Hostage Three (5 page)

— That's where Moses climbed the mount, said the stepmother, when she came out on deck. She pointed. And where he was supposed to have seen the burning bush, she added, before he came back down with the ten commandments.

— Right, I said.

— No, really, she answered. I climbed Mount Sinai when I was younger. And this is, of course, the Red Sea, that Moses parted.

I looked around me. It was weird to think that those things might have happened close by. I mean, I didn't believe in the parting of the Red Sea, but it was still a story I'd known since I was very young. To think of it happening in a real place, and that place being here, was weird. It was like someone pointing to the horizon and saying, oh, look, there's Never Never Land.

Sometime after that, Dad called for Damian to cast anchor and lower the diving deck. He'd been looking at some charts or something on the internet, and reckoned that there was an amazing reef right underneath us. He was all for getting out the scuba equipment, but the stepmother said she'd rather snorkel, so the two of them started getting out just masks and flippers and stuff.

— Come on, Amy, Dad said, as he took off his T-shirt. Loosen up a bit. Take those headphones out for once.

I looked at his pasty white skin, at the stepmother beside him, sitting down on the deck to pull on her flippers.

— I don't think so, I said.

— The colours of the coral are going to be amazing, Amy-bear! Dad said.

— Good, I said. Enjoy them. I opened a magazine and plugged my earphones back in.

— Leave her, James, I dimly heard the stepmother saying, and Dad's approaching footsteps stopped. Let her miss out.

Bitch, I thought, closing my eyes, as Dad walked away. Like I cared about missing out. I hadn't even gone to their wedding. They got married at some registry office in Richmond and I went out with my friends and got wasted instead.

 

Even though I didn't snorkel, I did like the Red Sea. I actually started looking around me from then on, especially after a school of dolphins turned up and followed our yacht for most of a day, jumping into the air, tumbling, the sea sparkling where they splashed it into the sky.

Another weird thing: I started to get why Dad had taken us on this trip. It was to do with the movement when you were on the front deck. You watched the sea coming towards you, endless, and you could turn and see the wake behind. It was like the yacht was moving all the time into the future, always leaving something behind. It was hypnotic. The blue sea, the red land, drifting by.

I understood what the yacht was, then: it wasn't a boat; it was a machine for forgetting the past. I started to like it.

And then came the first time I heard about the pirates.

— We're connected to SSAS
, said Tony. He was giving us a security briefing in the cinema room. So if we think we're under attack, he continued, the first thing that will happen is that Damian will hit an emergency button. It's like dialling 999 on a boat – it will tell everyone who matters that we're in trouble.

— Wait, I said. Why would we be in trouble? I'd turned up late, so didn't really know what was going on.

— Pirates, said Tony. From Somalia. There've been a few ships taken this year. But we should be OK. We're not going down the Somali coast – we're just going through a bit of the Gulf of Aden. We'll stay equidistant between Somalia and the Yemen at all times. We'll be a hundred miles from Somalia.

— Oh, right, I said. That's comforting. You didn't mention bloody
pirates
, Dad.

— Actually, said the stepmother, Amy's right. No one said anything about pirates. Why don't we just go another way?

— We can't, said Damian, who was sitting in an armchair at the back. We want to get to southern India before the monsoon season, and that means going this way.

— There are things we can do, Tony said in a reassuring tone. He was standing in front of the screen, and he picked up a remote and pushed a button. A film came up of a little wooden boat, scooting along the waves, men with headscarves inside it. They were holding guns, one of them shouldering what looked like a bazooka. The film seemed like it was taken from the deck of a larger boat, looking down. As we watched, the pirates' boat came closer, and one of the men inside started reaching out to grab the netting on the side of the bigger boat. The person filming swung down to catch what was happening.

But then a jet of water came from nowhere, hitting the pirate square in the face, making him fall back into the little boat.

— Water cannon, Tony said, pausing the image. We have one on each side of the yacht, for fires. But if pirates come at us, we'll man the cannon and use them to deflect attack.

— You're talking about it like it's going to happen, I said.

— Just being prepared, said Tony. A strong hose can stop pirates boarding. Just watch out for knots in the hose – something like that could make the difference between being taken captive and not. The hoses are powerful when used properly. Mr Fields, I'd ask you to take the starboard side, if that's OK. I'd take portside. Damian would need to stay in the bridge to talk to any navy people, if we can raise them. Once you've got the nozzle in position, just open up and aim the water.

— Oh good, I said. They have bazookas and we have water pistols.

Tony glared at me.

— The point is to stop them getting on board, he said. They won't shoot – we're worth too much alive. As long as we can prevent them from boarding, we'll be OK, hence the water cannon. We'll also trail knotted ropes in our wake from now on. They stop boats from coming up behind us, because they snarl up in the outboards. And we'll run dark from tomorrow night.

— Dark? asked my dad.

— Like in the Blitz, said Tony. No lights at night. All curtains drawn. We don't want to be seen from afar. He pointed to a table, where he'd laid out what looked like rolls of black bin bags, sheets and towels. I'll need everyone's help to block all the windows, please, he said. We don't want any light getting out.

— Of course, if they've got radar, they'll see us anyway, said Damian. Then he winked at me.

— Do pirates have
radar
? asked the stepmother, aghast.

Tony shot Damian a look.

— Some of them do, Tony said in his West Country voice. Some of them . . . They can be quite well equipped.

Dad made a dismissive gesture.

— I've already looked into it, he said. The chances are 0.1%. That's why the big shipping companies still use the lane. Even with the risk of piracy, it works out cheaper to run their shipping this way rather than pay for the extra fuel to go round the Horn of Africa. The ransoms the pirates demand might be high, but the likelihood of coming across them is so infinitesimally small.

— 0.1% is not infinitesimal, said the stepmother. That's one in a thousand.

I sometimes forgot that she worked in Dad's bank as some kind of broker, before he got together with her, so she wasn't completely stupid.

— Well, yes, he admitted. But that's still small. Honestly, dozens of vessels go through the Gulf of Aden every day and don't get taken. The navies of France, Britain and the US are on constant patrol. Besides, we're not a big container ship. From a distance, or on radar, we'll look like a fishing boat or something insignificant.

— Exactly, said Tony. We'll also turn off the AIS.

— AIS? I asked.

— Automatic Information System, Tony explained. It broadcasts our identity, our position, our route, everything about us, by radio to anyone within fifty miles. It tells other ships who we are, basically. If we turn it off, a lot of the pirates simply won't know we're there. And those that do won't know that we're a yacht.

I thought for a moment.

— So that means the navy won't know we're there, either?

Tony frowned.

— Er, no. He paused. But that's OK because we've got the SSAS, like I said. The alarm system. In any case, pirates use small attack boats, which means they're pretty much confined to the coast of Somalia.

— It's not going to happen anyway, said Dad. No chance.

And he was right.

It didn't happen.

Not on the first night.

After the briefing
, we all went round and hung stuff up in the windows and portholes – bin bags, cloths, towels, all sorts. We unscrewed the bulbs from the outside lights, the ones that lit up the deck at night.

That night, as we sailed out of the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden, we did so in darkness.

It was an odd experience. We couldn't read or watch TV because that might produce glimmers of light, so once we'd had an early dinner, I went to my room and lay on my bed, listening to music in the dark.

 

When I woke up, it was morning, and my iPod was silent.

We had breakfast on deck. Felipe had made scrambled eggs and croissants to go with the usual cereal and fruit and coffee. It was a beautiful day, the sun a disc of molten metal in the sky, a few scraps of cloud floating overhead. The sea was calm, and there was a slight breeze, so the mainsail was up. Damian said it was always better to use it when we could; it saved us fuel.

After breakfast, I stayed out on deck, just watching the sea, the unending colours of it. Often it was like silver, or steel, flashing in the light. Then it would shift to petrol, all multi-coloured sheen, and then it would be blue, like you think the sea should be, but really only rarely did it look like that. It was properly hot now, too – forty degrees, easy.

Maybe an hour later, I saw something on the horizon, ahead of us. I watched it for a while, until I was sure it was a ship. It looked big, like a tanker or a trawler or something, so I wasn't that worried.

Still, I went inside and up the steps to the bridge. Damian was looking out through the big windows with a pair of binoculars.

— You saw it, too, I said.

— Yep. Looks like a trawler, but I'll give it a wide berth anyway. Good job the sails are up. I can squeeze eleven knots out of her.

— Er, OK.

He smiled.

— Sorry, sailors' habit. You relax. There's no way this is pirates. It's a big old fishing boat, probably Yemeni.

I went back to the deck. Again, the bad thing about yacht travel: it's so slow. It took a good hour before the trawler was close enough for us to see it properly, and then another half an hour for us to skirt around it, keeping the wind behind us, but staying a safe distance away.

Eventually, though, it was in our wake, and then it began dwindling to a speck until, finally, it disappeared completely.

I hadn't realised I was tense until I felt my shoulders loosen. I lay back and picked up a copy of
GQ
that someone, probably Damian, had left there.

I was about halfway through the magazine when there was a blast from the ship's horn, and I jumped, like, a metre in the air. I ran inside and up to the bridge.

Damian was at the wheel, cursing.

— What is it? asked Tony, who came clattering in behind me.

In my head, tritones were shrieking, like in Bernard Herrmann's score for
Psycho
, when he does D and G sharp together, again and again, to mark the stabs in the shower, so I already knew this was bad because of the discordant music my mind was making – my instincts screaming at me, I guess.

— Dinghies, said Damian. Outboard motors. They came up behind us.

As he spoke, I saw the prow of a little boat appear to our left, just moving into our vision, before falling behind. I thought I caught a glimpse of a man, but then he was gone.

— Fuck, said Tony. The trawler?

— Yeah. Must have been a mother ship.

— A mother ship? I asked. It sounded sci-fi, which was just so incongruous on the bridge of this yacht, in the middle of a desert sea. Inevitably it also made me think of my mother, which wasn't quite so incongruous. For me, the word
mother
isn't one that means anything safe. It has a lot of danger in it already, even before you put the word
ship
after it and use it about pirates.

— I've only heard about them, said Tony. I didn't know if it was a rumour.

— Shit, shit, shit, said Damian, spinning the wheel with a grunt, then pushing the throttle all the way forward.

The yacht lurched, but slowly, and a dinghy came surging up on our left-hand side, containing silhouettes of armed men.

— What's a mother ship? I asked, my voice coming out a bit strangled.

— Pirates live on there for ages, said Tony. It's a big ship with lots of supplies. They keep faster, smaller boats tethered to it. That way, they can go after ships from the middle of the sea, instead of being tied to just the coastline, and –

— Kind of busy here! said Damian.