We clamber into our hammocks. She’s close enough for me to hear the sound of her hand against her skin as she rubs mosquito repellent over her arms. We’re tired and happy.
‘I enjoy our friendship, Jameela,’ I say, half to myself.
‘Moi aussi,’ she answers from the edge of sleep.
When I wake, Jameela’s not in her hammock and I have a sudden sense of panic until I catch sight of the splash of her fins. She’s already in the sea, snorkelling. We breakfast on mangoes, wash in the water, and then it’s time to pack. As I’m doing up the bags I imagine once or twice that I hear the sound of an engine, dismissing the thought each time because the islands are uninhabited and the water is too shallow for fishing. Then as we’re getting ready to put the bags in the Zodiac, we hear the distinct whine of an outboard motor, which gets suddenly louder as a boat rounds the mouth of the cove and heads for the very spot where we’ve dragged the Zodiac onto the beach.
‘Fishermen,’ says Jameela.
They don’t look like fishermen to me. We watch them together in silence, and Jameela’s look of unease mirrors my own as they come to a stop a few yards away from the Zodiac and cut their engine.
Without acknowledging us, they point out the Zodiac’s features to each other as they drift nearby. I wave, but the wave isn’t returned, which is unusual. I wave again, thinking that perhaps they haven’t seen us. But we’re less than a hundred yards away and they must have. They lift their propeller from the water and one of them jumps overboard to pull the boat to the shore. The other, who is bare-chested, picks up what looks at first like a harpoon, but it isn’t.
‘Oh my God,’ whispers Jameela, ‘he’s got a gun. They must be pirates.’
‘Keep very calm please,’ I tell her. My mind is going through a list of options which is not as long as I’d like it to be. I have no weapon. We are barefoot. There is no shelter and nowhere to run.
They look the part. The one who pulls the boat ashore is a bulky man with cropped hair and deep black skin. His chin protrudes like the kind of fish that patrols the floor of the sea. The bare-chested one has wild-looking hair and seems to be giving the orders. The weapon is an AK-47 with a folding metal stock, a variant known in Russian as the Partisan. He barks something at us as he approaches but I can’t tell what language he’s speaking. Whatever he’s saying it’s not particularly friendly, and as he nears us he shifts his grip on the weapon so that his left hand moves under the stock as if he’s planning to use it. He’s lean, strong and young, which is not good from my point of view.
‘Speak English?’ I call out, to try and slow down the whole process.
He’s asking a question which I can’t understand a word of, but it doesn’t sound like he’s inviting us back to his place.
‘He’s speaking Amharic with a weird accent. He wants the key to the boat,’ says Jameela in a shaky voice. ‘Give him the key.’
She’s standing next to me and has wrapped a towel protectively around her waist, but she’s still a sight to behold and the effect is not missed on our visitors. The one with the weapon looks at her and says something to his partner, who advances towards Jameela. He tries to grab her wrist, which is still wet and allows her to break free, so he has another go and the same thing happens. On a third try he pins her arms against her body from behind and lifts her from the ground as she kicks frantically and uselessly against him.
It’s obvious they want to take Jameela, and once they’ve got her, getting the key to the Zodiac isn’t going to be too difficult to achieve after a 7.62-millimetre round has passed through my head. But there’s something so improbable about the timing of their arrival and the fact that only Seethrough knows our exact location that I’m not too bothered. I’m impressed, in fact, with the thinking that’s gone into it, but I mustn’t let it show because I’ve got a part to play.
‘Tell your friend not to do that, please,’ I say to the one with the weapon. ‘It’s rude.’
I take a step towards him because I need to see the position of the selector lever on the right side of the AK. And to put a little more space between him and his friend. The safety’s on, which gives me a slight but meaningful advantage. I raise my hands a little further, take another step towards him and now start babbling in English, which I’m hoping will make him think I’m telling him something important.
He bares his teeth in a snarl as I near him and raises the line of the weapon so that it’s centred on me. The muzzle resembles a giant cannon, which gives me an unpleasant feeling, but his finger hasn’t moved to the safety yet. I hope Seethrough has built in some form of compensation for the men he’s sent, because they’re not only doing a very good job of pretending to be pirates, but what’s about to happen is going to hurt one of them a lot more than it’s going to hurt me.
He raises the barrel of the AK to my chest and pokes it into me, barking another incomprehensible instruction. I raise my hands a little higher. It’s a textbook replay of the very same defensive drills I did with H all that way away in Herefordshire, which does indeed seem a very long way away.
He pokes it into me again, stepping towards me now, and since all good and probably bad things come in threes, I wait for the third time. At the instant he gives another push with the weapon, I bring my left hand down hard and fast onto the barrel and turn my body to the left. He lurches forward and my right hand connects with his chin and drives it up and back, forcing him to try and regain his balance by stepping away from me. But my foot is there to meet his, and as he begins to tumble his left arm leaves the weapon by reflex in the attempt to break his fall. I yank it by the barrel and it passes almost miraculously into my hands. His efforts to scramble to his feet again are put to an abrupt end by the single round I fire into the sand just near his ear.
There’s a scream of fright from Jameela, and then an immense shrieking fills the air as a cloud of birds erupts in a single swarm from the trees behind us. Jameela and her attacker are momentarily frozen in surprise. She breaks free from him, and in an impressive move whacks him squarely on the jaw. He’s about to retaliate, but seeing his friend cringing on the sand has a different idea and sprints for the trees. I fire two rounds by his feet and he gets the message.
We need to leave. Jameela gathers up the bags as I cover the two men, make them take off their shoes just in case anyone feels like running anywhere, and direct them on their knees back to their own boat. I’d rather they didn’t go and fetch any of their friends, so I break off the top of the spark plug of their outboard with the butt of the AK. Having to paddle with their hands will slow them down and have the added advantage of keeping their minds off robbery and kidnap.
Jameela finishes loading the boat and throws a look of contempt at the men.
‘They would have killed us,’ she says in a frightened voice. Then she shouts something at them in what I suppose is Amharic and probably a curse.
‘Want to shoot them? The sharks will be happy if you do.’ I offer Jameela the AK, guide her hand to the grip and the trigger, and point out the foresight for her to line up on her cowering targets.
‘They would have killed us,’ she repeats.
‘Women with guns.’ I shrug my shoulders at them as if the decision is out of my hands. ‘Scary, isn’t it?’
They’re not laughing.
We move out of the shallows and throttle up the engines. The two stranded men are stooping over their boat as we gain distance. Jameela sits next to me, gripping me in silence and looking back from time to time as we race across the water. At the halfway point I pass the AK to Jameela. I’d love to keep the weapon, but it would be hard to explain. She flings it into our foaming wake and returns to my side.
The first moments of intimacy are never really equalled. She hasn’t tidied up the rose petals, and their perfume wraps itself over us as we fall onto the bed and submit to the momentum that feels as though it was set in motion the instant we first saw each other. A frontier rushes beneath us as if we are entering territory new to us both, and where before there has always been restraint, there is now abandon.