The Pirate's Daughter (16 page)

For a long time, Cricket was silent. “You ever fuck in a hammock?” she said at last.

“No,” Wilson said.

“It's not easy,” Cricket said, “but it can be done.”

Wilson got out of his T-shirt and shorts and managed to pull himself up beside her. The nylon ropes creaked from steel eyelets anchored into the bulkhead. The canvas bowed dangerously beneath their weight, but the contraption held. Cricket was naked, her skin cool to the touch. From the porthole a damp breeze blew down Wilson's back. This time, it wasn't a question of thrust and counterthrust. Wrapped up in the hammock like a cocoon, the usual movements were useless. It was like making love without the restraining hand of gravity. They moved against each other, and Wilson felt himself locked inside her. Again he heard the faint sound of porpoises clearing their blowholes from the nearby water. The beasts had been following the ship for hours, good luck or bad luck, depending on which sailor you talked to.

When it was over, they lay suspended together, stuck with sweat, part of the same body, bent to the same inscrutable end.

“The hard part is getting down,” Cricket said in Wilson's ear.

It took them nearly five minutes to disentangle themselves from the hammock. When they stood barefoot and naked, face-to-face on the cold planking, they were exactly the same height. Wilson reached forward absently and put his hands on her breasts. Cricket rested her elbows on his shoulders.

“This next part's going to hurt,” she said quietly. “I've got to mark you, and the mark has to be permanent.”

Wilson didn't quite understand, but he heard in her tone that she was serious.

“It has to be done, or else,” she said.

“Or else what?” Wilson said.

“Don't ask,” she said, and he felt her shudder. “Remember, you
promised to do exactly what I told you to do, and no questions. Remember?”

“Yes,” Wilson said reluctantly.

They crept aft into the galley and closed the hatch behind them. Cricket pulled Wilson over to the gas burners, lit one of them with a kitchen match, and took a thick-bladed table knife from the cutlery rack.

“This might work,” she said, and held it up. The blue glow of the gas flame shimmered along the dull blade.

“Wait a minute!” Wilson said in a loud voice.

“Sh!” Cricket caught the back of his neck with one of her hard hands. “This is crucial! If you don't do exactly what I tell you to do, we could both end up dead.”

“Will you tell me what's going on?”

“No. I can't explain right now. Will you honor your word to me, or not—and jeopardize both our lives?”

She took an oven mitt from the wall and held the table knife, blade first, over the burner in the blue heart of the flame. After a few minutes, the blade glowed a bright red, with blue sparks frizzing off the edges.

Wilson began to sweat and tremble. Suddenly he regretted the empty streets of his out-of-the-way neighborhood, the faces on the Rubicon bus, quiet evenings at home with Andrea, the dusty, nondescript life he had left behind for the sea. But a small voice in the back of his head still said:
Then you were asleep; now you are alive
.

“We're just about ready.” Cricket turned the knife in the flame. “Do you guys have something like butter or lard in here?”

Wilson found a can of Crisco in the cabinet.

“Open it.”

He opened the can and peeled back the aluminum top. The round surface of congealed fat looked white as a field of untouched snow.

“Now, your shirt.”

He pulled his T-shirt over his head, and Cricket saw that he was afraid.

“Steady,” she said in a softer voice. “You've got to hold still for this, and you can't make a sound.” She took a wooden spoon from the cutlery rack and put it in Wilson's mouth. “Go ahead, bite down.”

Wilson bit down; the dry, splintery taste of the spoon gave him goose bumps. Cricket brought the knife blade out of the flame and set the thick edge into the flesh of Wilson's shoulder. He felt a searing pain, and the galley was full of the rancid odor of seared meat. After a moment, the burning sensation was cooled by a handful of the lard. Cricket took a bandage out of the first-aid kit beneath the grill and bandaged him in an efficient, nurselike manner, and she helped him get his T-shirt back on. The sensation of lifting his arm brought tears to his eyes. She replaced the knife and turned the burner off, and they were in total darkness.

“I'm sorry I had to hurt you,” she said, in a voice that seemed to come out of nowhere. “You hide that mark until I tell you different.” She set a quick, soft kiss on his lips.

“Cricket …” Wilson said, but when he felt for her, she was gone.

The
Compound Interest
drew closer to the vast bulk of Africa. Her bow cut the greening waves. Light as feathers, land birds sailed on the morning breeze.

The captain spotted it first. “My eyes are a little weak these days,” he said, and handed over the electronic binoculars.

Wilson peered and fiddled. For a moment he couldn't make out anything but water and sky. Then, all at once, there it was, the vaguest speck on the horizon. From time to time it disappeared
among the swells, then appeared again, a shadow at the far limits of vision. They watched it closely for the next hour.

“O.K.,” the captain said at last, “I think she's within range of our sensors,” and he sat down at the navigational computer and tapped for a few minutes on the keyboard. “She's following a parallel course, making good speed, maybe twenty-five knots.” He tapped out another command, and the bow cameras swung to the starboard with an electronic whirring sound. In an instant, a fuzzy video image of something that might be a ship appeared on the screen. It didn't look like much to Wilson, but the captain seemed very tense.

“What is it, sir?” Wilson said.

“Hard to say just yet. No markings. She's obviously a military vessel of some kind. Maybe a coast guard cutter out of the Ivory Coast; they've got two or three rusty old destroyers and a couple of other odds and ends. And look here!”

Wilson leaned closer. He felt a sudden queasiness of the stomach; the burn on his shoulder began to ache again. The screen showed an indistinct grayish blob protruding from the front of another indistinct grayish blob.

“She's pretty heavily armed,” the captain said. “I make that out to be a potent piece of ordnance. A big Krupp marine cannon. Fires incendiary shells. Good range, great for shore bombardments. And this”—the captain indicated a slight silvery flash—“a rocket launcher. Most likely Davoust antiship missiles. French-made and murderous.”

The captain took the
Compound Interest
off autopilot and for the first time gave Wilson a live wheel. Wilson felt it buck and pull in his hands as the vessel beat against the waves and knew why sailors think of ships as living things. The captain checked his charts, made a few quick calculations.

“We're still about two days out of Conakry,” he said. “That's the nearest port. We're going to make a run for it.” He retracted the beach umbrella sails, and for a moment there was total silence.
The
Compound Interest
faltered in the water. A wave hit the gunwales amidships with a violent slap.

“I don't understand. The diesels should turn over automatically.” Now Wilson heard something in the captain's voice he had not heard before. A single drop of sweat formed on the end of the man's nose and fell into his beard.

The captain went to the manual control board, switched a red-handled switch, and pulled a red knob marked “
CHOKE
.” For a moment the twin diesels began a harmonious rumbling; then they coughed and stuttered out all at once. He turned a baleful eye to Wilson.

“I'm going below,” he said. “The ship's in your hands.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Wilson watched the horizon with an increasing sense of dread. The shadowy vessel had altered its course and was cutting through the waves straight for the
Compound Interest
.

When it was close enough to make out details through the binoculars, Wilson lashed the wheel and took a copy of
Jane's Fighting Ships
from the chart drawer and went through the illustrations till he found a match. It looked like a U.S.-built minesweeper of Korean War vintage that had long ago seen better days. But the vessel's old naval markings had been painted out, and her sides were black with grime and rust-streaked. Two long, foreign-looking skiffs hung loose in the hawsers, and the decking was strewn with debris. Fierce eyes had been painted on either side of the bow—like the eyes that had decorated the warships of the Greeks when they set sail for the sack of Troy. Only the big naval gun on the forward deck, and the missile launcher aft, gleamed bright and new-oiled in the sun.

A few minutes later, the captain emerged from below, pushing the Vietnamese cook before him. There had been a struggle. The captain's face was bruised; the left side of Nguyen's jaw was swollen, his forehead cut. Engine grease and dried blood were scrawled across his chef's whites. His wrists were bound behind his back with a bit of electrical wire.

“Sabotage,” the captain said. “I caught this little bastard having a go at the engines. He already smashed the distributor and was in the process of mixing sugar with the oil. I checked, all the spares are gone.”

“You can shoot the mechanic,” Nguyen said with a yellow-toothed grin, “but engines still broke.”

The captain turned and hit the cook across the face with the heel of his hand. Nguyen went sprawling against the taffrail but somehow managed to stay on his feet.

The captain glanced out to sea. He didn't need binoculars to see the vessel bearing down. “I think I know what's happening, and it's a damn shame,” he muttered, half to himself. Then he sighed and squared his shoulders. “And me just two years away from retirement.”

He fished a small key from his pocket and handed it over to Wilson. “Mr. Wilson, the small arms closet.”

Wilson went over to open a wooden chest stowed beneath the port bench in the octagon. The chest contained two Mauser carbines, an over-and-under shotgun, a 30/30 Marlin with a lever-action Winchester stock, three semiautomatic handguns, a few thousand rounds of ammunition, a flare gun and case of flares, a dozen pairs of plastic handcuffs, and a Stentorian Model E police bullhorn.

The captain took a pair of plastic cuffs and one of the Mausers from the small arms closet, loaded it with a 90-round banana clip, then turned to Nguyen and cuffed him to the taffrail. The Vietnamese cook seemed totally unconcerned. He leaned back, licking blood off his lip.

“I gave your sister a pistol and told her to lock herself into the larder,” the captain said to Wilson. “She might have a better chance that way. I'm sorry.”

Then he went below and emerged a quick moment later wearing his gold-braided hat and dress uniform jacket. Gold captain's stripes and gold hash marks denoting more than thirty-five years' professional experience glinted from the sleeves. He stepped over to the communications console, smashed a small glass panel with his fist, and activated the yellow switch inside. A yellow light began to wink on the console. It was the emergency locator beacon that would go out on all channels to all ships and installations for five hundred miles. Then he went to the small arms closet and took out the flare gun and the case of sausage-shaped flares.

Wilson watched as the captain fired them off the starboard, one by one. Silver streaks of exhaust arched into the blue sky and exploded in powdery stars at the apex of trajectory. In another minute the octagon was full of sulfurous clouds of propellant. Wilson coughed, his mouth dry. He turned to the port side for a breath of air. Just above, the beach umbrella sails filled with wind, useless as a child's balloon. The captain handed him the over-and-under.

“I don't know what to do with this, sir,” Wilson said. The shotgun felt thick and ugly in his grasp.

“It's a shotgun,” the captain said. “You point in the general direction and shoot.”

Nothing in Wilson's life had prepared him for the shock of what he saw when he turned back starboard. The approaching vessel had raised its colors, a black flag bearing a white skull and crossbones, flanked on one side by a horned demon drinking a bottle of rum and on the other by a bare-breasted mermaid holding a dagger in her hand.

“Ha! There's all the answers you need,” the captain said. “That black flag means no quarter. We're all dead men.”

“They're kidding,” Wilson said, his voice wavering. “That sort of thing is out of fashion these days, right?”

“Last year there were one thousand and thirteen acts of piracy on the high seas, my friend,” the captain said grimly. “Call Lloyd's of London; it's a matter of public record. But someone here's got a sense of humor or at least a sense of history. I've seen that flag before in old books. It was the ensign of an infamous pirate clan from the golden age of piracy. Captain Elzevir Montague was the worst of them. He sacked Portobello with Morgan. They passed the dirty trade down from father to son for more than two hundred years. Did a little bit of slaving, you know, a little wrecking. But killing innocent people on the high seas was their favorite occupation. Terrorized the shipping lanes from the Spanish Main to Madagascar until the British Navy finally put a stop to the whole bloody crew in 1805. Wiped out their home base, a group of obscure islands in the Gulf of Mexico not too far from the mouth of the Mississippi.”

Wilson felt a cold hand on his heart. The pirate ship was not more than a hundred yards off now. He could see the rusty eyes, the cannon gleaming, the murderous black flag flying in the wind.

These last moments were strangely calm.

“Do you remember the name of the islands?” Wilson heard himself say.