Introduction

When the pirates struck at Tanjong Belait, Christine Wheeler was reclining half asleep on the veranda of the Administrator’s bungalow, high up on the hill behind the town. It was a still and oppressive afternoon. The heavy sagging brown cloud of the previous few days had thinned at last, allowing the tropical sun to penetrate. It had left behind a thick deposit of volcanic dust, which a heavy thunderstorm overnight had washed into drifts and sandbanks on the lawn and half-filled the deep monsoon ditches.

The town lay out of sight below. All that Christine could see from her prone position was the watery expanse of the bay, calm now, but still flecked with floating debris, and, beyond it, the dark triangular bulk of Pulo Belait, the sheltering island which a few months earlier had saved them from a more complete disaster. Its bulk was noticeably shrunken. She could hardly contemplate it now without a shudder, her eyes going uneasily to the empty sea horizon beyond; a placid sea, with only the lightest of breezes coming from it to cool her naked skin. Incredibly placid it seemed now, remembering how it had risen like a monster! If she closed her eyes she could still relive that terrifying sight. The sea had risen far above where it should have been, spilling round and right over the cliff flanks of the island, crashing and tumbling with a hideous roar into the enclosed waters of the bay until it filled like a seething cauldron. The earth had shook with the impact and all was finally blotted out by a boiling, salty tasting, fog of spray.

Shuddering, Mrs Wheeler stood up, seeking reassurance in a wider view, holding her loose bikini top against her breasts, tilting back her broad brimmed straw hat to inspect a solitary vessel that had appeared out of the pearly haze along the coast. Heading as if to approach the town, it trailed a broad wake across the placid expanse of the bay. She had hoped that it might be the patched-up Administration launch, with her husband and the Administrator aboard, returning from their exploratory trip in that direction to examine the wreck of the abandoned oil installations. But then she saw with disappointment that it had no mast or sails rigged and was propelled by several pairs of oars, creeping along like a many-legged water beetle. She supposed it to be only another desperate plea for help, carried in a salvaged boat by a crew of forlorn survivors.

She walked forward out onto the lawn until she could see below her what remained of the little coastal town, a huddle of roofs of soft brown attap or rust red, corrugated iron, spilling down the hillside amid a tropical luxuriance of vegetation, then ending abruptly in a clean-swept slope with only stumps and foundations of trees and buildings, all stained brown with mud down to the new waterline. The sea itself had fallen back but not all the way, or perhaps it was the land that had sunk. A pale greenish oblong in the water, projecting offshore, indicated the submerged shape of the town jetty, a line of twisted girders the only sign above water of where the cargo godowns had been.

Looking over the intervening hedge, Christine could see the sampan crawling in towards the root of the former jetty, where a makeshift addition of timber and rubble had recently been added to facilitate the handling of newly constructed fishing canoes, upon which it seemed likely the future feeding of the town would depend when so much rice land was under water.

She thought of going down to the shore to find out if the incoming boat had brought any fresh news. Since the Catastrophe, in communications as in much else, without working electronics Tanjong Belait was back to the Dark Ages. But going into town meant she would have to go and get dressed, since the local religious fanatics had adopted the disaster as divine confirmation of their prejudices. Though she and her hostess were safe enough up here in the enclosed privacy of the garden, qualifying as a kind of harem area approachable only by way of the house, she wouldn’t have dared to appear amid the jittery survivors and unstable refugees without being fully covered up.

She decided that it was just too hot and she would stay where she was. She could see the sampan was crawling into the landing place, rowed laboriously by a dozen square bladed oars. Its long awning concealed the rowers from view, with rattan blinds lowered as if they had recently come through a rain storm. A trickle of people were already picking their way down to the water side. She would hear any news fast enough. One of the khaki-clad figures she recognised as a government official. He would listen to the newcomers’ tale and give them whatever reassurance he could.

Oars shipped, the oncoming vessel bumped alongside the new jetty and suddenly the situation was shockingly transformed.

The obscuring blinds ran up all at once and men swarmed out onto the stones, more men than the number of oars would have warranted, brandishing gleaming weapons, parangs or something of the sort. Faint sounds of their yelling reached to Christine’s ears. The khaki clad official had suddenly fallen on his back on the jetty, clutching at something protruding from his chest. The rest of the reception party, men, women and children, were fleeing, running and screaming back up the hill, some of them falling, the rest pursued by the howling invaders.

In safety, high above the mayhem, Christine stood wide-eyed and frozen in disbelief, clutching her loosened top to her breast. Of course she knew there had been piracy on these coasts before the Catastrophe, when radios, aircraft and satellites were still working. Civil war between Christian and Moslem in the islands to the north had allowed disorder to spill over the sea frontier. But they too must have suffered as badly from the Catastrophe. Had that really been a crossbow that had felled the poor official? That seemed to indicate those people had no usable firearms either. Yet some of them must have adapted with terrifying speed, to begin to prey upon their fellow survivors!

At that, recollecting her own vulnerability as pursuers and pursued disappeared among the houses below, Christine turned to see from somewhere close behind the house, a tall column of black smoke rapidly climbing like a signal against the sky. She started towards the house at first, intending to shout an alarm to her hostess, only to be forestalled by the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood and Felicity’s voice screaming from inside. Christine had gone only a few more faltering steps before a cluster of dark squat figures suddenly appeared on the veranda with naked blades flourishing among them. Men, whose fierce eyes fell immediately on her, caught out hesitating in the middle of the lawn, an almost naked female, blatantly vulnerable, evoking at once a triumphant masculine roar. Open mouthed, Christine swung about and ran, still clutching the bikini top to her, in the opposite direction across the wide lawn.

Evidently the sight of lissom nudity fleeing from them, with only an inadequate scrap of blue and white cotton spanning her bobbing rump, evoked the inevitable response of a hot pursuit. The sound of their lewd yells of appreciation lent wings to their quarry’s heels and raised panic in her brain. She hurdled a bed of dusty, red and yellow lilies with her loose bikini top waved wildly in one hand like a lure. She left a trail of naked footprints over a drift of volcanic sand, only to find herself faced with the impenetrable barrier of the boundary hedge. In desperation she tried to repeat her record spring, this time as a high jump, but security had become imprisonment and she came down crashing bodily into the thickest part of the hedge.

Threshing desperately, Christine sank deeper but made no forward progress. Strong hands from behind snared her kicking ankles and she screamed wildly as they tried to drag her out. A heavy body crashed into the hedge alongside her and rough fingers pried at the soft flesh about her hips until they had hooked under the tight strings of her briefs. Still trying to cling to thin twigs, she felt herself being drawn inexorably backwards out of the hedge, backside in the air, hatless, hair resisting, entangled. Then, just as she emerged into the open in a shower of leaves and twiggy fragments, the over-tried strings of her bikini snapped.

The one man still holding her fell over backward in surprise and she nearly escaped, wriggling between their legs and scuttling off across the grass on all fours like a lizard. But a man’s hand quickly snagged her again, first by one ankle then the other. She was dragged back into their midst, leaving desperately clawed finger marks in the grass, before they captured her wrists too.

Face down and spread-eagled, then hoist between four of her captors, one to each limb, she was carried like that back towards the house, blonde hair dragging along at the trail, her down-curved belly almost brushing the grass. Above and around her, men laughed and exchanged incomprehensible comments, while Christine’s brain jittered with dreadful notions of what they intended to do to her.