“You guessed right on all counts and now I’m undoubtedly fucked. So what happens next?” he spat out defiantly.
“You better tell me how you became involved and what exactly your roll has been with the Syndicate,” Alex invited him in a quiet conciliatory tone. “There may be a way of getting you off the hook but I’d need to understand the full story. OK?”
“Chief, why don’t you go and help the other crew unload our cargo before they bugger everything up completely!” The captain smiled encouragement to the exasperated engineer who’d been watching Big J’s crew hammering away at his precious cargo hatches.
“You’ll be OK?” the old chief queried, looking across suspiciously from his captain and friend to Alex and then to John, who was taking little notice of the conversation; trying to figure out the ship’s controls was of more interest to him.
“Don’t worry old friend I’ll be OK; you best go and show them how to open the hatches without sinking the ship!” the captain smiled.
The chief left the bridge without any more encouragement.
Alex watched him leave, and then turned to the captain. “Been together long?” He nodded towards the departing chief engineer.
“Ten years,” he sighed, then went on to tell his story. It was typical of the majority of Syndicate vassals.
It had all started on his first trip as captain of a small refrigerated coaster built with a reinforced icebreaking bow. Their commission was to make the first run into the coastal ports of the Baltic Sea at the end of the winter freeze. They would be delivering cargo and collecting mostly frozen fish products for the return journey.
They’d sailed through the Kiel Canal and up to Stockholm and then across to Finland where they port-hopped along that jagged coast, collecting and delivering a wide variety of goods. Their last port was Vaasa, where they refuelled and decided to rest for a couple of days before starting back to the Swedish side of the Baltic and the return journey.
They’d been drinking in a rather seedy back street bar and hosting a couple of local females.
“Couldn’t quite call them ladies, if you understand!” the captain smiled briefly as he reminisced.
Towards the end of the evening one of the locals, possibly a sailor or fisherman, shouted drunkenly across to their table.
“Don’t think you’re going to get anywhere with one of our girls!” He stood up unsteadily. “If you want a girl go back to Cyprus and find one there!”
Recognising trouble at once, they paid their bill and stood up to leave. The captain gave each of the girls a ten dollar bill smiling, “No harm done eh girls?” and walked out of the bar.
They’d hardly gone ten paces when one of the girls ran out calling after them.
“Don’t go! We have some more fun yes?”
The chief turned grinning,
“OK little girl, come to Papa. We have some fun OK?” He held out his arms, inviting her to join him.
At that moment, the drunken man from the bar appeared at the doorway.
“I told you to leave her alone!”
He staggered as he advanced, his hand outstretched towards the chief; he was holding a vicious-looking filleting knife.
The girl screamed, “No Sven, no!”
She ran towards him, ignoring the weapon. It all happened in a split second. She seemed to launch herself at the man. It was certainly not intended but he pinioned her on the knife, which entered her chest cavity at the sternum and pierced her heart. The blood gushed from the tiny wound. The chief dived at the man and punched him with the heel of his hand to the side of the head. The blow, which carried his full body weight added to the man’s forward momentum, was devastating. The man stopped dead in his tracks and toppled over, striking his head on the smooth granite kerb. His skull cracked like eggshell, driving bone splinters into his brain. He died within a few seconds. The captain joined in the mêlée by grabbing at the dying girl, who had collapsed onto her knees, and gazing transfixed at the blood pumping from her chest. She looked up with appealing eyes at the captain but did not speak and then fell forward to the ground. The captain, who never knew why, grabbed the knife and jerked it from the woman’s chest and stood dazed and staring in disbelief at the blood-soaked weapon.
It was the chief who came to his senses first.
“Christ Cap, what a mess!” he exclaimed, looking at each of the prostrate forms in the road then back to the captain. Trying to come to terms with the desperate situation, he pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and tried to slow the flow of blood still pumping from the woman’s chest. The captain looked up in alarm, suddenly aware of another man who stepped out of the shadows.
“Having a bit of trouble Captain?” The man asked coolly.
“Who are you?” the captain asked, a tremble in his usually confident voice.
“You could call me your ‘guardian angel’ because I think you are going to need me to help you out of this rather nasty little mess don’t you?” the man offered somewhat cynically.
For the two sailors, the whole episode was like scene from a horror movie. Standing over two dead bodies, both men liberally covered in blood, the captain still holding the knife that had killed the girl. On top of which they were in a foreign port, where once the locals scented blood justice could be hard to find. It was an impossible dilemma.
Incredibly, the stranger offered to clean up the whole mess for them. All they needed to do, he instructed, was to “ go straight back to your ship and wait for me there. I’ll be with you in about an hour.”
For them, it was like being offered he last two lifebelts as the ship slips below the waves. So without any further thought they agreed and jogged back to the ship relieved to get away from the place.
Within the hour, the stranger appeared as promised. He quickly explained, “I am associated with a group known as the Syndicate and just by chance had been completing some business here. When I saw your little problem I realised that you need help. My colleagues in the Syndicate are always happy to give assistance to honest traders down on their luck so I had no problem persuading them that I should help out”! He smiled benignly.
The Captain, having recovered his composure, was naturally suspicious.
“So what do we have to do in return for this generous gesture?” he asked directly.
“You are very perceptive and yes there is always a price to pay but I am sure you will find that our way is to be reasonable. In fact we are known to be extremely generous and reward success in abundance. It also has to be said that failure or disloyalty should never contemplated; the price is far too high.” He pursed his lips. “You understand me?”
He went on, “The Syndicate is looking to acquire and operate their own coastal shipping company, allowing them to move cargo without the bureaucracy associated with legitimate shipping companies. They have agreed that you could have the contract!”
They needed little further persuasion when the man explained that the woman was the daughter of the tough local mayor. The fisherman was a local bad boy so it had been easy to persuade the policeman that he had killed the girl. The police were still curious however as to how the bad boy had died.
“We don’t need to assist them do we? I have been able to assure them that two foreign sailors went straight back to their ship when they left the tavern and so could not have been involved,” he smiled benignly. “That is unless my memory were suddenly to be jogged.”
Still in shock from the sudden nightmare, they were easily recruited.
Soon after returning to their homeport, they transferred to their new ship. They never saw the stranger again. For a couple of years they ran the chartered coaster for their Syndicate masters; the cargoes always seemed to be legitimate, and though the paperwork was frequently either inadequate or so messy no one understood it, it all seemed to be reasonably above board.