couple of the guards. They hauled the man up by his arms, pulled him to his feet and tried to get him to stand up on his own. But the man could not, he had something seriously wrong with his side, perhaps more than just a few broken ribs, Stratton guessed. The Somalis showed no interest in the man’s condition and manhandled him away.
The remaining guards looked like they could care less about what had happened. All but two of them stepped off back to their spot in the shade. The one that Stratton had struck got to his feet in easy stages, feeling his bruised jaw. He sought out and found Stratton, looked at him like he was fixing the image in his head. The other downed Somali stepped beside him, looking at Hopper. He removed a long, crudely made blade from his belt and held it in a tight fist. He spat out some words to the other pirate.
The old Somali was still vigilant for trouble and did not miss it. He barked a command. The two guards showed no servility but decided to walk back to the shade. Stratton and Hopper glanced at each other, aware they had not made life any easier for themselves. Stratton wondered how much control the leadership had over its men.
The girl had watched her friend be taken away and stepped back into the shade provided by the stack of crates. She sat down, leaned back tired against them and stared into the sky like it could give her the answer to her problems.
Hopper and Stratton sat down in the sand near her.
After a glance at them and after some hesitation, she said, ‘Thanks.’ Then she looked away.
Stratton felt bad for her. This wasn’t a good place for her. He knew how common rape was in hostage circumstances. In a place like Somalia it would be practically inevitable. And the most apparently devout jailers would be among the worst offenders. In Iraq and Afghanistan he had seen the results of the rape of prisoners, male and female. On top of everything else a hostage had to contend with – the psychological stress of pitiful confinement, the fear of torture every day, the pain of the beatings, the threat of death at any time – a girl had to live with the great possibility that her jailers would come for her like animals. And once they began, they usually did it again and again. Until death or release. If a girl survived, she had to cope with everything that came after, the physical and emotional scars, the possibility of disease, even death. And then there was the potential pregnancy and all that entailed.
‘Where’re you from?’ Stratton asked. He didn’t know why he was attempting to ease her anguish because there was nothing he could do for her. But she was sitting there beside him and he felt a kind of obligation to try and ease her suffering.
She took her time replying, like she was deciding whether or not she wanted to talk to him. ‘China,’ she said eventually.
Stratton couldn’t help thinking how he had not talked to a single Chinese person in years and he’d met two in the same number of days. ‘What ship you off?’
Once again she took a long time to answer. ‘No ship.’
Stratton found the answer curious and wondered if she understood English that well. But something about the way she listened to him and responded suggested she knew the language well enough. ‘How’d you end up here, then?’ he said.
‘A yacht,’ she said. It was as though she felt guilty about it.
‘You were sailing? Out there?’
She nodded.
It sounded like a pretty dumb thing to do. ‘A regular sailing yacht, with a sail?’ he said.
‘Yes. With a sail.’
Stratton could only wonder why.
She looked towards the water and the carriers in front of them. ‘I don’t know where it is now,’ she said. ‘My friend and I were sailing around the world.’
‘I guess it was just as risky going around the Cape?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Statistically we should have been OK. Something like seventy boats a day pass through the Gulf of Aden. Only a couple a week are attacked. Maybe one or two a month get hijacked. We were almost in the international transit corridor when they saw us. We were unlucky.’
Stratton sympathised. The international corridor ran east–west across the Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia. It was a protected route patrolled by various foreign navies and regarded as the safest way to transit past Somalia. It obviously didn’t guarantee complete safety from hijacking but it increased the chances of a navy vessel responding to a distress signal. Many pirate vessels actually hunted the corridor, knowing that it improved the chances of them finding a commercial vessel somewhere along it. The risk of running into a navy boat was all part of doing business.
‘How long have you been here?’ Stratton asked.
‘It must be two weeks now.’
‘You speak good English.’
‘I learned in China. I spent six months in London. That was a year ago.’
She seemed intelligent and despite being petite, tough. She’d carried the boxes without complaint and wasn’t afraid to lay into the Somali guards. ‘Do you know what’s happening with your negotiations?’ he asked.
She glanced at him for the first time like she was finally interested enough to want to see what he looked like. ‘They have told me nothing.’ She looked away again. ‘I don’t even think anyone knows I’m here.’
‘These guys would’ve tried to make contact with someone. They’re running a business.’
She looked at him again. ‘You are English.’ It was more of a statement than a question.
‘Yes.’
‘What ship are you off?’
Stratton hadn’t prepared for the question, not in any great depth at least. The obvious story was that they worked for the local oil company that ran the terminal in Riyan, the company whose secur ity ran the semi-rigid they stole. They could sing that song all day, until Sabarak decided to tell his story. Once he found the right people to talk to he would sound a lot more convincing than Stratton and Hopper. Stratton had expected the pirates to ask. But then what did they care? As far as they were concerned they’d netted three more potential pay cheques. What else did they need to know? He looked for Sabarak. The Saudi was squatting alone on the edge of the group and looking out to sea.
‘They picked us up off the coast of Yemen,’ Stratton said. ‘We were doing a spot of sightseeing.’
‘That’s almost as bad as what I was doing.’
‘No one told us pirates operated that close to the Yemen coastline.’
They heard a commotion coming from the town. They saw a man marching down towards the beach at the head of a boisterous retinue of gun-toting Somalis. It took Stratton a couple of seconds to realise it was Lotto, wearing tailored military fatigues, a green beret at a jaunty angle and wrap-around sunglasses. He carried an ornate walking stick over a shoulder and wore a pearl-handled pistol in a holster at his side. The men immediately behind him, judging by their dress and bling, had been exposed to a higher class of contraband than the run-of- the-mill guards and townfolk.
The group reached the beach and turned towards the anchored carriers, walking past the prisoners, largely ignoring them. There came the sound of electronic chirping and one of the men handed a satellite phone to Lotto. The leader stopped to talk into it, looking skywards after a few seconds. The guys around him did the same.
A shrill shout went up from one of the men standing on the bridge wing of the
An aircraft of some kind.
Lotto was still looking up and he was still speaking into the phone.
Then the aircraft came into view, about a thousand feet up, hugging the coastline. A small twin-engine propeller-driven craft. The sound got louder as it closed in. It was slowly descending, Stratton decided, as it approached them. Then the pilot adjusted its track and flew it over the line of cargo ships, then turned sharply away and began a wide turn out to sea.
It described a long, easy circle and it kept descending. When it reached the beach again, it turned sharply back towards the ships. But this time it came inland to fly over the sand. Right towards the pirate leader.
