“Okay, starboard beam it is,” Lanyard said as he slowly pushed the left throttle up to half-speed, causing the yacht to slowly turn to the right.
“How far to the territorial line if we stay on this course?” Gavin asked, looking amazingly focused for a man who had been fighting against nausea for last hour, and frequently losing the battle.
Lanyard checked the GPS screen. “Maybe another fifteen minutes.”
“Think the pump’ll hold out that long?”
“It might.”
Two minutes later, the fourth pump light on the control board began flashing, and Lanyard made the reluctant decision to abandon and scuttle the crippled yacht.
The rain had stopped and the dark surface of the Malacca Strait — or at least what little of it they could see through the fog — was relatively calm; which made the idea of taking a twelve-foot dinghy out on the open ocean in stormy weather, in the middle of the night, with a limited store of food and water, and an ocean full of patrol boats looking to blow them out of the water at the first opportunity, seem only foolish instead of suicidal.
Ten minutes later, Lanyard was braced against the wallowing dinghy’s steering wheel, watching the Avatar slowly settle into the water, while Gavin hung over the tubular bow and vomited what little food and drink he’d managed to keep down over the past hour. Then, as the yacht’s torn bridge structure finally disappeared beneath the waves, Lanyard checked his compass heading and accelerated the small boat into the face of the low swells.
Twenty long minutes later, Lanyard’s satellite cell phone finally rang.
“Gecko-two,” he said, and then listened for a few seconds, a smile growing on his grizzled face. “Right, we’re probably the lads the whole bloody Thai Navy and Air Force are out looking for; but, fortunately for us, they‘re searching west and south instead of east. They won’t find the Avatar in any case. She’s resting on the bottom a couple miles back. We’re in the dinghy, keeping our heads down. Jack’s a little worse for the wear, took a nick alongside the head, but he’s still game. My navigation’s a bit rough, but I think we’re in Malaysian territory right now. Hold one.”
Lanyard reached into his life jacket, pulled out a GPS unit, and read off the coordinates into the phone. “Aye, we’ll put an IR-flasher out. Water’s a bit of a chop down here; try not to run us over when you come in. Gecko-two, out.”
Chuckling in satisfaction, Lanyard re-secured the cell phone to his belt, reached for the emergency infrared flasher attached to the transom, turned it on, and then turned to the dark figure of Gavin, who was sprawled on his back in the bottom of the dinghy muttering to himself.
“See, what’d I tell you, laddie? Just because we sank the Avatar and let Hateley’s hundred-thousand-dollar trophy get blown to bits, that doesn’t mean Wallis would leave us out here to paddle all the way to Darwin.”
“That may be true, but he doesn’t know we did all that just yet, does he?” Gavin said morosely.
“No, he doesn’t,” Lanyard conceded. “Let’s just hope the plane ride put him in a good mood.”
On the Malacca Strait, Malaysia
Ten minutes later, the ex-RAF pilot of the completely blacked-out, fifty-year-old, high-winged, dual-engine seaplane came in low over the water, visually verified the dinghy’s position; and then came back around and touched down, landing into the face of the rolling swells with an ease that suggested a history of many such landings in far worse conditions.
As the pilot kept his engines running, maintaining the seaplane’s position heading into the wind, Lanyard brought the dinghy around behind the plane and up to the open main cabin door where Wallis was waiting with a grappling hook.
Then, as Gavin scrambled up and in through open doorway, Wallis held the dinghy tight against the plane while Lanyard leaned down with a combat knife, punched a few holes in the hull, and slashed the flotation tubes.
Finally, as Lanyard and Gavin pulled themselves into two of the four main cabin seats, and Wallis secured the door, the pilot made a final adjustment to his wind alignment, advised his passengers to hang on, and then firmly shoved the throttles forward to takeoff speed, sending the old seaplane crashing through the swells of the Malacca Strait one more time.
Moments later, they were airborne, the gallant old plane roaring into the darkness several miles south of the line where the Thai patrol boats were maintaining a determined grid search for the missing Avatar.
Across the Malacca Strait
To their surprise, given all of the unfortunate events of the past twenty-four hours, the subsequent two-hour, very-low-level flight across the Malacca Strait to Singapore proved to be a relatively quiet and uneventful affair for Lanyard and Gavin.
After listening to their stories, seeing to their medical and food needs, and congratulating them on their narrow escape, Wallis sat back in one of the two rear seats and proceeded to stare out the window, lost in thought, as the twin-engine seaplane surged and rumbled through the dark southeastern Asia sky.
Lanyard and Gavin would occasionally glance back to see if Wallis’ mood had changed; but they knew better than to disturb their fearsome and occasionally unpredictable leader when he was thinking about a new plan, or the failure of the previous one.
It was only when the pilot announced their pending arrival in Singapore Harbor, and suggested that everyone might want to strap in, that Wallis sat up, leaned forward, and slapped both men on their muscular shoulders.
“Okay, lads,” he said, “I think I’ve figured out a way we can keep Mr. Hateley and his friends happy, and make us moderately rich in the process.”
CHAPTER 18
Tanga Island Cove — late the next afternoon
To the numerous tourists and residents who remained a careful distance off shore in their boats, watching the activities of Bulatt and the three Navy seamen with their binoculars, the four crime scene investigators must have appeared tired, sunburned, and otherwise thoroughly satisfied with their accomplishments over the past nine hours.
They were sitting on a series of tarps they’d laid out around a small, stone-lined cook fire on a grassy knoll just above the beach of Tanga Island Cove — Bulatt sitting bare-chested with his scraggly beard and his white hair hanging loose over his muscular and reddish-tanned shoulders, looking very much like a shipwrecked Viking at rest as he sipped cautiously at his bowl of hot soup, while Chief Petty Officer Narusan and his two seamen compared crime scene notes, lists and sketches against items of collected evidence neatly arranged on one of the tarps — and keeping a wary eye on the surrounding boat-crowd, when they all heard the sound of a distant aircraft.
Chief Narusan spotted it first.
“Helicopter,” he said to Bulatt, pointing at the northeastern horizon.
Setting his soup bowl aside, Bulatt shielded his eyes from the sun, and then finally spotted the incoming aircraft — a small surveillance helicopter with military markings and a pair of pontoons attached to the landing skids.
“About time they showed up,” Bulatt commented, generating a brief series of smiles and thumbs-up from the chief and his crew before they returned to their paperwork.
Two minutes later, the four men watched the helicopter pilot flare the rotors of the small aircraft above the cove, settle it down onto the water, and then use a series of brief engine revs to nudge the leading edges of the pontoons into the shoreline sand.
As they continued to watch with tired curiosity, a familiar figure opened the co-pilot’s door, stepped out onto the metal floats, hopped down to the sand, and strode up the beach to the grassy knoll with a grim look on his face.
“Welcome to the Tanga Cove crime scene, Khun Sat,” Bulatt said, forcing himself up to his feet along with the
