‘She’s arranging for the sick to be transferred.’
Brompton nodded. Across the fifty yards of water he watched the refugees coming up on deck. They waved, most of them, as they came out on the deck house. Brompton lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the low angled sun.
‘That’s the girl, sir,’ the lieutenant said. ‘The one that’s hustling them all up on deck.’ He looked round and was puzzled to see that the captain was smiling to himself. As he looked back it took him a moment or two to realise that something was different. He looked again, harder this time. The angle of that strange sail was different. He checked the level of the deck. The bow was angled strangely upwards. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘She’s sinking.’
He saw the captain smile again. ‘Get another boat out there and swing the nets down,’ Brompton ordered.
It was an operation carried out with consummate efficiency. Women and children were handed down to the cutter as the stern of the fishing boat settled in the water. Then the men jumped from the low rail and started swimming towards the warship. Nan Luc left last, diving from the rising prow.
From the destroyer’s deck the captain watched her cut through the water then swim slowly back and forth behind the swimming refugees, shepherding her charges as they reached for the nets being lowered down the ship’s side.
She was the last to come aboard, almost tipped from the net at his feet, Ed Brompton thought, like a rare, beautiful object from the deep. She got to her feet.
‘Of course,’ he said holding out his hand. ‘It’s obvious, when you think about it. Sink your own ship. You could almost call it the Nelson touch.’
Nan Luc turned to the rail. Less than fifty yards away the oddly shaped black sail of Cahn Roc listed sharply and slid into the water.
‘Now hear this,’ Edward Brompton’s voice came over the ship’s loudspeakers. ‘I have just received a signal from the Admiral’s flagship. It reads: “Special commendation to F flotilla, Commodore Brompton and officers and crews of his ships. Exercise Peking Duck ends as of now.”’
Nan Luc was leaning on the deck rail looking out across the slow swell of the ocean when Ed Brompton came down the accommodation ladder. She had grown to like the man with his easy white-toothed smile, his dose-cropped hair and the gold-rimmed spectacles that gave him almost an academic air.
‘Congratulations,’ Nan Luc smiled. ‘That’s what a special commendation for F flotilla means, isn’t it?’
He nodded. ‘You’re learning Navy ways, Nan.’ For a moment he stood looking at her.
‘What happens now?’ she said.
‘Now we put you ashore and sail for home.’ He paused again. ‘Six weeks is a long time, Nan. I’m going to miss having you on board. The whole crew is,’ he added hurriedly.
‘They’ve been wonderful,’ she said. ‘I feel like writing my own commendation to the Navy Department.’
He grinned. ‘That could be going too far. My orders now are to put you ashore at the UN reception island of Gulanga. It’s technically Indonesian territory but administered by the UN.’
‘Is it far from here?’
‘No. Only five or six hours’ sailing.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then your applications are processed.’
‘I can’t believe it’s all going to happen.’
He gripped the rail. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t just happen like that,’ he said. ‘Not everybody gets accepted. I don’t know how they decide these things but it’s not always plain sailing.’
‘One step at a time,’ she said. ‘It’s plain sailing as far as Gulanga Island.’
‘Just point the bow and let wind and wave do the rest.’
She touched his hand. ‘I can never thank you enough,’ she said. He looked at her, indecisive for almost the first time in his life. She was not yet twenty-five. He was more than twenty years older. He looked from her face out over the grey swell beyond the rail. ‘It’s been easy,’ he said, ‘all too easy.’
Nan Luc stood on the white concrete quayside. Around the bay the thickly wooded hills rose blue and strangely pinnacled with rock. A half-mile out the USS John C. Hunter was raising anchor. The little group of refugees around Nan watched and waved.
The sun glistened on the bridge glazing and Nan Luc too lifted her hand, sure, even though she could not see him, that Ed Brompton was standing there. Then she turned and led the group of refugees towards the registry and the barrage of signs and directions for the reception of refugees.
At the door a man in khaki shirt and shorts was emerging. He was a thin, sandy-haired man with a beach towel thrown over his shoulder and some snorkelling equipment under one arm. He looked at the long straggle of refugees coming up the steps. Lifting his free hand he said in a carefully enunciated English accent, ‘The registry is closed for today. Temporary accommodation will be provided until it reopens on Monday morning.’
‘It’s Thursday midday,’ Nan said. ‘What do we do until Monday?’
The Englishman shrugged. ‘Get to know the island,’ he suggested impatiently. ‘Lovely views.’
‘We need to register,’ Nan Luc said. ‘We need to feel our applications are at least in the machine.’
The UN officer looked contemptuously at her. He shifted his snorkelling equipment from one arm to another. ‘The registry is only one part of the work that goes on here,’ the Englishman said severely. ‘The business of Gulanga can’t be stopped to process the reception of two dozen new refugees.’
‘I thought that was the business of Gulanga,’ Nan said.
The Englishman turned his eyes on her. They were a pale, almost colourless green. ‘You would be advised,’ he said, ‘to appreciate that you are not an American yet.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
‘Nan Luc, come here.’ The Australian woman’s voice rose peremptorily. Freda O’Keefe appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, small, thin-faced, not yet thirty years old. ‘I said I wanted the breakfast things cleared first. Your English is good enough to know what that means.’ She paused to give weight to the words. ‘It means I damn well want the breakfast things cleared first.’ Nan Luc rose from the floor where she was kneeling. ‘One of the children broke a glass, Mrs O’Keefe,’ she said calmly. ‘I thought I should clear that up first.’
Freda O’Keefe turned away. ‘Just do what you’re told when you’re told. If I’m wanted I’m down at the beach.’
Nan Luc stood at the window and watched the woman follow the path down to where her car was parked in the dusty road between the two rows of identical UN staff bungalows. Beyond, she could see the stretch of white sand speckled with the coloured umbrellas of UN staff families spending Sunday on the beach.
On the point, the headland which took up a quarter of the island and almost all its habitable land, was the gigantic shanty town of tents and boxwood huts which the Vietnamese refugees called bitterly, New Saigon. Some of them had been on Gulanga Island for over two years; some had already chosen to be returned to Vietnam. Many, like Nan Luc herself, were deep in the process of interviews and ‘verifications’ which might, at some point, lead them to Australia or the United States. But the process was heart-breakingly slow and only the strongest refugees endured it without scars.
It was three months since Nan Luc had left Cahn Roc. After their time aboard the USS John C. Hunter the contrast in their treatment on Gulanga was immediate and painful. Here on the island a mostly unimpressive selection of the world’s civil servants exercised a haughty authority over the refugees in their power. They were encouraged by the fact that the newspapers and television companies of the West no longer found the plight of the boat people particularly newsworthy.