Mission Dragon Read online

  By sunset, the place where they were standing would be underwater. That was fine – it gave them plenty of time to explore.

  Above the cliff was the rest of the island. The tightly packed undergrowth that Beck had seen from the sea came right up to the edge and, this close up, the damage caused by the recent typhoon was even more obvious. The hundred-mile-per-hour winds had torn branches away and uprooted trees, and now they were all matted together.

  Jian looked back at where Dolphin’s mast still stuck out of the water.

  “It must have been the typhoon,” he said suddenly. “It tore up the sea bed as well. It disturbed the sand banks – it probably moved rocks about. The keel hit one of them. I know these waters but I didn’t think they might have changed.” His shoulders sagged. “I should have realised.”

  Ju-Long put a hand on his good shoulder.

  “No one is blaming you,” she said gently.

  “We’re here, we’re alive,” Beck agreed. “The big question is – how long will it be until we’re missed? And will they know where to look for us?”

  “How long?” Jian cocked his head as he thought. “My father was not sure how long he would be away. It could be a week or more. I asked him if I could take you out on Dolphin, but I did not say where, and he would not expect us to get in touch while we were on board. So, it might be a week before he misses us. Then, he might guess I headed for the archipelago but he will not know which bit.”

  This was bad news. Boats weren’t like aeroplanes, Beck thought, where you had to file a flight plan before you took off. Then, if anything happened to you en route, rescuers would realise when you didn’t turn up, and they would have a vague idea of where to look for you.

  “Okay.” He thought quickly. “So we might have to stay alive for a week, maybe a bit longer. If we don’t get rescued first. We can do that.”

  Jian looked up at him sceptically and drew a breath to speak – and then let it out again.

  “All those things you were telling us about,” he said. “How you have survived in other places. You can do that now?”

  “No,” Beck said promptly. Both Ju-Long and Jian looked at him sharply, and he corrected what Jian had said. “We can do it now. The three of us, working together.”

  The last thing he wanted was for Jian to start feeling useless. Any survivor had to keep a positive attitude in their head, and the more they were injured, the harder that became. Jian was the oldest, the experienced sailor, Dolphin’s captain. Under any other circumstances he would have been the one in charge. Just because he had an injured hand, Beck saw no reason for him to be diminished in any way.

  “Beck is right,” Ju-Long chipped in. “When we were in the gorge, he was the one who knew where to find food, how to prepare a camp for the night – but I could also teach him some things.”

  “Yup.” Beck grinned at the memory. He still remembered the awe he had felt as Ju-Long used her ki energy, with feats of strength and ability that Beck would have thought were impossible.

  Jian looked from one of them to the other, and for the first time something like a smile flickered over his glum features.

  “The three of us,” he said. “That will be good.”

  “But first,” Beck said, “let’s have a look at your arm. See how bad it is.”

  Jian hesitated, but then he shrugged. Nothing that could happen would make it worse than it was. He sat clumsily down on the rock and rested his arm on his lap.

  Beck gently took hold of it and started to roll back the sleeve, and despite his deliberate optimism he braced himself for whatever he might find.

  Chapter 7

  Jian’s left arm was red and swollen and bruised, but Beck immediately breathed a sigh of relief. It was a closed fracture. The bone was broken, but it didn’t penetrate the skin. That would have opened up whole new areas of complication, such as how to dress the wound, or how to stop it getting infected.

  There was an especially inflamed spot a few centimetres above the wrist, which Beck knew was the break itself. Jian’s arm kinked at that point, with the hand considerably out of line with the rest of it. But he knew better than to take anything for granted, especially where broken bones were concerned. And so he gently pressed his fingers against Jian’s skin, starting at the shoulder and working his way down. He was feeling for swollen tissue, for muscles that spasmed – and of course for the edges of the broken bone. Just because he knew where one break was didn’t mean there weren’t others.

  “Have either of you done a medical course in the Young Pioneers?” he asked conversationally as he went. He had gathered that Jian, like Ju-Long, had been a member of the Chinese youth organisation until he was fourteen.

  “First aid,” Ju-Long said.

  “Nothing like…” Jian nodded at his hand.

  “Okay. We need to establish exactly where the break is, and I think it’s going to be – sorry, Jian – here…”

  He pushed gently with his fingertips at the red spot. Jian hissed abruptly through his teeth and shuddered.

  “Right.” Beck sat back on his haunches and considered. He could do with some ice…

  He had broken one of his own arms in the last year – but that had been in Nepal, on a snowy, icy mountain. Finding ice to put on the break and reduce the swelling hadn’t been hard, there, but it wasn’t going to happen here.

  “I think you’ve got what’s called a Colles fracture – a broken wrist. It’s either the ulna or the radius bones, probably the radius.”

  And very disabling, he didn’t add. Jian would find that out soon enough. Beck’s medical instructor had told him how she had once driven home with a break near the elbow: it worked because the other bone acted as a splint, holding the break in place. This close to the wrist, though, the break didn’t have that kind of support. She had known people faint from a Colles fracture.

  “The best we can do is splint it, and try to get rescued,” Beck finished.

  “You can do that?” Jian asked cautiously.

  “I can.” Beck had practiced it many times – he didn’t mention that he had never actually had to do it on a human patient.

  “Then do what you have to do,” Jian muttered.

  Beck suppressed a shiver. They were all soaked through, and even in the sun, the wind on their wet clothes was going to chill them until they were properly dried out. They were all full of adrenaline, so they would feel colder as it drained out of them. And Jian was probably in shock, which would make him feel colder still. Beck wished they had something to wrap him up in.

  But it told him what the first priority was for Jian, even before they splinted the break.

  “Let’s get you somewhere warm. Over here.”

  There was a nook in the rocks, a bit further up, beyond the high water mark. It was out of the wind, and it faced south, so the rocks were dry and warmed by the sun.

  Beck and Ju-Long helped Jian to his feet. Jian looked like he was going to wave their help away, until he stumbled slightly and once again hissed through his teeth as pain lanced up and down his arm. Then he let them escort him to the nook, and help him to settle down again.

  “Just rest quietly here,” Beck said. “Warm up and dry out while we explore. We need to see what we’ve got to work with – see if we can get something to fix your arm, for a start.”

  Jian shot them a ghost of a smile.

  Beck picked his way around the rocks at the base of the island, following the high water mark. The shoreline was always a rich hunting ground for a survivor – all kinds of goodies could be included in that flotsam. A mental map was growing inside his head: the layout of the island, and the resources they had at their disposal. It was pretty sketchy at the moment, but it would fill out with detail.

  Most of the high water mark was weed, dried and twisted in the sunlight, but there was other stuff too. A dead, rotting sea bird, probably a booby – almost a skeleton, with a few strips of flesh and feathers clinging to it, and a powerful, pointed beak. A plank of wood, still with some bits of paint that had not yet been washed off. An empty plastic bottle. A length of orange plastic netting, of the type that road repair crews might use to section off some roadworks – more like a sheet of plastic with holes in it. A square lump of polystyrene foam that, to judge from the shapes cut into it, must have once been part of the packaging for something thin and electronic – maybe a laptop or a DVD player. There seemed to be a universal law, Beck thought with anger, that every shore on the planet should have at least one lump of washed-up polystyrene on it. The stuff might float extremely well but it took millions of years to degrade, and most of twenty-first century civilisation seemed to be based on it.

  And there would be stuff like this all around the island. He made a mental note of where everything was. Everything could come in useful, maybe even the dead bird, though right now he couldn’t quite think how.

  He kept going until he came to a promontory of high ground that stuck out into the sea. The waves washed right up to its base and he couldn’t go any further. He craned his head back as he looked up at it. It was ten metres high and its side was a sheer cliff. He could probably have climbed it, but at the moment his priority was finding anything that might be useful for Jian, and climbing would just take up time he could use for other purposes. It wouldn’t take much longer just to go around the island the other way, until he got to the promontory on the other side.

  But it was useful to know the high ground was there. He could already think of a very good use for it.

  He made his way back the way he had come, this time picking up bits of flotsam as he went. It made him feel a little like a character in a kids’ computer game, retrieving treasures as he progressed across an alien landscape. By the time he reached Jian’s nook in the rocks, he had a small pile of planks in both arms, with the orange netting and polystyrene block balanced on top, and the bottle and a single foam flip-flop tucked into his waistband.

  Ju-Long was already there, bent double beneath a fishing net that she had had to sling over her back to carry. It was big and black, tangled up into a mass the size of a very fat, tall man, crusted with weed and grit and shells.

  “Wow!” Beck exclaimed. In one stroke, Ju-Long had supplied all their rope needs for the foreseeable future – considerably stronger, and considerably easier to get hold of, than the vines they had had to make do with in the river gorge.

  “There is a small beach in that direction – gravel, not sand. This was washed up – and a lot of other stuff, but I thought it would be useful.”

  “You were right,” he assured her. She had really learned the survivor’s art of identifying the resources available, and using them. It was good to know he could rely on her help.

  “And this,” she said proudly. She gave a fold of the netting a tug, and a coconut fell out onto the rocks. Not the brown, wizened, dried out thing you would get at a fairground but the real deal, the size of a football and encased in green leaves.

  “Well, you got lunch!” he said. “But first let’s see what else we have.”

  They dumped everything into a small pile. Beck sifted through the pieces of wood until he had found a couple the right sort of length for Jian’s splint. They were both straight and smooth and flat – they had been part of something, maybe a boat or a building, quite possibly smashed up and washed out to sea by the typhoon. He knocked them together experimentally. They seemed firm, not likely to snap at a moment’s notice, and they were fully dried out.

  He dug into his pocket for his knife – one of the two personal items that he took everywhere with him, even on sailing holidays – and began to slice off a couple of thin, flat lengths from the block of polystyrene, the same length as the bits of wood.

  “Here’s how it is,” he said conversationally as he worked. He wanted it to sound straightforward, matter-of-fact, to help Jian relax as much as possible. “The muscles of your arm will have contracted, to try and protect the bone.” He held his two forefingers out, crossed in an X. “The broken ends will be overlapping and the muscles will be holding them in place like that. Unfortunately that makes it harder to reset it, so we’re going to have to apply traction. That basically means Ju-Long and I pull on it in different directions. Right?”

  If he could have been sure that rescue was only a few hours away, he would have just splinted the arm as it was. The broken bone would have been held steady and it wouldn’t have got any worse, until a doctor could knock Jian out with an anaesthetic and do it properly. The broken ends wouldn’t grind together, and they wouldn’t move around and cause damage to flesh or nerves or blood vessels.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t be sure when rescue would arrive. It was safest to assume the worst, and make the arm the best it could be now.

  Jian set his jaw firmly and nodded very quickly.

  “Right,” he said. Beck noticed his breathing was speeding up. He knew pain was coming and this was how anyone would react.

  Beck shook a length out of the pile of Ju-Long’s black net, and cut three short lengths of rope. The splint was almost ready. He laid the three lengths on the ground, side by side, and then rested one of the bits of driftwood on top of them, with a strip of polystyrene on top of that. Last of all, he took Jian’s forearm and gently laid it on top of the polystyrene.

  The time had come. He bit his lip and looked down at Jian.

  “This is going to hurt,” he said. Jian was pale, but resolved.

  “I know. Just do it.”

  Beck moved his grip to Jian’s elbow and nodded at Ju-Long. She gently took hold of his wrist with both hands.

  “Okay. Go.”

  Beck clenched his fingers tight, took a deep breath, and pulled.

  Chapter 8

  Jian’s face was twisted, his eyes screwed tight shut, and something like a slow scream squeezed through his clenched teeth.

  Between them, Ju-Long and Beck stretched Jian’s forearm out. Beck kept a steady grip on his elbow with one hand, and he kept the fingers of the other over the break. There was a sudden shift beneath the skin as the two broken ends popped back together.

  Shudders ran through Jian’s body as Beck grabbed the second strip of polystyrene and the second piece of wood, and quickly laid them on top of Jian’s arm. Jian was making retching sounds, as though he might be about to throw up. Beck swiftly tied the ends of the rope over them and over the arm, deftly whipping them into a square knot.

  Jian’s shaking slowly died down. His shoulders stopped heaving. He swallowed a couple of times, still like he might be about to spew, which Beck knew would be a perfectly normal reaction to what had just happened. But after a minute, even that seemed to be under control.

  “Okay.” Beck pinched the ends of his fingers. “Can you feel that”?

  “Yes.” Jian gasped the word out as though it were on his last breath.

  “Do your fingers feel cold?”

  Jian shook his head and Beck puffed his cheeks out with a sigh of relief. The knots he had tied were tight enough to hold the splints in place, but not so much that they cut off the blood or the feeling to Jian’s arm. The wood on either side would keep his arm steady and hold the break so that it could heal. The polystyrene was padding to prevent the wood chafing against his skin.

  Beck cut off a length of the plastic netting and tied the two ends together to make a sling. He hung it around Jian’s neck, then gently rested the splinted arm in it.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “About as comfortable as anyone with a broken arm and no painkillers can be,” Jian said grimly. His voice was sounding stronger and Beck smiled to himself. As long as Jian didn’t take any knocks to the arm, or over-exert himself, he should be okay, for the time being.

  They sat together and Beck drilled a pair of holes in the coconut with his knife – one to let the air in, one to drink from. He hoped it wasn’t too obvious that he passed it to Jian first. Jian was the one who most needed it but Beck knew he wouldn’t want to think he was being nursemaided.

  If Jian noticed, he didn’t say thing. He only took a small sip of the rich, nutritious fluid before passing it on, and that was how they finished it off – each taking turns with a small amount until it was all gone. The perfect balance of salt, minerals and sugar, Beck thought – if the coconut came from a tree on this island, then there was a good chance of finding more. There again, it could have been in the sea for months, floating hundreds of miles, hermetically sealed against the salt water and still perfectly fresh. Time would tell.

  Once it was drained, he cracked the shell open with the blade and sliced out portions of the creamy white meat that lined the inside.

  They all felt more human once it was all gone. It was mid-afternoon – they had missed lunch, and everything else that had happened had drained the strength from them until their bodies were crying out for something to replenish it with.

  “Now I just need some water to wash it down,” Ju-Long said. It was meant to be a light remark, but Jian’s face suddenly grew long, the good mood that comes after a meal forgotten.

  “There was plenty of fresh water in Dolphin’s tanks,” he remarked gloomily. True, Beck thought, but not helpful. He was determined that the older boy shouldn’t be allowed to dwell on the accident. Jian could spend the rest of his life kicking himself for losing Dolphin. That would not help them survive now.

  “Well, there’s water over here.”

  Beck walked to the base of the cliff, and the dark streak that he had noticed earlier. Closer up, he could see it was a thin, glistening film of water that dribbled slowly down the rock face. It pooled at the base of the cliff, and then trickled away to disappear into the million little cracks and crevices of the rock ledge. He put his lips to the wet rock and sucked in. Water sprayed into his mouth like a light aerosol. The rock gave it a dry, stale flavour – it was like sucking on a pebble. It wasn’t thirst-quenching, but it was fresh, and it was good. He smacked his lips.

  “Give it a go,” he suggested. The other two both looked at him like he had gone mad.