Once I’d strapped myself in, and put on the headset that Chuck/Biff/Wow handed me, he took off. We followed the line of the coast, the sequined ocean to our left, the coast with its Legoland of highrises to our right. Every now and then, something else would nibble, rat-like, at the very edge of my excitement – sorry, !@#$%^&*.
The Preacher dying.
Imogen on the trail of her missing father.
The fact that this was my fifth, my penultimate, instalment.
But only for a fleeting second, before the !@#$%^&* took over again.
Chuck/Biff/Wow was on the radio.
‘Copy that!’ he said, punching some numbers into the flight deck.
As he worked the controls and we swung away from the land, heading out to the sea, something pretty basic occurred to me.
‘How do I get onboard?’
‘We land, of course,’ he said.
Obviously we were talking about a very different type of vessel from the Hispaniola.
Clouds were starting to invade the blue morning sky and down below I could see the scuds of white.
‘Though this might make it interesting,’ said Chuck/Biff/Wow.
After twenty minutes he was on the radio again.
‘Got a visual on the Argo,’ he said.
He nudged me and pointed to his left.
Following the line of his finger I could see the Argo, all thirty gleaming metres of it, ploughing majestically through the water, spray flying up over its bow, the vee of its wake messed up by the waves.
A very different type of vessel from the Hispaniola!
More talking on the radio, the gist of it being that it was too rough to land the chopper on the boat.
The excitement – the !@#$%^&* – became its opposite, became *&^%$#@!.
I wouldn’t be boarding.
‘So what do we do now?’ I said.
‘If they’re serious about having you on board, which they seem to be, then I guess they will have to go into port,’ he said. ‘Which will take them eight hours at least.’
The *&^%$#@! must’ve been written all over my face, because he added, ‘Unless you’ve done some abseiling?’
I nodded, though the abseiling I’d done had been pretty limited, and in the gym.
‘I hover above the deck,’ said Chuck/Biff/Wow. ‘We drop the rope, and you abseil down. I’ve done it hundreds of times.’
‘I’m up for it,’ I said.
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ I said.
Chuck/Biff/Wow smiled his Chuck/Biff/Wow smile and showed me where I could find the gear: the rope, the harness, the helmet, the gloves, the lifejacket. After he’d finished explaining the gear, and the procedure to me, he said, ‘So what do you think?’
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
It was the same technique we’d learnt in the gym. Except in this case I’d be dangling over a heaving, shark-infested ocean from a helicopter.
He got back on the radio, and told them what was happening.
I put on the lifejacket, the helmet, the gloves, and slipped my legs through the harness.
After Chuck/Biff/Wow had ensured that the rope was securely tied to the chopper, he showed me how to thread it through the descender. And then attach the descender to my harness.
‘You still good?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Still good.’
Chuck/Biff/Wow got back on the radio – we were ready to go.
As the Argo slowed down, we swooped in closer, and lower, until we were hovering about twenty metres above the deck. I could see figures in yellow spray jackets down below.
‘Rope over!’ said Chuck/Biff/Wow.
I threw the coil of rope out and over the helicopter’s skid, and watched as it unwound, the last couple of metres landing on the Argo’s deck.
‘No tangles?’ said the pilot.
‘None.’
‘Okay, get out there!’
Guiding with my left hand, letting the rope out with the right, I stepped onto the skid.
‘Ready?’
I positioned myself on the balls of my feet, knees flexed.
‘Go!’ he said.
Every atom in my body told me one thing: don’t jump! Ignoring them, I jumped out, letting the rope flow through both gloved hands.
And then I was falling down, faster and faster.
I brought my right hand up slightly. The rope bit, and I slowed.
From then on, it was pretty easy – left hand guiding, right hand braking. It was really no different to what we’d done in the air-conditioned climbing gym.
Soon eager hands reached out to grab me, to unclick the harness.
I’d done it!
I looked up and waved to Chuck/Biff/Wow. He responded with a wobble of the chopper’s tail.
‘Bloody Kevin, showing off again,’ somebody said.
Kevin?
A quick glance around the boat was enough to show that the Argo was indeed a very different vessel from the Hispaniola.
The Hispaniola was old. This was pretty new.
The Hispaniola was dirty. This was spotless.
The Hispaniola was disorganised. This was a boat my mum would’ve totally approved of: a place for everything, everything in its place.
‘How was your trip, Dominic?’ said a voice I recognised as belonging to the world’s most successful treasure hunter.
I wanted to say !@#$%^&* but didn’t quite know to pronounce it, so went with ‘Way cool’ instead.
E Lee Marx looked about twenty years younger than when I’d last seen him, the light in his eyes shining brightly.
He put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘It’s great to have you onboard, son.’
He was Indiana Jones, he was Jacques Cousteau, he was Hans Solo, and he had his arm around my shoulder.
‘Let’s have a bite to eat and a chat.’
As the boat lurched into a wave, spray flew into the air and the deck was awash with water.
‘Below decks!’ he added, smiling.
The people who had helped me aboard had disappeared and there was nobody around.
It was a bit strange; I’d imagined a dedicated treasure-hunting ship as a place that was always bustling with activity. But as I followed him below decks and into a cabin, we didn’t see anybody at all.
There was a single bed, a fixed table and chairs, a large flatscreen TV, a little ensuite bathroom with shower and toilet, and a window or a porthole or whatever it’s called with a view of the sea.
Again, I was totally surprised – I guess I’d been expecting hammocks not something that was like a pretty generic hotel room.
We sat down, but immediately there was a knock on the door and E Lee Marx got up, returning with a tray of food: two amazing-looking ham and cheese baguettes and a chocolate milkshake.
I was pretty hungry, so I wasted no time in demolishing it all.
‘Damn, I’d forgotten how much a growing boy can eat,’ said E Lee Marx, looking at me admiringly. ‘So why don’t you tell me everything? Nice and slow, there’s no rush and I ain’t as quick on the uptake as I used to be.’
I didn’t tell him everything, of course. But I told him as much of everything as I thought he needed to know. But as I did, I wondered whether, if you took The Debt out of my life, the things I’d done lately actually made any sense. Because let’s face it, for most of it The Debt was the number-one motivation.
‘But why were you so keen to catch this Zolt character?’
The Debt. But I couldn’t say that.
‘But why where you so keen to get me here?’
The Debt. But I couldn’t say that. And I wondered how much E Lee Marx knew about his employers.
‘So do you, like, see much of your boss?’ I said.
He gave me an odd look and said, ‘Funny you should ask that, because when we started out there seemed to be about three levels of management between me and them. Look, I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. I’ve done jobs where the bo
ss has been breathing down my neck every second of the way and you don’t want that. But one of my stipulations if this search was going to continue was that I had somebody onboard who had some authority, who could give a direct yes or no. So, yes, we’ve got our man, now.’
He seemed lost in thought for a while.
‘Treasure hunting’s a strange business, full of strange types. Maybe that’s why I’ve been doing it for so long. But this job, well, it’s been stranger than most,’ he said, his hand delving into his pocket.
‘If it wasn’t for this,’ he said, his voice brighter, holding out his hand, the Double Eagle sitting on its palm, ‘we would’ve gone home long ago.’
‘Lucky you didn’t,’ I said, my voice as bright as the coin he was holding.
‘So let me get this right: you’ve actually dived in this area?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, remembering how scary it had been.
‘So what can you tell me about it?’
‘It was sixty metres deep,’ I said.
‘They were diving on sixty metres?’ he said incredulously.
‘Sure,’ I said, wondering how else you were supposed to discover underwater treasure if you didn’t dive on it.
‘So they obviously don’t have an ROV?’
‘A remote-operated underwater vehicle?’ I said.
‘Yes, we have two of them on board, state-of-the-art, a Castor and a Pollux,’ he said. ‘I would never risk my people diving at those sorts of depths. Way too dangerous.’
Wow, so I’d either been really brave or really stupid.
‘And what was the bottom like?’ he said.
‘The visibility, I mean the vis, was really bad,’ I said. ‘It was pretty silty. And there were these wicked currents.’
Okay, I’d been really stupid.
‘And you wouldn’t have an approximate position for me, would you?’ said the world’s most famous treasure hunter, a real-life Indiana Jones.
This was, without doubt, my proudest moment.
Or what I thought was going to be my proudest moment. I took out the scrap of paper, the bit I’d torn off Skip’s chart and read out the latitude and longitude. E Lee Marx referred to a piece of paper in front of him but didn’t write anything down.
It was almost as if he knew already what the figures would be.
We talked a bit more until E Lee Marx said, ‘Well, we’ve got six hours of steaming, so you may as well rest up.’
Rest up?
‘Plenty of DVDs to watch,’ he said, pointing at the plasma.
He left the room.
E Lee Marx was right, there were plenty of DVDs.
Which was great because what I really wanted to do, more than anything in the world, while I was on the most exciting adventure of my life, was to watch DVD after DVD. Then after that, perhaps I could catch up on all the Maths homework I hadn’t done for the last ten or so years. And then get stuck into some contextualising actuarial solution.
I checked my phone; no further messages from Imogen, from anybody – no signal. I chucked it on the bed. Bored, I actually did start watching the first Indiana Jones movie. I got all the way to the cave scene before I realise what a dumb choice I’d made. If you’re going to be stuck in a cabin by yourself you should watch the film version of Waiting for Godot or some uber-mushy chick flick, something that makes being stuck in a cabin by yourself seem quite exciting.
I turned Indiana Jones off mid-exciting adventure, having decided that I deserved a little look around the ship.
I went to open the door – it was locked.
Surely not! He couldn’t have locked me in. I turned the handle, pushing harder this time, but it didn’t budge.
He, or somebody, had locked me in.
And the cabin instantly seemed to get smaller, shrinking to about the half the size it had been before.
I began searching my brain, trying to find some justification for this.
In the end all I could come up was that this ship was a finely tuned mechanism and they couldn’t have just anybody wandering around.
But as soon as I’d thought of that I came up with several reasons why it was crap. I wasn’t just anybody, I was the reason this ship was now headed to where the treasure actually was. And if they hadn’t wanted me to wander around, why hadn’t they just asked me to stay in my cabin?
But there wasn’t much I could do about it except watch DVDs.
I finished the first Indiana Jones movie.
And I’d just reached that part in the second when they jump off the pilotless plane in a blow-up raft when I decided that enough was enough.
The door was locked, but the window or the porthole or whatever it was called was definitely unlocked.
I pushed it wide open and poked my head outside.
The sea, three or so metres below, looked grey and uninviting. Certainly wouldn’t want to take a dip in there.
I twisted my head around to look up. The guardrail, or whatever it’s called, wasn’t within reach, but a lifebuoy that was attached to the guardrail definitely was. A plan was formulating in my head: I could squeeze through the window, hoist myself up using the lifebuoy, and scramble onto the deck. It actually looked pretty straightforward.
Why would you want to do a stupid thing like that, Dominic? said my internal Nanna. Obviously they don’t want you around.
That, internal Nanna, is exactly the reason I am going to do it, to show them they can’t bully me, lock me in my room like a naughty five year old.
I pulled myself through the window or porthole or whatever you call it so that I was sitting on the ledge, my body outside, legs inside.
This wasn’t a particularly difficult manoeuvre, and if I’d been at home, with spongy lawn beneath the window, I wouldn’t think twice about what I was doing. But this wasn’t lawn, this was water. If I fell I would probably have a softer landing, but I’d never heard of sharks living in lawn, or any other potentially life-ending predator.
I’d also never heard of anybody being lost at lawn, or drowning at lawn.
I was starting to seriously question what I was doing.
Despite this, my right hand reached up and grabbed hold of the rope at the bottom of the lifebuoy. My left hand did the same.
I was now able to carefully hoist myself to my feet, my toes balanced on the edge of the window.
The next move was the trickiest: I had to pull my whole weight up and use this momentum to swing my leg over the guardrail.
But it really wasn’t that difficult, I’d done stuff like this many times before.
On the count of three, I ordered myself. One. Two. Three!
I clenched hard, swung myself out and pulled myself upwards.
Too easy, I thought, because already I knew I had enough momentum to carry me over the guardrail.
When I was about halfway there, the lifebuoy came off the guardrail and, instead of going up, I went down, dropping into the ocean.
I reckon in all times of disaster there is always a second of excitement, when you’re thinking: Wow, this certainly is a spiffing adventure with a capital A!
It was only a second, however, maybe not even that, and as I plunged into the sea, the taste of salt a shock, it was replaced by a hell with a capital H, E, L and L.
My first thought, as the engine’s throb sent tremors reverberating through me, was: Propellers!
So I swam, arms thrashing furiously, away from the ship.
And when I could no longer feel the engine, I stopped.
The ship, which had seemed to be going so slowly before, was now a speedboat, something out of a James Bond film, flying away from me, disappearing in and out of view as it was obscured by the toppling waves.
I screamed at it, though I knew it was no use.
I screamed.
And I screamed.
And when I finished screaming I started crying.
Salty tears into salty ocean.
Because I knew I was dead, that I had just killed myself
.
Whoever it was who had locked me in the cabin wouldn’t be checking on me for hours, maybe.
Even if it wasn’t hours, even if it was only minutes, I knew it would be next to impossible to find somebody in a sea as lumpy as this.
I screamed some more.
And I cried some more.
And screamed some more.
And cried some more.
As the ocean played catch with me, throwing me from one foam-crested wave to the other.
The second Indiana Jones isn’t even such a bad movie, I told myself. In fact, in some ways it’s better than the first. It has that kid in it, and he’s pretty cool.
And I actually laughed at my own pathetic joke.
A sound.
What could that be?
A sound getting louder.
As I rose up on the crest of a wave, I could see it, the Argo heading straight for me. They were coming to get me!
I was dead no more.
It wasn’t until the elation had subsided that I asked myself the obvious question: but how?
I remembered how E Lee Marx had seemed to know the position before I’d told him.
I remembered what Zoe had told me once: You are so owned.
I realised now that she was absolutely right – I was so owned.
But how was I so owned?
I travelled back to the morning of my fifteenth birthday, the day The Debt had come into my life.
Those missing minutes, the small raised lump on my hand.
Some sort of chip had been inserted into my body.
That’s how I was owned.
Thank god I was!
The Argo stopped about a hundred metres away and a Zodiac slid down some rails and off the stern of the ship.
As it neared me I could see E Lee Marx on board.
He pulled me over the side.
‘What the hell were you doing?’ he said, wrapping me in his arms.
It was then I noticed the man behind him.
I knew him. Not by name, but I knew him.
I’d seen him three times before. Twice in the flesh.
The first time had been at Nimbin – he was the other man who had been walking with my dad, Ron Gatto and Rocco Taverniti, talking in Calabrian. One of the Nimbin Four, as I liked to think of them.
The second time had been when Seb had been picked up on the street – I’d caught a glimpse of the driver through the open door. It was the same man.
Yamashita's Gold Page 19
