Mr Lee heaved on the wheel and took the Aussie Rules up the face of the giant wave at about forty degrees. Jules held on, wedging herself into a corner of the bridge, unaware she was clenching her teeth, willing the 228-feet super-yacht over the moving ridge of black, storm-tossed sea water. A force-eleven storm raged outside, reducing visibility to near zero as it hurled sheets of rain and ocean spume at the thick glass windows of the wheelhouse. Lightning strobed, followed almost immediately by the crash of thunder as Lee took them over the crest and down the other side, dropping so precipitously that Julianne had to hold on to the grab bars even more tightly to avoid having her head smashed into the ceiling.
‘Nice work, Mr Lee,’ she called out over the uproar.
The old Chinese helmsman did not reply, remaining steadfastly focused on trying to feel the heaving ocean beneath their keel.
‘Radar, how we doing? Have we lost those cheeky fuckers yet?’ Jules asked.
The Rhino, who had strapped himself into his chair, gave her a ready thumbs-up and raised his voice over the shrieking of the storm, speaking around the newly lit cigar that was fugging up the air in the bridge. ‘Hard to tell, skipper, but I’d bet two inches of horn that they’re losing contact. Slow but sure. Last time I had a good fix, it looked like they were having real fucking problems with the storm. We had about eighteen nautical miles on them.’
‘But they weren’t breaking off pursuit?’
‘Afraid not, no, ma’am. Oh, and Boss Jules, is this a good time to ask about the location of the humidor? It’s just I couldn’t find it in the library, like you said, and -’
Julianne silenced him with a warning look.
‘Alrighty then,’ he said, conceding the point. ‘We’ll sort that out later.’
The ship suddenly tilted precipitously, as a rogue wave took them abeam and tried to roll the vessel over. Lee cursed in Mandarin and spun the wheel again, calling for more power.
Jules would never have admitted it, but her heart felt as though it might burst out of her rib cage. She took a deep, difficult breath and announced as calmly as she could, ‘I’m going to go check on everybody down below. Shout out if there’s any change at all, for better or worse. Good work, everyone. We’ll outrun these blaggers yet.’
Lee didn’t reply or even turn his head, so fiercely was he concentrating. He stood on the balls of his bare feet, knees flexing to meet the rise and fall of the deck, eyes seemingly unfocused, simply lost somewhere out in the dark and violence of the storm. The Rhino, by way of contrast, looked quietly pleased with himself. The bridge crew, Dietmar the navigator and Lars the Norwegian backpacker turned first mate of the Aussie Rules, both grinned like stupid dogs given a pat on the head. They were among the younger members of her pick-up crew, and even though they’d been shot at half-a-dozen times so far, the two Northern Europeans still seemed to think it was all just insane fun, a great story they couldn’t wait to tell all the Helgas and Anyas at their next travellers’ hostel. Nobody but Mr Lee and herself seemed to be too bothered by any of it. Jules wondered how they’d be feeling if things turned bloody and personal in a few days, should the Peruvians get close enough to board. The Rules enjoyed a speed advantage of a few knots and had put some good distance between them, but they were hanging on doggedly.
She clawed her way out of the corner she’d been jammed into and tried to roll out of the bridge and through to the companion-way in synch with the movements of the yacht. With seas running at ten metres and whipped up into a frenzy by sixty-knot winds, her progress was slow and extremely hazardous. She found the conventional stairwells and wide corridors of the Aussie Rules to be more difficult in extreme weather than the cramped conditions she’d grown used to on Pete’s little yacht. It was so much bigger here that the chances of being thrown clear across an open area by a particularly bad wave were significantly higher. As she proceeded towards the media centre, she climbed up a steep, pitching rise, levitated into the air, and crashed back onto a plunging deck as Lee took them through another boiling ravine on the surface of the southern oceans.
Having finally reached her destination after a trek that took three minutes instead of the usual one, Jules launched herself through the door and into the plush confines of the media room with a real sense of deliverance. She found Shah, Fifi and Pieraro there, all of them wedged deeply into the soft blue armchairs, talking amongst themselves, if somewhat volubly over the sound of the storm. The big screen was lit up with a feed from the Rhino’s radar, showing a highly degraded image on which a lone vessel occasionally popped out – the giant trawler Viarsa 1, according to the Rhino, a toothfish poacher turned pirate raider.
‘How’s it goin’, Julesy?’ asked Fifi.
‘Spiffing. They’re holding on. I was really hoping we’d lose them in the storm, but Rhino says not. They’re used to these conditions and worse. We’re not.’
‘No,’ Fifi agreed.
They really weren’t. On the Diamantina, they’d always run from big storms, harboured up or anchored on the leeside of an island wherever they could, and ridden them out. Only once or twice during their time together had Pete been caught out in open seas when a big blow started up, and that had been nothing like this.
‘Miguel, how’re your people hanging on?’ she asked. ‘They wouldn’t see a lot of ocean storms back in the village, I’d imagine.’
The vaquero, whose face was a study in granite stoicism, shook his head almost imperceptibly. ‘Very sick, Miss Julianne. The children are frightened. They are all frightened, but only the children admit so.’
Jules saw the Viarsa 1 appear as an indistinct, faraway blip on the big screen. It must have climbed a crest at the same time as the Rules and been painted by the radar. She wondered if there was somebody on the other vessel hunched over a screen, hanging on for a fleeting glimpse of them through the fury of the storm. There had to be. Otherwise Lee would’ve lost them already.
She turned back to address the Mexican again. ‘As soon as the weather calms down enough to get them out of their bunks, Miguel, I want you and Sergeant Shah to start training everyone again, especially the Yanks. Just the basics, as we discussed. Aiming, firing, reloading, clearing jams. Over and over and over, with every minute we have. These bastards may never get within a bee’s willy of us, but if they do, I want to kick them so hard that their goolies pop out of their eye sockets.’
‘The passengers will be fine, Miss Julianne,’ Shah assured her. ‘They did very well in their lessons before the storm. They understand what is required, and what will happen to them if the pirates get control. They will fight. All of them. Even the children, if you let them.’
She looked across at Miguel. Deep hollows under his eyes gave him a ghoulish appearance in the dim light of the room. The ship plunged and rolled again, forcing him to grab the arms of his deep padded chair with white knuckles that stood out starkly against the blue fabric.
‘I have discussed this with Mariela, my wife, and the old ones,’ he said. ‘We have agreed that only the very youngest will go with Ana and one of the crew in the big launch if the worst happens. The other children will carry ammunition, and if they can hold a weapon, they may fire it too.’
It was hard to be certain in the half-light, but Jules thought he may have been on the verge of tears.
‘My daughters, they will fight,’ Pieraro went on. ‘They must. Better for them to die quickly than to live out their years as a slave to some stinking Peruvian cabron.’
‘Miguel, I promised you safe passage for you and your family,’ said Jules, as softly as she could and still be heard. The girls do not have to fight. If the Viarsa 1 gets close enough, we can put them in the sport fisher with Lars or Dietmar and Grandma Ana. They would outrun any pursuit.’
Pieraro smiled sadly. ‘And then what, Miss Julianne? How far are we from safe land? They would not survive a storm like this, and they would be heading into the bad weather. I told you I would hold you responsible for their safety, but I do not hold you responsible for this. You are not pursuing us. You did not bring the storm out of the skies.’
Shah clapped his hands together, a thunderous sound. ‘Enough of this talk!’ he declared. ‘This will defeat us as surely as any man. How many of these monkeys have we seen off in these last weeks? They are desperate, foolish fishermen playing at pirates. Let me tell you what will happen if they should come alongside us: we will cut them down and take their stores for our own.’
‘Hooah!’ cried Fifi, grinning hugely. ‘That’s the spirit, mountain man!’
Julianne braced her back against one arm of her chair and her feet against the other as the Rules began another tumbling ride down a foaming summit. She glanced at the screen to see if they’d lost radar contact with the Viarsa 1, but it wasn’t on screen to begin with. It must have been hidden in some shifting valley of water at that moment. The seas were large enough to tower over both vessels at times, hiding them from each other.
‘Okay,’ sighed Jules. ‘Shah’s right, Miguel. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I’d best get on with my King Henry routine.’
‘I am sorry, Miss Julianne?’ quizzed the Mexican, confused.
‘A little Shakespeare, darling. Benefits of what classical education I received before Daddy pissed away his ill-gotten gains and all the family silver. “For forth he goes and visits all his host; Upon his royal face there is no note, how dread an army hath enrounded him.’”
Pieraro was an intelligent man, but she could see she’d lost him.
‘Don’t bother none about her, Miguel,’ said Fifi with good humour. ‘She gets all thinky and stuff sometimes. Your girls, they’ll be fine. I will personally take apart any motherfucker who tries to interfere with them.’
‘You are kind, for one so fierce, Miss Fifi. But in the last extremes, I shall attend to my own family.’
‘Enough!’ barked Shah, clapping his hands together again with a thunderous report.
‘Yes,’ said Jules, ‘enough.’ She pushed herself up out of the chair with the momentum of the ship. ‘Try to get some sleep.’
Her rounds of the ship took nearly an hour – a slow, difficult progression through all decks, moving hand over hand along companionways that violently plunged and rolled and shifted as the storm tossed the super-yacht about. Most of the passengers were in their beds, many of them strapped in against the violence of the night. Down in the engine room her grease monkeys – a Sri Lankan and two Dutch merchant mariners she’d picked up in Costa Rica – were tending to the Rules’s gleaming white plant with the universally pissed-off look of all engineering crew. The Sri Lankan, Pankesh, had one hand bandaged, the legacy of a fall against a steam conduit in the difficult conditions. She checked his burn, which seemed quite ghastly, but he insisted on remaining at his station.
The main lounge looked very bare now, with most of the fittings stowed away. There she found one half of the trust-fund brats, Phoebe, sitting with one of the village children. They’d wedged themselves into one of the heavily padded loungers. Before Jules could ask them what the fuck they were doing out of their cabins, Phoebe spoke up.
‘Maya was scared,’ she said. ‘She got lost looking for the little girls’ room – didn’t you, sweetheart? – and wandered into my cabin. I said I’d sit with her a while.’
Julianne wondered if Maya was the only one who’d been scared, but she let it go. The last thing she needed now was hysterics over a lost child. ‘Thank you, Phoebe. Good show,’ she replied. ‘But make sure you get her back to her bunk soon. I need everyone rested.’
She had turned around and was about to claw her way back to her own sleeping quarters when Phoebe called after her: ‘Hey, Julianne?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’
There was a neediness in the girl’s eyes that answered Jules’s earlier, unspoken question. ‘What’s up, Phoebe?’
The little village girl, Maya, no more than five or six years old, snuggled in tight, burying her face in the young woman’s chest.
‘You used to be rich once, didn’t you?’
Jules couldn’t help but smirk. ‘So did you.’
‘No,’ said Phoebe, ‘that’s not what I mean. Before all of this, before the Disappearance, before you found this yacht. Before whatever it was you were doing with Fifi and that Chinese man. You used to be rich. Like me. I can tell from your voice and from the way you run your crew – like you were always meant to.’
The ship dipped and plunged again, unbalancing Jules and propelling her forward. She let herself fall into another lounger close to Phoebe, lest she get hurled out through the glass doors.
‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘My family had money. Old money. And my father stole a lot more. But it was never enough to fund his extravagant tastes, or to pay the upkeep on our estates.’
‘I knew it,’ said Phoebe with a note of triumph. ‘So you, like, grew up in a castle?’
‘Something like that. It’s not nearly as much fun as it sounds. We had to throw the place open to the public every other weekend just to pay for heating.’
‘And how did you end up doing, you know, whatever?’
Jules’s smile was genuine now. ‘Smuggling, Phoebe. I was a smuggler – I still am, I suppose. It’s one the few jobs still paying these days.’ Jules gave a quick shrug and settled deep into the safety and comfort of the chair. ‘I loved my father, in spite of his faults. Because of them, in some ways. He was very different from the sort of people we mixed with. Or rather, he was just like them, but more honest about it.’
‘But you said he stole money’
Jules smiled again, fondly. ‘He did. He was a terrible crook, but he only ever stole from the rich – and believe me, Phoebe, if your family has been rich for nine hundred years, somewhere some of that loot was stolen. Most of it, even.’
Lightning and thunder flared and crashed so closely together that Jules was unaware of any lag between them. The flat, white light illuminated a ghastly vision outside of the whole ocean in turmoil, of living, waterborne mountain ranges boiling up around the ship.
‘You didn’t tell me how you became a smuggler,’ Phoebe continued, pressing for more.
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Jules, who pushed herself up out of the chair and headed for the nearest grab bar. ‘Don’t worry, Phoebe,’ she called back over her shoulder, ‘you’ll be fine. The only reason you’re on this boat is because you were quick enough and smart enough to react to the Disappearance. You got some of your old money out and turned it into new money, very quickly. Most people aren’t like that – they’ll sit and wait for the situation to bury them. You, you’re a survivor. Plus, a family like yours, it would’ve had investments all over the world, wouldn’t it? Not all of them would have tanked.’
The American said nothing to that and Jules smiled again. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ve paid for passage, I’m not going to ask for any more. But tomorrow, or the day after, when this storm clears and those Peruvians have a clear run at us, if we can’t outpace them, you’ll have to earn your passage. So get some rest.’
She pulled herself up the rising deck and out into the companion way. The journey to her own cabin, the former owner’s quarters, was a hand-over-hand trek that took another six or more minutes and came close to exhausting her.
‘Maya? Maya?’
A woman’s voice, Mexican, made her look up. Mariela Pieraro was clawing her way along the corridor towards Jules, a frantic look haunting her eyes.
‘It’s all right,’ Jules called out. ‘Maya’s in the big lounge. With Phoebe.’
The two women hauled themselves along, hand over hand, holding on to the safety rails that ran the length of the companionway. The look of animal fear disappeared from Mariela’s face, but a deep, abiding worry remained. The storm, Jules supposed. Your first big storm at sea was always terrifying. How much more so would it be for a woman who had spent her life on the edge of a desert?
‘Miss Julianne. I am… sorry… I… not to find her… I…’
The boat slipped sideways and Jules nearly lost her footing as she waved away the mother’s concerns. Mariela didn’t speak English with much confidence, although Jules didn’t know why. Her grasp of the language seemed fine, but after the scene at the Fairmont she and the other villagers had very much kept to themselves, doing everything asked of them but trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible.
‘Just down there a little way,’ Jules said, pointing back to the way she’d just come. ‘Through the big doors. She went to the loo… to the toilet, sorry. And got lost. She is fine, Mariela.’
Pieraro’s wife nodded gratefully. ‘I worry. I cannot see her and I worry.’
‘She’s fine,’ Jules repeated.
The woman grabbed at her arm as they passed each other, a strong, almost vice-like grip. ‘You are a good person, yes?’ she said. ‘A good person to save my family. All of us. Thank you, thank you…’
Embarrassed, as any Englishwoman would be by flagrant neediness and raw emotion, especially from a stranger, Jules blushed slightly and tried to shrug it off.
‘No,’ insisted Mariela. ‘You did not have to take us all, but you did. You helped when no one else would. You are good person, Miss Julianne. Good person.’
‘It’s fine,’ replied Jules, not knowing what else to say. ‘She’s in the lounge. Best go get her.’
‘Si Si’
Mariela continued on her way, muttering ‘Thank you’ repeatedly as she receded. It was the longest conversation Julianne had had with her or any of Miguel’s people, save for Pieraro himself, of course. Truth be known, she had avoided them, not wanting to grow attached to people she had promised herself she would cut loose at the first opportunity.
Putting that uncomfortable thought out of her head, she resumed the journey to her cabin, taking another few minutes to get there. She was sticky with salt and sweat, and filthy from the day’s exertions, but the sea was too rough to have a bath or shower. Instead, Julianne stripped down to her underwear, crawled under the covers and turned out the light.
There was nothing she could do about the storm or the men chasing them. The storm would pass. The men would not.
She fell asleep haunted by visions of the little girl called Maya being tortured by faceless ghouls.