Part Eleven of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: Mot, Hai, Ba, Zô!

Last time, we had left key characters in our Soap Opera – Lady Lynne Shrimpleton and Soldier Jay – in something of a pickle. Their abduction of leading member of the Khalistan Warriors’ – Baban Singh Chopra – had gone disastrously wrong. Particularly for the poor old Sikh, whose overloaded heart couldn’t cope with what had happened to him. Jay and his former team-mates at Shrimpleton Town AFC – Nine and Four – had just laid-out the big man in the rear cabin of Lady Lynne’s yacht as it lay at anchor just off the coat of Cumberside Island in the Irish Sea close to the inlet known as Morecambe Bay.

All three men were visibly upset as they looked at Baban’s inert body as it lay in the Recovery Position on the floor of the boat.

Their reverie was broken as Lady Lynne reappeared behind them and beckoned them back into the main cabin.

“I don’t know who you are…” she said, staring in a very accusatory way at Soldier `J’. She was interrupted by excited jabbering by Nine and Four which she listened to carefully.

(`Jabbering’ is the sort of deprecatory word so many white supremacist morons would use to describe foreign languages that they don’t understand. So I use it advisedly. Both Four and Nine had been chosen by General Department II in Hanoi – and Lady Lynne personally – not just for their footballing skills – which were exceptional in themselves. Just like herself, these men were selected by their employers in Hanoi because they were also extraordinarily gifted intelligence agents: better by a country mile than the sort of Cheviot Watt–type dummies our Old Boys’ Network usually comes up with. These guys could speak fluent Vietnamese and both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, for a start. Heriot Watt and his chums could barely speak basic English, let alone ` a load of bally squiggles’ – as his `Unky’ Timmy would describe any form of Chinese; Japanese; Malay or countless other Oriental languages. Both Nine and Four’s understanding of English was first class. But – as Lady Lynne herself knew all too well from experience (unlike her unilingual counterparts in British Intelligence,) understanding the written or spoken word was only the first step to true mastery of a foreign language. Speaking it was by far the hardest part. But when her compatriots spoke in whatever language they chose, she listened: these guys were no mugs…)

Turning back towards Jay, Her Ladyship continued, slightly less aggressively:

“My boys tell me you are the Centre Half of the Shrimpleton Town football team. They like you – which is just as well because I’m not sure I do. Tell me what you were doing in the pub tonight – and how you came to be on board my yacht!”

So Jay did. Almost fully truthfully. Lady Lynne’s expression changed markedly when she learnt that Dirty Dora was this man’s beloved little sister and she even smiled at him a little sadly. She didn’t seem surprised that he was an ex-soldier (Jay said nothing of his experiences as a Special Forces operative but her Ladyship had already guessed that for herself: this handsome hunk looked like he could handle himself and she knew that genuine hard nuts like him never let on how they had turned-out that way…)

Besides – who but a Special Ops man could possibly swim in the dark the best part of a mile in cold sea water from shore to ship and emerge not only unscathed and ready for action but with a perfectly serviceable weapon?

“Sit down!” she commanded him. “We need to talk!”

Then she spoke to Nine and Four in Vietnamese. Four obediently went forward to the galley and came back with a tray of drinks before returning to cook four bowls of Bún Bò Huế (a noodle dish somewhere between soup and a main meal according to Dr Google); Bánh Xèo savoury crepes and Gỏi Cuon spring rolls. Nine went aft and Jay was soon aware of a deep throbbing in the boat as he started its engines and the yacht began its long journey towards the south coast of England.

As all this was happening, Lady Lynne was offering Jay a small glass full of clear liquid: Rượu. She stood up and announced:

“It’s Roo-O, a Vietnamese spirit distilled from rice.”

She took another glass for herself and proposed a toast:

“Mot, hai, ba, zô! It means: one, two, three, Cheers!” and knocked hers back in a single gulp.

Jay followed suit – and then gulped anew: fresh air this time. This stuff was strong enough to strip paint…

Another toast followed – and finally, a third. Then Lady Lynne sat down and started to talk. She explained to Jay how fervently she also wanted to get her hands on the Khalistan Warriors – although, he noticed, not why…

And as she talked, Jay was only too aware of the way she deliberately rationed her smiles in unison with small alterations in her posture. There were almost imperceptible changes in the way she sat. But by the end of her speech, she was bestowing her warmest and most beguiling smile on him and had turned almost side-on to the ex-soldier, clearly to give him the most advantageous view of her exquisite figure. She seemed almost disappointed when he didn’t respond – so much so that, her smile suddenly vanished – she blurted out:

“You’re not gay, are you?”

It was his turn to smile.

“I know what you’re doing!” he said. “I’ve seen it all before – and better! You are a very beautiful woman, Your Ladyship and you clearly have had a lot of practice getting men to do what you want. But I’m immune to it. I don’t expect you to understand: you don’t have a beautiful sister called Dora who was even better at it – partially because she used to regularly practice flirting with her big brother, safe in the knowledge that nothing would ever happen.”

He looked suddenly sad and turned away as the full horror of the fact that Dora would never be able to do so again dawned on him yet again. He could still barely believe that she was no longer here and the pain this caused was actually physical, as if someone had just punched him in the gut.  So imagine his surprise when a soft, warm hand took one of his and squeezed it gently.

“We need to work together, Jay!” Lady Lynne said in suddenly subdued tones as she leant towards him. “We can start later in my cabin – it’s near the back of the boat! This is not an offer I usually make to men I hardly know but there’s something about you that…” she paused as she searched his body and then his eyes for the word she was searching for. And failed.

“But first – let’s all eat!”

So all four of them ate together in the large cabin. It was all very democratic in the best traditions of a People’s Democracy. It was also a veritable feast.

Afterwards, Four went to deal with the dishes, happy with the abundant and genuine praise he had received from Five for his culinary efforts. After that, he would retire to his cabin for a brief sleep before taking over from Nine, who returned to the bridge house higher up in the boat and continued to steer the vessel parallel to the English and then the Welsh coasts which lay some miles away to the west in the pitch darkness of a moonless night.

Then Lady Lynne retreated to her cabin and slipped on her most revealing negligee: a little black number complete with black stockings, suspenders and the skimpiest of black thongs. Then she slipped into her bed. And waited. There were things she suspected Jay knew about the Khlalli Scallies that he wasn’t telling her. She intended to persuade him to do so. All men were the same the world over. There was one thing none of them could resist – and she would let him indulge in it but only in return for information…

But she hadn’t listened to what Jay had told her earlier. Dora had educated him not to be so easily distracted and although a part of him (you can probably guess which one) wanted to do exactly what Lynne expected, another part of him – his brain – told him otherwise…

As soon as everyone else was out of the way, he slipped his gun into a sealed plastic bag. He placed Baban Singh Chopra’s phone and the wallet which he had pocketed earlier on a table next to Her Ladyship’s. He had slipped this into his pocket too when he knew she had been distracted earlier on. Jay paused for a heartbeat, looked – for some reason towards the back of the boat where he knew she was waiting for him – and then opened her phone and examined it briefly. Then he took Baban Singh Chopra’s and used it to text something – Her Ladyship’s number – to his own phone back on Cumberside Island. He then put hers back and opened-up Baban’s He did something to the settings and then sent another text message to the same mobile number he had just used. When it had gone, he went back to the settings; undid whatever he had done to them and then closed the phone down without turning it off, leaving it in exactly the same place on the table where it had been before.

Then, with a grim smile; he stuck his head out into the pitch darkness and checked the ship’s position by consulting the stars overhead. Without even a glance backwards, Jay then slipped silently into the dark, freezing waters of the Irish Sea and started to swim strongly towards the shore.

It was late – just turned one o’clock in the morning. It was cold too and Jay was tired. But the cold water shock he received as he slipped over the side of the yacht soon brought him round again.

He would have got an even bigger shock, though, if he had realised what was happening even further away almost on the other side of the planet on a totally different continent. There, two red alerts had just popped-up on several computer monitors at virtually the same instant in a place called Jalandhar in the Punjab. And these alerts not only told the people who were carefully studying these monitors that two messages had just been sent from Baban Singh Chopra’s mobile phone, it also – at a touch of a button – showed them exactly what these messages contained…

One quick move of a mouse and a map of Western Europe appeared on a large screen in the room where four geeky Sikhs were avidly staring at it. They zoomed in to it to discover the location of the phone Baban’s had targeted: a spot in the Irish Sea somewhere off the coast of Barrow-in-Furness.

On Cumberside Island, far to the north of where he was taking a moonlit dip, Jay’s phone may have vibrated slightly as first one and then two text messages were received by it in quick succession. The first was simple enough: it was another phone number.

It took only a minute or so for the watchers in India to key this number into a specialised programme they were running and see almost instantaneous results. Another blip was added to the screen right alongside the one that already told them where Baban’s phone was. So this was another new device to be found alongside one that they were already tracking. They had no idea who the new phone belonged to but it didn’t take them long to download all the data they needed from it to show them that this was the personal property of a woman called Lynne; perhaps Linh or maybe even `Majesty’. The messages gave very little away about her. So the best thing to do, they decided as they split into a day and a night shift, was to wait for this particular phone to ring – and then listen-in to whatever was said.

Blissfully unaware of any of this, Jay was soon hauling himself out of the sea just south of Fishguard but way north of St David’s on the tip of the peninsular there on the south-west extreme of the Welsh coast. He could see ships – including a couple of big ones – riding at anchor in Fishguard harbour and that’s where he intended to head once he had landed near to Stumble Head, whose lighthouse was his aiming point.

Running overland in the dark was no problem for a man of `Soldier J’s’ experience. The great thing about all port towns where ferries dock regularly is that there is always somewhere to stay at any time of day or night.

So – by two o’clock – he had booked a room, showered, taken advantage of the generous offer of sandwiches, a double whisky and a hot drink and was lying beneath the sheets of a single bed, his clothes spread out on a chair next to a radiator, slowly steaming themselves dry. He knew that Lady Lynne’s yacht was out there beyond the window, somewhere to the south. He intended to follow its voyage. But not literally: his own dingy was still safely hidden away on Cumberside Island far away to the north. He didn’t need to physically pursue it because one of the text messages he had sent from the boat would make this totally unnecessary as soon as he could retrieve his own mobile from the bushes where he had hidden it last night…

—-

It took Lynne a while to realise that Jay wasn’t going to visit her in her private cabin on the yacht. She was annoyed – and slightly disappointed, truth be told. But she wrapped a warm dressing gown around herself and conducted a search of the boat eventually for the absent Special Ops Soldier.

Nine – busy at the wheel navigating – hadn’t seen him. Four’s cabin was dark and she could hear him gently snoring within. Some primeval fear stopped her even poking her head into the rearmost cabin but she was sure Jay wouldn’t be in there. So he most have gone; literally jumped ship.

“Maybe he was gay after all!” she thought to herself as she climbed back into bed a little while later. But she knew there must be a powerful reason why he had chosen to disappear. Her only problem was – she hadn’t a clue what it was…

Nine finally ended his yacht-steering stint in the early hours of the morning to almost bump into a yawning Four, who was heading the other way to relieve him at the controls of the boat. They greeted each other and then froze. They had both heard some unearthly noise coming from towards the back of the yacht. They turned towards it as – suddenly – the door of the cabin in which they had deposited Baban Singh Chopra earlier burst open and an apparition in white stumbled into view. Brave and tough as both Vietnamese were, they shrieked and fled forwards towards the front of the boat. Lynne woke with a start, disturbed by the cacophony.  She pulled a dressing gown over her sexy lingerie and went to investigate. To find Nine and Four cowering in front of a large white figure which was uttering extraordinary noises.

With commendable courage, she flicked on the light in the cabin and grabbed hold of the arm of the spectre or whatever it was, spinning it around. She realised she had hold of a bedsheet, which slipped sufficiently as she pulled to reveal the face of a wailing Baban Singh Chopra.

“Get food and drink!” she said urgently to her crew in Vietnamese. “I don’t know what’s happened but we can’t risk losing him again!”

It took a while to calm Baban down and persuade him to take a strong drink and then some noodle soup. Then another drink. And another after that. Eventually, he seemed reassured enough to be coaxed back to the rear cabin and into the bed there. As the Lady Lynne stayed with him and held his hand, the big man finally slipped into a deep sleep.

Once he seemed to be settled, she returned to the main cabin on the yacht. Four was aft, steering the boat; Nine was asleep in his cabin and Lynne found herself alone. She saw her mobile phone on a table next to another one which she didn’t recognise.

“I don’t remember leaving it there!” she thought suspiciously but got her laptop as well and started to research terms such as `Narcolepsy’ and `Catalepsy’ in a bid to understand what had happened to the man they had kidnapped on Cumberside Island the previous evening once he had reached her boat.

And as she did this, prying eyes in a small room in a Jalandhar were sharing the information she was searching. The people doing this were beginning to wonder why this woman was looking for articles about `apparent death’ syndromes – and increasingly worrying about it.

These Sikh nerds were members of the PPF:  the Punjabi Popular Front. Every one of them was geeky enough to be not only highly educated in the latest developments in computer technology and electronic communications (often at American or British Universities) but had also done this sort of thing many times before.

So – even as Lynne and her motley Vietnamese crew grabbed Baban Singh Chopra the previous evening and had set sail from the waters off Cumberside, the PPF knew exactly where he was. They also knew precisely which direction he was heading in because of the signal the phone in his pocket was constantly emitting.

The only questions from their point of view were: why did whoever it was who had interfered with Baban’s phone choose that moment to do it? And what state was Baban Singh Chopra actually in? This searching for `apparent death’ syndrome details bothered them all even more than the fact that they hadn’t actually known what had happened to him in the first place. So what were they going to do to liberate him? And when?

The obvious thing, of course, was just to ring the abducted Sikh. But previous experiences had taught them not to do so. Unexpected phone calls could make kidnappers panic. People who panic are unpredictable. They can do stupid things – like shoot their hostage or, in Baban’s case, do something else equally rash – like push him overboard, for instance. Better to assume he was alive: if he wasn’t, what would have been the point of kidnapping him?

They decided to do nothing but watch for the next 24 hours. See where the phones they were tracking led them. Wait for someone to use either of them to make a call. They could listen-in. If it was a list of demands to a newspaper or TV news or something, they might understand better what they needed to do to get Baban back again. If not, they always had the Doomsday Option of returning the call and speaking to the kidnapper direct. That might end in disaster for the reasons already stated – but it was better than doing nothing when all other possibilities had been exhausted.

Jay thinks he’s killed a member of the Khalistan Warriors. He’s also disappointed the rather lovely Lady Lynne Shrimpleton by abandoning her in her love-nest on her luxury yacht off the Welsh Coast. Is he gay after all?

Whether he is or not, what is the former Special Ops soldier up to?

Don’t miss the next climatic episode of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga to find out what happens next!

Part Eleven of The Sensational Shrimpleton Saga: Mot, Hai, Ba, Zô!

Last time, we had left key characters in the Soap Opera – Lady Lynne Shrimpleton and Soldier Jay – in something of a pickle. Their abduction of leading member of the Khalistan Warriors’ – Baban Singh Chopra – had gone disastrously wrong. Particularly for the poor old Sikh, whose overloaded heart couldn’t cope with what had happened to him. Jay and his former team-mates at Shrimpleton Town AFC – Nine and Four – had just laid-out the big man in the rear cabin of Lady Lynne’s yacht as it lay at anchor just off the coat of Cumberside Island in the Irish Sea close to the inlet known as Morecambe Bay.

All three men were visibly upset as they looked at Baban’s inert body as it lay in the Recovery Position on the floor of the boat.

Their reverie was broken as Lady Lynne reappeared behind them and beckoned them back into the main cabin.

“I don’t know who you are…” she said, staring in a very accusatory way at Soldier `J’. She was interrupted by excited jabbering by Nine and Four which she listened to carefully.

(`Jabbering’ is the sort of deprecatory word so many white supremacist morons would use to describe foreign languages that they don’t understand. So I use it advisedly. Both Four and Nine had been chosen by General Department II at home – and Lady Lynne herself – not just for their footballing skills – which were exceptional in themselves. Just like herself, these men were selected by their employers in Hanoi because they were also extraordinarily gifted intelligence agents: better by a country mile than the sort of Cheviot Watt–type dummies our Old Boys’ Network usually comes up with. These guys could speak fluent Vietnamese and both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, for a start. Heriot Watt and his chums could barely speak basic English, let alone ` a load of bally squiggles’ – as his `Unky’ Timmy would describe any form of Chinese; Japanese; Malay or countless other Oriental languages. Both Nine and Four’s understanding of English was first class. But – as Lady Lynne herself knew all too well from experience (unlike her unilingual counterparts in British Intelligence,) understanding the written or spoken word was only the first step to true mastery of a foreign language. Speaking it was by far the hardest part. But when her compatriots spoke in whatever language they chose, she listened: these guys were no mugs…)

Turning back towards Jay, Her Ladyship continued, slightly less aggressively:

“My boys tell me you are the Centre Half of the Shrimpleton Town football team. They like you – which is just as well because I’m not sure I do. Tell me what you were doing in the pub tonight – and how you came to be on board my yacht!”

So Jay did. Almost fully truthfully. Lady Lynne’s expression changed markedly when she learnt that Dirty Dora was this man’s beloved little sister and she even smiled at him a little sadly. She didn’t seem surprised that he was an ex-soldier (Jay said nothing of his experiences as a Special Forces operative but her Ladyship had already guessed that for herself: this handsome hunk looked like he could handle himself and she knew that genuine hard nuts like him never let on how they had turned-out that way…)

Besides – who but a Special Ops man could possibly swim in the dark the best part of a mile in cold sea water from shore to ship and emerge not only unscathed and ready for action but with a perfectly serviceable weapon?

“Sit down!” she commanded him. “We need to talk!”

Then she spoke to Nine and Four in Vietnamese. Four obediently went forward to the galley and came back with a tray of drinks before returning to cook four bowls of Bún Bò Huế (a noodle dish somewhere between soup and a main meal according to Dr Google); Bánh Xèo savoury crepes and Gỏi Cuon spring rolls. Nine went aft and Jay was soon aware of a deep throbbing in the boat as he started its engines and the yacht began its long journey towards the south coast of England.

As all this was happening, Lady Lynne was offering Jay a small glass full of clear liquid: Rượu. She stood up and announced:

“It’s Roo-O, a Vietnamese spirit distilled from rice.”

She took another glass for herself and proposed a toast:

“Mot, hai, ba, zô! It means: one, two, three, Cheers!” and knocked hers back in a single gulp.

Jay followed suit – and then gulped anew: fresh air this time. This stuff was strong enough to strip paint…

Another toast followed – and finally, a third. Then Lady Lynne sat down and started to talk. She explained to Jay how fervently she also wanted to get her hands on the Khalistan Warriors – although, he noticed, not why…

And as she talked, Jay was only too aware of the way she deliberately rationed her smiles in unison with small alterations in her posture. There were almost imperceptible changes in the way she sat. But by the end of her speech, she was bestowing her warmest and most beguiling smile on him and had turned almost side-on to the ex-soldier, clearly to give him the most advantageous view of her exquisite figure. She seemed almost disappointed when he didn’t respond – so much so that, her smile suddenly vanished – she blurted out:

“You’re not gay, are you?”

It was his turn to smile.

“I know what you’re doing!” he said. “I’ve seen it all before – and better! You are a very beautiful woman, Your Ladyship and you clearly have had a lot of practice getting men to do what you want. But I’m immune to it. I don’t expect you to understand: you don’t have a beautiful sister called Dora who was even better at it – partially because she used to regularly practice flirting with her big brother, safe in the knowledge that nothing would ever happen.”

He looked suddenly sad and turned away as the full horror of the fact that Dora would never be able to do so again dawned on him yet again. He could still barely believe that she was no longer here and the pain this caused was actually physical, as if someone had just punched him in the gut.  So imagine his surprise when a soft, warm hand took one of his and squeezed it gently.

“We need to work together, Jay!” Lady Lynne said in suddenly subdued tones as she leant towards him. “We can start later in my cabin – it’s near the back of the boat! This is not an offer I usually make to men I hardly know but there’s something about you that…” she paused as she searched his body and then his eyes for the word she was searching for. And failed.

“But first – let’s all eat!”

So all four of them ate together in the large cabin. It was all very democratic in the best traditions of a People’s Democracy. It was also a veritable feast.

Afterwards, Four went to deal with the dishes, happy with the abundant and genuine praise he had received from Five for his culinary efforts. After that, he would retire to his cabin for a brief sleep before taking over from Nine, who returned to the bridge house higher up in the boat and continued to steer the vessel parallel to the English and then the Welsh coasts which lay some miles away to the west in the pitch darkness of a moonless night.

Then Lady Lynne retreated to her cabin and slipped on her most revealing negligee: a little black number complete with black stockings, suspenders and the skimpiest of black thongs. Then she slipped into her bed. And waited. There were things she suspected Jay knew about the Khlalli Scallies that he wasn’t telling her. She intended to persuade him to do so. All men were the same the world over. There was one thing none of them could resist – and she would let him indulge in it but only in return for information…

But she hadn’t listened to what Jay had told her earlier. Dora had educated him not to be so easily distracted and although a part of him (you can probably guess which one) wanted to do exactly what Lynne expected, another part of him – his brain – told him otherwise…

As soon as everyone else was out of the way, he slipped his gun into a sealed plastic bag. He placed Baban Singh Chopra’s phone and the wallet which he had pocketed earlier on a table next to Her Ladyship’s. He had slipped this into his pocket too when he knew she had been distracted earlier on. Jay paused for a heartbeat, looked – for some reason towards the back of the boat where he knew she was waiting for him – and then opened her phone and examined it briefly. Then he took Baban Singh Chopra’s and used it to text something – Her Ladyship’s number – to his own phone back on Cumberside Island. He then put hers back and opened-up Baban’s He did something to the settings and then sent another text message to the same mobile number he had just used. When it had gone, he went back to the settings; undid whatever he had done to them and then closed the phone down without turning it off, leaving it in exactly the same place on the table where it had been before.

Then, with a grim smile; he stuck his head out into the pitch darkness and checked the ship’s position by consulting the stars overhead. Without even a glance backwards, Jay then slipped silently into the dark, freezing waters of the Irish Sea and started to swim strongly towards the shore.

It was late – just turned one o’clock in the morning. It was cold too and Jay was tired. But the cold water shock he received as he slipped over the side of the yacht soon brought him round again.

He would have got an even bigger shock, though, if he had realised what was happening even further away almost on the other side of the planet on a totally different continent. There, two red alerts had just popped-up on several computer monitors at virtually the same instant in a place called Jalandhar in the Punjab. And these alerts not only told the people who were carefully studying these monitors that two messages had just been sent from Baban Singh Chopra’s mobile phone, it also – at a touch of a button – showed them exactly what these messages contained…

One quick move of a mouse and a map of Western Europe appeared on a large screen in the room where four geeky Sikhs were avidly staring at it. They zoomed in to it to discover the location of the phone Baban’s had targeted: a spot in the Irish Sea somewhere off the coast of Barrow-in-Furness.

On Cumberside Island, far to the north of where he was taking a moonlit dip, Jay’s phone may have vibrated slightly as first one and then two text messages were received by it in quick succession. The first was simple enough: it was another phone number.

It took only a minute or so for the watchers in India to key this number into a specialised programme they were running and see almost instantaneous results. Another blip was added to the screen right alongside the one that already told them where Baban’s phone was. So this was another new device to be found alongside one that they were already tracking. They had no idea who the new phone belonged to but it didn’t take them long to download all the data they needed from it to show them that this was the personal property of a woman called Lynne; perhaps Linh or maybe even `Majesty’. The messages gave very little away about her. So the best thing to do, they decided as they split into a day and a night shift, was to wait for this particular phone to ring – and then listen-in to whatever was said.

Blissfully unaware of any of this, Jay was soon hauling himself out of the sea just south of Fishguard but way north of St David’s on the tip of the peninsular there on the south-west extreme of the Welsh coast. He could see ships – including a couple of big ones – riding at anchor in Fishguard harbour and that’s where he intended to head once he had landed near to Stumble Head, whose lighthouse was his aiming point.

Running overland in the dark was no problem for a man of `Soldier J’s’ experience. The great thing about all port towns where ferries dock regularly is that there is always somewhere to stay at any time of day or night.

So – by two o’clock – he had booked a room, showered, taken advantage of the generous offer of sandwiches, a double whisky and a hot drink and was lying beneath the sheets of a single bed, his clothes spread out on a chair next to a radiator, slowly steaming themselves dry. He knew that Lady Lynne’s yacht was out there beyond the window, somewhere to the south. He intended to follow its voyage. But not literally: his own dingy was still safely hidden away on Cumberside Island far away to the north. He didn’t need to physically pursue it because one of the text messages he had sent from the boat would make this totally unnecessary as soon as he could retrieve his own mobile from the bushes where he had hidden it last night…

—-

It took Lynne a while to realise that Jay wasn’t going to visit her in her private cabin on the yacht. She was annoyed – and slightly disappointed, truth be told. But she wrapped a warm dressing gown around herself and conducted a search of the boat eventually for the absent Special Ops Soldier.

Nine – busy at the wheel navigating – hadn’t seen him. Four’s cabin was dark and she could hear him gently snoring within. Some primeval fear stopped her even poking her head into the rearmost cabin but she was sure Jay wouldn’t be in there. So he most have gone; literally jumped ship.

“Maybe he was gay after all!” she thought to herself as she climbed back into bed a little while later. But she knew there must be a powerful reason why he had chosen to disappear. Her only problem was – she hadn’t a clue what it was…

Nine finally ended his yacht-steering stint in the early hours of the morning to almost bump into a yawning Four, who was heading the other way to relieve him at the controls of the boat. They greeted each other and then froze. They had both heard some unearthly noise coming from towards the back of the yacht. They turned towards it as – suddenly – the door of the cabin in which they had deposited Baban Singh Chopra earlier burst open and an apparition in white stumbled into view. Brave and tough as both Vietnamese were, they shrieked and fled forwards towards the front of the boat. Lynne woke with a start, disturbed by the cacophony.  She pulled a dressing gown over her sexy lingerie and went to investigate. To find Nine and Four cowering in front of a large white figure which was uttering extraordinary noises.

With commendable courage, she flicked on the light in the cabin and grabbed hold of the arm of the spectre or whatever it was, spinning it around. She realised she had hold of a bedsheet, which slipped sufficiently as she pulled to reveal the face of a wailing Baban Singh Chopra.

“Get food and drink!” she said urgently to her crew in Vietnamese. “I don’t know what’s happened but we can’t risk losing him again!”

It took a while to calm Baban down and persuade him to take a strong drink and then some noodle soup. Then another drink. And another after that. Eventually, he seemed reassured enough to be coaxed back to the rear cabin and into the bed there. As the Lady Lynne stayed with him, the big man finally slipped into a deep sleep.

Once he seemed to be settled, she returned to the main cabin on the yacht. Four was aft, steering the boat; Nine was asleep in his cabin and Lynne found herself alone. She saw her mobile phone on a table next to another one which she didn’t recognise.

“I don’t remember leaving it there!” she thought suspiciously but got her laptop as well and started to research terms such as `Narcolepsy’ and `Catalepsy’ in a bid to understand what had happened to the man they had kidnapped on Cumberside Island the previous evening once he had reached her boat.

And as she did this, prying eyes in a small room in a Jalandhar were sharing the information she was searching. The people doing this were beginning to wonder why this woman was looking for articles about `apparent death’ syndromes – and increasingly worrying about it.

These Sikh nerds were members of the PPF:  the Punjabi Popular Front. Every one of them was geeky enough to be not only highly educated in the latest developments in computer technology and electronic communications (often at American or British Universities) but had also done this sort of thing many times before.

 So – even as Lynne and her motley Vietnamese crew grabbed Baban Singh Chopra the previous evening and had set sail from the waters off Cumberside, the PPF knew exactly where he was. They also knew precisely which direction he was heading in because of the signal the phone in his pocket was constantly emitting.

The only questions from their point of view were: why did whoever it was who had interfered with Baban’s phone choose that moment to do it? And what state was Baban Singh Chopra actually in? This searching for `apparent death’ syndrome details bothered them all even more than the fact that they hadn’t actually known what had happened to him in the first place. So what were they going to do to liberate him? And when?

The obvious thing, of course, was just to ring the abducted Sikh. But previous experiences had taught them not to do so. Unexpected phone calls could make kidnappers panic. People who panic are unpredictable. They can do stupid things – like shoot their hostage or, in Baban’s case, do something else equally rash – like push him overboard, for instance. Better to assume he was alive: if he wasn’t, what would have been the point of kidnapping him?

They decided to do nothing but watch for the next 24 hours. See where the phones they were tracking led them. Wait for someone to use either of them to make a call. They could listen-in. If it was a list of demands to a newspaper or TV news or something, they might understand better what they needed to do to get Baban back again. If not, they always had the Doomsday Option of returning the call and speaking to the kidnapper direct. That might end in disaster for the reasons already stated – but it was better than doing nothing when all other possibilities had been exhausted.

Jay thinks he’s killed a member of the Khalistan Warriors. He’s also disappointed the rather lovely Lady Lynne Shrimpleton by abandoning her in her love-nest on her luxury yacht off the Welsh Coast. Is he gay after all?

Whether he is or not, what is the former Special Ops soldier up to?

Don’t miss the next climatic episode of TheSensational Shrimpleton Saga to find out what happens next!