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

The weather went bad quickly. Stiff wind soon built to a proper gale which knocked whitecaps off the waves, whipping up spray which combined with the spume gouged by the plunging bow to fill the rushing air. We were wet through before the rain began.

Xander fought the seasickness, but couldn’t beat it, and eventually had to drag himself up in the stern so that he could be violently sick over the transom between the big outboards. I felt for him. So did Mo. He cut the tape binding Xander’s ankles so he could at least brace himself against the bucking of the boat.

With Xander throwing up over the stern, Amelia tapped Mo on the shoulder and said, ‘Cinnarizine, cyclizine, promethazine, are all types of …’

‘Antihistamine.’

‘Used to counter?’

‘Motion sickness, among other things.’

‘If you pass me my dry-bag, I’ve got a packet I can open for Xander.’

‘You brought them, but you’re not sick yourself.’

‘Better safe than sorry.’

At Amelia’s direction, Mo retrieved her bag from the bulkhead. She spent long enough rooting around in it to make me think she was up to something, but in fact she did have some pills buried among her stuff, and she did give Xander a couple. He washed them down with water, but frankly they didn’t stay on board long: he was in a right state.

Before the storm proper hit us the captain appeared at the rail again and gave the order to transfer us to the bigger vessel. Only Barrel-man, still lounging in Pete’s chair and looking about as bothered by the weather as a rock might, was to remain behind.

One by one Mo freed us of our bindings and led us forward, up onto the prow, to make the jump across to the platform off the cruiser’s stern. I went last. Although the tape around my ankles hadn’t bothered me too badly, now that it was undone my legs were weirdly stiff. I felt unsteady on my feet, and it wasn’t just the fault of the waves.

The others were suffering too. I’d seen Mo take an incapacitated Xander by the hand and tell him when to jump, and I’d also seen Amelia lose her footing climbing up onto the prow. She had to clutch the boy for support. I was damn well going to make the trip without help. But though I have a pretty good sense of balance, it’s one thing to sit in a bucking boat, another to stand up, and harder still to walk when your legs have gone to sleep.

Mo, who hadn’t spent an age tied up, and who apparently lived on a boat anyway, understandably made the whole thing look like nothing at all. But although I did my best to concentrate and ignore the numbness of dead-wood calves, I mistimed my jump, leaping as the prow rose and the platform dropped away. This turned what would have been a three-foot drop into a ten-foot one. I landed with an awful thump and crumpled to my knees.

Mo caught me round the shoulders and asked, ‘You’re OK, you’re not hurt?’

‘I’m fine,’ I growled, standing up.

‘Good, come then,’ he said, and having slackened off the tow line to put a good thirty metres between us and the dive boat, he ushered me up the rusty ladder, across the cruiser’s rear deck, and into the cabin itself.

From the speedboat I’d not worked out the size of this enclosed space. It dropped away from the captain’s seat in the wheelhouse – he barely looked at me as I passed by – down a set of steep stairs, and opened up into a cramped room lined with benches bolted to the floor, between which stood a table, similarly secured.

Visible beyond this room was a further, hutch-like space extending into the prow of the boat. I made out a figure – one of the two gunmen I’d seen yesterday, presumably – lying on some sort of cot. His outstretched foot was stuck in a flip-flop that seemed to have been made from an offcut of old tyre.

The last member of the five-man pirate crew – or, more properly, four men and a boy – was up on the jump seat in the wheelhouse next to the captain, looking down at us through the open cabin door, cradling a gun in his lap like a little dog.

Presumably they shifted us into this enclosed cabin to shelter us from the worst of the weather, but to be honest I’d have preferred to stay on Pete’s boat. This one stank of rotten fish drenched in cat pee and cloaked in diesel fumes. Never mind the rolling of the boat, the smell was enough to make me want to throw up.

Poor Xander had nothing much left to get rid of, but immediately looked like he was going to be sick again, so Mo pulled open a cupboard door to reveal a tiny toilet cubicle. There was barely space in there for Xander to lean over, but that’s what he did, retching into the bowl while the cupboard door swung open and shut, hiding and revealing him, until he managed to grab the inner handle and hold it shut.

It hit me again then: we should have been eating fruit salad and waffles in beautiful Ras Nungwi, safe from the storm, getting ready to return to England, but instead we were stuck here being thrown around by the waves in this stinking pirate boat, heading god-knew-where, hungry and wet, one of us sick, at the mercy of armed maniacs, our only hope this strange Mo kid. Pete was lost at sea. Mum would be beside herself. And it was all my fault. I wanted to punch something out of frustration.

‘Do you think this boat is safer than Pete’s then?’ Amelia asked. She was trying to sound conversational but for her to have asked me, no expert in boats, such a non-scientific question, I knew she had to be out of her mind with worry.

My