by Chris Ryan
'Here, Li. Sit here,' said Paulo, giving up his place in the shade for her.
'Thanks,' said Li gratefully, sitting down with a sigh and working the knots from her shoulders.
'You can have the first drink, Li,' said Alex, nodding to the dented lemonade can.
Li picked up the can and the others all turned to watch, suddenly aware of how thirsty they were. She tapped the top a few times to make the bubbles subside, then eased back the ring-pull until the seal cracked with a hiss. Once she was sure the drink was not going to foam out uncontrollably, Li pulled the ring all the way back.
'How much?' she asked, glancing at Alex. 'A couple of mouthfuls?'
Alex nodded. Li licked her lips as she watched a tiny fountain of bubbles fizz out of the top of the can, then she closed her eyes and took two deep swallows. She would never have believed that warm lemonade could taste so wonderful. Quickly, she handed the can on to Paulo before she was tempted to take more than her share. The can was passed from hand to hand as carefully as though it were a golden chalice. Amber was last. She drained the can then held it upside down over her open mouth, shaking out the last drops.
'That was nowhere near enough,' she announced, dropping the can in the bottom of the boat. 'We should crack another one.'
Alex shook his head as he picked up the empty can and stowed it away in the rucksack. 'We need to ration our drinking, until we're sure we can get more,' he said.
'OK,' sighed Amber. 'Food then, I need some food.'
'It's best not to,' said Alex. 'If you eat, then you have to digest the food – and that uses up more fluid.'
Amber scowled. 'I said, I need some food! C'mon! We can eat the fruit. There's plenty of fluid in fruit. And anyway, it won't last, all battered and bruised like that.'
Alex hesitated, looking around at the others. They were all gazing at him uncertainly and sending hungry glances at the food rucksack. Too late, he realized he should have explained all this earlier, instead of assuming they would all go along with a rationing system. Besides, Amber had a point about the bruised fruit. He felt his own stomach clench with hunger at the thought of biting into an apple.
Amber saw the indecision on his face and moved in for the kill. 'C'mon, Alex! Hand it over! We only made you captain, not the boss of, like, the whole world.'
'I'm not the boss—' began Alex.
'Well, then. Give.' Amber held out her hand, palm upwards, and waggled her fingers at him.
'– but I do know about survival situations,' continued Alex, ignoring the interruption. 'And my advice in this situation is that we don't eat and we ration water.'
Amber lunged for the rucksack and Alex shoved it further behind him. She glared at him furiously. 'OK. Great. You think you're such a Boy Scout? You think you know what you're doing? Did you ever even look at the nautical charts on the Phoenix? I don't think so.'
'What are you getting at, Amber?' asked Li.
'If he had looked at the charts, he would know we're in big trouble here.'
Alex yanked open the rucksack and pulled out the bag of fruit. 'You win,' he said tightly, dumping the bag at Amber's feet. 'Just shut up and eat, will you?'
'So,' said Amber, softly. 'You do know.'
'I said, shut up!' snapped Alex.
'Hang on a minute,' said Hex. 'We're not babies here. If there's bad news, we need to be told.'
Alex folded his arms and glared at Amber. She lifted her chin defiantly. 'I sail a lot. I'm a good navigator,' she said. 'Charts are my thing. I studied those charts on the Phoenix pretty closely and, well, the thing is, the further north we drift, the less likely we are to see a ship or a plane. We're drifting into a dead zone, see? No regular plane traffic, no shipping lanes, no trade routes. Nothing.'
'There are islands, though,' said Alex, looking around at the scared faces of the other three.
'All uninhabited,' retorted Amber.
'That's enough,' said Alex, watching Li's eyes grow big with fear, but Amber could not seem to stop.
'And in case you hadn't noticed,' she said, her voice high with barely controlled panic, 'the sun is getting lower in the sky. It'll be dark in another two hours. Even if we do come close to an island, the chances are we'll drift right by it without even realizing!'
'Well done, Amber,' sighed Alex. 'I'm sure everyone feels much happier for knowing all that.'
Amber did not bother to answer. Instead she reached forward and pulled a banana from the bag. Alex shook his head.
'Like I said,' insisted Amber, looking at her watch, 'I really need to eat now.'
Paulo watched hungrily as she peeled away the skin and took a bite of the sweet, white flesh of the banana. With a shame-faced look at Alex, he took a banana from the bag for himself and passed an apple to Li.
Any point in standing watch?' asked Hex, quietly, from the bows.
'Yes, there is!' snapped Alex. 'One little private plane, one yacht off the beaten track – that's all we need. We keep the watch going.'
They drifted on in virtual silence. The positive team spirit they had shared after defeating the shark was gone and Alex could not figure out how to bring it back. Nobody looked at anyone else. They each sat still and quiet, wrapped in their own thoughts and only moving to ease salt-stiffened clothes away from sore and sweaty skin. To start with, they all swapped seats every thirty minutes when the watch changed, so that everyone had some time sitting in the shade of the awning. After a while, as the sun dipped towards the sea and the air cooled, they stopped bothering.
Alex fell into a troubled doze and dreamed that he was in the water with the shark, watching its dead, black eye come closer and closer. Then something came up behind him and grabbed his shoulder. Instantly, Alex was awake and twisting to fight whatever had caught him.
'Sorry,' whispered Paulo from the bows. 'But there is something.' He took his hand from Alex's shoulder to point ahead of the boat. Alex stood up and searched the sea for the shark. 'Where? Where is it?' he demanded.
'No. Further away,' said Paulo, pointing to the northern horizon. 'I think I can see—'
'What?'
'Land,' said Paulo, simply.
SEVEN
They sat in the boat and gazed at the island ahead of them. It was typical of the smaller Indonesian islands they had already visited on the voyage. There was a volcanic peak rising steeply and narrowing to a blunted point at the top, giving the island a shape like a battered witch's hat against the reddening sky. Lush rainforest, fed by the monsoon rains of the area, darkened the lower slopes of the mountain. The forest spread downwards and outwards to form a wide green brim, fringed with mangrove swamps and lagoons. It was nothing like the gently sloping paradise of white sand and palm trees that most people imagine a tropical island to be, but at least it was land, and that was just what they needed right now.
'Active or extinct?' asked Hex, gazing at the flattened tip of the volcanic peak.
'Hard to tell from here,' said Li. 'But my guess is it's extinct, or at least dormant. I can't see any smoke or steam near the top and the sides are well covered with undergrowth – no fresh lava channels.'
'There are reefs,' said Paulo, briefly, noting the white frill of sea around the island. 'And that must be big surf if we can see it this far off. It will be difficult to land.'
'Slow down, cowboy,' muttered Amber, staring down at Alex's compass. 'Don't get ahead of yourself.' She paused, squinting up at the island again. 'Let's just see if we can reach it first. OK?'
They waited in silence while Amber frowned and muttered her way through her calculations, judging distances, speed of drift and the direction of the current.
'Hmmm,' she said, finally. 'There's good news and bad news. The good news is, as long as this current doesn't change direction, we should drift very close to the eastern tip of the island.'
Li let out a relieved breath. 'Just as well,' she said, sweeping an arm around the empty horizon. 'Because it's the only land in sight.'
'And the bad news?'
asked Hex.
'At the rate we're drifting, its going to take us half the night to get there,' said Amber flatly.
'But it will be dark soon,' breathed Li, pointing towards where the sun was beginning to sink below the horizon.
'We'd better get going, then,' said Alex, scrambling to his feet. 'There's a lot to do before then.'
The island sighting had given them a common aim and they started working as a team again. Amber took over the Watch Duty without complaint, while Li and Hex tied down or stowed away anything that could be lost overboard. Paulo and Alex were in the stern, working as fast as they could in the fading light. They were using a length of rope and the single oar to rig up a sculling mechanism which would power and steer the boat when they reached the island. After a few failed attempts, Paulo came up with a type of flexible, criss-cross lashing which held the oar firmly in place against the stern but allowed him to push the paddle from side to side through the water. He experimented with different paddling strokes and soon worked out the best way to propel the boat forward and even to make it turn from side to side. His teeth gleamed in the growing gloom as he smiled and gave Alex a shadowy thumbs-up.
'Good,' said Alex. 'Well done, Paulo. Now come and sit down. We've done all we can.'
A few minutes later, it was totally dark. For the next two hours all they could do was to drift along through velvety blackness, listening to the sea slapping against the bows of the boat. Every now and then, Amber took out the button compass and checked their direction by the glow of the beta-light crystal. As far as she could tell, they were still drifting north, but the island was a small dot in a very big sea. There was no way to be sure whether the current was still taking them towards the island or gradually edging them away from it. Finally, the moon rose and gave them enough light to see the silhouette of the island, much closer now and still directly ahead of them.
'Right on target,' said Hex and they all breathed a sigh of relief.
Soon they could smell the island on the breeze. It was a rich, cloying scent, a mixture of rotting vegetation, swamp water and fresh, green leaves. Alex breathed in and was reminded of the smell of the compost heap on his grandfather's allotment after rain. The island loomed larger on their left-hand side as they drifted closer and closer, until it was too big for them to take it all in with one look. The boat inched towards the eastern tip of the island, dwarfed by the volcanic slopes which towered over them.
They began to hear the booming crash of waves hitting the reef up ahead and the sea around the boat was becoming choppier as the deep ocean swells suddenly came up against a steeply rising sea bed.
Paulo looked over at Alex and the whites of his eyes shone in the moonlight.
'Now?' he asked. Alex nodded. Paulo moved over to the stern and took a firm grip on the sculling-oar.
'In a minute, Paulo's going to try to steer us in over the reef,' said Alex to the others. 'It's going to get pretty rough, so we need to hunker down low in the boat and hang onto the safety line I rigged up earlier. Even better, anchor it around your waist or your arm if you can.'
'Couldn't we try to find a beach without a reef in front of it?' asked Li, sending a nervous sideways glance at the pounding surf.
Alex shook his head. 'It's too risky. We don't know how well we can handle the boat with only one oar. If we tried to get round the eastern tip of the island, the current might be too strong for us. We might get carried away from the island.'
The four of them got down into the bottom of the boat and each grabbed their own section of the safety line. Paulo began moving the oar back and forth with a smooth, powerful rhythm which made the muscles in his arms stand out in the moonlight. The boat turned sluggishly and started heading slowly towards the reef.
'One more thing,' shouted Alex, over the growing roar of the surf. 'If the boat doesn't make it over the reef, try to use a breaker to body-surf into the lagoon. Don't wait for anyone else. Don't try to turn back. If you get caught on the reef, it'll cut you to ribbons. Just get clear of it as fast as you can.'
The boat began to pitch and roll as the peaks and troughs of the ocean swells became sharper and deeper. They braced their feet against the hull and tightened their grip on the rope. In the stern, Paulo hung onto the oar, sometimes sculling it back and forth, sometimes letting the sea do the work. All the while he was watching the surf ahead and then turning to look at the moonlit swells behind him, trying to judge which one might carry the boat safely over the reef and into the lagoon.
At last, Paulo looked behind him one more time, then began sculling furiously. The boat caught the growing breaker just at the right moment. The bows tilted upwards as it rode the sloping crest of the wave, climbing higher and higher. Seawater poured in on them and the roar of the surf grew deafening.
The breaker, with the boat caught up in it, reached its peak and began to curl over. With a sickening, roller-coaster lurch, the boat turned its nose down-wards and fell with the breaking wave.
Paulo abandoned the oar and crashed down into the bottom of the boat beside Hex, frantically grabbing for a handful of the safety line. The breaker smashed the boat down into the surf and they were lifted helplessly into the air, then flung back down onto the floor of the boat with an impact that knocked all the breath out of their lungs. Before they had the chance to take another breath, they were swamped by the foaming, churning water. Then they were out in the air again, as the bows of the little boat miraculously rose out of the surf.
Alex choked the seawater out of his throat and took a painful breath as the boat lurched forward. He had been totally unprepared for the power of the breaker but, unbelievably, it seemed that the boat was going to clear the reef. Then his hope turned to horror as the boat slowed, stopped and began to slide back towards the reef, caught up in the pull of the retreating breaker.
'Hang on!' he yelled.
The boat hit hard. It juddered backwards across the reef with a splintering scraping noise. A jagged spur of coral punched through the bottom of the boat, missing Li's thigh by a few centimetres. The boat came to a sudden halt and, for a few seconds, it see-sawed back and forth, impaled on the reef with the surf crashing down on top of it. Then, with a crack like a rifle shot, the spine of the boat broke in two and the last thing Alex remembered was being thrown into the tumbling, roaring water.
EIGHT
'There's always a fuse,' croaked Alex, waving his arms weakly as he tried to swim back up to the surface. 'Don't light the fuse . . .'
Someone took hold of his hands and gently lowered them to his chest. Someone else leaned in so close to his head that he could feel warm breath tickling his ear.
'It's all right,' whispered the voice. 'You're on the island. We all are.'
'Li. . . ?' Alex opened his eyes and bright daylight burned into his retinas, sending drum-beats of pain through his head. He groaned, squeezed his eyes into slits and peered up at the four grinning faces above him.
'Good to have you back,' said Li.
'Are you OK?' asked Paulo. Alex made the mistake of nodding and the drum-beats in his head exploded into dizzying pain. He turned on his side and vomited up seawater.
'Eeeuuwww!' shrieked Amber, taking a step back. 'Gross!'
Alex had to agree with her. He had never felt so gross. Every inch of his body felt battered and bruised, but the back of his head and his left wrist hurt most of all. He lifted his arm up to his face and squinted at his wrist, trying to work out why it hurt so much. His first impression was that he was wearing some sort of tight, red bracelet, then he realized that the bracelet was a strip of raw flesh.
'What. . . ?' he croaked, holding up his arm.
'What happened?' guessed Paulo. Alex nodded again and immediately wished he hadn't.
'It is a bad rope burn,' explained Paulo. 'But it probably saved your life. We think part of the boat must have hit you on the head and made you – what is the word – not awake, yes?'
'Yes,' agreed Alex, remembering the stunning blow to
the back of his head as he struggled to swim ashore.
'You would have drowned, I think,' continued Paulo. 'Except your wrist got caught in the safety line, which was still tied to the broken boat. So you were washed ashore. We found you—'
'And I gave you CPR!' announced Amber, proudly. 'You know, the kiss of life and all that stuff? See, I know how to do that, because of the sailing—'
'Shut up, Amber,' said Hex.
'But I saved his life—'
'Then I guess that makes you even, doesn't it?' said Li.
Alex felt much better now that he was rid of a stomach full of seawater. His head was clearing and the thudding pain was subsiding. With the help of Paulo and Hex, he sat up and took his first look around. They were at the top of the beach leading from the lagoon to the rainforest. All around them, above the high-tide line, were strewn bits of wreckage from the boat. He tried to see whether there was anything useful amongst the wreckage, but Paulo moved in front of him and held up three fingers.
'How many?' he demanded.
'Twenty-three,' said Alex with a deadpan expression.
Paulo grinned but persisted with his questioning. 'What is your name?' he asked.
'Barbara,' replied Alex, still playing it straight.
Paulo laughed out loud. 'OK, joker. No concussion. Your skull must be made of steel.'
Alex put his fingers to the back of his head and gently explored. He could feel a crusted-over gash about two inches long. The flesh surrounding the wound was swollen and bruised, but the damage was less than he was expecting to find.
'I'll live,' he said with a relieved grin. His eyes sharpened and he scanned the others, looking for signs of injury. Like him, they were liberally covered with scrapes and bruises, but that seemed to be all. 'Look's like we'll all live,' he concluded.
'That's the second time you've promised me that,' drawled Hex. He was trying to appear casual, but kept sending wary glances into the jungle at the top of the beach. 'Do you always keep your word, Alex?'
'Always,' said Alex, firmly. 'We're going to be fine. My dad's been in rainforest like this before. He taught me all about it. It's not too hard to survive if you know what you're doing.'