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

Life is disappointing, I thought.

Dad, I felt.

The detector rummaged a dead starfish from the sand.

There was snot in my mask. I bit the mouthpiece hard.

Sea is salty.

So are tears.

Where the hell were Amelia and Xander, anyway? The drill was to stick close together but occasionally one of us strayed. I swivelled to look for them and immediately the metal detector’s flash-blipping shot up in tempo.

Sculling backwards kept me – and it – in place.

The blipping became a constant hum.

I pulled out the focused probe and zeroed in on what I’d found, knowing it would be a hair clip or the arm off a pair of sunglasses or maybe a bit of tin can, but hoping for something better all the same. The dolphin-clicking of the probe quickened to a white line of noise. I dug my fingers beneath its tip and gently sifted the sand. Something glittered in the refracted sunlight. A ring. White gold or platinum, heavy either which way, a thick hoop of wedding ring. Up close, magnified by my mask, I could make out engraved markings on the ring’s inner edge.

Amelia had seen me stop. I looked up to find her at my side. Xander also cottoned on and joined us. Amelia held out a hand. I placed the ring on her palm. She inspected the ring and gave me a thumbs-up. In diving a thumb jerked upwards is a signal to your diving partner to surface, but I knew what she really meant and replied with the correct hand sign, my thumb and forefinger held in an ‘OK’ circle.

She returned the ring to me and I put it in the net bag clipped to my BCD. I was concentrating as I did this, double-checking the thing was secure, but something made me pause. The detectors were out of synch; one of them was blipping faster than the other. They were probably just set that way, I thought, fastening the bag shut. But no, one set of blips was definitely speeding up. I looked down and saw that Amelia’s detector, dangling behind her on its lanyard, was the culprit.

She hadn’t noticed, but quickly turned around when I pointed. With me having just found exactly what we were looking for right here, her machine had to be on a hiding to nothing. But she worked the sand with it, zeroed in on whatever had set the detector off, and used her probe as I had done to locate whatever metal thing was buried in the sand. When she dug the thing out and held it up I just about spat out my regulator.

She’d found another ring.

‘Incredible!’ I shouted, though of course it just came out as garbled bubbles.

Amelia blinked at me, her eyes massive in her mask-squished face.

Xander gave the signal to surface and up we went. Since we hadn’t been deep, we didn’t have to hang around to decompress. We simply popped up into the brightness.

‘That’s unbelievable!’ Xander said once he’d spat out his regulator.

Amelia, still clutching the ring in her fist, pushed her mask up onto her forehead with her other hand and said, ‘Why?’

‘Eh? Nothing for days then two rings not ten feet apart!’

‘It makes adequate sense to me,’ she said.

‘Sense?’ I chipped in. ‘Monumental luck, more like.’

‘No, it makes obvious sense. Think about it.’

She was serious. When that happens it’s best to be serious back; she’s usually a step ahead. Side by side, afloat on the glassy swell, we floated while she waited for us to catch up.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Help me out.’

5.

‘We’re looking for rings that have fallen off newlyweds’ fingers,’ said Amelia.

‘Yeah.’

‘And I agree that finding two such rings in the same ten-foot by ten-foot patch of sand would be improbable.’

‘Impossible, more like.’

She did that eye-narrowing thing she does when she’s about to point out something illogical, but today she decided to let my ‘impossible’ slide. Instead she said, ‘So if two accidents in the same place would be improbable, and yet there were, incontrovertibly, two rings in the same patch of sand, we have to assume it wasn’t an accident, meaning somebody dropped or threw the rings in the sea on purpose.’

‘Who the hell would throw away valuable jewellery?’ asked Xander.

‘I agree, it’s a stupid thing to do. But these are wedding rings. Hitching yourself to another person for life isn’t that bright in the first place, in my opinion. What if that person changes? Everyone does. And when it happens, if you don’t like the change, and the marriage goes sour, well, people do all sorts of weird things.’

‘Like lob their rings into the Indian Ocean.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But this is a honeymoon resort!’

‘Not exclusively. And anyway, some marriages are so stupid they collapse immediately.’

Pete had arrived in the boat. Its outboards idled gently. With my ears above water, the noise was a throaty gurgle, but when I leaned my head back into a wave the sound was more a buzz.

‘Told you so,’ said Pete before we’d even explained what we found. ‘Didn’t I? I said I had a lucky feeling about this afternoon.’

I let Xander reveal the full extent of that luck as we climbed aboard. Pete raised his wraparound sunglasses, whistled, and said, ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘What would be the point of such a deception?’ said Amelia.

‘I still don’t get why they’d throw away valuable jewellery,’ Xander muttered, inspecting our find. ‘These rings are heavy. They must be worth a bomb. Why not just sell them?’

‘That’s unknowable,’ Amelia replied. ‘Though symbolic acts are a thing.’

I was stowing my kit, double-checking the straps very carefully indeed. Amelia was looking the rings over closely. ‘The hallmarks match, meaning they were made by the same jeweller, which supports my theory.’

‘How much do you think they’re worth?’ I asked.

‘Together, a few thousand pounds,’ said Amelia. ‘Maybe even as much as ten! Great, eh?’

I had a plan for my share. Raising awareness of the plight of the coral reefs costs money. I wanted to contribute to Mum’s work, but since the only