The girl, who had put on several extra layers of dirty clothing to keep out the chilly night air, lay curled up in a ball, halfway inside the cabin, her head resting on a bundle of clothes, her eyes closed. Fast asleep.
Stratton felt good having slept during the day. He was hungry but ignored it. He had enough energy to keep going for days without food. It hadn’t been the first time he’d had to fast on an operation.
The longer he stayed in the business, he knew the greater the chances were of experiencing a disaster he wouldn’t survive. Stratton had often been lucky and that wasn’t a good thing to rely on. He wondered how often Hopper thought he had been lucky in the past. It could just as easily have been Stratton’s fate. The regrets piled up in his head. Leaving without Hopper. Not being able to kill Sabarak. The lingering doubt he had about Hopper and about whether he had succeeded in killing his own partner. The possibility that the man could be experiencing a living hell at that moment. Guilt flooded through Stratton once again and any feeling of relief he had of escaping that foul country withered.
He would have to report everything to SBS operations, exactly how it had happened. That would include an admission of his complete failure in regard to Hopper’s safety, one that led to the man’s death ultimately. If Stratton hadn’t killed him, those bastards would have. But operational reports weren’t forums for outpourings of personal blame and emotions. London wouldn’t want to hear all of that tattle. That could come later if the operative wanted to reveal it. He could hear his boss in Poole telling him to go and get drunk, get it off his chest and get ready for the next job. If he really wanted one, they could provide him with a shrink or therapist. They would also watch him closely, concerned about any emotional baggage interfering with the job. If it did, he would be out.
Stratton thought about how he used to be. When he was young and full of piss and vinegar, it had been a simple process to fob off the deaths of colleagues. You accepted that it was all a part of the risk of the job. And if anyone got uptight about that, they should never have joined up. He recognised the sentiments of exuberant, carefree and ambitious youth, but also those of the mandarins at the top who ran everything. They could be even more ruthless. They had to be. Few of them had done anything more dangerous than run a desk or an ops room. Some had been exposed to the level of field operations Stratton had, but not many.
The more time Stratton spent in the field, the more operatives he knew personally died or ended up in wheelchairs, and the deeper the psychological wounds that cut into him. And not all of them healed. Not fully. The kind of wounds you never got rid of.
Like Hopper would be.
Stratton felt a chill run through him. He looked up at the North Star and made another slight adjustment of the tiller. Satisfied he was on course, he tied off the tiller.
He went to the cabin and reached over the girl to search through the bag of clothes, found a thick old sweater and pulled it on. The elbows had gone and it had a large hole on one side, but otherwise it would help keep out the night air.
He stepped out of the wheelhouse and looked behind them again. He couldn’t help it. But until the pair of them were aboard a vessel and heading for civilisation he would always be looking over his shoulder. The edge of the sea had been black as pitch all around them for hours. He looked back again and something registered in his mind. Something insignificant to the point of being non-existent but he couldn’t look away. The black sea met the lighter sky and the only light came from the stars. He thought maybe he had seen one shoot down past the horizon.
After a long hard look, he was about to face the front when he saw a tiny speck of light appear for less than a second. So faint that he still wasn’t sure if he had actually seen anything.
He stared, suspecting his eyes of playing tricks on him. His mind began to run at the possibilities. If a vessel, it could have come from only one source: the pirate town. It was directly behind them. It could be from nowhere else.
The light appeared again. This time for a moment longer. It was real. It was a light. He hadn’t imagined it. It had to be a boat of some kind.
He realised what it had to be, following directly in their track, and how it was doing it. It had to be the pirate mother ship. It didn’t need daylight to see them. It had radar.
He felt a flush of fear run through him then he brought it under control. The implications were clear enough. Which amounted to nothing more complicated than death if they were caught again. Lotto had discarded the girl once and would not even bring her back to the town this time. And if the master wasn’t on board, those would undoubtedly be his orders. Stratton doubted the girl would let herself be taken again only to go through the ordeal of a gang rape before being killed. As for him? Lotto had threatened to amputate his feet and Stratton didn’t doubt for a second that the leader would do a lot worse this time. He wouldn’t see land again if the ship got them.
It gave the chase clear parameters. Escape or die trying.
He continued to study the distant light and decided it had definitely become more visible. It had gained on them. The mother craft hadn’t been a particularly quick ship but it probably had about a couple of knots on them at least. He could get little more out of the fishing boat. The mother craft cut through the water on the line of the horizon, which put it at three to four miles away. If the light he could see was on top of the boat that would make it a bit further away. He calculated the variables. He reckoned they had anywhere from two to four hours before the boat caught them.
He checked the fuel cans connected to the engines. Both nearly empty. He untied the knot in the short rubber pipe attached to the bottom of the fuel barrel. Fuel leaked out. He opened the cans, poked the end inside the first and let the fuel gush in. He repeated the process with the other can and when it was full, he checked the barrel. It looked like he could get four more working containers out of it.
He guessed they had covered around thirty miles by now. Not very much more. So his initial estimate of a hundred miles of fuel looked about correct. The bad news was that the pirate craft had enough fuel to cross the Gulf and back. Stratton would run out of the stuff long before the pirates did.
That left the single option of making it to the corridor and hoping to find a ship before they got caught. Considering the attitude the pirates had towards other ocean-going vessels, it would have to be a navy ship to help him and the girl. Or things wouldn’t work out too well for them.
He looked in a wide arc across their front but he could see nothing, no sign of another ship. He felt certain they would come across another ship before long. But how long?
He looked back at the light. It had come over the horizon and no longer shimmered.
His mind started to work on alternative plans. Perhaps he could do something to confuse the pirate’s radar or shrink the fishing boat’s image. They could tear off the small bridge house and toss it over the side. But in the calm sea, it would probably make hardly any difference to their signature. Could he give the pirates another target to chase? That would require something tall and metallic. But it would need to move off under its own power in another direction. Impossible. Could he make the fishing boat go faster? He could if he made it lighter.
He went to the front and the heavy sea weights. He picked one up with an effort and swung it over the side. The others soon followed and he stood there panting while he searched for anything else he could dump.
He looked to the forward horizon again. He could see a faint light on the port side front quarter. If it was on the top of a large ship, it could be ten or twelve miles away.
He went back to the tiller and pushed it over to turn the boat towards the light. If they were lucky, it would be a navy ship.
If they were even luckier, it would be sailing towards them.
The turn caused the boat to rock a little and the girl rolled over and nudged the edge of the cabin’s door frame with her head, which woke her up. She sat up and looked at Stratton, watched him pick up a coil of chains and throw them overboard. She watched him pick up just about anything that wasn’t attached to the vessel and throw it overboard.
She got to her feet and stepped into the breeze. ‘Are you OK?’ she called out above the wind and the tinny sound of the engines.
‘I was about to wake you up,’ he said. ‘We need to throw the bridge house overboard.’
‘Is there something wrong?’ she said, concerned about the way he was attacking everything.
‘Well, we have some bad news and we have some good news,’ he said as he opened a box and rummaged through it, pulling out several old life jackets. ‘Which would you like first?’
‘I’ll have the good news first.’
Stratton lifted up a tarp to find a collection of angling rods and weights and several heavy-duty fishing reels and harnesses. ‘You see that light directly ahead?’
