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

‘Sand tiger shark,’ Amelia said by way of explanation.

The words ‘tiger’ and ‘shark’ more than outweighed plain old ‘sand’ for me. I told Amelia so.

‘They’re no relation to actual tiger sharks. I wouldn’t have told one of them where to go. Sand tigers are harmless. Unless you’re a very small fish, or something already dead.’

‘How could you be sure?’ Xander asked. He knows Amelia pretty well, but not as well as I do. Challenging her knowledge rarely turns out well.

She narrowed her eyes and said, ‘Well, a sand tiger is brown on top and yellowy-grey underneath, which I imagine you spotted. It also has a flattened, conical snout and its mouth extends back beyond its eyes, which are small. The big teeth you saw are smooth, not serrated. You’d have to have been a bit braver to notice that, and swum as close to it as I got. Those teeth are for hooking up smaller fish rather than ripping out lumps of whale. But it wouldn’t have been hunting, not now. They’re nocturnal feeders.’

‘You were confident enough about all that to risk annoying it?’ Xander muttered.

‘Er, yes.’

I tried not to smile.

‘Look, it was obviously discombobulating you. I just wanted to –’

‘She means it was freaking me out,’ I explained to Xander.

The noise of the approaching boat rose over our conversation. It’s pretty loud. Pete Saunders, the guy Mum hired to help us out with our underwater treasure hunt, is rightly proud of it. Pete’s an ex squaddie – British army – turned dive instructor and he bought the boat new after selling up at home and moving here, to Zanzibar. It’s worth ten times the shack he rents. I know because he told me so. The boat, called Thunderbolt, is Pete’s thing. He has a shaven head and wears huge wraparound sunglasses day and night, and looks a bit like a boiled egg felt-tipped with a superhero mask as a result. He takes his job – getting his clients to dive sites, helping with the equipment, and generally keeping us safe – dead seriously.

‘You’re up nine minutes early. Everything all right?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

I could see the thought going through Amelia’s head: everything hadn’t been all right, because we – or I – had been spooked by a shark, but now we’d surfaced without incident, so nothing bad had happened, so I was technically correct. She kept her mouth shut, and because of that I had to come clean.

‘Truth is, we met a pretty big shark down there. It rattled me. But Amelia shooed it away.’

‘Basking shark?’ Pete asked her.

‘Sand tiger,’ she explained.

Helping me out of my buoyancy vest, Pete patted me on the shoulder. ‘I’m not surprised it shook you up. They look the real deal. But sharks – any of them – very rarely attack. It’s the stingrays you want to keep onside. They’re more dangerous.’

Xander looked sceptical.

‘It’s true,’ said Pete. ‘But even then, the chances of an unprovoked attack are infinitesimal. Anyway, how’d you get on before the interruption?’

I explained our slim pickings.

‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘There’s always this afternoon. I’ve got a good feeling about it.’

‘A good feeling?’ said Amelia. ‘Based on what, exactly?’

I was busy stowing our used tanks, Velcro-strapping them into the rack in the hold. Over my shoulder I said, ‘Don’t worry, Pete – no need to answer that.’

‘I wasn’t about to.’ He’d only known Amelia a couple of days but had already got the measure of her unique brand of literal genius.

‘I can’t make you,’ said Amelia, her voice deadpan.

Pete’s sunglasses glinted darkly against the ocean glare as he busied himself wiping down the boat’s controls. Once he’d done that he said, ‘Lunch then. Your mum’s waiting for us back at base.’

‘Good, I’m hungry,’ I said.

Pete nudged the throttles forward gently and Thunderbolt’s twin Yamaha outboards bit the turquoise water. The back of the boat dipped as the prow rose. Where there had been turquoise stillness all around us, brilliant white-water now boiled in our wake.

I knew – because Pete had proudly told me before I’d been in the boat ten minutes – that each of those outboards was capable of producing 350 horsepower. Between them they could propel us upwards of seventy miles an hour. But Pete was restrained today, barely pushing above idle as we cruised back up the coast towards Ras Nungwi and the swanky resort Mum had decided to treat us to.

I stood beside him at the wheel, one hand gripping the central console. ‘Very tranquil,’ I said, and sensing he’d need little encouragement, added, ‘but don’t be shy of letting rip.’

That was a mistake.

Not because Pete wasn’t up for it, but because of what happened when he grinned and unleashed a bit of power. As the boat surged across the water its hull, beyond the plane, hit a rhythm, and slapped one-two-three shallow wave-tops reasonably hard. Nothing unusual in that. Except, with the fourth bounce, one of the metal tanks I’d supposedly stowed came loose and bounced clean across the boat’s fibreglass deck.

I hadn’t tightened the Velcro strapping properly. As bad luck would have it, the base of the heavy canister hit a cleat, hard, snapping it from the gunwale, and leaving a split in the boat’s pristine whiteness. I’d heard the thump of the tank hitting the hull above the noise of the engine and wave-slap. So had Pete. Instantly he cut the throttle and, as the speedboat slewed to a standstill, we both turned around to see the offending oxygen tank rolling about in the bilge.

‘That looks expensive,’ said Amelia. ‘Also annoying.’

You’d think I might have resented her for saying that, but damaging Pete’s pride and joy had made me feel so immediately sick that the realisation I could pay to have it mended was actually a huge relief.

‘I’m so sorry. Completely my fault. I’ll pay for the repair, of course.’

I could just make out Pete blinking at me through his sunglasses.

‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I should have checked the