Home Fires

9. ACHILLE’S MIRACLE

Skip was never sure afterward how long he lay in darkness. Perhaps he slept. Certainly he worried, and toward the end he prayed for death.

Perhaps there had been furtive steps; if so, he had not heard them. Something was moving his arms, ever so slightly. Rats? Rats might be gnawing at his fingers; he would, most probably, feel nothing.

There was a new odor, too—the stink of sour sweat? A new sound, soft grunts widely separated. And then the unmistakable sound of someone spitting.

He turned his head, not far but as far as he could. The darkness was unbroken, and at last he said, “Who is it? Who is that, and what are you doing?”

“My—” The speaker had been interrupted by the sound of gunfire, distant but unmistakable, echoing through the hold.

Skip said, “Who’s shooting? Do you know?”

(One more shot, alone, followed at once by a faint scream.)

“I chew rope, mon. My name Achille.”

“Thank God. There’s a penknife, fairly sharp, in my left-hand trouser pocket.”

“I can no reach in, mon. For this they cut my hands.”

Skip sighed. “And you couldn’t open it if you had it. I understand.”

“I talk, no more chew.”

Seeing the wisdom in that, Skip ventured no further questions. When the rope parted at last, he pulled his hands apart, rolled onto his back, and managed to sit up. His feet were still tied.

“I rest mouth,” Achille said. “No more chew.”

Skip nodded absently—a nod Achille could not have seen—and beat his hands against each other, hoping to restore them to life.

Two shots, then a third.

“You lady, mon. This I think.”

“Chelle?”

“Is so, mon. One mon give slip? He tell lady.”

Somewhere nearby, an automatic weapon fired three short bursts.

Skip was fumbling in his pocket with a hand whose pain was just short of excruciating. He found his knife, and managed to open it with his teeth. Some minutes afterward, he and Achille crept away, hiding in shadows from men who were too busy fighting to notice them.

* * *

Skip scarcely heard the captain; his mind was occupied with the captain’s audience, which he had counted. It was a motley group, a hundred and sixty-two crew members and seventy-four passengers—two hundred and thirty-six in all. The crew members were young and muscular for the most part, mostly male, brown, black, and white. Four fat men in snowy tunics were chefs; they looked resolute, but Skip wondered whether they would fight.

“We were determined,” the captain said, “to avoid any showdown before we reached Grenada and had a chance to send the children and old people ashore. Then too, we hoped the Grenadan police…”

The big woman in the middle of the room was a masseur; the captain had whispered it earlier. Skip tried to recall her name. Trinidad? Something like that.

“This changes everything. Mr. Grison broke free with the help of this man, whom Mr. Grison had hired earlier as an interpreter.”

The captain’s gesture indicated Achille, who raised an arm ending in a hooked and pointed device that might almost have been the head of a medieval weapon.

“They had taken his prosthetics, by the way, but we’ve had a machinist fit him with substitutes that should enable him to fight.”

Vanessa was fidgeting in the front row. The sleek little pistol Chelle had insisted on buying for her suited her perfectly, Skip decided: small and bright, with shiny pearl grips. She turned it over and over in her hands.

“As many of you have heard, Mr. Grison succeeded in finding and freeing three of the men who had gone into the hold without authorization.”

As he watched, Vanessa pushed back one of her long sleeves, revealing the spring holster he had nearly forgotten strapped over what seemed to be livid welts.

“Two were too badly hurt to escape. The other three are with us here. Would you like to hear from them?”

There was a chorus of nods and assents.

“Then you shall. Sergeant Kent-Jermyn. Why don’t you go first?”

The sergeant stood, a rangy man of thirty or so with high cheekbones and cropped brown hair. He clasped his hands behind him. “The captain’s putting me on the spot. That’s okay, I’ve got it coming. It was my show. I lined up the others, good soldiers who wanted to fight. Some are dead, or we think they are. Dave and Greg are going to die unless they get to a medic soon. We all had guns, and the enemy got them. That hurts worse than anything they did to me. I can’t speak for Joe and Don, but if you’re willing to go down there, I’ll go with you. With a gun if I can get one, with whatever I can find if I can’t.”

Skip applauded as he sat down; within a second or two, everyone in the room was clapping and cheering.

The captain raised his hands as soon as one or two people had stopped. “Private Bonham?”

A stocky young man with a wide, cheerful face stood. “I’m no hero. I wanna say that first. Sure, I went down there and shot, and I think I got three. One for sure and two probables. Only when the sarge said we had to give up, I just thought my God I might get out of this alive yet.”

He sat—and stood up at once. “What he said about fighting again, that goes for me, too. You’re going to need us. We know how to skirmish and you don’t, and now they’ve got Mastergunner Blue and how many more?”

Skip said, “Seven ex-soldiers, men and women, went down with her. The hijackers say she’s still alive, and that four others are. We don’t have the other names.”

“I got it, sir.” Bonham’s cheerful face was anything but cheerful. “They’ll rape her. Shit, they’ve raped her already, only there’s guys that don’t just wanna fuck. They wanna beat up on the girl. Biting—all that shit.” He paused to swallow. “I came on this boat hopin’ to get laid, sir, and I got it, too. Three times so far. Only I—well, I try to leave the girl happy, you know?”

Skip nodded. “I understand perfectly.”

Bonham sat again, and the captain said, “Have you anything to add, Corporal Miles?”

He rose, taller than Bonham and serious-looking. His short, dark hair was beginning to thin at the temples. “Yes, sir. Quite a bit, I’m afraid. I’ll make it as quick as I can.”

“Go ahead.”

“When I heard that Mastergunner Blue had come down trying to get us out … Sir, I wanted to go down right then. Just me, and I didn’t even have a gun. Sarge grabbed me and Joe helped hold me, or I would’ve done it. It was crazy, and they made me see that. But Mr. Grison here went down alone—”

“Under a flag of truce,” Skip told him. “I went down hoping to negotiate their surrender.”

“So maybe I could’ve done something. I don’t know. Most likely I’d just have gotten killed.”

He coughed. “Nobody’s talked about tactics, so I’m going to. There’s three freight elevators go down there. There’s a couple ladders, too. I saw one when I was down there, and I talked to this lieutenant about an hour ago, Mr. Reuben. He said there are two, one forward and one aft so anybody down there can get out if the elevators lose power. There’s elevators forward, aft, and in the middle—amidships is how they say it. You can get maybe ten guys onto each elevator. Not much more than that.”

He glanced at Kent-Jermyn. “Am I running on too long, Sarge?”

Skip (who had been staring at Achille) said loudly, “Keep talking, Corporal.”

“Thank you, sir. Okay, they’ve got barricades set up in front of the elevators. Only one or two guys at each barricade, but you’ve got to get over the barricades first, and that was where we lost men. The ones who were watching our barricade started shooting, and the rest came on the run. They don’t watch the ladders much, but anybody who tried to go down those would be a sitting duck. So what I say is that if we’re going to rush them, we’ve got to have at least thirty men with guns. Put ten on each elevator and send all three down at the same time. Give me a gun, and I’ll take one elevator.” He sat down.

The captain said, “Thank you. Anyone else?”

A sailor raised his hand. “Most people would take a hour getting down those ladders, sir. Not me and my mates. You’ve seen us on the ratlifts, and I’ve been down there working a hell of a lot. We’d have fifty topmen at the bottom of one of them ladders faster ’n you’d believe.”

Half a dozen others assented.

“Thank you.” The captain’s gaze roved the room. “Does anyone else want to propose a plan?”

No one spoke.

“All right, then. I’m going to meet with Mr. Grison to discuss one. I want you to stay here. Mr. Valentine has been working on the weapons problem. He’ll share out what he has and talk to the rest of you about arming yourselves now, and after the fighting starts.”

It was the tearoom, the room in which Skip and Chelle had conferred with the captain and Vanessa earlier. “I can get us coffee if you like,” the captain said.

Achille nodded with enthusiasm.

Seeing it, Skip said, “Please. And something to eat, if you can manage that.”

The captain made a call. When he had hung up, he eyed Achille frostily. “You don’t need an interpreter when you talk to me. Why did you bring him?”

“Because I realized during the meeting that he had done something that seemed close to impossible. When you sent me down to negotiate with the hijackers, he came with me. He was the one they had sent to tell us about their prisoners, and I thought he might be useful. As he proved to be much later.”

“He freed your hands? I know you said that.”

“Correct. Chelle was attacking while I was trying to get loose, and he told me that one of Kent-Jermyn’s men—Angel Mendoza—had escaped and told Chelle about the rest. Just now it struck me that he must have gone back up here while I was lying in the hold in the dark. He hadn’t known that Mendoza had talked to Chelle when he showed me his list of names—he would surely have mentioned it. But he knew it when he freed me. Obviously, he hadn’t been hiding in the hold all that time, which was what I had assumed.”

Skip turned to Achille. “You were in the freight elevator with me. I went out with my hands up, and that was the last I saw of you. Where did you go?”

“Up here, mon. Is big drum in elevator.”

“A big stainless beverage drum. Yes, I remember.”

“I hide back of him. When they take you away, I go back up. Talk lady.”

The captain said, “How did you get back down there?”

“I slide in air pipe, mon.”

Skip said, “You would have had one hell of a fall if the hold had been empty.”

Achille shrugged, and the captain said, “It isn’t. We’ve supplies enough to get us to Melbourne even if we run into a good deal of bad weather.”

“I was hoping,” Skip said slowly, “to get something we could use. As it is…”

The captain said, “We send ten fighters down in each elevator, and send the topmen down the ladders at the same time. Or we wait until we reach Grenada—and pray to God we don’t run into storms. You want to do the first, and I want the second. That’s what we have to thrash out.”

Gloomily, Skip nodded. “Thirty armed men and women in the elevators, plus the topmen on the ladders. Say thirty down each ladder. How many guns have we got?”

“Twenty-one, plus your pistol and your machine gun. So twenty-three altogether.” The captain’s face looked longer than ever. “You’ll be on one of the elevators?”

“Certainly. You’re counting Chelle’s mother’s little pistol?”

“I’m counting everything, including my own gun. We gained thirty-one in the initial fighting—I’m including your machine gun. I had six in the arms chest in my cabin, making thirty-seven. Your Chelle and Virginia had two more, making thirty-nine. We lost eight when that sergeant and his men went into the hold without authorization, leaving thirty-one. We lost eight more when your Chelle went down as well, leaving twenty-three.”

“Chelle had her own gun,” Skip said wearily.

“I’m counting that. She took seven other soldiers and former soldiers with her, giving the hijackers another eight guns.”

When Skip said nothing, the captain added, “So twenty-three people who can shoot will have guns, if we follow your plan. That’s what Valentine is telling the group right now. The rest will have knives and clubs, and they will be told to try to pick up guns as the fighting progresses. You may like that picture—”

“I don’t.”

“Nor do I. We could turn out their lights down there. That might help. I don’t know.”

“It might hurt more than it helped,” Skip said. “I think it would.”

“We could block their ventilators, too. That would at least make them uncomfortable.”

“After which they would threaten to kill Chelle if we didn’t—”

There was a knock at the door.

“That’ll be our coffee,” the captain said, and added loudly, “Come in!”

The young officer who opened the door had no coffee. “There’s a boatload of Mexicans alongside, sir,” he said. “They say they’ve come to rescue us.”