Chapter 32

The freighter pulled slowly away from the Suez Canal, easing itself into the Atlantic Ocean. Natalia and her brothers had finished a light salad lunch and were playing cards together in the lounge, just a couple of metres behind the bridge.

The Captain was on watch and loved Cuban Havana cigars. He was a larger than life character with a blue cravat tied loosely around his wide neck. He wore brown chinos and a strong leather belt to ensure that his trousers stayed up around his ample girth. His feet were covered with strong walking boots to ensure that he had a trusted grip on all of the decks and he was excited by his forthcoming retirement.

Captain ‘Sharkey’ was so called because he had survived a shark attack. An extremely rare incident, he had the remains of the wounds to the side of his stomach to prove it, albeit it had happened over twenty years ago.

There was only a crew of seven for the boat and they all heralded from Lima. Brought up within the city, the sailors had sought to travel the world. A surprising amount of time was spent on the freighters, with weekends off being unheard of. Their ships would only be based at ports to load and dock containers for twelve or twenty four hours. Therefore the crew’s lives were spent onboard, experiencing the monotony of keeping the ship going and relaxing by playing cards, reading and the structure of the watches.

It was on the following night after leaving the Suez Canal that the two tribal stowaways put their plan into action.

It had been the Morales brothers who had inflicted the damage on their friends. The Morales’ Spanish lady did not bother them so much. Whilst she represented a family who were resented by many of the tribal peoples, she had provided a number of the Andean villages with a selling outlet for their wares. What the tribal villagers were angry about was how the brothers had taught their own village people a physically violent lesson. The fact that much of the delivery had not reached the Morales had been out of their control.

In the early hours of the following morning, the tribesmen lured the brothers out of their cabin by pouring diesel under the door and setting fire to it. The Morales brothers, dazed and confused from being woken mid-sleep, attempted to run down the corridor outside their cabin.

The diesel had set light to the wooden door frame extremely quickly and heavy smoke was billowing along the passageway. There were few lights on outside the cabin and the brothers were unsteady on their feet.

The tribal men had located themselves further down this outside gangway and, in the middle of the night, the freighter’s exterior railing led to a dark abyss beyond. There was the hum of the freighter’s generators and the swishing sound of the ocean below. All else was quiet.

As the brothers attempted to raise the alarm by shouting that their cabin was on fire, the tribal villagers approached the two men from their rear. As if they were preparing a goat for a feast, the men muffled the cries of the Morales brothers with one hand and slit their throats with the other.

Helping each other to lift the bodies – they were still warm and twitching – the tribesmen heaved with all their strength to move them to the railing of the freighter and then pushed them over the side. There was no remorse and they hugged each other after the bodies had slipped away into the waiting waves below.

Time had been spent over the sleepless, cold days and nights preparing their life-raft, located on the other side of the ship for departure. The fire alarm rang out at last and lights started to cascade the ship in an eerie glow as the tribesmen rapidly took the cover off the smaller boat, ensured that the stolen provisions and Global Positioning System was on board, and started to operate the electronic crane.

As expected, as the bridge realised that the fire alarm was sounding across the ship, the night watchman on shift lowered the power to the turbines. The freighter would take another mile to slow down to walking pace. The tribesmen were ready to take advantage of the slowly moving freighter. The life-raft would be brought to bear on the water so that it was facing in the same direction as the freighter and adjoining the mother ship. They would then sail away, back to the South American coastline.

Unfortunately for the tribal stowaways, Captain Sharkey had quickly toured as much of the outer walkway as practically possible. He noticed that the life-raft was being removed and grappled with the weathered controls to stop it leaving his ship. One of the vertical ropes managed to snag itself in the crane mechanism so that the life-raft lurched forward. The tribal men were holding on for their lives as neither of them could swim. They were manically seeking to cut through the crane ropes and release themselves from the ties that kept the small vessel dangling beside the freighter. Ultimately, the life-raft tipped up as the bow rope split and the stern rope took the entire weight of the boat. The craft dangled vertically downward and the tribesmen were catapulted into the Atlantic, swallowed by the dark seas. The crests of the waves glowed, lit by the fire burning on the freighter.