Seas of South Africa by Philip Roy Read Free Book Online Page A

for him. I could barely hold back my tears.
    But I did.

Chapter Seven

    SHOULD I WALK TO the police station to report the murder, and tell the policeman there everything I had witnessed? But what if he told me to stay around to testify, and what if I couldn’t leave for a long time? What if he didn’t believe me, and kept me under suspicion? After all, I hadn’t entered the country legally. I had never shown anyone my passport. Maybe he would put me behind bars until he sorted it all out. What would happen to my crew then? No, there was no way I could risk telling the police. I had been warned not to trust them. For a moment, I wondered if I ought to pull the body into the water, tow it a few miles out, and give it a burial atsea. But then I would be destroying the evidence of the crime, which would be helping the murderers, and creating another crime. And what if I got caught with the body? Everyone would believe I had killed him. No, I couldn’t do that. I didn’t see how I could do anything but leave. I would have to let somebody else find the body. But then, what if it were found by young kids playing on the beach? As I stood over the body and tried to figure it out, I caught a glimpse of a small mast in the fog. The dark sailboat!
    That settled everything. I ran to the kayak, pushed it into the water, and raced to the sub. As I climbed up and opened the hatch, I saw the sailboat approaching slowly through the fog. Maybe they were coming to collect the body and hide what they had done.
    There was no time to deflate the kayak. I tied it to the hatch, jumped inside, started the engine, and cranked it up. As we motored away, I looked back with the binoculars, but couldn’t tell if they were stopping or not. Probably they were. I sailed around to the sea side of the island and half a mile out from shore. I deflated the kayak, folded it, and put it away. Then I put the kettle on again, sat at the radar screen, and waited for them to show.
    I drank a cup of chamomile tea, with honey, but couldn’t seem to settle down. My crew knew when I was upset or excited. They could feel the difference in my mood. And if I was calm and relaxed, or nervous and agitated, they reflected that. Seaweed stayed on his feet, ready to climb up the portal andjump into the air. Hollie picked up his ears, listened extra carefully to every sound, and sniffed the air. But not Little Laura. She cakewalked around the floor like a tiny penguin, picking up tiny bits of rope and wood that Hollie had dropped, and carrying them all the way up to her cage. She reminded me of Jack in the Beanstalk. It was so much work for her. Finally, it occurred to me to tie her cage closer to the floor. So I did. I hung it from a rope just two feet off the floor. She watched me do it, trying to bite me the whole time. But now, her climb was a lot shorter, and she went up and down a lot more often.
    Half an hour later, there was a beep on the radar. A vessel appeared at the northern corner of the island. They were coming now.
    I submerged, raised the periscope, and waited. Without lights, they were hard to spot. Sometimes they appeared as a dark shadow on the water, and sometimes they seemed to disappear. The closer they came, the better I could see them. The further from shore we were, the less fog there was. A mile out, there was none.
    They came within a quarter of a mile of us, and I was starting to wonder if they had located us with a portable sonar device. But they hadn’t. They came past and kept going, never knowing we were there. I engaged battery power and followed them. They were towing the orange dinghy.
    They motored out three miles, and stopped. I surfaced a quarter of a mile away, climbed the portal, and watched themthrough the binoculars. They lit two lanterns and hung them from the mast. There were six pirates in the boat.
    The first thing they did was climb into the dinghy, reach down and lift something heavy out, and drop it