Thunderbolt Wilbur Smith (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

lot of fun this evening,’ said Xander, turning to me. He’d also obviously lost interest in Mum and Amelia’s coral-cataloguing conversation.

‘Sorry, yeah. Miles away.’

‘I could see that. What are you thinking about so hard?’

‘Kids,’ I said. I hadn’t planned to. I just blurted it out.

‘Eh?’

‘They employ kids in this hotel, doing the laundry, cleaning the rooms. I just saw two girls who work here, both younger than me.’

Xander nodded. ‘There was a boy scrabbling about in the flowerbed out front when my cab pulled up. I thought he must have lost something. But he was digging weeds. He was tiny. Eight or nine at most.’

Amelia took a breath. I’ve heard her do so a million times. Generally, it’s a sign she’s going to set me straight on something. Now was no exception.

‘You realise kids our age have it rougher than us all over the place. We’re the exception, not the rule?’

‘Sure, but –’

‘The chambermaids and gardeners they employ here should still be in school, but many kids are even worse off. Those boys and girls we saw digging with their bare hands in the Congolese mines, for example. Remember how hopelessly exploited they were? Well, even they are lucky compared to some.’

‘How?’ asked Xander.

‘Most of the world’s nastiest conflicts involve child soldiers one way or another. Theirs has to be the bleakest existence. All sorts of evil gangs and militia and even state armies force kids our age and younger to run chores for soldiers, man checkpoints themselves, act as spies and in the worst cases fight on the front lines. It’s a fact: kids are pretty much used as cannon fodder, all over the place. For example, in Somalia, just up the mainland coast, there are children fighting for the government and every other warring faction, including the dreaded Al-Shabaab. They’re Islamic terrorists,’ she said, second-guessing my blank look. ‘Jihadist fundamentalists, linked to Al-Qaeda.’

I looked out across the terrace, twinkling with fairy lights now, while Amelia expanded on the dreadful conflict in Somalia. She talked of the country’s problem with pirates, so desperate that they’d risk attacking international boats protected by armed guards.

Beyond the terrace lay the shifting surface of the sea, studded with reflected stars. It was a beautiful sight. So tranquil, in fact, that it made it hard to believe what Amelia was saying, though I knew she was telling the truth.

Lounging around in this luxurious resort, eating great food, with only the excitement of diving for treasure to worry about … we had it good, I knew that. But weirdly, although I felt sympathy for all those kids working for a pittance or being forced to fight in wars, I also resented having to think about them at all. Their problems weren’t my fault and I couldn’t do anything to help them, could I?

Luckily Pete arrived at that moment, distracting me. He was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, which immediately brought my uncle Langdon to mind. Pushing that unwelcome thought aside I said to Xander, ‘Actually, I was thinking about where we might dive tomorrow. What’s the plan, Pete?’

The dive instructor immediately launched in with suggestions. Xander had done his research. He seemed to know the spots as Pete brought them up. Either that, or he was doing his excellent-with-adults thing again.

I could tell he wanted to be as excited by our find as I was, and his enthusiasm spurred mine on: by the end of the evening I’d pushed aside the message I’d seen on Mum’s computer. I couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I went to bed so keen to get up and dive again in the morning that I found it hard to sleep.

7.

We worked our way around the island’s pristine coastline over the following days, expertly guided by Pete. He dropped us in all the best spots, close to the island’s honeymoon epicentres, and he tended the boat while we searched the seabed, kept a watch on what was happening above the water, warning away the odd speedboat and jet-ski that strayed too close, making sure nothing ran us down when we surfaced.

We searched and searched with our detectors. The three of us egged each other on to do more dives and stay out longer, meaning we spent the maximum possible time we could hunting for treasure in those turquoise shallows.

Why the intensity? Because we were successful again, and success was like a drug: the more we had, the more we wanted.

We never repeated the two-rings-in-one-dive result, and we turned up a hell of a lot of rubbish, from tiny fish hooks so small that only Xander’s detector spotted them, to a complete anchor and chain which somebody must have slung overboard without checking it was attached to the boat. The only way we could retrieve this hulking mess was to swim down to it with a bit of rope, tie that to the chain-end, and swim clear to let Pete winch it up into the launch.

He wasn’t best pleased to see the rusty thing bleeding out in his immaculate white hold. But he was as delighted as we were when we turned up a slim ring the following morning, and we were yet more excited about the one after that, a fatter ring studded with tiny diamonds flush to its platinum surface.

In all, over the next seven days, we found five valuable rings. Xander and Amelia found two each, and I found the last one, a single band of gold. Xander also pinpointed a gold earring that morning. Together with the engraved pair of wedding rings Amelia and I started with, that meant we’d sniffed out eight pieces of actual treasure in a little over a week and a half.

And we still had a bit of time left. But with the end of the trip in sight, I began to feel antsy, and not just because it meant an end to our metal detecting. If my hunch was right, and Mum had chosen Zanzibar because of what –