It must have been a shark. A very big one.
Pat looked around him. Nothing but a few wandering fish.
The shark must have seen the tanks as a fat fish and taken them on a charge. It would have found the tanks tasted bad and spat them out a second later, but that was enough.
Col stared at Matt, waving the rope at him.
At that moment Pat sucked the last of the air in his tank. He was like a baby sucking an empty milk bottle. He reached up and clutched Matt’s leg.
Matt turned round and saw Pat running his fingers across his throat and quickly passed his octopus over. He glanced back at Col’s frozen face and hesitated for a second before slinging off his tanks. He passed his tanks over to Pat as well, and put his gold chain around Pat’s neck.
He sucked in a long breath as he nodded at Col, tapped his watch, pointed up and showed five fingers. He unbuckled his weight belt with the metal detector and his long torch.
What ’? Pat thought.
Matt opened his hand, allowing them to tumble slowly into the dark as he pulled the mouthpiece away. He kicked powerfully for the distant surface.
He is going to die ’ Pat clutched after him.
Col grabbed Pat’s arm, pulled him up to his level but his eyes were locked on Matt. He began to beat his flat hands against his chest. The lungs, remember the lungs!
Pat widened his eyes.
Matt was barrelling out of the deep water towards the lightness of air. If he keeps his mouth shut, if he keeps himself sealed like a tank as the water pressure on his body drops to nothing, his lungs will burst. Like a shaken soft drink bottle.
But small plumes of air were rising from Matt’s head. He was breathing out as he thundered towards the bright sunlit water. Holding his arms pressed beside his body, he was a black torpedo driving towards the tiny dinghy hull.
Then he began to swing from the dinghy. As if he could not see the hull, and he could not care less. His body lengthened as he moved from the hull. He didn’t seem to want to reach the air of the surface of the sea anymore. He swam across the blue water, no tanks, no air, until he disappeared from view.
Pat tried to see a shape through the distance of the water, but there was nothing. He looked at Col. Col tried to show a touch of confidence but Pat could see the terrible fear in his eyes.
He thought: Why the hell do you wait?
He kicked but Col grabbed his leg and shook his head. You cannot leave here. You will die.
What’s the difference? You want Matt, Dad, and he’s gone. He’s up there dying, doubling over in agony.
Col let go of Pat’s leg and held his hand up, fanning his fingers as Matt had done. And closed the fingers. Five minutes he wanted and we’ve only been through two.
All right, all right.
Col pushed down the water. Just breath slow. Very slow.
There is something that you aren’t seeing. What had Matt been trying to do?
Pat hung onto the rope, staring at the spot where Matt had disappeared in the light blue water and tried to work it out.
The Tub, he thought. Matt could see the Tub’s hull as he swam up to the dinghy, so he went for that instead of the dinghy. But why? Now he’s rolling around the deck in front of the sneering lion. He’s still dying ’
But half a minute later Pat could see a shape coming from the blue water. Col pointed urgently and waved the beam at the shape.
As it cut through the water it began to look like a pregnant seal.
Matt was carrying a tank! The tank that had been discarded beside the air compressor, and it had no air regulator, no mouthpiece.
Col shoved the torch into Pat’s hand, swam around his back and began to disconnect his regulators from his BCD and the tanks. Pat saw that Matt was driving down at an angle, keeping his back to the bottom and holding the tank against his stomach. He occasionally looked over his shoulder to make sure he was on track, but as the distance shortened Pat could see his face darkening with the strain.
When Col finished plucking the regulators from his back Pat suddenly raced to Matt to thrust the octopus mouthpiece at him. Matt looked surprised for a moment but he sucked in a long breath while he scrabbled his fingers in Pat’s hair.
Col took the tank from Matt’s stomach and worked at it without a glance at Matt’s face. Only when Pat’s regulators were attached to the new tank did he peer into Matt’s mask. How are you?
Matt waved a hand. It’s all right. No worries.
Col shook his head. You’re mad, you know.
They hung onto the rope for fifteen minutes, emptying the old tanks before sucking around the new one, looking like kids with a cigarette at the back of a shelter shed. Finally Col poked at Pat and jerked his thumb up.
Pat hesitated for a moment, then he nodded. He sucked at the mouthpiece for a final breath, passed it to Matt and kicked for the surface. Hissing gently between his teeth, he watched the dinghy slowly grow as he climbed in the shimmering water.
Of course you had to leave. There was no point in you staying down there; you were just one extra head for the tank. But ’
A warm current flowed over him as the water became green. His lungs were beginning to ache and he felt his heart thudding in his chest, but he could see the lipping skin of the surface just above him.
And that’s your dad down there! Not Matt, just Dad, the bloke who will somehow get everyone out of disaster. And he calls us Dad and Son. Hey!
Pat burst from the water a metre from the dinghy. He took one stroke to the side of it, grabbed the dinghy and panted. A sea mist was drifting over the still sea but he could see the dark shadow of the Tub, like a pier, fifty metres away.
Nothing in the world had changed.
32 / treasure
‘That was a dumb thing to do,’ said Col, his first words out of the water.
Matt shrugged. ‘It had to be done.’
Pat reached out from the dinghy for Matt’s hand. ‘But you’re all right?’ He sounded very nervous.
Matt looked at Pat’s hand, tilting his head to smile at him. ‘That’s the first time I’ve done that. Bit hairy.’ He grabbed Pat’s hand and kicked himself into the dinghy.
‘A bit.’ Col hefted the tanks over the gunnel and followed them.
Matt shrugged. ‘Read that some kids get a kick racing to the surface and down again before the bends start. They say when you come out like that the nitrogen bubbles don’t start in your blood for a few minutes. Okay, it worked that time.’
‘Are you quite sure?’ Col held his hands out as if he expected Matt to keel over any moment.
Matt took Col’s shoulders in both hands and squeezed them. ‘I’m sure, mate. That’s the end of it.’ He disconnected the yellow buoy from the dinghy and pulled towards the Tub.
But it’s not, thought Pat. Something had changed down there. Col’s the same, stirring your imagination, being a bigger Robbie as well as being Mum, worrying about you all the time. But there were no more of Matt’s secrets, no pirate chasing a crazy dream of a treasure ship. Somehow part of Matt had stayed down there.
They climbed up on the Tub awkwardly, concentrating on getting their suits off before doing anything else.
Matt – Dad – smiled at Pat and rubbed his hands together. ‘Hey son, let’s have a look at it!’
Pat passed him the chain, feeling the surprising weight in his hand.
Matt turned on the light in the wheelhouse and held the chain up to the bulb, swaying it to catch the glitter. He sighed softly and smiled at Col. ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’
Matt placed the chain gently on the deck, stroking the kinks in it and its small cross. There had been a stone in the middle of the cross but now there was no more than a gap. He tapped and smiled at Pat like an old poker player. ‘Well, that’s me, I’ll see you.’
Smiling back, Pat pulled out his red stone and placed it near the cross. ‘Couple of sevens?’ The stone was too big to fit in the cross but it had been worked at.
It flashed as he moved his head and he realised there were precise cuts on it to give it tiny angular planes, like a cut diamond.
Col picked up the red pebble, spat at it and rubbed it against his thigh. The pebble shone from its centre, a crystal glass of wine. ‘Four aces.’
‘A ruby then?’ said Matt.
Col nodded. ‘Definitely. And it’s a big one.’
‘Well ’?’ Pat looked from Matt to Col, twitching the beginning of a smile.
Col placed the ruby back as he lightly finished Pat’s question: ‘Is that wreck down below us the Flor?’
Matt waved a finger over the chain and the ruby. ‘That, my son, is the whole bag of wax. The Royal Flush. Is it the Flor do Mar, the Treasure Ship, loaded with the Malacca Sultan’s loot down below? Oh, yes, it bloody well is!’
Pat flicked his eyes to Col.
‘Yes, I think so,’ Col said almost reluctantly.
Matt looked at Col, a fine twitching at the corners of his lips, Col slowly smiled, Matt grinned, Col beamed at him and began to laugh. They roared at each other, shaking their shoulders, arms, then leaned back to howl into the morning mist. As if their nightmares, Col’s Sorrento and Matt’s Accident, were finally being hurled out of their systems.
Pat felt that he wasn’t quite part of their eruption, but he was giggling with them. He couldn’t help it.
But when the laughing petered away Matt put his heavy arm over Pat’s shoulder and squinted down at him. ‘Hey, how’s things?’ As if he had been away for a long while.
‘Good, fantastic ’’
‘But not perfect.’ Matt tapped Pat’s jaw affectionately with his free hand. He nodded at the grey water.
‘No, no, it’s great!’ Pat shook his head. What did he mean?
Matt smiled at the chain and the ruby. ‘We’re a bit like your mate Robbie, still catching small fish. We’ll have to try it again.’
Col looked at Matt and Pat with a touch of sadness.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ Matt said quickly. ‘We’ve got the ship.’
‘I’m happy, I’m happy.’
‘Well you hardly look it.’
Col shrugged. ‘Just thinking, this is the end of it.’
‘What are you talking about? We’ve got a treasure ship down there, this is the beginning!’
‘Sure.’
‘Come on, we’ll haul things from the wreck that haven’t been seen for five hundred years, a glass peacock maybe, a crown of green jade. Floris going to be big. Huge. We’ll have to get a bigger boat ’’ Suddenly Matt looked around the scarred Tub.
‘And that’s it,’ said Col.
‘The Tub?’
‘We need a lot of guys – experts,’ said Col. ‘Teams of divers are going to spend hours on the bottom. We need wreck archaeologists to make sure we don’t foul up everything down there. It’ll be like the site of a ruined temple.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Matt sighed.
‘And the mountains of paper. There will be Indonesian officials, because the ship is in their water, and there will be Portuguese officials, because it was their ship, and Malaysian officials, because the treasure was taken from their Malacca. We are going to need a lawyer, maybe a platoon of them.
‘All right, all right.’
‘Okay, we’ll get through it. But this is the best of it. This is the end of playing about, of drifting around with the Tub, putting about with funny dreams. No more barbequed coral trout under the stars. We can’t dive for the bottom and see what we can find anymore. It’s not getting better from this moment.’
But Matt was smiling broadly. ‘Oh, I don’t know ’ We can do some of that work from home.’
‘Home?’ Pat said very lightly, as if he was trying to stroke a butterfly. ‘You want to come home?’
‘That is if Beth can put up with me ’’
Pat saw that his left hand was shaking and clamped it down. But the quiver seemed to ripple up his arm, up his throat, across his cheek and hit his mouth, giving him a dumb, lopsided grin.
‘We’ll get Robbie a snorkel and see if he can catch a bigger fish. Maybe we can take Beth and Misery Col up in a balloon while we are doing the paperwork. And when we come back with a better boat Beth can come with us ’’
Everything is coming right, Pat thought.
Then he saw a footprint on the deck.
33 / footprint
Matt clapped his hands. ‘Come on boy, don’t go to sleep now ’ What are you looking at?’
‘Feet.’
‘Why the hell for?’
‘You’ve got bare feet, everybody has bare feet.’
‘So?’
Pat simply pointed at the half-footprint near the edge of the China lion. The sharp zigzag pattern of a sandshoe.
Col pulled his nose. ‘Oh ’’
But Matt shrugged. ‘We wear sandshoes often.’
‘Not like this.’ Col was on his feet, crouching above the footprint. ‘This one’s almost come straight from the shoe shop.’ He stepped quickly to the wheelhouse.
Matt glanced at Pat. ‘You couldn’t have brought a sandshoe like that?’
Pat shook his head.
‘The fishermen were here.’ Matt called after Col.
‘You saw them. They never wore anything on their feet. Besides, rain’s washed the deck since then.’ Col studied the inside of the wheelhouse. ‘There has been someone here.’
‘What, the machines smashed?’ Matt scrambled to his feet, collided with Pat.
But to Pat, there was nothing wrong. The machines’ little green lights were glowing, the chronometer was ticking softly, the old wheel moved slightly, nothing was broken.
‘I can’t see anything wrong.’ Matt said in annoyance.
Col pointed at the pile of charts and graphs of the sea bottom. They were confused, pushed to one side, but nothing more.
‘Ah, come on.’
Col stepped into the wheelhouse and snatched a mug from the top of the compass. He pulled a coffee-stained sheet of paper from the pile. ‘My mug was there, on the pile. I would never put my mug on the compass.’
‘Ho boy.’
Col yanked a drawer out from below the machines, and pulled out a wallet. He flapped it open.
‘Hey, that’s mine.’
Col showed him. There were a few plastic cards, but there was no money. Nothing at all.
‘Okay. They have been here.’
‘The General and his bloody boat.’
‘But why has he been so careful? His guys could have gone through the Tub like a cyclone.’
‘Because ’ Hell.’ Col hurried out of the wheelhouse to the dinghy, pulled the rope that was used to dangle the tanks in the deep and threw it down on the deck.
Pat looked around the Tub, and suddenly it was full of lurking shadows.
Col picked up the severed end of the rope, studying the even strands and looked up. ‘The General didn’t want anyone to know that his boat was here. The Tub would have been a deserted boat floating in the sea, like the Marie Celeste. Just one more mystery that couldn’t be solved.’
Matt frowned at the rope in Col’s hand.
‘This wasn’t bitten off by a fish.’ Col said quietly.
Matt closed his wallet. ‘What are you saying?’
‘The General’s men were here in the dinghy too. The General had them pulling up that thick rope to see what we had down there. From the tanks he would have worked out that we were fiddling around in deep water. So he cut the rope but he left the torch. Then he lowered the rope into the water.’
‘I don’t understand. Why?’ said Pat.
‘Because he has a lovely imagination. He can be cruising ten kilometres away, but he can know that we are swimming up from the deep to that torchlight with emptying tanks and no full tanks waiting for us.’
‘That would be murder,’ muttered Matt.
‘Yes.’
‘But why? Why?’ Pat was trying to grasp an understanding and failed.
‘I don’t know. Maybe he
doesn’t like the colour of our eyes,’ said Col.
Matt looked at Pat, and then shook his head. ‘Oh no, it’s not worth it. We’ve got to get away.’
Col nodded, moving to pull up the Tub’s anchor.
‘But ’’ Pat opened his hands helplessly.
‘We can come back, but we can’t stay now.’ Matt started the motor and guided the Tub to the long, light line across the chasm as Col hauled it in.
He is carrying on like Col at the village, Pat thought. Because you’re on the Tub he is giving up his great treasure ship. How do you feel about that?
Awful.
Col pulled the yellow buoy out of the water. ‘Do you know where this is?’
Matt grabbed the chart in a moment of fright. ‘Oh, yes. No worries at all.’
Col cut the deep line away from the buoy.
It coiled and dropped into the water. It would snake down through the black deep to the Flor do Mar, silent in the dark. But Pat was feeling better.
34 / mist
Col pulled the grapnel from the other side of the chasm, then Matt tracked down the other yellow buoys so Col could pull them from the water. Now there was not a sign that they had been there. Matt turned the Tub blindly into heavy shrouds of mist, heavy enough for Pat to have trouble working out Col’s shadow against the shape of the drums on the bow.
‘This is good to hide us,’ said Matt as the planks trembled from the motor. ‘Couple of days and we’re in Singapore, and then home. The General can’t stop us.’
‘Hey!’ Col strolled to the wheelhouse. ‘Don’t you think you’re going too fast? You can’t see!’
‘Fast! The Tub couldn’t catch a pier.’ But Matt slowed the engine to a steady beat and the wake died to a ripple.
And that allowed the other sound to be heard.
‘What’s wrong?’ Matt saw Pat’s changing face.
Pat was leaning away from the wheelhouse, staring into the white fog. ‘You can’t hear it?’
‘No, what?’
‘A throbbing sound.’
Col glanced at Pat and stepped quickly to the rail and hunched like a buzzard, listening, pushing his eyes forward. Then he shook his head slowly. ‘No, I can’t hear anything.’
Treasure Hunters Page 15
