Sea of Troubles Box Set

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Right, out past the lighthouse into the Singapore Strait,’ persisted Tom as though he had noticed nothing. ‘What’s this thing here?’

  ‘Wreck. Swing south a little, towards Heluputan.’ Richard’s eyes were half-closed now as though he hardly needed to consult the blue, white and sand-coloured paper.

  ‘Yes, I see that,’ said Tom, his voice low. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Beware of floating islands.’ Richard’s eyes were closed now. This was information not displayed on the chart.

  ‘Isn’t that a kind of pudding?’ asked the psychologist, sidetracked by surprise.

  The master mariner opened his bright eyes and looked down on him from an ineffable, unamused height. ‘They can be big. Fifteen metres long, five metres high. Trees, animals, you name it. Make a nasty mess of you. They come south out of the Mekong. You have to sail almost due north into the flood of them as they come south out of the Mekong.’

  The repetition made the psychologist prick up his ears but he still had no idea how close he was to pushing things through the barrier in Richard’s memory. ‘So, you go north, through the outwash of the Mekong, depending on the season, past this place called Krakatoa …’ Now that sounded familiar, Tom thought. Why did that sound so familiar?

  ‘Kar Katoaka,’ corrected Richard gently. ‘Yes, that’s right. “Kar” is short for “karang” or reef. It’s shallow water but we keep well clear and swing round here towards Pulau Jemaja, with the Pulau Mangkai light at its north-western point. Once past that, we sail on up due north past the Udang oilfield. There are two platforms, a storage tanker and a radio station, but it’s nearly thirty kilometres south-east of us. We’ve nothing to worry about until we come up towards the Charlotte Bank and Scawfell. We run north-west past Alexandra, south-east of the Julia Shoal and the Catwicks, keeping an eye out for mines south of Dao Phu Qui.’

  ‘More hidden dangers from Vietnam, eh?’ asked Tom.

  Richard flinched. The psychologist began to realise how close they were to making some kind of breakthrough. But he did not fully understand how, or why.

  ‘After that,’ he persisted, ‘it looks to me like plain sailing until the Paracel Islands.’

  ‘Clear, up to the Paracels,’ agreed Richard, his voice dreamy. He sounded to Tom as though he was on Pentothal and under deep hypnosis, but he was not and they had only been talking for a few minutes.

  ‘Then, once you come through the Paracels, once you come up past these — what do you call them? Lights. Once you come past these lights at Woody Island and North Reef, then you’re set fair for Hong Kong. Nothing more to worry about. Not even your nightmares from Vietnam can get at you up here.’

  The observation was inspired and its effect cataclysmic. Richard rose, his face dead white, his wide eyes staring across the table at Tom.

  ‘Tell her!’ breathed the terrified man. ‘You have to tell her.’ His face twisted in a mixture of rage and fear. ‘Get through and tell her at once.’ His tone of voice took on a terrible earnestness; a depth of concern which made Tom, for the first time, genuinely fear for Richard’s sanity. ‘You have to warn her about the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese! Don’t you understand? They’re not all dead. Oh God! They’re not all dead.’

  *

  Less than an hour later, at 13:30 local time, Lata Patel found herself sitting beside John Shaw in the Heritage Mariner office on the fourth floor of the Jardine Matheson building as the young Chinese punched in Seram Queen’ s call sign on the company radio frequency. They were alone together now, for Mr Thong had gone back to court. ‘They checked in at nine thirty, a little later than usual,’ he was saying to her. His dark eyes were fixed on her face but he was having trouble stopping himself from examining her breasts. ‘They did not report any trouble at that time. It was a standard “fair weather, calm voyage” report. Seram Queen is well clear of the Paracels now, and behind schedule because of some trouble with the engine yesterday. They reported that last evening. It is a bit of a nuisance, but nothing unusual. Nothing to worry about apparently. They will proceed a little above maximum economic speed to try and catch up but we have moved her booking at Kwai Chung to allow for a slightly later ETA. It has all been routine.’ John Shaw surrendered to his lower instincts and dropped his gaze. Her white blouse was tight and the space between the buttons gaped slightly, revealing a web of white lace.

  ‘I expected an update this morning,’ he continued, his voice quieter, more seductive, in spite of the bland words. ‘But they will probably save it for later. They are due to call back at sixteen hundred and I’ll reconfirm then. Those are her call times, nine in the morning and four o’clock in the afternoon Hong Kong time. But Captain Sin doesn’t approve of detailed reports. If there is anything wrong, he usually waits until he can report in detail in person at the next port of call. It is to do with his face as captain. Do you understand about face, Miss Patel? I sometimes think Captain Sin would have to be going down with all hands before he authorised anything more than a standard progress report.’

  Lata seemed not to have heard John Shaw’s brief lecture on the captain’s sense of personal pride; and thankfully she had not noted the direction of his hot gaze. Instead of answering him directly, she said, in worried tones, Tom Fowler was quite specific. We have to warn them about some Vietnamese people. Beyond that, things aren’t quite so clear. Does it normally take this long to get through?’

  ‘No, not usually. I mean, it is lunchtime out there the same as it is here, but there should still be a watch officer on the bridge even if the radio officer is eating.’

  ‘Whose watch should it be?’

  ‘The first officer’s.’

  ‘That’s Robin. I can’t imagine her skipping out on her duty.’

  ‘No, there’s no question of that,’ said John quickly, abruptly concerned that he might appear to be accusing Robin Mariner, for whom he still harboured some indulgently lustful thoughts. He stopped examining Lata’s bosom and raised his eyes, frowning with concern, ‘And anyway, Mrs Mariner has been putting in a regular midday call to keep up with the progress of the captain’s trial and to pass on her thoughts, but she has not been in contact for a couple of days now. Still, you must know all that. Let’s try this again …’

  John Shaw went through the simple routine again. Then, ‘Vietnamese, you say?’ he asked, to cover his increasing embarrassment and loss of face at failing in such an easy task before the attractive young woman.

  ‘That’s right. Tom Fowler says Captain Mariner is well on the mend but he still doesn’t make absolute sense, especially when he feels that something is particularly vital.’

  ‘This sort of thing happens to us all,’ said John Shaw. ‘I am often forgetful of names. And the more I try to remember who someone is, the less chance I have of getting it right.’ An admission of a small, common social failing covered his much larger failing with the radio, and helped him save face.

  ‘I’m just the same,’ said Lata, frowning into the dumb instrument as John Shaw completed the call sequence, again with no success. ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’

  ‘Something is not working properly, that is certain. It may be that this radio is broken. Or the radio on Seram Queen has developed a fault in the same way that the engines did yesterday. But I do not believe there’s anything actually wrong. They have emergency equipment. If there was anything actually wrong, they would contact us via the open distress channel available to the lifeboat radios, of which she has four. She is an old ship, but she still has a supply of open-channel emergency beacons. There are many ways for them to alert us if there is anything badly wrong.’

  ‘But in the meantime we can’t actually warn them about these Vietnamese.’

  ‘Well, no. But I bet they will be on again as usual at sixteen hundred hours.’

  ‘Unless Captain Mariner’s mysterious Vietnamese have struck in the meantime.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’ John asked with an air of innocent enquiry, as though trying to
comprehend a cross-cultural experiment in communication. He turned towards her again and let his gaze settle downwards one last time.

  ‘No,’ said Lata, suddenly cold with foreboding. ‘No, I don’t believe it is.’

  *

  They had come for Robin twelve hours before this conversation took place. She was more than one hour late for her midnight watch, but they had let her sleep on for reasons of their own. The last of the natives had departed, bowlegged and laden, soon after midnight, and the thoroughly sated crew had begun to sort out their ship once again. The chief engineer found the strength to restart the engines and give the ship some steerage way. Third Officer Sam Yung took up his watch late, and stared dreamily ahead, his eyes scarcely focused, his mind full of libidinous memories and his back and private parts full of a thoroughly satisfied ache. He had no idea at that stage that the parts in question were also full of a painful and embarrassing social disease.

  Down in his cabin, Captain Sin, who found his satisfaction in different ways, was carefully counting the money which he had earned in the little personal enterprise which the orgy on the foredeck had been designed, so successfully, to disguise. The Captain had no clear understanding of the very much larger contraband cargo carried by his ship; the secret, extra containers were carefully hidden and were accessible from on board only through the use of the deck gantries. The lading officer knew that all was not quite right, but even he — still lying comatose with fever in Singapore — had done little other than to look the other way when he realised that the computers at the automatic container ports loaded or unloaded a couple of extra boxes, apparently by accident. Their existence was concealed in his records just as they were hidden at the heart of the cargo on the deck. Only the unfortunate Brian Jordan, ever a man with an eye to the main chance, had looked deeper than that.

  And so, on the bridge, Sam Yung stood, almost as comatose as the distant, hospitalised Chin Lau, at the shoulder of the steersman as Seram Queen gathered way into the small hours, with the Woody Island light swinging through the visible quadrant away to port, on his left.

  Sam had just enough intellectual energy to ensure that their course kept them well clear of the Dido bank low on the starboard. And then he collapsed back into the watch-keeper’s chair and fell asleep as the ship surged up out of the island chain and, apparently, out of danger at last.

  In the ship’s surgery, Robin slept deeply, under the influence of shock, exhaustion and painkilling drugs. In spite of all her foreboding, she had little to fear from Captain Sin and his crew. Even Chief Steward Fat Chow was less fearsome than he seemed. They were rogues, perhaps; and they were none of them above taking advantage of easy money and easy virtue; but they were not murderous — or desperate enough to dream of attacking her, or even of harassing her in any particular way. They fantasised about her — or Sam Yung certainly did — but that was all. She was, after all, the wife of the man who owned the company. And if he was mad and she was eccentric — both true as far as the crew of the Seram Queen could see — nevertheless, if any harm came to her then they would all be out of a job in very short order. This job was a very cushy number, with automatic loading and unloading in most of the major ports, the chance of a little profit from personal enterprise, and a regular orgy on the Paracels every time they came through. The risky plan of knocking her out with a lifeboat had been no more than an attempt to make sure she knew nothing about their dealings with the islanders that Thursday night. And, as far as any of them knew, it had all worked perfectly well. There would be a little more treatment, a lot of apologies and a sad farewell in Hong Kong. Mrs Mariner would leave the ship none the wiser, leaving everyone richer, more satisfied and secure in their jobs.

  It never occurred to them that what had happened to their sister ship would happen to them as well. The two crews, although they worked for the same company, were not close. No friendships had been formed; no professional links forged. The deaths of their colleagues, the disappearance of the captain and the accusation of his stand-in all seemed distant events, irrelevant to their placid existence. Even the disappearance of Anna Leung touched them not at all now that their jobs and their pay seemed to be set fair to continue.

  No one aboard was aware that it was Seram, not Sulu, which was carrying two containers full of crack cocaine belonging to the White Powder Triad of Hong Kong and destined for a specific market in the People’s Republic of China, as the less legal business concerns in the colony tried to go one better than Charles Lee and his friends in gaining influence after the colony was handed back. It was well understood by the leaders of the White Powder Triad that such a cargo would attract attention, which was why they had let it be known that the cargo was on the first of the ships. This ploy had led to the wrong ship being attacked but, like the authorities in Hong Kong, the Triad had no precise idea who had actually carried out the attack. If Captain Mariner had killed everyone himself, that was all very well by them. Unlike the police, the Triad knew that the missing cargo was not a fortune in drugs; but if the Triad knew what had actually been in the crates later discovered on Ping Chau Island, then they were not about to act on their knowledge. They were saving themselves up to deal with the next offloading of a China Queens ship at the container port of Kwai Chung. And so, while she was at sea, they had no real way of protecting the second ship or the priceless cargo she carried. Since no one, except the men involved, knew exactly who it was that had come aboard the first ship six weeks earlier and, failing to find what they sought, had carried out an orgy of frustrated revenge, no one, not even the White Powder Triad, knew for certain whether or not these men would return and try again. No one knew for certain but, as Twelvetoes Ho had observed, Richard Mariner knew more than most, if only he could remember what he knew.

  *

  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 visi
on 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.’