Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

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.