PULAU MATI (19 page)

They had to boil the clams in two batches because they would not all fit into the pot
.  After a breakfast of rice, clams and papaya, they assembled a few items, gathered their weapons and the shovels and started across the island.  They considered burying the two bodies in the trail but Shinobu said it would be easier to drag them to the water.  He expected the current to take them out as it had the debris from the wreck.

The bodies were badly mutilated by the mine, by
Paolo’s, Keegan’s and Anna’s spears and apparently some small animal had gnawed thumb sized chunks from the flesh around the missing thigh muscle which got Melanie’s attention.  She made a face and pointed at the gaping mass.

Anna and Shinobu could not suppress grins.
  Shinobu said, “One of us must be a cannibal.”

Melanie could not correlate the horror with the grins and looked confused.  Anna said, “Gray did that, to give the pirates something to think about.”

A look of both amazement and relief came to Melanie’s face.

They tied ropes to the arms of the bodies and dragged them down to the water and pushed them off.  The
bodies were beginning to bloat so they floated well.

In a short time the group reached the saddle where
Gray scanned the clearing with the binoculars.  Nothing had moved except perhaps Bossman had rolled onto his other side.

When they started down
toward the clearing, Anna signaled Gray to hang back.  When the others were out of sight, she asked, “What did you say to Melanie?”

“I told her she
did a stupid but human act that resulted in terrible consequences and that she did not deserve what happened to her.”

“It must have helped.  She is less remote.”

“Good.”

“She likes you, despite the thing between you two over the pirates.”

“I think a lot of her.”

“Dayah, like
s you too.”

“And I her.
  Anna, I could ask you how you know Melanie and Dayah like me but that is not the important thing I am hearing here.  You are sounding like an insecure school girl half your age.  You are usually straight forward but you seem to be beating around the bush as my mom used to say.”

“A
n insecure school girl you say?”

“A very sweet
and lovely school girl who has no reason to be jealous.”

“Okay, meine Liebe.”

At the clearing Keegan and Dayah had thrown caution to the wind and walked across to the body by the shore.  Anna and Shinobu stayed back with Melanie who showed a reluctance to cross the clearing.  Gray came over but did not bother to check for life.  The man was shredded.  A battered rifle wrapped in shredded plastic lay by the body.  On the man’s torso and limbs were what looked like the remains of bandages from before he tripped the mines which meant not a single one of the pirates had escaped without wounds from the ambush.  And this guy swam ashore in that condition.  Despite how much Gray hated these men he admired their toughness.  He also wondered if it was loyalty that had driven the man to swim ashore or if the man could not operate the ship by himself and his own survival depended upon aiding his leader.

When Gray
walked to the dock, his heart fell.  The Zodiac was swamped, its engine under water.  When they pulled it to land, examination found several punctures by the steel balls and conglomerate from the mine.  They found a life vest at the shoreline which they guessed the pirate had used to swim the seven or eight hundred yards from the ship.

Gray went over to Bossman, unwound the wire from his hands and pulled off the blindfold and gag. 
The crotch of his shorts was wet, either from relieving himself intentionally or from the fright that must have resulted from the explosion.  Gray asked Keegan to toss the pirate a bottle of water and motioned for Dayah.

“
Dayah, ask him if there are any more Zodiacs on board.”

She asked and t
he man greedily emptied the bottle before answering.  When Dayah heard his reply, she shook her head.

“Ask him if he has any ideas about getting out to the ship.  Tell him the Zodiac is too badly punctured.”

Dayah translated the query and then shrugged at the answer.  “Bossman say he die anyway, no help you.”

“Tell him he is correct. 
Tell him if he helps us I will shoot him in the head, if not I will turn him over to the cannibal who will eat off of him while we are building a boat which might take days.”

The conversation went back and forth longer than Gray thought was warranted.  Dayah said to
Gray, “He want know who is cannibal.”

Rubbing his belly and smiling, Shinobu made his growling mmmmm sound of appreciation.  Dayah did not give anything away but nodded in Shinobu’s direction with a frightened look on her face.
Bossman glanced very briefly in Shinobu’s direction before turning away.  He seemed to be considering something.  After a moment he rattled off several sentences to Dayah.  She held her hands up for him to stop, presumably so she could translate all he had said before she forgot it.

“He say
one Zodiac on ship, no motor.  He say make raft and paddle to ship very hard because wind.  Put motor on raft maybe work.”

Gray looked at the others.  “Can anyone thin
k of something better?”

Anna said, “We still have mines for signaling while we try to build a boat or raft.”

Gray said, “Dayah, ask Bossman if there is a radio or satellite phone on the ship.”

Dayah asked the question and the pirate chuckled before he replied.  “He say
radio on ship not work.  He ask what satellite phone.”

They put there heads together and split themselves into two teams, one to build a raft to get to the ship, the other to set up mines on the peak and watch for ships.  Gray, Shinobu, Keegan and Melanie would work on the raft and Anna and Dayah would set up the mines.  Anna had learned well enough how to arm and disarm the mines and both women had seen the damage one could do to the human body so there was little chance they would become careless with handling them.  Gray wanted Shinobu on the raft team because of his knowledge of working with the materials available and Keegan had some training with engine
s.

The young Irishman
immediately went to work drying out the swamped engine from the Zodiac.  Shinobu said Balsa trees grew on the island but they did not have the tools to tackle them.  There was plenty of bamboo used in the construction of the hut but most of it had split, making it unusable.  The raft did not have to last long, a round trip to the ship at most.  If the Zodiac on board the ship was usable, the motor Keegan was working on could be transferred to it.  Gray found a sharpening stone for the machetes but no more blades for the hack saw.

Gray
gave Anna one of the two way radios but they also agreed upon a rough signaling code using the mirror and hand signals in case the batteries went dead in the radios.  A string of several flashes from the peak meant danger of some kind.  Three flashes meant they had spotted a ship within signaling range.  Two flashes was simply they were doing okay.  Since those on the peak had the binoculars, those at the clearing could use arm signals or shots from the rifles.  Arms crossing overhead several times or three shots was danger.  Two arm crosses was everything was okay.  They agreed that if it appeared they would be stuck on the island for much longer they would work out a more sophisticated code.

It was still morning when Anna and Dayah headed for the peak
.  Gray, Melanie and Shinobu went into the jungle searching for big diameter bamboo.  They had only a vague idea of the buoyancy of the bamboo or how much would be needed to float the outboard motor and one or two passengers.  Keegan suggested they could remove the transom from the swamped Zodiac and attach it to the raft, saving the work of building something to hold the engine and the fuel tank which was attached to the transom.

Gray found a bamboo grove with the size
stems they needed and they began the laborious task of cutting it down.  They had two machetes and the sharper the blades the better they cut but neither stayed sharp very long so after every other relief, one of the men would resharpen one of the blades.  Melanie took turns with a machete and chopped with a ferocity that surprised the others.  Despite blisters that formed and broke, she refused to quit until they had a sufficient quantity.  They hauled the long stems down to the clearing and close to the water.

Gray put his arm around Melanie’s shoulder and turned one of
her hands up, revealing the raw flesh of her palms and fingers.  “You have done your share of this work.”  He turned his own palms up and showed his own blisters although they were not as severe as Melanie’s.  “I don’t want to piss you off but we are going to be hungry soon.  Could you fix us something to eat?”

“You sexist asshole,” she said but threw her arms around him and gave him a quick kiss on the mouth.  She turned and went toward the hut.
  To reach the hut she had to pass Bossman shackled to the post.  Rather than go wide she walked straight to the hut, coming within feet of the post.  Gray smiled.  She was recovering.

They cut the bamboo into fifteen foot lengths and arranged them side by side in such a manner they formed a stern of about four feet wide with a slight taper to the bow. 
They bound cross pieces to the base structure with detonator wire, twine and rope.  When it was rigid enough that it would not deform with weight on it, they dragged it to the water.  It floated fine but when Gray climbed aboard it went awash and tipped precariously.  They dragged it back onto land.  The raft needed more buoyancy to carry the engine and a pilot, and outriggers to stabilize it.

Melanie called Shinobu over to the hut and he ambled over while Keegan and Gray started cutting bamboo for
an outrigger.  When they had the bamboo cut to Shinobu’s specifications, he came back and told them lunch was ready.

Melanie
had boiled some bok choy in canned chicken broth, both items among those the pirates had brought from the ship to replenish the supplies at the hut.  There were also cups of fresh coconut water.  Someone among the pirates had the skill to climb the coconut trees and there was a pile of green skinned coconuts in the shade of the porch.  Melanie had asked Shinobu to show her how to hole them and drain the water.  All their eyes moistened when they toasted Lex with the deliciously sweet coconut water.

While eating
a lunch of the bok choy with crab, rice and papaya, the four talked about how to improve the raft.  Constructing an outrigger was relatively easy but the raft had to either be light enough to row against the wind or have enough buoyancy to support at least Keegan and the outboard motor.  They estimated it would take two more layers of bamboo to provide adequate buoyancy and then it would be unwieldy and Gray and Keegan did not think their hands were up to cutting that much more bamboo unless absolutely necessary.

Melanie asked, “How about something inflatable?”

Gray said, “We thought of using a cell from the Zodiac but all of them are punctured.”

“How about an air mattress?” she said and pointed across the hut.

Gray and Keegan both rose to examine it.  The air mattress was heavy rubber and about six feet long by three wide and four inches thick.  After lunch they built a bamboo frame just the size of the mattress under the raft, placing it at the rear and then wiring cross pieces to hold the mattress in place.  They added two lengthwise rails onto the cross pieces to aid dragging the raft into the water.  They mounted the transom from the Zodiac on to the stern of the raft and added outriggers of four inch diameter bamboo about ten feet long.  It was much more difficult than before to drag into the water.

Keegan and Gray
waded out with the motor and dropped it onto the transom.  The raft floated a little nose high and when Keegan climbed aboard it was even more down in the stern.  Shinobu climbed up onto the bow and it floated level.  Keegan started the motor and made a circle around the bay.  The only adjustment needed was raising the front of the outriggers about eight inches to reduce drag.

Anna and Dayah had apparently watched the progress with the raft
.  Although the sun had passed well overhead, they managed to flash them several times in sets of two which Gray interpreted as improvised congratulations.  He crossed his arms twice in reply.

After one more test,
Keegan and Shinobu started out for the ship.  They carried some water, rope and a machete.  Keegan had found a plastic bag to keep his pistol dry.

Gray watched as the raft passed out of the bay and into the open ocean.  A line of surf tipped the bow up sharply and he feared Shinobu would be throw
n from the raft but the old man must have been anticipating the wave because he held on and the bow dropped and the raft pushed on toward the ship.

Gray had no watch
with which to time them but it seemed to take nearly twenty minutes to reach the ship.  When Keegan reached for the ladder it gave Gray some perspective to measure the ship.  The side of the ship, cut down at the midpoint from a higher bow and stern, was about ten feet tall.  With a coil of rope over his shoulder, Keegan climbed up the ladder, threw a leg over and dropped onto the other side.  Only his head and shoulders appeared above the gunwale.  He disappeared for a moment and then came back and moved sideways to the gunwale.  It looked like he hollered something to Shinobu and then a body came up over the side and splashed into the water.  He moved back across the deck and again dragged something to the side.  He threw the coil of rope down to Shinobu but still held onto one end.  In a moment a brown colored Zodiac rose over the gunwale and dropped into the water with the other end of the rope attached to it.  He climbed down the ladder and they pushed away from the ship and turned for the bay towing the Zodiac.  Even pulling the Zodiac they only took half the time to reach the shore as going to the ship had taken.