Solomons Seal

Chapter Seven

We had reached the first loop of the double hairpin and were standing on the verge, trying to make out the line of the tote road, when a glimmer of light showed from down the slope towards Anewa. We stood, watching in silence, as it climbed steadily towards us. There was sudden movement where the road had been blown, three figures standing by the parked car. The sound of an engine came to us faintly as the twin lights of the approaching vehicle emerged from the trees. It was being driven fast, and soon the headlights were shining full on the three armed men, all black, their fuzzy mops of hair distinctly visible. The car stopped just short of them, the headlights dipped now.

Two men got out, and I heard Perenna give a little gasp as they moved forward into the beam of the headlights to talk to the guards. One of them wore a white shirt, and his hair was red in the lights. I couldn’t be certain who the other was, only that he was an islander. They stood there for a moment, talking, and then the whole group walked up the road to stand on the edge of the dark line where the charges had blasted the surface. The beam of a torch showed, a pinpoint of light sweeping the gap in the tarmac.

Hans Holland and his companion were there about ten minutes. Then they went back to their car. We watched as the headlights blazed on the figures of the men standing there, the weapons in their hands clearly visible, then swept the red rock of the gulley edge as the car turned. ‘So you’re right,’ I said.

Perenna nodded. ‘I said it was Hans. It had to be. Nobody from the Buka villages could have planned this.’ Her words, whispering in the night, had an undertone of excitement. It was almost as if, against her will, she admired the man for what he was doing. Pictures of Nazis, seen in old films, flickered through my mind. The figure had been tiny, but even at that distance I couldn’t help noticing a swagger in his walk.

‘For tonight,’ I said, ‘he’s a sort of Führer, a little Napoleon.’

She didn’t say anything, standing very still, gazing intently as the car’s lights dwindled, so intently that I suddenly had the feeling her mind was reaching out to him, that she was imagining herself in that car, a part of the plan he had conceived. Then she seemed to collect herself, and in a cool voice she said, ‘Better get started if it’s going to take us all night.’

I nodded, and we moved back on to the tarmac, walking quickly down to the second bend, where the old road was just visible in the starlight. To scramble down to it would be rough, the darkness of the valley full of croakings. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’ She was standing on the road, staring down into the forest growth below.

‘You couldn’t help it,’ I said, thinking she meant the drive up to the mine. But she shook her head. ‘Tim, I mean. I shouldn’t have left him. I didn’t realise-’ She hesitated. ‘It’s all so different, and now this plan … I can’t do anything for Tim here.’

But I was still thinking of Hans Holland inspecting the blown road like the commander of a military operation.

‘You think he’ll pull it off?’

‘Probably. I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘But Tim needs me. I know that — I feel it. And there’s nothing I can do, no way I can help him. Only pray …’ She looked up at me suddenly, her eyes luminously large in the dark. ‘Have you ever prayed? I mean, really prayed.’ She sensed my hesitation and added, ‘I tried prayer in Aldeburgh. But it didn’t work. I think — deep down … I found myself believing, but not in God, in something else … the powers of darkness, evil, I don’t know what, but it was there in my heart. It scared me. Even there, in England, it scared me. And now, out here-’ My hand was on her arm, and I felt a shiver run through her. ‘It’s stronger out here.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to get back to the ship, we’d better get started.’

‘Yes, the ship.’ She squared her shoulders, bracing herself. ‘Jona’s different, isn’t he? Much more practical, a seaman, no imagination …’ She forced a little laugh, and then she had stepped off the verge and started down the bulldozed debris of the steep slope leading to the shadow line of the old road. It was a hard scramble, requiring all our concentration so that we didn’t talk, either then or when we reached the tote road, for the line of it ran close below the highway and with every step down the remains of the steep track we were approaching the gulley. I dared not use the torch, so that our progress was slow. In places the track was completely obliterated by the rubble of the roadworks above, and there were muddy stretches where the rainwater lay trapped.

It took us over half an hour to reach the gulley. There were trees to our right, and it was very dark, only the sound of water to indicate that we were right below the guards. The track here dropped steeply down the face of the mountain range, and we were a long time scrambling through the tangle of new forest growth that had almost obliterated it. Finally, well hidden from the highway, I began using the torch.

I think if we hadn’t returned to the highway, we should never have made it, for the lower we went, the worse the going became, the jungle growth almost impenetrable and patches of swamp water. It was past midnight and we were both of us very tired when I finally made the decision to force our way up the slope to the road. We reached it just over an hour later, hot and dirty, our clothes torn and soaked with sweat. After that it was easy, just a long downhill walk. Twice we had to seek shelter among the trees, once for a car going up full of men and again when it came down. Presumably the guard at the gulley was being relieved.

It was during that long walk down the highway that my mind began to grapple with the implications of what was happening. Now that I was sure Hans Holland was behind it, I tried to put myself in his shoes, but the more I thought about it, the less I understood it. It was quite inconceivable that he could hold such a large and important company to ransom, a company that had international connections and a worldwide market. And if it wasn’t money but power he was after, how could he possibly achieve that with three or four old landing craft and a group of Cargo-crazy islanders? Tooley was probably correct in saying that the mine administration tried to keep clear of politics, but even if the white expatriates stood by and did nothing, there was a large workforce drawn from Bougainville and other islands in and around the Solomons. How would they react? And the fact that Papua New Guinea had only become independent a few years back would not prevent them from reacting very vigorously to the threat of secession, particularly as Bougainville provided such a large slice of their revenue. And any action they took would presumably have the moral support of the UN, the co-operation of those countries where the copper was marketed and the active support of the Australian government.

It just didn’t make sense. That he could achieve a temporary success was obvious. He appeared to have done that already. But how could he possibly hope to build on it to the point where Bougainville could successfully achieve a unilateral declaration of independence? There had to be some advantage for him, something that he was certain he could negotiate before the initial success of the plan collapsed under the longer-term strain of forces that must in the end prove too powerful for him. But what? Perhaps he didn’t see it that way. Perhaps he believed that the people of Bougainville and Buka would combine to make the whole thing politically possible.

It was a fascinating possibility, and toying with it in my mind, I began to wonder how I could turn it to my own advantage. Providence had brought me to this island at a moment of intense political activity when events would produce either change or chaos. Whichever it was, there would be opportunities. A selfish point of view, perhaps, but when you’re out of a job and looking for openings in a new world, it’s not unnatural to relate events to your own personal problems. By the time we reached the intersection with the Kieta road I had more or less made up my mind.

There was no road block now, and no guard. With the mine road blown there was no need. The time was 02.17. Four hours since Tooley would have sent his telex. I wondered what he would have said, what they would think of it at Port Moresby. Or would he notify his own head office in Melbourne and leave them to inform the PNG government? The latter probably, in which case nobody would do anything about it till morning. It would probably be midday before Port Moresby appreciated the situation, and then, even if they were able to establish communications with the mine, they would still have to convince themselves that it had really happened, and only then would they start considering what should be done about it. It could be thirty-six hours at least before any positive action was taken.

I was thinking about that as we approached Anewa. A lot could happen in thirty-six hours.

The dark rainforest walls that had hemmed us in since we had struggled up on to the road fell back. We were into a clearing, the tarmac shining wet under the stars, and round a bend storage sheds black in shadow. It was cooler now, a faint smell of the sea and the sweat on my body ice-cold. A bridge over a stream, another bend and the road straightening out with the power station’s fuel oil tanks looming above us, everything dark except for the double flash of the light tower on Takanupe Island marking the passage seaward. Perenna paused, her head on one side, listening. ‘I thought I heard the sound of a generator.’

We had just passed the second fuel tank, and through the gap between that and the next I could see the huge bulk of the power station itself. It stood in total darkness. ‘Maybe it’s the ship.’ I was close beside her, staring at the road ahead. Beyond the last tank was the sea. It was lighter there, the road bending round to the left to pass in front of the power station. I was wondering where they would have set up their guard post.

She seemed to read my thoughts, for she said, ‘If we keep to the road, we’ll walk straight into a trap.’

But there was nowhere else we could go, the sea and the stream to our right, and the fuel tanks to our left surrounded by a wire fence.

‘They’ll probably have control of the ship anyway.’ Now that we had reached the port I wasn’t at all sure what to do for the best.

‘I don’t care whether they’ve got the ship or not.’ She was tired, and her voice sounded petulant. ‘I just want to get back on board. To my bunk, a shower, familiar surroundings, Jona.’

We went on, moving cautiously under the shadow of the last fuel tank. We could hear the sea, a soft lapping of tiny wavelets. And then, round the bend, suddenly there was the glimmer of lights and the familiar, homely shape of the LCT. It was no longer at the slipway, but tied up alongside the loading wharf. ‘It’s still there.’ She said it in a tone of weary relief, and she quickened her pace.

The road all the way to the ship was clear under the stars, and it was empty, no vehicles, no sign of movement, nothing, and the power station a huge black block above it with no sign of life. I thought we’d make it then as we hurried on past some small buildings and into the shadow of the power station. Several company cars were parked in front of it, and with the whole building silent and dead, they had an abandoned air like cars in a film sequence depicting some nuclear disaster. I was wondering what had happened to their drivers, to all the men who would have been on the night shift, when the trap was sprung. A powerful spotlight blazed blindingly out from the ship, and turning away from the glare of it, I saw a torch signalling from one of the small buildings back down the road and figures with guns in their hands running towards us.

I put my hands up, told Perenna to do the same and waited. There were five of them, and when they were close to us they slowed to a walk, talking excitedly among themselves. One of them seemed to know who we were. He spoke briefly to Perenna in Pidgin, all the time watching me as though I were some sort of prize exhibit. ‘We’re to go to the ship,’ she said. The blacks hemmed us in, and we started walking. ‘It seems there’s been a search party out looking for you.’

‘For me? Why me?’

She spoke to the tall, rather stately looking man who seemed to be the leader. The name Holland was mentioned several times; then she shook her head. ‘He doesn’t know. Only that they need you for something.’ The spotlight had been switched off, and I could make out the figure of a man moving along the wharf towards us.

It proved to be Teopas, and when he reached us, he said, ‘We wait here now.’

‘Why?’ Perenna demanded. ‘Where’s my brother? Is Captain Holland out looking for us?’

He shook his head, his eyes sullen. ‘Your brother not well.’

‘Not well? What’s happened?’ She tried to push past him, but he held her back. ‘I must go on board — now.’ Her voice sounded wild, tiredness and alarm combined as she tried to wrench her arm free.

‘Mr Hans speak with me on the radio. You do not go to the ship until he has talk with you.’ He was looking at me now. ‘So we wait here. Okay?’

I nodded, and the two of us stood there waiting in an uneasy silence, the islanders talking quietly amongst themselves. Twice I asked Teopas why Holland wanted me, why the ship had been moved from the slip to the loading wharf, but he ignored my questions, standing with his back to me, his gaze fixed on the Anewa approach road.

About ten minutes later the loom of headlights showed beyond the fuel tanks. It was a car, driven fast, its headlights sweeping the bay as it came round the bend, then blazing straight at us. Perenna’s face, picked out in the full glare, was white and very tense, her eyes closed, her lips moving wordlessly. I had no doubt who would be in that car, nor had she, and again I was conscious of the powerful effect he seemed to have on her.

The car stopped, and he got out, the red hair limned by the lights, the same jaunty, commanding air as he stood for a moment talking to Teopas. Then he came towards us, glancing briefly at Perenna before turning to me, his face in shadow. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ There was anger in his voice, the anger of a man under considerable strain. ‘I’ve had to waste an hour looking for you. Well, where were you?’

‘Up at the mine.’

Something had clearly gone wrong, and I thought that might provoke him. But all he said was: ‘I see.’ He was silent a moment, looking at the two of us. ‘You walked out, then. How?’

‘By the old tote road.’

‘Why not the highway?’

‘You’ve blown that, and there were guards there.’

He stared at me hard. ‘So you know what’s going on?’ And then his tone suddenly changed. ‘Well, that makes it easier.’ He was forcing himself to relax. ‘I said I might be able to give you command of a ship. You can have command of one right now.’

‘Is that why you’ve been looking for me?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded towards the wharf with the LCT lying alongside. ‘I want you to take her out right away, a run up the coast to Buka.’

I heard Perenna give a little gasp. Then she had moved between us. ‘Where’s Jona? What’s happened to him?’

‘He’s drunk.’ His voice came in a whiplash, full of contempt. ‘He’s no good, Perenna. No guts.’ Her shoulders sagged, and he stepped past her, facing me. ‘Well, now’s your chance. If you want a job with the Holland Line …’ He stood there, staring at me.

No point in asking him why he needed the ship taken to Buka so urgently, I’d find that out soon enough. And if I refused … I could see his face now, tired and edgy, full of nervous tension, and his eyes lit by an inner glow, excitement overriding exhaustion, the adrenalin still running. ‘Well?’ His hand reached out impatiently, gripping my arm, propelling me towards his car.

‘Why not Luke?’ I asked. ‘Or Mac?’

‘Don’t trust them,’ he snapped.

It was no moment to obstruct the man, the whole island in his grasp and only a skipper needed to take the ship up to Buka. ‘What’s it worth to you?’

He laughed then, a sudden explosion of nervous relief. ‘A future. That’s what I’m offering you.’

‘Cash,’ I said quietly, and I saw Perenna’s mouth open, anger chasing disbelief.

‘No cash,’ he snapped. ‘Just a stake in something big. Bigger than you’ll ever be offered again.’

‘And the cargo?’ It was the cargo that would dictate my terms.

He jerked me round, his face thrust close to mine, and suddenly that description of his father flashed into my mind again. ‘Yes or no? Make up your mind.’ He saw my hesitation, his eyes suddenly smiling as he released my arm. ‘You’ll know about the cargo soon enough, so let’s go.’ He nodded to the car.

Behind me I heard Perenna say, ‘It’s Jona’s ship.’

‘Is it?’ He laughed, pulling open the rear door and jerking his head for the two of us to get in. Teopas sat in the front with him, and as he drove off, he said, ‘What’s happened here tonight has been brewing a long time. You’d have to have lived with these people to understand. It’s their whole future. Just remember that. Also that I’m a businessman. I’m involved only to the extent that-’ His words were cut short by the sound of a shot. Even above the noise of the car I heard the clang of the bullet on steel, the whine of its ricochet, followed by shouts and then the sudden staccato rattle of automatic fire, a noise like calico ripping. A single scream was followed by an appalling silence.

‘Shit!’ Hans Holland thrust his foot down, swinging the car fast round the end of the slipway and out on to the open area of the loading wharf. No sound now, no movement, the ship still and silent except for the hum of its generator as we drew up at the gangway and tumbled out. Teopas was first on board, talking to one of the crew, who was holding a machine pistol pointed down into the tank deck. A thin wisp of blue smoke curled up from the short barrel. ‘Some polis,’ Teopas reported. ‘They try to climb out.’

By then I was across the gangway and looking down at the cargo held captive in the tank deck. There must have been upwards of a hundred men down there, police and officials, all of them black, no whites. The loading lights were on, and they were standing very still, well clear of the ladders, most of them facing aft so that the whites of their eyes flickered in the glare. At the foot of one of the starboard ladders three men lay in a pool of blood, one of them with his face smashed in, still kicking out with his feet, his back arching. Nobody took any notice. Half the crew seemed gathered on the catwalks, all armed and chattering away like sparrows. Death meant nothing to them. It seemed to mean nothing to me either, not for that moment, the whole scene strangely unreal. Even the human cargo on the tank deck seemed determined to ignore it, a space left round the bodies as though the cause of death could be contagious, their minds, all their attention, focused on the after part of the ship as Hans Holland stepped forward into the gleam of the deck lights.

He moved fast, almost dancing forward on the balls of his feet, like a ballet dancer, or an actor making his entrance, then standing, suddenly quite still, staring down at the mass of men below him, his silence, and his stillness, increasing the effect. He spoke to them briefly, in their own tongue, his voice high and harsh, then silence again, staring down at them, allowing time for the words to sink in. Finally he turned abruptly and moved out of the glare back to where I was standing. I’ve told them — the next man trying to escape, they will all be shot.’ He nodded to the guards posted on the catwalks. ‘They’ll see to it you have no trouble. They’ve been well trained.’

‘Who trained them for you?’ The question was a prevarication, an avoidance of the one I knew I had to ask.

He shrugged, gave a little bark of laughter. ‘Vietnam left a useful legacy of unemployed deserters floating around in the Pacific.’

‘And the rest of those men down there … ’ My voice trembled. ‘What are you going to do with them?’

‘That’s your problem.’ He was already climbing the ladder to the wheelhouse, Teopas close behind him. He paused, looking down at me over the handrail. ‘Till you reach Queen Carola. There you land them on Hetau and the Co-operative takes over. Got it? And you return here with whatever cargo they give you.’ He went on up to the wheelhouse, still issuing instructions to Teopas. I followed, pausing on the bridge wing. Perenna had gone in search of her brother. I was alone for a moment, looking down at my cargo and the guards with their pistols, the same Japanese machine pistols we had uncovered in those crates. God! It had been neatly organised, and Jona Holland just about the only hitch.

I was still standing there when they brought him out, drunk and barely conscious, his eyes glazed as I tried to speak to him. They carried him down to the car, and Perenna went with them. Hans Holland was suddenly back at my side. ‘Just remember this,’ he said, his vitality brimming over. ‘A few days, and Bougainville will be independent. Then we can expand, raise money, buy ships, get moving.’ And he wasn’t talking like that to bolster his courage.

‘You really believe you’ll get away with it?’

He laughed, clapping me on the shoulder, his mood infectious. ‘Think about it on the run up to Carola. The whites employed at the mine, the redskins from PNG, all of them locked in on this island, hostages for the reasonable behaviour of the other parties to the independence negotiations. And when it’s all settled, I’ll have the contracts for the shipping out of the concentrates. Think about that, too. You could do very well out of this night’s work.’ And he added, ‘But just in case you don’t see it that way, Teopas will be sailing with you.’ He stared at me a moment, a hard, calculating look, then turned abruptly and went down to the car.

The ship’s engines had already started up, the deck vibrating under my feet, and there were men up for’ard standing by the warps. Teopas came out of the wheel-house. ‘Let go now, Kepten?’ His broad face grinned at me from under the beetling brow and the mop of fuzzy hair.

I nodded and went into the wheelhouse. Luke was already there, looking sullen. ‘You take her out,’ I said to give him something to keep him occupied. One of the Buka crewmen was standing beside the helmsman with a machine pistol gripped in both hands, the same man who had let loose that shattering deadly burst of fire. There would be another in the engine-room; even the men hauling in the warps were armed.

The time was 03.21 as we steamed out of Anewa Bay, the stars still bright, the sea calm with a light breeze from the north-east. We cleared Bara shoal on a backbearing, passed the Takanupe light close to port, and quarter of an hour later, we were out through the gap between the Kuruki and Banaru reefs and had turned on to our course of 325° to pick up Cape L’Averdy at the north-eastern end of Bougainville. The black outline of the mountainous spine of the island was clear against the stars, and in less than an hour we could identify the volcanic mass of Bagana and the higher peak of Balbi beyond it.

In ordinary circumstances it would have been a night to dream about, the sea so quiet and the ship ploughing serenely through the diamond-bright velvet of the darkness under the Southern Cross. But the armed crewman in the wheelhouse, the others on the catwalks, the mob of captives huddled like slaves on the tank deck … everywhere I looked there was something to remind me of the situation we had left behind. The simplicity of it, the speed, the organisation! In just a few hours it had all been over, the copper mine unprepared and held in pawn, the Administration, all the services, taken over, the airport out of action. An armed landing at Kieta or Anewa, anywhere along the coast, would be met now by a warning that the lives of Australian and other expatriates would be at risk. And Perenna and her brother, would they be at risk, too? Were they now hostages for the safe delivery of my human cargo to that island off the Queen Carola anchorage?

I learned a lot about myself that night, my mood introspective, which is something quite unnatural to me. Normally I act without too much thought, taking things as they come. But now there was Perenna. For the first time in my life I was emotionally involved with another human being, and it made a difference — made me think.

In the darkened silence of the wheelhouse, the course set and nothing else to do but let thoughts chase one another through my mind, I found myself in a state of uncertainty. I knew I ought to do something, try to gain control of the ship, free the human cargo. It was Perenna’s ship as much as her brother’s, her name on the stern, her capital locked up in it. But then there were moments when I was able to persuade myself that the whole thing was a political matter where the divisions between right and wrong are blurred and principles depend upon circumstances. When a man like Hans Holland takes the plunge, risking all on one wild attempt to alter the balance of forces to his personal advantage, then I suppose there are always people like me who will throw overboard any principle they ever had in the hope of bettering themselves.

Oh yes, I learned a lot about myself in the small hours of that calm, quiet night.

But then Teopas had the three bodies thrown over the side, an action that altered my perspective, so that as the night wore on, sleepily steaming along the coast of that high-backed Pacific island, my mind dwelt more and more on the heroics of action, weaving fantasies that had no basis of reality. I knew damn well I wasn’t going to do anything heroic. I was going to drift along with events, deliver those poor devils to Hetau and steam back again, hoping there’d be something in it for myself, and without too much risk.

I tried to pretend that it was because I didn’t care who ruled Bougainville, that I was just a visitor caught up in something that didn’t concern me. Why should I stick my neck out when for all I knew the Buka people, and those Bougainvilleans who supported them, had right on their side? But deep in my guts I knew it wasn’t that. There was a side of my nature that said, Make the most of it, seize the opportunity. I could just see myself captain of a big ore carrier making the run up to Japan or across the Pacific to California with a shipload of concentrates. That side of me admired what Hans Holland was doing, admired his determination, his ruthlessness, his efficiency. And in a few years I could be Marine Superintendent, in charge of a whole fleet of ships. Why not?

Dreams, all dreams, fantasies woven by a tired brain. I was just a pawn, useful to replace a man who had drunk himself into a stupor rather than do what I was doing. I could use a landing craft man. He hadn’t said anything about ore carriers, only that it was a chance to become part of something big. So why build castles? My eyes were closed, and I was rocking on my feet, thinking suddenly of Perenna, the flash of anger and despair as I had asked the price of cooperation. If I did what I was told and stayed with Hans Holland, would she stay, too? Would she accept it? For the sake of the Holland Line, her brother — me? And there was Hans. Hans with his boundless vitality, his essential male dominance. I thought of that wretched little house and shuddered. The first masterful man she had met in ages and she had fallen flat on her back with her brother lying desperately ill in the next room. I pictured that scene, that bed, the mask hanging over them.

A hand was tugging at my arm, and I opened my eyes. It was Luke. ‘Cape L’Averdy,’ he said.

I went to the porthole, my eyes wide, peering into the night ahead. The stars were paling over the mountains. Dawn was approaching. ‘There!’ A flash low down on the horizon. I counted six, and it came again, almost dead ahead and the ship’s bows swinging across it. I checked the course and then handed over to him, telling him to wake me when we were abreast of the Cape, which would be about 08.00. There would just be time for both of us to get a couple of hours’ sleep before we started the run through the Buka Passage.

In the alleyway a guard sat with his machine pistol resting on his knees, his back propped against my cabin door. He was a young man, his eyes closed, sleeping peacefully, and I hesitated, suddenly alert as I considered whether I could get the pistol from him. But his hand was on the butt, and as I moved softly towards him, some animal instinct seemed to trigger off the mechanism of his body, his dark eyelids flicking open. In one quick, flowing movement he was on his feet, wild-eyed and the gun pointing, his finger on the trigger.

I smiled at him, holding my hands wide, and went through into my cabin. It was hot and I was tired, but sleep didn’t come easily, my mind active. I was thinking of the Buka Passage, all that had happened there during the war, and the Hollands, that house of theirs on the island of Madehas, wishing Perenna were with me, that this was a different sort of voyage and we could stop for her to show it to me. But then, of course, the memories of her grandfather, and of the yearly visits made when she was a child, were now overlaid by the tragedy of her mother’s death. The Passage, Madehas, Kuamegu in Papua New Guinea — all the past of the Hollands. And that house in Aldeburgh, The Passage — was that nostalgia, or had the name some deeper significance? Four hours and I would be in the Passage. There, somewhere, I felt, must lie the key to the chequered past of this strange family.

An hour later the cook woke me. What was he supposed to do about feeding the men on the tank deck? He hadn’t enough bread, and to give them all something would just about clean him out. Could we purchase food for the voyage back at Chinaman’s Quay? I told him to check with Shelvankar, then remembered Hans Holland had taken the little Indian off the ship. ‘Do the best you can,’ I said, adding, ‘Use the lot if you have to. The crew can go short.’ He was from the Mortlocks, and he nodded, smiling. Though as black as the Buka men, he was not in sympathy with them.

There was a different guard on duty in the alleyway outside, an older man who watched me suspiciously as I went to the heads. Sun streamed in through the porthole. I had a leisurely shower, shaved and relieved Luke. We were about 2 miles off Cape L’Averdy. To port was the little harbour of Teop, and for a moment I toyed with the idea of turning in to it and running the ship aground. But a glance for’ard at the tank deck, with its huddle of humanity sprawled listlessly on the steel plating and the four guards lounging on the catwalks above them, showed the impracticability of such a move. Even the slight alteration of course for the entrance to the Passage brought Teopas swaggering into the wheelhouse, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, a machine pistol slung over his bare shoulder, demanding to know why we had changed direction. And when I told him to send men to the galley to give the cook a hand, he tried to argue that it would do ‘them dam’ polis’ good to be without food for a day.

He stood there, grinning, confident that it was he who was in command of the ship. I was short of sleep, my eyes tired, but the shower had freshened me. I was in no mood to be challenged on the bridge. ‘Very well,’ I said, picking up the chart I had been studying and walking with it to the open door of the bridge wing. ‘You see this?’ I held it fluttering in the breeze of our passage. ‘You either feed those men or it goes overboard.’ The chart was Aus. 683 with large-scale plans of the Solomon Island ports. ‘Without it we can’t navigate the Buka Passage.’

The grin faded, his confidence ebbing. ‘Then we go round the north of Buka.’

‘It also gives the plan for the passage through the islands into Queen Carola Harbour.’

‘Luke been there many times.’

‘Does he remember all the bearings, all the shoal patches? Do you know them? You must have been there as often as Luke.’

The entrance was easy, but he wasn’t to know that. He couldn’t read a chart, had never navigated. His eyes dropped. ‘Okay. I give them some food.’

‘And water,’ I said as he turned sullenly away. ‘It will be hot as hell on that tank deck when the sun gets into it.’

He nodded and went out. I put the chart back on the table, feeling pleased. A small victory perhaps, but an important one. I now knew I could bluff him on navigation. I watched as the tank deck came to life, buckets full of chunks of bread, cheese and cold meat being lowered to them from the catwalk. Time passed, the heat increasing and my mood changing. I had got them fed and watered, but that was all. Samson brought me my breakfast on a tray. It was a rough meal, and I wasn’t hungry, but the coffee was good. And then Holtz came up to say he was having trouble with one of the generators and we would be without electricity for two or three hours. ‘You going to do anything?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘I could arrange an engine breakdown.’

I had already thought of that. ‘Teopas would open the sea cocks and drown the lot of us, and they’d get away in the boat.’

He pushed his cap back, rubbing at his hair with oily fingers. ‘So, there is nothing to be done.’ He nodded slowly. ‘I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t believe it is intended anyone should be killed. Why else should Mr Holland go to such trouble to have them transported to Hetau? It has palm trees for shade, and they will be as secure there as if they are in prison. No, they will simply be held there until the future of Bougainville is decided.’ He stared at me, waiting for me to say something. ‘So, you agree with me?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He seemed relieved. ‘Three hours at most; then you have electricity again.’ He straightened his cap, nodded and went out.

We were closing the coast all the time now, low cliffs and the tip of Bougainville merging with Buka, no indication of a passage through. If Luke hadn’t joined me, I would have stood further off until we had opened up the gap. Through the glasses I could see the first of the Buka villages on the clifftops, thatched wooden huts, some of them quite large, half hidden in the shade of dense plantations of palms. We were barely a mile off, the shoreline beginning to separate; suddenly, there it was, a narrow gut about three cables wide running south-westerly, straight as a die, with open water at the far end of it.

‘You turn now,’ Luke said. He was at the chart table, and as our bows swung towards the opening, he added, ‘The tide is with us, and it is near maximum, so we must have plenty steerage way till we are through.’

A flat-bottomed vessel and the south-west-going stream building up to six knots. I hadn’t been in anything like that since my early days on the west coast of Scotland. But there was no wind here, and as the coast of first Bougainville, then Buka closed around us, the surface of the water took on a flat, oily look disturbed here and there by the swirl and ripples of the tide. I could feel the grip of the current under the ship now, the shoreline slipping past faster and faster, the tension in me mounting. Palm trees lined the Passage. Ahead, on the Buka side, there was a quay with a small coaster lying alongside, beyond it a row of wooden buildings with signs over them. ‘Chinaman’s Quay,’ a voice said behind me, but I barely took it in, my glasses fixed on an old-fashioned high-sided vessel coming out from the shore, its tall funnel packed round with fuzzy-haired blacks all dressed in the brightest colours. It was in the narrowest part, crabbing across the current to the Buka shore and right in our path. ‘Just hold your course.’

I turned to find Mac standing right behind me, cold sober and looking ghastly, his eyes staring. ‘Johnny Ferryboat will gi’ way.’ His voice was slow, a little slurred, but not by drink. This, and the staring eyes, made me wonder if he was ill.

‘You all right?’ I asked him.

He eyed me as though I had no right to ask him such a question. ‘Stole my gun,’ he hissed. ‘Right from under my nose.’ He turned his head, glancing obliquely towards the guard standing impassively with one of those Japanese machine pistols cradled across his chest. ‘Bastards! I was asleep.’ He leaned forward. ‘Don’t do anything,’ he hissed in my ear. ‘Whatever happens, don’t move.’ He pushed me aside, lurching forward past the helmsman to grab the ledge below the porthole. He hung there, his yellow-skinned, liver-blotched hands clinging to the ledge like a prisoner peering out. ‘Mechanics, the Old Man called them. Mechanics, not skippers. Coming through the Passage under engine, that’s easy. But under sail … I tell you, if there wasn’t enough wind, then we’d wait for the tide and drift through like the East Coasters with their barges. Aye, and I’ve beat through against the tide with my little schooner so loaded with copra, and such a mass of humanity clinging to her deck, that there wasn’t one of them didn’t look as though they was swimming.’

The ferryboat hooted, a puff of steam at her funnel as she swung bows-on to the current to let us pass. To starboard was a jetty bright with the colour of waiting passengers, and behind the jetty a row of shops along a stretch of pot-holed tarmac, names like Yu Wong and one of them split down the middle, Mac said, because the two members of the family that owned it couldn’t agree. Another, narrower passage, a rocky gut, opening up to port. It ran due south between Buka and the little island of Sohano, on top of which stood a big veranda-ed house. ‘One time DC live up there,’ Luke said.

And Mac muttered, ‘One time Japanese Officer Commanding. We got him two nights after we raided Madehas.’ His mind seemed rooted in the past.

The ferryboat hooted again as we swept past her, the people on her all waving. I wondered whether their excitement had anything to do with the night’s events. Did they know their Co-operative had taken over Bougainville? The guards on the catwalks, I noticed, made no attempt to conceal their guns.

Past Sohano, with its shallow reef topped by wooden toilet huts built out on stilts over the water, the tide slackened. Here the water became muddy, the channel marked by iron beacon posts set on the edge of reed-covered shallows, Minon Island so low that the thicket of bushes covering it seemed to be growing out of the water. Mangrove swamps fringed the Buka shore. ‘I seen crocodile here.’ Luke grinned.

It was no place for a stranger to navigate, and I left it to him, following the course he took with the chart folded in my hand. Any moment now we should sight the island of Madehas. ‘Shall we be able to see the house?’ I asked Mac. But he didn’t answer, his eyes blank, seeing only what was in his mind.

‘You want to see Colonel Holland’s house?’ Luke was leaning with his bare elbows on the back of the captain’s chair, quite relaxed and only occasionally checking our course. ‘You see that beacon?’ He pointed ahead to a lopsided post topped by a triangle with its point upwards that marked the limit of the shoal area on the Buka side of the channel. ‘When we are there, we are clear of Minon, and I show you Holland house.’

‘That’s Number Seven beacon.’ Mac suddenly turned, his eyes wide, a fleck of froth at the corner of his mouth. ‘That night we raided Madehas, we were waiting in our canoes right here on Minon. The Jap guard boat was late, and the mosquitoes — the bloody bastard mozzies … there were six of them, and we got every one, over there by Number Seven.’ His words came slowly, his voice strange as though it were somebody else speaking through his mouth, and he wasn’t looking at me or Luke, or even at the helmsman. He was looking straight at the guard, who was standing at the back of the wheelhouse between the Decca and the echo-sounder. ‘Yu,’ he said suddenly, his hand outstretched, pointing. ‘Yu savvy olpela armi kiap? Yu savvy Colonel Lawrence?’

The man nodded, his eyes widening, his face going pale as Mac moved slowly towards him, talking, talking, his voice getting wilder, the froth gathering on his lips. He was speaking in a voice that was quite strange to me and in a language I didn’t understand, and yet I got the drift of it. And the man’s eyes grew wide with fear. This was the older man who had been on guard outside my cabin after dawn. He would have been a teenage youth when the Japs ruled in Buka and Colonel Holland and his men raided from the mountains. He would have grown up in fear of him, a legendary figure, and now this madman frothing at the mouth was claiming he spoke with the tongue of Colonel Holland, moving steadily closer, imposing his will and impressing his words by angry stabs of his left hand, the fingers spread. I watched, mesmerised. So did Luke. So did the guard, a growing horror in his eyes. And then, with a quick, powerful thrust of his right hand, Mac lunged forward.

The guard’s mouth opened, a scream — but it never came. Mac’s left hand clamped over the lips, blocking the sound in, thrusting at the man’s body so that it was forced back against the bulkhead, and all the time the nerves jerking it in the violence of death, the heavy galley meat knife buried the full length of its blade inside his stomach. The jerks subsided, the eyes glazing. Mac held the body there a moment, then put his knee against it, tugging at the knife. It pulled out suddenly, thick with gore, and some guts and a thin trickle of liquid spilled out with it. He let the dead man drop then, taking the pistol carefully from the limp hands, the body hitting the deck with a thud. He was smiling. ‘Oldest trick in the world. Pretend to be a man back from the dead … ’ He gave a cackling laugh. He knew I hadn’t the stomach for it and was sickened by his callousness. ‘What did you expect?’ he growled. ‘Mutiny and bloodshed go together, don’t they?’

I stared down at the body lying on the steel deck, a man of about forty, with a wife no doubt and a thatched hut full of kids. And now the black face gone grey, the eyes staring, no life there, and Mac standing over him with his gun in one hand and the other red with half-congealed blood, holding a butcher’s knife. The Passage had suddenly become an evil, haunted place. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ He pushed past me, spitting a piece of soap out of his frothing mouth and dropping the knife as he reached for the mike of the ship’s broadcast system, his eyes all the time on the helmsman, who stared back at him like a petrified rabbit. ‘Call Teopas to the bridge.’ He thrust the mike into my hands.

I did as he said, unable to keep my voice steady and wondering what he was going to do now. Holding the mike to my lips, I could feel the stickiness of half-congealed blood on the handgrip. ‘Coxs’n to the wheelhouse, please. Coxs’n Teopas. To the wheel-house, please.’ I put the mike back in its cradle, and we waited. Nobody spoke. Mac had withdrawn to the chart table, putting Luke between himself and the sliding door to the bridge wing. I saw him checking the safety catch, to see that it was on, I thought. A minute, maybe a little more, passed before Teopas’s bare feet sounded on the ladder to the starboard bridge wing.

A moment later he came in, swinging his rifle loosely by the breach, relaxed, smiling, confident. ‘What yu want, Kept-’

The short burst of fire caught him in the stomach first, then the chest. It flung him backwards, yet his feet were still making forward-pacing movements so that his big torso, the jet-black skin stitched with small holes, was forced over, to lie on its back twitching with death-throe reflexes. That burst of fire had sounded shattering in the confines of the wheelhouse. ‘Why did you do that?’ The words burst from my lips. It was killing for the sake of killing.

Mac looked at me. ‘He’s their leader.’ He said it flatly, and still in the same flat voice he added, ‘You should’ve done it yourself if you wanted it done different.’ He turned to Luke, telling him to get Teopas’s body out on to the bridge wing. And when he didn’t move, standing frozen into immobility as he peered down at the man’s chest with the holes leaking blood, Mac grabbed hold of him and shook him. ‘You want to get killed?’ He reached for the telegraph handle, slammed it to Stop Engines and picked up the broadcast microphone again, this time speaking into it himself, using the Buka language, not Pidgin. ‘Get that body out of here, on to the bridge wing, where they can see it,’ he shouted to Luke. ‘Go on, move! Yu tu.’ He motioned to the helmsman with the machine pistol. ‘Mekim.’ Then he was speaking into the mike again. The ship’s engines had stopped, everything very still as we lost way, the reeds and mangrove trees almost stationary, the bows swinging.

For’ard the guards on the catwalks, all four of them, were facing aft, eyes showing white and the dark faces puzzled and uneasy. Suddenly one of them fell prone, wriggling behind a ventilation cowl, his gun thrust forward. The others followed his example. ‘Sitting targets,’ Mac said, still with the mike to his mouth so that his words boomed round the ship. He caught my eye, nodding towards the dead coxs’n. ‘Get him to the bridge wing, and pitch his body down on to the deck. Go on — move! Show the bastards he’s dead. If they don’t throw their guns down into the tank deck then, we’ll have to kill them.’ It was the threat to kill them that got me moving. Luke, too, I think. We got hold of the body, half carrying, half dragging it to the doorway. ‘Now stand him upright,’ Mac said. ‘Let them see how he’s been shot to pieces. Then pitch him down the ladder.’ And as we pushed Teopas into an upright position, holding him there on the bridge wing so that guards and prisoners alike could see, Mac’s voice boomed again from the loudspeakers. ‘Push him over,’ he called, and we pitched the body down the ladder. It fell with a sickening thud, the round black head rammed against the metal grating, blood staining the woolly halo of hair.

Silence! Then Mac’s voice again and movement on the tank deck. Luke and I dived for the shelter of the wheelhouse. The rifle Teopas had been carrying so casually, with such total confidence, lay abandoned on the deck. I picked it up. It was the first conscious independent action I had taken. Mac nodded approvingly. ‘You take the door. I’ll cover the deck.’ But there was no need. Men were swarming up the ladders from the tank deck, spilling on to the catwalks, and the Buka guards were rising sheepishly to their feet, their hands in the air, their guns on the deck.

It was over without a fight. Armed now with machine pistols that they knew how to use better than our Buka crew, the police moved in on the bridge housing in a quick crouching run. Two of them came directly up to the wheelhouse, one of them with sergeant’s stripes on his shirt. The other, short and broad and smiling, announced that he was Inspector Steve Mbalu. He went straight through into the alleyway, shouting for the Buka crew to surrender as his men began moving down the ladders from deck to deck towards the engine-room. For’ard all was chaos as the mass of captives struggled to escape the oven heat of the tank deck, climbing the ladders on to the catwalk, crowding the foredeck, spilling over into the shade of the bow door housing, anywhere to get a breath of air to relieve the humid, suffocating heat. The sun was half obscured, the air thickening all the time, the heat impossible. A shot sounded from down in the bowels of the ship. It turned out to be no more than a warning shot, and a minute later the Inspector came back to report that he was now in complete control of the ship.

Mac had hung his pistol by its strap on the back of the captain’s chair and was leaning heavily against it, his screwed-up features the colour of mud, his eyes staring out through the open starboard door of the wheelhouse. No breath of air now, the ship drifting slowly sideways with the current and a view back down the Buka Passage framed in the doorway, the scene darkening as heavy cu-nim clouds obscured the sun. ‘Always was a tricky place.’ He was muttering to himself, wiping the sweat from his face, the hand holding the dirty handkerchief shaking uncontrollably.

I moved out to the port bridge wing. Released prisoners crowded the deck below, clung to the ladder leading up to where I stood. Our bows had already drifted past No. 7 marker post, the current carrying us out towards another pole beacon with a flat top marking the last of the Minon Island shallows, and beyond that beacon, in line with our stern, the island of Madehas was coming into view with a small hill covered with palms and a house just visible on North Madehas Point.

I went back into the wheelhouse and got the glasses. It was a wooden building with a veranda, rather taller than the old DC’s house on Sohano and with storage sheds. There was a track leading down to a reef-enclosed creek. Something that looked like a light was stuck up on a pole. ‘Is there a jetty there?’ I asked Mac.

I got no reply. He was staring past me, straight towards the house, his eyes quite vacant, seeing only something that was in his mind. The body of the dead crewman was being carried out, but he didn’t notice. The Inspector was talking to Luke, the ship drifting, everything in a hush of suspended animation, nobody — least of all myself — knowing what to do next. Luke kept glancing at Mac, hesitating. Finally he turned to me. ‘Inspector Mbalu say we must get under way. We cannot stay here.’

‘Of course not.’ If we didn’t get moving soon, even a shallow draft vessel like this would be aground. ‘But where does he want us to go — continue on or turn back into the Passage?’

There was a long pause, and then the Inspector said, ‘On. We go on.’ It was obvious he hadn’t thought what he was going to do next and needed time to consider. Rain began to fall, large drops as big as coins. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Mac turned his head, jerked suddenly out of his trance. ‘Holland House Cove,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s five fathoms close off the jetty. You can anchor there.’ He peered out through the bridge wing door. ‘Aye, and you’d better do it quick, or you won’t be seeing a bloody thing.’ And he climbed into the captain’s chair and just sat there, staring moodily ahead.

I rang for engines and with a little backing and filling got the ship’s head round. We were already past the flat-topped marker post, another fine on our port bow and not much more than half a mile to go. The Buka Passage vanished behind us, engulfed in a thundering, inky blackness. The raindrops bounced on the flat brown surface of the water, leaping to meet the next drop falling; lightning ripped the indigo heavens, a crack of thunder and a distant hissing growing closer.

We were just off the eastern reef of the cove when the storm hit, everything suddenly wiped out in the torrent of water pouring down. Luke was aft seeing to the stern anchor, the Buka crew working under police guard, and I was left to con her in, nothing visible — only the echo-sounder recording 7 fathoms and the vague impression of the reef-edge yards away to port. I could see nothing, absolutely nothing. I took her in on the echo-sounder, dropped the stern anchor by guesswork and then ordered Luke to the bows to supervise the letting go of the main anchor.

About ten minutes later the wind hit us. It came from the north at first, tugging at our stern anchor. The rain, lessening now, drove horizontally past the ship, and there was nothing else to see — just the wind-driven rain and the water round us lashed to such a frenzy that at moments the surface of it took off and became airborne. It was like that for perhaps a quarter of an hour. It seemed much longer, the wind backing and the noise so violent it was impossible to speak, even to think. Gradually the wind shifted to south so that we were under the lee of Madehas, gusts alternating with lulls, and then for a moment there was no wind at all, the rain much heavier now and falling vertically in a steady, persistent downpour. That’s how I arrived at the Hollands’ house on Madehas, looking up at it through a curtain of tropical rain with the sun’s faint glimmer coming and going.