“Then, may I make a suggestion, sir?” Quillain said, looking up. “How about letting me and some of my boys pay a call on this guy’s home base, this Palau-whatever-it-is. Let’s kick a few doors down and see if we can get our hands on him. It won’t take long to get some answers. I guarantee it.”
“I doubt it would be that easy, my friend,” Tran said. “I think it may be assumed that Harconan is not going to permit himself to be available to either us or the Indonesian authorities. I would say he’d likely disappear down the same escape-and-evasion route as he intended for Captain Garrett.”
MacIntyre stopped his pacing. “Yes. He’ll be with her. Wherever they’re headed.”
“East.”
Up to that point, Christine Rendino had taken little part in the conference. She had drifted silently into the far corner of the wardroom and to the planter there, lightly caressing the leaves of the miniature palm tree with a fingertip. “It won’t be either Java or Sumatra,” she said, her voice oddly distant and detached. “Too civilized, too high a population density. It won’t be Sulawesi, either: too expected, too close to a large Bugis population. It will be off in the eastern end of the archipelago somewhere, in the wild islands.”
Banda Sea, North of the Tayandu Group
1106 Hours, Zone Time: August 22, 2008
Amanda Garrett writhed through a protracted nightmare, reaching out for consciousness but never getting a solid grasp upon it. Pain… fragments of voices speaking in tongues she didn’t know… a stranger’s hands stripping away her clothing… a wetness being poured on her head… a protracted time with nothing but a vibration and a roar hammering at her dully aching mind… at last the deeper, safer darkness of true sleep.
Her eyes opened, and after a vague moment more she forced them to focus. She was in a small room — no, a cabin — on a boat or small ship. Her surroundings were moving and with wave rhythm and not just vertigo.
The cabin was maybe eight by eight, white-painted but grimy, with rice matting on the deck. She was lying on the cracked plastic cover of a foam rubber mattress in the lower of a double-decker bunk. There were no other furnishings or accouterments except for a cracked mirror and a number of heavy nails driven into the bulkhead to serve as clothing hooks.
And speaking of clothing, her own was gone. Her uniform replaced by a wraparound sarung of bright cheap cotton print, the almost universal garment of the archipelago. Her feet were bare, but a pair of woman’s size rubber sandals had been thrown on the deck.
Amanda sat up too quickly and had to fight an explosive surge of nausea. The side of her head throbbed, a result of the… she groped for memory… a result of the car wreck. There was also a less readily identifiable stinging on the inside of her left elbow.
Glancing down, she noticed the two needle punctures in her skin. Drugged on top of being knocked out. No wonder she felt like the wreck of the Hesperus. What else had been damaged? She pulled herself to her feet, using the bunk frame, and promptly lost the sarung, the securing tuck at its top having come undone. To hell with it: The cooler touch of air on her skin helped to clear her head. Lurching across to the mirror on the bulkhead, she peered at herself.
Someone else looked back.
The effect was momentarily startling. Her hair had been dyed jet black. After a moment, Amanda smiled grimly at the stranger. She’d always wondered what she might look like as a brunette.
There was nothing left in the room to examine, save a single porthole and the door. The porthole was open and latched back for air, but a heavy wooden bar had been screwed across it on the outside. Only open water, sunlight, and sky were visible beyond it.
The ship was wooden-hulled; Amanda strongly suspected it to be a Bugis pinisi, but the deck was vibrating to the drive of a propeller, and she could hear the rumble of a powerful marine diesel. They were underway under power with none of the steadying lean of a schooner under sail.
And that left the door.
She reclaimed the sarung, spent a few moments securing it, and slipped her feet into sandals. Crossing to the doorway, she carefully tried its tarnished brass handle.
Locked from the outside. That confirmed it. She was in enemy hands.
She returned to the mirror. A small wooden box had been bolted underneath it, and Amanda recalled seeing half of a broken comb lying in it. Taking it up, she sat down on the bunk once more and, after carefully examining the comb for possible passengers, began to smooth and order her hair.
Amanda’s motivation was simple: Do something to improve your situation now! Even if only combing your hair, it was a refusal to surrender to apathy and helplessness, a statement of control over one’s destiny. It was never too early to start fighting that battle. As she worked on her snarled mop, she did the only other viable thing possible. She thought.
She was clearly a prisoner, taken in an action possibly tasked for that specific purpose. But she was also a “soft” prisoner. She was neither bound nor blindfolded, she was being permitted clothing and she was being held in fairly comfortable surroundings. This all pointed to a single specific conclusion as to who was responsible.
A positive factor, the potential for at least a slight degree of leverage. Amanda didn’t fool herself into thinking it would be much, but even the poorest card can be built into a fighting hand.
She tore a strip from the inner hem of the sarung and used it to bind her hair back. Crossing to the mirror once more, she checked the result of her grooming. Deliberately she slapped herself twice across the face, pulling up a little color into her cheeks. Without a make-up kit, it was the best she could do.
Going to the cabin door, she pounded insistently on it with her palm, stepping back as she heard a bolt draw back on the far side.
Amanda found herself confronted with a Bugis seaman, an older man, gaunt, scarred, and lean, his naturally bronzed skin darkened from the salt baked into it by decades of tropical sun. He, too, wore a sarung around his waist and a bandanna binding his graying hair.
He also cradled a well-maintained L2 Sterling machine pistol under his arm. Cancel seaman and substitute pirate. He stared levelly at Amanda.
She met his gaze head on, with no attempt at obsequiousness. This was Asia. Prisoner or not, she must set “face,” establishing herself as a person of position, mandating respect. “I don’t know if you can speak English or not,” she said, “but you know who Harconan is. I want to see him, now!”
The Bugis schooner was a big one, a hundred-and-fifty-footer that had undergone a conversion into a motor coaster. A large combination deck and wheelhouse had been constructed atop the aft half of the hull, and the foremast had been shortened to serve as a kingpost for cargo handling.
The inside of the wheelhouse was spartan in the extreme, the wheel itself the control pedestal for the engine and a binnacle. No electronics were apparent, nor was there even a chart. For a Bugis skipper, such affairs Would be irrelevant.
Harconan was there in the wheelhouse, sharing the watch with the Bugis helmsman. It was a very different Harconan than the one Amanda had so far known. He wore faded jeans and a disreputable dungaree shirt, half unbuttoned and with the sleeves rolled. Comfortable sandals were on his feet, and a broad sun-cracked leather belt was cinched in at his waist. He hadn’t bothered with shaving. At the receptions and on Palau Piri be had looked suave, polished, and ineffably debonair. Here, leaning in the open wheelhouse window, with the trade winds ruffling his dark hair, he was merely magnificent.