Dolphin Song

by Lauren St. John

  “Nothing here,” he said. “It could be that they’re ordinary communications or construction workers, and the test they were talking about has something to do with their project. It could be that they’re just not very nice people.”

  They looked at each other. Then both of them went: “Nah!”

  “Ordinary workers don’t have undersea explosives,” Martine reminded him. “And they don’t lock up innocent children.”

  “We’ve got two mysteries to solve,” said Ben. “Number one, why are these men so determined to keep people away from Dugong Island? Two, who or what is killing the dolphins?”

  “And are those things linked in some way?”

  “Come on,” said Ben, “we’d better hurry if we’re going to find the answers by morning.”

  They already knew that the dining area where Claudius was being held was a phone-free zone, so the office, if indeed there was one, was either in the staff apartments near the beach, where they’d seen the men heading, or in one of the ruined buildings. Since the staff quarters were inaccessible, they decided to start with the blocks of rooms, taking along the flashlight they’d found in the cutlery drawer in the kitchen. They didn’t dare switch it on, but pocketed it anyway in case of emergencies.

  “It’s like an abandoned movie set,” Martine said when they reached the ballroom after a lightning search of the rest of the hotel—a task made easier because many of the rooms were missing doors or windows. “It’s as if a plague or some terrible catastrophe has swept away all the actors and dancers.”

  They stood on the terrace breathing in the salty night air and listening to the rhythmic swish, swish of the sea. It was hard to believe that it was only yesterday that they’d stayed up till dawn trying to save the beached dolphins.

  Martine yawned. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I feel like we’ve been awake for days.”

  “That’s because we have,” was Ben’s dry reply.

  A sweeping yellow beam sent them diving for cover. They’d temporarily forgotten about the guard. They crawled back into the ballroom and hid behind the piano. After a while they heard his footsteps retreating.

  “We’ll have to think of a way to get into the staff apartments,” Ben said. “There’s nothing here.”

  Martine put her hand on his arm. “Wait. We haven’t looked upstairs.”

  “It’s probably just a bar or lounge area. The whole hotel is empty. The bar is not going to be any different.”

  Martine’s gaze followed the curve of the spiral staircase high into the black darkness of the upper floor. It looked like the last refuge of the ghosts of Paradise Island’s penal colony, the prisoners who’d lived or died in torment centuries before the sun seekers arrived to lounge beside the ocean, or twirl beneath the twinkly lights on the ballroom floor.

  “We have to be sure,” she said. “What if it is different?”

  The second story was, as Ben had suspected, a lounge bar, but he was wrong about it being empty. Big plastic bundles lined one wall and there was a desk and a filing cabinet in front of the windows. Moonlight spilled in, but it wasn’t bright enough for their purposes. They needed the flashlight if their hunt was to be effective. After several long minutes studying the grounds below for any sign of life, they decided to risk switching it on. The first thing they saw was the contents of the clear plastic bundles.

  “The cables!” exclaimed Martine.

  “So maybe we are on the right track after all,” Ben said.

  But the filing cabinets were as dreary as the boxes had been over in the restaurant area. Whatever else the men were doing, their record keeping could not be faulted. Not if the neatness of their handwriting was anything to go by. File after file revealed nothing more riveting than orders for cement, and letters from the planning department reporting delays to building work.

  “I guess if there was anything important here, the door would be locked,” Ben said disappointedly. “Their computers, phones, and radios are probably in their apartments.”

  They were just about to leave when Martine spotted a wire basket beneath the desk. Ben handed her the flashlight and she moved the chair and grabbed it. Inside was a single ball of paper. She smoothed it out. It was a printout of an e-mail. The sender’s address had been torn off, but the message was still intact.

  Dear M,

  Thank you for your kind permission to conduct a further test near Dugong Island on the date agreed. Please be advised that it will take place at 1200 hrs and will be 235 decibels. Payment is as before.

  VS

  “Sonar testing,” said Ben, crouching down beside her. “Has to be. What else could they be testing that’s measured in decibels? Somehow these guys are mixed up in it.”

  Martine looked at the printout again. “It doesn’t have a date on it, but it could be the test that Claudius was telling us about. That means we have until noon tomorrow to stop it. Or is it today already? Do you think it’s past midnight?”

  She turned off the flashlight. “Oh, Ben, the test that drove the whales to their deaths in the Bahamas was two hundred thirty-five decibels. I remember that because those are the first three digits of our phone number at Sawubona. Mr. Manning told me that under water, two hundred thirty-five decibels sounds like a rocket taking off.”

  “If it’s true about the test, we’re in way over our heads,” Ben said. “We have to find a phone or a radio and get a message to my father’s ship. If we can reach him, he’ll contact the coastguard or the navy. We’re going to need some outside help.”

  Keeping low, they crept over to the arched doorway. Ben put a finger to his lips. “Shh! Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?” whispered Martine, but by then a hand was descending from the darkness like a club, mashing her face into the floor and wrenching her arm behind her back, and it was already way too late.

  28

  “At least we tried,” Martine said. “We did everything we possibly could.”

  “Yes,” Ben agreed. “We did our best.”

  “We’re just kids. It wasn’t realistic to think that we could go up against the kind of men who blow up manta rays and win, ’specially not here, on some island in the middle of nowhere.”

  “You’re right. We’re just kids.”

  “It’s just that . . .” Martine’s tone was wistful. “It’s just that I keep thinking, what if we’d done things differently? What if we hadn’t been caught? What if we still had a chance of saving the dolphins? I can’t bear to think of the agony they’ll be in if the test goes ahead.”

  “I know,” said Ben. “Unless we can escape and prevent it, I feel as if we’ll have failed Cookie and Sun Dancer and the others. I keep thinking that there has to still be a way to keep our promise to Mini.”

  It was hard not to feel regretful. They’d had a chance and it had slipped through their fingers like sand.

  After capturing them with the help of Fernando, the young guard, the skipper had turned ugly. He’d ranted that Claudius had, as he’d suspected, been lying to him about being alone on the island. He’d said that “Cloudies,” as he called Claudius, would be punished—“but not too much, because we don’t want to make the father cross.”

  Alarmed, Martine and Ben had insisted that Claudius had in a way been telling the truth because none of them got along. “When we reached the island, sir, the first thing he did was tell us to get lost,” Ben had informed him.

  Unfortunately, that had backfired, because the skipper saw an opportunity to get even more extra cash. He would deliver Claudius, who was still locked in the dining room, to his father in the morning but would hold on to Ben and Martine for another few days and try to claim some reward money from their families. Martine noticed that he was careful not to mention the million dollars he aimed to extract from Mr. Rapier in front of the guard.

  That’s when she said, “Why do you need more money? Aren’t you getting enough from the tests?”

  The skipper reacted as if he had just received severa
l hundred volts in the rear from a cattle prod.

  “What do you know about the tests?” he shouted.

  “We know everything,” Martine bluffed. “We even know that there’s one tomorrow at noon. The islanders are not going to be happy when they find out what you’re up to.”

  If looks could kill, the skipper’s would have incinerated her. Instead he shouted: “Lock them up, Fernando. I must think of what to do with them.”

  Martine and Ben’s big chance came a few minutes after he’d locked them in the disused lounge bar. It happened when they were fumbling around in the dark for the flashlight and Ben found a hard, heavy object. Martine found the flashlight at the same time and she switched it on.

  Ben started to laugh. “I don’t believe it. The guard must have dropped this when I was struggling with him. Martine, he dropped his radio!”

  In the distance, Martine caught the ring of boots on concrete. “Ben, someone’s coming!”

  But Ben was already adjusting the dial and putting his mouth to the microphone. “This is Dumisani Khumalo’s son, Ben, to the Aurora. Do you copy?”

  There was no reply.

  “This is Ben Khumalo to the Aurora. Do you read me?” he repeated.

  “Ben!” said Martine. “We’re going to be caught!”

  He continued without a pause. “I can’t hear you but I’m just going to hope you can hear me. Over,” he said clearly into the radio. “At twelve hundred hours tomorrow, there’s going to be a two-hundred-thirty-five-decibel sonar test near Dugong Island in the Bazaruto Archipelago. Over. There is a strong possibility that hundreds of dolphins might beach themselves because of it. Over. Dad, if you get this message, Martine, Claudius Rapier, and I are on Paradise Island—Santa Carolina—and we’re fine, although if you could rescue us after you’ve helped the dolphins, that would be great. Over and out.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Do you copy, Aurora?” Ben said desperately into the radio. “Did you read any of that?”

  As if to tease him, static crackled and hissed.

  A key turned in the lock and the door burst open. A swinging gas lamp showed the panicked face of Fernando, who was carrying blankets and a bottle of water. He looked a little less fraught when he saw them sitting innocently on the windowsill, and gave a visible sigh when he caught sight of the radio, half hidden beneath the desk. Even so, he stared at them suspiciously.

  “Lucky for you that you didn’t find this,” he said, flinging down his load and snatching up the radio.

  “Lucky for you, you mean,” Martine retorted. “Why are you mixed up in this, anyway? You’re Tsonga, aren’t you? You’re an islander. How can you take money from people who put bombs in the water around your beautiful islands? People who murder dolphins? Those dolphins have saved generations of your fishermen.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said angrily. “Nobody is murdering dolphins. They are here to build a hotel, which will bring work to many islanders.”

  “Are you sure?” Martine asked him. “Or maybe they’ll just give the work to people from the mainland. As for the tests, what do you think they’re for?”

  “You are a child and you are not from Bazaruto,” he said. “You know nothing.”

  The door slammed shut and he was gone.

  Martine turned to Ben, who’d been quiet throughout this exchange. His knees were scrunched up and he had his face buried in his arms.

  “Ben,” she said worriedly. “Ben, what’s wrong?”

  But he was too distraught to reply. He kept his head down and spoke so softly that she had to lean close to him to make out what he was saying. “They couldn’t hear me. It didn’t get through. The message didn’t get through.”

  Five thirty a.m. found them leaning against the sacks of plastic cables, wrapped in blankets, watching the morning star flicker against the fading blue of night. For days they’d yearned for sleep, and now that it was an option—their only option, in fact—they were too tired, too hungry, and too concerned about what would happen next, to surrender to it.

  For the first time since the dolphins had deposited them on Dugong Island, Martine was losing hope that she’d ever return to Sawubona. She thought about the last dawn she’d watched at the game reserve, twenty-four hours before boarding the bus for the school trip. Her grandmother had perched on the side of her bed and watched her with wry affection as Martine propped herself up sleepily and looked out at the elephants drinking from the misty water hole. She could still recall the thrill she’d felt that the game reserve was her home. She’d had no idea then that that home was about to slip away from her, just as the Sea Kestrel had slipped away from the continent of Africa. That that sunrise might be the last she ever saw at Sawubona.

  “Ben,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? Just in case . . . You know, just in case . . .”

  He smiled wearily. “Just in case you’re too busy to ask me when we make it back to Cape Town, you mean? Sure. What do you want to know?”

  “Why don’t you ever speak at school?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  “Promise.”

  “A long time ago I read this Buddhist quote: ‘Say nothing that doesn’t improve on silence.’ I guess it just . . .”

  There was a jingle of keys and the door flew open. Fernando rushed in. “I can’t find the key for the motorboat,” he said. “Can you sail?”

  Ben and Martine tore through the coconut groves to the beach, but their strength was depleted and every stride was an effort. When Martine’s feet came into contact with the cold, squeaking sand, she almost collapsed. Her arm was still sore where it had been wrenched by the skipper, she had a stitch in her side, and her legs felt like two tree stumps. A large part of her just wanted to give up—lie down on the beach, go to sleep, and hope that when she woke up, somebody else would have saved the day. She forced herself on, telling herself that she was running to save the dolphins. Running to get back to Jemmy. Running to be reunited with her grandmother, Grace, Tendai, and the sanctuary animals at Sawubona.

  “Follow the sun and you’ll reach my home island, Bazaruto,” Fernando had promised. “Somebody there will help you, for sure.”

  At first they’d just stood stock-still and stared at him, like birds unexpectedly released from a cage.

  “You want to know why, don’t you?” he said. “It’s because when you spoke to me last night, it reminded me that I went to the mainland to find honest work—to better myself—not to lock up children or work for people who would cause the mathahi, the dolphins, to die. So it is time to look for a different job.”

  He grinned. “Anyway, I am a terrible guard.”

  They’d thanked him profusely and sped off, but as they neared the water, they could see that escaping wasn’t going to be quite as easy as it sounded. It wasn’t just that there was very little wind. There was no breeze at all. Without it, the dhow was going nowhere.

  Ben didn’t hesitate. “We’ll take the motorboat.”

  “How? We don’t have a key,” said a frantic Martine, but Ben was already on his way over to the sleek white vessel. He leaped on board. Martine followed more slowly.

  “Keep a lookout,” Ben told her. “I’m going to try to start it manually. A lot of boats have a hand crank as a backup.”

  This boat did too, just not a very cooperative one. Time and time again Ben tugged at the cord, but the most he could get out of it was a feeble cough. He paused, panting, for a breather.

  Martine was a nervous wreck. “Let me try,” she said impatiently, leaving her post. She wrenched with all her strength at the cord and the engine roared to life.

  “You’ve done it!” Ben cried in laughing disbelief. “Martine, you’re a star.”

  There was a thud and the boat rocked violently. They both swung around.

  “Going somewhere?” inquired the skipper.

  29

  To Martine, there was a certain symmetry to the whole island adventure. An inevitabili
ty. It was almost as if destiny had been in motion since the day Miss Volkner told them about the Sardine Run, and that no matter how hard Martine had tried to stop it, she was going to end up speeding across the ocean on a boat steered by a man with only one purpose: to deliver her to Death Island. And she knew without being told that that’s where she and Ben were being taken.

  “Are you really going to leave us here to die?” she demanded when the boat spluttered to a halt at a shell sandbank and the skipper indicated that they should get off. When she hesitated, he gave her a push.

  “What kind of monster are you?” she said furiously.

  “Monster? I’m not a monster. If I was, I would have fed you to the sharks. No, I am a kind man—a generous man—as you will see. I am giving you a chance to win your freedom, like the old prison guards used to. You are young and strong. If you can swim to the shore, just eight miles from here, you can go home to your families, and I will forget that you tried to steal my boat and interfere with my business and stop my chance to get some real money. A million dollars. Do you know how much that can buy in Mozambique?”

  He revved up the engine. “Enjoy your swim,” he said. “Perhaps if you are lucky, a fishing boat will come to your aid.” He was gone in a swoosh of flying spray.

  Martine looked at the sliver of sandbank and the seething ocean that surrounded it. Her nightmares returned in flashback. She could hear the screams on the night of the storm; feel the slow-motion terror of impending disaster; see the circling, dead-eyed sharks. She knew now how the Paradise Island prisoners must have felt in centuries gone by. At least she could swim a little; most of them had probably been unable to swim at all.

  Ben was scared too, although he was trying hard not to show it. He said, “I don’t suppose one of your powers is holding back the tide? No? Well, hopefully a fishing boat really will come along and rescue us, but until then, why don’t we pretend we’re on a lovely beach and that we’ve chosen to be here? I could help you with your sea swimming if you like.”