Pirate - Duncan Falconer [75]
‘Go inside,’ he said.
She felt reluctant to take refuge by herself at first. But he was standing there, so strong and dominant. Like an automaton. A master in control. For a moment she felt like a girl, protected by her man, although he wasn’t hers. It was a momentary feeling of partnership and it felt good, despite everything else.
She opened the small cabin door and sat on the floor inside.
‘I saw some clothes bundled in there. You should find something to put on,’ he shouted.
He watched her find them, pull on a large sweater. She needed to take care of herself, that was for sure. In her state he knew she could quite easily go down with hypothermia. But something had started to bug him. The girl was tenacious, gutsy, but she was also naive, vastly inexperienced for what she was doing. He asked himself why the Chinese Secret Service had selected her. Because if he hadn’t been with her, he doubted she would have escaped. She would most likely already be dead. Whichever, she would certainly be in no state to continue the task she had been given.
He suspected the Chinese system probably had the same problems as his own, as many parallel Western ones. The so-called special operations organisations were never as good as they were cracked up to be. Too flawed, too many departments populated by fools. Too many mistakes, made all the time. Too much holding it together and hoping for the result in the end.
If they got out of this, she would return to her outfit a hugely more experienced operative. But he couldn’t help feeling critical of her basic planning. Her bosses had to be heartless bastards.
He glanced back once again. The ships and the town beyond had become a single glow, the individual lights hard to pick out.
13
The small fishing boat eventually emerged from beneath the dark clouds and the stars appeared above them. Stratton searched for a constellation he knew. Any one of Orion’s Belt, Cassiopeia or the Plough would lead him to the North Star, ultimately what he was looking for. He found the Plough, the end of it pointing directly at the North Star shining brightly in a space of its own. He hadn’t been far off course and made an adjustment to put the star above the point of the bows. The vastness of the night sky was always humbling, especially in the wild and far from civilisation. The stars seemed brighter and more abundant.
For a moment, as he stared up at them, he forgot all his troubles.
He looked behind them again and the glow from the pirate town and its cargo ships had disappeared completely beyond the horizon. He looked ahead at the black sea and a great absence. He couldn’t see a single light in any direction. Few ships would sail within a hundred miles of the Somali coast any more. And many of those that did preferred to scorn navigation lights in favour of remaining invisible to the evil eyes of the sea hunters.
The girl, who had put on several extra layers of dirty clothing to keep out the chilly night air, lay curled up in a ball, halfway inside the cabin, her head resting on a bundle of clothes, her eyes closed. Fast asleep.
Stratton felt good having slept during the day. He was hungry but ignored it. He had enough energy to keep going for days without food. It hadn’t been the first time he’d had to fast on an operation.
The longer he stayed in the business, he knew the greater the chances were of experiencing a disaster he wouldn’t survive. Stratton had often been lucky and that wasn’t a good thing to rely on. He wondered how often Hopper thought he had been lucky in the past. It could just as easily have been Stratton’s fate. The regrets piled up in his head. Leaving without Hopper. Not being able to kill Sabarak. The lingering doubt he had about Hopper and about whether he had succeeded in killing his own partner. The possibility that the man could be experiencing a living hell at that moment. Guilt flooded through Stratton once again and any feeling of relief he had of escaping that foul country withered.
He would have to report everything to SBS operations, exactly