaps he should have got her to take a glass of wine. Just a sip wouldn’t hurt — not now, with only five weeks to go. Four of us. Who would ever have guessed at twins? It was, he considered, a bloody terrifying thought. That’s why Anna had wanted to do this trip. Last chance for a while.
Anna finished her meal first, refilled her glass from the water jug and slid across onto the sofa that lined one wall of the day cabin. Hamnet mopped up the last of the rice with a finger and moved to sit beside her, kicking off his deck shoes.
‘How’re you doing, Mrs Hamnet?’
‘Pretty good, Mr Hamnet.’ She smiled, and shifted to lie back against the cushion, the silk robe falling away from her smooth and amply distended belly.
‘And all the little Hamnets?’ He laid his hand gently on the soft, warm skin.
‘Kinda frisky tonight.’ She twitched her eyebrows up suggestively, sipped at her water and put the glass down on the side table.
Hamnet could feel the motion. ‘I guess they get that from their mother.’
Her hand tugged at the buttons on his shirt, then slid up and onto his chest. ‘You need a shower, darling,’ she said, her pretty nose twitching.
‘Maybe you should come with me,’ he said, leaning forward to meet her slightly parted lips, their eyes locked together, his hand slipping down her belly, the open door forgotten.
The buzzer went on the intercom.
‘Damn,’ he swore. Anna frowned as he pulled back and leaned over to reach the handset.
It was the voice of the chief mate, Paul Richardson, that greeted him. ‘Skipper?’
‘Yeah,’ Hamnet replied shortly. He couldn’t keep the impatience out of his voice. This had better be good. Anna’s hand ran tantalisingly slowly down his chest to his navel, and hesitated.
Richardson continued. ‘Could you come up and take a look? I'm not sure about this turn.’
Hamnet glanced skywards in resignation. His eyes scanned the rusting rivet line that ran the length of the cabin. He would be so happy to get off this worthless crate and away from its mediocre crew. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘Anna, I'm sorry, you know what an old woman he is. If I don’t go now he’ll be back on the line in another five minutes.’
Anna rolled her eyes, and sighed loudly enough for those on the bridge to hear her.
‘On my way,’ said Hamnet. He replaced the phone. ‘Sorry, darling. I’ll just go hold his hand for a while. I won’t be long.’ He eased himself stiffly off the couch and fumbled for his shoes. Behind him, Anna’s sigh was transforming itself into a rather steady heavy breathing. He stood up and moved towards the door.
‘I'll try and save you some dessert, honey,’ murmured Anna.
Hamnet kicked the wedge away, stepped outside and quickly closed the door. He stood for a moment in the corridor while his eyes adjusted to the red night-lights. The engines rumbled in the depths below his feet. The moaning of steel plates and wires was louder out here. The wind and sea had continued to build. But the rain and the ship’s motion cooled the air, and Hamnet could feel the sweat start to dry as he strode down the corridor and back up the steps, two at a time, to emerge onto the bridge.
‘The weather’s really closed in, hasn't it?’ he said curtly, still thinking of Anna.
Richardson looked up from the chart table he was huddled over. His stooped figure and lined face indicated a lifetime of worry. Behind him, rain splattered suicidally against the bridge glass. Beyond, it was completely black, without even the reassuring glow of navigation lights. The company’s standing orders were to run without lights whenever in close proximity to the Indonesian, Thai, Philippine or Malaysian coasts. Which for this Singapore-based tramp was most of the time. It was one of the precautions against pirates. Hamnet always added a deck watch on the stern, complete with shutters for the anchor hawsepipes, barbed wire on the guardrail and a supply of beer bottles filled with sand as missiles. The stern was always where they came from, slinging grappling hooks from fast, open boats. Creeping on board with machetes. Most of the time they could come and go without a crew even realizing. The first they knew was when the master returned to his cabin to find it ransacked and the contents of the safe gone. The thought had Hamnet reaching for the intercom just as it buzzed.
‘Phil?’ It was Anna’s breathy voice.
‘I was just about to call you.’
‘Don’t call me. Come on back down here, babe.’ She paused, breathing heavily, rhythmically.
Hamnet could feel his face flush. ‘Darling, this is a ship’s intercom, not a phone-sex line.’ He slapped the receiver back down. Then thought, damn, he’d forgotten to tell her to lock the door. But still, it was a filthy night — no one in their right mind would be out there in an open boat.
Richardson was talking to him. ‘She just blew up from the northwest like we thought it would. Always bad, the storms when the monsoon’s changing.’ There was a crack and a flash of lightning, as if to emphasize his words.
Hamnet caught a glimpse of the cargo deck, lashed with rain; beyond it, whipped-up, white-capped water. There was more vibration now as the Shawould rolled off the occasional bigger wave. ‘Hmm,’ he grunted, a hand on the console to brace himself. ‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Well.’ Richardson drew out the word with his Texan drawl, but Hamnet could see from the rapid tap, tap of his hand on the chart that he was far from composed. ‘We've been heading down the channel as planned, and according to the GPS we’re here.’ Richardson’s finger finally came to rest, and Hamnet moved over to the chart table to take a look.
The Global Positioning System plot put them safely in the middle of the Bangka Channel, headed just south of east. ‘So what’s the problem?’ Hamnet repeated.
‘Well,’ Richardson drawled again, ‘I’ve been waiting to pick up the light and the radio beacon here, before I commence the turn to south-southeast round Selokan Point.’
Hamnet glanced at the chart again, at the Pelepasan Rock, whose light should have been flashing at them three times every thirty seconds, from as far as thirty-six miles away. It should have been visible from the moment they had left Muntok, on a clear night at least. He waited impatiently, his fists slightly clenched. But experience had taught him that rushing Richardson was worse. Then the Texan started to stutter. It was an inability to perform under pressure that had kept the old boy as chief mate on a boat like this.
‘Now it should only be five miles away on the bow. And I still don’t have a visual or a radio contact,’ finished Richardson, finally.
‘Not a huge surprise. The Indonesian buoyage isn’t the world’s most reliable.’
‘Well, that’s what I figured too. So I thought I would make the turn on the GPS, but that doesn’t seem to agree too good with the depth right now.’
Hamnet’s eyes flicked over the depth gauge: sixty feet. He turned back to the chart. If they were where the GPS said they were, they should be in fifty feet of water. Not so badly wrong as to get you in a panic. But not right either. Perhaps Her Majesty’s hydrographers had
been a little rough and ready down here, or, more likely, had used data from someone else’s survey. Hamnet checked the chart, then grunted to himself: the sources were Indonesian government charts. Another note confirmed the unreliability of the navigational aids in Selat Bangka, a third the movement of the mangrove swamp that lined the channel. He sighed. So much for the radio direction-finding beacon and the light. They were on their own.
‘What about the radar?’ he asked Richardson.
‘Well, with all this weather I was having trouble getting a picture worth looking at.’
Hamnet contained himself with difficulty. This was the real reason Richardson had got him up here. He couldn’t confirm their position with the radar. Getting clear radar vision in bad weather was an art, because the rain and sea deflected the signal back at the detector. The result was a wall of noise and clutter on the screen behind which genuinely solid objects could hide with ease. But the art of brushing aside that curtain of clutter was one you were supposed to have mastered by the time you were a chief mate in your mid-fifties.
Hamnet would deal with the radar in a moment; in the meantime, he had to believe the GPS. The US Department of Defense’s ten billion dollar satellite position-fixing system was to be trusted, even if some of the residents of the Lone Star State were not. And the GPS said they would be aground shortly if they didn’t turn to the southeast now.
‘Start the turn to sou’-sou’east please, Richardson. And slow her down to half speed to give us a little time to figure this out properly.’
Hamnet listened to Richardson step over to the wheel and dial up the change. His eyes went to the chart; there were some low hills on Bangka Island to the east that he should be able to pick up on the radar. He checked the position on the GPS so he could measure the distance it gave from the hills. It was then he noticed the indicator light showing that the GPS unit was receiving signals from a differential radio-transmitter beacon. A differential beacon used a precisely known position on land to check the accuracy of the satellite signals. It then transmitted the necessary corrections to all GPS units in the area, corrections that each GPS automatically included in the calculation of its position.
Hamnet scanned the chart. Differential was used in places where high navigational accuracy was required or helpful — outside ports, along well-travelled coastlines. This didn’t seem the kind of place for someone to set up a beacon. The only traffic through here would be the few ships headed to Jakarta via Muntok, like the Shawould. Anyone else would go round the outside of Bangka Island. There were some oil installations further south — they could have installed differential, perhaps that was it. Perhaps not. Could they be picking up some rogue signals bounced long distance through the atmosphere by the storm? Hamnet couldn’t remember if this was possible with differential transmissions. He decided it was worth checking the GPS fix using the satellite signals alone.
‘Richardson, you know how to stop this thing switching to differential automatically?’ Hamnet turned to look at his first officer, whose face was creased in puzzlement.
‘It's getting a differential signal?’ he asked slowly, his heavy, walruslike moustache twitching nervously.
‘Yes,’ snapped Hamnet, finally losing patience. ‘And I would appreciate it if you would shift it to manual reception of satellite signals only, while I sort out the damn radar.’
Richardson moved forward to the GPS, the pain of a decade-and-a-half of career stasis written all over his face.
Hamnet went back to the chart and measured the distance to the hills from their GPS position. They were between nine and fifteen miles away. There was also an island in the channel; it wasn’t as high as the hills but it was closer — only seven miles in front. He glanced again at the depth before he went back to the radar. It was shallowing quickly — forty-five feet. They drew forty with this cargo. The turn to the southeast should have meant the depth was increasing. Now he was worried. Damn it, what the hell was going on? He stepped over to the engine control and rang up neutral. They were coasting, and would quickly lose steerageway in the tight channel, but steerage was little use to him when he had no idea what the error in their position was or which way to turn.
The radar would help if he could pick up the island, or the first of those hills, and get a distance and a bearing. That and the depth should be enough for a position fix. The picture was full of junk as the radar signal bounced off waves and rain. He carefully tuned the display to remove the clutter, then glanced over at Richardson, who was keying the GPS from the manual.
‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered under his breath. But the radar screen was clearing under his deft touch, and the line of hills beginning to emerge. In front of them was a single blip — Pulau-Pulau Nangka Island. He switched the range ring on and dialled it in towards the dying glow of the radar return. The distance measurement clocked down and settled. Eleven miles. Adrenaline started to pump, and he realised how fuzzy his head had been from the wine. But it was clearing now — God knows it was clearing now. It needed only the most cursory glance at the chart to tell him what he already knew.
Hamnet had started moving when he heard Richardson’s startled splutter. The depth alarm went off a half-second later. All three were too late. The Shawould stopped. Just like that. Nine thousand tons of decaying general-cargo carrier hit the mud bank at a little under nine knots and stopped dead. Hamnet was halfway to the wheel when it happened. He carried on at a little under nine knots, head first, and the bulkhead stayed in place to meet him. The lights went out.
Chapter 2
There was a thought, dragging him out of the darkness like a snarling Rottweiler with his arm in its teeth. What was the thought? He had to know. Phil Hamnet opened his eyes. He was instantly engulfed in the bright, white pain of light. His arm went up protectively, eyes clamped shut again. A rush of nausea, choked back.
Toby Johns, engineer, looked on anxiously as his skipper’s face writhed, every muscle and sinew in the arm and balled fist clenched tight. Johns had watched Hamnet drift close to consciousness for the last couple of minutes, but now he needed him awake.
‘Skipper, we have to move you. We’re taking on water in the forward hold. We have a twenty-degree list. Richardson wants everyone aft, on the boat deck. There’s a ship standing by — they’re sending over a boat. He wants to take people off.’
There it was, the thought. It frightened him. Hamnet let himself drift back into the darkness. But the darkness was going, burning away, the fog of unconsciousness receding before the light. Phil opened his eyes again, this time slowly, carefully.
‘It’s OK, I've switched over to the night-light,’ said Johns.
Hamnet stared into the red gloom. The room was disjointed. Diffracting in watery vision. He moved the protective hand up and gingerly touched the throbbing area on his forehead. It was bandaged, and it hurt like hell. But the thought was crowding him now. His ship, Anna — what had he done? Johns’ words had been merely sounds, shifting frequencies and tones lodged in some preconceptual corner of his mind. But now they had meaning. Water, a twenty-degree list. He’d put his ship on the beach. And Anna — where was Anna?
‘Skipper, we have to move. Come on.’
‘Anna,’ Hamnet croaked desperately as he struggled to sit up. The movement startled the pain; it charged forward, threatening to engulf and overwhelm him. But this time there was no going back into the darkness. He steadied himself and spoke again, louder this time. ‘Where the hell is Anna?’ The face before him was still blurred, badly lit, but recognition was arriving. ‘Johns, where’s my wife?’
‘I'm not sure. I guess she’s on the boat deck with the others.’
‘And Richardson?’ He had it now, the knowledge of what he had to do.
‘On the bridge.’
‘I'm going up there. You go to my cabin and check that my wife has left and gone to the boat deck. Make sure she’s there with everyone else. When you find her, stay with her. Whatever we decide to do, I'm making you re
sponsible for her safety.’ Anna would be furious at such treatment — it wasn’t as though, under normal circumstances, she couldn’t look after herself — but she was eight months pregnant. Johns nodded, his face clear, happy that the skipper was back in charge.
Hamnet struggled off the bunk. His head was still pounding, his knees were shaky, but he had no time for that. ‘When you find her and get her to the boat deck, call up to the bridge and let me know. Now go.’
Johns was already moving out of the cabin door. Hamnet stood for a moment, getting used to the tilted deck and his unresponsive legs. He was in the cabin they used as a rudimentary sick bay. The bridge was above him. He staggered to the door and grabbed the jamb, peering out. He saw the torn safety poster on the companionway wall. Its ripped edge spoke of carelessness. Carelessness, the bastard son of negligence. He could feel the sweat chill all over him. This would finish him — he’d never get another boat. He forced the thought away, made himself deal with the here and now, move on. There was a stairwell to the right. He let go of the door and stumbled forward. Gradually his feet and legs began to work, shuffling across the steel deck.
He could feel the violence of the storm outside, spitting down the companionway from the open starboard-side door. Feel the tremor of the waves on the plates. The seas pounding on a hull that was unable to respond — except by breaking up. He had to get to the bridge and find out what was happening. Could they salvage her? They wouldn’t abandon the ship until the last possible moment. Ships were better than lifeboats. But Johns had said something about another vessel standing by — that would mean safety for Anna and nonessential crew. Then, if Richardson had contained the leak, maybe they could buoy her up and tow her off. They weren’t that far from Singapore. The necessary resources would be available there. But was it worth it for this old boat? Or would the company kiss it goodbye and collect the insurance? Damn it, was he going to lose another ship? He would find out soon enough.
The Defector Page 29
