by Wilbur Smith
Pete exchanged a look with the others as if to say, ‘What’s got into him?’
Xander shrugged minutely in response.
To buoy up the mood, Pete explained the plan as we pootled out of the bay. He even went as far as to make it sound like he approved of where we were going now, but of course Amelia called him out with, ‘But yesterday you told us it was a sub-standard place to search, probability-of-success-wise.’
‘I’ve thought about it some more,’ he said and left it at that. We’d reached the edge of the go-slow zone, so he let Thunderbolt do the rest of the talking by opening up her outboards.
The prow lifted and the hull rose with it, pinning us back in our seats for a moment. Then we were flying, the engines a-roar, the great white speedboat slapping the tops of the waves. Wind tugged at my hair and made my eyes stream. I looked behind us at the sea unzipping itself in our boiling wake.
After a time, the noise and vibrations of the outboards and the rushing wind and the juddering of the waves through the hull had a numbing effect on me and I forgot why I was annoyed. Excitement at what we might turn up built in me, blotting out everything else.
To conserve fuel, we cruised the last twenty or so minutes at a slower and more restful pace. The island rose up to meet us. There wasn’t much of it. We puttered round to a beach, a little horseshoe of brilliant white, with arms extending into the sea as if in welcome.
Though the beach was deserted for now, Pete dropped anchor at a respectful distance. The sea was calm here and so blue it looked like somebody had photoshopped it. Behind the palm trees fronting the beach a slab-like grey building sat impassively. Slices of sunlight glanced off the waves and bounced back at us from the building’s tinted windows. Other than that, nothing seemed to be moving.
‘Somebody’s a James Bond fan,’ said Xander.
‘It’s completely out of keeping,’ I replied.
‘With what, exactly? It’s the only thing here,’ said Amelia.
‘Fair point, but still.’
‘Let’s get going then,’ I said, rolling up my wetsuit top, ramming my arms through the sleeves and reaching behind me for the zipper-string.
‘Aye aye, captain,’ said Xander, doing it up for me.
I could tell the others were as keen as me to make a start now, no doubt fuelled by thoughts of what we might find. A sense of urgency had set in. Amelia checked her oxygen, regulator, BCD and detector over with military precision, and Xander followed suit.
Within minutes we were underwater, three abreast, finning our way purposefully to the western tip of the horseshoe. Once there, we slowed right down. The drill was to sweep each new site methodically rather than crisscross all over the place like headless underwater chickens.
A cloud of tiny orange fish, sparks flung from an angle-grinder, shot past us as we started, and the familiar chirruping soundtrack of our detectors at work heightened the hope I felt in that moment. It was an addictive feeling, that sense of possibility, the outside chance we might turn up something big.
9.
As it turned out, we had a slow start, by which I mean we didn’t find anything all morning. For our first afternoon dive we worked the shallows and uncovered a Coke can. I didn’t want to settle for that, obviously, so pressured Pete to let us go down one last time and strayed deeper than I should have, dragging the others with me. More idiotically still, when they surfaced I stayed down for an extra few minutes, then came up too fast to make up for it, breaking about six basic diver’s rules. Pete was putting on his own kit to come down and look for me when I bobbed up next to the boat. Furious, he tore his mask off and threw it at me in the water.
‘Never. Dive. Alone!’ he shouted.
‘I lost track … I …’
Neither Xander nor Amelia would look at me; both knew I was lying.
‘And messing with the timings like that. It’s all calculated carefully, to avoid you getting ill. We’ve been through it. Decompression sickness is a serious thing.’
‘It was just a few minutes,’ I mumbled.
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘It does, in fact,’ said Amelia. ‘The risk depends upon depth and time; it’s not an on-and-off thing.’
She was right, we all knew that, but Pete’s simple point – and the calculations he’d done – were designed to eliminate the risk, not just minimise it.
I’d been an idiot. That, combined with the general disappointment of the day, cast me into a truly black mood. There I was, with my two best friends, in paradise pretty much, with a haul of treasure back at the hotel already, and I’d somehow managed to make myself feel as grimly wrong as that streak of darkness on the blue horizon behind us.
Was I imagining it? No. There was a dot of a boat, with a wisp of smoke above it, in the distance to our stern. Amelia was inspecting her fingertips. Xander had his eyes shut, face turned to the lowering sun. And Pete was focused on one thing alone: getting us home.
‘Guys,’ I said through gritted teeth.
Xander turned to me.
‘Look.’
‘At what?’
‘Is that what I think it is?’
‘You’ll have to say what you think it is for us to judge that,’ said Amelia.
‘Fire,’ I said, loudly enough for Pete to hear.
He shot a look over his shoulder at me. ‘What’s that?’
‘He’s right,’ said Xander. ‘There, off to our left. Smoke?’
‘Without which …’ said Amelia.
Pete throttled back to idle and swung the boat round. He pulled a pair of binoculars from a compartment down by his knees, brought them up to his face and looked through them for a fair few seconds before muttering one word: ‘Odd.’
‘What’s odd?’ said Amelia.
Pete still had the binoculars pressed to his eyes. ‘That boat was in the vicinity when you were down below. During your last dive it went past at a distance, quite slowly. Seems it circled the island. Now it’s coming towards us, and it’s smoking, you’re right. But I can’t see flames.’
‘Do I have to repeat myself?’ Amelia asked. ‘There’s no smoke without –’
‘Yes, yes, I know but –’
‘It’s more bad than odd,’ I said. ‘We should get over there and help them.’
Pete had reached that conclusion too, it seemed, but reluctantly. He wasn’t rushing. Maybe because I wanted to claw something back having let myself down, I snapped, ‘Their boat’s on fire. We need to help them now.’
Pete eased the throttle forward. He’d put down the binoculars. I picked them up and looked through them. It was hard to keep the image steady, but despite our bouncing I could make out a cabin cruiser trailing a plume of smoke. And there, on the bow, was a figure. He was slight. A boy, in fact. A small black boy waving something above his head, a flag, or T-shirt perhaps; I couldn’t make it out.
Our boat glanced off a wave lip at that moment and I stopped looking through the binoculars.
‘There’s a kid on board,’ I shouted over the noise of the engines. In response they grew louder. We bore down on the stricken boat. Since it was still somehow motoring towards us as well, the distance between the two boats shrank very rapidly indeed. In no time at all Pete was slackening off and we were dropping low into the water and I could clearly see that the little boy was waving a dirty beach towel. His eyes were very wide, the whites visible all around his dark irises.
The towel wasn’t the only thing that was dirty, I noticed. The cabin cruiser’s hull was grey and patched, and one half of the split windscreen had been replaced with a bit of board. The man piloting the boat was half hidden by it. For a horrible moment it seemed the two boats – our sleek weapon of a dive launch, long and low in the water, and the smoking, battered cruiser bobbing above us – might actually run into one another, but with a deft flick of his wrist Pete jinked left at the last minute, so that we drifted very slowly alongside the cruiser.
‘Something’s not right about this,’ mutt
ered Pete.
At precisely that moment, with the boats at a virtual standstill beside one another, two men leaped up above the cabin cruiser’s rail. Each had a machine gun. The sea around us exploded with foam as both men unleashed a stream of bullets into the depths.
10.
A switch flipped inside me, flooding every muscle with exactly what it needed to answer the question: fight or flight? But there was nowhere to run to and nobody close enough to punch. Why on earth hadn’t Pete hit the throttles? No idea. He’d put his hands above his head instead.
‘Go!’ I shouted, and lunged forward to get us out of there myself.
Before I made it to the controls the gunman nearest us let loose again, inches above Thunderbolt’s prow at first, but then he delivered a second microburst that actually hit us, ripping bits of fibreglass from the immaculate white hood.
In the quiet that followed this volley the man who fired it raised an arm, signalling for us to put ours up. He was still waving his semi-automatic haphazardly in our direction with his free hand.
‘Do as he says,’ hissed Pete.
My heart was jack-hammering in my chest. I lifted my hands. Xander and Amelia did the same. She looked ashen and he was panting with fear.
Smoke was still billowing from the rear of the battered cruiser, a black column rising above us. It didn’t seem to be hampering the captain though. We were drifting forward, but he had put the cruiser in reverse and was matching our speed, the prow nosing closer to ours as we went.
As soon as the gap between the two boats was jumpable the kid who’d been waving the towel leaped. He’d lost the rag now, and was instead holding the end of a length of rope. The boy was barefoot and wearing cut-off jeans. In no time at all he’d worked that rope through an eyelet on the prow and tied it off expertly.
The launch, lashed to us now, swung round to reveal its stern. A low, shelf-like platform stuck out of the back of the boat a couple of feet above the water line. In the middle of this shelf stood an oil drum, the source of the smoke, pouring upwards into the sky.
A third man, every fine muscle in his arms and chest seemingly visible beneath his smooth black skin, pushed the barrel off the shelf with a single kick. It flopped forward, spilling flame and tar into the turquoise sea.
That act, the casual selfishness of it, scared me even more than the crack of bullets splitting fibreglass. It made me think of Mum. Her selfless campaign to protect Zanzibar’s coral reef was so at odds with what this man had just done, I felt physically sick.
No doubt the fear coursing through me made the sensation worse. From where I was standing, I could see the barrel sink through the clear water beneath us, sludge unrolling from it as it went.
What had I done?
If I hadn’t insisted otherwise, we’d have stayed close to the main islands of the archipelago, rather than sailing all the way up here. If I hadn’t insisted otherwise, we’d have left more than an hour ago, and we’d be safely back at Ras Nungwi about now. If I hadn’t insisted otherwise, we wouldn’t have fallen for the boat-in-distress smoke signal that Pete had been suspicious of; we’d have turned around at a distance and outrun the guns easily. If I hadn’t insisted otherwise, Pete’s precious speedboat wouldn’t now be overrun with thieves.
I thought of Mum. She’d lost her eldest son to a stupid accident caused by me. I’d also uncovered her husband’s terrible deceit. She’d thought him a good man until I’d effectively pulled the mask from his face. After I did so he was dead to her too. And now I’d gone and got myself kidnapped by pirates. Mum is a tough woman but this would break her. With the rest of our family dead or gone, we only had each other. I was scared for myself in those moments, but I was dying inside for Mum.
As well as the boy, the ripped guy who’d kicked the barrel into the sea was on board now. Both of them moved around the boat without speaking to us, while the men with the guns kept them trained our way from on high. Barrel-man seemed to be inspecting things. He picked up one of the detectors and looked it over with interest, then he put it back down carefully. Next, he had a little rummage through the stowed scuba gear. He looked a bit like a man browsing in a shop without any intention of actually buying anything.
‘What do they want?’ whispered Amelia.
Barrel-man overheard her and swivelled instantly. He took her in, an almost playful look on his face, then he looked me and Xander up and down as well, before his eyes eventually came to rest on Pete. For a second he stood still, as if considering something. Then he corralled the three of us kids, hands still raised, towards the stern.
In a language I didn’t recognise he yelled something up at the cruiser while surveying the three of us in turn again. A voice from the boat shouted something back. It belonged to an older black guy wearing a baseball cap backwards who now emerged from the cabin and leaned over the rail to inspect what was down below. I felt like an exhibit in a zoo.
The two men carried on their conversation. They seemed to be disagreeing about something. The captain had the final say, or at least he ended the conversation by looking from Pete to us and back again before flicking his fingers dismissively. In response Barrel-man hopped over to Pete, gently eased the sunglasses from his face, and put them high on his own head.
Pete blinked at him. Veins stood out in his muscled neck.
A trickle of sweat ran down between my shoulder blades.
Absurdly, I hoped the answer to Amelia’s question – what do they want? – may be just that: Pete’s sunglasses. Nothing more. Barrel-man had done his browsing and, having looked through everything we had on display, that’s what he’d chosen. Perhaps he would offer to pay for them. He might even want a receipt?
I knew none of that was true just as well as I knew it was all my fault. I’d as good as invited these men aboard. Pirates. Come on in, have a look around, take what you want. Barrel-man would have the sunglasses for good measure, sure, but he’d have the rest as well.
11.
Since the situation was my fault, it was up to me to do something about it. But what? Pete had told me to do what these guys wanted. Barrel-man, Pete’s sunglasses still balanced on his forehead – why didn’t he wear them properly, given the brilliant sunset? – had now come upon our dry-bags, hung from hooks on the bulwark. He went through Amelia’s first, pulled out her sunscreen, dropped it back in, held up a T-shirt and did the same with that, then found her phone, inspected it, and slid that back into the bag as well.
Did that mean he might return it to her? No, it was still far more likely that he planned to have it all. He went through my and Xander’s bags next. He was so unhurried and deliberate in his movements. I don’t have to make a show here, he seemed to be saying: you’re powerless, so I can do exactly what I want.
Watching this thug go through our stuff was tough, but at least the rings we’d found at the bottom of the ocean weren’t there for him to discover. Amelia had taken all of them to look after the previous night, so they were locked in her room safe back at the hotel, but I held my breath as the guy went through her stuff all the same. When he didn’t take anything, I breathed out slowly. It was a silver lining of sorts.
I cast about for something – anything – to upset the imbalance of power. The boy was still in our boat, sitting comfortably on the gunwale near us, one thin leg across the other, showing me the pink sole of his foot. There were white cracks across it. He reached down and scratched his shin, eyes alert, dancing from the men with guns to Barrel-man to the captain, Pete and us. When he next looked my way I caught his gaze and tried to hold it by doing something he wouldn’t expect, namely smiling.
He smiled in return.
There was a big gap between his bright white front teeth.
I nodded at him.
He nodded back.
Unable to think of anything else to do, I murmured, ‘You OK?’
‘Better than you, I expect,’ he replied.
I fought a double take but both Xander and Amelia beside me, h
earing the boy speak English, looked up at him in surprise.
‘You’re right, I’ve been better,’ I said.
‘Stay calm. That’s my advice,’ the boy replied, still smiling.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Xander.
‘Mo,’ he replied, eyes darting from us to the others. ‘Yours?’
‘Xander.’
‘I’ve not heard that name before, where’s it from?’
‘Nowhere in particular, but it’s short for Alexander,’ said Xander conversationally.
‘Ah,’ said the boy. ‘I’m from Somalia. We all are.’
Under her breath Amelia said, ‘Great, pirates from Somalia. Just great.’
To head off the potential insult of Amelia’s sarcasm Xander said, ‘This is Amelia, and that’s Jack.’
‘Xander, Amelia and Jack,’ the boy said. ‘I’m still Mo.’
‘Yes, obviously,’ said Amelia under her breath.
The boy, Mo, had sharp ears. He not only repeated what Amelia had said, but did so in her London accent. ‘Yes, obviously.’ Speaking like that made me realise that his own accent was a bit American. Nothing was adding up.
Barrel-man, cottoning on to the noise of this conversation if not its meaning, turned to tell Mo something that was at once unintelligible to me and yet obvious, along the lines of ‘Shut up!’
I was watching Pete out of the corner of my eye. The sweat was pouring off him now. His hands, which he’d been holding high, had inched down to his chest. He kept looking from the deck of the cruiser to Barrel-man and back again.
One of the gunmen was speaking over his shoulder to the wheelhouse. Pete’s right hand dropped lower still. Was he about to do something? Mo must also have been watching the divemaster, thinking what I was, because he said, ‘I’d tell your boss to be sensible if I was you. He may be a good swimmer, but he won’t get far with a bullet in his head.’
Barrel-man took two quick steps towards Mo, yelling whatever ‘shut up’ was again as he went, and slapped him across the face. That slap would have knocked me off the gunwale, but Mo somehow took it. He swayed there before Barrel-man, staring at the deck.