Star Of Africa Part 3

'What are you getting so uptight about anyway? Jesus Christ, you talk as if he was your b.l.o.o.d.y son.'

Ben was silent a beat.

Then said, 'Jeff, he is my son.'

Jeff sat back in his chair, stunned. 'Are you kidding me? How can that be?'

'It just is,' Ben said.

Jeff stared at Ben, scrutinising his face as if he was seeing him for the first time. 'It's obvious, really, when you think about it.'

'Fancy that.'

'He's got your eyes. And your chin. Hair colour too.'

'If that was all he had of mine, it wouldn't be a problem.'

'But now I'm confused. Only a minute ago, you said his parents left him money when they died.'

'That's just what Jude thought.'

Jeff frowned, even more confused. 'So ... his father wasn't a vicar at all.'

'That's the whole point, isn't it?' Ben said. 'I wish he had been. Simeon was a good man. A better one than me, that's for sure.'

'Then ... what about his mother?'

'His mother was his mother. Michaela Arundel.'

'Then you and she-'

'You're the last guy I'd imagine believing in Immaculate Conception,' Ben said. 'Obviously, yes.'

'When did this happen?'

'Uh, at a rough guess, I'd say Jude's age plus nine months ago,' Ben said. 'It was when we were all students together, long before she and Simeon were married. Simeon knew all about it. She never tried to pretend that it was anything other than it was.'

Jeff was staring at him in amazement. 'And what about Jude, does he know?'

'It was agreed to keep it secret from him. He only found out the truth by chance, after they died. It was a bit rocky at first, but he accepts it.' Which wasn't strictly accurate, but it was the best Ben could do to describe their faltering relations.h.i.+p without getting into the painful details. The reality was that they hadn't spoken in well over a year, and Ben could easily imagine more years going by before they spoke again, if ever. The last words his son had said to him still resonated in his mind.

'Oh, just f.u.c.k off, Dad.'

Jeff was still stunned. 'Who else knows about this? Does Brooke know?'

Ben nodded.

'And Boonzie?'

'Him too,' Ben said.

'Then how come you never told me?'

'You were there when I told Boonzie.'

'When?'

'Right after the thing in the Gulf of Finland. Can I help it if you weren't paying attention?'

'I'd just taken a b.l.o.o.d.y rifle bullet in the leg,' Jeff said.

'It hardly touched you.'

'I was unconscious, for Christ's sake.'

'Then you should have woken up. I can't be repeating myself all the time.'

'It's not fair. How come I'm always the last to know these things? How come the others never told me either?'

'Maybe they thought you lacked the emotional maturity to be able to handle it,' Ben said. 'So now you know. And that's why I don't want him joining the d.a.m.n services. The last thing I need is Jude following in my footsteps. Next thing he'll be wanting to do something even more stupid, like get it into his head to try out for Special Forces.'

Back in Ben and Jeff's day, SAS and SBS recruits had undergone separate selection processes; nowadays it was all run together under the joint auspices of UKSF. The few who survived the ninety percent failure rate were then streamed into their different divisions. In addition to the torture of hill marching, jungle combat, parachute, survival, evasion and resistance to interrogation training, Special Boat Service candidates were put through battle swimming and progressive dive tests in order to qualify as Swimmer Canoeists, before ultimately going on to join an operational squadron.

Jeff went quiet.

Ben narrowed his eyes. 'He didn't. Did he?'

'He did. I'm sorry. He went on about it quite a bit.'

'And of course, you didn't try to talk him out of it. Did you, Jeff?'

'Give me a break. He wanted to know what it's like in the SBS. How to apply to get in, what the training involves, what it takes to get badged, the kind of life it is, and all that sort of stuff. What was I supposed to do, refuse to tell him? He could've found most of it out online anyway. All I did was add in a few details. The kind of stuff you'd only know about if you'd been there and done it. I had to give him a proper idea, didn't I? I mean, he asked me, for f.u.c.k's sake.'

'Jesus, Jeff.'

But Ben knew there was little point in arguing. Jude was gone, and as usual, Ben hadn't been there for him. It was the story of their whole relations.h.i.+p, from day one.

'He's got a fire in the belly, Ben. Just like we had at his age. You can't stop him, if that's what he wants to do. Maybe it's in the blood.'

'Yeah. I know,' Ben said. 'That's exactly what I'm afraid of.'

Chapter 7.

Port of Salalah, Oman Two days later When he climbed out of the taxi, still lagged from the long flight, and followed the directions he'd been given through the thirty-degree heat and clamour of the bustling port to where the Svalgaard Andromeda lay moored at the dockside, Jude's first impression was of the s.h.i.+p's sheer enormity. He'd expected it to be large, but checking out images on Google and seeing it for real were two completely different things.

For a few moments, planted on the dock clutching his backpack and surrounded by busy workers running here and there, forklift trucks zapping to and fro and the general noisy activity of the largest commercial seaport in Oman, all Jude could do was boggle at the overwhelming vastness of what was to be his home and workplace for the next little while.

It looked more like a floating city than a boat. Stretching over nine hundred feet from end to end, it was longer than the Trump World Tower in New York laid on its side. The black, rust-streaked sides of its hull towered over the dock with SVALGAARD LINE, the name of America's fifth-largest s.h.i.+pping company, painted in white letters twenty feet high. Most of the vessel was deck, which by the time Jude arrived at port was already in the final stages of being stacked high with cargo by the s.h.i.+p's on-board forty-foot cranes. As he already knew from his web browsing, Andromeda had been built in 2007 and was listed as a Panamax-cla.s.s vessel rated at 4,000 TEU capacity, which meant simply that she could accommodate four thousand twenty-foot-equivalent units of intermodal s.h.i.+pping containers. As he would later learn, the mixed cargo on this voyage consisted of vast quant.i.ties of electrical goods, generators, building supplies, agricultural equipment, tyres, and a million other items due for delivery to the various ports they would be visiting as they cruised southwards across the Indian Ocean on what was known as the East Africa run: stopping off at Djibouti, the Kenyan port of Mombasa and, finally, Dar es Salaam.

'Well, here I am,' Jude muttered to himself. This was it. There was no turning back now. The slight nervousness he'd felt ever since Jeff Dekker had lined him up with this job was intermingled with excitement at the prospect of going to sea for the first time as a real mariner, one of the ABs, short for able-bodied seamen, who crewed the s.h.i.+p along with the engine room team, the mates and the captain himself.

As he walked up the gangway he was met by a ruddy-faced, sandy-haired American wearing an open-necked khaki s.h.i.+rt and a look of hara.s.sed urgency, who briskly welcomed him aboard and introduced himself as Jack Skinner, s.h.i.+p's bosun.

'No time to give you the guided tour right now,' Skinner explained. 'Just do what you're told and try not to get in the way, okay?' Which was fine by Jude, even if the guy's manner was a little short. Jude figured he'd have to get used to that kind of thing if he wanted to join the Royal Navy. Skinner quickly handed him over to an older AB called Mitch, whom Jude guessed to be from one of the southern US states not that he was an expert on accents, but the Confederate flag T-s.h.i.+rt was something of a giveaway. Mitch seemed happy to get a few moments' break from his duties to grab a quick smoke and lead the new recruit to his quarters on C Deck. C Deck was the second floor of the looming seven-storey superstructure towards the rear of the s.h.i.+p Jude had made a mental note to try to use nautical terms like 'stern' that was known as 'the house'. Jude had seen smaller apartment buildings.

'You a Limey, right?' Mitch asked with a gap-toothed grin. 'I sailed with Polaks, Krauts, Gooks, j.a.ppos, Eye-ties, all sorts. Never sailed with a Limey before.'

Welcome to the United Nations. 'Got a problem with it?' Jude said.

Mitch shrugged. 'So what's your story? You don't look like no sailor to me. More like a college boy. Daddy's a lawyer, right? Or a doctor. Wants you to join the family firm and this is your way of telling'm to go screw himself.'

'I'm not a college boy,' Jude said firmly. 'I'm anything but that.'

Mitch grinned again and punched him in the arm. 'Hey, just f.u.c.king with you, man. Lighten up. Betcha I'm right, though, huh? The daddy thing?'

Jude felt like telling him to keep his nose out of his business, but that didn't feel like the best start to a happy working relations.h.i.+p with his fellow crewmen.

'My father's dead,' he said after a beat, and then repeated it, as if somehow he had to make it doubly true. To have lost one father, only to discover another you didn't want to know that had been a difficult and confusing time and he wanted to put it behind him. Closure was the best way. 'My father's dead. So's my mother. There is no family firm. No family at all. Just me.'

's.h.i.+t, man, sorry to hear it.'

'Yeah, whatever,' Jude said, looking around at his new quarters. There wasn't a lot to see. Being the most junior of the crew, he had been lodged in what he suspected to be and later discovered was the smallest and most cramped of the cabins allocated to the ABs. He had no problem with that, however. He intended to enjoy every minute of this adventure to the full. After stowing his backpack in the locker next to his berth, he followed Mitch back down onto the cargo deck and was immediately plunged into the hectic activity of helping to load the rest of the containers on board prior to s.h.i.+pping out.

Mitch, the amiable bigot who liked to poke into people's personal lives, quickly turned out to be not such a bad guy at all, to Jude's relief. 'Don't you mind Skinner,' Mitch advised him as he showed him how to lash down a container to prevent it from slipping in heavy weather. 'He's one mean, tough, hard-a.s.sed sonofab.i.t.c.h and a h.e.l.l of a screamer, but do your job, keep your head down and your nose clean and he won't give you too much s.h.i.+t.' Which was good to know.

'What about the other officers?' Jude asked.

'We don't call 'em officers in the merchant marine. You got Frank Wilson, the chief mate. We just say "the mate". He's okay, I guess. Between you and me, he likes a drink. Starts every trip with a full case of Jim Beam. Catch'm on a good day, you wouldn't know it, but ...' Mitch rolled his eyes knowingly. 'Then you got Diesel, he's what we call the chief. Chief engineer,' he explained for Jude's benefit. 'He's only about a million years old, knows every nut, bolt and rivet of this ol' tub like you wouldn't believe. Guzman, second mate, he's a slob, eats like a hog and he's so full of lard he can't hardly move. The boys call'm the Guzzler, but not to his face, okay? Then you got Ricky Marshall, the third mate. Real straight-up guy. You ask me, he oughta be captain.'

'Got it,' Jude said, making mental notes of it all. 'And what about the captain? What's he like?'

Mitch gave a noncommittal shrug. 'I sailed with Cappy O'Keefe a bunch of times, been loop the loop around the d.a.m.n world together twice, three times, maybe more. He's comin' up for retirement. Ain't the guy he used to be. Spends most of his time in his cabin, writing long emails to his wife back home in Indiana, while he leaves it to Wilson and Skinner to do all the hard work. Then Wilson and Skinner pa.s.s it all down to the rest of us. That's pretty much the system here, kid. Better get used to it. You'll earn your money on board this s.h.i.+p, believe me.'

Jude was unafraid of hard work, which was just as well, because Mitch hadn't been joking. By the time the Andromeda was finally loaded up and ready to set off, Jude was drenched with sweat and fit to drop from exhaustion and his first day on board had barely even begun. He watched from the deck as, to the deep throb of the diesel engines, they made their way out of the port and through the lesser s.h.i.+pping towards open sea. It was a heady feeling for Jude, and tired as he was, he couldn't keep the grin off his face. Before long, the land sank out of sight and they were alone under the vast empty bowl of the sky, with nothing but the deep blue-green waters of the Indian Ocean from horizon to horizon.

The voyage had begun.

And if Jude had known then how it was going to end, he would have dived straight into the sea and started swimming back to sh.o.r.e.

Chapter 8.

Before now, Jude had never been on any kind of boat for longer than a few hours at a time, and he'd wondered about things like ocean sickness. But the Indian Ocean was as smooth as an endless sheet of blue gla.s.s, and after a couple of days he'd found his sea legs and the gentle movement of the s.h.i.+p felt as natural as being on land.

It might take him a little longer to get used to the heat, which was oppressive and humid everywhere except on the outer deck, where it was just scorching. And the three hours' sleep a night, four if you were lucky, took some adapting to as well. No time in the merchant navy to lounge on deck with a gin and tonic in your hand, admiring the view and counting dolphins. That was for sure.

He was getting to know his way around a little better, as well as getting to know his fellow crewmen. The mess and canteen were situated down on A Deck, two floors down from his quarters, where a lot of tired and hungry sailors would gather to recuperate from their s.h.i.+fts, to eat, smoke, gulp gallons of coffee and shoot the breeze. There were fourteen ABs aboard including himself although, as far as he could see, some of them didn't really seem to be that able-bodied at all after so many years at sea. A number of the sailors were in their sixties, work-hardened and leathery as h.e.l.l but beginning to show the strains of a lifetime of physical hards.h.i.+p. For many of them, this was the only life they'd ever known, and Jude quickly learned that it was one that seemed to attract some very colourful characters. The casual, totally non-uniform dress code among the ABs wasn't exactly what he could later expect to find aboard a Royal Navy s.h.i.+p, either. Tatty sweats.h.i.+rts, faded jeans, military surplus gear, anything went. Steve Maisky, an ageing hippy who for reasons best known to himself insisted on being known as 'Condor' and claimed to have been hopping s.h.i.+ps ever since dodging the draft for Vietnam in 1972, jangled with beads and bangles and had grey hair in a ratty ponytail that hung halfway down the back of his Grateful Dead T-s.h.i.+rt. He was benevolently disapproved of by Lou Gerber, a white-bearded ex-US Marine five years his senior, who strutted about in khakis and combat boots with a shapeless fatigue hat jammed on his balding pate to protect him from the sun.

Jude had developed a liking for Mitch and thought he could learn a lot from him. During work and breaks, the older man regaled him with all manner of colourful and sometimes improbable tales from his twenty-odd years in the merchant navy. Mitch had seen the world, all of it. There was, he claimed, not a bar or gambling den or wh.o.r.ehouse in any port town on the face of the planet that he hadn't frequented and in some way left his mark on. He'd been thrown out of many, barred from several. He'd been carried back comatose to his s.h.i.+p on a wheelbarrow more than once or twice. He'd been knifed in the ribs over a card game in Sri Lanka and shot at by a disgruntled pimp in Hong Kong. He'd won more bare-knuckle fights and arm-wrestling bouts than he'd lost, made a ton of money on them, too. He'd had more women, and probably fathered more children, than he could count or remember. It had been, he told Jude with a contented grin, one h.e.l.l of a crazy run and it wasn't nearly over yet.

'What the h.e.l.l for?' he asked when Jude told him of his own ambitions to join the Royal Navy. 'Do yourself a favour, partner. You don't wanna get in with that bunch of tight-a.s.sed dips.h.i.+ts. You wanna sail the world, Jude, then this is the way to do it. There is,' he added grandly, 'no better life for a free man than this one right here.'

'A free man?'

'You ain't got no wife back home, do you? Not at your age, right?'

Jude shook his head. 'Girlfriend. Nothing that serious.' The truth was, he was pretty certain his thing with Helen, who'd been a year below him at university, was dead and buried now that he'd dropped out of his studies. Her parents disapproved of his 'dissolute ways' and were a little too much of an influence on their daughter. He still wore the little bracelet she'd given him, a string of beads that spelled her name. He hadn't had the heart to throw it away.

'I'm not one to go givin' advice,' Mitch said, happy to go on dispensing it freely. 'But don't go gettin' yourself saddled. I finally had the good sense to walk away after number four. Lord knows there ain't no ocean as cold nor no mountain on this earth as hard as a woman's heart. These days I keep the b.i.t.c.hes strictly on a payin' basis, if you get my drift.'

'I'll take your word for it,' Jude said, with a smile.

For all that he was making friends and feeling more comfortable by the hour in his new environment, Jude wasn't so sure about all his fellow crewmen. In particular, a chisel-faced, greasy-haired ex-biker called Scagnetti, who wore a grimy wife-beater T-s.h.i.+rt to show off his muscles and tattoos, and whose moods fluctuated between being silent and sullen, then argumentative and p.r.o.ne to lash out at the slightest provocation. He had been a Harley mechanic somewhere down in New Mexico before he'd gravitated to stealing choppers, nearly got caught and fled to sea. Everyone had a story, it seemed.

Mitch had already warned Jude not to get too close to Scagnetti. 'Dude's a decent enough mariner but there's something ain't quite right up here' tapping a finger to his head. 'Watch'm, is all I'm sayin'.'

Another crew member Jude quickly warmed to was Hercules, the s.h.i.+p's cook, a larger-than-life black man with a laugh that could vibrate the hull from stem to stern, and who always wore the same frayed old army jacket that was spattered with a thousand grease stains. Hercules's constant companion in the galley, the mess, and everywhere else, perched on his shoulder, was an evil harpy of an African grey parrot that went by the name of Murphy and possessed an even more scatological vocabulary than most of the sailors. Not everyone appreciated the bird, especially after being screeched at repeatedly and at maximum volume to get the f.u.c.k out of here! its favourite expression.

'If that vulture of yours s.h.i.+ts in my plate, I'm going to chew its G.o.dd.a.m.ned head off and spit out the beak,' complained Gerber, absolutely serious. Which, Hercules later confessed to Jude with a grin, earned Gerber a dollop of green parrot excreta mixed in with his gravy. Gerber either didn't notice, or thought it was an improvement on the usual slop the galley served up. Jude had to secretly agree that, whatever else Hercules might be, he certainly was no chef.

Strangely, Murphy never swore at Jude. On the third day of the voyage, the bird even flapped off its master's shoulder to swoop across the mess and perch on Jude's. 'First time he's ever done that,' Hercules said, mightily impressed, while Jude sat very still and hoped the thing wasn't about to rip his earlobe off with its nutcracker beak.

'Murph has real good taste in people,' Hercules chuckled while pouring Jude a mug of stewed coffee later that day. 'If he don't take kindly to a guy, that's how I know they's an a.s.shole. He's like my early warnin' system.'

'Everyone seems okay to me,' Jude said, playing the diplomatic newbie. 'Mostly, anyway.'

'Ain't such a bad bunch crew on this run,' Hercules said. 'Just that lousy p.r.i.c.k Scagnetti and the three a-holes up on D Deck.'

D Deck was where the engineers and mates had their slightly more comfortable quarters than the common crewmen, and for a moment Jude thought Hercules must be referring to some of them.

'Nah, man. Talking about our esteemed f.u.c.kin' pa.s.sengers. Bird don't think too much of them neither, believe me.'

This was the first Jude had heard of pa.s.sengers on board. No mention of it had been made by anyone until now, which struck him as being odd. 'I didn't realise merchant s.h.i.+ps carried anybody but the working crew.'