Pirate - Duncan Falconer [17]
Hopper pushed Sabarak down into the semi-inflatable and jumped down himself, carrying a couple of bottles of water. ‘I hope the tap water’s potable,’ he said as he untied the bow line.
Stratton straddled the jockey seat and reversed the long and powerful craft away from the jetty. As he did so, a 4×4 slewed up to the harbour gates, followed by another, their headlights shining through the barred entrance. A figure got out of the first vehicle and pulled the gates open. The two 4×4s swept into the harbour and came to a squealing stop. Doors opened. Men got out and started running along the walkway.
Stratton played the throttles. The powerful engines roared and Hopper and the Saudi held on as the nose of the boat came tightly around towards the harbour entrance. The Chinamen had guns in their hands. Stratton heard the loud cracks of the weapons over the revving engines. As he lined up the nose of the boat with the mouth of the harbour he gave the engines full throttle. The boat lurched up on to its plane, the nose dropped and it tore out of the relatively smooth waters of the harbour and went partially airborne as it hit the choppy waters of the Gulf of Aden proper. The gunmen, who had run out of bullets, reloaded but by the time they came up on aim they had nothing more to shoot at.
The sea was heavy and Stratton eased the power back enough to get the boat into its rhythm, rolling over the waves.
‘They might try and follow us,’ Hopper shouted, looking back at the harbour entrance.
‘Good luck to them in this. By the time we get into that lot, they’ll need more than radar to find us.’
Hopper looked ahead and saw where they were heading: due south, straight out to sea, right into a massive bank of low, thick cloud. All sign of the land behind them disappeared as they hit the dark shroud that reached down from the skies to the sea. They couldn’t see a single light, not even a shadow.
Using the compass on his watch, Stratton brought the tip of the boat around to the north-east, and set the speed at what he estimated was a steady twenty knots. With three hundred miles to go that would take around fifteen hours, if there was no tide of course. In the windless haze he had little chance of working out its direction or speed. Only daylight and the lifting haze would reveal that.
Stratton pulled his jacket together against the chilly air. Hopper sat in the bows looking unperturbed. He was a tough bird. But Sabarak was already feeling the damp cold through his thin jacket. He sat between them. He had lost the shemagh he had been wearing and his short, black curly hair framed a thin face, light-brown skin, dark eyes and thick eyebrows that came together above a large, narrow nose. His mouth was accentuated by a thin, manicured line of a beard that gave him a permanent grimace. It was either that or he hated the two Englishmen so much he couldn’t hide it from his face.
As the hours passed the waters became even calmer and the boat motored along with only the occasional dip and bump. After a while the Saudi rolled himself into a ball on the deck and closed his eyes. Hopper hardly moved other than to offer Stratton and Sabarak a drink.
‘Tastes pretty good,’ Hopper said. ‘A hint of chlorine but that’s only encouraging. If we’re not shitting through the eye of a needle by morning, we should be fine.’
Sabarak looked like he wasn’t very well but Stratton suspected he was tougher than he appeared. The Saudi was trying to condition them. Stratton fully expected the man to act ill by the time they arrived in Oman. It might delay his interrogation by a little, but not much. It would be easy enough to determine the Saudi’s true strength and condition.
Hopper raised his head like he had heard something. He turned to look ahead into the darkness. Stratton noticed the sudden interest and watched him. Hopper signalled Stratton to cut the engines. Silence fell over them like a heavy shroud. The swell gently lapping against the inflated rubber sides of the boat became the only sound. Sabarak