Without warning

Pete knew he was never going to be anywhere near as wealthy as any of the Diamantina’s former skippers – although the dot-com guys had tanked badly a couple of years ago and were probably down to their last two or three million now, hence the bargain basement price he’d paid for the old girl. Not that he could give a shit. The Australian Government issued his passports, but he considered himself a citizen of the waves, and for the past eight years, after taking a redundancy payment from his old job as a rig boss for Shell, he’d been devoted entirely to the pursuit of the world’s most fantastic lifestyle. Mostly that involved meandering from one secret surf break to the next, putting in a few weeks at the Maldives, cutting down the Indonesian archipelago to Nias, or booming across the Pacific to chase triple overhead sets off northern California. And sometimes, of course, to pay for this life of pure indulgence, it meant loading the boat up with half a ton of compressed ganja and running the gauntlet of international super-narcs like the DEA and the AFP.

Even worse than them were the state-sponsored but highly autonomous shakedown artists like the crooked Indonesian Navy commodore he’d tangled with in Bali last year. Or the Peruvian federales he thought he’d paid off in Callao only to have them come back a day later saying they’d ‘lost’ his very generous bribe and would be in need of another to the same value within twenty-four hours – unless Seсor Pedro felt like seeing out his days as a slave in a manganese mine deep in the jungles of la Montana. Pete had transferred the money within two hours and never sailed into the territorial waters of Peru again.

As he watched Fifi and Jules moving around to clear away the remains of lunch, the veteran smuggler catalogued all of the near misses he’d survived over the years. It was a sobering exercise, one he forced himself to endure before every new payday, as a caution against hubris and stupidity. Bad luck he couldn’t control, but with good planning and preparation he could at least minimise any opportunities for the ever fickle finger of fate to insert itself firmly into his anus. Hubris and stupidity, on the other hand, were completely avoidable. They were the principle mechanism by which natural selection thinned out his competitors, and he’d be damned if he were going to fall victim to them. Pete Holder was a survivor.

‘Mr Peter, sir?’

Lee had snuck up on him again. A Malaccan-Chinese from a 300-year-long line of pirates, Mr Lee was always doing that. Pete tried to rearrange his features into a sunny smile, but Lee knew him too well and responded with a pitying shake of the head. Pete was notorious for his ill temper in the hours leading up to a job, and try as he might to control it, his face was always clouded over and dark until they were safely away. Frankly, he resented the necessity for the whole smuggling business and would have done almost anything other than getting a normal job to avoid it. But he couldn’t, so here they were.

‘Hey, Lee. What’s up, mate?’ Pete tried for a light tone, the sort of thing his fellow Tasmanian Errol Flynn might have pulled off if he’d gone into smuggling and full-time surf bummery. Instead he just came off as clipped and nervous. He noticed Fifi and Jules throw a curious glance back his way. They’d only been with him eighteen months, but like Mr Lee they’d learned to read his moods with an almost preternatural accuracy. It was the legacy of living so close together and taking things right up to the edge.

‘Something is up, Mr Peter.’

‘Okay. I’m waiting.’ Jeez, he wished he could loosen up.

‘The Pong Su, she is changing course, sir. She will not meet up with us if she continues on her new heading.’

Pete was dressed in ripped board shorts and a sun-faded sky-blue cotton shirt. The Tropic of Cancer was well north of them and the day would have been uncomfortably warm were it not for a gentle sou’-wester, which only just bellied out the sails but did little to dry the sweat pooling between the breasts of his female crew.

‘Come see. I show,’ said Lee.

Jules finished scraping a plate of grilled fish scraps over the side and used the dish to shade her eyes as she straightened up. ‘Is there something the matter, Pete?’ she called out in her rather posh English accent, the sort of accent his mother would have called ‘all peaches and cream’.

‘Dunno yet,’ he answered. ‘Could be. Let’s be ready to split just in case. You and Fifi better kit up too, soon as you’re ready.’