by Wilbur Smith
That didn’t stack up. I’d barely moved a muscle, because with my feet and hands bound I couldn’t! And yet although I shifted all those life jackets about enough to make Amelia hiss, ‘Whatever it is you’re looking for, they’re going to notice if you don’t stop,’ there was nothing beneath any of them, just the smooth white deck of the boat.
I glanced up when she said that, to check that Barrel-man was still looking the other way, and he was. But my relief was quickly snuffed out when I saw that Mo was indeed watching me. Our eyes locked.
For a second I was certain that he would alert the captain, or Barrel-man, because they’d made it plain that we were his responsibility: any fuss from us, and he’d be in the firing line too. But instead of calling out in alarm the boy just held my gaze for a moment, both palms raised, as if to say, ‘It’s OK, keep calm, I’ve got this.’
Infuriating!
17.
Breakfast that morning was the same as dinner the night before, only this time I ate it. I’d made my point. The flatbread tasted of salted butter and the jerky was infused with some sort of chorizo-like spice. Washed down with more lemonade, it was actually pretty good. But Xander, hunched beside me, didn’t seem to want his.
‘I don’t feel too good,’ he explained when I asked why.
‘What sort of not-good?’ asked Amelia.
‘Swimming head, lurching stomach. But it’s just the swell,’ he said. ‘I’ve had seasickness before.’
I’d not really noticed, but now that he pointed it out, I saw the sea had got up. Except for a few ripples it had been flat as a lake since we set out the day before, but now we were lifting and falling, tugged on by the cruiser over black-green humps.
They were coming at us from an angle, causing Thunderbolt to pitch and roll at the same time. We were making uneven and lurching progress beneath a grey sky that I now saw was stacked with purplish clouds. That morning they boiled up to blot out the morning sun.
The weather went bad quickly. Stiff wind soon built to a proper gale which knocked whitecaps off the waves, whipping up spray which combined with the spume gouged by the plunging bow to fill the rushing air. We were wet through before the rain began.
Xander fought the seasickness, but couldn’t beat it, and eventually had to drag himself up in the stern so that he could be violently sick over the transom between the big outboards. I felt for him. So did Mo. He cut the tape binding Xander’s ankles so he could at least brace himself against the bucking of the boat.
With Xander throwing up over the stern, Amelia tapped Mo on the shoulder and said, ‘Cinnarizine, cyclizine, promethazine, are all types of …’
‘Antihistamine.’
‘Used to counter?’
‘Motion sickness, among other things.’
‘If you pass me my dry-bag, I’ve got a packet I can open for Xander.’
‘You brought them, but you’re not sick yourself.’
‘Better safe than sorry.’
At Amelia’s direction, Mo retrieved her bag from the bulkhead. She spent long enough rooting around in it to make me think she was up to something, but in fact she did have some pills buried among her stuff, and she did give Xander a couple. He washed them down with water, but frankly they didn’t stay on board long: he was in a right state.
Before the storm proper hit us the captain appeared at the rail again and gave the order to transfer us to the bigger vessel. Only Barrel-man, still lounging in Pete’s chair and looking about as bothered by the weather as a rock might, was to remain behind.
One by one Mo freed us of our bindings and led us forward, up onto the prow, to make the jump across to the platform off the cruiser’s stern. I went last. Although the tape around my ankles hadn’t bothered me too badly, now that it was undone my legs were weirdly stiff. I felt unsteady on my feet, and it wasn’t just the fault of the waves.
The others were suffering too. I’d seen Mo take an incapacitated Xander by the hand and tell him when to jump, and I’d also seen Amelia lose her footing climbing up onto the prow. She had to clutch the boy for support. I was damn well going to make the trip without help. But though I have a pretty good sense of balance, it’s one thing to sit in a bucking boat, another to stand up, and harder still to walk when your legs have gone to sleep.
Mo, who hadn’t spent an age tied up, and who apparently lived on a boat anyway, understandably made the whole thing look like nothing at all. But although I did my best to concentrate and ignore the numbness of dead-wood calves, I mistimed my jump, leaping as the prow rose and the platform dropped away. This turned what would have been a three-foot drop into a ten-foot one. I landed with an awful thump and crumpled to my knees.
Mo caught me round the shoulders and asked, ‘You’re OK, you’re not hurt?’
‘I’m fine,’ I growled, standing up.
‘Good, come then,’ he said, and having slackened off the tow line to put a good thirty metres between us and the dive boat, he ushered me up the rusty ladder, across the cruiser’s rear deck, and into the cabin itself.
From the speedboat I’d not worked out the size of this enclosed space. It dropped away from the captain’s seat in the wheelhouse – he barely looked at me as I passed by – down a set of steep stairs, and opened up into a cramped room lined with benches bolted to the floor, between which stood a table, similarly secured.
Visible beyond this room was a further, hutch-like space extending into the prow of the boat. I made out a figure – one of the two gunmen I’d seen yesterday, presumably – lying on some sort of cot. His outstretched foot was stuck in a flip-flop that seemed to have been made from an offcut of old tyre.
The last member of the five-man pirate crew – or, more properly, four men and a boy – was up on the jump seat in the wheelhouse next to the captain, looking down at us through the open cabin door, cradling a gun in his lap like a little dog.
Presumably they shifted us into this enclosed cabin to shelter us from the worst of the weather, but to be honest I’d have preferred to stay on Pete’s boat. This one stank of rotten fish drenched in cat pee and cloaked in diesel fumes. Never mind the rolling of the boat, the smell was enough to make me want to throw up.
Poor Xander had nothing much left to get rid of, but immediately looked like he was going to be sick again, so Mo pulled open a cupboard door to reveal a tiny toilet cubicle. There was barely space in there for Xander to lean over, but that’s what he did, retching into the bowl while the cupboard door swung open and shut, hiding and revealing him, until he managed to grab the inner handle and hold it shut.
It hit me again then: we should have been eating fruit salad and waffles in beautiful Ras Nungwi, safe from the storm, getting ready to return to England, but instead we were stuck here being thrown around by the waves in this stinking pirate boat, heading god-knew-where, hungry and wet, one of us sick, at the mercy of armed maniacs, our only hope this strange Mo kid. Pete was lost at sea. Mum would be beside herself. And it was all my fault. I wanted to punch something out of frustration.
‘Do you think this boat is safer than Pete’s then?’ Amelia asked. She was trying to sound conversational but for her to have asked me, no expert in boats, such a non-scientific question, I knew she had to be out of her mind with worry.
My reply, ‘It’s as safe as any other,’ sounded so lame I felt I had to add something better to reassure her. ‘Though these guys are crooks, I’ll bet they know exactly what they’re doing when it comes to negotiating a storm at sea. And anyway, none of them seem bothered.’
Nobody asked his opinion but Mo said, ‘The captain, he is very experienced, it’s true,’ and coming from him that seemed a solid enough observation to raise a nod from Amelia.
Xander emerged unsteadily. I helped him back to one of the benches. All the blood seemed to have drained from his face. Being half Nigerian he is normally a healthy brown, but he was sludge-grey now. He lay out flat at my suggestion, but it was impossible for him to rest as he had to keep reaching out a
nd bracing himself. I tried to help him by wedging myself between his legs and the table, keeping him in place.
The boat had begun to buck and dive even more ferociously, and every now and then a wave hit us hard enough to make me think the hull would split open like a pea pod hit with a hammer, spilling us into the depths. The thump of those waves was nothing compared to the noise of the rain, however. It sounded like a million marbles slamming into the deck, the wheelhouse roof and the exposed stern, a torrent pouring from the sky with such venom that if a wave didn’t split our hull the rain would surely fill the boat and sink us.
I’d tried to reassure Amelia, but I was fighting back my own panic. As the storm swelled around us I’d never felt smaller, more vulnerable, more sure I was about to die.
18.
I hung on to one thought: if the boat didn’t sink the storm would eventually pass. I couldn’t have told you whether we were tossed about for six hours or twenty-six. The boat pitched and slammed and wallowed and lurched endlessly. It was too much to take in, so I sort of switched off, blotting everything out.
Though it had built quickly, the storm fizzled out very gradually indeed. I didn’t feel it fade, just began to notice other things. For example, I realised the guy in the bunk room was listening to something, a voice coming from somewhere, perhaps a shortwave radio? It was all static and gibberish for the most part, but I swear I heard a repeated ‘mayday’ at one point. A little later he lumbered past us and up the stairs to the wheelhouse to talk to the captain. I don’t know what he said but he sounded animated, and shortly afterwards the pitch of our engines deepened.
I also noticed that an inch or so of water had flooded the floor. As we rocked, it swept from side to side picking up bits of plastic wrapper, twine, bottle tops, and the like. The water must have come down the stairs. We’d have known about it if we’d sprung an actual leak, surely?
Amelia seemed to read my mind. She pointed at the floor and said, ‘Is that a problem?’ I have to admit I was relieved when Mo shook his head. At first that little lake sloshed about all over the place. In time it rolled from side to side more slowly. The rattle of the rain became a hiss which gradually quietened to nothing. In the quiet the cabin seemed bigger and brighter. The stairs lit up. I’ve no idea if we’d actually sailed right through a full day of storm and into the following morning, but the sky was now weakly bright again overhead.
Xander woke up, raised himself on one arm, and said, ‘Mo, can you ask permission for us to go up on deck?’
Mo looked nervous. ‘Why?’ he said.
‘I need some air.’
Amelia chipped in: ‘You’ll need some water too. We all do. But you must be properly dehydrated.’
‘I have a splitting headache.’
‘That’ll be why.’
Mo nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said.
From my vantage point to one side of the stairs I watched Mo as he talked to the captain. I couldn’t hear the captain’s response but knew it was positive from the boy’s super-grateful nodding. In my opinion, he really needed to grow a backbone. All the same, it was a huge relief to be allowed up those stairs again. The breeze on my face was enough to make me feel almost human again.
Mo ushered us to the stern and told us to sit down there. The first thing I noticed was that Pete’s speedboat had disappeared. The rope that once attached it to us was coiled neatly on the platform below. Neither Barrel-man nor the gunman with the tyre-tread flip-flops were aboard with us, so they’d presumably gone off in the dive launch together somewhere. That angered me: it made the fact that they’d stolen the boat all the more obvious, I suppose.
Mo disappeared again. When he surfaced, he had more of the same food, but the plastic bottle he brought turned out to contain actual water this time.
‘I’ve never understood why it’s called finding your sea legs,’ said Amelia.
‘It’s a balance thing,’ I said.
‘I know, but surely finding your sea stomach is more important.’
I’d thought it was morning, but from the position of the sun in the sky, low among tumbled clouds, it had to be afternoon. Though I’d lost track of time, something didn’t feel right about that. It took me a while to realise I was right: the sun was gaining height, not losing it, meaning it was indeed morning and we were headed south-west rather than north-east.
‘Why the change of course?’ I asked aloud, resenting the fact that only Mo could answer the question.
‘I think perhaps they heard something on the radio, and are investigating,’ he said.
‘What do you mean, investigating?’
The answer became clear soon enough. We’d not been up on deck long before a notch appeared on the horizon, dead ahead. We were making our way steadily straight for whatever it was. The thing split in two as we approached. Pete’s idling speedboat was one half of the equation, the other was a becalmed yacht with a broken mast.
It was lying low in the water, clearly half flooded. I put two and two together to work out what Mo had been reluctant to say. Most likely the mayday call I’d overheard during the storm had come from this stricken boat. The pirate captain had dispatched his new quick launch to find it.
I knew before I saw the yacht’s owners – a white-haired man and a younger woman with sunburnt shoulders, who were taped back to back next to the shattered mast – that the pirates hadn’t sped here to offer assistance. They were stealing anything of value. Flip-flops was minding Pete’s boat, but Barrel-man, the assault rifle slung across his back, exited from the half-submerged interior of the yacht carrying something and dropped it into the open mouth of a kitbag on deck.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Amelia.
‘They’re robbing those people,’ muttered Xander.
‘That boat looks like it’s sinking though,’ said Amelia. ‘They’ll bring that couple aboard, right?’
Mo looked away.
‘They won’t leave them on a sinking boat, surely.’
Mo didn’t reply.
Both the captain and the remaining guard on our boat were fixated by what was going on with the yacht. That meant they had their backs turned. I cast around for anything I might use as a weapon, but there was nothing. Hitting one of them over the head with a half empty water bottle wouldn’t achieve anything.
Even if we managed to take control of this boat, we’d never outrun Pete’s launch with Barrel-man at the helm. A length of thin plastic cord, coiled in the bilge, was the only object of any possible use within reach, so I picked it up and wrapped it round my hips, then concealed it below the waistband of my shorts. It might come in handy for tying something to something, possibly.
The poor couple on the boat were keeping their eyes down. I noticed that the man had a livid gash running the length of his left shin. He was bleeding onto the deck. Surely they’d have a first aid kit on board?
I was about to ask Mo to suggest Barrel-man look for it, when I spotted the speck of another boat on the horizon. It was coming our way. If I was right and the yacht had put out a distress call during the storm it would make sense that other boats in the area might respond to it as well.
The captain had also clocked this new inbound boat. He yelled something across the water, alerting Barrel-man and Flip-flops. Barrel-man dived into the half-submerged yacht again to retrieve another bag filled with I’ve no idea what, flung it and the other spoils across to Flip-flops in the speedboat, and followed himself, deftly jumping the gap. At the captain’s order the two men began to ready the dive boat.
‘We should do something,’ I said.
‘Like what?’ replied Xander.
‘Something to alert that boat. They’re sailing into a trap.’
Mo grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t!’ he hissed.
I might not have done what I did next if he hadn’t been so insistent, but I wasn’t about to take orders from Mo. I shook the boy off easily enough. Then I pulled my T-shirt over my head and waved it frantically in the air,
a flag of distress.
It was a ludicrously weak attempt at a warning; unless somebody on the other boat had a pair of binoculars trained on me they’d never see me at that distance, but so what?
Xander hissed, ‘That looks like a distress signal! It’s as likely to make them think we need help and draw them to us as it is to warn them off!’
Like an idiot I ignored him, and regretted it almost instantly. The approaching boat may still have been too far away to spot me but the big bear-like guard who’d stayed on the cabin cruiser with the captain, the one who cradled his assault rifle with such tenderness, saw what I was doing. He moved very quickly for such a big guy. In three or four steps he was slap bang in front of me with the gun pointed at my midriff and a look about as blank as that sand tiger shark’s in his eye.
19.
Somebody shrieked, ‘No, no, no!’ beside me. I thought it was Amelia, or possibly Xander, but it turned out to be Mo. With hindsight that’s pretty scary: Mo knew these guys and definitely thought the big guard might pull the trigger. But that wasn’t his plan. Although he advanced pointing the gun’s muzzle at me he swung the butt forward as he arrived and slammed it straight into my solar plexus.
The blow drove the air from my lungs and knocked me flat on my back.
I’ve been winded before, but this was different. The nearest thing I can liken it to is the time, aged eight, I accidentally gave myself an electric shock trying to get a burning bagel out of the toaster with a fork. The electricity shooting through me then felt like icy lightning. It bounced me across the kitchen. I cracked my head open on the corner of the island unit.
Now, on my back in the bilge, trying to draw a breath was impossible. The air had somehow turned to tarmac. I had to cough up lumps of the stuff before I could catch a lungful of actual sea breeze.