Dave Bates brings his boat alongside the Pescador in the startled light of a new day at sea. It’s three weeks since he spotted the Pescador off Heard Island. He radios de Ridder who is in the apprehended vessel’s wheelhouse. Another of the South Africans has taken the helm.
‘The Pescador’s officers are denying they were fishing illegally,’ de Ridder informs the Australian master. ‘They say they caught the fish in international waters and were simply sheltering at Heard to attend to their engines. Over.’
‘And pigs have wings,’ Dave quips. ‘Of course they’ll deny it. If they’re prepared to risk their lives in pack ice, they’re not going to give in now. Anyway, that’s not our problem.’ He wonders how the case will play out in the courts; if all of this will be worth it. He watches a fine curtain of rain fall on an ocean that appears to be made of countless silver coins angled to catch the first rays of light. ‘Have you told them about the fellow we have on ice? Over.’
‘No. Thought we’d leave that to you.’
If he had said no to the chase, Dave thinks, the three dead men might still be alive. He steers his concentration back to the job at hand. ‘Anyway, we’re just about ready to send over Harry Perdman for a reconnoitre before he skippers the boat home tomorrow. Our fisheries officer’s pretty keen to check out the catch, too. Label and catalogue the evidence—all that jazz.’
‘No problem. We’ll send over our launch, seeing it’s already in the water. No point getting yours wet,’ the South African says with a jocular air.
‘Much appreciated. Over and out.’
Dave ends the radio call as Cactus enters the wheelhouse.
‘Need another man to go aboard, Davo? I’m happy to put me hand up if necessary.’
Dave tries not to laugh at Cactus’s efforts to sound only moderately interested. ‘She’ll be right, mate. We’ll need you here to help Harry and the others into the launch. I’ve got to have at least one experienced seaman on deck.’ He hopes the last comment will stroke Cactus’s ego enough to stop him from becoming a nuisance. He uses the intercom to let Harry know the plan and follows the approaching launch with binoculars until it’s beneath them. The door shuts noisily and Dave realises that Cactus has left to join the others on deck. The rain has stopped and he watches Harry ordering the deck crane operator into position.
In under ten minutes, the launch is back in the water with Harry and the fisheries officer on board. It travels the short distance to the Pescador and lines up with a rope ladder that has been dropped from the midship rails and descends all the way to the sea. Harry begins to climb and Dave wonders how it must feel to finally be in physical contact with the boat they have chased almost to Africa. The ladder swings out from the side of the ship and Harry collides with the hull, swinging like a fish on a line. Dave hears the wheelhouse door open and shut again and assumes that it’s Cactus.
‘He’ll be shitting himself, I reckon.’ It’s William’s voice beside him in the wheelhouse, watching through his own set of binoculars.
Dave laughs but doesn’t take his eyes off Harry until two South Africans hook the Australian first mate under the arms and drag him on board, landing him like a great big trophy of a fish. Dave scans the deck and finds himself looking, for the first time, into the dark, glaring faces of several of the Pescador’s crew.
Harry and Dougal McAllister, the fisheries officer, arrive back on board the Australis just before nightfall. ‘It’s a bloody dog’s breakfast over there,’ Harry tells Dave in the wheelhouse. ‘Can’t believe they’ve made it as far as they have.’
‘’Specially given the weight of toothfish they’ve got on board,’ Dougal adds.
‘So they haven’t ditched the evidence then?’ Dave looks at the two boats—the Pescador and the Bremner—lit up like floating oil rigs. If he didn’t know better, he’d say the Pescador even appeared welcoming. The lights flicker on the darkening blanket of sea, which is calmer than Dave has seen it for the duration of the chase. It’s as if even the ocean is appreciative of the chance to bed down and ready itself for a rest.
‘Nope, got enough evidence to sink a ship,’ the fisheries officer answers, pleased with his accidental play on words. ‘I’ve started labelling it, and grabbed a few samples and measurements as an insurance policy. There was one fish, two metres long, that they’d had on ice to be made into a wall trophy. What a beauty. Should have seen the size of those child-bearing lips! I kept thinking of her cruising around down there in the pitch black just a few weeks ago—’
‘Anyway, mate,’ Harry says, ‘you go and make a start on cataloguing those samples. I’ll be down in a minute to lend a hand.’
‘I reckon he’d talk at fifty fathoms with a mouth full of marbles,’ Dave jokes as soon as the young man is out of the room.
Harry snorts derisively.
‘Tell me about this Carlos Sánchez character. Is he what you expected?’
‘Not at all. Spent most of the time in his bed, such as it is. The Springboks have booted him out of his cabin, so he’s sleeping in the crew’s quarters. You’ve got to feel sorry for the lot of them, really. They’re just a downtrodden bunch of blokes trying to scratch out a living.’
‘You going soft on us, Harry? They’re scratching a living out of our fish. Our livelihood. This fishery will be buggered in under a decade if the illegals don’t back off.’ Dave bites at the ragged corner of his thumbnail, and tears a piece off. ‘I know what you’re saying, but they chose to be here, and they started the chase. If they’d just accepted their fate earlier, three people might still be alive. We’re just lucky our lot made it through okay.’
‘I told them about the body we recovered,’ Harry tells Dave as if seeking his permission retrospectively. ‘I said it looked like he’d been shot and they gave me the whole sorry story. It turns out the Russian bloke—the mutineer—smuggled the gun onboard. The deceased fellow we have down below – Roberto Cruz was his name—was killed in front of his son. Poor kid.’
Dave goes quiet again. He knows it could have been worse. In those seas, with a madman in charge, it’s a wonder the Pescador hasn’t made a grave on the bottom of the ocean for the lot of them.
‘A Spanish guy called Manuel was at pains to let us know how much it meant to have the old man’s body recovered. He told us a story—I’ll never forget it actually—about a fishing boat that went down off Spain. His brother and father were among the missing. Anyway, when none of the bodies washed up on shore, a team of divers went searching for them. Found them lying together on the seafloor like they were just asleep, as if the ocean had “sung them a lullaby”, in Manuel’s words.’
‘An eddy must have kept them together.’
Harry nods. ‘The divers strung all the bodies along a rope, like a bunch of fish on a line, and towed them back to shore. As the divers swam and dragged the load, the bodies all rose to their feet and bloody walked along the seafloor behind them. Or, so it seemed. I can’t get that image out of my head. Can you imagine?’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘No, sorry. But the point this Manuel fellow was making was that if the divers hadn’t gone to such lengths, those men would never have been returned home to their families. It was his way of saying thanks, I s’pose, for recovering his friend.’
Dave shakes his head and thinks of the other body still out at sea. The South Africans told him it was the Pescador’s first mate. He thinks of the first mate’s family, and how they will always be left wondering what became of him. His bones and skin and hair. At least he knows where his son’s remains are. At least he gave Sam a proper burial. Dave can hardly believe it’s almost two years since he died. It still feels like yesterday.
‘Not a bad yarn, is it? Not one for the grandkids, though.’ Harry goes quiet as if hearing his words too late. He scratches his head, and Dave can tell he’s preparing to change tack. ‘It’s interesting, the science stuff,’ Harry announces quickly, latching onto his new subject. ‘I hadn’t really known what young Dougal gets up to until now.’
‘The genetics and so on?’ Dave asks.
‘Yeah, and the way they can tell the age of a fish by counting the growth rings in its earbones, of all things.’ Harry chuckles. ‘Bit like counting the rings in a tree trunk, apparently. And get this: really old fish still contain radioactive markers in the growth rings corresponding to the years of atomic testing. So the scientists can check their methods because they know the dates of the blasts.’
‘Well I’ll be blowed.’
‘To be honest, I hadn’t realised just how little we know about species like the toothfish. The boffins still haven’t got the foggiest idea how often they reproduce or how many eggs they make. We’ll be playing Russian-bloody-roulette if we give out too many licences or set the quotas too high around Heard and McDonald. Especially with the illegals getting their paws in. Boats like the Pescador are only getting stuck into Australian waters because they’ve buggered up the subantarctic stocks further west. It’s no wonder the French and British and South Africans have naval boats regularly patrolling their territories. Dougal reckons toothfish numbers around Prince Edward are just ten per cent of what they used to be, and around Crozet it’s only about twenty-five or thirty per cent.’
‘You saying this chase hasn’t all been a waste of time then?’
‘Not if they get convicted.’ Harry shrugs, as if to say that they have no control over that part of the equation. ‘Not sure I go along with all the genetics stuff, though. Seems like a lot of fuss just to prove the fish they’ve got on board came from our waters. I mean, to state the bleeding obvious, an Aussie trawler saw them there, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Yeah, but they didn’t actually film them fishing. Wentworth said the angle of the boat was wrong. To anyone watching the footage, the boat could just have been doing some routine maintenance in our waters like they’re claiming.’
‘Whatever happened to common sense? Honestly, the world’s gone mad.’ Harry scrubs at his short blond beard. ‘Anyway, like I said, I’d better go and help the young lad out. A promise is a promise.’
As Harry leaves the wheelhouse, Dave notices, for the first time since they left port, how tired the first mate is looking. Dave knows that Harry is the sort of man who would give his right arm to save a friend. He is dependable and loyal and as honest as the day is long. If Harry was asked to take the helm for twenty-four hours straight, Dave has no doubt he would do it, no questions asked. It’s a steadfastness that Dave hopes he hasn’t abused by asking too much of him—this man he would be proud to have as a brother.
The Pescador has drifted so that it is side-on to the Australis and Dave ponders on the future that awaits the men bunkering down inside its metal walls. The ship’s owner, he suspects, will get away scot-free. Dave supposes it’s the same in the drug trade. The small-time pushers get caught, while the drug lords run amok. As he watches, a light in one of the cabins goes out and he imagines it’s Carlos Sánchez finally surrendering to his fate.