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

one of Pete’s empty fuel canisters. With weary deliberation he picked the can up, looked over his shoulder at Barrel-man, who was still asleep in his chair, and plonked the thing down again loudly. Then he screwed the cap tight, or pretended to at least.

I was about to protest when he repeated the operation. Barrel-man hadn’t woken at the first ‘plonk’, but he did now. Far from trying to cover anything up, Mo made it perfectly obvious that he’d just filled up the tank, securing the fuel cap and tightening the lid of the canister and returning it to where I’d stored it – along with the other one, both of them completely empty – in the forward compartment.

Barrel-man looked on idly, one hand under his T-shirt, scratching his washboard stomach. Bored and bleary, the pirate watched Mo stow the canister without comment, then hawked up a lump of phlegm and spat it overboard.

‘What the hell were you doing?’ I muttered when he came back to the boat’s stern.

‘I’d have thought that was obvious.’

It wasn’t, not to me, and I didn’t like that one bit.

Mo smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s all part of the plan.’

‘What plan?’

‘Your plan!’ he said, a you-really-don’t-get-it? glint in his eye.

We were still tethered to the battered cruiser, which tugged us along gently. The water was silver this morning. We were headed north again. I tried to work out how far we would have travelled overnight. Twelve hours at what, eight or so miles an hour? About a hundred miles, give or take. Not knowing where we’d turned around meant I couldn’t accurately predict how far up the coast we’d come. It was tempting to ask Mo if he knew, but I didn’t. I was still trying to figure out what his messing about with the fuel canisters could have contributed to my sabotaging the dive boat.

I soon found out. Before the sun had risen high enough to turn the sea its rightful blue the cruiser slackened its pace ahead of us, the captain expertly bringing us alongside.

The pirates conferred. Their conversation sounded urgent. It turned out – Mo told me later – that Flip-flops had intercepted another radio message, this one from a nearby catamaran with a sick crew member. The captain thought there could be tasty pickings aboard. He wanted Barrel-man to give chase, and, with Flip-flops and his gun aboard, ordered us to get going.

Mo immediately untied the rope tethering us to the cruiser and Barrel-man hit the ignition. The outboards roared to life. I was surprised for a nanosecond, then realised that there would of course have been clean fuel in the pipe connecting them to the fuel tank.

Once they’d sucked in a shot of my gas-and-seawater cocktail the engines started coughing hard enough to make the fibreglass hull shiver. That shivering quickly became the death rattle of a soon-to-be corpse, before both engines cut out completely.

The boat hadn’t made it more than a couple of hundred yards. The captain in his cruiser quickly caught up with us again. It turned out that the wounded Bear was the team’s best mechanic. He was hampered by the sling supporting his injured arm, but soon worked out what was wrong, and within minutes he and Barrel-man were examining the canister Mo had – apparently openly – tipped into the boat’s fuel tank.

Interrogating the boy, Barrel-man’s voice had a menacing edge to it. Mo, palms up, was the picture of innocence. ‘I was just trying to be helpful!’ his pleading eyes said. He sniffed at the empty fuel can himself and spoke insistently. I could tell he was pointing out that the canister smelled strongly of petrol. And it did. There was probably still a dribble of the stuff in the bottom.

Barrel-man couldn’t dispute the smell, but that didn’t mean much: something must have been wrong with whatever Mo had added to the fuel tank. He looked angry enough to toss Mo overboard. But the Bear, more perplexed than cross, was perhaps secretly pleased to have to cut the trip short. From the sweat on his brow and the way he was gritting his teeth I could tell his arm was hurting more than his tough-guy status would let him admit.

He said something to Mo that made the boy scuttle off to re-tether us to the cruiser, and gave Barrel-man an it-can-be-fixed-but-not-here shrug.

If it was a mistake to smile in that moment, the bigger one was to let Barrel-man see. He’s the sort of person whose anger doesn’t fade. He needs to let it out.

I don’t think he thought I was responsible for the fuel contamination. As far as he was concerned, Mo had been the one to add spoiled fuel to the mix, not me.

But he didn’t like the look of me in that moment, and he didn’t give me the chance to wipe the grin off my face myself. He did it for me himself. He closed the gap between us in two quick steps and hit me across the cheek and temple with a lightning-quick open palm.

It was as if a firework had gone off right next to my ear. I reeled sideways, my head ringing. He was jabbering at me furiously. I couldn’t have made sense of English in that moment, much less Somali. The ringing in my ears was jet-engine loud. I thought he’d burst my eardrum.

I kept a malevolent eye on the pirate all morning, thinking it had been worth it. The bastard could slap me all he liked: it wouldn’t bring the outboards back to life.

24.

A slice of coastline came into view while we were eating our lunch, which today was a single hardboiled egg. The yolk of mine was edged the exact same pale grey colour as the distant sliver of whichever country it was – Kenya or Somalia, I presumed – seen through the haze.

We made for the land mass obliquely as the afternoon wore on. Its contours darkened. By about four