China Sea (32 page)

They ate for hours, and as the night deepened brought out the
tuba
. Kalapadon explained it was coconut wine, the 10:00
A.M
. vintage. Dan passed on it but accepted a hand-rolled cigar from a friendly old woman. He gave it a token puff and passed it on. The elder took it with a nod and settled down to smoke it between swigs of fermented coconut sap.

“Now, about these pirates,” Kalapadon said in a low voice. “We know something about them. It may be you know it already, though.”

Dan dropped his eyes from the singers. The bancas in the lagoon looked like they had putt-putted many miles. Fishermen exchanged news. It would be strange indeed if no one on this island knew anything about the incidents to the north. Whether they would say anything or not, of course, he had not been sure of. Now the elder leaned close and murmured beneath the singing, “You know they are Chinese.”

“I'd heard that.”

“There is a battleship with them. Our boats have seen it. We are too small to bother with. We have nothing valuable. They do not disturb us. We turn and run when we see it.”

“A ‘battleship'?” Dan couldn't help grinning.

“A navy ship. A big ship.”

“I'm looking for pirates. Not a warship.”

“This ship works with the pirates. It makes the large ships stop, and then the pirates board them.”

Dan stared at the old man. “Where does this happen?”

“West of the Pratas, south of Hong Kong, east of Hainan Dao.”

“A big piece of sea.”

“Look for the battleship. Viatai here, his son saw it.” One of the gray heads nodded vigorously, reaching for a chunk of sizzling-hot pork. “He said it had large guns and many portholes. That is all we can tell you about it. Please, do not let anyone know you found out from us here. Manila is far away, and the Chinese are very close.”

Dan thanked them gravely, not putting much stock in the rumor. Someone had glimpsed a Chinese destroyer, and it had become a “battleship.” But the news might be worth forwarding up the chain. If they ever reestablished contact or found someone willing to acknowledge the wayward and orphaned
Gaddis.
Which he was beginning to doubt might ever happen. He kept thinking of the Flying Dutchman. Maybe these islanders would tell legends of the Flying American, the ship that steamed off into the wide, flat emptiness and never was seen again.

A group of boys began singing, and the elders joined in, something in Tagalog whose tune sounded familiar but which he could not quite place. Not much later, Dan made his excuses and hoisted himself to his feet, figuring to find a convenient place to relieve his bladder.

The night was fragrant ink. As he stumbled along, he came out suddenly on the path to the village. The worn earth was smooth and cool as fine flour under his bare feet. He smelled moist earth and strange flowers and the sweet breath of rotting coconut. Brush scraped and rustled as the path closed in. Then it widened again and a cloud cleared from a quarter-moon and he could see, a little.

He was standing on the beach alone, looking up at the stars, filled with a slow sweet peace, when he suddenly heard a scream.

It was coming from the village, not the beach. He started walking that way, bare feet slipping in the sand. Then another scream ripped out, and he lurched into a run, hands in front of him to avoid running into the trees that came out of the shadows, turning solid right in front of him.

A woman was wailing by one of the huts. Islanders surrounded her, faces ashen. Flashlights flickered, but kerosene lanterns were more numerous.

“What's going on?” Dan asked.

“You. Captain. He cut my daughter with knife.”

“What are you talking about? Who?”

“The sailor. My daughter twelve years old … he cut her with knife. She bleeding.”

When Dan stepped into the mat-screened interior he caught his breath. Two old women stared up at him with blank ancient faces. One lifted a blood-soaked cloth for a moment. In the buttery light of a kerosene lamp he slowly made sense of what he saw.

The girl had been a chubby-faced, dark-haired island Lolita. Now her right eye was gone, cut from the socket with a crisscross of razor slashes angled in from the circumference. The rest was blood and loathsomeness.

“U.S. sailor,” the mother said, spitting the words at Dan. He felt the hostile looks of the islanders, the steady accretion of adult men at the edges of the group. Each carried an unsheathed machete.

“Who was with her?” he asked the old women. No response. He asked the mother, “Does anyone know who it was?”

“We don't know name. Just a sailor.”

Marsh Mellows, pushing his way into the hut. He was in khaki cutoffs. His bare chest shone in the kerosene glow. Dan caught the smell of coconut beer as Mellows stared down, then quickly looked away.

“Get down to the beach, Chief,” Dan told him. “Take charge and get everybody into the boats. Check every man as he gets in. He's got to have some blood on him. She might have fought back, scratched his face. Ask every man who he was with, what he saw, what he heard.”

“Aye, sir.” The master-at-arms glanced at the girl once more and left. Dan stood, conscious now of the murmurs and jostling around him. He understood how they felt. This girl was his own daughter's age. He'd brought the killer to them, unleashed whatever beast or horror
Gaddis
carried with her on this innocent island.

Engelhart pushed his way in, dislodging another surf rumble among the islanders. The warrant officer looked at the women. “We found the knife,” he said.

“Where? Whose was it?”

“On the path. No telling whose it was, no markings.” Engelhart squatted by the girl. The women followed his every movement with flat, wide gazes. “We could take her out to the ship, get Neilsen to clean her up … oh. God. Her
eye—
”

“See if you can argue her mother into it,” Dan told him. “I'm going down to the beach.”

A bony figure in a wraparound joined Dan as he went through the trees down toward the sound of men's voices. It was Kalapadon. Dan said, “Sergeant, I can't tell you how sorry and angry I am about this. I knew we had a killer aboard. I had two suspects locked up, or I wouldn't have let the men come ashore.”

“It is very unfortunate.” The old man was close to tears. “That girl did not have a good name in the village. She would creep into men's huts at night. But we did not look for this from you.”

The liberty party was gathered near where the inflatable was drawn up. The engine was running, and the lights glowed bright. Dan came up to them, and when they saw it was him they parted, letting him through to where, in the center of the group, Chief Mellows stood inspecting a line of men one by one as they waited to step into the RHIB. He looked around as Dan came up to him, and his broad face was expressionless as coral stone. “Here's the knife,” he said, thrusting it at Dan so suddenly he winced. It was a hunting blade, a heavy pointed thing that glowed silvery pale under the lanterns. “It was pushed into the sand. There was blood on the hilt.”

He stared down at it, unwilling to touch it. The spittle had gone dry in his mouth. He had to think. Already he saw flames guttering in the woods back of the beach, heard shouts and threatening voices. The motor of the other inflatable droned in the darkess, and men splashed out toward it through the shallows. He heard the crackle of a voice on the PRC-10, urgent, peremptory. He dismissed all these things from his mind and said to Mellows, “Any luck, any ideas?” in a voice that sounded thick and slow.

The chief master-at-arms held out a thick forearm, blocking the next man's access to the boat. “OK, that's a load. Cast off, then back here just as soon as you can,” he told the coxswain. To Dan he said, “No, just the knife. But I guess it wasn't Shi-hime, like I thought.”

“I guess not. Nor Pistol, either.”

“This is one sick puppy. Carving on her eye like that—”

“Just like Vorenkamp,” Dan said. “Just like the girls in Fayal and Singapore. I'm just glad someone interrupted him at it, this time. I wouldn't blame these people if they killed us all, you know? If those torches start coming down here, I want all you men in those canoes learning to paddle. They were so glad to see us.… How can he keep doing this?”

In a voice so low Dan could barely hear it over the yelling from the village, which was drawing nearer with each passing minute, Mellows murmured, “Oh, he's having too much fun. He loves it. Why should he stop?”

Torches flared and dipped, approaching from the direction of the huts. Dan saw it was the island men, maybe twenty of them, bare-chested, heavily muscled, carrying what looked like rolled palm-frond torches or else kerosene lanterns. And long machetes. The sailors turned to face them, drawing together into a denser mass.

Engelhart, a few feet away in the flickering dark. “Captain? Where are you? Captain?”

“I'm here, Chief Warrant.”

“Sir, we got some pissed-off natives on our six. We got them outnumbered, but them choppers look sharp. Suggest we get the hell out of Dodge.”

“I agree. Where's the girl? I thought we were taking her out to the ship.”

“The old women won't let us take her, sir. And I don't blame 'em.”

Just at that moment, the islanders surrounded them in a semicircle, not shouting now, just edging their way forward with the machetes held downward. Some of the sailors snatched up driftwood and rocks.

Dan slogged through the sand and held up his hand between the two groups. The islanders looked at him. “Listen to me,” he said. “I am the captain. If you want to kill anyone, kill me first. Where is Kalapadon? Where are the old men? I will speak to them. I am the captain, and I promise you justice.”

*   *   *

THEY didn't want to let him go. Only after an hour's angry discussion, punctuated by threats and shouting from the younger men, did Dan succeed in persuading the elders that he would report the crime, that he personally guaranteed that when the perpetrator was found justice would be done, and that he would inform them of it, and of the sentence, when it happened. He also promised sizable cash indemnity to the girl and her family, payable as soon as he could arrange it with the Navy.

Gaddis
got under way at first light, bringing the hook up at the first faint silvering of the eastern sky. The withdrawing darkness revealed canoes ringing the ship. The islanders watched them leave without gesture, without motion. The pilothouse, too, was silent, except for the low-voiced updates as they passed through the eastern entrance, between reefs seething like scalded milk. As the atoll sank astern, Dan sat slumped, chin tucked into his chest. Contemplating his failure, his complacency, his fault and guilt.

Around midmorning, after huddling for several hours in the signal shack, the signalmen broke a new flag at the port yardarm. Dan ordered it hauled down the moment he saw it. The signalmen protested that it was a joke. They lowered it sullenly.

It was a black piece of cloth, hastily stitched with a white staring skull and crossed bones.

IV

THE FAR SIDE OF THE LINE

19

19° 14' N, 117° 32' E:

THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

THE dawn broke with him still in his leather CO's chair, staring out at the sea as it created itself from darkness. For all he could tell from the rolling crests, the same polished gray-green as olive leaves, it could have been a billion years ago, before whole biological kingdoms had risen. Only instead it was today, this unavoidable day he had to meet and somehow master.
Gaddis
, dangerously low on fuel, without orders, manned by a sullen and restive crew, saber-sawed again and again into ten-foot seas driven out of the Luzon Strait by the interminable monsoon wind. The surface current here was carrying them north. He had moved with it, urged by a shadowy sense his business lay somewhere in that direction.

“Skipper? Sir, you awake?”

He flinched and sat up, returning to the prickle of unshaven beard, the dry mouth, the anxiety that accompanied him now wherever he went, every eye averted from his. Thank God he no longer drank. Or he'd be down in his cabin, turning into Dick Ottero bottle by bottle. “What you got?” he asked Compline.

“Sir, I don't like the weather picture. Here's the latest.”

“I thought we couldn't copy Fleet Weather.”

“We can't; I'm eavesdropping on the commercial reports out of Hong Kong. They're only three hundred miles north of us, and I'm getting it pretty clear. This Hercule they're talking about—”

“Make sense, Chief. What ‘Hercule'?”

“The typhoon,” Compline said, gaining Dan's attention immediately. “It's out around 130 and headed west. They're getting real focused on it, in the Philippines.”

Dan told him to bring him every report he could get on it and to have Robidoux put up a typhoon chart for the bridge watch. He sat and worried a bit more after the chief went below.

Even at minimal consumption, they'd suck the last of the Brunei oil out of the bottom tanks in a couple more days. The last evaporator had crapped out, meaning all the freshwater would soon be gone, with
Gaddis
's increasingly leaky steam system wasting it. The men were down to a gallon a day, barely enough to shave and wash under their arms. Slowly failing boilers, no water, no air-conditioning, no comms … pretty soon this crew would be hoisting pirate flags for real. He didn't know what he was doing or where he was going. Maybe it would have been better if the islanders had done a Captain Cook on him back at Dahakit, grabbed him and chopped him in the surf. No, that was self-pity. He didn't have anything he recognized as a death wish. And without him, the ship would be chaos. Juskoviac would never be able to hold things together. The way he had so far, under some pretty trying circumstances.