I took my iPhone out of its waterproof casing, turned up the volume to full, hit the play button. Putting it back in its casing, I held it under the water.
‘Hi, it’s Saffrron. Hello, is anybody there? It’s Saffrron here. Hi, it’s Saffrron. Hello, is anybody there? It’s Saffrron here.’
A little white fin sliced through the water, making straight towards where I sat on the edge of the wharf.
A little white nose appeared at the wharf.
Putih was soon joined by other, bigger, dolphins. I put my hand in the water and Putih nuzzled her nose against it.
‘Over there!’ somebody shouted and I was caught in the beam of a powerful spotlight.
An alarm triggered.
All over Sealands lights were switching on.
Had Sealands been a shoot-on-sight sort of place, then I would have been one dead fifteen year old.
Even so, I was dazzled. I couldn’t move.
And I could hear people converging from all directions.
‘I’ve got him,’ somebody said, somebody who sounded a lot like Buzz the Security Guard.
Getting got by Buzz wasn’t an option.
I crammed in my mouthpiece and was just about to push off into the water when I got hit.
Buzz was a big unit, maybe even bigger than Tristan, and he hit me hard, driving me face-first into the wharf.
And then he basically sat on me.
‘I’ve got him,’ I could hear him yell triumphantly. ‘He’s all mine.’
There was no use mucking around with this: I had to get Buzz off me, and I had to get him off fast, before the others came. My hand reached for the knife on my leg.
My hand unstrapped the knife.
I went to stab him in the foot.
But then I changed my mind, turned the knife upside down, and brought the hilt down as hard as I could on the tip of his boot.
The effect was instantaneous: Buzz screamed, and his bulk was off me.
I rolled off the wharf and into the water, kicking hard with one and a half fins, going down.
Above me, spotlights criss-crossed the surface, but I was too deep now for them to reach me.
Keeping to the bottom, I headed seawards, avoiding the shark enclosure.
I checked the iPhone.
‘Hi, it’s Saffrron. Hello, is anybody there? It’s Saffrron here. Hi, it’s Saffrron. Hello, is anybody there? It’s Saffrron here.’
It was just as I’d planned, as I’d hoped – the dolphins were following me.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
When I reached the net, I took out the knife and started hacking.
It wasn’t easy going; the net was made from thick fibrous material.
Above me was the sound of outboard motors. I kept sawing away.
There was a boat above me, a light on me.
And then dark shapes dropping down – divers.
One final saw with the knife, and the square of net dropped down. I swam through the hole, legs trashing hard, worried that one of the divers were after me.
It was only when I’d go some distance between me and Sealands that I risked a glance behind.
No divers were following me. But the dolphins were.
I took out the iPhone, still in its pouch, and hit the off button.
Wild animals should not be kept in captivity, I thought as I watched the dolphin shapes disappear.
It’s not getting to Everest that kills people, it’s getting off. I’d sort of climbed Everest and now I had to find a way off.
The obvious thing to do was to go back the way I’d come, use the torch to follow the curve of the coast, and then on to the beach.
But surely after all that hullaballoo at Sealands, I reasoned they would have people on the beach waiting.
Surely.
New Zealand was not an option. Not without a passport. Not without spending money.
So really I only had one choice: to head the other way, to head north along the rocky headland. And then all the way around the other side. Even though it was pretty much all exposed cliff, there was a place where you could get up; I’d seen surfers use it in certain swells.
Yes, they might have people waiting there too. But I didn’t think so.
I adopted the same technique as I had on the way here: keeping to the bottom, using my depth gauge to make sure I didn’t get too deep, too far from the shore.
It was much harder going than before, though. I was getting tossed around a lot, and it was obvious that up above there was a lot going on.
I thought of sitting in that comfy chair in the nerd room, sipping a coffee, watching as Castor and Pollux did their thing. I so got E Lee Marx now.
Still, I made steady progress.
That is, until I ran out of air.
I sucked and nothing came. I sucked harder, but still nothing came.
So I checked the gauge. Empty, it said. Emptier then empty.
But it can’t be, I thought. A tank lasts at least forty minutes!
Under normal circumstances, a tank lasts forty minutes. Cedric the shark, caught under the cable: these weren’t exactly normal circumstances. Pan had had his revenge after all: he’d made me gobble up all my precious air.
I unclipped the tank, unclipped my weights, and I surfaced.
I knew it would be rough.
Rough as guts.
But this was rougher than guts.
But the swell did have distinct troughs and peaks that formed huge waves as they made for shore, huge waves that broke and smashed upon the craggy rocks.
I looked towards the shore; there were lights flashing everywhere on the beach. Going back would certainly mean a world of pain.
I had to keep pushing on, around the headland.
But what had been possible underwater just wasn’t possible on the surface. No matter how hard I swam, how hard I kicked, the swell just kept pushing me in one direction, kept pushing me towards the rocks. Really, I had only one option: arrest. And already my mind was busy manufacturing reasons why I was out swimming on such a night, in such weather, reasons that had nothing to do with Sealands or liberated dolphins.
As I did, I noticed something: the waves, as they smashed on the rocky headland, weren’t random, they followed a pattern. A lull, followed by two huge waves, and then an enormous wave, and then a smaller wave, and then a lull.
It was the enormous wave that interested me, because this wave surged beyond the craggy rocks and onto the smoother rocks beyond, and sometimes even reached the vegetation, the small gnarled trees that clung stubbornly to the slope.
If I managed to catch one of these, then …
But that was crazy – if I didn’t catch it I was mincemeat.
I looked behind, at the lights flashing on the beach. At, really, my only option. Arrest. World of pain.
A lull. Two huge waves. And then an enormous wave.
A smaller wave.
A lull.
I swam towards the rocks.
A swell passed beneath me, and I could feel its power, its suction grabbing my legs, shaking them in their joints. The wave broke on the headland, water foaming around the rocks.
I swam closer.
Another swell, but this one wanted me, grabbing me, dragging me with it. I swam against it, legs and arms thrashing. And finally it let go.
Two huge waves.
And now an enormous wave.
I could feel the extraordinary suction, the water drawing back. And then building up, and I thought: No, this is crazy, I can’t do this.
But it was too late. The wave had me, and the wave was taking me with it, and there was no getting off.
I set myself into bodysurfing position, like I’d done thousands of times before on the gentle breakers at Surfers. Body straight, head tucked in, arms straight ahead.
The wave had me, and the wave was taking me, lifting me high into the air as it crested, as plumes of water were whipped away by the wind. Ahead I could just make out the exposed rocks in t
he moonlight – craggy, jagged. If this wave dumped me on these, if I fell off the face, then I was gone.
The wave was breaking left to right, so I pulled in my left arm, thrust my right arm to the right. It worked; I moved across the face, staying in the wave’s muscle as it took me over the rocks.
Keep going, I urged it.
But the wave was losing shape; all around it was collapsing into a tumult of swirling white water.
Ahead I could see the knotty shapes of trees.
Just a bit more, I urged it.
I could almost reach out and grab a branch. And the wave disintegrated, then I was in air, and then I was underwater, bounced against one rock, and then another rock. My arms and legs felt like they were getting ripped out of their sockets.
And then I could feel it sucking back.
Gravity was taking over, ordering all that water back into the ocean where it belonged. I knew that if I let it do this, that if I let it drag me across the rocks, I would be peeled like a banana.
So the next time I was bounced against a rock, I grabbed at it with both hands.
Left hand – nothing. But the right hand found a knob of rock, a handhold.
Both feet were scrabbling now, but it was no good with fins. I kicked one fin off, then the other half-fin.
My left foot found a hole, and I jammed it in.
Right hand, left foot – it was the best I could do.
The water was streaming seaward, pushing against my body, trying to dislodge me. But I pushed into the rock, my face flattened across the rock, kissing the rock. And gradually the water’s force decreased. I lifted my head up.
Smooth rock ahead, glistening under the moonlight. And beyond that the trees.
Be careful now, I warned myself. Those rocks will be slippery.
I pushed myself up on hands and knees, and started crawling.
Behind me, there was a roar as another wave crashed onto the rocks.
The pattern: an enormous wave, then a smaller wave.
But I knew that didn’t mean anything, that patterns were made to be broken and this wave might be even bigger.
I waited for the wall of water to hit me, but it didn’t. I kept crawling, and then I was grabbing wet branches.
I dragged myself from one tree to another until the branches were no longer wet, and I knew I’d made it. I stopped, my legs straddling a tree trunk. And I had that same feeling I’d had when I’d escaped from the whirling props of the tanker during the second instalment.
After such a momentous experience I should be having feelings, emotions, that were equally as momentous. But I wasn’t. I felt extraordinarily calm, more calm than I could ever remember feeling before.
And not only that, there weren’t all these thoughts bouncing around in my head like there usually were.
It was as if the enormous wave had washed it clean.
So I just sat there, straddling the tree, feeling calm, my head clear. It seemed like hours, but it was probably only a few minutes. And then the weirdest thing happened. All the pieces of information that had been floating around in my head coalesced and became a whole, became a story.
Why hadn’t I seen this before? It was so obvious, so obvious.
Zoe and Otto had set me up!
Of course they had, I told myself as yet another wave crashed onto the rocks below me.
Their putting me through the gauntlet, to test if I had the ‘right stuff’ to join their search.
The ease with which I’d managed to escape from Camp Y.
Me ‘rescuing’ them from the Hispaniola.
They’d set it all up! Played me like a Casio keyboard, because they knew that I was connected to something more organised, more resourceful than Bones’s tinpot outfit.
How did I know this?
Easy. The first time I had suspicions that they, or Otto, were searching for Yamashita’s Gold was when the police arrived at the dive shop to investigate the disappearance of some dive gear; some dive gear that just happened to be extra large!
Yes, there were some holes in my theory – how did they know for certain I would come and rescue them from the Hispaniola? – but I knew it was right.
And I began to laugh, and as I did I realised I hadn’t laughed in a pretty long time. Not properly. Not like this. The laugh began deep in my guts, building momentum until it spilt out of my mouth.
Spasm after spasm of laughter.
Just when I thought it had subsided, it started up again.
Another wave, bigger than the others, crashed just below me, sending a cloud of spray into the air.
Enough! I told myself.
Time to get serious. Time to get out of here.
With all those trees, it was relatively easy to pull myself up the side of the slope.
And then I was on a level walking path, one of those National Parks ones with little signs everywhere.
It was time to lose the wetsuit, so I peeled it off and shoved it into a hollow log.
Barefoot, dressed only in boardies, I made my way along the path, following the signs that took me to Burleigh Heads.
One of the great things about living on the Gold Coast, where women go supermarket shopping in their bikinis, is that nobody takes any notice of a barefoot kid dressed only in boardies, even on such an inhospitable night.
Just as I walked onto the street, into a blaze of street lighting, I heard my phone beep.
I’d almost forgotten that it was still around my neck, ensconced in its waterproof pouch.
Like all phone addicts, I couldn’t ignore it. Quickly, I checked who it was from. Imogen! Our meeting!
I checked my watch.
The meeting I was supposed to have gone to an hour and a half ago.
I unzipped the pouch, took out the iPhone.
I was about to ring her – the apology was already working itself out in my head – when I hesitated. Better to check the message first.
i know my father is dead, it said.
No wonder she needed to talk to me! According to Imogen her father had always ‘disappeared’. Now he was ‘dead’?
My phone beeped again.
Another message from Imogen
I opened it.
YOUR FATHER KILLED HIM.
I had never been so utterly, terribly alone. Who could I talk to? My parents? Sure. I wasn’t even sure who they were any more. Who could I ask whether killing another human being is ever justified?
Read the chilling conclusion to the debt …
December 2013
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Yamashita's Gold Page 25