The Dutchman felt his mouth go dry again. “I’m afraid not, sir,” he muttered. “In fact, it may already be too late.”
“Why is that?” Major Yu’s eyebrows rose behind the round wire frames.
“Look out of the window, sir. We’ve arrived at Darwin. They’ve already sent out a couple of tugs to tow us in.”
“Surely we can delay docking for a few more hours.”
“No, sir. If we do that, we could be stuck here for a week.” De Wynter ran a hand over his jaw. “The Australian ports run like clockwork,” he explained. “Everything has to be very precise. We have an allocated time for arrival, and it’s a small window. If we miss it, another ship will take our place.”
Yu considered. Something very close to anxiety appeared in his shrunken schoolboy face. This was exactly what Zeljan Kurst had warned him about in London. Like it or not, Alex Rider had taken on Scorpia once before and beaten them. Yu had thought it impossible that such
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a thing could happen a second time. And yet the boy did seem to have the luck of the devil. How had he managed to get out of the container? It was a shame nobody had been able to understand the old man before he had died.
“Even if we dock, the boy cannot possibly leave the ship,” De Wynter said. “There is only one exit—the main gangway, and that will be guarded at all times. He can jump into the sea, but I will have men on lookout. We can cover every angle with rifles. We’ll pick him off in the water. A single shot. No one will hear anything. We’ll only be in Darwin for a few hours. Our next port is Rio de Janeiro. We’ll have three weeks to flush him out.” Major Yu nodded slowly. Even as De Wynter had been speaking, he had made up his mind. In truth, he had little choice. Royal Blue had to be unloaded immediately in order to continue its journey. He couldn’t wait. On the other hand, there was something that Alex Rider didn’t know. Whatever happened, all the cards were in Yu’s hand.
“Very well, Captain,” he muttered. “We’ll tie up at Darwin. But if the boy does slip through your fingers a second time, I suggest you kill yourself.” He snapped a cookie in half. “It will spare me the trouble, and it will, I assure you, cause you a great deal less pain.” Alex Rider had heard everything that Major Yu had said.
The man who sat on the executive board of Scorpia and who headed the most powerful snakehead in south-H i d e - a n d - S e e k
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east Asia would have been horrified to know that Alex was hiding in perhaps the most obvious place in the world. Under his own bed.
Alex had known what he was up against. The moment he had seen the refugee killed on the deck and had heard Yu give the order for the crew to hunt him down, he had realized he needed to find somewhere on the ship that nobody would even dream of looking. It was true there were hundreds of hiding places—ventilation shafts, the crawl spaces between the containers, cabins, cable hous-ings, and storage units. But none of these would be good enough, not with the entire crew searching for him non-stop throughout the night.
No—it had to be somewhere completely unthink-able . . . and the idea had come to him almost at once.
Where was the last place he would go? It had to be the captain’s cabin or better still, Major Yu’s own quarters on board the
He’d only been given a few minutes’ start. As the crew members organized themselves and the various listening devices were handed out, Alex was racing. The layout of the ship was fairly easy to understand. He had seen much of it already. The engine rooms and the crew’s cabins were somewhere down below. Yu, the captain, and the senior officers—anyone important—would surely be housed above sea level, somewhere in the central block.
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Breathless, imagining the crewmen fanning out behind him, Alex stumbled on a door that led to the spotlessly clean, brightly lit corridor that he had explored the day before. He was on the right track. The first door he came to opened into a conference room, full of charts and computers. Next came a living space with a bar and TV. He heard the clatter of saucepans and ducked back as a man wearing a chef’s hat suddenly crossed the corridor and disappeared into a room opposite. A moment later, he emerged again and went back the way he had come, carrying a box of canned food.
Alex hurried forward. The chef had clearly entered some sort of larder, and Alex wasted a few seconds pulling out a bottle of water for himself. He was going to need it. Continuing down the corridor, he passed a laundry, a game room, and a miniature hospital. He came to an elevator and was tempted to take it. According to the display, there were six floors above him. But he didn’t have time and dreaded waiting for it to arrive, only to find it packed with Yu’s men.
He came upon Yu’s stateroom at the very end of the corridor. It wasn’t locked—but there wasn’t a man on board the
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didn’t dare touch anything. Moving even one page a frac-tion of an inch might give him away.
He looked around him, taking in the pictures on the walls—scenes of the English countryside with, in one image, a traditional hunt setting out across what might be Salisbury Plain. A sophisticated stereo system and a plasma TV. A leather sofa. This was where Yu worked and relaxed when he was on board.
The bedroom was next door. Here was another bizarre touch. Yu slept in an antique four-poster bed. But Alex knew at once that it was perfect for his needs. There was a silk valance that trailed down to the floor, and lifting it up, Alex saw a space half a yard high that would conceal him perfectly. God—it reminded him of being six years old again, playing hide-and-seek with Jack Starbright on Christmas Eve. But this wasn’t the same. This time he was on a container ship, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, surrounded by people who were determined to kill him.
