* * *
A few minutes later, as they watched the ship finally go down, the drifting mass of floating people started to gather, organizing around the three inflatable life rafts they had managed to throw free before their ship sank.
As the crew helped each other aboard the rafts, a part of James told him that they were not out of the woods. His body continued going through the motions of helping his crew up and into the rafts, but in his heart he knew what must come next.
It started as suddenly as the first attack had, but the laser had no steel to contend with here, so instead it simply sliced straight across each of the life rafts in turn. Anyone already on board was cut cleanly in two, or worse, a couple of poor souls had their legs or arms partially severed, screams pouring from their mouths as the blood should have poured from their instantly cauterized limbs.
The panic and fear began afresh as everyone started swimming for their lives. But the harder they swam, the faster it found them, silencing them one by one. The beam was tracking down any movement, and the more frantic your flailing the sooner death came.
James and Laurie’s eyes connected one more time across the water before she saw him cut down by the unseen, merciless blade, his head simply exploding in white flame like a match being lit, steam leaping from around his still moving shoulders.
“Run, Neal, hide,” she sobbed into the night, as hell raged around her, “don’t ever mention this to anyone. They’ve come for us.” she said desperately, her eyes turning skyward as death found her.
The sun forced its way in through the woefully inadequate curtains like an unwelcome party guest, filling the room with an ever growing heat to match the stifling humidity. Neal alternately stood, fidgeted, glared at the silent radio on the bed, or paced back and forth in the small, dusty guest room, stopping at each turn to look out the window to the busy alley just below.
Madeline sat on the bed, not looking at the radio at all, like she was avoiding eye contact with a regretful one-night stand.
“I’m starving,” said Neal, “we can’t sit in here all day.”
Madeline sighed, “I know, I know. I just thought we said we were going to talk further in the morning, why haven’t they beeped us, or answered our pages?”
Neal paused before answering, “I’m sure they are just dealing with the crew and getting the ship back here as soon as they can. James said they would be back in port this afternoon. I’m sure we’ll hear from them soon.”
It was nearly eleven, and they had not left Madeline’s room all morning, or strayed from the SurFeR that sat on her bed. Madeline had insisted on taking the radio to bed with her after they had all signed off, in the hope that James would take a moment to call her later on.
“How about this?” suggested Neal, “The radio is fully charged, I’ll tuck it in my bag and we’ll head to the market and get some food. If they buzz us while we’re there we can be back here in a couple of minutes.” he looked at her, but she did not look up from her seat on the bed.
He kneeled in front of her and took her hands in his, seeing in her face the concern and fear that he was refusing to acknowledge in himself. “Hey, come on.” he said softly, “We’ll both feel better if we get some food.”
She nodded, giving in meekly, and they both stood. Unplugging the radio from its charging cable, he placed it in his small messenger bag and they headed for the door.
* * *
They sat in silence in the shade of a bleached old Coke umbrella, eating freshly cooked mushroom bhajis and sipping mango lassi. The heat of the summer in southern India was profoundly oppressive, and they felt it coat them, like a hot, damp blanket clinging to every inch of their skin.
Madeline eventually broke the silence, “Neal, you’ve been very diplomatic, but it’s time we started to think about what could have happened to them.”
His eyes connected with hers, his body remaining passive in the heat, and his mouth opened as if to utter another platitude. Then it closed again, a slight sag of his shoulders his only acknowledgment that he was having as much trouble deluding himself as her.
She continued, “There is simply no way James would have forgotten to contact us this morning, and even if he was busy on deck, which I find hard to believe with twenty-five trained navy sailors on board, then Laurie would have had plenty of opportunity to call us instead.”
Neal decided to reiterate a possible option they had talked about when they had sat in her room earlier, “Let’s not forget that they may have simply suffered some mishap with the radio, maybe it malfunctioned, or the batteries went.”
“That is a possibility, but wouldn’t James have used some other method to let us know they were OK?” She looked at him for some kind of reassurance, but he was running low on it too.
“Neal, last night we found pretty good reason to suspect that something has … arrived here from somewhere else.” She still could not wrap her mind around it, but it was becoming steadily easier to say. “We all knew when we were talking about it that there was a pretty reasonable chance that whatever it is may not be friendly.”
She paused, and he saw the next thought coming, watching her steel herself.
“If ‘they’ were watching last night,” she continued, looking at her drink, “don’t you think they would have noticed a ship patrolling the waters where one of their own had landed? They must have gone to vast lengths to hide whatever they are doing here, what wouldn’t they do to keep it a secret?”
For the first time Neal felt what it was like to have someone jumping to conclusions faster than him, and felt some measure of the frustration that General Pickler and his colleagues must have felt when he ran off down theoretical roads in their meetings. He smiled ruefully, knowing he was about to deliberately be as pigheaded as they had always been to him.
“OK, let’s hold on. We are going to need a lot more information before we can jump to conclusions like that.”
She looked at him with the same frustration he must have shown a thousand professors. The difference was that all those teachers had all thought that he was being deliberately controversial, but Neal knew Madeline had no more desire to think these thoughts than he did.
As she went to speak again, they were interrupted by a commotion outside their boarding house down the street. Neal stood and peered down the crowded, dusty road to the small group gathering at its end. He saw the lady who had rented him and Madeline their rooms look down the street at him. He saw her say something to two officially dressed Indian military people standing next to her, and he saw her finger rise and point at Neal. The army men’s eyes followed her outstretched arm, coming to rest on the only white man in the town, and the two soldiers both promptly began to run toward Neal.
He considered running too, he thought about grabbing Madeline’s arm and dashing off down the street, but knew it would be pointless: two white people fleeing in rural India. He thought about saying something to her, warning her, but instead he stared mutely, her eyes posing a question at him and his obvious alarm.
The two men arrived, out of breath, a moment later, one of them replacing the hat on his head that he had held while running.
“Ms. Cavanagh?” he said to Madeline, his English pronunciation good, but stiffly lilted with local accent. She nodded, staring in fear and astonishment at him like he bore the plague, her worst fears trying to surface in spite of her.
“Ms. Cavanagh, please come with us. We have something most urgent to discuss with you.”
She stood, starting to walk in the direction the soldier was indicating with the lack of will of a captured criminal, looking with pleading eyes at Neal. He followed her, suddenly feeling an overwhelming need to protect her.
“What is going on?” he demanded from the soldier. “Where are you taking her?”
“Please, sir, we have some urgent business with Ms. Cavanagh. She will not be harmed. You must let her come with us.”
He tried to think of some reason for them to take him as well, and then blurted, “She’s my sister. If you must take her, I demand to come with you as well.”
The soldiers looked at Madeline, who was nodding emphatically, and then back to Neal. They were in no mood to argue. Their orders were to locate Madeline Cavanagh, who, according to their records had arrived into Kodikkarai with a James Hawkson a few days beforehand.
“Very well, sir, please come with us.” one of them said, indicating a waiting green jeep.
* * *
The two of them sat in stony silence in a small air-conditioned room. The windowless space held one desk, four chairs, and nothing else. It was the first time they had been in air-conditioning since landing, and they felt like they had been pulled from an oven. Steam, Neal noted, was actually rising from their clothes.
But the pleasure of entering the cool office building had been but a moment’s relief from their concerns as they had been led to, and then left in this hopeless room.
After five minutes the door opened and an officer in his mid-fifties entered carrying a folder and a fatherly smile walked briskly through it. He was followed by a younger man with more folders and a notepad, who closed the door while the officer introduced himself.
“Good afternoon, my name is Colonel Patel, of the Indian Coast Guard.” he said as he seated himself across from them. “You must forgive my men for coming for you with no information, I am afraid that must have been quite alarming, but we had little choice, as, in truth, we do not have a great deal of information ourselves.”
Neal and Madeline were confused, but they waited to see where this was going, unwilling to hurry the conversation to its potentially unpleasant conclusion.
The colonel got down to business, “You are Ms. Madeline Cavanagh of the United States?” he asked, acknowledging her nod with a note on a pad. “And you, sir, I am informed by my men that you are Ms. Cavanagh’s brother?”
“Well, no, not really, but we are old friends, and I wanted to make sure I was allowed to come with her.” Neal explained.
The colonel looked annoyed by this irregularity. “And you, Ms. Cavanagh. Are you as keen to have this man present as he clearly is to be here?”
“Yes, definitely, Colonel,” she said emphatically, “Neal is a good friend of mine, and I very much want him here.” Her candid desperation and vulnerability was obvious, and the colonel softened.
“Very well. You may stay at Ms. Cavanagh’s request. May I have your full name for my records, please?”
“Danielson, Neal Danielson.”
The colonel consulted his notes and, finding the name on the same passenger manifest that had linked Ms. Cavanagh with James Hawkson, relaxed his guard a little more.
He looked at them, summoning an air of professionalism, and proceeded, “I am afraid we may have some bad news for you.”
Madeline cracked, a sob flowing from her in a fit, like a held back cough. Madeline was unable to reply for herself, so Neal turned to the colonel even as his arms went around her. The soldier was clearly discomfited by her reaction: it was as though she had been expecting him to say the worst, so Neal prompted him from his silence, “Maybe you could elaborate a little, Colonel?”
“Yes, well, we do not have many details. Last night, or rather early this morning at around 4am, we picked up a distress signal known as an EPIRB from about fifty miles offshore, actually many signals were registered, often a sign of a ship in significant distress.
“A coast guard helicopter stationed about three hours away was immediately dispatched,” he continued, “though we were unable to get any response on any radio frequency. It is the coast guard’s policy to investigate any EPIRB signal, even if no mayday is reported. Better to be safe than sorry.”
He saw that Neal was clearly getting annoyed with his explanation, but he feared the man would not be happy when he heard what little more information the colonel actually had.
“When we arrived on the scene we found very little. Of the multiple signals detected at first, only one remained, and I am very sad to say it was not a survivor, but a single life jacket attached to a bag.”
Neal looked at him, even Madeline stopped crying for a moment, her desperate mind grasping at the lack of concrete evidence that something had actually happened.
“Wait,” said Neal, “where was the
King’s Transom
?”
The colonel shrugged, “We found no sign of the actual ship, but her crew, well, they were …” he struggled to find words. He had seen the photos of what they had found, and it had shaken him to his very core.
He summoned his strength and soldiered on, “It appears there was a severe fire aboard the
King’s Transom
, though caused by what, we cannot tell at this time. Though we could not find the ship itself, the crew were …. I am afraid there were no survivors.”
He did not stop, he did not want to dwell on the image in his mind. He had one piece of information that was not completely terrible, and he wanted to move on to it.
“As I said before, the one remaining EPIRB signal that led us to the site was actually attached to a bag.” he said, and then nodded to his assistant who stood and hurriedly left the room, returning a moment later with a large orange dry bag. Its attached life jacket, striped with soot like the rest of the floating debris and carnage, had been removed.
“You will understand that, for purposes of our investigation, we will have to ask you to stay in the area for the next few days while we complete our investigation. That said, in the absence of the actual vessel, said investigation will be … well … anyway.”
He paused again. After a moment’s silence, he nodded to his assistant who handed the bag to Madeline.
The colonel stood, slowly, saying, “Here it is,” his sober tone displaying how little satisfaction he expected the bag to give them.
“Actually, it was the contents of the bag that led us to Ms. Cavanagh.” he said, pausing for just a second more.
“Maybe I should leave this with you?” he said, finally, and turned to leave. Saying as he reached the door, “We will be just outside. Please let us know if you need anything at all.”