He released the button and the radio gave a brief hiss of static. Todd turned the volume down, waited ten seconds then tried again.
‘Hello. This is Todd McLean. I’m aboard the vessel Mekong Dawn. Hijackers have taken over the ship. The captain is dead. Does anyone copy me?’
***
'… So Chehn’s in this brothel, pants around his ankles, the girl naked on the bed when… Wham! The front door is kicked in. A raid! Led by none other than Chehn’s father-in-law, the local police chief.’
A chorus of laughter erupted around the campfire. Klim laughed too and tried to forget the gnawing feeling of worry in his guts. He still nursed the sat-phone and sat closest to the boat and its radios. At 21.00 he’d called in a report to headquarters and learned there had still been no word from Ang. The helicopter was still missing.
‘So what did Chehn do?’ One of the men goaded the storyteller to continue.
‘Chehn has his pants up in an instant. He leaps through the window and drops into an…’
The marine radio gave a hiss of static, drawing Klim’s attention away from the story. The static died away, but the radio wasn’t totally quiet, there was something else there, a faint voice, more imagined than heard. Klim cocked his head and tried to listen. It was a voice, barely audible, the origin probably many kilometres away. Maybe two barge captains passing the time by having a good chat.
‘…Then he realises he’s left his gun and holster up in the brothel. But ol’ Chehn is not finished yet. He tacks himself onto the back of the raid and goes in through the front door with the rest of the boys and…’
The voice was still there, but it wasn’t barge captains or any other local. This voice spoke in English.
‘The girl was most surprised to see ol’ Chehn turn up in her room. She—’
‘Shut up!’ Klim stood and headed for the boat. The men watched him go in silence. The radio was quiet now. He climbed over the gunwale and stared at it, willed it to make a noise, to bring back the English-speaking voice.
He got his wish.
‘I say again, this is Todd McLean. I am on the Mekong Dawn. Terrorists have seized the vessel. The crew is dead. Some passengers are dead. Can anyone hear me?’
***
Todd released the transmit button on the radio. This was the fifth time he had tried to raise someone. The guards must soon come back around on their rounds. When that happened he would need to turn the radio off and hide. He moved to the port doorway and checked the companionway. Clear! He went to the starboard doorway. Nothing but darkness.
With a growing feeling of despair he looked at the walkie-talkie. Maybe it didn’t have the range to get a signal out very far. Maybe he needed to be higher. He could try climbing up onto the wheelhouse roof, maybe even the sundeck, but the thought of leaving his hiding place drove that idea from his mind. He would be in plain sight of any hijackers up there.
The radio crackled. A voice came through, louder than Todd expected. He fumbled with the volume control and felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead.
‘This is Captain Klim of the Cambodian National Police. I have you weak but readable, Mr McLean.’
Todd pressed the transmit button so hard it hurt his thumb. ‘Thank God! Terrorists have seized the boat. They’ve killed the captain and some of the passengers. They’re killing everyone. Please help me!’
In his excitement and desperation he forgot to release the transmit button. When no response came through he realised his mistake and lifted his thumb.
‘Do you know where you are, Mr McLean?’
‘They have the boat moored beside a mountain. A big mountain with antennas on it.’
***
Klim looked up at the men standing on the island. They stared at him wide-eyed.
‘Don’t just stand there gawping! Get me a map of Tonle Sap.’
No one moved.
‘Now!’
One of the men snapped out of the trance and went to a pile of equipment. He picked up a map and brought it to Klim.
Klim folded out the map on a seat and took a small torch out of a pouch on his belt.
‘A mountain with antennas?’ He moved thecircle of torchlight over the map as he muttered. ‘A mountain with antennas?’ Quickly, he picked out the spot heights around Tonle Sap. Three showed structures on the summits, two to the south and one to the north. He glanced down at the scale. The mountains were forty to fifty kilometres apart. It would take at least a day to reach the farthest one and that didn’t include the time needed to search the other two mountains along the way. He needed more information.
‘Mr McLean? Do you know where you are? Are you north or south of the lake?’
Klim released the microphone button.
The radio remained quiet.
‘Mr McLean?’
The silence lingered on. Klim punched his fist into the seat back and cursed.
***
The beam of torchlight moved around the interior of the wheelhouse. Todd crouched under the control console and watched it cross the captain’s corpse and climb the rear bulkhead.
He’d almost missed the footsteps on the starboard companionway and had only moments to turn off the radio and hide. The hijacker’s outline was silhouetted in the window of the wheelhouse door. The barrel of a rifle followed the beam of light wherever it went.
The beam of light crossed the bulkhead and stopped on the red-painted cabinet on the wall. The cabinet hung open and Todd swallowed hard as he realised his mistake. The mistake that was about to get him killed.
The hijacker muttered something in Khmer. The words were lost on Todd, but not the inflection, which was something akin to, ‘What the hell!’
The beam of light moved quickly now, urgently. It lit the space beyond the helm and, finding nothing, jerked to the floor. It crossed towards the console and found him crouching there.
Todd blinked in the glare of the beam. He heard a metallic snick and knew it was a safety catch being flicked. The hijacker yelled and more yells answered him from somewhere aft. Running feet pounded on the deck.
The hijacker decided to open the wheelhouse door. He took a hand from his weapon and slid the door on its track but had to lift the barrel to clear the window frame.
Todd saw that the assault rifle no longer pointed at him. The hijackers would kill him, of that he was sure. His only chance was now, while the hijacker brought his gun around the window frame. He raised the flare gun, cocked the hammer and squeezed the trigger.
The noise was softer than he expected, like a champagne cork released from a bottle. The flare gun kicked slightly in his grip and a streak of red light erupted from the stubby barrel, crossed the wheelhouse in a nanosecond and embedded itself into the hijacker’s chest.
The hijacker stumbled backwards, the terror on his face illuminated by the fizzing red flare that burned deep into his torso. He screamed and tried to pry the flare from his chest but the searing heat defeated him. In desperation he backed onto the railing and didn’t stop, launching himself over it.
Todd heard the splash as he moved for the opposite door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another hijacker running down the companionway towards him, gun up. Todd leapt over the railing in a flying dive, clearing it as the sound of machinegun fire filled the air. The water closed around him and he angled deep, the sound of shooting replaced by pffffft pfffft as bullets struck the water somewhere over his head.
For the third time in two days, Todd McLean swam for his life.
***
Nancy snapped awake at the sound of gunfire. The other passengers were awake too. Nervous chatter came out of the darkness in the dining saloon. She could hear the hijackers yelling and running along the port companionway. A few more bursts of automatic gunfire split the night and then the few brief moments of pandemonium came to an end.
Nancy settled back against the bulkhead. Soo-Li’s head was on her lap. She could feel the girl’s fingers digging deep into the flesh of her leg.
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‘It’s all over now, sweetheart. Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep.’ She rubbed the girl’s back and felt the fingers relax.
Ky appeared in the doorway. He held a torch in one hand, his knife in the other. Two gunmen flanked him, the barrels of their weapons pointing into the saloon. He flicked the torch about, running the beam of light across the faces of the passengers and crew lining the walls. Nancy knew he was looking for someone in particular.
The beam of light ran down the starboard side then started back up the port. It lit up Collette’s face, then Fred’s, stopped on Scott’s for a moment before it moved on to her. Nancy squinted in the brilliance of the beam. She held up a hand to shield her eyes and realised Ky had crossed the floor and was standing over her.
‘Come with me.’
‘What’s going on?’ Nancy asked.
‘One of my men is hurt – burned. You will treat him.’
Nancy lifted Soo-Li’s head from her lap and shifted her towards Scott. Ky lowered the torch beam and saw the girl there. He stooped and grabbed her arm, dragging her to her feet.
Soo-Li cried out in sleepy protest. She opened her eyes, saw Ky and tried to pull back towards Nancy.
‘You lied to me, you little whore! That boy was on this boat the whole time.’
No! I—’
Ky brought his arm back and made to punch the girl in the face with the fist wrapped around the handle of his knife.
Nancy grabbed the arm. His flesh felt as hard as iron. ‘Hit her or touch a hair on her head and you can treat your man yourself. I won’t do it.’
Ky’s menacing stare shifted to Nancy. ‘Then I will kill you, too. I will cut your throat right here so your husband can watch you bleed out in front of him.’
The hatred in his eyes almost defeated her resolve, but somewhere up forward a man screamed, a man who was obviously in a great deal of pain. Ky’s eyes flicked to the sound.
‘If you want me to treat him then let the girl go.’
Another scream and Ky looked at Soo-Li. ‘Another time.’ He pushed her towards Scott and grabbed Nancy’s arm. ‘Get your stuff. Come with me.’
The hijackers had placed the injured man on a bunk in one of the forward cabins. He lay on his back and at first Nancy thought his shirt was open, but as she played Ky’s torch over the writhing figure, she saw the material had been completely burned away from his chest, exposing a charred, black crater.
‘Can you help him?’
Nancy stared at the wound. Her nostrils twitched at the stench of burned flesh. ‘He needs a hospital.’
‘He can’t have one. Do what you can.’
Pulling on a pair of latex gloves, Nancy examined the wound closer. Pieces of material, presumably from his shirt, were burned into the blackened flesh. She used a pair of tweezers to delicately pull away the bits she could. The casualty writhed about on the bunk and Ky detailed two men to hold him still.
‘Can’t you give him something for the pain?’
Nancy thought about the powerful sedatives in the first-aid kit and about Major Sinh’s plan to dope the guards. For it to work, she would need to use every one of the tablets in their food. But her patient cried out in agony and she knew she must do her best for him. She decided to sacrifice two of the tablets and removed them from the kit. The man was barely lucid. She doubted he would be able to swallow them whole.
‘I need two spoons.’
Ky disappeared down the companionway and returned moments later with two spoons from the dining saloon. He handed them to Nancy.
She placed the tablets into one spoon and used the back of the other to crush them to a fine powder. Then she fed the powder to the wounded man, trickling it into his mouth. The sedatives were good for four to six hours normally, but she knew they weren’t meant to treat burn victims or trauma. The pain would soon eat through whatever relief they gave, and she couldn’t afford to squander the tablets if their escape plan was to have any chance of success.
The man settled into a kind of uneasy stupor. The writhing stopped, replaced by an incoherent muttering. The two guards let go of his limbs and backed towards the door.
‘I’ve done all I can. He needs a doctor and a hospital with the right equipment – fluids, antiseptics.’
Ky stepped aside and let her out onto the companionway. ‘I do not have any way of getting him to a hospital. Perhaps when the colonel returns with the boat tomorrow.’
Nancy nodded and tried not to walk too fast as she headed back to the dining saloon. Ky followed as far as the breezeway. She found her way to Scott, Ang and the others.
Scott moved aside and made room for her to sit on the deck. ‘How’d it go?’
‘If they don’t get him to a hospital he’ll be dead in two or three days, but that isn’t our problem. Malko is returning to the boat tomorrow.’
‘How do you know this? Ang’s voice out of the darkness.
‘Ky told me the colonel will be back with the small boat tomorrow.’
Scott put his arm around her shoulders. ‘So, if the governments aren’t paying our ransoms, we can expect retribution.’
‘He will make an example of some of us, yes,’ Ang said.
Nancy moved into Scott’s side and placed a hand on the sleeping girl’s back. ‘Then this plan of ours had better work, hadn’t it. It’s our only chance.’
Chapter Twenty-five
Todd clung to the bough of a tree and looked back over his shoulder. The swamps were in darkness and he couldn’t see the Mekong Dawn or any sign of pursuit. He had no idea how far he’d swum, but it must have been three or four hundred metres. He’d deliberately swum away from the island, for that was where the hijackers would expect him to go, and where they would concentrate their search. It would be much safer out in the swamps, at least until daylight. But he must get out of the water.
It wasn’t until he reached up to grab the branch with his other hand that he realised he was still holding the flare gun. He slipped it into the pocket of his board shorts and hauled himself up onto the bough. Water dripped from his body and he winced at the noise it made. As he climbed higher, he hoped he was concealed a little by the tree’s foliage. He settled into a fork some five metres above the water and listened. There was only the sound of frogs and insects.
He felt the weight of the flare gun in his pocket and pulled it free.
Why the hell didn’t I keep the bloody radio?
A foolish thought. It probably wouldn’t have survived the immersion anyway, but he couldn’t help but think there were police out in the swamps, looking for the Mekong Dawn. He hadn’t had time to give them a direction or to tell them he was on the north side of the lake.
So bloody close!
He recalled the captain’s questions, the urgency in his tone. They were out there somewhere looking for him, looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack, and he hadn’t been able to tell them where he was.
He lifted the flare gun and looked at it, just a vague shape in front of his eyes. That walkie-talkie wouldn’t have had a lot of range. Maybe ten or twenty kilometres at most. The police had to be fairly close.
Close enough?
Todd felt his other pocket. The flares bulged the material of his shorts. Shifting his weight on the bough, he slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out one of the small, bullet-shaped cylinders. Breaking open the flare gun, he ejected the cartridge from the spent flare, blowing through the barrel to clear it of as much water as possible.
‘Do you really want to do this, Todd?’ His voice sounded weak in the darkness. ‘It’s a two-edged sword, you know. The hijackers will be able to tell where you are.’
He recalled the words of his Uncle Harry, an ex-soldier. ‘Never fire from the same place twice, Toddy. Always move after shooting, matey. Fire and move.’
Making up his mind, Todd slipped the flare into the gun and snapped the breach closed. ‘I hope you’re right, Uncle Harry.’
He stood on the bough and tried
to peer up through the darkness. He couldn’t tell if there was open sky above him or not, but decided to take a chance. Maybe the flare would punch through the foliage?
He lifted the flare gun, cocked the hammer, aimed straight over his head and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked in his grip and the flare shot away, a streak of red light that travelled all of two metres before it hit a branch and ricocheted back towards him. Todd ducked as it passed a centimetre over his head and plummeted into the water where it fizzed out.
But the brief moment of light had shown him a gap in the foliage just a metre to his right. He quickly loaded another flare and fired.
This time the flare zoomed into the sky like a laser beam and burst into a bright red star that began to float back to earth. Todd watched it for only a second or two then pocketed the flare gun and climbed down into the water.
Fire and move!
He swam away from the tree as fast as he could.
***
Across the lake the party of police had settled down for the night. Klim was exhausted, but sleep eluded him. He sat in the boat, as close as possible to the marine radio. The volume was turned up full, but there had been nothing for nearly an hour, not even the banter of barge pilots. He strained to hear the young man’s voice on the ether. All he needed to hear from him was a simple direction. West or north? If he knew which way the Mekong Dawn had steamed after she was hijacked, then they might stand a chance of finding her tomorrow. But all he could hear was the whine of insects as they swirled about his head.
One of the men roused from his place by the campfire and walked beyond the circle of light, unzipping his fly as he went. Klim watched him for a moment, his eyes drawn to the movement. Then he settled back into the seat and closed his eyes. If he couldn’t re-establish contact with Mclean, they would have to follow the original plan and search the areas south-west of the lake first. Mclean had said he was near a mountain with antennas on the summit. There were two such mountains to the south of Tonle Sap, and the police commander in Kampong Chhnang had said the only waterways capable of taking a vessel the size of the Mekong Dawn were on the south side of the lake. That was the area the helicopter had been searching. Unless they got better information, he had no choice but to start there.