The dripping man, exhausted, nodded and let his body sag back onto the tarpaulin-covered coffee sacks, while Isaac walked back to the man working the steering stick to tell him the change in direction. The other two men on this raft squatted beside the weary messenger, staring at him with wide eyes. Pirates!
Isaac didn’t use that melodramatic word. “We’re changing our route,” he told the steersman. “There may be a ship by Matale Point meaning to steal the coffee from us. So we’ll go around the other side of Sigulu.”
“Much longer,” the steersman said.
“But safer,” Isaac told him. “If that ship is really there.”
The steersman was truculent. “You should have given us all guns,” he said.
“Oh, it’s better if we don’t have to fight. Try to keep up close to the raft ahead.”
“We should have guns out here,” the steersman insisted.
“Nothing to do about that now,” Isaac told him, and went away forward, not wanting any more of that conversation. Nor did he intend to be baited into repeating Lew’s reasons for not arming these amateurs. He himself was an amateur, and he had no doubt but that Lew had been right.
The messenger still sprawled on his back, gazing up at the quarter-moon, his chest heaving. Over the last hour he had nine times dived into the water, swum from one raft to the next, clambered up the twelve-foot wall of sacks, and repeated Frank Lanigan’s message; then, after a brief rest, he had dived again. By the fifth time he had become very tired, and others had offered to carry the message the rest of the way, but he had refused. Like most of the men, he lived in fear of Frank Lanigan—which Frank, who knew only Charlie’s cheekiness, would have been astonished and a bit abashed to know—and he was the one to whom Frank Lanigan had entrusted this commission. He would delegate it to no one, but would finish the job himself. He had, too, though he’d come close to drowning on the final two laps, and was now so worn he couldn’t even return Isaac’s encouraging smile.
“Sigulu,” said one of the other men, and pointed ahead and to the left.
Isaac squinted but couldn’t yet see it. Despite the quarter-moon, despite the almost cloudless sky filled with high small white pinpricks of stars, it was a very dark night, the lake a deep black velvet, its softness obscuring all outlines. The coast of Uganda had disappeared behind them almost the instant they’d quitted Macdonald Bay, and ever since they might just as well have been in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or traveling on some fuzzy black cloud between the planets.
The man who had pointed at Sigulu Island said, “Are there really pirates, Mr. Otera?”
“Well, there are certainly thieves in this world,” Isaac said, smiling, trying to make a joke of it to reassure the man. “We just stole a train. When you do that sort of thing on the water, they call you a pirate.”
The other man said, “You can’t steal a train on the water.”
The first man gave him a pitying look. “How can a person be so stupid?” he asked.
A wheezing sound distracted them all. It was the messenger, too exhausted to laugh, laughing. That made the others laugh, and when they’d stopped they were all friends again. “I see the island now,” Isaac said.
It was a low shape ahead of them. The next raft forward was already angling to the right to go around the island’s blunt end. By day, you would be able to see the coasts of both Uganda and Kenya from here, but now nothing was visible but that furry back humped up out of the water.
Isaac went aft to sit near the steersman and watch Sigulu Island move slowly past. The island was a good ten miles long, and at their current rate would probably be there on the left for nearly an hour.
Half an hour after they’d first spotted Sigulu Island, the steersman said in a strangely hushed voice, “Mr. Otera.”
“Yes?”
“There’s something behind us, Mr. Otera.”
A chill ran down Isaac’s spine. At first he didn’t even think of the pirates. Being out here alone on the water, emptiness all about, and then the odd wording of the steersman—“There’s something behind us”—made Isaac think first of ghosts, or lake monsters, supernatural and incomprehensible. But when he turned about, the hairs rising up on the nape of his neck, that black shape he saw bearing down on them, running without lights, cutting a harsh white V of foam through the water, was nothing otherworldly at all, except in name. It was the Angel, tired of waiting, seeking them in the open water of the lake. And finding them.
The Angel, originally named Kikuyu, had been built under commission to the Marine Services Division of the Kenya & Uganda Railway in 1925, and until the Victoria was finished in 1959 she was the largest ship on the lake. Two hundred thirty-seven feet long, with a beam of thirty-seven feet, she had a cargo capacity of eleven hundred tons. But she possessed almost no passenger space, and the railway found her wastefully large, so in 1963 they sold her to a private company. She had had four owners and three names by now and was showing signs of her final decline: rust, persistent leaks, rotted hoses, and uncertain engines. But she was still big, and when traveling empty she was still fast, and she came steaming onto the rafts like Juggernaut, high-sided, black, inexorable.
“Down!” Isaac screamed. “The pirates!” And he flattened himself face down on the tarpaulin.
White light bathed him: a searchlight from the ship’s prow. Not looking up, Isaac folded his hands over his head, crushed his nose down into the rough gray canvas, and prayed for invisibility.
The stuttering sound was so diminished by the great emptiness of the lake that he didn’t at first realize it was a machine gun, strafing them. Screams mingled with the stutter, and the flat crack of rifle fire joined in.
They’re not giving us a chance! Isaac thought, as though they were all playing some game with rules. Terrified, believing himself already dead, he pressed lower and lower onto the lumpy sacks of coffee beans. A wasp stung the back of his left leg, and he whimpered into the canvas.
The machine gunner had a problem. He was firing down on the rafts from a greater height, and was under orders to avoid shooting up the cargo as much as possible. The men who lay flat made extremely difficult targets, but those who sat up or paused to shout or ran to the edge to jump were simple hits. Those who actually did jump overboard were picked off in the water by the riflemen, guided by the smaller spotlights.
When the white glare flicked away from Isaac he lifted his staring eyes and saw the Angel already passing the next raft, pinning it in the beam of the searchlights, the guns chattering and cracking.
On this raft, the steersman and one passenger were simply gone, leaving Isaac and the messenger and one other man. Isaac scrambled to them on all fours, crying, “Are you hurt? Are you hurt?”
Neither had been hit, though both were as panicky as Isaac himself, who had a three-inch gash burned in the fat of his upper leg. Teeth chattering, the messenger said, “What do we do? They’ll come back!”
“Swim to Sigulu,” Isaac said. “It’s our only chance.”
Shocked, the other man said, “Sigulu is in Uganda! Mr. Otera, tomorrow—!”
“God help us then,” Isaac said. “But if we stay here now, they’ll kill us sure.”
The messenger cried, “Look! Look!”
The Angel, hurrying past the third raft, was suddenly veering off, no longer shooting, steering toward the open lake. Beyond her was a confusion of movement, other lights, the crackle of other guns. While Isaac stared, trying to sort out what he was seeing, there came the authoritative phoom of a small naval gun, a flash of muzzle fire, and a great spout of water burst up beside the turning Angel.