He replayed the events of an hour before. Five minutes of madness. Nothing had been gained, except for the loss of innocent lives. Their attackers had not allowed for armed resistance. Clumsy and brutal, they too had paid with their lives. By accident or design they had rammed the trawler in attempting to draw alongside, and holed her just above the waterline. And now, in the rising seas, they were shipping water. If the storm that threatened should break, there was every chance they would sink.
He felt an arm slip through his and looked down to see Ny peering up at him. The deck, he realized suddenly, was deserted. The others had slipped away in silence to take cover under the awning or in the wheelhouse, where the Chinese doctor had set up a makeshift hospital to treat the wounded. From below came the sound of men working in the hold to try to patch the breach in the hull. The trawler dipped sharply, and a huge wave broke across her bows. The spray drenched Elliot and the girl.
‘Sometime, Mistah Elliot,’ she said seriously, shouting above the wind, ‘people need someone. Just to hold. Just to be there.’
Did she mean him, or her? He took her in his arms and held her as the thunder crashed overhead, and a great fork of lightning turned darkness to light.
The storm broke with a terrifying ferocity, clouds three thousand metres deep, forming vertical air movement up to one hundred and fifty kilometres per hour. Great white-topped waves gathered into towering walls of water that broke, repeatedly, over the trawler, threatening to engulf her. The captain fought to keep his craft head-on to the wind. But it was an impossible task. The forward hold filled rapidly with water, despite the efforts of the refugees, and the boat yawed and slewed hopelessly under the furious onslaught of the storm.
The awning was torn away in the first hour, and the wheelhouse windows smashed by the force of the waves. It was impossible to stay dry, to cook, to do anything but be sick, and seek whatever shelter or security could be found. Most of the refugees lashed themselves to the deck, or the rails, or crammed into the wheelhouse. Not one of them believed they would survive. Death was inevitable.
For fifteen hours the storm vented its unrelenting anger upon them, retribution for their daring to seek escape in a world where freedom is as rare a commodity as wealth — a gift granted only to a few. Each time they plunged into yet another chasm opening up beneath them, it seemed impossible that they could climb back out. Miraculously, the very force which had drawn them down would throw them up again, a few moments of optimism before another trough of despair. One could not fight such power. Surrender was the only option.
It was the early hours of the following morning before, finally, the storm abated — a gradual process as though the sea had slowly tired of failure, fatigued by its efforts, anger spent. The trawler, which had slipped out of the harbour at Rach Gia forty-eight hours before with such optimism, was battered, bruised and slowly sinking. Listing badly to starboard, the forward hold was almost entirely swamped, and the crippled craft made erratic progress through the still heavy swell. Their maps had been ruined, navigation gear in the wheelhouse irreparably damaged. The sky remained black with cloud, no stars available to guide them. The captain, almost dropping from exhaustion, scanned the horizon constantly for their signpost in the sky — the gas flares of the oil rigs off Terengganu. But he saw nothing, and could only keep the boat head-on to the wind, in the hope that this was the prevailing westerly, and not some distortion of the storm.
By the time daylight crept over them from the east, the captain estimated that they would sink in less than six hours. Elliot lay huddled together with Ny, Serey and Hau where they had lashed themselves to a rail in the lee of the wheelhouse. Further weakened by constant vomiting, he could barely move. Two more men had been lost overboard, a child had died, choking on its own sick, and a woman three months pregnant had miscarried during the night.
Gradually, as the sky cleared and the sun beat down to steam-dry the deck and its litter of human cargo, hope germinated again from the depths of despair. Stoves were lit, and the smell of cooking carried on the smoke. Clothes and goods were laid out to dry. Families and friends regrouped. But the spectre of death still moved among them, and few words were spoken.
Elliot drew himself into a seated position, leaning back against the wheelhouse. Serey handed him a bowl of rice and fish. He ate with difficulty, fighting back the urge to let his stomach empty itself yet again. His shoulder ached and his head was pounding. Hau held out a water bottle and he took it gratefully, the warm liquid washing away the foul taste of salt in his mouth. He drained the container and sat gasping for several seconds. ‘I could do with some more,’ he said.
Serey said simply, ‘There is none.’
He looked at the three faces in consternation and felt the stirrings of conscience, like the first warning shiver of a coming cold. ‘What about you?’
‘Your need is greater than ours,’ Serey replied.
A shadow fell across them, and the young doctor who had changed his dressing on the first day out, crouched down beside them, his face grey with fatigue. He laid down his precious bag, kept safe somehow during the storm, on the deck. ‘We must change your dressing,’ he said. The sound of a child crying bitterly for its mother carried on the breeze.
By mid-morning the sun blazed down on the stricken boat. Every scrap of shade was occupied, makeshift tents and awnings contrived from whatever materials were available. The trawler’s nose dipped low in the water. The angle of the deck made walking impossible without holding on, scrambling from one fixture to another. Numerous makeshift rafts were in the process of construction; there was no lifeboat. It seemed such a cruel stroke of fate that they should sink now. The sea was dead calm, a deep, inviting, marine blue. But the only invitation it offered was death.
Elliot fought the pain and the heat and the nausea, to try and complete their raft in time. With Hau’s help he had stripped all the wooden planking from the back of the wheelhouse, and showed Serey and Ny how to lash them together to create a dozen thicker planks, like logs, nine inches deep and eight feet long. With a machete he cut four thick, pliable stakes long enough to overlap the width of the raft deck. He laid them down seven feet apart, and the others manoeuvred the lashed planking to lie across them. It was a simple matter, then, to lay the other two stakes across the top, directly above the bottom two, and lash the notched ends together to hold the raft firmly in place.
They were visited frequently by other groups building rafts, to see how it should be done, and Elliot demonstrated how to make a paddle rudder and mount it on an A-frame at one end of their rafts. In return they provided food and cigarettes. Large areas of the deck had now been ripped up, and there were a dozen rafts at various stages of construction, the trawl nets providing more than enough rope for the purpose.
Elliot was in the process of lashing the last of their belongings to the deck of their raft when a shout came from the forward part of the boat, followed by a chorus of voices raised in excitement. Elliot looked across as Ny scrambled up the steep slope of the deck to grasp the rail. She gazed out across the sea for a moment, and when she turned back her face was shining. ‘Land!’ she called. ‘There is land!’ And she broke into a babble of Cambodian.
Elliot climbed painfully across the deck to see for himself. There, in the shimmering distance, a dark green line of tropical vegetation broke the horizon. He looked up, and for the first time noticed that there were birds circling overhead.