The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [54]
Ranjit cast one look around, found no human beings on the shore, and let himself down into the warm calf-deep water.
Humans had been on that shore at one time. They had left unmistakable signs of their presence. This was one of those deserted Indian Ocean beaches that once had been used for low-cost (and low-safety) ship breaking. The whole place stank of oil and rust. All up and down the edge of the water were fragments of old hulls, or of discarded bits of ship’s furnishings—chairs, beds, tables—too old and damaged to be worth removing. What was nowhere in sight, though Ranjit knew they had once been there, was any trace of the desperately poor men who had taken the jobs of cutting up the hulls and separating out the commercially profitable sections of engines and drive shafts…the men who had died on that beach, as often as not, from the toxic substances that would have made the job too expensive on any better-policed stretch of coast. How much of those trapped poisons and carcinogens might remain in the sands and waters around him, Ranjit could not guess.
The best way to deal with that problem, Ranjit knew, was to get off that beach as quickly as possible.
There didn’t seem to be any good way of doing that. If there was to be help from local gangs, Ranjit could see no signs of it. Well, there might have been something—a quick glimpse of some shadowy something half-concealed by the brush, but when he looked again, nothing was there.
Wading just behind Ranjit, Dot Kanakaratnam was doing her best to keep hold of four little hands at once without letting go of her loot bags. Finally she gave up and shoved one of the bags at Ranjit. “Here,” she said. “It’s George’s spare clothes. You hang on to them until he shows up; I want to get these kids out of the water.”
She didn’t wait for his consent. Kids attached, she shuffled through the hot sands to the high-water mark, where she stood and looked all around for her husband. Ranjit himself was suddenly the target of one of the pirates, waving his gun approximately at a cluster of the captive crew but clearly shouting at Ranjit. Who wasn’t sure what the man was ordering but thought it was not likely to be anything he wanted to do. So he bobbed his head as though in agreement, while turning and running, as fast as he could, around the stern of the beached ship. He didn’t stop until he was out of sight of the pirate….
That was when he heard the first distant, mournful hooting.
It was a scary sound, not musical exactly but reminiscent of the background to a horror film, as the undead begin to clamber out of their coffins. Nor was he the only one who heard it. Up on the beach a pirate who had flung himself to the sand, panting with the exertion of getting there, sat up and looked wonderingly around. So did another pirate, and a couple of the crew, all sitting or standing and trying to see where the sound had come from.
Then Ranjit saw them, a string of distant aircraft coming toward them from the sea. Helicopters. At least a dozen of them, and every one fitted with curious soup plate–like disks, all rotating with every shift in the choppers’ course to remain pointed at the people on the beach…and the sound grew louder….
And kept on growing louder and louder.
For all the rest of his very long life Ranjit Subramanian never managed to forget that day on the beach. True, there were even worse days that followed it, but those terrifying and degrading moments under the acoustic barrage from the helicopters were bad enough for anyone. Ranjit had never before been