Thunderbolt

by Wilbur Smith

  That was a mistake.

  Not because Pete wasn’t up for it, but because of what happened when he grinned and unleashed a bit of power. As the boat surged across the water its hull, beyond the plane, hit a rhythm, and slapped one-two-three shallow wave-tops reasonably hard. Nothing unusual in that. Except, with the fourth bounce, one of the metal tanks I’d supposedly stowed came loose and bounced clean across the boat’s fibreglass deck.

  I hadn’t tightened the Velcro strapping properly. As bad luck would have it, the base of the heavy canister hit a cleat, hard, snapping it from the gunwale, and leaving a split in the boat’s pristine whiteness. I’d heard the thump of the tank hitting the hull above the noise of the engine and wave-slap. So had Pete. Instantly he cut the throttle and, as the speedboat slewed to a standstill, we both turned around to see the offending oxygen tank rolling about in the bilge.

  ‘That looks expensive,’ said Amelia. ‘Also annoying.’

  You’d think I might have resented her for saying that, but damaging Pete’s pride and joy had made me feel so immediately sick that the realisation I could pay to have it mended was actually a huge relief.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Completely my fault. I’ll pay for the repair, of course.’

  I could just make out Pete blinking at me through his sunglasses.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I should have checked the fastenings.’

  ‘I don’t think Jack sees it that way,’ Xander pointed out.

  Pete tried to make light of the mistake. ‘Worse things have happened at sea,’ he said. But he couldn’t stop himself lashing the oxygen tank back in place with a harshness that undercut the joke.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated.

  ‘Easy mistake to make,’ he said evenly. ‘Try not to let it happen again.’

  I’d almost have preferred him to be outwardly angry with me, but he didn’t say anything further. After we moored up, I walked the length of the quay slowly. Pete hadn’t examined the boat in front of us, but when I turned back from the shelter of the pines fringing the beach, I saw him bent down in the stern, inspecting the damage.

  3.

  Mum wasn’t sunbathing on the white sand beach or kicking back by the pool. She wasn’t sipping fizzy water under the striped awning of the bar or making an early start on lunch in the waterfront restaurant either. No, she was in her suite, online, doing some research. She looked up guiltily when I knocked and entered, but the last thing I wanted to do was make her feel bad. If I’d had a tough time in the Congo, she’d been to hell and back.

  We were supposed to be here relaxing, blotting out what had happened to us, but neither of us is particularly good at lounging around doing nothing and Mum’s idea of a good time is to do some good. Though she’d couched the trip as a holiday, for Mum it was all about protecting the Indian Ocean’s coral. We’d already seen bleached skeleton reefs right here off Zanzibar, and Mum was looking into who was responsible for protecting marine habitats in this part of the world. That didn’t surprise me. It was her version of our treasure hunt, finding something valuable to do with her time.

  ‘Detect anything?’ she asked, snapping the screen shut.

  ‘No, but we will,’ I replied. ‘Probably.’

  Sunlight pouring in across the bureau illuminated the side of Mum’s face and neck. Her cheekbone seemed sharp, her jawline too. She’s a strong woman but the ordeal in Kinshasa had taken its toll on her. Never mind being held captive all that time, the revelation that her own husband – my father – had staged the entire kidnapping was a bombshell that blew our little family apart.

  She wouldn’t let him back into the house. I didn’t blame her. I wanted nothing more to do with him myself. It struck me, as I put my arm around her bony shoulders, that I hadn’t told her I’d reached that conclusion myself, and before I knew what I was doing I was putting the mistake right.

  ‘You do know I’m glad we’re shot of Dad, don’t you?’

  She went very still within my hug.

  ‘Obviously I wish he hadn’t done it, but he did. He lied to us both. He had you locked up by thugs, for God’s sake. I don’t care that he’s my father, I’ll never forgive him for doing that.’

  She took a breath to say something, but held back.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Don’t know what?’ She was shivering lightly. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘What are you frightened of?’

  She twisted away from me, stood up, folded her arms, fighting to compose herself. ‘Nothing,’ she said firmly. ‘You deserve to know the truth.’

  ‘Er, I do know the truth. It was Amelia and I who pieced it together.’

  ‘I don’t mean about the kidnapping,’ she said slowly. She looked at me steadily. Spokes of brightness bisected her irises. ‘I mean about your father.’

  ‘What more is there to know? He’s a lying, greedy …’

  I petered out. The intensity of her gaze was extraordinary. I swear I knew what she was about to say in the nanosecond before she said it: the revelation made complete sense as it landed, clumping into perfect place like an expensive car door.

  ‘Nicholas Courtney isn’t your father,’ she said.

  So simple a sentence, yet to begin with the words refused to make sense. If Dad – Nicholas Courtney – wasn’t my father, then that meant I wasn’t a Courtney at all. But the family name defined me. It stood for endeavour and guts and not backing down.

  He’d tainted it himself of course, but after discovering Dad was a crook, I’d felt more for the family name, not less. It was all the more my responsibility to uphold what it really stood for. And now Mum was telling me that the man who’d given it to me was not my real dad. I was dumbstruck.

  ‘Jack,’ Mum whispered. ‘Say something, please.’

  ‘I knew it,’ I replied, surprising myself. A sudden rush of understanding made everything click into place. That’s right, now that she’d spelled it out, the brutal fact of Nicholas Courtney not being my real father made sense of a lifetime of doubt. I had never wanted to admit it to myself, but he – ‘Dad’ – had always treated me coldly, made me feel somehow unworthy. I thought it had to do with my brother Mark’s accident. And perhaps my part in Mark’s death did make things worse. But in truth he’d treated me differently when my brother was alive too.

  ‘He was Mark’s father though, wasn’t he?’ I said.

  Mum nodded.

  ‘But not mine.’

  She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why?’ A strange feeling was rushing through me, odd because it was out of place. Of course, sadness and confusion were bubbling up as well, but the main sensation I experienced as the news sank in was relief. ‘In a way that makes things easier,’ I said under my breath. ‘For me, if not you. You chose to be together. Now you’ve chosen to be apart. But I couldn’t be, not until now. Now I’m free. I don’t have to think about his blood running through my veins.’

  ‘He’s been good to you in many ways,’ she whispered. ‘But he isn’t your father. He always knew it. Now you do too.’

  The obvious question came hot on the heels of this admission. If the businessman and crook Nicholas Courtney wasn’t my father, who was? Something about the way Mum wasn’t volunteering the information made me scared to ask, but I steeled myself to do so regardless.

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Who’s who, Jack?’

  She obviously didn’t want me to ask, but all this pretending she didn’t know what I was on about only made me want to know more badly. ‘My real father,’ I said. ‘Who is he?’

  Now it was her turn to put an arm around me. I allowed her to pull me close. Her hair smelled of apples. ‘It’s complicated,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but in a way it is.’


  The way she was holding me and her soothing tone reminded me of when I was much younger. She’d held me like that in the days and weeks after Mark died. Then, it felt like she was protecting me from myself. What was she trying to protect me from now? After what we’d just been through, I’d surely proved myself capable of withstanding more or less anything. I shrugged her off gently and said, ‘Come on, Mum, I want to know.’

  She stood back, stared at me steadily. Did she not want to tell me because she couldn’t? As in, did she not know herself? I nearly backtracked. The words ‘It doesn’t matter’ were on the tip of my tongue. But even that – my own mother not knowing who my father was – I could have handled. It would have been an answer of sorts.

  She reached out and stroked the side of my cheek with one finger. I couldn’t help it; I leaned away. Instantly I felt guilty. I’m glad I didn’t cave in though, because she broke the silence eventually, with a promise.

  ‘You have my word: I’ll tell you when it’s time,’ she said. ‘Just as I was always planning to do.’

  Though I wanted to ask her what ‘when it’s time’ depended upon, I couldn’t. It would have felt cruel somehow if I’d pushed further in that moment. Mum moved back to her little hotel desk and tidied it pointlessly. The conversation was over.

  She had never lied to me before. I had no reason to doubt she was telling me the truth now: she had a plan and would follow through. And in any case, I knew for a fact that I would never take ‘no’ for a final answer to this question. It was too important. One way or another, no matter how long it took, I’d work out the answer.

  I watched Mum busying herself and saw more clearly how the strain of these last weeks had taken their toll. Beneath the bright Zanzibar sun her skin, which normally tanned so easily, was still pale and papery. And she’d lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. But she’d also lost confidence somehow. She moved with a brittleness I’d not noticed in her before.

  ‘You guys will need to fuel up at the buffet bar,’ she said, ‘before throwing yourselves back into your underwater hunting.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, and I followed her out into the dappled courtyard, thinking that of all of us she was the one who most needed feeding up.

  4.

  That afternoon, on Pete’s advice, we searched off a different beach. He ran us down to it in the boat. We went gently. He’d already made a temporary repair to the fibreglass damaged by the sheared-off cleat. Noticing the split was neatly covered with gaffer tape, I looked away guiltily. Though this stretch of sand was smaller, one of the most exclusive resorts on the island sat above the beach, meaning wealthy guests. We dropped anchor not far offshore to gear up. A breeze pulled up ridges in the sea. They weren’t big waves, but enough to rock the boat beneath my feet.

  ‘Low tide in an hour, so you’re best off searching close in,’ said Pete.

  I steadied myself on the rail near the stern, nodded to Amelia and Xander, then tipped back off it into the sea. The view through my mask was an instant explosion of bubbles.

  When they cleared and I surfaced, Pete threw the detectors down to me. Amelia was sorting herself out on the other side of the boat. Xander had also dropped in. I bit down on the regulator, took the first metallic breath of oxygen, and rolled forward to swim beneath the boat and join them.

  As I swam well beneath the hull – there was no way I was going to risk scraping it – I met not only Amelia and Xander, but also a large leatherback turtle, a metre across at least, flapping unhurriedly between us. It was swimming at an angle towards the shore. Without so much as a glance at each other we all fell in behind it. The leatherback didn’t swim so much as pulse, beckoning us on.

  I’m not superstitious, but that turtle struck me as a sign. We kept a respectful distance, swimming side by side behind the leatherback, with the seabed rising to meet us. When the water was no more than ten or twelve feet deep, and we were not far from the beach at all, the turtle veered away, and again, without communicating to each other, we all stopped. Quite clearly this was the spot to start our search.

  This wasn’t the shallowest place we’d scoured. The previous afternoon I’d run the detector so close to shore I could have stood up, but the aqualung was still a huge help: with just a snorkel I’d have been duck diving and resurfacing every thirty seconds.

  Now, even though the serrated surface of the sea was almost within reach, I could hang a couple of feet off the seabed and search systematically. The blip-blip-blip of the detector was a familiar and soothing soundtrack. I worked my way methodically along the beachfront. Any moment now, I said to myself.

  Any. Moment. Now.

  For a good twenty minutes, all I heard was blip-blip-blip.

  Life is disappointing, I thought.

  Dad, I felt.

  The detector rummaged a dead starfish from the sand.

  There was snot in my mask. I bit the mouthpiece hard.

  Sea is salty.

  So are tears.

  Where the hell were Amelia and Xander, anyway? The drill was to stick close together but occasionally one of us strayed. I swivelled to look for them and immediately the metal detector’s flash-blipping shot up in tempo.

  Sculling backwards kept me – and it – in place.

  The blipping became a constant hum.

  I pulled out the focused probe and zeroed in on what I’d found, knowing it would be a hair clip or the arm off a pair of sunglasses or maybe a bit of tin can, but hoping for something better all the same. The dolphin-clicking of the probe quickened to a white line of noise. I dug my fingers beneath its tip and gently sifted the sand. Something glittered in the refracted sunlight. A ring. White gold or platinum, heavy either which way, a thick hoop of wedding ring. Up close, magnified by my mask, I could make out engraved markings on the ring’s inner edge.

  Amelia had seen me stop. I looked up to find her at my side. Xander also cottoned on and joined us. Amelia held out a hand. I placed the ring on her palm. She inspected the ring and gave me a thumbs-up. In diving a thumb jerked upwards is a signal to your diving partner to surface, but I knew what she really meant and replied with the correct hand sign, my thumb and forefinger held in an ‘OK’ circle.

  She returned the ring to me and I put it in the net bag clipped to my BCD. I was concentrating as I did this, double-checking the thing was secure, but something made me pause. The detectors were out of synch; one of them was blipping faster than the other. They were probably just set that way, I thought, fastening the bag shut. But no, one set of blips was definitely speeding up. I looked down and saw that Amelia’s detector, dangling behind her on its lanyard, was the culprit.

  She hadn’t noticed, but quickly turned around when I pointed. With me having just found exactly what we were looking for right here, her machine had to be on a hiding to nothing. But she worked the sand with it, zeroed in on whatever had set the detector off, and used her probe as I had done to locate whatever metal thing was buried in the sand. When she dug the thing out and held it up I just about spat out my regulator.

  She’d found another ring.

  ‘Incredible!’ I shouted, though of course it just came out as garbled bubbles.

  Amelia blinked at me, her eyes massive in her mask-squished face.

  Xander gave the signal to surface and up we went. Since we hadn’t been deep, we didn’t have to hang around to decompress. We simply popped up into the brightness.

  ‘That’s unbelievable!’ Xander said once he’d spat out his regulator.

  Amelia, still clutching the ring in her fist, pushed her mask up onto her forehead with her other hand and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘Eh? Nothing for days then two rings not ten feet apart!’

  ‘It makes adequate sense to me,’ she said.

  ‘Sense?’ I chipped in. ‘Monumental luck, more like.’

  ‘No, it makes obvious sense. Think about it.’

  She was serious. When that happens it’s best to be serious back; she’s usually a step ahead. Side
by side, afloat on the glassy swell, we floated while she waited for us to catch up.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Help me out.’

  5.

  ‘We’re looking for rings that have fallen off newlyweds’ fingers,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And I agree that finding two such rings in the same ten-foot by ten-foot patch of sand would be improbable.’

  ‘Impossible, more like.’

  She did that eye-narrowing thing she does when she’s about to point out something illogical, but today she decided to let my ‘impossible’ slide. Instead she said, ‘So if two accidents in the same place would be improbable, and yet there were, incontrovertibly, two rings in the same patch of sand, we have to assume it wasn’t an accident, meaning somebody dropped or threw the rings in the sea on purpose.’

  ‘Who the hell would throw away valuable jewellery?’ asked Xander.

  ‘I agree, it’s a stupid thing to do. But these are wedding rings. Hitching yourself to another person for life isn’t that bright in the first place, in my opinion. What if that person changes? Everyone does. And when it happens, if you don’t like the change, and the marriage goes sour, well, people do all sorts of weird things.’

  ‘Like lob their rings into the Indian Ocean.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But this is a honeymoon resort!’

  ‘Not exclusively. And anyway, some marriages are so stupid they collapse immediately.’

  Pete had arrived in the boat. Its outboards idled gently. With my ears above water, the noise was a throaty gurgle, but when I leaned my head back into a wave the sound was more a buzz.

  ‘Told you so,’ said Pete before we’d even explained what we found. ‘Didn’t I? I said I had a lucky feeling about this afternoon.’

  I let Xander reveal the full extent of that luck as we climbed aboard. Pete raised his wraparound sunglasses, whistled, and said, ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘What would be the point of such a deception?’ said Amelia.