The Last Theorem

12 JUDGMENT

Ranjit didn’t see much of the actual bloodshed, being totally absorbed by his own humiliatingly nasty problems. Apart from the fact that he felt as though a herd of mad swine had been stampeding through his digestive system, the subsonics had, as they were programmed to do, caused him voluminously to foul himself. He had not done anything like that since early childhood, and he had forgotten how repulsive a process it was.

He managed to strip off the soiled garments and stagger back into the warm wavelets, using the least filthy of his own clothing to scrub himself nearly clean. After that he had a plan. He looted the bag of George Kanakaratnam’s clothing that Dot had given him. There were no shoes in the bag, and Ranjit chose not to put on another man’s underwear, but all the rest was there: slacks, and pullover shirts, and thick woolly socks that Ranjit hoped might protect his feet from the sharp-edged pebbles of the beach. Then he stepped out of concealment to take stock of the situation.

It looked bad and smelled worse. The choppers had landed and positioned themselves in orderly ranks, and now they disgorged at least a hundred armed troops—probably either Indian or Pakistani, Ranjit guessed, though he was not familiar enough with either to guess which. Whoever they were, they had efficiently separated the former cruise ship population into four clusters. Two were made up of the former passengers, one group for men, one for women, and what the clusters amounted to were enclosures made up of hastily strung-up sheets along the water’s edge. Half a dozen soldiers were handing out towels and blankets to the passengers who had cleaned themselves as much as they intended to. Ranjit noted that the soldiers helping the female passengers were female themselves; in the uniforms, wielding their weapons, they had all looked interchangeably sexless.

A couple of dozen meters down the shore twenty or thirty men and women, unguarded, were doing their best to clean themselves as well. They didn’t have anyone to hand them towels, but a stack of the things was available for the taking on the beach. Ranjit could identify them as rescued crew by the few he recognized…but he actually would have known who they were anyway, by the rapturous looks of relief these saved-at-the-last-minute souls wore on their faces.

There was one other cluster. These had not been allowed to clean themselves or change their clothes. They lay flat on their faces, fingers locked atop their heads, and they were guarded by three or four of the soldiers, weapons at the ready.

There was no doubt which group they represented. Ranjit scanned the prostrate forms, but if any of the Kanakaratnams were there, he could not recognize them from their backs. None looked small enough to be any of the younger children, either.

One of the soldiers guarding them was taking an interest in Ranjit, shouting something Ranjit could not make out and waving his rifle meaningfully.

It seemed to Ranjit that walking around on his own made the soldiers suspicious. “Right,” he called to the soldier, hoping he knew what he was agreeing to, and looked around at his options.

Which group Ranjit actually belonged to was hard to say. Still, there was no doubt that the former passengers were getting the best treatment, so he flipped a soft salute to the soldier and then strolled over to those waiting for fresh clothing at the men’s side and attached himself to the line, nodding pleasantly to the oldster just ahead of him.

Who didn’t nod back. Instead he scowled at Ranjit for a moment and then opened his mouth and let out a yell for the soldiers. When a couple of them came running, the man was shouting, “This one’s no passenger! He’s one of them! He’s the one who was trying to get me to tell how much my kids would pay to ransom me!”

Which is why, a moment later, Ranjit wound up lying facedown, his hands on his head, between a pair of the largest and—because they had been given no chance to clean themselves up—smelliest of the pirates.

He kept on lying there, for hours.

Those hours were not totally without anything happening, because in the first of them Ranjit learned two important lessons. The first was that he shouldn’t try to lift his head enough to try to look for the Kanakaratnams, because when he did, he was hit with a stick just above his left ear, while whoever was wielding the stick yelled, “Lie still!” The pain of the strike was like a lightning bolt. The second was that he shouldn’t try whispering to his neighbors for information. That got him a serious kick right about where his lowest right-hand rib was. The pain from the kick was indescribable. And the kicker was a soldier, all right, because he was definitely wearing steel-braced army shoes.

After about two hours—when the tropical sun had mounted high in the sky and Ranjit was beginning to feel as though he were being baked alive—something did happen. A new fleet of helicopters arrived, bigger and a good deal more comfortable-looking than the first, and immediately boarded all the passengers—and all those passengers’ reclaimed possessions—to take them to what no doubt would be a nicer place than this. An hour or so more and there was a sound of heavy-duty engines from the brush, and a couple of flatbed trucks pushed their way onto the sand to take the rescued crew away. And later still—much later, when the sun had done its best to parboil the helpless pirates, Ranjit included—it was their turn. It was helicopters again this time, big ones that didn’t look comfortable at all. The man in charge was identifiable by the amount of metallic embroidery on his uniform and cap and by the facts that he arrived in his own helicopter and that before he got out of it, other soldiers had immediately prepared a chair and a table—well, an upended box, to be more accurate—for him to sit at as he dispensed judgment.

Each of the pirates, one by one, was commanded to stand up and answer the officer’s questions. Ranjit couldn’t hear the questions or answers, but the verdicts were delivered clearly enough to be heard by all. “Rawalpindi, central jail,” the officer said to the first prisoner, and again, “Rawalpindi, central jail,” to the second and the third.

Ranjit was next to be summoned before the dispenser of justice. He took advantage of the few moments he had between getting to his feet and facing the officer to hastily look over the remaining pirates for a sign of the children, but if they were there, Ranjit could not identify them.

Then he was standing before the officer and did not dare look farther. His questioning was brief. The officer listened while another soldier spoke in his ear, then addressed Ranjit. “What is your name?” he asked—gratefully, in English.

“I am Ranjit Subramanian, son of Ganesh Subramanian, who is the high priest of the Tiru temple in Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. I was not one of the pirates—”

The officer stopped him. “Wait,” he said, and said something inaudible to his aide, who equally inaudibly replied. The officer mulled over that information in silence for a moment. Then he leaned forward, his head close to Ranjit, and inhaled deeply.

Then he nodded; Ranjit had passed the smell test and could therefore be tolerated as a traveling companion. “Interrogation,” he said. “Put him in my aircraft. Next!”