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

‘Ah,’ said the boy. ‘I’m from Somalia. We all are.’

Under her breath Amelia said, ‘Great, pirates from Somalia. Just great.’

To head off the potential insult of Amelia’s sarcasm Xander said, ‘This is Amelia, and that’s Jack.’

‘Xander, Amelia and Jack,’ the boy said. ‘I’m still Mo.’

‘Yes, obviously,’ said Amelia under her breath.

The boy, Mo, had sharp ears. He not only repeated what Amelia had said, but did so in her London accent. ‘Yes, obviously.’ Speaking like that made me realise that his own accent was a bit American. Nothing was adding up.

Barrel-man, cottoning on to the noise of this conversation if not its meaning, turned to tell Mo something that was at once unintelligible to me and yet obvious, along the lines of ‘Shut up!’

I was watching Pete out of the corner of my eye. The sweat was pouring off him now. His hands, which he’d been holding high, had inched down to his chest. He kept looking from the deck of the cruiser to Barrel-man and back again.

One of the gunmen was speaking over his shoulder to the wheelhouse. Pete’s right hand dropped lower still. Was he about to do something? Mo must also have been watching the divemaster, thinking what I was, because he said, ‘I’d tell your boss to be sensible if I was you. He may be a good swimmer, but he won’t get far with a bullet in his head.’

Barrel-man took two quick steps towards Mo, yelling whatever ‘shut up’ was again as he went, and slapped him across the face. That slap would have knocked me off the gunwale, but Mo somehow took it. He swayed there before Barrel-man, staring at the deck.

With the pirate’s back turned, Pete lunged after him. He caught a shoulder with one hand and locked his other forearm across Barrel-man’s neck, spun, and held him as a human shield.

The ex-soldier was much the bigger of the two men, his sunburnt shoulder twice the size of the pirate’s, but amazingly Barrel-man, all sinew and muscle, wriggled out of Pete’s neck lock with apparent ease.

As well as being stronger, he was nimbler. Before either of the gunmen on the boat had bothered to train their weapons on the pair, Barrel-man, having slipped Pete’s grip, had somehow grabbed him by the throat and marched him to the side of the boat. He had Pete unbalanced there. The dive master was on one leg, his hip against the fibreglass.

I was too slow. By the time I realised what was happening – that Barrel-man was actually pushing Pete overboard – I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Pete slip-fell into the water with the same harmless splash we all did at the start of a dive. And immediately the speedboat, tugged gently by the cruiser, swung away from him, opening up a few feet of water, ten, fifteen, twenty. Though Pete kicked after us, he couldn’t close the gap.

Amelia was shouting at Mo, something about throwing out a rope. Perhaps Mo knew better than to respond. I couldn’t stop myself though. There was no rope within easy reach but I knew about the life jackets stowed beneath the bench seat the three of us were sitting on, and before anyone could object I flung one out over the stern. Pete, still making after us, gathered it in.

The man in the wheelhouse had come out next to the gunmen again, and as before he seemed to be angry, this time at the guy who’d raised his rifle to his shoulder and was pointing it at Pete. It was obvious that the gunman wanted to pull the trigger. I couldn’t tell if the captain was urging him to get it over with or to lower his gun.

‘Mo, please,’ I begged. ‘Tell them not to do it. Let us throw out a rope and pull Pete in.’

Mo looked the other way. It was as if he could no longer understand me. For an awful moment I thought: he knows what’s coming next.

12.

The gunman on the cruiser, assault rifle pulled into his shoulder, cheek pressed tight to the stock, had one eye shut and the other unblinkingly open, staring straight over the sight at Pete in the water. He definitely wanted to pull the trigger.

Barrel-man wanted the same thing: he was shouting from the speedboat to do it. But the captain from the wheelhouse, the older guy who’d been piloting the cruiser, had one hand raised steadily aloft now. Was he about to give the order? Mercifully, no: he was holding the man back, his raised hand a stop sign, saying, don’t waste bullets.

All the while the boats were drifting further away from Pete. He’d got his right arm through the life jacket. As I watched, he worked his left hand through the other loop and, kicking onto his back, fastened the vest across his chest.

He was no longer trying to reach us. We were already more than the length of a swimming pool away from him. The red of the jacket merged into the darker red of Pete’s face as we moved still further away.

Barrel-man, angry at having been rushed by Pete, seemed to want more in the way of revenge. He stalked over to me. I braced myself. But he didn’t hit me as he had hit the boy, Mo. Instead he dropped to his haunches, yanked a handful of life jackets from the compartment under the bench seat and threw them at us. He shouted at us then but of course I couldn’t understand him.

‘Mo?’ said Xander.

‘He says to put them on,’ Mo, still on the gunwale, said, adding, ‘but I wouldn’t if I were you.’

Barrel-man shouted at us again, homing in on me. The whites of his eyes had a yellowish tinge and the anger pulsed from him. He picked up one of the life jackets and swung it at my face. I ducked and raised an arm to protect myself and somehow