by Wilbur Smith
Contents
Title Page
Dear Reader
THE JACK COURTNEY ADVENTURES
Epigraph
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Epilogue
About Wilbur Smith
The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation
Copyright
Dear Reader,
What would you do if you were a long way from home, in a place that felt unfamiliar and dangerous?
Would you be able to trust your instincts and survive? Well, this is the position Jack finds himself in.
But Jack's not just trying to stay alive. He has a bigger mission to save not only himself, his friends and his parents but also the WORLD.
Our planet is already under threat, without more bad guys trying to destroy it. But it only takes one hero to make a difference.
So get ready for the most explosive adventure of your life …
Yours sincerely,
Wilbur Smith and Chris Wakling
THE JACK COURTNEY ADVENTURES
Cloudburst
Thunderbolt
Look out for more …
‘How far that little candle throws the beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.’
William Shakespeare
I dedicate this book to all my young readers whose hearts are in flame for the right to win.
Wilbur Smith
1.
I was asleep when the airliner hit turbulence. It must have dropped a hundred metres in half a second. The swooping up-rush launched my stomach into my chest and my head grazed the ceiling before my bum slammed back into the seat. I opened my eyes as an electronic warning bell started pinging above us. The ‘fasten seat belts’ light came on.
‘Bit late for that,’ I said to Amelia beside me.
‘I never unbuckle mine,’ she explained, showing me the snug clasp before returning to whatever she was doing on her phone. Reprogramming it, probably.
‘Of course you don’t,’ I said, just as the plane bounced hard again.
Mum craned round from the seat in front. ‘You OK, Jack? Amelia?’
‘Just fine … Why wouldn’t we be?’ we said over the top of one another.
The co-pilot’s voice oozed out of the speaker, full of reassurance: ‘Ladies and gentleman, we seem to have run into some unexpected weather. We’ll do our best to skirt it, but in the meantime, for your comfort and safety, we ask you to remain seated with your seat belt fastened.’
Beyond Amelia was the porthole window. I leaned across her to look out of it. The endless blue sky was dotted with occasional clouds, but it didn’t look particularly stormy. I could make out the lush green rainforest below us without difficulty.
‘Seems a nice day to me,’ I said.
‘The Democratic Republic of Congo has more thunderstorms per year on average than anywhere else on earth,’ Amelia replied.
‘Good to know. Still, not today, eh?’
As if to prove me wrong, at that moment the plane hit another airborne speed bump, hurling me sideways in my seat. I burst out laughing. Up until this point the trip from London to Kinshasa via Brussels had been long and boring. This was fun.
Mum, however, is a nervous passenger at the best of times. Through the seat gap ahead, I glimpsed her neck, rigid with fear. More loudly than she meant to, she said, ‘Will the plane cope, Nicholas?’ to Dad, who was in the seat next to hers.
‘Of course,’ he said, stroking her hand on the armrest.
Unfortunately Amelia heard what Mum said too. Amelia always means well, more or less, but has a knack of saying the wrong thing. Now she leaned forward and said, ‘Mrs Courtney, the wings on an Airbus A330 are tested to more than ***
5.2 metres of displacement. It would take an extraordinarily abrupt pressure differential to rip them off.’
Mum withdrew her hand from under Dad’s, her knuckles white.
‘Where do you get this stuff?’ I asked Amelia.
‘What stuff?’ she replied, genuinely confused.
Amelia’s mother met mine on the maternity ward fourteen years ago; we’ve known each other since we were babies. How her mind works, though, I’ll never understand. It’s not short of processing power, I admit, but she uses that power for the strangest things.
‘Amelia means we’re perfectly safe, Mum,’ I said, as another wedge of turbulence lifted me, grinning, from my seat. ‘The wind’s just giving us a helping hand. We’ll be in Kinshasa in no time.’
2.
I was wrong about that. The jagged air got worse. Someone a few rows back threw up (and I mean up) and somebody near the front lost it completely and began wailing. A few minutes later, although I still couldn’t see anything other than blue sky out of the window, the co-pilot’s super-calm voice informed us that the weather had closed in on Kinshasa. For safety’s sake, we were being diverted from N’Djili Airport to somewhere else beginning with R, or it might have been D. Either way, Amelia immediately informed us that it was five hundred kilometres away. This news turned Mum’s fear to frustration: she forgot her concern that our wings might fall off and set to worrying that we would miss the first of the meetings she’d scheduled in the lead-up to the environmental summit she and Dad had flown all this way to attend.
I tried to placate her: ‘It’s only a few hours’ drive, Mum.’
‘On a tarmac motorway, yes,’ Amelia pointed out. ‘But that distance can take days on dirt roads, particularly in the wet season, which it is now,’ she added helpfully.
Dad also tried to reassure Mum all would be well. We’d be there in time to make a proper impact on the big vote, he said, but his voice had the same tone he used when he told me boarding school would be a walk in the park, which it hasn’t been, and I could tell she didn’t believe him either.
This vote that Mum and Dad – Janine and Nicholas Courtney, joint founders of the Courtney Conservation Foundation, to give them the names by which they wield such influence among environmental campaigners – were hoping to help get passed, was the latest in a long line of interventions staged by the Foundation. Since they took early retirement from their finance jobs in the City, eco-activism through the Foundation has been their thing. It’s a pretty generous way to spend their time and money, I suppose, but if I’m honest, although I completely back the whole save-the-planet thing, I can’t get quite as excited about it as they do. Which was why Mum had insisted I come along on this trip. While they would be lobbying business leaders, government offi
cials and ministers in the capital, Kinshasa, Amelia and I were set to go on safari in one of the country’s national parks, to check out the natural wonders Mum and Dad were here to protect. Though she hadn’t spelled it out, I knew Mum was hoping that once I saw first-hand what was threatened, I’d be more keen to do my bit to help. And maybe I would. I was certainly up for seeing some gorillas. Either way, the gorillas’ habitat, and the big vote about whether to protect it or sell it off to mining companies, was the reason we were now coming in to land at the wrong airport somewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
For ages there’d been nothing but trees visible below the plane. As Amelia pointed out, I was looking at the second largest rainforest in the world, after the Amazon, in a country roughly the size of western Europe, slap bang in central Africa. I couldn’t help thinking that if the gorillas weren’t able to sort themselves out down there the Courtney Foundation would have its work cut out to help them, but I didn’t say that to Mum, obviously. I’m not a total idiot. Instead I listened as Amelia, who – true to form – had done her research, gave a mini lecture on the ‘endemic corruption’ the citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo have to put up with.
‘It’s rife,’ she said, ‘as in quite possibly the most corrupt country on earth. There’s more mineral wealth in the ground here than just about anywhere else, and yet the people are among the world’s poorest. Even those who do the digging for the gold, cobalt and tantalum – which is used in mobile phones – barely see any of what it’s worth. Foreign companies from China and the West bribe corrupt officials, buy up what’s dug out for a pittance, sell it overseas and pocket the profit. Unless the government steps up properly – which is what the vote your folks are here to influence is all about – the country will have lost ninety-five per cent of its rainforest within the next eight years. Add in the militia, who’ve turned much of the country into a war zone, and the deforestation for charcoal, and the threat to wildlife from poachers …’
She tailed off. Looking at the calm green landscape beneath us, it was hard to believe the scale of the issues. But Amelia doesn’t lie – it’s one of the things I like best about her – and Mum and Dad wouldn’t be focusing their efforts here if it wasn’t necessary.
The pilot hit the brakes hard when we did finally touch down. That was the scariest moment for me. As with any jump, landing is the hardest part. We juddered to a crawl at the end of the runway, the seat belt tight across my lap, and then doubled back to the little terminal.
Passport control was two guys. Ours was wearing a hat about four sizes too small for his head. When I made the mistake of nodding for Amelia to check him out she said aloud, ‘That’s for a child; it must be uncomfortable,’ and for an awful moment I thought the man had heard, since he gave us one of those very hard stares, and what Dad had told me about the country being sketchy – skirmishing militia, tourist kidnappings and an epidemic of street robberies – came to mind. Apparently Dad had arranged for us to be chaperoned on our safari by ex-military guides, to head off any threat. ‘We Courtneys will not be intimidated, but I’ve taken every precaution to make sure you kids are kept safe. We can’t be too careful here,’ he’d said.
3.
It soon turned out that Dad needed to take his own advice. We collected our luggage (from the squeakiest baggage-reclaim carousel ever) and stumbled onto the hot concrete apron beyond the airport building, where a colourfully dressed crowd seemed, from the sound of things, to want something quite badly. Money, of course, in exchange for taxi rides, hotel rooms, bananas, fake DVD box sets, and even, according to the little old lady wearing odd trainers, tins of glue. Fellow passengers from our diverted flight stood blinking in the harsh sunlight, trying to work out their next move. We fought our way through the throng to the kerb. The guy standing next to us looked as if he had brought everything he owned on the trip, including a set of golf clubs that toppled off his airport trolley when Amelia bumped into it. Clubs slid out, balls bounced away.
I helped her retrieve them while Dad, hands on his hips, legs apart, argued that we should check in to a hotel before deciding what to do. Mum wouldn’t hear of that though. ‘We have to charter a plane to get us to the capital right away,’ she said.
‘But the weather …’ Dad was drowned out by the harsh rattle of an approaching motorbike.
‘It will probably have cleared by the time we’re back there!’ Mum hollered over the noise. She’d changed her tune, fear of flying being no match for her commitment to getting on.
As I often do, I sensed something was wrong before it happened. The motorbike veered towards us. Neither of the guys on it were wearing helmets. I learned later that’s the norm in Africa, but in that moment I was surprised to see beaded sweat on the driver’s brow. His pillion passenger leaned out towards Dad as they got close. Dad goes to the gym three times a week and his reactions are still quick enough for him to beat me at ping-pong half the time, but he cottoned on to what was happening here as if underwater, and did nothing sensible to protect himself; he just stood there. The motorbike cut in and Dad staggered forward as the thief, having yanked his briefcase from his hand, shoved him to the ground.
The motorbike was ancient, its exhaust shot, its powers of speeding away pretty laughable. But it was able to pull beyond us before I could grab the briefcase back, and, as it flickered around the assembled crowd, I knew I couldn’t catch it up.
Other than meeting my friend Xander there’s not much my first year at boarding school has been good for, apart from learning how to play this game they call ‘roofs’. It’s banned and therefore popular, and involves throwing a tennis ball from the yard up onto the roof of our four-storey boarding house, the idea being that the next boy in line has to catch the ball when it comes down. That sounds simple, but the house is an ancient Victorian relic, and its roof is made up of all sorts of pitched hips, gables and buttresses. Throw the ball high and accurately enough and those weird slopes become a pinball machine, making it pretty hard to catch. Throw it even higher and you might break a slate, which is why the game is banned, and accounts for four of the six detentions I had in my first term.
As the motorbike wove its way through the crowd of bewildered passengers and clamorous hawkers, I realised I was still holding one of the golf balls I’d picked up from the spilled trolley. There was no way I could hit the bike, driver or passenger through the throng. But the road swept close to the side of the brick-built terminal building just beyond the crowd, and before I knew what I was doing I’d unleashed that golf ball with a year’s worth of tile-busting roofs practice straight at the wall. Golf balls bounce hard. The one I threw was still flying level when it hit the bricks. I got the angle right: no doubt it was a lucky shot – Amelia wasted no time telling me that afterwards – though it must be said that I have a good arm. Either way the golf ball struck the guy driving the bike in the face, hard enough to make him lose control. He swerved into the kerb and both men fell off. By the time I’d made it through the crowd the driver was back astride it, revving hard. His passenger had to run and jump to make it back onto the saddle.
He’d dropped the briefcase in the crash. I picked it up and returned it to Dad. Subsiding adrenaline left me shaky as I did this, but it wasn’t just the aftermath of having sprung into action that made me unable to meet Dad’s eye, having done something so obviously helpful. Weirdly, my achievement made looking straight at him even harder than usual. The awkwardness itself wasn’t new; I’d not been able to face Dad properly in a long while.
‘Thanks!’ he said. ‘My passport, laptop, all our money. How brilliant of you, Jack. What an amazing …’ He tailed off. Though I couldn’t lift my eyes to his, I felt his gaze upon me. He certainly sounded pleased, but what, when he saw me now, did he actually see?
4.
To guess at that, I have to go back four years, to when I was just ten, and Mark, my brother, was twelve and a half. Mark was good at everything: sport, maths, art, the electric guitar, coo
king pancakes, coding, walking on his hands, French, chess, pulling wheelies … the list goes on. But he was modest. When he did something well, the most he’d do was smile, run a hand through his shock of dark blond hair, give a little shrug. He wasn’t even competitive. As often as not, whatever it was we were doing, he’d let me win. I loved him for that, but couldn’t stand him for it at the same time.
We were walking home from school on a Friday afternoon. It was summer and we’d just had sports day. I still had sand in my socks from the long jump, which I’d won, for my year group at least. I’d also won the hundred metres. Mum and Mark both knew: they’d seen me triumph, but I still couldn’t resist mentioning it again as we passed the hardware shop. I was only ten, but even then I understood that telling them I’d won when they already knew was pathetic. Still, neither of them pointed that out. I could forgive Mum’s kindness, but Mark’s ‘That’s great’ just made me feel more ashamed. ‘Really great,’ he repeated.
‘I’ve got faster,’ I said. ‘Fastest in my year.’
He didn’t reply.