Blind Reef

by Peter Tonkin

  Ahmed pointed below, apparently unconcerned, and the three of them levelled out, side by side, then angled downwards and began to fin gently through the seven metres – twenty feet or so – that separated them from the top of the reef. As they descended, their torches and Richard’s wide-beamed head light began to pick details out of the gloom. Clouds of fish swam around the reef itself. Almost at once, like the glassfish and the zebra-striped sergeant majors, they began to catch the light whirling against the glimmering gloom like shooting stars. Anthias and damselfish, seemingly in their thousands, looking exactly like the goldfish their twins, William and Mary, had kept in their big aquarium as children – right up until they left for university a few years ago, in fact. Then, amongst them, flashes of darker but still iridescent colour. The purple and indigo, gold-tipped bodies of tangs, and Arabian angelfish, the same colours striped with white across Red Sea bannerfish; all of them still seemingly the perfect size for a child’s aquarium.

  They were down close to the top of the reef now, deep enough for Richard to be clearing his ears again, while the white light of their torches caught the kaleidoscope of iridescence that was the coral. He knew the basic types, though even less about their names than the names of the fish that teemed around them. There were brain corals, tree corals, finger and fan. Hard corals and soft corals. Coloured corals and plain. He remembered an illustrated article he’d read in preparation for an earlier dive and tried to match the corals here with the pictures in his photographic memory. But, as he approached the edge of the reef, he became distracted by the range of larger fish moving in and out of the depths and the shadows. He recognized napoleonfish, parrotfish, groupers, snappers, jackfish and trevallys. A devil scorpionfish moved across the reef top, apparently pulling itself along with prehensile fins. A pair of big brown-striped lionfish cruised behind it, their spines halfway between knitting needles and stilettos, tipped with poison. But then, with a lift of excitement, he saw, deep within the floral tentacles of a huge sea anemone, a pair of orange-and-white-striped clownfish. He ached to take out his regulator and call to Robin, ‘Hey! I think I’ve found Nemo!’

  But as he glanced up towards her he saw, way over Robin’s shoulder, past the column of bubbles that rose rhythmically above her head, at the outer edge of the long blade of his torch beam, the first sinister, sinuous swirl of a grey shark’s flank. He looked at Ahmed, close beside her, swam forward and touched the dive master’s shoulder. Ahmed glanced at him and made the OK circle with his index finger and thumb. Richard gave a mental shrug as the shark vanished, glanced at his dive computer and saw that he had the better part of twenty minutes’ air left, including decompression stops. He paused and fell a little behind the others, waiting for his pulse rate to ease. And it was the rhythm of his pulse thumping gently in his ears, perhaps, that alerted him to the throbbing of a boat’s motors, echoing, amplified, approaching rapidly through the waters above him.

  No sooner had this new element entered the equation than Richard was struck forcefully from behind. He whirled in the water, searching for his attacker. There was apparently nothing there. No steely barracuda, no granite grey shark. Only the blue and gold of a triggerfish, twice as broad as his hands and twice as large as his head. Even before it dawned on him that this was actually his assailant, it threw itself forward once more. Without thinking, Richard rapped it across the beak of its nose with the torch. It turned away, just missing him, but spinning at the end of its run to come back in like a bull at the corrida. Jesus, thought Richard, calm down, fish; what did I ever do to you?

  As the triggerfish began its run, Ahmed’s hand descended gently on Richard’s shoulder. The dive master was gesturing towards the spire that towered above them now, joining the reef top to the surface. Robin was already finning towards it, the beam of her torch illuminating the cliff wall of its side. There was an opening there – the mouth of a cavern or a tunnel. It lay in the opposite direction to the shark and well clear of the earlier barracuda. As long as it wasn’t already occupied by a giant moray, it would give them a place to regroup. And as long as the triggerfish stayed away. This time it was Ahmed who dealt with the bellicose fish. He kicked it away with a gentle fin, sending it charging off towards the reef top.

  As Richard finned determinedly after Robin towards the cave mouth, he suddenly realized that, during his fight with the triggerfish, the sound of boat motors had become louder, closer. And there were at least two boats by the sound of things, racing across the night-dark ocean ten metres above their heads. What on earth is going on up there? he wondered.

  Robin reached the cave mouth and slowed, shining her torch into every internal crevice before she finned carefully in and turned, hanging upright in the cave mouth. Richard swept past her, too confident in her survey of the place to even hesitate. The cavern he plunged into was the size of a large room. There was plenty of room for three divers – especially as, if this had been a room, they were all hanging like bats off the ceiling. Richard turned towards the cave mouth as Ahmed eased in past Robin, and the three of them hovered there, looking out across the reef like characters in a legend or a fairytale, trapped in a prison cell halfway up an enchanted tower.

  The image had no sooner occurred to Richard than the racing of the boat motors high above came to a climax. There was a screaming rumble that ended in a grinding bang!. The fish around the tower flicked away and ran for the shadows. Even the triggerfish were gone in a swirl of meaty yellow flank. The coral spire shook as though an underwater earthquake was starting. Sand from the cave floor stirred into clouds, billowing in and out around them. Richard’s eyes lost clarity of vision, as though he were in a picture that was suddenly out of focus. The water itself seemed to reverberate as though they were trapped inside a drum during a drum roll. His eardrums stretched agonisingly. His eyes flooded with tears. Rocks and coral debris rained down past the cave mouth. Ahmed held up his left forearm, shining his torch on the whiteboard there and Richard had to blink several times before he could focus on the words the dive master had written on it:

  Ship wrecked up on the reef spire. Danger. Take care.

  Richard looked at the three most vital words on Ahmed’s whiteboard. Ship wrecked … Danger … ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ he said to himself.

  One way and another Richard knew a lot about shipwrecks and the dangers they presented. He had been involved in various incidents: the break-up of huge super tankers, the sinking of damaged submarines, the pitch-poling of Olympic standard multihulls, the destruction of priceless gin palaces like Katerina. He had been aboard a waste disposal vessel whose ill-stowed, leaky deck cargo had dissolved the protective coating round the nuclear waste in her holds, then eaten through her hull. He and Robin had been trapped aboard a Russian cruise liner, storm bound in the Southern Ocean, whose computer control systems had all failed, one by one. He had even saved the crew of an ocean-going three-masted schooner which had broken her back on Wolf Rock in the Western Approaches to the English Channel. What he knew about shipwrecks was that the various immediate dangers – to the crew and passengers, to those nearby, to the rescuers and to the environment, varied depending on the size of the vessel, the composition of her hull, the nature, toxicity or explosiveness of her cargo. Even apparently innocent lost cargoes could have unexpected consequences. He was all too well aware of the fates of containers full of bath-time ducks, beachwear flip-flops and Lego bricks and figures, lost years ago and still turning up on coasts all over the world. Also crucial were factors such as the number of people aboard, the effectiveness of those in command and how well they were all practised in emergency routines.

  The state of the sea … The time of day … The proximity of help … The mood of the Gods … The disposition of the Fates …

  Richard pushed past Ahmed and hung just beneath the lintel of the cave mouth, looking towards the distant waves, shining the long bright blade of the Beaver upwards. They were fifteen metres – fifty feet, down. The beam faded twenty feet short of
the surface. But even so, it was suddenly full of tumbling wreckage. The first thing that plunged into the brightness was an outboard motor. Its top was big, black and cuboid. It had Yamaha, amongst other things, written on the side in faded paint. The long stem leading from the motor housing down to the propeller was snapped off short. Richard remembered the crunching sound. That would have been the propeller chewing itself to pieces on the coral head and snapping off, he thought, just after the reef tore the hull of the vessel wide open. But one outboard meant the wrecked boat was probably not much larger than the Katerina’s RIB. Ten- to twelve-seater max …

  But then the twin of the first motor came tumbling into the light, even as the first span down towards him, trailing fuel like bright brown blood. And that upped the ante quite considerably. Twin motors like that could power a sizeable open boat, five to seven metres long and two to three metres wide. So he reckoned whatever had just ripped its heart and bottom out on the top of the spire must be around seven metres or twenty feet long, able to carry a dozen or so people if it met American Coastguard safety rules. But America was a long way from here. As, in all likelihood, were the coastguards.

  But maybe not – for as the second motor came spinning after the first, Richard heard the whine of high-performance propellers closing from the same direction the wrecked boat had come from. No sooner did he register this than the much closer motors powering Katerina and the RIB added their turbulence to all the rest as they moved in to help the survivors, of whom there could be upwards of twenty, he thought with a frown that threatened to break the seal between his mask and his forehead. He glanced down, reversing the angle of the Beaver’s beam, grimacing as it showed him what lay beneath. The motors were going to impact with the top of the reef six or so metres beneath the tips of his flippers. Well, there was nothing they could do about that. He angled the beam of his torch upwards once more, and gasped. Gasped so deeply that he damn near swallowed his regulator.

  The next heavy metal object heading for the top of the reef sixty-five feet below the agitated surface was a surprisingly substantial anchor. It dragged a tangle of bright orange anchor cable behind it. And enmeshed in that tangle were three men, all fighting to get free. But their hope of doing so seemed slim in the extreme. Richard knew only too well that the cable wrapped around them was all-but unbreakable. Even his knife and his shears would take time to cut through it. He looked down once more, his mind racing. The first Yamaha hit the reef top with a sound like a flipped coin landing on a marble table and tottered there, miraculously upright, until a swirl of south-running current, the last of the lowering tide, took it and it fell drunkenly on to its side with a muffled metallic crash.

  Richard looked upward again and was in action at once. Behind the entangled men came the entire bow section of the boat, a gently curving arrow-head some six feet long and reaching towards seven feet wide. Its broken and coral-torn edges gleamed in the torch light, revealing a metal hull beneath the thin paint and the thick weed in which it was covered. From the looks of things it even had a metal deck section-cum-bow seat under which all sorts of things had been stowed. Equipment came tumbling out as it sank. Anonymous bags and boxes. More anchor rope. Fishing tackle. For a moment it looked as though the helpless men would be simply crushed beneath the weighted, broken bow section, but then the south-running current took it and moved it, as though it were a solid sail, southwards. Even so, boxes of tackle, bundles of possessions and even jerry-cans of fuel continued to vomit out of it as it sailed away like a leaf on a breeze.

  Richard threw himself forward, finning outwards and upwards. The moment he moved, he found Robin at one shoulder and Ahmed at the other. Whatever else might be going on above or below them, nearby or further away, they had one simple priority here. Their immediate responsibility was to rescue the men tangled in the anchor cable before they drowned. But no sooner were they in motion than the situation changed. One of the three managed to disentangle himself. He swam for the surface with powerful strokes, clearly desperate for air. But it seemed that his departure also removed some buoyancy from the tangle above the anchor, for as he departed, the two men still trapped in the orange toils began to sink more swiftly.

  One, ensnared by his ankle, was still struggling to pull himself free. The other, who appeared to be enmeshed up to his knees, had apparently given up. Or, thought Richard, who knew almost as much about lifesaving as he knew about shipwrecks, he was on the verge of drowning. An unusual breadth of experience had taught him that the not waving but drowning image was the wrong one. Drowning people did not splash about and scream for help as bathers joking around tended to do. They quietly surrendered to the overwhelming inevitability of their situation and most often slid down almost secretly. Silently slipping away to their deaths, as often as not utterly unobserved by those closest to them.

  He started finning towards the apparently comatose man as fast as he could, therefore, with the other two at his shoulder. The torch beam showed a skeletal ebony torso dressed in a ballooning white vest and a reed-thin waist above hips just wide enough to support baggy shorts. Arms like black branches stood out from broad shoulders, apparently reaching up towards the surface. Legs that looked little thicker than Richard’s arms reached down to the heart of the Gordian knot which the anchor cable had made of itself. The apparently sleeping face was African, if almost skull-like, reminding Richard of mummies he had seen in museums in Cairo and London. Cavernous eye-sockets, broad, slightly flattened nose. Sunken jowls that emphasized the sharp lines of cheek- and jaw-bone. Yet it was a young face, strikingly handsome and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable. Something in it – youth and vulnerability perhaps – reminded Richard of his own son, William.

  No sooner had Richard completed this almost instant summation than the second man also managed to break free. He started stroking desperately for the surface, desperately but increasingly sluggishly. A glance at his dive computer informed Richard that his destination was more than fifty feet away – more than half the width of an Olympic swimming pool above a man who was already out of air. No chance. He completed an almost instantaneous mental calculation and reached for Robin. She could get the survivor up from this depth using her octopus emergency oxygen line. She wouldn’t want to go, but it had to be her because the last man was going on down past eighteen metres and was going to end up on the top of the reef beside the Yamahas before they could cut him free, by the looks of things, and Richard intended to go down with him to share his oxygen while he used the shears and the knife as best he could. Ahmed, as dive master, was not about to leave a situation like that either, so Richard could rely on his help, too.

  Not for the first time, he found to his relief that Robin had read the situation exactly the same as he had. When he tapped her shoulder, pointed to the vanishing figure and gestured upwards with his thumb, she nodded once and was off, finning resolutely upwards, leaving a trail of buckshot in her wake as she lightened her load. He watched for an instant longer – one that was nearly fatal in a range of ways, as it turned out. For he saw, beyond the surface high above her, a star-bright point of light. To penetrate this depth, he knew, it could only have been a flare. And it must have been falling down towards the sea. No sooner had he registered its existence than it was extinguished – plunged into the water, he thought. But the moment of its death was the instant of something else’s birth. Suddenly there was a sheet of wild, unsteady brightness covering the whole of the surface thirty feet above Robin and the man she was trying to rescue. The wrecked vessel must have covered the water all around it with petrol and the flare had set the sea alight. A strange sound echoed down through the restless, south-flowing water. That, combined with the buzzing of the motors, the thrashing and shouting of the terrified, burning survivors, and the unusual brightness of the burning water, was enough to bring the big grey reef sharks cruising inquisitively upwards, and the large tigers close behind them.

  A strange, sharp metallic chink! redirected his attention downwards
. The anchor had landed on the reef. Ahmed was already swimming down towards it, the pool of his torch beam illuminating the drowning man as though putting a strange, underwater ballet under a spotlight. Without a second thought, Richard powered after him. As he went, he cleared his ears and was struck immediately by a strange beeping sound. It took him a moment to realize it was the alarm on his dive computer. He looked at it. Its simple display warned him that he was diving too deep and getting dangerously short of air. Well, he knew someone who was down deeper and a good deal shorter, he thought grimly, and disregarded it altogether, plunging after Ahmed with all his might, heading for the dying African.

  It was a matter of moments before the pair of them were beside the young man. Richard reached for his octopus tube, but Ahmed shook his head and gestured down at the cordage. With his Speedo shears and his Aropec K1 Quick Release knife, Richard was much more likely to do to this Gordian knot what Alexander did to the original. And the widely experienced dive master would be best suited to perform the simple – literal – life-saving.

  As Richard settled down on the reef top in a way he would never have done under normal circumstances, he saw that Ahmed had decided not to use his octopus. Instead he was gently inserting his regulator into the young African’s mouth. He pressed the button on the side. A stream of bubbles exploded from the nostrils of that slightly flattened nose. Then the boy’s body jerked and the bubbles vanished – sucked deep into that skeletal but sizeable chest. The cavernous eyes blinked blindly. Richard felt his knees gently hit the sandy reef top, thankfully clear of lionfish, spiky sea urchins and fire coral, and went at once to work.