The Betrayal Read online

  THE BETRAYAL

  JG ALVA

  PART 1

  THE ISLAND

  CHAPTER 1

  Nick hit the water with all the grace of a swimmer that has lost his footing on the edge of the pool.

  His shoulder and head took the brunt of the impact, but even though it was a long drop from the deck, he didn’t feel it. All he felt was the searing pain from the knife wound somewhere to the left of his belly, the pain reaching up to his armpit and around his back like a coil of barbed wire. The salt water did little to alleviate this; if anything, it felt like it was tearing it open wider. Nick thought, they stuck a knife in me, but it was so unbelievable that his mind skittered away from it. In its place, the deathly thought: my God how bad is it? It was entirely possible he could bleed to death.

  But the agony came on again, blotting out all thought.

  He held his breath and rode it out, but it took time. When he was finally able to surface, he had floated to the stern of the boat. There were few lights on here; there was only a sliver of moon and all he could make out were the dim lines of the two ships, and a glow of a cigarette as somebody kept watch on deck on the ship furthest from him. Nick tried to hang on to the side of ship but another convulsion of agony overtook him, and he could do nothing but curl in to a ball around it, trying to keep his head above water, helpless under the force of the pain, his teeth gritted against it, good God, good God, make it stop, until it was over, or at least manageable. He was able to lift his head high enough above the water to take a deep breath, and as he did so he looked around. The two ships were fifty feet away, two spots of light bobbing on a dark horizon, and his mind spoke again, and this time it said Jessica, and he was torn up with a different kind of agony.

  Something in the water bumped him.

  He gasped involuntarily, and the sudden movement started the fire up again, but it eased quickly; Nick wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. He reached out in the dark for the object and putting his hands on it immediately knew it was the girl.

  He pulled her closer to him and felt along the lines of her until he had located her face and smoothed back the hair over it and leaned close and listened. By some miracle she was still breathing, but as he brought her closer his hand closed over the matted lump of flesh on the side of her head, and although he could not see it to determine its severity it felt like a hideous canyon in the delicate flesh of her, and he wondered that it was a miracle she had survived the bullet, let alone a near drowning.

  As if it mattered, they were a hundred miles from anything out here, adrift in a foreign ocean, discarded and vulnerable, and knowing it was futile but with nothing else to do Nick put his arm around the girl in such a way as to keep her head out of the water, and with his free arm and his legs he began swimming.

  ◆◆◆

  Two months prior to that fateful boat trip, he had been fool enough to tell his wife about the impending company retreat.

  “Who’s going to be there?” Jessica asked.

  “Most of the company, I think,” he said. “And some wives. But I think we need to do it. You know. As a thank you. We’ve had such a good year.”

  She was wearing that put-out look that he knew so well, so he asked her, “do you want to come, Jess?”

  And she had replied with delight, “Oh yes, please.”

  He hadn’t known, with that one question, that he was sentencing her to death.

  ◆◆◆

  No direction seemed better than any other, other than away from the two boats and the dangers they posed. He couldn’t determine what progress he was making, if any, and once a bolt of pain froze him in the water like a mannequin until it passed and he was able to continue, but it wasn’t long before he was too tired to do anything but float, with his unconscious cargo hanging on his arm.

  He wasn’t sure how long it was before there came a sound to his ears a little different from the usual slap-and-slosh of the open water, but he did know that the sound was of the sea hitting some great solid object, and he couldn’t admit to himself or even to God that he hoped it was another ship, but as they drew nearer to the sound Nick was able to make out the white peaks of waves breaking on something, highlighted softly by the muted glow of the moon.

  It wasn't a ship however.

  Nick tried to make out as best he could what they were approaching in the dim light; he became convinced that it was probably a coral reef, and a hard one, and he was sure it would tear them up if he wasn’t able to get around it, so he began, in some feeble way, to try and divert their course, kicking and waving his free hand back and forth in the water. The sound of breaking waves gradually moved to his right, and then fell behind him. Now, there was a definite current pushing them toward something, and it wasn’t until they were almost on top of it that Nick saw the bone white beach glowing dimly under the moon. It seemed to stretch to his left and right as far as the eye could see. Then with some surprise Nick felt his foot catch the sea bed, and he stopped to put both feet down on it and stand up, and he rose a clear foot above the water. The girl, free of the water, pulled on his arm, igniting the agony in his belly again, but he was so overcome with relief that he was able to control it. He began walking to the beach, his arms and legs shaking with the effort of first swimming with the girl and then carrying her. Nick knew how unfit he was and now he was suffering for it; his body demanded why he had let it get so out of condition, hadn’t it kept him in relevant comfort with rarely a complaint? He had no answer for it, only that it was indulgence: he had become soft with good living. Nick struggled through water that was now as low as his ankles, the girl growing heavier by the second; he only just managed to get her above the line of the water before she almost fell from his grip to the sand. He fell to his knees next to her and then collapsed on to his back, too exhausted to feel anything except relief at his struggles.

  He lay like that for about ten minutes, and was slowly overcome with an ecstasy of good fortune, he was alive, alive and on dry ground, what were the chances of finding an island in all this blackness? A million to one, he thought, and tomorrow they’ll be out looking for us, we’ll make a fire, lots of smoke, they’ll see it, thank God, it’s going to be alright, I think it’s just possible that everything is going to be alright.

  The pain pulsed again but it was definitely easier this time. Quickly, his damp clothes cooled on his body, and with something close to dread he sat up and lifted his shirt, trying to see the wound in the light available to him. It looked black. He touched it gingerly, and it was nowhere near as painful as it had been. Fluid leaked from it, but from what he could see it didn’t look like blood. With any luck, the sea had cleaned it, and the salt had disinfected it.

  He laid back down, exhaustion in every part of him, and looked up at the stars and the sliver of moon hanging over him, and those billions of tiny lights made him feel small but incredibly fortunate, so fortunate in fact that it seemed hard to believe, and he wondered what he had done to deserve it.

  ◆◆◆

  CHAPTER 2

  Nick had been on the port side listening to Jim tell him about his days in Rover when gunfire erupted in the night, a sound so out of place that everyone on deck seemed to freeze, their eyes searching each other out to see if they had been the only one to hear it, before another blast confirmed it. Everybody, almost as one, flinched, ducking as if they could dodge a volley of bullets, but Nick felt in his feet that the bullets had punched in to the hull. He looked for Jessica but couldn’t see her. There was shouting suddenly, people rushing back and forth on deck, and dimly Nick heard the engines roar in to life, and the boat began to move, but by then it was too late, a ship rolled out of the dark and came up on their port side and hit them, and the St. Anne lurched, Nick almost losing his f
ooting, and he stumbled and grabbed the stairway that went up on to the fly deck to steady himself.

  He couldn’t see much of the ship because it was running without lights but what he could see turned his marrow cold: dark men in dirty, torn clothes, with knives in their belts and machine guns in their hands, and as he watched they jumped over the railing on to their ship, shouting in a language he couldn’t understand, their gun barrels twitching with a language of their own, one that was much more comprehensible.

  Everyone from Mitchell Cole stood frozen, their drinks still held in their hands, an expectant look on their faces, as if this was part of the cruise and at any moment the captain would pull the curtain on this little charade by announcing that they had been a great audience, and there would be applause and the party would continue, with excited chatter and barely suppressed relief.

  But Nick knew it wasn’t going to be like that.

  Nick saw Jessica then, in her eye catching green dress, a slender, beautiful woman with dark hair as soft and luxurious as velvet, and he began moving towards her, and she to him, but a gun barrel blocked her path, the man barking orders he couldn’t hope she would understand.

  Jessica.

  ◆◆◆

  The first night on the island was an unpleasant one.

  After he had regained enough of himself to get to his feet, Nick had picked up the girl and carried her further up the beach.

  Here, Nick was able to make out more of the island. It seemed to be little more than a large hill risen out of the sea, covered in short, windblown trees, with the occasional, taller Coconut Palm. All these islands in the Seychelles were volcanic, and there was no reason to think this was any different, a volcanic lump that had popped up out of the depths of the Indian Ocean a thousand years ago and was home now to trees, crabs, birds and the occasional lost turtle.

  But strange sounds came from the thick line of vegetation, big things tearing through the trees that made Nick nervous. He felt uneasy about getting too close to that dark line of trees and undergrowth, so he put the girl down a good distance away, and lay down on the sand next to her, one ear open for anything creeping up on them.

  He didn’t think it would be a good idea to try and sleep that first night, so he tried to sort out what he should be doing as soon as it became first light. Get a signal fire going had to be the first order of the day, but how the hell was he going to be able to do that? He felt in his pockets and all he had on him were keys, some coins and some notes. And of course his watch. Was there something on the island he could use? Flint, maybe, that he could strike together to make a spark? He’d have to see. The second order of business of course was going to be identifying a food source, although at that moment he couldn’t have eaten anything if he had tried, his stomach was a big ball of painful acid. He just hoped he wasn’t more severely injured than he appeared. Fish provided the best hope for food, although if he was pushed he supposed he could look under some rocks and see if he couldn’t find a crab or two…although in truth the thought of sucking on a crab leg made him feel queasy. There might be things to eat on the island, birds or maybe some small scurrying animals, but how would he catch them? How was he going to catch fish for that matter? He had no net, no knife. He could fashion a spear using wood from the trees on the island, but how was he going to sharpen it? He looked at the keys in his hand and wondered if that would work; he didn’t know. It began to feel like a hopeless exercise, but it was possible, with the signal fire going, that they would be picked up early in the day, if the St. Anne had managed to get back to port that night, and then all his worrying would be for nothing.

  If the St Anne got back to port…and everyone on it wasn’t dead.

  ◆◆◆

  He had been surprised at Mike’s suggestion at first. It seemed so against his character that Nick wondered briefly what his ulterior motive might be.

  “Are you sure?”

  Michael Ross was five years older than Nick, but about ten times healthier. He seemed to be a man with an endless fountain of energy. Nick knew that he did white water rafting, climbed mountains and jumped out of aeroplanes on a regular basis, and that he was a brown belt at Judo or Tai-Kwon-Do or Jujitsu, whichever the hell one it was he did. He looked like a physical person, with his broad shoulders, blocky weathered hands and thick neck. He also had more than a passing resemblance to the actor Tom Selleck; Mike’s features were a little sharper than Selleck’s, but the rest was pretty much the same: the long-over-the-ears dark hair, the hair from his chest like the pelt of a grizzly bear that seemed to spill over the collar of whatever shirt he happened to be wearing, and of course the long slice of moustache that obscured his top lip. Nick wondered, perhaps a little unfairly, if Mike didn’t play up to his resemblance to Tom Selleck a little bit. And of course at six foot five, he seemed to tower over everyone he met, Nick included.

  Mike smiled. He was an easy going, likeable man; his laid back manner gave no indication of the driving force that pushed Mike to succeed in almost everything he did.

  “Our gross profit margin for this quarter has crawled up to twenty seven point eight percent. That’s twenty seven point eight percent, Nick. That makes this financial year average out at twenty six point two. That’s our best yet. I think that’s worthy of a pat on the back, don’t you. Anyway, it’s not like we’ll be throwing it away. It’ll be an investment in the company. In the work force. That all their hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed. You can’t buy loyalty, but money can certainly go some way towards influencing it.”

  “So what were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere abroad.”

  “What – France? Spain?”

  Mike had a strange light in his eyes when he said, “about three years ago I went on a fishing holiday to the Seychelles. Beautiful place. Clean beaches, good looking women, great food.”

  “Seychelles?” Nick frowned. “How much is that going to cost?”

  “I looked it up-”

  “Oh, did you.”

  Mike’s eyes flickered with amusement.

  “One of the travel agents is doing a special offer to the Seychelles. A reduced price. For groups larger than eighteen.”

  “Eighteen?”

  “Well, we’ve got to think about the wives and such...”

  “Jesus, Mike, can we afford that?”

  “Course we can. Course we can...”

  ◆◆◆

  Nick was reluctant to leave the girl, but he had to collect wood for the signal fire otherwise they’d never be rescued.

  The sun had illuminated an island about half a mile in diameter, lushly green with the strange, squat trees of the Seychelles, ringed along its edge by blinding white sand. Nick didn’t have to go back far amongst the trees in his search for firewood; for one, there were enough dried out logs washed up just beyond the beach to provide ample fuel, and for another the trees on the hill grew too closely together to get through them without getting sliced and marked by the needle-like foliage.

  He discovered that the heat came out early. It was no surprise…but it was something else he had to deal with. It was like a wall. The humidity hugged his skin like a blanket. He didn’t know how long he was gone – salt water had gotten inside his supposedly waterproof Storm watch and stopped it, but he figured it for something like an hour – but when he got back the biggest rat he had ever seen was sniffing at the girl, paying special attention to the wound on her head. Nick chased it off, and it was only at the last minute that Nick thought it might have been a good idea to catch it and cook it…but by then it had already scurried away into the undergrowth.

  He went back to where the girl lay and sat down beside her. The sun lay hotly upon her skin, and he moved her in to the shade of a tree lest she burn. He took the time to look at her. She was a funny little thing, about sixteen or seventeen he thought, all knees and elbows, with sandy blonde hair cut in to a boyish bob, and small tidy features. The wound didn’t look as bad as it had felt to hi
s groping fingers last night, but on examination in the cold clear light of day he wondered if the bullet wasn’t still lodged in there. If it was, there wasn't much he could do for the poor thing. It was a long runnel in a line from behind her left ear to just past her temple where it finished in a lump that had swollen to the size of a golf ball. It had clotted and was healing. Maybe the bullet wasn't in there after all. Who was she? He didn't know her. He tried to remember if he had seen her on the boat, perhaps as one of the crew, but nothing came to him.

  As he piled the wood up farther down the beach he studied the unconscious form of the girl. She posed a problem that he had purposely avoided thinking about. What if they weren’t rescued straight away? What if it took a couple of weeks? What the hell was he supposed to do with her if she didn’t regain consciousness? He couldn’t feed her, he couldn’t make her drink. There was a distinct shortage of IV drips and saline on the island. The prospect of watching her waste away as her body fed on itself was not a happy one. Nick shook his head and turned back to the foundations of his fire. He would just have to hope that they were rescued quickly. If they weren’t, and she didn’t regain consciousness, well...he would deal with that as and when it happened.

  He scanned the horizon.

  No ships.

  Damn it. They had to be looking.

  He sat back on his heels and wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was only April but the sun beating down on his back was hot. Hadn’t he heard one of the guides on the St. Anne say that the Seychelles stayed the same temperature all year round? Too close to the equator. He took his shirt off, the feel of the sun good on his skin, but God was he white, and fat; like an enormous sun shy slug. He stared at his pile of sticks. Now just how in God’s name was he meant to light it? He hadn’t smoked in years, therefore he kept no lighter on his person. He didn’t wear any glasses so he had no way to magnify the light. He spent ten minutes looking for something that might be flint, picking up rocks that he thought might do the trick and hitting them against each other to no effect, great, typical, and wandering around in a circle and scratching his head he decided the only way he was going to get a result was the good old boy scout method of rubbing two sticks together. He broke some off a nearby tree and went back to his pile of sticks and got down to it, wishing uselessly for some newspaper to help start him off.