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

‘Without which …’ said Amelia.

Pete throttled back to idle and swung the boat round. He pulled a pair of binoculars from a compartment down by his knees, brought them up to his face and looked through them for a fair few seconds before muttering one word: ‘Odd.’

‘What’s odd?’ said Amelia.

Pete still had the binoculars pressed to his eyes. ‘That boat was in the vicinity when you were down below. During your last dive it went past at a distance, quite slowly. Seems it circled the island. Now it’s coming towards us, and it’s smoking, you’re right. But I can’t see flames.’

‘Do I have to repeat myself?’ Amelia asked. ‘There’s no smoke without –’

‘Yes, yes, I know but –’

‘It’s more bad than odd,’ I said. ‘We should get over there and help them.’

Pete had reached that conclusion too, it seemed, but reluctantly. He wasn’t rushing. Maybe because I wanted to claw something back having let myself down, I snapped, ‘Their boat’s on fire. We need to help them now.’

Pete eased the throttle forward. He’d put down the binoculars. I picked them up and looked through them. It was hard to keep the image steady, but despite our bouncing I could make out a cabin cruiser trailing a plume of smoke. And there, on the bow, was a figure. He was slight. A boy, in fact. A small black boy waving something above his head, a flag, or T-shirt perhaps; I couldn’t make it out.

Our boat glanced off a wave lip at that moment and I stopped looking through the binoculars.

‘There’s a kid on board,’ I shouted over the noise of the engines. In response they grew louder. We bore down on the stricken boat. Since it was still somehow motoring towards us as well, the distance between the two boats shrank very rapidly indeed. In no time at all Pete was slackening off and we were dropping low into the water and I could clearly see that the little boy was waving a dirty beach towel. His eyes were very wide, the whites visible all around his dark irises.

The towel wasn’t the only thing that was dirty, I noticed. The cabin cruiser’s hull was grey and patched, and one half of the split windscreen had been replaced with a bit of board. The man piloting the boat was half hidden by it. For a horrible moment it seemed the two boats – our sleek weapon of a dive launch, long and low in the water, and the smoking, battered cruiser bobbing above us – might actually run into one another, but with a deft flick of his wrist Pete jinked left at the last minute, so that we drifted very slowly alongside the cruiser.

‘Something’s not right about this,’ muttered Pete.

At precisely that moment, with the boats at a virtual standstill beside one another, two men leaped up above the cabin cruiser’s rail. Each had a machine gun. The sea around us exploded with foam as both men unleashed a stream of bullets into the depths.

10.

A switch flipped inside me, flooding every muscle with exactly what it needed to answer the question: fight or flight? But there was nowhere to run to and nobody close enough to punch. Why on earth hadn’t Pete hit the throttles? No idea. He’d put his hands above his head instead.

‘Go!’ I shouted, and lunged forward to get us out of there myself.

Before I made it to the controls the gunman nearest us let loose again, inches above Thunderbolt’s prow at first, but then he delivered a second microburst that actually hit us, ripping bits of fibreglass from the immaculate white hood.

In the quiet that followed this volley the man who fired it raised an arm, signalling for us to put ours up. He was still waving his semi-automatic haphazardly in our direction with his free hand.

‘Do as he says,’ hissed Pete.

My heart was jack-hammering in my chest. I lifted my hands. Xander and Amelia did the same. She looked ashen and he was panting with fear.

Smoke was still billowing from the rear of the battered cruiser, a black column rising above us. It didn’t seem to be hampering the captain though. We were drifting forward, but he had put the cruiser in reverse and was matching our speed, the prow nosing closer to ours as we went.

As soon as the gap between the two boats was jumpable the kid who’d been waving the towel leaped. He’d lost the rag now, and was instead holding the end of a length of rope. The boy was barefoot and wearing cut-off jeans. In no time at all he’d worked that rope through an eyelet on the prow and tied it off expertly.

The launch, lashed to us now, swung round to reveal its stern. A low, shelf-like platform stuck out of the back of the boat a couple of feet above the water line. In the middle of this shelf stood an oil drum, the source of the smoke, pouring upwards into the sky.

A third man, every fine muscle in his arms and chest seemingly visible beneath his smooth black skin, pushed the barrel off the shelf with a single kick. It flopped forward, spilling flame and tar into the turquoise sea.

That act, the casual selfishness of it, scared me even more than the crack of bullets splitting fibreglass. It made me think of Mum. Her selfless campaign to protect Zanzibar’s coral reef was so at odds with what this man had just done, I felt physically sick.

No doubt the fear coursing through me made the sensation worse. From where I was standing, I could see the barrel sink through the clear water beneath us, sludge unrolling from it as it went.

What had I done?

If I hadn’t insisted otherwise, we’d have stayed close to the main islands of the archipelago, rather than sailing all the way up here. If I hadn’t insisted otherwise, we’d have left more than an hour