Star of Africa

‘What the crap are we gonna do?’ Trent said again, breathing hard.

‘Get the hell out of here, is what,’ said Lang.

Gerber nodded. ‘We gotta get below, right now. Only chance. Down there with the chief and the others.’ And Jude knew he was right. The pirates would quickly gain access to everything from A Deck upwards. But if their small group could beat them to the single stairway leading below decks to the engine room and holds, there was a hope that all the survivors might be able to seal themselves off down there together.

Gerber led the way, still clutching his axe, Jude right behind him, followed by Lang, Condor and Trent. At every turn through the twisting, constricted passageways, there was the terrifying prospect of running into a gang of armed pirates. Or maybe even worse, Jude was thinking, they might meet Carter. Either way, they wouldn’t stand a chance.

They were just steps from the gangway leading below when a connecting hatch suddenly burst open and a large dark figure came piling through it towards them. Gerber raised the axe, ready to strike.

‘Whoa, easy, easy!’ It was Hercules. His old army jacket was spotted with fresh bloodstains and he was clutching a wicked-looking carving knife, the largest one he’d managed to grab from the galley before escaping. As he breathlessly explained, the pirates had stormed in as he’d been in the middle of serving coffee to Jack Skinner, the bosun. ‘I don’t know where Murphy is, man,’ Hercules said in anguish, brandishing the knife. ‘Just know if I get close to one of those mothers, they’s gonna have a real bad day.’

Gerber had the good sense not to say, ‘Never mind the damn parrot.’ Pointing at the blood, he asked, ‘Are you hurt?’

Hercules shook his head. ‘It’s Charlie’s blood, man. They shot’m.’ Charlie was the AB who sometimes helped in the kitchen. ‘Skinner, too. Just opened fire. Sucker didn’t have a chance. Me, I just managed to slip out the back way.’

Anxious looks passed between the others. Jack Skinner might not have been universally liked, but nobody was going to deny he’d have been a useful presence in a situation like this.

‘Is he dead?’ Condor groaned.

‘I saw the man go down, homes. He’s dead, all right.’

Jude quickly broke the news of the deaths of the captain and mates to Hercules, who just shook his head.

‘They’re wiping us out, dude,’ Lang mumbled. ‘We’re fucked.’

‘No we’re not,’ Jude said. ‘We’re going to get out of this.’

‘Listen to the boy,’ Gerber said.

‘This ain’t happening,’ Condor said, on the verge of succumbing to panic. ‘Pirates don’t do this.’

‘Not unless they want to take the ship for themselves,’ Gerber said grimly.

‘A ship this size? What the hell for?’

‘You have any better ideas? Come on, let’s keep moving before the bastards cut us off.’

As Gerber urged, the group kept moving. Six men out of twenty, with at least seven dead that they knew of above decks.

They could only hope that Diesel and his engine room assistants, Peters and Cherry, were still unharmed and without unwanted company down there.

As it turned out, the engineer and his guys were still very much alive, but not alone. They’d already been joined below by four more crewmen: Allen, Lorenz, Park the Korean, and Scagnetti, who’d bolted from their posts above decks to retreat to safety the moment the shooting had begun. Thirteen men crammed into the engine room and locked the hatch down behind them, safe for now. The heat in the confined space was stifling, the metal walls streaming with condensation. The sharp odours of oil and fuel, sweat and fear were heavy in the air.

An urgent conference immediately started, with Gerber announcing to those who didn’t already know that the captain and mates had been shot to death, the vessel had fallen somehow into the hands of an unexplained coalition of hijackers and pirates, and there was no way to radio out for help. Diesel, a grizzled veteran of many trips under Henry O’Keefe, took the news grimly but silently.

Jude had never thought he’d be happy to see Scagnetti. Gerber didn’t seem so pleased, especially when Scagnetti failed to suppress a crooked little smile on hearing of the captain’s demise. ‘We could have done with a little more help up there,’ Gerber growled at him.

‘You want to make something of it, Pop?’ Scagnetti countered, instantly rising to the challenge.

‘Cool it, boys,’ said Diesel, thrusting a big arm between them before it came to blows. ‘Thirteen of us are still alive. It could’ve been a hell of a lot worse.’

‘You figure?’ Condor said. ‘It’s only a matter of time before they get to us down here.’

Diesel shook his head. ‘Let ’em try. That hatch was built to keep a million tons of ocean out. You’d need a rocket to make a dent in it.’

‘Then we’d best hope they ain’t got any rockets,’ Trent said.

‘Face it, boys, we’re screwed,’ Condor said. ‘No food or water, no weapons and no way to communicate jack shit to the outside world. Even if we could get to a radio, how many of us would even know what channel to use, or who to call?’

There was a murmur of anxious consent among some of the men. ‘He’s right,’ Trent said.

‘Buncha pussies,’ Scagnetti sneered at them. ‘Scared of a few raggedy-ass nigger pirates.’

Gerber gave him a hard look. ‘You want to go up there and take ’em on all by yourself, Scagnetti, please, be my guest. Funny, I didn’t see you up on deck when they were all comin’ up the side.’

Cherry, one of the assistant engineers, put out his hands to quell the rising tension. ‘Okay, look, we all know we can’t fight them. Forget that shit. But there’s gotta be something we can do. Maybe there’s some other way we can get out a distress call.’

‘We’ll figure something out,’ Diesel agreed. Though for the moment, nobody was offering any ideas.

Jude slumped down against the metal bulkhead wall, suddenly feeling completely drained. His hands were shaking. He closed his eyes, but however tightly he screwed them shut, he couldn’t close out the image of Mitch’s dead face, covered in blood and brains, or the vision of the burning boat hit by the flare that had been fired by his own hand. Men screaming, diving into the water. Jude had seen at least one of the pirates engulfed in flames. Could you survive that? Had he killed them?

Jude had never hurt a living soul in his life before. The remorse felt like a leaden weight in his stomach. He kept telling himself that he’d acted in defence of his friends. But did that justify it?

He thought about his father, his real father. Ben never talked about the people whose lives he’d taken. Jude knew there must have been many. But even though Ben had never said so, Jude always had the feeling that he lived with a private burden of remorse over the memory of each and every one of them, no matter how bad they’d been in life, no matter how little choice Ben might have had in killing them. To take away everything a person had, everything they would ever have. It was no easy thing. Now Jude understood that personally, and it was a weight he knew he would carry forever.

‘You okay, son?’ said a voice. Jude opened his eyes and tried to smile up at Gerber.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. It was a lie, but he swallowed hard and forced himself to make it true. He stood up and willed the trembling to stop.

‘We’ll get out of this, you’ll see,’ Gerber said. ‘There’ll be a way.’

That was when Jude suddenly remembered something Mitch had told him, while they were still in port in Salalah. It felt like a hundred years ago.

‘What about sending out an email?’ he said, speaking his thoughts out loud. Diesel and a couple of the others heard him, and turned.

‘You mean like a text, from a cellphone? We’re in the middle of the Indian Ocean, son. You tried getting any reception lately?’

‘I don’t mean a text,’ Jude said. ‘I mean a real email, from a laptop with satellite internet access.’

Diesel shrugged. ‘Well, sadly, I don’t seem to have one on me right now.’

‘But there’s one on board,’ Jude said. ‘In the captain’s cabin. Mitch told me O’Keefe was emailing his wife all the time.’

‘So?’

‘So,’ Jude said, ‘what if one of us was able to sneak up there?’

‘One of us?’