Endangered Species (34 page)

Macgregor's astonishment faded quickly, and was replaced with an expression of feral savagery. He thrust the girl aside so hard that she fell and, unable to draw sufficient air into her gasping lungs, fainted.

Stevenson drove his right fist into Macgregor's face, but the seaman parried it with his left forearm. Stevenson's fist struck the bulkhead and the next instant he was reeling back. Macgregor hit him first on the jaw, then in his gut and Stevenson doubled up. The Glaswegian's upthrust knee caught his bruised shoulder and he sagged uselessly to his knees.

Macgregor had not finished yet. He caught Stevenson's hair and cracked his head into the steel bulkhead so hard Stevenson saw stars and fell full length.

For a moment he thought he would pass out, but Macgregor had let him go and he was dimly aware of the seaman leaving him and bending over the girl. As the breath rasped in Stevenson's throat, Macgregor hove the unconscious girl on his shoulder and turned aft. Instinctively Stevenson drew his knees up to his belly, spoiling the kick
Macgregor aimed at him in passing. A moment later a cool draft of air and then the bang of the alleyway door marked Macgregor's exit.

For a moment Stevenson lay where he was, overcome by nausea, the pain in his shoulder and his split head which bled copiously. Something beyond his pain stirred in him and very slowly, using the alleyway handrail, he groped his way to his feet and staggered aft.

He had been so sure, so Goddamned sure . . . the test . . .

And now this . . . humiliation . . .

On the after deck the sting of salt-laden air partly revived him. Despite the hiss of the sea, the rumble of the engine and the keen of the wind, a noise above him galvanised him to further action.

‘Come
on
you fuckin' whore!' A door banged and Stevenson began to climb towards the radio-room as quickly as his shaking limbs would allow.

Tam was naked by the time he tore open the door. Under the dim twenty-watt bulb of the emergency lighting her slender body was the ivory colour of the dead woman's corpse except for the red weals where Macgregor had ripped her rotten clothing from her and lashed her shoulders to the chromed handles on the wrecked radio stacks with lengths of flex from the head and hand sets. With eager lust he had already parted her legs and his own jeans were round his ankles.

‘Come on,' he insisted through gritted teeth, thrusting forward, ‘you'd better get used tae it!'

‘No!'

As Macgregor swung round his rigid member bounced obscenely from his loins. Stevenson's right hand flicked out, finger extended, and it was Macgregor's turn to double up. Snarling with fury, Stevenson was on him. Seizing the handset from which Macgregor had torn the flex, Stevenson repeatedly swiped it back and forth across the seaman's face
in a frenzy of rage, reducing Macgregor to a sobbing supplicant kneeling, half-naked, at his feet.

Breathless and unable to lift his extempore weapon any more, Stevenson leant back and fell through the opening door, the sea step catching him behind the knees. For a moment no one moved, then Stevenson got slowly to his feet and stepped towards Tam. She had come round as Macgregor stripped her and remained rigid with shock, the ugly rectangle of the metallic rigging tape disfiguring her stricken face, her eyes like dark holes in her skull. Stevenson peeled back a corner of the tape and roughly pulled it from her skin. She gasped with pain and relief as she dragged air into her lungs. He tore at the wires securing her arms, whimpering in his own pain and inability to release her fast enough.

There was an old stained duffle coat on a hook beside the door. Grabbing it from him she pulled it round her and appeared to shrink away from him.

‘It's okay,' he gasped, trying to soothe her, ‘it's okay . . .'

He realised she was staring in horror at Macgregor and he slowly drew her past him and out on deck. He put his arm tentatively round her. He could feel her shaking as they edged forward towards his cabin. Halfway along the deck she stopped. Like a frightened mule, she would go neither one way nor the other.

‘What's the matter?' he asked. ‘Is it me? I won't hurt you! God, I couldn't hurt you . . .'

She muttered something, the syllables chattering incoherently through her uncontrollable sobbing.

‘Not Shanghai, not Shanghai,' he thought she said.

‘You don't want to go to Shanghai? I know.'

With an effort she shook her head. ‘
Not
Shanghai,' she repeated, gradually mastering herself. ‘They stop you, make you go Hong Kong . . . Phan . . . the gun. They catch ship . . .'

‘
Catch
ship? You mean
seize
the ship? When, for God's sake?
When?'

‘Now!' she almost shouted at him, ‘Now!
He
help them!'

Comprehension dawned on Stevenson. He looked forward at the extension of the bridge-wing, pale against the already lightening sky. What the hell was going on up there?

‘Come,' he said with a sudden, harsh urgency, ‘I take you my cabin. You have wash, take my clothes, lock door. You'll be quite safe.'

The habits of half a lifetime spent as a watch-keeping officer die hard. Despite his years as Master, Mackinnon could never sleep longer than seven hours without waking. Moreover, a man with a problem which has pierced him to his soul will wake the moment his tired body lifts from its deepest slumber, not stopping at that dreaming plane of shallow sleep from which most of us emerge every morning. In Captain Mackinnon's case, with several problems claiming his attention, he rose like a breaching whale to lie anxious and wide awake in the first grey glimmer of dawn.

His initial anxiety for the ship was thrust aside the instant he knew from her motion that the typhoon had passed and they ran through nothing more than a near-gale. It was swiftly replaced by a deep anger. He felt demeaned and insulted by James Dent's message, not merely because it would cause ructions amongst the majority of the crew, but because it was manipulative, dragging Shelagh into the matter of the disposal of the
Matthew Flinders
. He began to suspect some skulduggery attendant upon the sale of the ship, in which the unplanned arrival of the refugees had somehow served James Dent to his profit.

It was the sort of luck fate doled out in abundance to his ilk: Mackinnon did not like James Dent. Putting aside an old man's prejudice against a younger man set above him, he disapproved of Dent's cynical attitude to his company's ships. Bent on preserving Dentco as a viable commercial house, James Dent had diversified into other fields, bought into other interests, none of which had anything to do with
shipping. His ships had receded from the forefront of his business; they had been flagged out, their crews subjected to an erosion of their conditions of service and their quality of life. In competition with the cheap labour of the Third World, his employees, many having given long years of service with the proud tradition of being part of Britain's Merchant Navy, were unashamedly reduced to Third World status.

For Mackinnon such a thing was unforgivable, an arrogant disregard of a great trading house's responsibilities; a squandering of a national asset in the squalid name of profit and, worst of all, a betrayal of the thousands who had died in war.

Musing in the twilight, Mackinnon could hear Able Seaman Bird's tirade against shipowners as the lifeboat tossed on the heaving bosom of the grey Atlantic. It had not proved the rantings of a crank Bolshevik, after all . . .

Whilst Mackinnon did not trouble himself to fathom the scam Dent was working, beyond the obvious reason that the
Matthew Flinders
would have fetched a better price sold for further trading than for scrap, it disturbed him to realise how they had unwittingly played into Dent's hands by their humanitarian rescue. Of course, Mackinnon reasoned to himself, humanitarian acts were inimical to the cold logic of profit. By complicating the arrival of the ship in Hong Kong with the presence of the Vietnamese, Mackinnon was in no doubt Dent had enlisted the weight of the authorities by way of counter-measure. He would have played the game of influential contacts so that the Hong Kong government would refuse entry to the ship. There was no evidence for Sparks's hunch, but Mackinnon's instinct endorsed it and now he feared the worst.

But what of the refugees themselves? How could he, complaining of Dent's capitalist logic, deliver them to Shanghai? On the grounds that it was his duty? Duty to whom? To Dent? Was Dent so powerful that the fate of
those wretched people depended upon John Mackinnon's sense of obligation to James Dent?

What exactly
was
his duty? He had built his life upon duty and obedience; to duty and his obligations to his owners just as he had expected obedience from those who served under him. But the pure responsibility of a Master for his ship and its people were ineluctable. This very obligation had sustained him and his men in the past hours and, with God's help, brought the ship and all but three of the souls confided to her, through the typhoon. Any dereliction of such a duty was a spiritual matter for his conscience, and a temporal matter for the Department of Transport . . .

No, it was not! He realised that the formal apparatus of government to whom he was responsible was no longer that of Britain; Sparks had pointed
that
out. Furthermore, Dent himself had flagged the ship out and he, Mackinnon, was answerable to a government in Central America!

Surely then the duty he was now laid under by Dent's signal was a different matter. The company as Mackinnon knew it was finished, the
Matthew Flinders
their last ship. When the voyage ended James Dent would wash his hands of all her people; they would, in that term of disposal hallowed by usage, be ‘discharged'.

And among those luckless people, among whom even the detestable Macgregor was a prince, were one hundred and forty-six Vietnamese refugees.

How could he deliver them to the cousins of their Communist persecutors?

He found sleep had increased his desire to do
something
for the refugees. It would doubtless be confounded, the unfortunate boat people would end up in a wire cage on Stonecutter's Island in Hong Kong harbour, but he had to make some gesture, no matter how quixotic. Nor could he remain detached for much longer; his influence over their lives would last only until the ship reached port, and if he chose to flout Dent's order and go to Hong Kong, that time diminished rapidly.

It struck him with poignant urgency, so much a part of him had it become, that he would cease to command the
Matthew Flinders
when they arrived – and Hong Kong was less than twenty-four hours away . . .

Mackinnon threw off his bedclothes and drew back his window curtains. A grey daylight revealed a grey sea, the streaks of spume no more than old scars and no threat as the ship ploughed doggedly along, throwing out her bow wave as she plunged and drove northwards. Overhead the cloud was breaking up; the cold fire of fading stars showed against the sky.

Where
exactly
were they? Had Rawlings got his star sights?

Mackinnon was seized with a sensation of sudden panic. He shoved his feet into his slippers and reached for his red silk dressing gown. It occurred to him with a sense of gut-wrenching haste, this was his last morning in a sea-going command, perhaps his last at sea. He wanted to be on the bridge, to draw the stars down to the horizon and swing the arcs of their altitudes against the rim of the world and find that most exciting thing a navigator can: exactly where in all the wide oceans of the globe they were.

He struggled into his dressing gown, cursing the fact that he had drawn one sleeve inside out when last he had taken it off. The crepuscular moment when star and horizon were visible did not last long. Stumbling out of his day room he squelched on the wet mess of his cabin carpet. The book about the Uffizi lay face down, its glossy paper ruinously welded by the water. Stupefied by fatigue, he had not noticed it last night. He felt a momentary pang of conscience for Shelagh, picked up the sodden book and put it on his settee. He must hurry!

His last dawn . . .

In his haste he fumbled with the girdle of the red silk dressing gown. How many dawns had he spent taking star sights as Chief Officer? And afterwards, before the news of
the child's death, how many hours had he paced the bridge, cock of the walk, amid the smell of bacon and eggs floating up from the galley, waiting for the Third Mate to relieve him at eight o'clock, recalling Akiko's quickly responding body arching with pleasure as he made those last thrusting movements before the torrent of release . . .?

He stepped into the alleyway and collided with Stevenson.

‘Thank God they haven't caught you, sir!'

‘What the hell . . .?'

Mackinnon staggered back white-faced as Stevenson thrust the Captain into his cabin.

‘Not much time to explain,' hissed Stevenson urgently, ‘but please listen, sir.' The Second Mate flung himself to his knees before the ship's safe, as if suddenly mastered by an impulse to pray. For a moment Mackinnon thought he had taken leave of his senses, seeing the bruise and broken skin on his forehead, then the younger man looked up at him, anxiety etched in every muscle of his face.

‘Best get some clothes on, sir.' He turned back to the safe, explaining in a torrent of words as he twisted the combination lock. ‘A small group of Vietnamese have seized the bridge. Tam, the girl, told me. I stuck my head over the after end; they've got a gun up there, it must be the automatic we were looking for. Two of them are somewhere around; I thought they were after you. Macgregor's in with them . . .'

Stevenson yanked open the safe door, pulled out the pistol and closed it again. Mackinnon was struggling into shorts in the doorway of his night cabin, trying to digest what Stevenson was telling him after a moment's total incredulity.