Canal Dreams

Now, a leech, she'd let it. She was making the dream.

She hadn't meant to pretend to such authority.

Hisako sat down heavily on her haunches, staring out at the brown horizon of oil. Well, she thought, too late now. She looked up at the sky. She heard the shouts of the soldiers over the thunder of the pumps, then stood again and peeped through the clutter of pipes, watching the superstructure. There was movement behind the glass of the bridge. Suddenly she heard clicks and buzzes to her left, and leapt away from the pump-control housing, heart hammering, dizzy with dread, waiting for the shots.

There was nobody there. The controls clicked again, and the pumps whined down to silence; the deck stilled. She was tempted to switch the pumps back on again, see who could overrule who with the controls. But then they might guess she was there. She left the controls alone and went back to watching through the square tangle of pipework.

After a few minutes, three men appeared at the top of the steps which led down to the pontoon. Even from a distance the soldiers looked nervous and harried; one was still pulling on his fatigue trousers. They all held bags and rucksacks, were weighed down with guns and missile launchers. They looked as if they were arguing; two disappeared down the steps to the pontoon. The third seemed to be shouting back into the ship. He dropped his rifle, jumped, picked the gun up quickly again, looking round as though he expected to be attacked at any moment. He shouted through the doorway again, then he too ran for the steps.

The fourth man followed a minute later, even more heavily laden than the rest. He looked up the deck, towards the bows, and for a moment she was convinced he was looking straight at her. He stayed in that position, and her mouth went dry. She wanted to duck but didn't; the soldier was too far away, and the gap she was looking through too small for him to be able to see her clearly; at most she must be a slightly odd pale dot in the midst of the pipework. He couldn't be sure the dot was a face. Only moving would settle the issue for him, so she stayed still. If he had binoculars, she'd just have to try and duck down as he brought them up to his eyes. He moved, turning to the gunwale and shouting down, then going quickly to the steps, disappearing down them. She let her breath out. She wondered if they'd use the outboard. A military engine was probably safe to use on the oil, in theory, but she wasn't sure she'd like to trust her life to it. She crawled under and through the pipework, towards the port rail. When she was there she raised her head enough to glance over. No sign of the Gemini. She was puzzled, then afraid, and glanced back at the top of the steps where they came through the gunwale, fifty metres away. Shouts came from that direction, but beneath, where the pontoon was. She edged closer to the rail, craned her head out.

She found them; the ship had risen so much that the steps, which for months had ended virtually at water level, now hung four or five metres above the pontoon, which was itself near the end of its travel on the ropes attaching it to the ship; it was canted at an angle of thirty degrees or more, the hullside edge pointing up towards the dangling steps. The soldiers were at the bottom of those steps, lowering a wire ladder to the pontoon.

She edged back from the rail, crawled to the centre-line pipework and got up on the far side. She kept ducked-down and ran sternwards, towards the superstructure. Her naked feet slapped quietly; the metal covering the half-empty tanks beneath her soles felt cool, and still wet from the morning mists

The soldiers were on the port side; she entered the superstructure from starboard. Comparative silence. Le Cercle's donkey engine was still ru

The galley's gleaming surfaces were cluttered with opened tins and unwashed plates. Lekkas, she thought, would have had a fit.

She took the biggest kitchen knife she could find, and felt a little more comfortable.

The deck above was quiet too, and the one above that. She glanced into a couple of cabins, but couldn't see any guns. She'd hoped they might have left a few behind.

She approached the bridge deck slowly and carefully, then stole along it. The bridge was silent, a little messy, and smelled of cigarette smoke. From the port wing of the bridge she looked down to the lake surface.

There they were; rowing slowly away through the sticky brown mass of the oil, a man at each of the two stubby oars. The other two were shouting; encouragement, perhaps. They hadn't got very far. Two of them — one rowing — must have fallen in; they were brown with the clinging oil. She spared a few seconds for the view, surveying her handiwork; acres, hectares — a square kilometre perhaps, it was hard to tell with the islands and the other two ships blocking the view — of filthy brown, dead flat, glistening oil.

The boys at the nature reserve on Barro Colorado would probably have wrung her neck for this.

She took the flare gun from the chart room, loaded and cocked it, stuffed a few more rounds in her pockets and went to the radio room. No fuses, no power. The bridge radios were out too. She quickly searched the cabins, no guns or grenades. Another check on the progress the men were making through the sludge of oil; hardly out of the shadow of the ship.

She went outside to check the starboard lifeboat, feeling a sneer on her face as she thought of the fools taking to the Gemini.

Each of the tanker's lifeboats could hold the entire crew; they were big, bright orange, and fully enclosed. They were designed to survive high temperatures, and would work — and keep their occupants cool enough — on a sea on fire with spilled oil, if it came to it.

She came out on to the sunlit deck, beneath the starboard lifeboat.

It had been wrecked.

They must have machine-gu

She looked at the ragged gap in the lifeboat's bows, at the bullet holes scattered around the main breach, and the shards of orange hull material lying on the deck. She ran back, into the ship and across the bridge, ducked down — the Gemini was still less than fifty metres away through the oil — and saw what was left of the port lifeboat. Smashed; a grenade, she guessed.

Hisako went back across the bridge, out on to the starboard lifeboat deck again and climbed up into the wrecked boat through its bow hatch. She held the kitchen knife in her teeth, and couldn't help but laugh at herself. Inside the lifeboat, she found the grey plastic flare container, twisted the thick red plastic top off, and rummaged through the big smoke-canisters and the hand-held flares until she found what she was looking for. She took two, just to be sure.

She stuffed the pistol from the chart room under one arm, walked back to the bridge, reading the instructions on the parachute flares.

Through the bridge, through the door on to the port lifeboat deck. The Gemini had been rowed another ten metres away; She tore the cap off the base of the flare, and hinged the trigger mechanism out, like a heavy-duty ringpull. She stood behind a life-raft dispenser, a sloped rack of three bright, white plastic inflatable containers. She stripped the sticky tape off the red top of the flare casing and removed. the plastic cap. Looking over the top of the life-rafts, she could just see the Gemini and the four men in it, still rowing carefully through the brown sludge, oars cloyed and dripping. They hadn't seen her. She put the kitchen knife down on the deck.

'Hey! she screamed, standing on tip-toes. 'Hey, punks! Make my day! Don't push me! That ain't nice, you laughin'!

They looked; the oars dipped, paused. Two looked straight at her, the pair in the stern of the inflatable turned, stared back.