Lovers of War by Barlay Stephen

Author:Barlay, Stephen [Barlay, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2016-11-01T23:00:00+00:00

IX. Live Bait

The Dirty Lady limped into Singapore harbour for urgently-needed repairs. Four weeks later she was fully rejuvenated in every respect but looks, because all forms of rust protection had been scrupulously avoided as if she were allergic to paint. During the first sea trial, Bushy Cooper behaved like a child on the loose among the Christmas displays of a toy shop. He could make the Lady’s new, souped-up engine splutter and cough at will, producing the pitifully erratic sounds of a genuine refugee boat. The new radar and radio were camouflaged in battered beer crates.

Cream and Fred the Vet had been determined to be fair to all throughout the four weeks on shore: they distributed their spending power evenly among the bars and whorehouses of the port and the backwaters of Orchard Road. Stanton was busy trying to replenish the depleted crew of the ship. Night after night he carried out a one-man dredging operation in Singapore’s muddy underworld, and eventually he dug up two illegal immigrants from Vietnam, one of them old and emaciated enough to take the lead in the well-tried SOS show. But the real prize of his recruitment campaign was a gaunt, taciturn Irishman, who took a long, long minute to choose a name. ‘Call me Sean,’ he said when he was introduced to Deacon. Call-me-Sean came complete with access to black market ‘army surplus’. His conversation thrived on two sentences — ‘no go’ and ‘don’t mind if I do’ — that would soon be mastered and much favoured by all the Vietnamese on board.

‘We need artillery,’ Deacon told him.

‘No go.’

‘Try it. Just don’t get caught.’

The Irishman shrugged. It was as good as a don’t-mind-if-I-do.

Two days later he delivered a bazooka in mint condition, an army-issue M-79 grenade launcher, an industrial nail gun that would fire three-inch nails with some accuracy at sixty yards, and an electric prodder that was suitable for crowd control as well as stunning cattle. It was difficult to see how some of these came under the heading of ‘army surplus’, but nobody was keen to question call-me-Sean too closely, and the crew chuckled unstoppably when Cream exclaimed, ‘We’ll nail the bastards.’

Deacon telephoned Helen in Hongkong, and she persuaded Inspector Kay to open a special bank account that would channel Deacon’s share of the ‘profits’ to the refugee camps. During their last week in Singapore, it was only by accident that Cream found out about the charity arrangement. ‘You should have told me,’ he said. ‘I might have chipped in.’

‘Why?’

‘Why not?’

The only answer to that was to laugh or shrug. Deacon chose to do both.

The four months that followed developed random marauding into a regular industry. At first it appeared to be a series of coincidences that they had been held up so frequently by pirates of various nationalities, but soon they would see that it was not a matter of luck. Whenever they stopped to help Vietnamese boat people with food, water or diesel, they heard sickeningly repetitive tales of horror.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.