Pirate - Duncan Falconer [91]
She would rather die than let that happen.
The basket was winched aboard and lowered to the deck. Most of the twenty-five-man crew, a mixture of Western officers and Filipino hands, watched from some part of the bulker. The captain and bridge crew stood on the bridge wings. On the deck, waiting for the basket to descend, stood Bob and the rest of his boys, except the pair who had picked up Stratton and the girl. When they had radioed ahead that the two people were an English Caucasian man and a Chinese woman, the word had spread and everyone wanted to see for themselves.
Stratton and the girl stepped off the side of the basket as it hovered inches from the steel deck. They could practically hear the whispered questions about who they were and what they had been doing in the middle of the Gulf of Aden.
Among the crew there had been the usual round of the more obvious suppositions and explanations: they had fallen overboard; they had been in a small boat that had sunk; they had been in a plane crash. But no one could work out how they’d managed to be speeding through the water having somehow attached themselves to the cargo ship while being pursued by murderous Somalis. At this point the conspiracy theorists among the crew, and there were always several, had a field day. One suggested they were submariners who had ejected from their vessel. Yet the fact that one of them was a girl served to enhance the most popular theory: they were spies of some kind and more probably assassins. The lack of any vaguely intelligent explanation as to what they could have been spying on or who they intended to assassinate did not deter this theory. Even those who declared the whole idea preposterous couldn’t help being lured to it in the absence of anything else.
‘Thanks very much,’ Stratton said with a smile. He held out his hand. ‘John Stratton.’
‘Bob Haldon.’ A firm handshake. ‘Pleasure to meet you.’
There was an awkward pause. They both stood for a couple of seconds. Stratton knew what he needed from the man but he waited. There were some rather obvious bureaucratic requirements.
On seeing Stratton face to face Bob had lost some of his confidence in regard to the questions he wanted to ask. He would have had no problem asking anything of a stranger under normal circumstances. Bob could be very direct. The same would have applied if Stratton had been an ordinary bloke, despite his anything but ordinary arrival. But there was something very unordinary about the man standing in front of him, soaking wet and looking at him with bright-green, intelligent eyes. Bob had never had anything to do with special forces, but he knew one when he saw him, or at least thought he did. This bloke, with his long hair, had the bearing and stature of someone who dealt with extreme adventures of a military nature. Bob felt certain of it. And although he had sneered at the stories going around about the couple, he couldn’t think of any other explanation for such an outrageous arrival.
Bob had had time to think about and time to prepare a few questions. But after a glance at the girl, he realised something. ‘I expect you could both do with a drink and something to eat perhaps,’ he said.
‘A wet would be fantastic,’ Stratton said.
Bob gave his men a glance, like he had discovered something. ‘This way,’ he said, indicating one of his men to lead off.
The girl discarded her sweater and buoyancy aids. The security guys almost tripped over themselves to help her, fumbling with the oversized kit as she removed it. She smiled politely, which only caused an even greater quality of fumbling.
Stratton walked behind the leading guard towards the superstructure. Bob followed a few steps back, leaning close to one of the other security guards.
‘I’ve sussed him,’ Bob said. ‘He said he