The Most Dangerous Game and Other Stories of Adventure by Connell

Author:Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Action & Adventure
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2021-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

ALONE IN SHARK WATERS

John Kruse

DOWN IN THE hold, the noise was earsplitting. Every timber, the length and breadth of the Ben Sidi Tajir, seemed to be shrieking in agony. The single hurricane lamp swung sickeningly overhead, swilling its anemic light around in the blackness. Mike Gardener shut his eyes and braced himself against a crate; he felt the ship lift and drop away crabwise in a quick, double movement that sucked his stomach about inside him like water in a goat skin.

The native passengers around him were now fully awake. They were sitting up among the cargo, chattering shrilly, the whites of their eyes showing clearly in the lamplight. There were about twenty of them, traveling freight, like himself, from Ceylon to the Maldive Islands.

The Ben Sidi Tajir was a Maldivian schooner, and her run was between Colombo and the islands. She was a cross between a felucca and a Spanish galleon, and her crew was a ragged bunch of moplas, descended from the old Malabar Coast pirates. There was nothing those moplas didn’t know about the sea. They had smelled the wind coming five hours before it hit the ship. The ship was a full day out of port. There was nothing they could do but keep running and hope to miss it. When the wind was an hour away, they knew by the sky that they didn’t have a chance. It was two in the morning, and Mike was asleep on deck. They had shaken him awake and told him to get below. Then they had dropped the big triangular sail, battened down the hatches and heaved to.

The only passenger accommodation was the hold, and Mike had gone down there wondering what the panic was. He didn’t wonder for long. It was a hurricane.

It hit the mainmast with a shock that went right down into the ship and set up a howl in the rigging that made Mike’s hackles creep. The ship was half empty, and with all her galleonlike superstructure in the stern, she began to roll like a tar barrel.

Mike braced himself with his feet and listened to the grinding timbers and cursed. There were safer ways of getting to the islands than in this relic, but not as cheap; that was the rub. When you speared fish for a living, you couldn’t afford to ride fancy.

He was on his way to the Maldives to try the spearing there. He was planning to fish his way through the reefs, selling his catches as he went—a sort of working vacation. His spear gun lay on the rice sacks beside him, with his fins and mask strapped to the trigger guard. His only other baggage was a pack containing a change of clothing, a dozen harpoon heads and the sixty-foot reel he used for spearing in deep water.

The storm seemed to be getting worse. He could hear the Diesel auxiliary laboring hard in the struggle to keep the ship’s head into the wind, felt the screw race in the air each time she toppled down into a trough.

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