Thunderbolt Wilbur Smith (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

o’clock we were close enough to see the detail of the coastline, bays and headlands and stretches of scrub and sand, an occasional village, even the fringes of trees.

Seeing the palm trees made me think of Mum back on Zanzibar. I prayed her tough streak would see her through this ordeal. Like me, Mum’s idea of a nightmare is being powerless. If there’s a problem, she has to sort it. The odds don’t matter. She’s tenacious. That’s why she’s such an effective activist. But what, realistically, could she be doing to help us now? Unable to do anything, the worry would be eating her alive.

For some reason I assumed we would hold off landing until nightfall, that the pirates would want to return under the cover of darkness, spiriting us away without risk of detection. But I was wrong. Late in the afternoon with the sun still a good hour or two above the horizon, we veered landward and sailed straight into a scabby little harbour backed by a mess of corrugated sheds, with both boats in plain view.

The captain pulled the cruiser up to the ramshackle pontoon – made out of concrete and piled-up packing crates – next to a decent-sized boat that smelled of rotting fish. Nobody aboard it seemed to mind, and the pirates were instantly embroiled in a loud and cheerful conversation with a man on deck who paused in what he was doing – mending some sort of winch, it looked like – to shout equally happily back at him. At one point the captain went as far as to pull Amelia and Xander from the cabin so he could show them off to his friend. He also jerked his thumb at me, laughing.

A group of men gathered on the dock to look at Pete’s boat, which Mo had skipped ashore to tie up. I have to hand it to him, he’s good at knots. Barrel-man made it clear I should join him. I gathered our three dry-bags from the bulkhead, half thinking he’d scream at me to put them back, or worse still show me the palm of his hand uncomfortably quickly again, but he didn’t seem to care. He was more interested in greeting the men gathering on the quay, who seemed good friends with all the pirate crew.

The atmosphere felt a bit like I imagine it would when soldiers return from war. More men showed up as news of our arrival quickly spread. If everyone hadn’t been so happy to see the captain, Barrel-man, the wounded Bear and Flip-flops, I’d have been worried: looked at one way the crowd seemed hyper enough to be dangerous, but the mood was in fact more festive than angry.

Though nobody laid a finger on us I was frightened that they might, and suddenly very aware that Amelia was the only girl in sight. Whether or not she’d clocked that too I don’t know, but her face, bowed to the dusty dock, was pretty ashen.

Mo hovered close to us, to one side of me one minute and the other side of Amelia the next. It seemed he was doing his best to form a one-man wall around us. ‘When we move off, stick close together, with me, yes,’ he said.

Why he thought we might do anything other than that, I don’t know. I’d already ruled out trying to make a run for it. There were too many eyes on us, and in any case which way would we go? No, there’d be a better opportunity sooner or later, and when it came I’d make sure we were ready for it.

‘Keep your heads down, and stay close together,’ I said to Xander and Amelia.

Instantly I wished I hadn’t when she replied, ‘Why repeat stuff Mo’s already said?’

I understood; when Amelia is stressed, she finds it even harder than usual not to point out things like repetition, superstition or lapses of logic. ‘Nice to be back on dry land anyway,’ I said in a lame attempt to calm her.

‘Lovely,’ said Xander.

‘I’d hardly call it that,’ said Amelia.

Ignoring this literal take on his sarcasm, Xander asked Mo what he thought would happen next.

‘They’ll take us to a safe house for the night, I expect,’ he answered, adding, ‘Don’t worry, nothing’s changed. You’re still very valuable to them.’

The words ‘safe’ and ‘valuable’ were comforting, I suppose. We had little choice but to hope they were true.

Leaving the boats in the hands of the men who had gathered to greet them – one of whom was already at work bleeding the contaminated fuel from the dive boat’s outboards – the pirates steered us away from the quay and into the little town behind it.

The sun was in our faces. It made the moving figures ahead of us silhouettes. A dog missing one of its front legs hopped out of our way, disappearing behind a half-built wall.

We moved in among the buildings. I tried to take it all in. One thing was for sure, this place was poor. We’re not talking mud huts with grass roofs, but all the buildings were basic, a hotch-potch of breeze blocks and corrugated metal overlain in places with bits of plastic tarpaulin.

That wall there was braced with three logs; one end of each was jammed in the ground with the other angled up towards the roofline. The wall itself still looked like it was about to fall over. It would kill that chicken pecking at its base if it did.

The street was unpaved; dust rose around us as we moved forward. A filthy white car stood in the lee of the next building we passed. It had no windscreen.

The first children I’d seen, younger than us by far, were playing on a bit of scrub near where we turned left. They were using a plastic bottle as a football, kicking it about without much enthusiasm.

Spotting us, they stopped to watch us pass. One of the littlest broke from the group and ran in among our legs, hand