Of course he did. Captain Richard had been his friend. He nodded vigorously. The hostage added, ‘You are Taban, right?’
Taban nodded again and smiled. ‘I help you,’ he said eagerly.
‘No. You need to get out of here… fast.’ When the boy looked puzzled, the man made gestures as if shooting a gun.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘Quick. Vamoose. He was going to shoot you. If you stay here any longer, he will do it.’
‘But I-’
The Western man interrupted, shaking his head. ‘You must go. Run and get help. Or they will kill you.’ And he drew his finger across this throat. ‘Now!’ he said urgently.
Taban hesitated no longer. He struck out at once, not towards the dunes, where men were already positioned with guns, but north, over a section of low wall. Once out of sight of the compound, he started to run. He ran straight on without looking back, then he turned towards the coast. He was heading for the sanctuary of his past – the village, less than two miles away, where he had grown up with his father and brother; the village from which he had gone out to sea each day to fish; the village where he had seen his father murdered. He wondered who would still be there; the last he had heard, some other pirates were using the dilapidated huts as shelter, in between their hijacking runs.
He ran as quickly as he could. He was young and fit, but the soft sand slowed him down. At last, as he climbed up to the top of the dunes, he could see the huts and the splintered wooden landing stage beside his former home. It was beginning to get dark now and he ran faster, fuelled by the adrenalin of fear, sprinting down the last few yards of sulphur-coloured sand to the hamlet nestled on the shore. As he reached the straw-roofed huts he could see that none was inhabited – they had been stripped bare by raiders, who had taken everything from chairs to cooking pots. There was nowhere to hide: not a bed to crouch under, no cupboard to conceal him, just sand floors and bare board walls and open squares for windows. Soon it would be pitch black, so propping himself up against the back wall of one of the huts, he sat down to wait till dawn.
Taban opened his eyes suddenly to grey daylight and the low throbbing of an engine. Peering round the wall of the hut, he could just make out, far in the distance, near the compound, a jeep moving along the beach in his direction. Men had been sent to bring him back. No, not to bring him back; they would have been sent to kill him.
The noise of the jeep was growing louder; he could hear the harsh cough of its carburettor, but didn’t dare wait to watch his pursuers draw closer. He looked desperately about for some way to escape. Then he spotted a single skiff moored at the end of the landing stage. But was it still seaworthy or had it been holed? He ran out along the splintered boards to where the little boat floated at the far end, tethered by a fraying piece of rope. It had no engine, and its mast was badly split – too broken to support a sail.
Taban jumped in regardless; to stay on land would mean certain death. The bottom of the boat was fairly dry, and tucked under one gunwale was a pair of oars. He undid the rope, pushed off as hard as he could from the wooden platform and quickly slotted the oars into the rowlocks. He heard the jeep roar into the hamlet and heard its engine cut out. They were here.
Struggling at first with the long oars, he gradually found a rhythm. The tide was going out, which helped, and he made rapid progress, pulling away from shore – when he allowed himself a glance back he was almost a hundred yards out. The men couldn’t have looked out to sea at first – they must have started by searching the huts – but now one of them appeared at the far end of the landing stage, shouting and gesturing to his comrades.
Soon there were three men running along the wooden planking, all armed, and as the first got to the end, he started firing. A bullet sang by Taban with the buzzing whine of an angry bee. He tried to row faster but almost lost an oar, so he forced himself to row calmly, rhythmically. The bullets were hitting the water well short of him now and the firing paused; then it resumed and they must have been using a different weapon, for he heard a sharp crack and realised that a bullet had found the side of the boat.
