Thunderbolt by Wilbur Smith (reading strategies book .txt) 📕

I did that carefully, and I’d finished the refuelling without spilling a drop, and stowed the canisters carefully, and double-checked everything else was ready to go, by the time Amelia and Xander strolled up. They were laughing about something they’d seen en route, but I was obviously giving off the wrong vibe and they didn’t share the joke with me.

‘Finally,’ I said under my breath as they climbed aboard.

Pete exchanged a look with the others as if to say, ‘What’s got into him?’

Xander shrugged minutely in response.

To buoy up the mood, Pete explained the plan as we pootled out of the bay. He even went as far as to make it sound like he approved of where we were going now, but of course Amelia called him out with, ‘But yesterday you told us it was a sub-standard place to search, probability-of-success-wise.’

‘I’ve thought about it some more,’ he said and left it at that. We’d reached the edge of the go-slow zone, so he let Thunderbolt do the rest of the talking by opening up her outboards.

The prow lifted and the hull rose with it, pinning us back in our seats for a moment. Then we were flying, the engines a-roar, the great white speedboat slapping the tops of the waves. Wind tugged at my hair and made my eyes stream. I looked behind us at the sea unzipping itself in our boiling wake.

After a time, the noise and vibrations of the outboards and the rushing wind and the juddering of the waves through the hull had a numbing effect on me and I forgot why I was annoyed. Excitement at what we might turn up built in me, blotting out everything else.

To conserve fuel, we cruised the last twenty or so minutes at a slower and more restful pace. The island rose up to meet us. There wasn’t much of it. We puttered round to a beach, a little horseshoe of brilliant white, with arms extending into the sea as if in welcome.

Though the beach was deserted for now, Pete dropped anchor at a respectful distance. The sea was calm here and so blue it looked like somebody had photoshopped it. Behind the palm trees fronting the beach a slab-like grey building sat impassively. Slices of sunlight glanced off the waves and bounced back at us from the building’s tinted windows. Other than that, nothing seemed to be moving.

‘Somebody’s a James Bond fan,’ said Xander.

‘It’s completely out of keeping,’ I replied.

‘With what, exactly? It’s the only thing here,’ said Amelia.

‘Fair point, but still.’

‘Let’s get going then,’ I said, rolling up my wetsuit top, ramming my arms through the sleeves and reaching behind me for the zipper-string.

‘Aye aye, captain,’ said Xander, doing it up for me.

I could tell the others were as keen as me to make a start now, no doubt fuelled by thoughts of what we might find. A sense of urgency had set in. Amelia checked her oxygen, regulator, BCD and detector over with military precision, and Xander followed suit.

Within minutes we were underwater, three abreast, finning our way purposefully to the western tip of the horseshoe. Once there, we slowed right down. The drill was to sweep each new site methodically rather than crisscross all over the place like headless underwater chickens.

A cloud of tiny orange fish, sparks flung from an angle-grinder, shot past us as we started, and the familiar chirruping soundtrack of our detectors at work heightened the hope I felt in that moment. It was an addictive feeling, that sense of possibility, the outside chance we might turn up something big.

9.

As it turned out, we had a slow start, by which I mean we didn’t find anything all morning. For our first afternoon dive we worked the shallows and uncovered a Coke can. I didn’t want to settle for that, obviously, so pressured Pete to let us go down one last time and strayed deeper than I should have, dragging the others with me. More idiotically still, when they surfaced I stayed down for an extra few minutes, then came up too fast to make up for it, breaking about six basic diver’s rules. Pete was putting on his own kit to come down and look for me when I bobbed up next to the boat. Furious, he tore his mask off and threw it at me in the water.

‘Never. Dive. Alone!’ he shouted.

‘I lost track … I …’

Neither Xander nor Amelia would look at me; both knew I was lying.

‘And messing with the timings like that. It’s all calculated carefully, to avoid you getting ill. We’ve been through it. Decompression sickness is a serious thing.’

‘It was just a few minutes,’ I mumbled.

‘Doesn’t matter.’

‘It does, in fact,’ said Amelia. ‘The risk depends upon depth and time; it’s not an on-and-off thing.’

She was right, we all knew that, but Pete’s simple point – and the calculations he’d done – were designed to eliminate the risk, not just minimise it.

I’d been an idiot. That, combined with the general disappointment of the day, cast me into a truly black mood. There I was, with my two best friends, in paradise pretty much, with a haul of treasure back at the hotel already, and I’d somehow managed to make myself feel as grimly wrong as that streak of darkness on the blue horizon behind us.

Was I imagining it? No. There was a dot of a boat, with a wisp of smoke above it, in the distance to our stern. Amelia was inspecting her fingertips. Xander had his eyes shut, face turned to the lowering sun. And Pete was focused on one thing alone: getting us home.

‘Guys,’ I said through gritted teeth.

Xander turned to me.

‘Look.’

‘At what?’

‘Is that what I think it is?’

‘You’ll have to say what you think it is for us to judge that,’ said Amelia.

‘Fire,’ I said, loudly enough for Pete to hear.

He shot a look over his shoulder at me. ‘What’s that?’

‘He’s right,’