The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [53]
When Kanakaratnam returned, an hour later, he made it explicit. “You need to keep on showing my friends that you’re cooperating with us,” he told Ranjit. “There’s been questions. So look, here’s the thing. We need to get biographical information about every passenger—to know how high to set the ransom—and most of our guys don’t speak any language the passengers can understand. So you can help us out that way, right?”
There was a question in the tone of Kanakaratnam’s voice, but in the realities of the situation Ranjit faced, there was none. It was clear to him that his best hope of survival was to be useful to the pirates, so he spent a few hours of each of the next two days questioning elderly couples—sometimes terrified, more often belligerent—about their bank accounts, pensions, real-estate holdings, and possibly wealthy relatives.
That only lasted for a couple of days, though, just until the trouble struck.
It was still dark when a change in the ship’s noise level woke Ranjit. The comforting sound of the ship’s engines was no longer the languid kerplum, kerplum but had become a fast and frantic beggabegga! beggabegga! Even louder was the yelling back and forth that came from the passage outside his room. When he peered out, he saw members of the original crew trotting as fast as they could toward the exits. Each of the men was carrying two or three suitcases, obviously purloined from the passengers’ staterooms—and, Ranjit was quite sure, stuffed full of passengers’ stolen valuables. Most of the yelling came from one of the pirates, urging the crew members along with a rope’s end. The pirates looked angry and worried. The captive crew members looked scared to death.
Once again it seemed to Ranjit that it would be a good idea to make himself useful. He backtracked the bag carriers to one of the ship’s stairwells, where other crewmen were throwing stolen bags down to his level. As Ranjit was about to pick up a couple of the bags to carry, he heard a childish voice calling his name, and when he looked up, Dot Kanakaratnam and her brood were coming down the steps toward him. All of them, even the tiny Betsy, were carrying a share of the loot, and Tiffany was full of information. An hour or two earlier, one of the pirates had spotted what looked like ship’s lights far astern. “But nothing showed on the radar,” Tiffany informed him excitedly, “so you know what that means?”
Ranjit didn’t, but he was capable of a decent guess. “A naval vessel with stealth antiradar?”
“Exactly! We’re being followed by some destroyer or something! That means we can’t make it to Somalia anymore, so we’re going to have to beach this ship somewhere—I guess it’ll be India or Pakistan, probably—and then just disappear into the woods. Up on the bridge they’re working the radio now, trying to arrange for one of the local gangs to help us.”
“And why would a local gang of crooks want to do that, when they can just take the loot away from us?” Ranjit asked.
But the children didn’t even try to answer that, and Dot said only, “Come on. Let’s get some of this stuff down to the departure place.”
Once everything worth stealing had been lugged to the B deck exit, there was nothing useful for any of the pirates to do. They mostly wound up on one of the outside decks, worriedly scanning the horizon for some trace of their radar-blind pursuer, or even more worriedly studying the horizon ahead for a glimpse of where the ship would be run aground.
There wasn’t actually much to see but water. If there was another craft or point of land anywhere near them, it did not reveal itself to Ranjit. Around noon he tired of the sport, went down to find something for lunch, and then returned to throw himself onto his bed. He was asleep in minutes….
And then awakened again when a violent metallic screeching and a rocking and bouncing motion that almost threw him to the floor told Ranjit they had arrived.
Then the ship was