The junk was close in shore, its brown sails flapping, the sheets creaking and the main mast groaning, and then the diesel roared into noisy, smelly life that was going to be our salvation, I hoped.
A machine-gun on shore began its deadly stutter, and then that damned gun on the junk fired again in an impossibly uncontrolled explosion that ought, by rights, to have sent the whole craft to the bottom. It was a roar and a sheet of flame, a cannonade straight out of the eighteenth-century histories, with shrapnel of all sorts and sizes flying haphazardly in all directions. But the machine-gunner was gone; one minute he was there, firing away in an arc that was cutting through the water and almost reaching us, and then next there was nothing. I heard the rattle of rifle-fire from the junk, orderly, organized fire that was keeping the shore empty of life with surprising efficiency.
From somewhere under cover, a bullet tore into the boat, and the boatman yelled and dropped one of his oars; but he kept going with the other, and between the two of us we reached the junk, and there was Theo, leaning down and grinning and helping us aboard and yelling over the din: “How you like my cannon, eh?”
There was a fearsome pain in my foot, and I fell as soon as we hit the deck, but Theo helped me up and I saw his face grow serious suddenly as he looked at Sally. He threw me a quick glance and said nothing, and then we were hurrying for cover as more and more bullets stacked into the heavy timber sides. He said calmly: “Just keep low down. We don’t got nothing to worry about now. We got good junk here, not the first time we catch little bit trouble, not the last time either.” The sides of the junk were heavy teak, strong as iron and eight inches thick.
The helmsman was bearing down hard on the tiller, and the motor was roaring, and the sails were taking up the wind as we swung round and away from there. All around us, along the scuppers, a dozen crewmen were kneeling, their rifles firing steadily under the watchful eye of the big Arab cook. He laughed and yelled at me: “Pretty good fighting man, I tell you.” He was standing there, huge and flabby and quite unafraid, completely exposed and saying calmly, over and over, in three different dialects: “Don’t wait for targets; keep firing around the ladder. That’s where they are; keep them under cover.” There was a stream of blood pouring down from his right forearm, but he seemed to pay no heed to it at all.
I was holding Sally down close by the dreadful cannon, and it exploded again and nearly blew the top of my head off with the force of the charge. Theo was down beside me, trying to keep Mai’s head down, unsuccessfully, and I said: “For God’s sake, what have you got in that thing?”
He grinned in the growing red light: “Dynamite, gelignite, I don’t know for sure. Whatever we got, we use. Fill up with nails, bits of iron; anything. Make pretty damn good noise, no?” Two men were packing rusted nuts and bolts down the old barrel for another blast, and close by, the open-breech culverin was being swiveled on its homemade base. A crewman was tamping powder into it with a calloused thumb, and when it was just so, he touched his cigarette to it, closing his eyes and turning his head away. The whole damn thing blew up in his hands, and he stared at a shattered wrist with something more like frustration than pain.
We were far offshore now, and out of useful range of their rifles. I heard a bullet or two clipping through the sails, a few more still thudding hopelessly into the timbers, but there was nothing much to worry about now. I said to Theo: “How long before we’re in safe waters?”
He laughed. “Chinese won’t worry us none. Too many people fight each other all the time here. Pirates, smugglers, they don’t care. But Ming, Ming is different. Maybe you get safe from Ming now when you go to moon. Not before that, you not going to be safe no place. Better I fix that foot for you, anybody else hurt?”
We made a quick survey. Mai was untouched, and as cool and calm as she had ever been. Sally was unhurt. I had a scratch in the side and a painful wound in my right foot where a bullet had ripped open the ankle. The big cook was sitting down on the deck and grinning at the terrible mess a pattern of machine-gun slugs had made of his left thigh. Two other men had been slightly wounded, and nobody seemed in the least concerned about it; it was part of the pattern of their daily lives.
And then, I beard the roar of the helicopter.
There was nothing to see at first; there was just the monstrous sound of it coming across the water. I looked at Theo, and the smile had gone. He said slowly: “Better we get the senhoritas below deck, I think, no?”
I said: “I suppose it’s too much to hope for an antiaircraft gun in this comic arsenal of yours?”
He shook his head. “Anything on the water, we fight it good, we win good. But up there...” He jerked a thumb at the lightening sky. “We don’t never have to fight airplanes before. Maybe next time.” I was glad he thought there was going to be a next time.
I told Mai: “Take Sally below, will you? Look after her?”
She hesitated. “If you give me a rifle...”
I said: “No, we’ll manage, Get life-belts for both of you.”
The resignation I was waiting for had come over Sally. She was sitting dejectedly on an upturned wicker-basket, her hands hanging listlessly at her sides, her glazed eyes staring at the teak boards of the deck. I had believed her when she said she was still off the drugs, and I believed her still; but there was a terrible, listless look to her eyes; the pupils were swollen to twice their normal size, and I remembered what she had said about the damage being permanent.
I said gently: “Better go below, Sally. There’s more trouble ahead.”
She said, not unkindly now: “More trouble than you know, Cain, for all of us.”
“As long as you realize that.”
“I know.”
“To get back at me, he won’t worry too much that you’re on board. Whatever you’ve done to strengthen his kingdom, it’s a likelihood he’d like to have it back for himself.”
She said heavily: “I know that too. I’ve known it all the time.” It was a good sign.
Mai took her arm silently, almost wincing when she felt there was nothing but a thin bone, and led her below.
We could see the helicopter now, rising up over the island. The gray sky was streaked with red and yellow as the helicopter wheeled over to the west and began to rise. Theo was binding a dirty length of cloth round the wounded cook’s fat thigh, and the cook forced himself to his feet, leaning against the bulkhead and still grinning. “Am okay, skipper, kulshi tamam, is all okay.” He spat into the water and laughed and looked at me and said: “Skipper think I fall down because I get hurt, but not so, is a little bit drunk still from last night.” He threw back his head and roared with laughter, and then yelled suddenly, in Cantonese: “Get that gun on its back!”
The helicopter was wheeling towards us. Theo, staring up at it, said: “He don’t know we got no antiaircraft. Maybe he waste little bit time making sure, no? What you think?”
I said: “I think we’d better get every rifle trained on him the moment he comes anywhere near us. I hope to God your men know how to shoot straight.”
“They shoot pretty good, you see.”
Four or five of the crew were struggling with the cannon, pulling it away from its embrasure and trying to wedge the barrel into an upright position. I said: “Good God, you can’t fire that thing like that. It’ll blow a hole in the deck. If it doesn’t run away and kill us all instead.”
Theo frowned, his mind working in unaccustomed academic exercise. “I don’t know, maybe you right, maybe it fire pretty good.”
“The recoil will blow it clean down to the bottom of the ocean.”
“I don’t think you right, Senhor Cain. We got pretty good decks on this ship.”
“You have now. I don’t know how long they’ll last.”
“We try, we find out, no?”
I shrugged. “It’s your ship, Theo.”
“No. Is Senhor Bonelli’s ship. He got plenty money. We lose it, he not get too damn mad.”
I sighed. It was a long swim home.
Now, the copter was swooping down towards us on a trial run. I looked at the cook. His arm was raised and he was watching the copter as he leaned against the bulwarks with his flabby face creased with pain. Under the cover of every obstruction on deck was a rifleman, his rifle raised high. Waiting. It hovered a moment out there, a hundred yards away and five hundred feet up, and then it swooped and came roaring in, almost at water level. The men on deck scurried to better positions against the side, and then the cook yelled: “Udrubbu!” and a dozen shots rang out in simultaneous precision.
It was close enough for me to see a burst of sudden holes in the helicopters fabric, and then the man in the passenger seat was slung round with a bazooka poked out over the side. I heard the shell come and yelled: “Cover!” as it slammed into the base of the mast and exploded, and I heard Theo yell: “Get the mainsail down!”
