The Trade (A Hans Larsson Novel Book 2) (2 page)

J
essica
awoke to the screech of a gull as it circled above, inspecting her floating
figure as a potential source of food. The rising sun already burned with savage
intensity, so she slipped out of her shorts and placed them over her head. Kicking
around in a circle, she longed to catch sight of the life raft, but there was
nothing, only rippling ocean and fragile sprays of white in an otherwise
faultless sky.

The harness cut into Jessica’s armpits, numbing her hands. She
struggled to change position, wondering where Penny was. Surely she must know
Future
had sunk and be en route to pick them up.

An almighty thirst took hold. Jessica splashed seawater on
her face but knew better than to drink it, because Papa said if you swallow seawater
it makes you go mad. She was hungry too and thought about the tuna they had
caught and barbecued on
Future
in the Canary Islands.

The noise of a diesel engine shook Jessica out of her muse. A
black speck appeared on the horizon.

“Penny!” she screamed, knowing her friend was coming to the rescue
and hoping her father was already safely on board.

The clank of the engine grew louder. Jessica grinned, but as
the ugly rusting hulk bore down on her, it looked like no ship she had seen
before. She began to feel afraid. Something didn’t feel right.

The vessel was about pass on by when a shout of “
Capitão
!” went up, and she slowed and came around. Thick
black fumes spilled onto the water as two black faces stared down at the little
girl bobbing in the swell.

Jessica read the faded nameplate on the rotting bow,
Rosa
Negra
, and started to kick away.

One month later

J
ens Greyling wiped the sleep from his eyes and reached for his coffee.

“
Dankie
,” he
grunted in Afrikaans, scanning the ocean ahead as dawn’s fingers raked life
into the oily black water.

The boy smiled. He’d been with the skipper long enough to
know that behind this gruff morning exterior the appreciation was there.

Registered in Panama, the
Kimberley II
had plied the
New York–South Africa shipping lanes for the past decade. At forty thousand
tons fully laden, she was by no means a large freighter, and nearing her thirtieth
year, the aging tub’s days were numbered – something Jens would worry about
when the time came. He’d taken over her command not long after his divorce eight
years previous, and the old girl had proved a faithful companion – unlike the
last one. The Filipino crew was his family, the boy the son he never had. The
Rhodesian captain had woken up in a shack in the township one morning after a
drunken knife fight to find Chamfar dressing his wounds. They’d been
inseparable ever since.

Over the years Jens had put a moderate sum of money aside,
and when his command of the
Kimberley
II
ended, he planned to take
the boy and retire to Mozambique. The former Portuguese colony had recovered
from years of war, and Jens knew the exact spot on Naherenge’s endless powdery
white beach where he would situate the fishing and dive center he planned to
build amid the lush green palms.

The skipper massaged his temples, which throbbed in harmony
with the
Kimberley II
’s powerful diesel engines, cane spirit being an
unforgiving mistress.

“So, my friend, what are you going to do when we reach
Kaapstad
?” he asked his first mate.

“Girls, girls, girls!” Chamfar did the sexy dance and
grinned fat white teeth.

“I guess I needn’t have asked.” Jens managed a chuckle, the sweet
black coffee working its magic on his sore head.

Having departed Pier 6 at the Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine
Terminal in New York three weeks earlier carrying vehicle parts, office
equipment and petroleum products, they would cross the equator in four days’ time
and be two-thirds of the way to Cape Town.

On the boat deck Juan, the chief engineer, pulled a Voyager
from a soft pack and shoved it between his lips, a morning ritual throughout
his time at sea. Soon he would give the systems a thorough checking over, looking
for tripped fuses, topping up water and oil reservoirs and replacing clogged
filters, but not before drawing the coarse smoke deep into his lungs and
letting the resultant waves of euphoria carry him across the shimmering wave
tops to his home in the Philippines. Leaning against the rusty rail, he pictured
his wife collecting his two boys from school, treating them to a ripe mango
sprinkled with paprika on the walk to their village shack. He saw them once a
year, flying home when the
Kimberley
II
stopped for a month of
routine maintenance in Cape Town.

The sun climbed ever higher into the unfolding azure. Juan
flicked his butt over the rail and watched it tumble through the air into the
ship’s wake. He was about to leave the boat deck to attend to his first chore
when something in the middle distance caught his attention.

It was an orange speck.

Juan screened his eyes from the sun and looked again. Nothing.
Likely just light reflecting off the water and playing tricks.

Then there it was!

Definitely something orange, the color of distress, bobbing
in and out of view with the rise and fall of the ocean.

Juan had seen his fair share of junk adrift on the sea over
the years – cargo containers, fishing nets, steel and plastic drums, flotillas
of ships’ garbage, even a forty-foot-long inflatable swimming pool – but his
instincts told him this was different.

Putting both hands up to block out the dazzling rays, Juan stared
at the spot, waiting for the right combination of light and line of sight.

A brief flicker of orange and then . . . yes!

It was a life raft, cresting a wave and remaining in full
view for what seemed an age though was probably less than a second. But it was definitely
a life raft.

Juan’s first thought was to duck inside the superstructure
and run up the four flights of stairs to the bridge, where the binoculars were
held, but he knew relocating the tiny craft could prove impossible, so keeping a
fix on the life raft, he picked up the boat deck’s intercom telephone.

“Captain, I can see an orange canopy one kilometer to starboard
at three o’clock.”

Jens Greyling jerked his head at the binoculars bracketed to
the bulkhead, as he had done thousands of times before. The boy passed them to
the skipper.

Using a figure-of-eight-pattern search – a throwback to his army
training – Jens scanned the area Juan had pinpointed. Minutes ticked by, and he
made several passes with the binoculars until – “
Ja
!” – he spotted the distant
orange dot. “We got her.”

Chamfar relayed the message to Juan, who began unlashing the
webbing straps securing the
Kimberley II
’s rigid inflatable boat, or RIB,
in preparation for a potential rescue.

Jens knew better than to take his eyes off the craft, which
could disappear from view in a flash. Instead he barked orders at his first
mate.

“Throttle back full and bring her hard to starboard.” There
was no way he could stop the ship on a dime, but an attempt to slow down while
circling the tiny raft would be better than sailing miles away from it. “And wake
the men and tell them to assemble on the boat deck.”

As the boy reached for the telephone it rang, for, sensing
the change of course and the engines winding down, the crew were already out of
their bunks, and Carlos, the ship’s cook, wanted a situation report.

In minutes Carlos and Virgilio, the deckhand, had kitted up in
dry suits and life jackets and climbed into the RIB. While Juan operated the
davit, swinging the inflatable boat outboard and lowering it gently over the
side, the two of them fended with their hands to prevent it from smashing into
the ship’s iron hull.

The RIB settled upon the relatively calm sea. As Virgilio
tripped the davit cable’s quick release, Carlos throttled forward, and they surged
into the white water streaming from the
Kimberley II
’s side.

Jens radioed directions to the two men, and minutes later
Carlos blipped the engine in reverse, nudging the launch up against the beleaguered
orange pod. Virgilio leant out and grabbed the exterior handline, but eyeing the
sagging tubes and rust and algae smears on the sun-bleached canopy, the men
could see the raft had collided with a ship, and they assumed its occupants
must have drowned.

The raft’s flimsy doorway flapped in the breeze. With his
thumb and forefinger, Virgilio slowly peeled it back.

“Urrch!” Carlos retched on his empty stomach, the stench of
death taking them by surprise.

Virgilio viewed the utter devastation inside. Rotting fish
carcasses washed around in a stagnant pool, along with empty tin cans and a
filthy, worn-out sleeping bag.

“Nothing,” he concluded, then, holding his nose, thrust a
hand into the putrid brown brine and plucked out a child’s teddy bear. Turning to
Carlos, he shook his head.

“Okay. We go.” Carlos released his hold on the raft’s handline
and was about to restart the motor when they heard a long rasping wheeze.

Both men froze.

Virgilio looked tentatively to Carlos, then, crossing his
chest and muttering to Mother Mary in Tagalog, leant inside the flagging pod
and lifted the flap of the sleeping bag.

“Mother of God!”
His eyes widened.

“No.” Carlos began shaking, and no more words would come.

From an emaciated and bearded face stared the eyes of a
dying man.

Virgilio dropped the flap of the sleeping bag, his own eyes
pleading with Carlos for direction. Both deeply superstitious, they were tempted
to peel away and return to the
Kimberley
II
, but here was a
fellow mariner in the direst of need, and the law of the sea saw them put their
own concerns aside and jump into action.

The man was in no fit state for them to transfer him to the
launch. They would have to hoist him on deck in situ. Besides, if he died, the
raft might hold clues as to his identity or the vessel he had abandoned.

Clipped to three anchor points on the launch was a triad of
straps that attached to the davit’s cable. In seconds Carlos had unclipped them
and reattached the hook fasteners at equidistant points around the raft’s
exterior handline. Then they towed the stinking, sagging capsule back to the
ship, radioing ahead with a sit-rep.

With the
Kimberley II
hove to, Jens joined Juan on
the boat deck.

“Stretcher and medical kit,” he hollered, slamming the davit’s
gear lever forward.

The life raft crimped inwards like a trawler’s net, emptying
out a torrent of filthy seawater as Jens maneuvered it up and over the rail. Juan
dropped the stretcher and medical kit and rushed to release the webbing straps,
then hauled the raft out of the way to make space for the launch, a dying stranger
not a priority when two crew members remained at the mercy of the ocean.

With Carlos and Virgilio safely back on board, Jens ran over
to help Juan, who had punctured the raft’s tubes with a boatswain’s knife and
cut away the canopy to get to the survivor and lay him on the stretcher. Juan
had taken a drip out of the medical pack but was struggling to find a vein in the
man’s wasted arms. When Jens knelt down beside his chief engineer, the stench
wafting from the corpse-like figure forced him to turn his head away for a
moment. He could tell the deep gash in the man’s temple was gangrenous, and the
infection had spread throughout his scrawny body.

“Give! Give!”

Jens took the saline pack from Juan. He knew the man’s blood
pressure was too low to get a vein up but had a better idea – another trick learned
while fighting in the bush in Rhodesia.

“If we don’t get fluid inside him fast, he will die. We’ll
shove it straight into his backside,” the grizzled sea captain informed his
crew with a lack of ceremony they’d long gotten used to.

Then he whipped out his sheath knife and lopped the hypodermic
needle connection off the drip tube. Dignity not an option, they removed the
man’s soiled, shredded shorts and maneuvered him into a suitable position for Jens
to insert the tube carrying the life-giving liquid.

“Okay, put two vials of antibiotics into his butt cheek, and
keep the drip in place until it’s empty,” Jens ordered, then hefted himself back
up to the bridge to send a distress call.

As the saline passed through the sensitive lining of the man’s
colon and into his bloodstream, the change in his condition startled them. The
infected wound had swollen one eyelid shut, but the other, now lubricated with
tears, began to flicker, the eye itself morphing from dry and drab, like that
of a dead fish, into a bloodshot piercing blue. Color returned to his pallid skin,
and he started to move, slowly at first but becoming increasingly agitated.

“Blanket!” Juan looked to Virgilio, who passed him one, but
as Juan draped it over the rescued man, he thrust a hand out and grabbed his shirt.

“Jessica!”
he rasped.

The three Filipinos jumped back in surprise.

“Jessica!” the man pleaded, his gaze unsteady as he tried to
fix on Juan.

“Jessica?” Juan repeated, screwing up his eyes.

The man released his grip, and his arm fell backwards,
pointing in the direction of the raft.

Virgilio walked over to the slashed-up craft and lifted out the
teddy bear. “Does he mean
this
one?”

Juan and Carlos looked at each other and shrugged. Virgilio
held the bear up in front of the man’s face. He let out a despondent gurgle and
collapsed into unconsciousness.