Solomons Seal (19 page)

‘That the crates contained outboard engines.'

He nodded. ‘Did she believe you?'

‘No.'

‘And you?' He turned suddenly and faced me. ‘You think I'm smuggling something, don't you?'

I shrugged. ‘It's none of my business. You made that perfectly clear.'

‘Well, understand this. I don't know what's in those crates any more than you do. They may be outboards. They could equally be full of cigarettes, or whisky. It's nothing to do with me. I'm being paid to put them ashore on Buka Island. If she wants to know what's in them, she'll have to ask Hans. He fixed it. It's his responsibility.'

‘What if it's drugs?'

He shook his head firmly. ‘Hans wouldn't ship drugs.'

‘Stolen silver then, something like that?' In Sydney the papers had been full of a wave of silver thefts by armed raiders. ‘It's your ship that's delivering them to Buka, and if the police find out, start an investigation …'

‘They won't. Buka is a long way from the centre of the Civil Administration at Arawa.'

‘And there's no Customs?'

‘No. Not where I'm going to put those trucks ashore.'

Again I was remembering that first meeting with him, and now that same driven look. ‘Why did you ask if I was going to Bougainville to stir up trouble?' I said it quietly, not wishing to push him too far.

‘Did I?' He was staring at me, shaking his head. ‘I don't remember.'

‘When I came on board that first time.'

‘I wasn't myself. I was very tired.'

‘You were worried about something.'

‘Yes, I remember now. You said I was scared.' His voice had suddenly risen, his face flushed, his eyes angry. ‘You'd no right to say that. I was worried about the ship, about my ability to stay awake for five nights. It's not so bad this way, but coming south, it's a long haul to the two reefs we'll be threading our way through in a few hours' time. Even so, there's the Louisiade Archipelago. There aren't any lights on the Louisiades. Yes, I was scared if you like. I didn't want to lose my ship the way Carlos Holland did.'

He hadn't answered my question, but I didn't feel this was the moment to ask him about the sullenness of the Buka element on board. ‘We'll talk about it tomorrow,' I said. ‘But if I were in command of this ship, I'd certainly want to know what was in those crates. If it's drugs—'

‘It's not drugs,' he said quickly. ‘Hans would never handle drugs.'

‘On moral grounds?'

He didn't answer for a moment, standing there, thinking it out. Finally he said, ‘I don't think he'd necessarily see it that way. He's a businessman. It's just that there'd be no profit in it. There's no demand for drugs in the islands.'

‘But he could be shipping the crates on – South East Asia, Singapore and no questions, even if the contents had been stolen.'

He shook his head, frowning, and that muscle moving on his cheek.

‘Well, if I were you, I'd check.'

I turned to go then, but he stopped me. ‘I've told the coxs'n nobody is to go on the tank deck without my permission. You understand? That includes you, and Perenna.'

It was so utterly illogical that I was on the point of telling him it didn't make sense, one minute convincing himself that the crates were no more than innocent contraband, the next giving orders to ensure that he couldn't be faced with the hard evidence of their contents. But seeing him standing there, gripping the back of the high chair, so tense that his hands were shaking, I thought better of it. ‘See you at o-four-hundred,' I said.

He didn't seem to hear me, his head turned to the porthole facing for'ard, his eyes wide, and I realised he was staring at those trucks, their tops just visible above the cab roofs of the Haulpaks. I didn't bother about a warming drink. I went straight to my bunk, and was asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.

Dawn was beginning to break when I woke. He hadn't called me at 04.00, and when I went into the wheelhouse, he was at the chart table. He nodded to me. ‘Just managed to get a bearing on the Saumarez light while it was still dark enough.' His face looked pale and drawn, but he seemed pleased, and he was quite relaxed now. He was a man who thrived on navigation, his mind totally absorbed in the necessity of picking up that light. ‘Had to rely on dead reckoning. No star sights. Thick cloud all night.' The
course hadn't changed. ‘I'll send Luke up to keep you company as soon as he's fed.'

I have never liked the dawn watch. There is a timelessness about it, daylight spreading but the day not yet come, the world in limbo, everything a little unreal. I went out on to the bridge wing and climbed the ladder to the upper bridge, letting the wind blow the sleep out of me. It had freshened. Away to starboard the clouds were greying. A glimmer of whitecaps showed in the dark blur of the sea, and a light drizzle touched my face, clinging to my sweater like dew on a cobweb. Once I thought I caught a glimpse of a light away to port, but the drab dawn was strengthening all the time, and I couldn't be sure. For'ard I could just see the trucks, dim, canvas-covered shapes.

I thought of all the times I had been at sea, sometimes wet and cold, sometimes frightened, but never before with any doubts about the purpose of the voyage or my own involvement in it. And now, standing in the boxed-in area of the open bridge, watching the coming of that reluctant dawn, I knew she was right. Somehow Holland had to be persuaded to check that cargo, and if he wouldn't do it himself, then we'd have to do it. Cigarettes or liquor was one thing, but I wasn't going to be party to the delivery of stolen goods, drugs, any of the things the police might investigate.

Back in the wheelhouse I found Luke poring over the chart. He looked up and smiled, a flash of white teeth in a broad black face. ‘Not very good morning, Mr Sling'by. I think it blow soon.' He nodded to the
barograph. ‘Pressure already falling.' And this was the Coral Sea. When Shelvankar came in with the latest forecast, it was for strong to gale force winds, sou'sou'east veering sou'westerly, rain heavy at times with moderate to poor visibility.

The sea was already getting up by the time I went off watch, the movement uncomfortable and the fiddles fixed to the wardroom table. The others had finished breakfast, Holland sitting beside his sister, smoking a cigarette. ‘Any sign of the Frederick Reef on the radar?'

I shook my head. ‘The trace is getting blurred by the break of the waves, and the rain is quite heavy now.'

He pushed the bell for the steward and got to his feet. ‘When you've finished, take a look round the ship and see that everything's secure, will you? Particularly the Haulpak fastenings. They may need tightening. I'll tell Teopas to go with you.' He poured himself another cup of coffee and took it with him to the wheelhouse.

The steward came in with my bacon and eggs. This time there was no fat. ‘I hope you like it,' Perenna said. ‘I've had him grill the bacon instead of frying it.' She smiled. ‘Getting him to cook vegetables properly may be more difficult.' She seemed unaffected by the movement, face fresh and the freckles very noticeable with no make-up.

‘We'll be hove-to before the day is out,' Holtz said gloomily. ‘It's not so good down below when she's hove-to.'

I didn't think it would be much better up top. I
could remember how I'd felt last time I'd been hove-to in one of these ships. We had been off South Uist then, and I'd been sick as hell. I hoped I wasn't going to be sick this time. An LCT is very different from a sailing boat. It never conforms to the wave pattern.

We were already slamming heavily by the time I started my tour of inspection. Down on the tank deck I found the coxs'n already tightening up on the securing chains of the first Haulpak. We were about a quarter of an hour checking the other three; then we came to the trucks, and I glanced up at the bridge. I could just see the top of the helmsman's head, nobody else. ‘I'll look after these,' I told Teopas. ‘You check the bow doors and ramp.' It meant he would have to go up to the catwalk and through past the workbench to the platform above the cross-members. As soon as he had vanished from sight, I unfastened the back of the starb'd truck. The movement up here in the bows was very violent, and as I clambered in with the bag of tools, the slam of the bows plunging into a breaking wave pitched me against the first of the crates. It took me a moment to recover myself, and then, as I was searching the bag for a cold chisel and hammer, my ankle was gripped. I turned to find Teopas staring up at me angrily. ‘
Ol bilong mi pipal
.' He was shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the sea. ‘What you doing there?'

For a moment I considered trying to persuade him to help me, but the dangerously hostile look in his eye made me think better of it. ‘Just checking to see that
the crates haven't shifted.' But he had seen the hammer in my hand, and he didn't believe me.

‘You come down. Nobody go inside truck. Kepten's orders.'

I jumped down, landing heavily on the deck beside him. ‘They seem okay,' I said. ‘I told you to check the bow doors.'

He reached into the truck for the tools and then fastened the canvas back of it. ‘First we check the trucks. Then we check the doors, ugh? Together.' The deep guttural voice was solid and unyielding, and I turned away, uncomfortably aware that this was a man of considerable authority in his own world.

‘Well, let's get on with it.' I felt I had lost face, and my voice sounded peevish. Perhaps it was the movement, the constant slamming. By the time we had finished I was suffering from nausea and a feeling of lassitude.

I got used to it, of course, but the constant plunging and twisting, the bracing of muscles against the staggering shock of breaking waves was very exhausting. There was no let-up in the tension, even when I was flat on my back in my bunk, and though we were never actually hove-to, I was conscious all the time that we were steaming close to the limit for an old vessel of this type.

The gale lasted a full two days, something I had never experienced during my National Service, and when the wind finally died, it left us wallowing in an uncomfortable swell, no slamming, but the movement equally trying. One thing I remembered afterwards –
the appearance of McAvoy on the bridge. It was in the early hours of the second day. I was on watch, and he was suddenly there beside me. He didn't say anything; he just stood there, his face very pale, his eyes staring wildly. He stood there for a long time, quite silent, staring into the black darkness out of which the brilliant phosphorescence of broken wave tops rushed at us. God knows what he saw out there, but something, some haunting product of his drunken imagination.

‘What is it?' I asked, unable to stand it any longer. ‘What are you staring at?'

He turned then, facing me reluctantly, his features crumpled by the intensity of the emotions that gripped him. He mumbled something, gripping hold of my arm, but the sound of his voice was lost in the crash of a wave. The shock of it flung us against the front of the wheelhouse. Involuntarily I ducked as spray spattered the portholes like flung pebbles, and when I had recovered myself, he was gone, leaving me with the odd feeling that his presence there had been nothing more than a ghostly apparition. I was thinking about him all the rest of that watch, and it was during those black lonely hours that I began to understand the depth of the man's attachment, the terrible burden he carried in his heart, living all the time in the past. I was certain that what he had seen out there was the corpse of an old man alone in a canoe.

I was on duty every four hours during the gale, sharing the watches with Holland. He wouldn't trust Luke to know when to heave to. In the end I was too tired to keep anything down, living on coffee and
falling into my bunk dead to the world the instant my watch ended. Sometimes Luke was in the wheelhouse with me, but he didn't talk much, and I was only vaguely conscious of his presence. And Perenna. She'd stand there for hours on end during the day, staring dumbly ahead as though searching the grey line of the dipping horizon for the imagined outline of Bougainville. But everything was so chaotic, a vague blur of sleeplessness and tumbling waves, that I don't remember whether we said anything to each other.

And when it was finally over, it took time for body and mind to adjust, muscles still tensing for the slams that no longer came, eyes bleared and heavy with sleeplessness. We were all of us exhausted. That afternoon the sun came out and I was able to get a fix. Within an hour the clouds were lying in a cottonwool pile to the north of us and we were steaming in a bright blue world, blue sea, blue sky, the surface of the water oily calm, and it was suddenly hot.

Perenna was in the wheelhouse then, looking fresh and bronzed in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. She came over to the chart table, leaned her bare arms on it and watched as I entered up our position. It put us at least 20 miles to the west of our dead reckoning and 30 miles ahead of it. We were getting very close to the Louisiade Archipelago now. She reached for the dividers and measured off the distance to Bougainville. ‘About three hundred miles to go,' I said.

She nodded. ‘So this is our last night at sea.'

‘Not quite. There'll be another night as we work our way up the coast to Buka.' I had forgotten all
about those damned cases. ‘Better leave it till then.' I pushed my hand up over my eyes and through my hair. I was too tired to care.

‘No. We must do it tonight.' Even whispering, her voice was implacably determined. ‘Tonight, while everybody's still exhausted.' And she added urgently, ‘I must know.'

‘Tonight,' I said, ‘all that matters is getting safely round the end of the Louisiades.'

‘He's been worrying about that all morning.' She ran the point of the dividers along the 300-mile outline of the archipelago. ‘Do you think that's where my Great-uncle Carlos went down?' She was tapping gently with the dividers, leaning forward and staring at the chart, and for no apparent reason I was suddenly reminded of McAvoy. Perhaps it was the
Holland Trader
he had seen out there in the luminous break of the waves, and not Colonel Holland at all. ‘Tonight,' she said. ‘It must be tonight.'