So it was the door, not Gus’s knocking, that was at fault.
‘Rise and shine!’ said Gus.
‘What is the time?’
‘Nearly nine.’
Had I really managed to sleep in while on top of those thread-deficient sheets, on that bed?
Obviously, yes.
‘The boat’s leaving at nine-thirty,’ I said.
I had considered losing the diving trip and using that time to look for whatever it was I was looking for. But diving was my alibi, and already in my brief career as a minor criminal I’d learnt that having a watertight alibi really was an excellent thing.
We headed down to the wharf.
Now, thronging with people, boats leaving and arriving, it was very different to the sinister place of last night. The Hispaniola was tied up in its usual place and, if possible, it looked even more battered than last time I was aboard.
Maxine greeted me like a long-lost relative.
My star pupil, she called me, which was pretty embarrassing because the other diver who was coming out today looked like a real pro, like somebody who would grace the front cover of a scuba-diving magazine.
Gus said goodbye – he intended to spend the day reading – and we were off.
I was right about Brett, the other diver. Soon he was talking to Maxine about all these amazing places he’d been to: Great Blue Hole, Sistema Dos Ojos, Aliwal Shoal. It was pretty intimidating, except he was actually really friendly. He asked me how long I’d been diving. When I said I’d only started last week, he threw Maxine a look.
‘Star pupil,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ he said, and I wondered what was going on – was he reluctant to go diving with a newbie like me?
After a while I went inside to talk to the skipper.
‘The kid with the questions,’ he said.
Okay, now I had a problem: how not to be the kid with the questions, while at the same time asking a truckload more questions?
‘We’re headed somewhere else today,’ I said, downward inflexion, making sure it was a statement, not a question.
‘This mob want somewhere a bit more exciting,’ he said. ‘The wreck of the Meryl.’
‘That does sound exciting,’ I agreed.
The skipper proceeded to give me some of the history of the Meryl.
A cargo ship, in 1954 it was en route from Jakarta to the Philippines when something happened to it. Nobody quite knew what. But the crew died, and it drifted aimlessly, sighted from time to time, until it sunk off Reverie Island.
‘But how did it end up here?’ I said.
‘That’s a very good question,’ said the skipper. ‘One I’ve actually given a bit of thought to.’
He proceeded to pull out a map – sorry, a chart – and spread it out on the chart table.
‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing to a spot north-west of Reverie. ‘And flowing along here is the mighty East Australian Current,’ he said, thumb tracing the current on the map. ‘That pumps warm water all the way down into the Tasman. You’ve heard of the East Australian Current?’
I professed my total ignorance.
‘Well, the boffins reckon it starts in Antarctica because of ozone depletion, and this gets something they like to call the South Pacific Gyre going, which in turn feeds into the East Australian Current.’
I thought of the Meryl, manless, rudderless, drifting down the coast, a ghost ship.
‘What it doesn’t explain is how the ship ended up this far east. That’s got me stumped.’
Ω Ω Ω
Half an hour later, the anchor was down and we were ready to dive. Maxine said she wasn’t diving today, so it was just me and Brett. As I was getting ready she strapped a dive computer around my wrist, taking a lot of care to make sure it was firmly secured.
‘I don’t dive without one these days,’ she said.
I looked at her and smiled, but there was something in her face that I hadn’t seen before. Was it concern? Had she remembered the incident with Joyless Joy? Surely it wasn’t that; I was her star pupil, after all.
As soon as I hit the water I knew I was going to learn more by observing Brett than I ever would on a thousand courses. Everything he did seemed so smooth, so unflustered. He really did look like a creature that lived in the ocean, not one that only entered it occasionally and even then with the help of some serious technology.
The wreck wasn’t deep, only about twelve metres down, and not half as scary as I’d thought it’d be. Encrusted with coral, shaggy with weed, there were schools of iridescent fish swimming in and out of it.
I was transfixed.
Brett kept pointing things out to me: an evil-looking eel in its hole, a manta ray gliding majestically past.
Remembering my training, I again checked my air.
Still a hundred to go – I was fine.
But, suddenly, when I was eyeballing a huge wrasse, my air ran out.
I checked my gauge – the needle was on ninety. But I definitely had no air.
Don’t panic, I told myself, looking around for Brett.
He was nowhere to be seen.
Remember your training.
Another controlled emergency swimming ascent was needed. I started kicking upwards, exhaling as I did so.
Again, I remembered what Maxine had said: You won’t run out of air, because your lungs will expand as you rise.
Finally I broke the surface.
I felt quite proud – I’d successfully done two CESAs now – but it was still pretty weird. Even weirder when I looked around and there was no boat in sight.
And where the hell was my dive buddy?
But I could see it now: a Zodiac headed straight for me. It wasn’t the Hispaniola, but it was still a boat; it would do.
‘Over here!’ I yelled, waving one hand as high as I could over my head.
Definitely not drowning, definitely waving.
I needn’t have bothered, as the Zodiac had me firmly in its sights. It pulled up next to me and two big strong arms reached over and yanked me aboard.
When I say yanked, I really mean yanked.
‘Water!’ I said, pulling my mask down so that it hung around my neck. ‘I need to drink some water.’
A bottle of water was passed to me.
After I’d gulped that down, I wiped the salt out of my eyes.
It took a while for them to focus, and when they did I sort of wished they’d remained unfocused.
There were two men in the boat: the man with the big strong arms who had yanked me aboard, and another man, also with big strong arms, who was operating the outboard. Both men were wearing balaclavas, their faces covered except for eyes and mouth. I couldn’t imagine any scenario where men in balaclavas was good news.
This was no exception.
This was bad, bad news.
‘What’s going on?’ I said, but the balaclavas weren’t in a talkative mood.
Now I noticed where the boat was headed: away from Reverie Island and straight out to sea.
I wondered if they were from The Debt, a thought that was weirdly thrilling. Because if they were, they were just men, just flesh and blood, like I was.
Logically, I’d already come to this conclusion: they were just plain old money-grubbers.
But here was the physical proof – there was absolutely nothing supernatural about them, they weren’t shapeshifters.
I thought of the two tough kids on the bus that time, how I’d bluffed the bejesus out of them. Maybe I could try a bit of that here, I thought. But I knew I was kidding myself.
There was no way out except overboard.
My fins were hurting my feet, so I kicked them off, made myself as comfortable as I could given that I was currently being kidnapped, and I waited.
As I looked back I could see a hazy Reverie Island recede in the distance.
Until it was a speck.
And then nothing.
The two balaclavas stayed where they were. Motionless, impassiv
e.
A little while later the Zodiac slowed.
And the balaclava who wasn’t steering moved forward, grabbed hold of me and tied something to me. Then he hoisted me overboard.
It happened so quickly, so unexpectedly, I didn’t quite understand what was going on. Not even when I was in the water, surrounded by water, did I get it.
But as I started descending rapidly my brain moved into action.
I had a number of problems.
The first was air.
I had none, and I was going to the bottom.
I would die.
But why did I have none, when according to my gauge I’d had plenty?
I reached behind, felt the valve. It was off!
There was only one explanation: Brett, my dive buddy – buddy? – had turned my air off without me realising it!
I turned it back on, grabbed my regulator, purged it and put it into my mouth. Air, beautiful sweet air, flowed into my lungs.
That was one problem solved.
Now for the next one.
My mask was still hanging around my neck. I positioned it onto my face and stretched the strap around my head. Head back, I exhaled through my nose, clearing the water.
Now I could see – second problem solved.
Third problem: I was plummeting to the bottom, and the bottom seemed a very long way down.
I knew ascending too quickly was a problem; it’s how you get the bends. But descending too quickly? I looked down; now I could see why I was sinking so fast. The balaclava had tied a rope to me, with something very heavy at the end.
It has to be an anchor.
Okay, easily fixed – just untie it.
But feeling around behind my back, behind my neck, I couldn’t find where on my BCD it had been tied off.
Down, down, down I kept going.
I had to get out of my BCD. Chest clip first. Then stomach clip. Stomach velcro. My left arm out of the harness, I reached across and grabbed the right harness.
I took a quick glance at my depth gauge – fifty metres was way too deep to do a CESA.
I slipped my right shoulder out, and now I was holding the BCD with only my left hand. The regulator ripped from my mouth.
I was going to lose it!
I hooked my arm through, so that the harness was secure in the crook of my elbow. Got the regulator back in my mouth.
Now I could see where he’d tied it off – just below the valve on the tank.
I tried to untie it with one hand, but it was no good, it was too tight.
Should I just ride with it all the way to the bottom?
No.
I relaxed my elbow a bit, so that I could use my hand to grab the rope and take off some of the pressure. With my left hand, I started working the rope loose little by little.
Only a little bit more – and it was free. The rope trailed off, and I was no longer on the downward elevator. I put the BCD back on.
Now for the ascent. I checked my depth – I was seventy metres down.
According to the PADI system, it would take me numerous dives until I was allowed to dive at this depth. But I knew that the golden rule was to ascend no faster than ten metres per minute.
Keeping an eye on my depth gauge, my watch, I swam slowly up.
And, when I was five metres below the surface, I stopped for five minutes.
When I broke the surface, I punched the air.
I’d done it!
But the exhilaration I felt at being alive didn’t last long.
Because when I looked around I was in the middle of the ocean with nothing – not a boat, not land, nothing in sight.
I’d just been killed by two men in balaclavas.
No, I hadn’t been shot.
I hadn’t had my throat cut.
I hadn’t been disembowelled.
But it was the same thing, because the result was identical. I was going to drown. Or die of exposure. Or get eaten by sharks.
But just when this despair was spiralling out of control, I saw a glimpse of something on the horizon.
A flash of grey.
The boat heading back to Reverie? The sun, also, seemed to be headed that way. So that was the direction I needed to swim, towards the west.
But was it?
How far away was Reverie Island?
I knew that the Meryl was around ten kilometres off the island. I figured the trip in the Zodiac had been at least twenty minutes and that we’d been going roughly twenty kilometres an hour.
So what did that make it in total?
Sixteen or seventeen?
Maybe even more.
But if my mental map was correct, then the mainland was closer, a lot closer. Not only that, that was the direction of the wind and the waves.
But what if I was wrong, what if the map I’d constructed in my head was wrong? Then I would keep swimming, and swimming, and swimming, and never ever reach land.
I had a decision to make.
Towards Reverie, in the direction the sun was heading? Or keep the sun on my left and head towards the mainland?
I guess there was some degree of certainty in the former – I was fairly sure that Reverie was in that direction. But I was less certain of the latter option, because for that I had to rely on memory. And then another option presented itself – if they were The Debt, would they really let me drown?
I mean, seriously?
So was I better off just staying here, treading water, expending the minimum amount of energy, until eventually they came to their senses and picked me up?
But what if they weren’t The Debt? And the more I thought about it, the more likely this seemed.
They’re just plain old money-grubbers. If this was true, and I just knew that it was, then what would they possibly gain by doing this to me?
No, it wasn’t The Debt; I couldn’t just tread water, wait for them to pick me up.
Some seagulls flying overhead came down for a closer look. They squawked at me a few times before they took off again. I imagined them when I got weaker, swooping down, pecking at my eyeballs.
I had to start moving.
Reverie? Mainland?
Again I brought up that map on the LCD screen of my mind.
Again it showed the coast doglegging.
It had to be the mainland, I told myself. I had to let the winds and the waves help me.
The first thing to do was lose any extraneous material. I unclipped the tank, and let it sink to the bottom with its attached regulator.
I adjusted the mask.
I blew some air into the BCD, so it had what I thought was just the right amount of buoyancy – not too much that it made swimming difficult, not too little that I had to work to stay afloat.
For some reason I had five kays in my head as the distance I needed to swim.
But you don’t want to have that in your head, because five kays is, well, crazy.
So what I decided to do was break it down into manageable portions, portions I could actually get my head around. A process.
Five hundred metres wasn’t that far, only ten laps of an Olympic-sized pool; it was twenty-five laps of our pool at home, and I’d done lots of those lately.
But how was I going to measure five hundred metres?
Well, I knew it took me around twelve strokes for one lap of our twenty-metre pool.
I knew that because Tristan kept telling me I had to get this down to under ten or I’d never be competitive. Dude.
So five hundred metres was approximately, very approximately, three hundred strokes.
So this is what I decided to do: I would swim freestyle nonstop for three hundred strokes and then I would stop and have a rest, reassess my position. After I’d done this ten times I’d be there; I’d have reached the mainland.
It was an excellent plan – logical, considered, and for a moment I got very excited by it.
Hey, this is going to be easy, I told myself. Not even really a challenge for somebody with my conside
rable capabilities.
And then I actually started swimming.
And it was hell.
For a start, I’d already done a fair bit of diving, so it wasn’t as if I was fresh or anything.
Everything ached, especially my arms and shoulders. Okay, I’d drunk some water, but I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. And even then it was only some crappy white bread and a coffee.
It was hell, but I had a plan, a good plan, and I knew if I didn’t stick to it, I was in huge trouble.
One stroke. Two strokes.
Usually I swim bilaterally, breathing every third stroke on alternating sides of my body, but knowing how important it was to keep the sun to my left, I decided to breathe on my left side only, so that I could keep an eye on it.
Three hundred strokes.
Rest.
One down, nine to go.
Ω Ω Ω
Two hundred and ninety-nine strokes.
Three hundred strokes.
I stopped, treading water.
Only three more sets to go, I told myself.
I wanted to ignore the thirst, and my cracked lips.
I wanted to ignore the hunger. Cinemascope-sized images of food were screening in my head. Hamburgers were talking to me. Pizzas were cracking jokes.
I wanted to ignore the pain. There was so much of it now, it was hard to find a source. Pain from arms, from elbows, from shoulders. And from other places you wouldn’t expect. My neck. My ankles. Just one great raging pain that was eating me up.
I wanted to ignore all of that and concentrate on process, The Process, on the next set of three hundred strokes.
Let’s go, I told myself. Three hundred more strokes, that’s all.
Two more sets and The Process was almost finished.
One more set to go.
Two hundred and ninety-eight strokes.
Two hundred and ninety-nine strokes.
Last stroke, and that was it – The Process was finished.
I’d done it!
Treading water, I looked ahead. To where there should be land. But all I could see was water, water and more water.
But The Process! There had to be land!
Water. Water. And more water.
No land.
The Process had failed me. The Process was wrong.
And I was going to die.
Yamashita's Gold Page 13
