Introduction

 

When the pirates struck at Tanjong Belait, Christine Wheeler was reclining half asleep on the veranda of the Administrator's bungalow, high up on the hill behind the town. It was a still and oppressive afternoon. The heavy sagging brown cloud of the previous few days had thinned at last, allowing the tropical sun to penetrate. It had left behind a thick deposit of volcanic dust, which a heavy thunderstorm overnight had washed into drifts and sandbanks on the lawn and half-filled the deep monsoon ditches.

The town lay out of sight below. All that Christine could see from her prone position was the watery expanse of the bay, calm now, but still flecked with floating debris, and, beyond it, the dark triangular bulk of Pulo Belait, the sheltering island which a few months earlier had saved them from a more complete disaster. Its bulk was noticeably shrunken. She could hardly contemplate it now without a shudder, her eyes going uneasily to the empty sea horizon beyond; a placid sea, with only the lightest of breezes coming from it to cool her naked skin. Incredibly placid it seemed now, remembering how it had risen like a monster! If she closed her eyes she could still relive that terrifying sight. The sea had risen far above where it should have been, spilling round and right over the cliff flanks of the island, crashing and tumbling with a hideous roar into the enclosed waters of the bay until it filled like a seething cauldron. The earth had shook with the impact and all was finally blotted out by a boiling, salty tasting, fog of spray.

Shuddering, Mrs Wheeler stood up, seeking reassurance in a wider view, holding her loose bikini top against her breasts, tilting back her broad brimmed straw hat to inspect a solitary vessel that had appeared out of the pearly haze along the coast. Heading as if to approach the town, it trailed a broad wake across the placid expanse of the bay. She had hoped that it might be the patched-up Administration launch, with her husband and the Administrator aboard, returning from their exploratory trip in that direction to examine the wreck of the abandoned oil installations. But then she saw with disappointment that it had no mast or sails rigged and was propelled by several pairs of oars, creeping along like a many-legged water beetle. She supposed it to be only another desperate plea for help, carried in a salvaged boat by a crew of forlorn survivors.

She walked forward out onto the lawn until she could see below her what remained of the little coastal town, a huddle of roofs of soft brown attap or rust red, corrugated iron, spilling down the hillside amid a tropical luxuriance of vegetation, then ending abruptly in a clean-swept slope with only stumps and foundations of trees and buildings, all stained brown with mud down to the new waterline. The sea itself had fallen back but not all the way, or perhaps it was the land that had sunk. A pale greenish oblong in the water, projecting offshore, indicated the submerged shape of the town jetty, a line of twisted girders the only sign above water of where the cargo godowns had been.

Looking over the intervening hedge, Christine could see the sampan crawling in towards the root of the former jetty, where a makeshift addition of timber and rubble had recently been added to facilitate the handling of newly constructed fishing canoes, upon which it seemed likely the future feeding of the town would depend when so much rice land was under water.

She thought of going down to the shore to find out if the incoming boat had brought any fresh news. Since the Catastrophe, in communications as in much else, without working electronics Tanjong Belait was back to the Dark Ages. But going into town meant she would have to go and get dressed, since the local religious fanatics had adopted the disaster as divine confirmation of their prejudices. Though she and her hostess were safe enough up here in the enclosed privacy of the garden, qualifying as a kind of harem area approachable only by way of the house, she wouldn't have dared to appear amid the jittery survivors and unstable refugees without being fully covered up.

She decided that it was just too hot and she would stay where she was. She could see the sampan was crawling into the landing place, rowed laboriously by a dozen square bladed oars. Its long awning concealed the rowers from view, with rattan blinds lowered as if they had recently come through a rain storm. A trickle of people were already picking their way down to the water side. She would hear any news fast enough. One of the khaki-clad figures she recognised as a government official. He would listen to the newcomers' tale and give them whatever reassurance he could.

Oars shipped, the oncoming vessel bumped alongside the new jetty and suddenly the situation was shockingly transformed.

The obscuring blinds ran up all at once and men swarmed out onto the stones, more men than the number of oars would have warranted, brandishing gleaming weapons, parangs or something of the sort. Faint sounds of their yelling reached to Christine's ears. The khaki clad official had suddenly fallen on his back on the jetty, clutching at something protruding from his chest. The rest of the reception party, men, women and children, were fleeing, running and screaming back up the hill, some of them falling, the rest pursued by the howling invaders.

In safety, high above the mayhem, Christine stood wide-eyed and frozen in disbelief, clutching her loosened top to her breast. Of course she knew there had been piracy on these coasts before the Catastrophe, when radios, aircraft and satellites were still working. Civil war between Christian and Moslem in the islands to the north had allowed disorder to spill over the sea frontier. But they too must have suffered as badly from the Catastrophe. Had that really been a crossbow that had felled the poor official? That seemed to indicate those people had no usable firearms either. Yet some of them must have adapted with terrifying speed, to begin to prey upon their fellow survivors!

At that, recollecting her own vulnerability as pursuers and pursued disappeared among the houses below, Christine turned to see from somewhere close behind the house, a tall column of black smoke rapidly climbing like a signal against the sky. She started towards the house at first, intending to shout an alarm to her hostess, only to be forestalled by the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood and Felicity's voice screaming from inside. Christine had gone only a few more faltering steps before a cluster of dark squat figures suddenly appeared on the veranda with naked blades flourishing among them. Men, whose fierce eyes fell immediately on her, caught out hesitating in the middle of the lawn, an almost naked female, blatantly vulnerable, evoking at once a triumphant masculine roar. Open mouthed, Christine swung about and ran, still clutching the bikini top to her, in the opposite direction across the wide lawn.

Evidently the sight of lissom nudity fleeing from them, with only an inadequate scrap of blue and white cotton spanning her bobbing rump, evoked the inevitable response of a hot pursuit. The sound of their lewd yells of appreciation lent wings to their quarry's heels and raised panic in her brain. She hurdled a bed of dusty, red and yellow lilies with her loose bikini top waved wildly in one hand like a lure. She left a trail of naked footprints over a drift of volcanic sand, only to find herself faced with the impenetrable barrier of the boundary hedge. In desperation she tried to repeat her record spring, this time as a high jump, but security had become imprisonment and she came down crashing bodily into the thickest part of the hedge.

Threshing desperately, Christine sank deeper but made no forward progress. Strong hands from behind snared her kicking ankles and she screamed wildly as they tried to drag her out. A heavy body crashed into the hedge alongside her and rough fingers pried at the soft flesh about her hips until they had hooked under the tight strings of her briefs. Still trying to cling to thin twigs, she felt herself being drawn inexorably backwards out of the hedge, backside in the air, hatless, hair resisting, entangled. Then, just as she emerged into the open in a shower of leaves and twiggy fragments, the over-tried strings of her bikini snapped.

The one man still holding her fell over backward in surprise and she nearly escaped, wriggling between their legs and scuttling off across the grass on all fours like a lizard. But a man's hand quickly snagged her again, first by one ankle then the other. She was dragged back into their midst, leaving desperately clawed finger marks in the grass, before they captured her wrists too.

Face down and spread-eagled, then hoist between four of her captors, one to each limb, she was carried like that back towards the house, blonde hair dragging along at the trail, her down-curved belly almost brushing the grass. Above and around her, men laughed and exchanged incomprehensible comments, while Christine's brain jittered with dreadful notions of what they intended to do to her.

Reaching the veranda she was dumped face down upon her belly across the chilly glass top of the circular coffee table just as she was, arms and legs outspread, encircled by her captors. It seemed that her fears were to be fulfilled.

Then a more authoritative voice seemed to intervene. Christine felt her limbs released. With her head over the edge of the table she was looking down the legs of the man the voice belonged to, camouflage trousers and a pair of military style boots. What she had feared seemed to have been prevented or perhaps only postponed. She might have been more grateful had she not suspected she was being reserved instead for the pirate leader's first use. Before she could get her strained and shaky limbs pulled into a position of more dignity, the man had stooped and accelerated the process, seizing her by a fistful of hair and yanking her to her knees on the tabletop.

Holding her there forcibly and thrusting his hand between her resistant thighs, he made an intimate examination of her sex, slapping her hands away and greeting her squeal of protest with what, by his underlings' guffaws, must have been an obscene joke. The manner, though, seemed more like that of a slave dealer checking a dubious purchase to make sure he was getting what he had been expecting, whether matron or virgin.

Whatever was required, Christine passed muster for she was hauled abruptly off the slippery table top and forced to accompany the man inside, his fist still buried in her hair keeping her almost bent double, scurrying along with her head at the level of his hip. In the dining room, two more men held Felicity bent across the table, one of them quickly removing his hand from behind her as his chief entered. Felicity gave an immediate cry as she saw her friend also captive, but before she could go further, was silenced with a hard slap. Handing over Christine to one of these followers who, at his instructions, thrust her alongside Felicity, their captor faced the two women, side by side across the table before him.

The pirate was dark complexioned, broad faced with greying hair, brush cut as if he had once been in the military. He held a small photograph. At a further word both women had their heads jerked up, held by the hair so that he could compare faces. His eyes, black and cruel, studied the two women then, making a decision, he thrust the photo in front of Christine's eyes.

"You?" he demanded, grinning wolfishly. Uncertain and confused, Christine was obliged to confirm that it was of her. A snapshot cut from some larger picture, taken at a party somewhere, Hong Kong probably, by her dress, she was grinning idiotically at the camera. No wonder he had found identification uncertain. Satisfied with that, he began to give orders.

Half an hour later, towing their two women captives each by a rope about her neck and her hands bound behind her back, the pirate band was on its way downhill towards the shore, leaving the vacated bungalow as a pillar of fire and smoke behind them. The choicest items of its loot were carried in bundles on the men's shoulders, as much as they could carry. The pirates were mostly stocky men with black hair worn long about cruel simian faces, wearing semi-military clothing of green cotton or camouflage pattern, most of them with rubber sandals. As if they also had found modern arms failing them, ruined by the insidious fall-out of micro-organisms from the peace weapons, they were armed with long cutting weapons. Slung on their backs were crossbows of a very modern-looking style,

The landing Christine had seen at the town jetty had only been a diversion. Another landing force had been dropped somewhere along the coast and taken the town in the rear, killing or dispersing into ineffectiveness the occupants of the small police post, dropping off the small gang who had seized the Administrator's bungalow and its two occupants.

Without fear of interference, the rest of the pirates were looting the small town. Down the hillside, where the shop houses lined the one main street, the landing party and the sea-borne invaders had linked up, pressing terrified townspeople into service as porters to carry their own property down to the jetty where two more pirate boats were coming in to pick up the landward raiders. That the victims were right to be terrified was borne out by several dead bodies lying in the street and the sound of smashing woodwork and the screaming of women and children.

Into this scene of chaos, Christine and Felicity's captors descended, fiercely striking at anyone who got in their way, dragging the two unwilling women with them. Felicity was now as naked as her companion, for her sarong had quickly slipped from its tuck under her arms. For a while she had managed to keep it from slipping over her hips, but with her hands bound she was unable to keep her grip and when it fell to her ankles, tripping her, she had been made to kick it clear and to stumble on naked. Protest had been dealt with in advance, for both women had been summarily gagged with a strip of cloth between their jaws as a reminder that their captors' native culture took little account of women's rights. Along the way, the two captives were joined by others rounded up by the pirates and they made their way to the shore amid a procession of terrified people, mainly women and girls, herded along bowed under heavy sacks of rice from the communal store.

In this public fashion Christine and Felicity were led naked along the jetty at the ends of their halters and the last that Tanjong Belait saw of its Administrator's English wife and her friend was of them being loaded like the other loot aboard one of the pirate sampans.

Already half full with piled bags of rice, its oars manned by a random selection of prisoners, the boat moved out as soon as the two Englishwomen were aboard. They were thrust down under the light wooden awning into a narrow space above the rice bags. Christine, following Felicity within, fell headlong, blinded by the sudden gloom, the blinds having been let down after them. Rough hands dragged and shoved her body and limbs. She found herself stowed face down, embracing with arms and legs a thick wooden beam that ran beneath her and secured like that with her wrists and ankles bound together below the beam. A pale oval shape that glimmered in front of her became identified as her eyes adjusted to the gloom as the figure of Felicity, secured in the same way and to the same beam so that all that was visible of her, from Christine's viewpoint, was her bare backside.

For a long time the pair lay uncomfortable and disregarded in the hot darkness, unable even to give one another the comfort of speech, hearing the sound of oars inexpertly plied and to the yelling of the pirates urging the rowers to better efforts. The timber was hard under soft bodies, bilge water washed to and fro beneath them and some discarded bottles rolled with a slow clunk to and fro. From time to time faces would appear under the rattan blinds to inspect the two captives and make incomprehensible jests, or worse, a man would crawl in past and over them, gritty feet and hard knees blundering over their cringing bodies to grope among clinking bottles for fresh supplies.

In the end their fear was justified for one of the rummagers lingered, crouched between the two women prisoners. He passed up the bottles he was carrying to a comrade above but lingered himself after a deal of argument, maddeningly incomprehensible to his other two hearers, forced to wait helplessly for its resolution without a clue to his intentions.

The man was perched on the beam that supported the pair of them. Christine could see, smell and almost feel his state of arousal. His sarong, his sole garment, was tucked up upon his thighs and as he turned from Felicity to her, his penis bobbed and swung in full view. She closed her eyes at the sight, fatalistically sure of what was to come, but he chose to go the other way, focusing upon Felicity instead whose white bottom, parted by a darker divide, loomed in the dimness like twin moons. Her thighs, spread widely to accommodate the thickness of the timber, offered him a clear view of the tempting crevice, despite her blindly prescient attempt to burrow into the solid wood.

Now behind the assailant, Christine had a close-up view of his brown buttocks, so close that if had she dared she might have attacked them with her teeth in defence of her friend. He, too, was now straddling the same beam and jockeying for position, giving Christine a glimpse of dangling testicles through the dark V of muscular male thighs. He hovered for a moment, the splay of his thighs framing the paler female rump beyond, before he centred on the dark cleft that was his target, and sank into it. Christine's view then filled completely with a display of clenching and thrusting brown flesh, male buttock muscles flexing and pumping, inches before her nose.

At such close quarters the reaction of both parties was audible and intimate. Felicity's gag-im­peded squeals and her assailant's triumphant grunts filled the hot darkness. Christine could hardly ignore their progress, her head jerked back and forth in forced response as the rhythmic withdrawal of the male buttocks, threatened to ram her in the face at every minute.

It seemed some of his comrades were taking an interest in his progress too, for from time to time heads upside down appeared through the blinds and the narrow space resounded with drunken guffaws.

Christine began drawing attention in her turn; another man came sliding down behind her to provide her with a distraction of her own. She had the impression that an argument was going on over her helpless form. A brown hand reached past her to lift a hank of her fair hair. Behind her, horny hands were cupping her trembling bottom cheeks then restlessly splaying them apart as the voices yammered and grunted, back and forth.

Straddling the wide wooden beam she was hopelessly placed for resistance. There was no way she could prevent the stiff male fingers from exploring between her thighs, worming under her plumpy fleshed and lightly furred mound, lifting it upon a work-hardened palm away from the protection of the timber. She squeaked and wriggled, then nervously tried to suppress her reaction, clamping her teeth into her gag as fingers slid upwards, testing each exposed fold and crevice right up to the pucker of her anus. When his thick forefinger, slipping back down, suddenly penetrated the lips of her vagina and drove deep within it, she almost bit the wet rag in two. Her squeal of outrage and her convulsive jerk only drew a grunt of appreciation from the brute. She could hear him exchanging banter with his fellows across her violently reacting body, boasting perhaps of his expertise or else, horrible to think of it, of her receptivity.

Yet she was helpless to avoid some response. A second finger joined the first, two big thick fingers thoroughly reaming the softly clinging walls of her vagina, producing deep spirals of feeling. Christine gurgled protests to unheeding ears. Far from ceasing, another pair of fingers reinforced the effects, fore finger and thumb teasing her clitoris, tweaking and tantalizing until she bucked and wriggled in a futile attempt to rid herself of the incubus.

She became conscious from the laughter that she was being made to perform for the other men's amusement. The fumes of stale alcohol made her head swim, but she held on with increasing desperation, trying not to give her tormentor the satisfaction of a response. By now three fingers were at work within her, slipping and slithering as if they or she had been greased. In her efforts to escape them she humped along the beam, body wet with sweat slithering along the timber inch by inch until she was suddenly rammed full in the face by solid male flesh, the clenched backward thrusting buttocks of the man in front, now stroking fast into Felicity.

Recoiling painfully in panic, Christine's own rump thrust automatically upwards as if offered to the manipulating fingers behind her, squirming upon the broad male palm as if for his greater convenience. Yelling, thunderous voices tormented her eardrums and tears blinded her. She almost sank into helpless submission.

The man in front gave a tremendous heave and Felicity a correspondingly shrill response. Blearily Christine saw the taut brown buttocks ahead of her suddenly relax and rise. Briefly revealed was a dangling, slackened penis with a thread of white dangling from its tip, before the man's tucked-up sarong tumbled down like a curtain descending upon the scene.

As he climbed swiftly out and dis­appeared, Christine subsided flat onto her belly. Her own assailant had released her in his turn. Unnoticed until then, the motion of the vessel and the sounds from outside had undergone a change. Christine sagged, limp and exhausted, arms and legs dangling, breasts squashed on either side of the timber, thankful to find her erstwhile abuser seemed inclined to follow his departing comrade. Then the brute hesitated, muttering to himself. He stooped, grunting, groping about beneath her, where the forgotten bottle was rolling and clunking at intervals. Fishing it up he shook it, cursed regretfully and, upending it, dribbled the last few dregs it still retained down the cleft of Christine's bottom.

Running down overheated flesh, the unexpected baptism was an icy shock. Before Christine could grasp was happening he rammed the neck of the bottle where his fingers had just been. Her reaction was evidently satisfying, for the bottle wielder heaved himself up, laughing, and ducked out under the awning.

For a while Christine lay groaning in humiliation just as he had left her. The boat was quieter now and almost stationary, lifting and swooping over the swell with only occasional application of the oars. The water-chilled bottle, rammed up to its rounded shoulders in her vagina, moved in sympathy with the swell, its long neck working from side to side within her, and its heavy body banging on the wooden beam in regular clunks. With each swoop it shifted a little, working its way down the channel. It hung at last with its bulging lip just within, on the verge of ejection for a seeming age, until Christine made an infuriated effort that rolled it so violently that it came free and toppled with a splash back into the bilges from which it had come.

Preoccupied with this process, she had hardly noticed that the rowing had finally stopped. The sampan was now rolling idly while a good deal of confused shouting went on above. A new ordeal faced them, for she and Felicity were cut free from their beam and hauled out, handled like sides of meat, hoist up onto the upper deck with their backs to the deckhouse and held by their wrists with arms above their heads. The pirates were clumsy drunk. The pair holding Christine nearly dropped her into the sea before she found a footing on the narrow strip of planking along the side.

Christine's own gag had come loose around her neck and she attempted some word of encouragement to her friend but Felicity, still securely gagged, couldn't make any adequate response, her eyes blinking wildly. Christine gasped in sudden horror at the sight of the vivid red smears on her friend's white skin, but then looking down she realised she was in the same state. There were bloody finger marks left where the pirates had handled them. One foot rested in a sticky patch on the planking that, at the moment she looked, washed away red in a stray slop of the sea.

In terror Christine looked about her for the shore. They were far out from the land. Dim blue shapes she saw on the horizon she recognised as the mountains inland from Tanjong Belait and a lower darker triangle sunk nearly out of sight might have been Pulo Belait. They were alone on the ocean with a gang of butchers!

Then, into the corner of her eye, the appearance of a white triangle heralded the sliding into view of a big three-mast schooner, painted white like a rich man's yacht, its crew on deck in white tops and blue pants, a total contrast to the pirates' colourful motley crew.

Yet this seemed to be taken by both parties as if it were an expected rendezvous. The schooner's sails came in with a rush and it closed the wallowing sampan to within a few score metres, its white bow wave dying away until it lay gracefully at rest with sails gathered in. It seemed as if Christine and Felicity were being held up for inspection, for to her chagrin, Christine could see binoculars being trained upon them by the other crew. Any hopes that the more sophisticated nature of the larger vessel might mean rescue were negated by the apparently friendly greetings that passed between two crews, though Christine noticed that the yacht carried upon its fore deck a bigger version of the pirates' crossbows, mounted on a pedestal and the two men manning it were keeping it trained upon the sampan.

Whatever the relationship, a rope had been passed to the pirates and some of them were advancing purposefully upon her and Felicity. Christine guessed with mixed feelings that a pre-arranged meeting was in progress and they were to be passed on, perhaps only to a new captor, but at least the yacht, if that was what it was, promised a less primitive kind of imprisonment.

The process of our shipping, however, was more effective than civilised! Christine made no resistance when a loop of rope was flung around her ankles, assuming it to be intended as a measure of restraint. Before she could revise that idea, a man picked her up and slung her bodily over the side. She hit the sea with a yell and a smack. Even before she went under, she felt the rope whip her ankles up and she was drawn feet first through the water.

After her first startled yell she had the sense to keep her mouth shut, swallowing only a modicum of salt water. She was being drawn so fast that her body acted like a surfboard and she broke surface at times for long enough to snatch a panicky breath. Even so it seemed nightmarishly long before her speedy career ended and then she promptly sank, her feet went upwards and her head downwards. For a moment terror seized her, but it was only a moment and then she broke surface again, this time upside down. A lifting wave slapped her in the face with a bucketful of the sea so that in place of the intended yell, she rose into the air spouting salt water, to find herself dangling from an out-swung boom at the end of a taut rope. For a long moment she twisted slowly in mid-air like a trophy fish being displayed by its proud captors, bare breasts with white undersides exposed upside down, long hair draining sea water, dipping its ends into the swell each time it rose beneath her.

She heard male laughter and reached instinctively to cover herself, but only succeeded in setting her body twisting wildly to display herself more thoroughly from a variety of angles. Only after their amusement had been satisfied was she swung aboard at last. She hovered for an instant over the dark square of a hatch in the wooden deck, out of which a black face, white teeth grinning, looked up at her with shining eyes. Down she went with a rush, to be halted just before her head hit the planking. She had her hands out to prevent it and used them to steady herself in that instant, before the rope was suddenly released again and she was deposited head over heels in a breathless heap on the deck.

A large black hand sorted her into some sort of order. "You are the Wheeler woman!" a deep rich contralto voice pronounced confidently. "In you go!" She was propelled by a slap on the behind in the desired direction. Her new captivity had begun.