Pirate - Duncan Falconer [79]
‘Is that how you will go?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t gotten that far yet,’ he said, picking up a marlin fishing reel and inspecting the thick line. ‘Do you know what the breaking strain of this is?’
She looked at the line in his hand, thinking it to be a strange question to ask when she was talking about their suicides. ‘Around two thousand pounds,’ she decided.
‘That’s right. You do a bit of sea fishing then?’
‘My father. I was brought up in a small fishing village in northern China. Deep sea fishing was his favourite thing to do.’
‘That the Yellow Sea?’
‘Yes. Have you been there?’
‘No.’
‘He used to take me with him. When I was about twelve I caught a shark more than twice my size.’ She smiled at the memory.
‘So why are you thinking of killing yourself?’
The question snapped her out of her reverie. Her smile vanished.
‘Don’t you want to see him again?’ he asked.
She avoided his eyes. ‘I cannot see him again. He did not approve of my job.’
‘You can’t see him because you joined the Secret Service?’
‘It’s a little more complicated than that. He has very strong reasons for disliking what I do. I don’t blame him.’
She seemed to want to tell Stratton something but she was unable to get it out. Stratton chose not to dig. It sounded personal and he had a lot on his own mind anyway.
She watched him pick up another fishing reel harness and check the buckles to ensure they worked. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I have a plan. Not a brilliant one. Very cheeky. With little chance of success. But it’s keeping me occupied.’
She wondered if he was losing it. She could see nothing they could do to prevent the pirates from catching them. Other than suicide.
She looked to their rear again. The dark mass below the light had taken on the form of a boat. She could make out the silhouette of the superstructure on top of a bulky, broad hull.
‘It won’t be long before they’ll be in firing range,’ she said.
Stratton took a moment to check for himself. ‘Yep … You haven’t looked ahead for a while, have you?’
She turned her back to the pirate vessel to see dozens of lights to their front and sides in all shapes and configurations. Each cluster represented a ship of some kind but they were all still so very far away.
‘We won’t reach any of them before the pirates catch us,’ she said.
‘I know. But we must be close to the corridor.’
She felt the optimism in his voice but still couldn’t see why.
He put down the reel and studied the array of equipment he had laid out on the deck. ‘They’ll catch this boat soon enough, but there’s no reason for us to be on it.’
Wherever his mind was, she was nowhere near it. She looked at the collection of life jackets, their use obvious enough. But the rest of the junk made no sense to her. ‘We jump into the sea and let the pirates chase after the empty boat,’ she said. It was all she could think of.
‘That would give us a lot longer to live.’
‘Then we hope one of those boats finds us.’
‘Dawn will be up soon. Now we’re talking hours of survival time.’
‘How many days did you say we could live without water? Three?’
‘Go on. Admit it. You think I’m brilliant.’
She figured it was an option, although nothing more than a delay of the inevitable, another desperate attempt to cling on to life.
‘We might as well get on with it,’ he said. ‘If we leave it too late, they’ll see us in the water. Put on as many life jackets as you can.’
‘They’ll see the bright orange.’
‘Not if we put the sweaters over us,’ he said, pointing to some clothing he had sorted out. ‘They’ll also keep us warm for longer. Truth is we’ll die of hypothermia long before we die of thirst.’
He picked up one of the life jackets, pulled it over his head and tied the lines around his waist and between his legs. She sighed as she watched him. She had come to terms with ending her life there and then and been only minutes away from grabbing a hold of something heavy that Stratton hadn’t already