Chapter 19

The trip to Hiroshima and Pusan were routine as far as a working ship was concerned, but nothing showed up in the way of pirates. That made the trip pretty dull for us who were there to defend the ship, but we did not have much to do until we hit the open ocean again as we headed back to Shanghai.

We had been out from Pusan five days and were aching for something interesting to do. We were lounging on deck, mostly bullshitting and trying to top the stack of fantastic and impossible stories that were being laid before us. We men were amazed by the stories that Liz told that she claimed came to her through her experience as a newspaper reporter. Only Hoi and I knew that she was making up the stories because we knew how little real experience she had as a reporter, but her stories were interesting and amusing, even to us who knew how much truth was to be found in them.

She was telling her stories in Mandarin Chinese to benefit the majority of her audience, and I was happy because she was expanding my vocabulary in a most enjoyable way. Anyway, she was about half-way through a very intricate and involved tale when there was a sudden cry from the lookout. He shouted that there was a plume of smoke on the horizon only about 5° to the right of our current course.

Immediately, Capt. Harmon ordered that the bow be pointed at the smoke plume and as much speed as possible be generated. Soon we were moving at our top speed of about 17 knots. That much smoke had to be coming from a ship at least as large as the Asian Queen. There was no way we were going to reach her in time to do much about saving the ship, but we might be able to do something to help the people aboard.

Eventually, the lookout reported that the smoke was coming from a ship about our size, but no people could be seen. That could be because of the distance between us and the stricken ship, but it would be at least another hour before we would have any clue as to the people who had been aboard the ship.

As a general rule, pirates did not burn a major ship or kill everybody aboard. All they did was to take any valuables that they could fine and rape any women aboard. The pirates usually did not have anybody who was qualified to run something as complex as a merchant ship, so they just left it once they had had their fun with the women who might be there.

Therefore, we had no idea what was going on, but all of us felt honor-bound to do what we could for anyone we could find who was still alive. Naturally, we assumed that the ship was in trouble because of pirates, but there were other possibilities, so we still did not know what we might be doing in the next few hours.

All of the story telling stopped and any other goofing off was abandoned as we rushed about readying the firefighting gear that we had available and appointing the men who would shift to the other ship. I was asked to lead the crew moving to the other ship to fight the fire, and the first-mate was going as the temporary captain of the stricken vessel if the former captain could not be found.

I was taking Hoi with me, and we would both be fully armed in case there were some hostile people aboard the burning ship. Liz insisted that we take along two of the shooters just in case that this was some sort of trap. Okay, that sounded like good sense, so I agreed to it. I got two volunteers to go with us, and we were ready to go as soon as Matt released us.

As we got very close to the burning ship, we still could not see any living people, and the lookout reported that there were no bodies lying on the deck. The whole situation was very confusing, but we decided to go. We loaded into three of the Asian Queen‘s lifeboats and were lowered carefully to the ocean. I tried to stay out of the way as the boats were rowed across the short distance to the other ship.

More questions and confusion as we found a single rope ladder hanging off the side of the ship, and all of the ship’s lifeboats were gone. I could not help the feeling that we were walking into a trap. I led my men up the rope ladder to the deck of the ship, and there was no doubt that we had stumbled into a trap of some sort.

Once we could see at close hand, we could see that the fires were nothing but decoys! We could see that each fire was actually a pile of refuse and wet vegetable matter arranged so that the smoke would escape through open hatches and passageways. There had to be men hiding below who were tending the fires so as to attract rescuers to the ship.

I waved the First-Mate onto the ship and showed him one of the fires. He agreed that this was a trap, but he still did not understand what was going on. Frankly, that made two of us, but we quickly formed a plan. One of the men accompanying us was a signal man who had an acetylene gas signal lamp that he could use to communicate with the Asian Queen. I sent a condensed description of my plan to retake the ship while the remaining men were coming aboard.

The fourth lifeboat from the Asian Queen was bringing Liz and the rest of the shooters over to help clear this ship. They arrived within a very few minutes, so we were soon ready to recover the ship. We had nine people with guns, so we were able to split up into five groups. There were two shooters each with four groups of men plus I sent Liz with the First-Mate and three other men to take over the bridge. Liz was somewhat disgruntled with this assignment, but I reminded her that I needed to send somebody whom I could count on, and she was the obvious choice. Well, she agreed with me, but she still did not like it.

I had already explained what I wanted to the men going below to kill the fires, so we left as soon as we had some people on the bridge. Hoi and I each led a group, and the two other groups were led by the smartest of the remaining shooters. We were at about the middle of the ship’s open deck, so two groups went down the port side, one forward and the other aft. I led one of the two groups going down on the starboard side, and we had split up the same way.

We had hardly reached the first deck down when we discovered that this was a passenger ship, so we had to contend with a lot of separate cabins. That slowed us down, but we found passengers in nearly every cabin that we came to. There was a lot of hysteria among the women because I think that every one who was old enough had been raped at least once, and the men were only a little better because they had to watch the rapes as they took place.

As it turned out, not every female was raped because the pirates ran out of steam before they ran out of women. However, that was when we found out why the lifeboats were missing. All of the white women who were on board and in the appropriate age group had been kidnapped. They were headed for two junks that would take them to the mainland where they would be sold to brothels as sex slaves.

Dammit, that meant that we had to get our asses in gear if we were going to rescue those women. There were no pirates left on board, and the fires had been set in an effort to attract rescuers. Well, that part of the plan had worked. Some of the crew was left aboard, but there were no officers—they had all been murdered by the pirates.

I sent a message to Capt. Harmon that we were returning to the ship with about half of the crew that he had sent over. That made up enough of a crew to take this ship, the Iris, to Shanghai. The First-Mate was going to put in a salvage claim on the ship on behalf of AGTC. Maybe we had our second ship at very little expense.

I explained the situation to Matt and Ed as soon as we were back on board, and they agreed that we were honor-bound to try to rescue the women headed for the brothels as slaves. Fortunately, several of the passengers aboard the Iris had seen which way the lifeboats had headed, so we had a good idea of where we should aim our efforts.