Frazer was about to yell something appropriately rude to Chung, but he didn’t get the chance. A scream came from behind him. He turned and beheld the extraordinary sight of Huru Huru charging towards him, his regal outfit floating behind him in the freshening gale.
For a moment Frazer thought that the deranged former chief was coming to wreak his revenge for the indignities of yesterday; but then he realized that Huru Huru was staring beyond him to the sea and the launch. One of the crew members was trying to get the engine to start, but it was spluttering and coughing like a drowning man.
Huru Huru would have run right over Frazer had he not dived aside. Now the titanic Polynesian was thundering through the water. Chung finally noticed him and started to yell at the crew. At last the engine caught and the launch began to surge away. With a final effort, Huru Huru hurled himself through the air. He seemed to soar for a moment, like a Zeppelin.
‘So an elephant can fly,’ said Frazer to himself.
And then Huru Huru bellyflopped into the water, sending a wave across the bow of the launch. He was just short of the boat, but he managed somehow to thrust out a hand and grabbed the gunwale.
The launch now laboured through the water, dragging Huru Huru along. Chung pulled out his pistol and tried to fire at Huru Huru, but either his weapon was empty or jammed. Then he began to hammer with the gun at the fat fingers clutching the edge of the boat. But Huru Huru was not letting go. The launch steered for the gap in the reef, but more and more water was flowing over the gunwales and into the boat. And, as they approached the reef gap, the current surging through added another element of instability.
But all that was dwarfed by what was happening in the sky. The huge area of intense blackness was now engulfing the island. Rain began to hammer down. Except that ‘down’ was out by exactly ninety degrees. For that first gust was nothing but an emissary of what now reached them. The wind was a manic force, a demon, a monster, raging across the lagoon. It mixed up the rain and the spray and flung it in the faces of the three Trackers, who were now the only people left on the beach.
Frazer turned away from the bizarre and almost comical spectacle out on the lagoon and ran back to Amazon and Bluey – although, with the wind behind him, he felt more like a kite screaming through the air than a running boy.
‘I guess we’ll just have to tough it out here,’ said, or rather yelled, Frazer when he reached them. The wind was now so loud only a yell could get through. The wind was tossing the tops of the palm trees around. It reminded Amazon of the hairdryer fights they’d sometimes had in the dorm back in school, with the girls trying to blast each other’s hair into the weirdest shapes. ‘When it blows over, we’ll find a way of getting these stupid cuffs off.’
‘I’m cold,’ said Bluey, although Amazon and Frazer had to work it out by lip-reading. He was still weak from the allergic reaction to the Portuguese man-of-war sting, and he hadn’t taken one of the pills for several hours. The three of them were in T-shirts and shorts, which had been fine for the morning weather, but now, with the rain and the wind, the temperature had dropped right down and they were all shivering.
‘I’m going to get your jacket,’ shouted Frazer. ‘And waterproof clothes for us too. Back in a sec. Amazon, you stay here with him. Try to keep him warm.’
Without waiting for a reply, Frazer set off, keeping as low as he could to avoid being blown over.
Amazon put her arm round Bluey. His flesh was cold.
‘Need to sleep,’ he said, his head nodding.
Something told Amazon that that was a bad idea.
‘Stay with us, Bluey. You’ve got to focus. Things are going to be …’
And then Amazon saw what was coming: a wave that washed clean over the reef, and continued travelling relentlessly across the lagoon.
This wasn’t a tsunami, which is always the result of an underwater earthquake. This was just a wall of water being driven by the wind. It reached the beach and rolled towards them, gradually losing momentum. By the time it reached them, some twenty metres from the water’s edge, it had lost its force. It still swept round their feet, and on into the forest, before rolling back again and sinking into the coral sand.
For the first time Amazon began to feel real fear. She had always loved storms, and thrilled when lightning flashes had made the other girls in her dorm scream. But there was something about an English storm that was, well, safe. But this did not feel safe at all.
Her thoughts were interrupted by Frazer, who slid next to her, gasping. He was wearing garish yellow waterproof outer-clothing, and had brought the same for Amazon and Bluey.
‘That wave,’ he yelled over the wind. ‘It came right over the beach. I hope …’
‘WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?’ boomed a voice, startling them all. ‘YOU WILL DIE!’
Frazer and Amazon turned to see Matahi leaning into the storm. Then Matahi saw the handcuffs and the almost unconscious Bluey.
‘These people are animals,’ he said.
‘Why will we die?’ asked Amazon, her voice shrill with terror. ‘It’s only a storm …’
‘Not any storm, the tropical cyclone, a typhoon. It will send waves right over the island. Waves that will reach halfway up this tree. All of the ground of the island will be underwater.’
Amazon and Frazer stared at each other, their mouths open.
‘How long?’ said Frazer, when he’d recovered from the shock.
‘Minutes.’
‘Can you cut this tree down, so Bluey can at least get to the higher ground?’
‘Not in time. If I had known … I was hiding from the men with guns. I was going to return in the night. But there is a way. Your friend must climb into the tree. We will help.’
‘We?’
‘Yes, me, you –’
‘And Oti!’ said Oti, suddenly appearing beside Matahi.
Oti went first, climbing up the tree as easily as a squirrel. The technique looked very simple. He hooked his hands round the tree, put one foot flat against the trunk and simply walked up.
Frazer and Amazon did their best to revive Bluey, but he was groggy with fatigue and illness. Matahi slid him up the trunk, and then propped him on his shoulders. Oti from above, and Frazer and Amazon from below, held him tightly there while Matahi climbed up, to begin the process again. In a way it helped that Bluey’s hands were bound around the palm tree trunk – it held him fast in those moments when no one else had a good grip.
Amazon was afraid of heights, but she was also, strangely, a brilliant tree climber. She tried to follow Matahi up the palm, but she could not grip the trunk.
‘Use your belt,’ said Matahi, from above. ‘Put it round the tree, and then use your feet, like Oti.’
Amazon didn’t quite get it at first. But then she looped her belt round the trunk, slid it up until it was level with her waist, then started to walk up the tree, moving the belt with her. She wasn’t sure if she was actually much use, but between the three of them, they managed to pull and push Bluey up into the relative safety of the network of branches at the top.
It was exhausting and dangerous work. The wind was growing stronger by the second, and the mix of blown spray and driving rain was blinding, deafening and painful. Now it was not only the tops of the trees that were being tossed around: the whole trunk was bending, almost like grass in a stiff English breeze.
‘We will stay with your friend here,’ Matahi yelled above the growing tempest. ‘But there is not enough room for all of us. You and Frazer must climb that tree. Tie yourself on with your belts. Do not let go of the tree whatever happens.’
Amazon shinned down the curving trunk of the coc
onut palm and explained to Frazer what they must do. The tree Matahi had directed them to was taller and straighter than the one they had wrestled Bluey into, so it was a tougher climb. The trick with the belts helped, however, and in ten minutes they were both clinging to the thick palm fronds at the top of the tree, like very strange coconuts indeed.
From their vantage point they had a view both of the other tree, with Matahi and Oti and Bluey, and across the lagoon and out to sea. The Tian-long, its engine straining, was desperately trying to work itself away from the reef on to which the gale was blowing it.
‘Look!’ said Frazer, pointing.
For a moment Amazon couldn’t see what it was that her cousin was pointing at. And then she spotted it. Boxes. White boxes, floating in the water. And there was the upturned hull of the launch. Most – if not all – of the lids of the boxes had come open. There was no sign of the occupants.
‘Do you think the baby turtles are OK?’ asked Amazon.
‘I can’t tell,’ replied Frazer. ‘But I think so, yeah. It looks to me like either Chung opened them up so they could escape; or maybe they just came open in the wreck. Either way, I think they’re free.’
‘I don’t see any people …’
‘Maybe the other boat picked them up …?’
Amazon hated Chung and Huru Huru, but she didn’t like to think of anyone out there in that deadly ocean in this storm.
Frazer shouted something else to her, but now the wind and driving rain were so bad that she just couldn’t hear what it was. Then she saw that Frazer had the sat phone in his hand.
Of course! Now that the schooner was leaving, it couldn’t jam their signal any more.
Frazer held on tightly with one hand, and dialled with the other. He’d almost completed his father’s number when the strongest gust yet shook the tree, bending it almost down to the sand. Amazon screamed, and so did Frazer, although he’d deny it to his dying day. As the tree sprang back, he lost his grip – the rubberized surface of the phone was slick with the rain and spray. It flew from his hand, and curved in a perfect arc, heading towards the floodwater, which was by now right beneath them.
The handset was water-resistant, but it could not survive total immersion in the saltwater. Luckily, the wristband caught and tangled in the fronds at the end of the last branch, and dangled out there, beyond Frazer’s reach.
Frazer was a headstrong and impetuous kid, but even he realized that it was folly to try to climb out to get the phone. They’d just have to hope it managed to hang on in there until the storm abated.
Right now abating was the very last thing on the cyclone’s mind. So far, Amazon and Frazer had only seen the warm-up act. The main show was just about to begin.
Had they been able to look down from space, they would have seen a huge spiral of cloud, many hundreds of miles across, with a circle of calm at its core – the eye. The eye was an area of low pressure that sucked in the surrounding air, the way a plughole sucks in water. The eye had passed over the island that morning, and now they were in the thickest layer of insanely circling cloud mass – the part known as the eyewall. In total, the storm had as much energy in it as ten thousand nuclear warheads.
But it didn’t feel like some dumb explosion to Amazon and Frazer. It felt like a living thing. An evil living thing. An evil living thing that wanted to kill them. Its huge hands took hold of their tree and shook it like a vast, malevolent baby with a rattle. If they hadn’t been held tightly with their belts, the children would have been thrown out of the tree and hurled into the seething floodwaters.
Amazon looked over to Frazer, hoping to find some reassurance there. But Frazer did not look back at her. His eyes, circled black with exhaustion, wide with terror, were staring out at the lagoon. The shallow water was thrashing about, as if those same mighty hands were splashing and surging through it, but it was not the water that so terrified Frazer, but the very air itself. No, not simply the air, but the monstrous hybrid of water and air. For there, skimming across the waves, was a twister: a viciously spinning tornado.
It sucked up the water from the lagoon, along with anything else in its path. Amazon saw fish in there and, yes, even a shark. Not the monstrous tiger that had so nearly dined on her a mere couple of days ago, but still, to see a shark flying through the air like that gave an indication of the power of the thing. And now the tornado crashed into the pearl-diving platform and smashed it to fragments, pulling the wooden structure apart and hurling it back over its head as it raged past.
Lightning crackled in the storm, and Amazon almost laughed at the thought that she might end up getting fried to death amid all this water.
And water was everywhere now. It was already pawing its way up the trunk of the palm. It couldn’t reach all the way to the top where they were, could it? Surely Matahi wouldn’t have let them stay here if it wasn’t safe? But, of course, nowhere was safe, and Matahi was simply doing the best he could.
She looked over at the tree with Bluey and the Polynesians. Oti and Matahi had their arms round the Aussie. Oti saw her looking over and gave a brave thumbs-up sign. But then the wind rose again and beat the trees so viciously that Amazon had to close her eyes.
It was, perhaps, the fact that her eyes were closed that heightened her other senses, and allowed her to detect that something strange, something truly terrible, was happening to the tree that was keeping them alive.
At first she felt it as a tremor that passed through the heartwood and into her body. And then she thought that she heard a groan. The tree itself sounded … what was it …? Defeated. Yes, as if it knew that the battle it had fought was now lost.
Amazon opened her eyes and found herself staring right into Frazer’s face. He had shuffled towards her, and they were close enough now to hold hands. He took hers in his and squeezed.
He mouthed something. Amazon could not hear – she would not have heard if a gun had gone off a metre from her face. But she was sure that the word was ‘sorry’.
Yes, sorry. Frazer was sorry that he had led Amazon to this place, that he had put her in this danger, that he had been responsible for her …
Again a groan from the tree. It was bent over so far now that the children could have reached out and touched the water. Each time this had happened, the trunk had bounced back, and the rebounding had been the most dangerous part of it all, threatening to hurl them through the air like a medieval catapult hurling stones at a castle wall. But this time the tree did not spring back. The spirit of the tree was broken. It did not snap, but merely bent lower and lower, as if it were an ancient creature, stooping to drink from the water.
At precisely the same moment Amazon and Frazer realized the peril they were in. They were tied to a tree that was about to topple into the water. They would be tangled in its branches and drowned for sure. They both tore at the belts that held them. Frazer got free first and helped Amazon. At that moment the torrent carried a broken canoe towards them.
Frazer pointed and yelled, ‘Jump!’ There was no time to think. They both leapt into the water next to the little craft, and clung to its sides. Once their weight was lost, their palm-tree refuge did manage to pull away a little from the water, but it also seemed as though the water did not want to release it, for now a huge surge came, lifting up the canoe and twisting and pulling it out and away from the beach.
As soon as they were beyond the small shelter provided by the other trees, the children felt the full force of the typhoon. It was as if they had suddenly leapt on to a moving roller coaster. The little canoe was flung across the lagoon – although by now the lagoon was merely another small part of the raging ocean. Luckily, both Amazon and Frazer
managed to get in between the hull of the canoe and the outrigger. They jammed themselves against the spars and prayed: there was nothing else that they could do.
The storm surge carried them over the reef and out on to the open sea. Around them there was nothing that looked like waves: there were just huge walls of water, moving in to crush them. This was water as sheer mass; water as power; water as the stuff not of life, but of death.
But still the children clung to their fragile ark, and still the water and the wind bore them away from the island of Uva’avu.
Frazer had a pretty good idea of the local geography. In his mind’s eye he saw the Paumotu chain of islands stretching across the ocean. The Disappointment Isles – of which Uva’avu was one – were at the eastern edge of the chain. If they were blown further east, then there was no land for hundreds of miles, and even then each island was so remote that they would almost certainly miss it.
No, that way meant certain death: death from exposure or drowning, or thirst. Or shark …
But the other way – westward – there were countless small islands, many of them close enough to Uva’avu for him to have seen them dotting the horizon, and it would be more difficult to miss one than not. But which way had they been blown? It was impossible to say, and the sun, which would have told him, was lost behind clouds so thick that not even a sledgehammer could get through, and certainly not rays of light that had travelled ninety-three million miles from a star.
And then Frazer remembered that he was wearing his TRACKS watch, with its GPS and compass function. He hit the compass button and squinted at the screen. It was hard to read as the light refracted through the raindrops, and in any case the numbers and letters kept changing, spinning, blurring. He wasn’t sure if it was the little boat that was spinning or his eyes. He tried to point the watch in the direction the wind and swell were taking them. He wiped the spray from the screen, and his heart sank. ESE. East-south-east. That way there was nothing for thousands of miles, until the coast of Argentina. That way was death.
Shark Adventure Page 14