Scott Mariani 2-book Collection: Star of Africa, The Devil’s Kingdom

‘Then how come you never told me?’

‘You were there when I told Boonzie.’

‘When?’

‘Right after the thing in the Gulf of Finland. Can I help it if you weren’t paying attention?’

‘I’d just taken a bloody rifle bullet in the leg,’ Jeff said.

‘It hardly touched you.’

‘I was unconscious, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Then you should have woken up. I can’t be repeating myself all the time.’

‘It’s not fair. How come I’m always the last to know these things? How come the others never told me either?’

‘Maybe they thought you lacked the emotional maturity to be able to handle it,’ Ben said. ‘So now you know. And that’s why I don’t want him joining the damn services. The last thing I need is Jude following in my footsteps. Next thing he’ll be wanting to do something even more stupid, like get it into his head to try out for Special Forces.’

Back in Ben and Jeff’s day, SAS and SBS recruits had undergone separate selection processes; nowadays it was all run together under the joint auspices of UKSF. The few who survived the ninety percent failure rate were then streamed into their different divisions. In addition to the torture of hill marching, jungle combat, parachute, survival, evasion and resistance to interrogation training, Special Boat Service candidates were put through battle swimming and progressive dive tests in order to qualify as Swimmer Canoeists, before ultimately going on to join an operational squadron.

Jeff went quiet.

Ben narrowed his eyes. ‘He didn’t. Did he?’

‘He did. I’m sorry. He went on about it quite a bit.’

‘And of course, you didn’t try to talk him out of it. Did you, Jeff?’

‘Give me a break. He wanted to know what it’s like in the SBS. How to apply to get in, what the training involves, what it takes to get badged, the kind of life it is, and all that sort of stuff. What was I supposed to do, refuse to tell him? He could’ve found most of it out online anyway. All I did was add in a few details. The kind of stuff you’d only know about if you’d been there and done it. I had to give him a proper idea, didn’t I? I mean, he asked me, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Jesus, Jeff.’

But Ben knew there was little point in arguing. Jude was gone, and as usual, Ben hadn’t been there for him. It was the story of their whole relationship, from day one.

‘He’s got a fire in the belly, Ben. Just like we had at his age. You can’t stop him, if that’s what he wants to do. Maybe it’s in the blood.’

‘Yeah. I know,’ Ben said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.’

Chapter 7 (#ulink_e2c723fa-3c55-5ccf-90d1-caea3f7a59f5)

Port of Salalah, Oman

Two days later

When he climbed out of the taxi, still lagged from the long flight, and followed the directions he’d been given through the thirty-degree heat and clamour of the bustling port to where the Svalgaard Andromeda lay moored at the dockside, Jude’s first impression was of the ship’s sheer enormity. He’d expected it to be large, but checking out images on Google and seeing it for real were two completely different things.

For a few moments, planted on the dock clutching his backpack and surrounded by busy workers running here and there, forklift trucks zapping to and fro and the general noisy activity of the largest commercial seaport in Oman, all Jude could do was boggle at the overwhelming vastness of what was to be his home and workplace for the next little while.

It looked more like a floating city than a boat. Stretching over nine hundred feet from end to end, it was longer than the Trump World Tower in New York laid on its side. The black, rust-streaked sides of its hull towered over the dock with SVALGAARD LINE, the name of America’s fifth-largest shipping company, painted in white letters twenty feet high. Most of the vessel was deck, which by the time Jude arrived at port was already in the final stages of being stacked high with cargo by the ship’s on-board forty-foot cranes. As he already knew from his web browsing, Andromeda had been built in 2007 and was listed as a Panamax-class vessel rated at 4,000 TEU capacity, which meant simply that she could accommodate four thousand twenty-foot-equivalent units of intermodal shipping containers. As he would later learn, the mixed cargo on this voyage consisted of vast quantities of electrical goods, generators, building supplies, agricultural equipment, tyres, and a million other items due for delivery to the various ports they would be visiting as they cruised southwards across the Indian Ocean on what was known as the East Africa run: stopping off at Djibouti, the Kenyan port of Mombasa and, finally, Dar es Salaam.

‘Well, here I am,’ Jude muttered to himself. This was it. There was no turning back now. The slight nervousness he’d felt ever since Jeff Dekker had lined him up with this job was intermingled with excitement at the prospect of going to sea for the first time as a real mariner, one of the ABs, short for able-bodied seamen, who crewed the ship along with the engine room team, the mates and the captain himself.

As he walked up the gangway he was met by a ruddy-faced, sandy-haired American wearing an open-necked khaki shirt and a look of harassed urgency, who briskly welcomed him aboard and introduced himself as Jack Skinner, ship’s bosun.

‘No time to give you the guided tour right now,’ Skinner explained. ‘Just do what you’re told and try not to get in the way, okay?’ Which was fine by Jude, even if the guy’s manner was a little short. Jude figured he’d have to get used to that kind of thing if he wanted to join the Royal Navy. Skinner quickly handed him over to an older AB called Mitch, whom Jude guessed to be from one of the southern US states – not that he was an expert on accents, but the Confederate flag T-shirt was something of a giveaway. Mitch seemed happy to get a few moments’ break from his duties to grab a quick smoke and lead the new recruit to his quarters on C Deck. C Deck was the second floor of the looming seven-storey superstructure towards the rear of the ship – Jude had made a mental note to try to use nautical terms like ‘stern’ – that was known as ‘the house’. Jude had seen smaller apartment buildings.

‘You a Limey, right?’ Mitch asked with a gap-toothed grin. ‘I sailed with Polaks, Krauts, Gooks, Jappos, Eye-ties, all sorts. Never sailed with a Limey before.’

Welcome to the United Nations. ‘Got a problem with it?’ Jude said.

Mitch shrugged. ‘So what’s your story? You don’t look like no sailor to me. More like a college boy. Daddy’s a lawyer, right? Or a doctor. Wants you to join the family firm and this is your way of telling’m to go screw himself.’

‘I’m not a college boy,’ Jude said firmly. ‘I’m anything but that.’

Mitch grinned again and punched him in the arm. ‘Hey, just fucking with you, man. Lighten up. Betcha I’m right, though, huh? The daddy thing?’

Jude felt like telling him to keep his nose out of his business, but that didn’t feel like the best start to a happy working relationship with his fellow crewmen.

‘My father’s dead,’ he said after a beat, and then repeated it, as if somehow he had to make it doubly true. To have lost one father, only to discover another you didn’t want to know – that had been a difficult and confusing time and he wanted to put it behind him. Closure was the best way. ‘My father’s dead. So’s my mother. There is no family firm. No family at all. Just me.’

‘Shit, man, sorry to hear it.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Jude said, looking around at his new quarters. There wasn’t a lot to see. Being the most junior of the crew, he had been lodged in what he suspected to be – and later discovered was – the smallest and most cramped of the cabins allocated to the ABs. He had no problem with that, however. He intended to enjoy every minute of this adventure to the full. After stowing his backpack in the locker next to his berth, he followed Mitch back down onto the cargo deck and was immediately plunged into the hectic activity of helping to load the rest of the containers on board prior to shipping out.

Mitch, the amiable bigot who liked to poke into people’s personal lives, quickly turned out to be not such a bad guy at all, to Jude’s relief. ‘Don’t you mind Skinner,’ Mitch advised him as he showed him how to lash down a container to prevent it from slipping in heavy weather. ‘He’s one mean, tough, hard-assed sonofabitch and a hell of a screamer, but do your job, keep your head down and your nose clean and he won’t give you too much shit.’ Which was good to know.

‘What about the other officers?’ Jude asked.

‘We don’t call ’em officers in the merchant marine. You got Frank Wilson, the chief mate. We just say “the mate”. He’s okay, I guess. Between you and me, he likes a drink. Starts every trip with a full case of Jim Beam. Catch’m on a good day, you wouldn’t know it, but …’ Mitch rolled his eyes knowingly. ‘Then you got Diesel, he’s what we call the chief. Chief engineer,’ he explained for Jude’s benefit. ‘He’s only about a million years old, knows every nut, bolt and rivet of this ol’ tub like you wouldn’t believe. Guzman, second mate, he’s a slob, eats like a hog and he’s so full of lard he can’t hardly move. The boys call’m the Guzzler, but not to his face, okay? Then you got Ricky Marshall, the third mate. Real straight-up guy. You ask me, he oughta be captain.’

‘Got it,’ Jude said, making mental notes of it all. ‘And what about the captain? What’s he like?’

Mitch gave a noncommittal shrug. ‘I sailed with Cappy O’Keefe a bunch of times, been loop the loop around the damn world together twice, three times, maybe more. He’s comin’ up for retirement. Ain’t the guy he used to be. Spends most of his time in his cabin, writing long emails to his wife back home in Indiana, while he leaves it to Wilson and Skinner to do all the hard work. Then Wilson and Skinner pass it all down to the rest of us. That’s pretty much the system here, kid. Better get used to it. You’ll earn your money on board this ship, believe me.’

Jude was unafraid of hard work, which was just as well, because Mitch hadn’t been joking. By the time the Andromeda was finally loaded up and ready to set off, Jude was drenched with sweat and fit to drop from exhaustion – and his first day on board had barely even begun. He watched from the deck as, to the deep throb of the diesel engines, they made their way out of the port and through the lesser shipping towards open sea. It was a heady feeling for Jude, and tired as he was, he couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Before long, the land sank out of sight and they were alone under the vast empty bowl of the sky, with nothing but the deep blue-green waters of the Indian Ocean from horizon to horizon.

The voyage had begun.

And if Jude had known then how it was going to end, he would have dived straight into the sea and started swimming back to shore.

Chapter 8 (#ulink_6da66b8b-6519-52ce-b934-387dcfd41bb3)

Before now, Jude had never been on any kind of boat for longer than a few hours at a time, and he’d wondered about things like ocean sickness. But the Indian Ocean was as smooth as an endless sheet of blue glass, and after a couple of days he’d found his sea legs and the gentle movement of the ship felt as natural as being on land.

It might take him a little longer to get used to the heat, which was oppressive and humid everywhere except on the outer deck, where it was just scorching. And the three hours’ sleep a night, four if you were lucky, took some adapting to as well. No time in the merchant navy to lounge on deck with a gin and tonic in your hand, admiring the view and counting dolphins. That was for sure.

He was getting to know his way around a little better, as well as getting to know his fellow crewmen. The mess and canteen were situated down on A Deck, two floors down from his quarters, where a lot of tired and hungry sailors would gather to recuperate from their shifts, to eat, smoke, gulp gallons of coffee and shoot the breeze. There were fourteen ABs aboard including himself – although, as far as he could see, some of them didn’t really seem to be that able-bodied at all after so many years at sea. A number of the sailors were in their sixties, work-hardened and leathery as hell but beginning to show the strains of a lifetime of physical hardship. For many of them, this was the only life they’d ever known, and Jude quickly learned that it was one that seemed to attract some very colourful characters. The casual, totally non-uniform dress code among the ABs wasn’t exactly what he could later expect to find aboard a Royal Navy ship, either. Tatty sweatshirts, faded jeans, military surplus gear, anything went. Steve Maisky, an ageing hippy who for reasons best known to himself insisted on being known as ‘Condor’ and claimed to have been hopping ships ever since dodging the draft for Vietnam in 1972, jangled with beads and bangles and had grey hair in a ratty ponytail that hung halfway down the back of his Grateful Dead T-shirt. He was benevolently disapproved of by Lou Gerber, a white-bearded ex-US Marine five years his senior, who strutted about in khakis and combat boots with a shapeless fatigue hat jammed on his balding pate to protect him from the sun.