The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Page 37

  A shadow appeared in the doorway. Elliot looked up to see a squat, ugly face contorted by fear and rage. The man was small, thickset. His brown shirt was torn and stained black with blood. A dirty white rag tied around his forehead was speckled with red above murderous eyes. In his hand he carried a long-bladed knife. As he came at Elliot, his voice rose in a blood-curdling howl, the blade flashing over his head. Elliot fell back, fumbling desperately for the pistol in his holster. It snagged on his belt as he tried to draw it out. The shadow of death loomed over him. He could smell the man’s sweat. A gun roared in the confined space, blotting out all other sound, and the dead weight of his attacker fell forward, pinning Elliot to the floor.

  Elliot was again crippled by pain, unable to move. A hand tugged at the shoulder of his dead assailant and pulled the body aside, and Elliot saw the captain crouching over him, a revolver in his hand. He helped the Englishman to sit up, and Elliot finally freed his pistol.

  From the deck, another burst of automatic fire raised further screams. The captain scampered across to the cabin door and peered cautiously out. He ducked back in at once, his face pale with fear. He shook his head. Elliot pulled himself up on the wheel and snatched a quick look from the window. In the grey light of the dawn he saw another, smaller, fishing boat pulled up alongside. A boarding party of more than a dozen men fanned out across the deck, wielding daggers, marlinspikes, cudgels and hammers. Several bodies lay, prostrate, near the awning over the forward hold. The shadowy figures of rudely awakened refugees ran forward and aft, trying to escape the ferocity of their attackers. Blades rose and fell, glinting in the growing light. From the cover of the awning came another burst of fire. Two men crashed through the forward hold and down into the belly of the boat.

  Elliot ducked down and glanced quickly round the cabin, eyes darting into every dark corner, before he spotted his pack, and his M16, stowed beneath his bunk. He slithered across the floor and grabbed the rifle. The captain still crouched by the door, afraid to move.

  ‘Lights!’ Elliot hissed. ‘How do you switch the fucking lights on?’

  The captain looked back at him blankly. Elliot pointed at the ceiling lamp in the cabin. The Chinaman looked at the lamp, brow furrowed in consternation, before it came to him what Elliot wanted. He darted across to the control panel at the wheel, waited for Elliot’s nod and flicked a switch.

  Lamps on the wheelhouse roof flooded the decks with light, creating an immediate sense of unreality, mock carnage played out on a pantomime stage. Elliot sidestepped from the door, like a player from the wings, and saw startled faces, caught in the unexpected glare, turn towards the wheelhouse. He released half a dozen short bursts of fire, picking his targets. Six men fell. Another burst came from the awning and two more men hit the deck. Of the remaining boarders, one leapt overboard and three vaulted the rail in a desperate attempt to get back to their boat. But the other vessel had already drifted clear, engines gunning, propellers churning, attempting to get away. All three landed in the water, splashing frantically, knowing that death was only seconds away. Elliot picked them off with single rounds.

  A strange silence followed, broken only by the wailing of a child. A pulley hanging from the end of a rope swung back and forth against the swell. Elliot scanned the deck for McCue. He shouted, ‘Billy!’ No response. A movement caught his eye as a crouching figure emerged from the shadow of the awning. It was Hau, wild-eyed and trembling, clutching his Kalashnikov. One by one anxious faces emerged from the darkness behind him.

  A hand touched Elliot’s shoulder. He turned to find the captain nodding towards the port side of the boat. He followed the Chinaman’s eye line, and saw the arm of a torn khaki tunic draped over the winch cable, a bloody hand dangling from its sleeve. He jumped down from the wheelhouse and hobbled across the forward deck, stepping over bodies. As he drew nearer, he saw McCue lying on the far side of the winch wheel, and he broke into a run. A marlinspike stuck out from the American’s chest. There were several gaping knife wounds in his neck. Blood had spread into a large thick pool on the scrubbed wooden deck. His eyes were open, staring blindly, the face reflecting, in its moment of dying, a look of surprise. Perhaps he really had believed in his own immortality. He seemed smaller in death than in life.

  Elliot stooped to pick up McCue’s discarded M16 where it had fallen. The feeder mechanism was jammed. He turned, in a moment of sudden fury, and hurled the useless rifle out over the rail, through the salt spray, a yell of sheer frustration ripping from his throat; a gesture of futile defiance – as if it were possible, somehow, to take revenge on death. He turned back to face the small group of refugees who had gathered round, and saw Ny and Serey and Hau among them. ‘We were so nearly there,’ he said. But their faces were blurred and he couldn’t see that they were weeping for him, too.

  *

  The wind and spray whipped their faces as the trawler ploughed bravely on through rising seas. The forward awning flapped and strained at the ropes which held it. The sky was thick and dark with cloud so low you felt you might touch it. They stood in silence as, one by one, they buried their dead; bodies wrapped in sheets slipped over the rail to be swallowed for ever by the black angry waters of the South China Sea. Six refugees, including a child, and one American a long way from home. Tears were lost in the rain that fell now in sudden squalls.

  Elliot watched as McCue’s slight frame, wrapped in its makeshift shroud, slid into the water. It barely made a splash. He remembered the night at the klong house; McCue’s surly and suspicious disposition, the pretty, open face of the Thai girl he had married. Sweet and sour. The baby in the back room beneath the mosquito net. A mother without a husband, a son without a father. Elliot had entered their lives and stolen their future. Ironic, he thought, that he should be the one to survive.

  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.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Half-filled cardboard boxes stood around the living room. Clothes lay draped over chairs. Piled in twos and threes, drawers containing the letters, jewellery, diaries and bric-a-brac that one collects over nearly forty years were stacked in the middle of the floor. Lisa sat cross-legged in front of the fire sifting through her mother’s things, deciding what should go to Oxfam and what should be consigned to the cardboard boxes.

  The house was haunted by memories, and these were the last tangible reminders; mother-of-pearl hair clasps with strands of her hair still caught between the teeth; a pile of scratched Elvis Presley singles; a box of black and white photographs of her mother as a child during the war years. These were all that remained of an unremarkable and unhappy life. A sad and meaningless legacy, to be wrapped in newspaper and packed away in boxes, as her mother had packed away all memories of her husband in an attic trunk.

  Lisa heard the sound of hammering from the front garden. She crossed to the window. A young man from the estate agent was knocking a FOR SALE sign on a pole into soft earth on the garden side of the wall. A light drizzle blurred the glass. She turned from the window and winced a little as the pain in her ribs reminded her of things she would rather forget. She was comforted by the thought that this memory, too, would fade with the pain.

  She picked her way across the floor and sat at the table. Before her, spread out on the cloth, were all the cuttings of the court-martial, and her parents’ wedding photographs. She had read and reread every word, examined every detail of every picture. She looked again at the press photographs of her father, and traced the line of the scar on his cheek lightly with her fingers, smearing the newsprint.

  However hard she tried, she found she could not recall with any clarity the features of the woman who had died for her in Bangkok in the damp basement of a dockland warehouse. Even the face of her mother had receded to the backwaters of her memory. There were, she supposed, always photographs to remind her, but these she could hide away in boxes in the attic. It was her father’s face that remained etched on her memory. It was his face she saw when she closed her eyes at night, though she had glimpsed him only once, sheltering beneath a tree at her mother’s funeral.

  Bangkok was a million miles away. It belonged to another existence, to a person she had been only briefly. Soon London, too, would be just a memory, along with the house. It was possible to put everything away, or behind you. It was possible to be someone else, the sum total of all those people you had been, but different from any one of them. It was possible to start again, to build a new life. If only . . .

  Her gaze re
sted again on the photograph of the young man in dress uniform grinning shyly by her mother’s side on the church steps. She wished she could hate him for what he had done to her. She wished she could have met him, if only to dislike him. She wished at least she had got somewhere near the truth. Perhaps then she could have forgotten.

  She sat for a long time gazing into the flames of the gas fire, before reaching a decision. She drew the phone towards her and dialled for a taxi.

  *

  Blair led her through to the room at the back, and the view over the river. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,’ he said. It had been less than a week since the doctor had declared her fit enough to return home. He took her coat.

  ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. I needed to talk.’ She touched the back of the chair she had sat in for so many hours, talking, listening, learning to trust again, and feeling scar tissue grow over mental wounds. ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course.’ He waved her into the seat. ‘I’d have thought we’d done enough talking to last a lifetime.’ He settled back into his armchair and lit his pipe. It was true, he thought. They had talked a great deal. Mostly about her father, feeding her longing for detail – about his life, where he had been, what he had done. But his instinct told him that she had returned now to ask the questions he had hoped she never would. ‘What have you been up to?’ Perhaps he hoped he could deflect her.

  She shrugged. ‘I’ve put the house up for sale, and I’ve applied for a job. In Edinburgh.’

  ‘Nice city. Doing what?’

  ‘Secretarial. A lawyer’s office.’

  ‘Seems a bit of a waste. I thought you were going back to college.’

  She toyed with the buckle on her belt, avoiding his eyes. ‘I changed my mind. It just seemed like a step back. Anyway, I don’t think I was cut out to be a journalist.’