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  The chart had plenty of rocks and shoals marked on it. Some would be visible, some would be underwater, depending on the tide, but Jian knew them all.

  “This channel is completely safe,” he said, tapping the space between the islands. “And we can drop anchor here and have our lunch.”

  It was Beck’s turn to be at the wheel again as the last island drew near. They passed it by on the port side – the left. It reminded him of a fortress built in the sea. There were no sandy beaches to lounge about on. Most of it seemed to be a platform of boulders and rocks that were only just higher than the sea they rose out of. Even now, the sea rose and fell so that the rocks were covered in a thin layer of water that was always in motion. It was either washing in with the next wave, or it was draining out again through the nooks and crannies. Then the next wave would come in and start the process all over again.

  The centre of the island was a little higher, basically a big lump of rock, with a thin layer of soil that had accumulated over the centuries on the bits that the tide didn’t reach. It was covered thickly in foliage, where seeds had blown over from the mainland and taken root in soil that was just thick enough to support them. So, everything would be battling for height and ground, without anything being able to get really massive. It was wild and untamed, all jumbled together without any human hand to guide it.

  Beck could also see the damage that the recent typhoon had caused. It must have smashed through here like an express train. Many trees lay uprooted, and bushes were still pressed flat against the ground. They were just starting to straighten up again. Without anywhere to shelter, the islands would not have been pleasant places to be.

  “Beck!” Jian called. He was standing on the foredeck, legs apart to brace himself. He pointed to starboard, to the right, with a flat hand to indicate that Beck should steer a little more away from the island. Beck nodded and turned the wheel a fraction until Jian was satisfied. Ju-Long tightened one of the winches to adjust the sails to the new direction. With the island to one side, there was now no land at all ahead until – well, Beck thought, probably Indonesia. And that was a good two thousand kilometres away. It was like they were at the very end of China.

  “Thank you.” Jian began to come back to the cockpit. “A wind like this could blow us onto the shore so it is best to keep distance–”

  CRASH.

  Dolphin stopped as abruptly as if it had run into a brick wall. The vibration ran through the entire boat and the sound of splintering fibreglass came up through the cabin hatch.

  Jian was flung down onto one side. He landed awkwardly on his left arm with a shout of pain. The rim of the wheel banged into Beck’s ribs as an invisible force threw him forwards. Ju-Long, who was sitting on one of the cockpit benches, was flung to the floor like a rag doll.

  Then, suddenly, Dolphin was moving again. It was turning, towards the island, blown around by the wind. Beck spun the wheel but it didn’t make any difference.

  “Jian?” he shouted. Jian was slowly trying to sit up, clumsily, thwarted by the boat’s random movement. His left arm seemed dead, and he was clutching it hard with his right hand, which meant he didn’t have a hand to spare for himself. His teeth were clamped, his face set in a mask of pain.

  There was something strange about the yacht’s motion, Beck realised. It no longer cut through the waves. It seemed to be bobbing on top, like a toy in the bathtub, not like a proper boat. And it wasn’t moving forward.

  But it was leaning. It always leaned away from the wind, a little, but now it was more and more over, to port. The left side of the boat was dipping down into the sea. Thirty degrees. Forty. Forty five. From the cabin came the sound of things dropping and breaking.

  Then it was more than halfway over. Beck braced himself against the increasing angle and watched with horror as the sea came closer and closer to the edge of the cockpit.

  Chapter 4

  Jian had struggled into a sitting position. He began to call their names, then broke off as his face contorted in pain and he clutched his arm again. He finished the sentence in a spurt of Chinese.

  “He says, we must get the sails down. He thinks the keel has gone,” Ju-Long translated, as she scrambled up out of the cockpit. Beck quickly scrabbled his way up to help her. Dolphin’s rudder was almost out of the water, so abandoning the wheel made no difference. The boat was so far over that the three of them were standing or sitting on the starboard side of the cabin.

  And Beck could see at once that Jian was right. There was just a jagged hole in the fibreglass hull where the keel should have been, and water lapped against the broken edges.

  Without the weight of the keel underneath, the force of the wind in the sails was enough to blow the yacht over. And that was why they weren’t moving. A sailing boat moved forwards because it was balanced between the pressures on the sails and the keel. But with no keel…

  They had to get the sails down before Dolphin was knocked completely flat.

  Jian muttered something else, almost to himself.

  “And he thinks he has broken his arm,” Ju-Long added.

  And I think he’s right about that, too, Beck thought grimly. He could see the way Jian’s arm was hanging. When the older boy had fallen over, he had landed even more badly than it looked.

  “I would help if I could–” Jian mumbled, now in English. He scooted on his backside away from the mast, still holding his arm, to make room for Beck and Ju-Long.

  “Don’t worry about it. First things first,” Beck assured him quickly. He released the halyard for the mainsail and pulled it down with strong, steady heaves, while Ju-Long took care of the foresail.

  But the port side of the cockpit had reached the level of the sea. Water splashed over it, then began to pour in as the boat settled further. The cabin hatch was still above the water, but somehow Beck could hear the sound of water gurgling inside the cabin. He crawled along the side of the boat to peer through the hatch, and cursed under his breath at what he saw.

  They had opened the cabin windows to get fresh air into the boat. Now the port side windows were below water and it was gushing in, its weight dragging Dolphin down even further. Even as Beck watched, the water reached the open hatch.

  “It’s going down!” Jian called. “It’s too late to save it!”

  Chapter 5

  Going down.

  Caught on a sinking boat, every particle of Beck’s body wanted to leap off. But common sense told him it still had a few minutes left, and maybe he could do something to help? No survivor ever achieved anything by panicking. You had to stay on top of the situation.

  What had they hit? he wondered. Jian had been so confident, and then – crash. But that wasn’t important right now. Survive this, and they would have all the time they wanted to ask why.

  His eyes fixed on a pair of life buoys tied to the stern rail, fastened with knots that could be released with a couple of tugs. They were shaped like giant letter ‘U’s, made of plastic-covered foam. Okay, those would be needed. He jumped down into the flooded cockpit and stood on what used to be the doors of the side lockers beneath the benches, so that the water came up to his knees. He pulled the life buoys free and carried them with him as he clambered back up onto the side of the yacht.

  Ju-Long was speaking rapidly to Jian in Chinese, with gestures at the water. Jian nodded. Ju-Long knelt and pushed her face into the water while she fumbled with something below the surface. Jian waited, seething with impatience and his useless arm.

  “She is trying to get the life raft,” he said by way of explanation to Beck, and Beck understood. The raft was in a hard plastic shell the size of a water barrel, tied to the roof of the cabin. Once it was released it would open up and inflate itself automatically.

  But the buckles that fastened the straps were on the other side of the boat – underwater. Ju-Long reared her head up suddenly, with water streaming from her face. She gasped, took a deep breath and plunged herself back under before either Beck or Jian c
ould say anything. She would be doing it all by feel – Beck knew what it was like trying to see underwater without a mask, with the salt turning your eyes raw. It was next to impossible. But he also knew she wouldn’t stop trying. She was never one to panic – she analysed what was needed, with a cool head, and went for it. In the jungle she had been the first one to say out loud that they had to go for help. Her first thought was always for how she could help others.

  The sea washed over his shoes. They still stood on the side of the cabin and almost all the boat was under. Ju-Long suddenly brought her head up again, gasping for breath.

  “I can’t reach…”

  “Never mind,” Beck said quickly, grabbing her before she went back for a third, futile effort. He cocked an eye at the island – it couldn’t be more than a hundred metres away. “We can swim it – right, Jian?”

  Jian was the captain and the final decision to abandon ship had to be his. Jian gazed helplessly at the island, and at the boat sinking beneath his feet, and nodded without speaking.

  “Here…” Beck said. He pushed one of the U-shaped life buoys under Jian’s armpits. The older boy hissed with pain as he was forced to raise his broken arm up, but then it was done.

  “Just lie down,” Beck said, giving him a gentle push to back up his words. Jian struggled to resist at first, until he realised what Beck was doing. He sat back and the buoy simply floated him off Dolphin’s hull.

  Beck chucked the other buoy into the water, and he and Ju-Long dived in after it. If he had been wearing anything bulky then he would have stripped it off first, but the clothes and shoes he had were light enough not to matter. What counted was getting off the boat before it took them down with it.

  The water was cool – under any other circumstances it would have been refreshing. They popped up beside Jian and grabbed hold of the buoy between them. They trod water and turned to look back at the yacht.

  Heavy bubbles heaved around the sinking boat. By now, only the tip of the mast – the crosstrees that jutted out on either side, and the radar reflector – stuck out of the water, not quite level with the surface. The angle of the mast slowly grew steeper again as the boat sank beneath it. It stopped moving with about three metres showing, sticking up at an angle that was about twenty degrees off the vertical. Dolphin must have settled on the bottom at a depth of about ten metres.

  Jian was still in a daze, staring at the top of the mast. Ju-Long and Beck, not feeling much better, clung onto their buoy and gazed at where the yacht had been.

  Concentrate, concentrate, Beck told himself. It wasn’t the first time calamity had struck suddenly. He made himself run through the options in his head.

  There was a radio in the cabin, but everything had happened too quickly to send off a distress call. And there were distress flares in the cockpit lockers which could have been used to get the attention of rescuers – but, again, too quickly. Even if they could dive down to the boat – he would have to think about that – the radio would be useless by now. The flares, probably not so much. They were in sealed metal tubes, watertight. If he could get at them.

  He glanced over at the island. It had looked closer when he was still on the boat. At sea level, with his eyes only a couple of inches above the water, it looked a lot further. But it was where they had to be. It was so close that it was the obvious destination to get to, and they should do it before the tide turned and swept them away.

  “Let’s get moving,” he said. Ju-Long nodded, and spoke to Jian in Chinese. Then she said it again, more sharply to get his attention. He seemed to snap back into the real world.

  “Can you swim?” Beck asked. Jian’s face was taut and pale, and he still held his teeth together unless he absolutely had to say something. But he nodded.

  “I still have legs.”

  “Okay… Hang on…”

  There were rope handles around the edges of the buoys so that multiple survivors could hang onto each one. Beck untoggled one from his buoy, threaded it through a handle on Jian’s, and reattached it to his own. Now the two buoys were linked and no one would be left behind.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  Jian gave a last look back at the tip of the mast, still poking bravely above the waves. Then he started to kick his away from the wreck with firm thrusts of his legs. His face was set in agony but he never made a sound.

  It took a long time for the island to draw near. Salt water splashed against Beck’s face and into his eyes. He could feel the surges of the waves through the water, half the time pulling them closer to the island, half the time pushing them back, so that it felt like they were making no progress at all. The steep sides that Beck had seen from the boat looked even harsher from surface level, and the island towered out of the water above them.

  But, over the sound of their splashing feet, Beck’s ears picked up the sound of water hitting rocks. They were drawing closer, bit by bit, and he could feel the invisible force of the swell, picking him up and letting him down again. He craned his neck, trying to make himself as high up as he could to get a better view of what lay ahead, and saw a wave dashing itself into foaming pieces on the boulders around the island’s base. He remembered the layers of rocks and boulders. They would be harsh and unforgiving. They could tear the bottom of a boat out, just as easily as break bones.

  He saw the look of calculation on Jian’s face – the grim set to the older boy’s jaw as he squared up to the near certainty of his broken arm bashing against the rocks, and a lot more pain.

  “Okay,” Beck said grimly. “We’re going to have to time this just right…”

  Even as he spoke, he felt the next wave lifting them up and towards the island.

  Chapter 6

  Beck fixed his eyes on the rocks ahead, calculating by pure instinct.

  “And – swim!”

  They kicked furiously, propelling themselves forward. Up ahead, the wave disintegrated into foam as it dashed against the rocks, and now they were heading straight for a hard, jagged boulder crusted with barnacles. White water surged around them. It reminded Beck too vividly of his recent adventure in the jungle, when he had inadvertently been swept away by a river into rapids. The water hissed and bubbled with a life of its own.

  And then, just as surely as they had felt the force carrying them towards the island, suddenly the island was pushing them away again. The waves were draining back off the rocks.

  “Try and hold steady,” Beck ordered. “Don’t let it carry us too far away…”

  The next wave was coming in. Beck could feel its force growing beneath them.

  “This is the one. Go!”

  The wave carried them up and over the rock. A shudder ran through the life buoys as they grounded, and Beck felt his knees and legs bang and scrape against the hard surface. Jian made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a whimper.

  The draining water pulled at them like a thousand little fingers, trying to pluck them back into the ocean. Beck and Ju-Long scrambled to their feet, dripping wet with their clothes plastered to their bodies, and they helped Jian stand up, while the running water made bow waves around their shins. Together they grabbed the life buoys and hurried further up the rocks.

  Behind them, Beck heard the next wave crashing in – but now they were high enough up that its remnants, the very last of the foam, only splashed around their feet. A few more metres, and they could drop the life buoys.

  Jian sank straight down into a squat, his head between his knees, clutching his broken wrist. Ju-Long bent double, her hands resting on her knees while she spat out the foul taste of salt water. Beck stood with his hands on his hips and drew in slow, deep breaths while he looked around.

  They were on a rocky ledge that extended for thirty or forty metres in either direction, before it curved out of sight. It was pitted with small rock pools and inlets where the sea surged in and out. Beck made a mental note of the pools. If there were fish trapped in them then they would be easy picking for three shipwrecked castaways.
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  The ledge sloped gently upwards, away from the sea, to a small cliff a couple of metres high. The granite rocks were all shades of dark grey, while an even darker streak showed where water was trickling down from the high ground.

  Between them and the cliff was a line of dead, dried seaweed and flotsam – man-made rubbish that had been washed up, then left behind when the tide went down. That was the high water mark – the highest point that the water reached when the tide came in.

  Jian was muttering, very quietly, in Chinese – the same words, over and over again. Beck couldn’t understand the words but he could read the tone. Harsh and bitter.

  “He says, ‘it’s my fault, it’s my fault’,” Ju-Long said quietly. And again, Beck found himself wondering what had caused the accident. Jian knew these waters and he had had the chart. He wouldn’t have taken the boat in close to any danger that he knew about.

  But, trying to reassure Jian probably would be hard. The fact was that responsibility came down to the guy in charge. Beck didn’t know if Jian could have done anything different. He couldn’t tell if it really had been Jian’s fault or not. What he did know was that Jian was a good sailor. He wanted to remind Jian of the things he could do well, to stop him beating himself up. That was quite apart from the medical help he was going to need to deal with that broken bone, and the shock and pain.

  And a good sailor would know the tides.

  So, Beck spoke, deliberately loud.

  “Jian, what’s the tide doing now?”

  Jian looked up and took a breath.

  “It’s low tide right now.” He still sounded dazed, bewildered, not quite able to believe he was here and having to say this now. “We were going to go around the island and the incoming tide would help carry us back to the mainland.”

  “Okay.” Beck checked his watch – it was waterproofed to fifty metres and a small thing like a shipwreck wouldn’t have affected it at all. It was just short of one p.m., and the tide worked on a cycle of just over twelve hours from low to high to low again. “So. High tide is at seven.”