Mission Dragon Page 4

  “We live off that?” Jian asked.

  “I didn’t say we live off it – but we can top ourselves up.”

  Jian looked up at the rest of the island.

  “The soil is so thin there probably won’t be proper pools or streams,” he said thoughtfully. “Rain water will just soak through the soil, enough to water the plant life, and come trickling out in places like this.”

  Yet again, Beck thought, that was true but not helpful. It would hardly be enough to keep three of them alive for long. It was ironic that they were surrounded by water. He knew it was possible to get so thirsty that you would happily chug down any liquid, but salt water would only kill you even more quickly. The salt would fry your kidneys and dehydrate you, sucking away what little good water there was in your tissues. There was only one result. Delirium, coma, and death.

  “Still better than nothing,” he said. “There’s other ways to get water.”

  An adult needed three litres of water a day – and that was if they were mostly standing still, not doing much. The three of them were all close enough to adulthood that they couldn’t do with much less, Jian especially – and they would not just be standing still. They would have to be active, trying to survive, fighting a hot sun and breathing air that was laced with salt spray.

  Even if it only took a week to be rescued, if they didn’t find water then their rescuers would only find bodies.

  Ju-Long raised her eyebrows, but she came forward and pressed her mouth against the wet rock as Beck had done.

  “Mm. That is good,” she said as she stepped away.

  “Care for some?” Beck offered to Jian with a smile. Jian frowned, then knelt and scooped a handful of water out of the small pool with his good hand. He did not get much because the pool was only about the same size as his hand in the first place.

  “There were more places like this at the beach that I found,” Ju-Long said. “And it is shaded by trees.”

  “Sounds like that might be our camp, then. That’s two out of four things dealt with.”

  “What four things?” Jian asked.

  “Protection, rescue, water, food.” Beck ticked them off on his fingers. “Please Remember What’s First – P, R, W, F. Protection. We’re out of the sea and the currents. That was the big danger.

  “Rescue – we’ll need to build a signal fire to attract attention. That’s the next priority because there’s no point risking not being rescued because we’re too busy looking after ourselves. Then water, because you die in a couple of days without it. And then food. Because, well, food. We can see if we can find more coconuts, for a start. Plus, the sea is nature’s ultimate larder”

  “There was food for several days in the cabin,” Jian observed. And even though he was trying to drag Jian’s thoughts away from the wreck, Beck glanced over to where the mast marked its position. Jian had a point. It would be difficult to reach, but it was there. Food in the cabin, and flares in the cockpit lockers – two potential resources that they would be mad to waste.

  “First, let’s check out this beach for other resources,” he said. Ju-Long nodded and picked up the two life buoys.

  “Your turn to carry the net, Beck!”

  “Agreed,” he said with a wry laugh. He picked up the soggy mass and slung it over his shoulder. Then he nodded at the two life buoys that she was carrying. “But you can leave one of those. I’ll be needing it.”

  Chapter 9

  Beck could easily have swum the distance back to Dolphin unaided, but he didn’t. A survivor did not take unnecessary risks. If that meant using a little assistance, you swallowed your pride and you used it. And so he took one of the life buoys, letting it prop up the upper half of his body and feeling like a little kid learning to swim with a flotation aid in the public swimming pool. It also meant that if there was any hidden rip current that could potentially sweep him away then he would have more chance of using his strength to get back to the island.

  This was a risk worth taking – but Beck knew he had to do this now. By now the tide was almost halfway back in again, and the more he waited, the more water there would be on top of the wreck. It wouldn’t start going out again until after sunset. That would be the danger time also for any rip currents. He had made another sling out of the plastic netting, which was tied to the buoy and would carry whatever he retrieved from the sunken yacht.

  It took just five minutes to reach the mast.

  He tied the life buoy to one of the stays – the metal cables that ran from the tips of the crosstrees down to the deck – and then just let himself float, carried gently up and down by the half-metre swell of the sea. He gazed calmly at the horizon and put his mind into as relaxed a state as he could summon, letting go of all the thoughts, worries and excitements that had dominated the last couple of hours. He simply began to breathe, slowly, deeply, in and out, over and over again.

  Ju-Long would have said he was preparing his ki energy. She had showed him a similar exercise when they were trekking through the jungle on their rescue mission. Beck just called it preparing his body for a deep dive. Either way, it was a kind of meditation, preparing him for what he had to do, and he had to get this right.

  They had talked through the physics together.

  “If there are ten metres of water on top of Dolphin,” she had said, “then the pressure is the equivalent of an extra atmosphere. So, the air in your lungs will be squeezed to half its volume on the surface.”

  So, half the usual amount of air to work with, and he would be exerting himself, blind in the salt water, with his heart working overtime with adrenaline, in an extremely dangerous environment. He would need every atom of oxygen that his body could find.

  Which meant, getting as much oxygen into his tissues as he could now, and flushing out as much carbon dioxide. The more his body burned up its oxygen, without replacing it with fresh breaths, the more carbon dioxide would build up, which was what triggered the desire to gulp in more air.

  He held onto the life buoy and kept breathing steadily until he could feel his lungs stretching the inside of his chest.

  Okay, almost ready to go, but he shouldn’t just dive blind. He needed to know where he was going. Based on where the mast was, he pictured Dolphin lying on the sea bed. Bow would be to his left, stern to his right, which meant he could find the cockpit and the hatch into the cabin. He probably wouldn’t be able to do this all in one dive, so the cockpit would be the first destination. There would be food on the island, even if he couldn’t get the supplies up from the cabin, but the flares in the cockpit lockers were irreplaceable.

  His body was buzzing with the extra oxygen he had taken in. There was no point delaying. He took a final breath, held it, and tipped himself headfirst down in the water. Hand over hand, he pulled himself below the surface, down the stay towards the boat.

  It was like sliding into an alien world, a heartbeat away from the world he knew of air and light. Just a couple of metres below the surface, the water grew abruptly cold with a chill that began to eat into him. He kept his eyes shut against the sting of salt. The jagged refractions of light and dark would just confuse him anyway. Water pressed against him from all directions. A sharp pain in his ears told him that his ear drums were bowing under the pressure. He paused in his hand-over-hand progress to hold his nose tight and blew through it. Air pressure built up inside his head, forcing itself down the Eustachian tubes that ran between his throat and his inner ear, and pressing against his ear drums from the other direction, to counterbalance the water’s weight. Squeaks and clicks and a distinct pop in each ear told him that the pressure had equalised. The pain vanished and he resumed his progress downwards.

  Immersed in a medium where sound travels four times faster than in air, the depths were alive with strange whirs and whooshes. His body felt somehow both weightless, able to float off at a moment’s notice, and strangely heavy – his lungs like a dead weight inside him, feeling heavier and heavier by the minute. Without the steel cable between his fingers he could have easily lost any sense of direction, to drift off into the dark with no idea which way was up, until all the oxygen was gone and he passed out. And if that happened, he knew he would be unconscious for about half a second before his body decided that that was it, game over, time to shut down for good. He fought that thought and pressed on.

  His hands brushed against one of the ribbons that Jian had tied to the stay as a tell-tale for the wind direction. Good. That meant that in another metre he would be down to the guardrail. Then he could pull himself along to the cockpit–

  Suddenly, a soft, billowing mass came out of nowhere and enveloped his arms and head, clinging onto him with a powerful grip. It was as if he had dived head first into the heart of a giant jellyfish that covered him up and would not let him go. He stopped abruptly and fought the panicked urge to breathe out his stored air in one gasp. His senses, already confused by the underwater scene, were now all firing off conflicting impulses so that he couldn’t tell which way his body was facing or how to get free from the grasp of whatever it was. He felt more of it, gently settling onto him and holding him in a grip of cold, molten iron. Its suction and dead weight just wanted to draw him further down into the depths.

  But he was still holding onto the stay. Heart pounding against his ribs, lungs feeling fit to burst, he made himself methodically reverse his course back up the metal cable, hand over hand in the other direction. The force that was gripping him didn’t want him to go. He felt a harsh, rough surface scraping against his skin as he pulled himself free.

  And then he was out of it. He risked opening his eyes, and even though they burned, immediately he could see the difference between the dark depths below and the sunlight above. He kicked his way up to the surface, following the training he remembered from his scuba course as a scout – clenching a fist above his head in case he came up underneath anything, and breathing out as he went so that the air in his lungs could safely expand as the pressure fell, without rupturing.

  He broke the surface a few metres away from the mast and gulped for air.

  Okay, scratch that plan.

  He had already worked out what the problem was, and he knew there was no point trying again. It was the mainsail. It must have unfurled itself from the boom – they hadn’t had time to tie it down properly – and it had draped itself across the rear half of the yacht. It was an impenetrable barrier, and going into that with anything less than proper scuba gear, like facemask and air tank, would be suicide.

  It meant that everything on board Dolphin was off limits. The food, the flares – and hey, all those square metres of sailcloth themselves would have been mighty handy to a stranded group of survivors.

  But that wasn’t going to happen.

  Beck swam over to where he had left the buoy, still bobbing next to the stay. He untied it and pushed himself back off towards the island.

  “Plan B,” he muttered.

  Chapter 10

  Beck stood at the island’s highest point.

  It had taken ten minutes to get up here from sea level, picking his way around fallen typhoon-damaged plant life. The centre of the island, out of reach of the tides, was completely covered in tightly packed undergrowth – a few palms, and the rest bushes and shrubs that he couldn’t immediately identify.

  The island wasn’t big. He estimated he probably wasn’t more than ten or twelve metres above the water, and even at low tide it couldn’t be more than two hundred metres across. What Beck could see of its shape reminded him of an egg dropped into a pan to fry.

  Ahead, and slightly lower than him, he could see the promontory that had stopped him earlier, when he had tried to get around the island. Good, he thought, I know what I’ll do with you.

  He turned a slow circle, gazing out to sea, getting his direction from the sun. It was coming up to four p.m., which meant that it was halfway between where it had been at noon – due south – and the western horizon where it would set. Knowing that, he could tell what was in which direction.

  Most ways he looked, there was only sea, and then more sea beyond it. Northwards, where he knew the land was, there was a haze on the horizon and he couldn’t see the mainland. He remembered from the chart that they were right at the far end of the archipelago. The only land nearby was…

  He turned to look north-east. Another island, about one kilometre away. He narrowed his eyes as he studied it. Without binoculars, he couldn’t make out much detail. It looked larger than this one, maybe twice the size, also overgrown. It looked like the trees came further down towards the water. There was a light strip between blue sea and green leaves, which he guessed might be a beach. So, that island over there could be a friendlier place than this one.

  But, this was the island they had at the moment, and one of the first rules of survival was to stay put, unless you have a very good reason for moving on. Rescuers are going to find it a lot easier to locate and rescue a stationary target. Plus of course, the only thing they had – at the moment – for crossing that stretch of water was a couple of life buoys.

  No – unless this island proved uninhabitable, this was where they would stick it out.

  When he had been exploring the shoreline, he had begun to build a map in his head of the island. Now he had seen enough of the island’s layout to fill it in. That would help plan their future movements. He turned to head back down to the shore and join the others, and put out a hand to move a bush aside.

  The bush rustled violently as something large moved inside it. Beck stepped quickly back, just as a reptilian head shot forward and snapped its teeth at where his leg had been.

  “Whoah!”

  Beck slowly crouched down and, from a safe distance, looked into the face of a Chinese dragon. And it was poised to bite.

  Chapter 11

  “Wow!” Beck murmured. He made no sudden movements, nothing to spook it – but he also tensed his legs to move very quickly indeed, if he had to.

  He had seen pictures of these creatures but never met one in real life. He was looking at a Five-Fingered Golden Dragon. All he could see was the head – smooth and blunt, about thirty centimetres long, its scales a blend of yellow and dark gold. He knew that the rest of the body behind it, hidden in the bushes, could be up to two metres long, and it was studying him with cold, emotionless eyes, just as closely as he was studying it. And though those eyes were set in the sides of its head, they both faced forward – the true sign of a predator. Forward-facing eyes meant binocular vision and depth perception – vital for homing in accurately on prey.

  A forked tongue flicked back and forth, in and out of its mouth. Snakes and lizards smell through their tongues, so the dragon was having a good sniff at him.

  He quickly ran through in his head what he knew about the dragons. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much. They were members of the monitor lizard family, which meant they had long, muscular bodies and necks, and powerful claws and tails. If it came to a race, the dragon could probably outrun him.

  And he didn’t know about Five-Fingered Golden Dragons specifically, but he did know about their cousins, Komodo Dragons – another type of monitor lizard. It wasn’t good. Komodos were active, aggressive hunters that would wait in long grass to ambush their prey. And they weren’t worried about the size of whatever they were attacking, because their bite was fatal. It wasn’t poisonous, like a snake – the dragon just had so many different types of deadly bacteria breeding in its mouth that its victim would simply die of the infection. The Komodo would take a nip, then just hang around waiting for you to fall over dead from toxic shock.

  If the same went for this kind of dragon, then they were in trouble. Without moving his head, Beck looked left and right for anything he could use in defence if the dragon decided to have a go at him.

  “So, this is your island, I guess?” he mumbled. It hissed at him again, and slowly withdrew its head. Neither of them took their eyes off the other until it was out of sight.

  Beck breathed out and made his way back to the shore, taking extra care with his route and keeping an eye out for any other potential dragons hiding out.

  So, they were sharing limited space on an island with at least one two-metre long carnivore with a poisonous bite. And almost definitely more. This was not a situation he would have chosen.

  Chapter 12

  “Dragons?” Jian exclaimed. It was the most interest he had shown in anything since he was injured.

  They had rendezvoused back at the beach that Ju-Long had found. The sea had swept up a long ramp of gravel through a break in the rocks, all the way up to the base of the high ground. It was on the eastern side of the island, with a view of the other island that Beck had seen.

  It wasn’t perfect – if it had been larger, and sandy, Beck would have marked out the word “SOS” in large letters, to attract the attention of any low flying aircraft. It was the international distress signal, even in Chinese, Beck smiled to himself. But the area was too small for that – thin, and narrow, and not sandy. Still, it would be a good place to camp. The top of the beach was surrounded by rocks and the cliff, and it was overhung slightly by trees, so it was shaded. The sun was beating down hard on the rest of the island, but here they were a comfortable temperature and not at risk of burning. The end of the beach was cut off by a natural staircase of boulders, piled up one on top of the other, with another of those dark stains that showed water was running very slowly down it.

  There was a plus to it not being sandy, and that was the absence of sandflies – tiny, buzzy little blood suckers that could end up covering you in a red rash of bites. If they had been around, Beck would have considered building a camp in the middle of the island, as far from the sand as they could get.

  But there were no sandflies, plus the cool shore winds down here would keep the mozzies away. They could camp a few comfortable metres beyond the high water mark, so the waves wouldn’t reach them, and they would be safe. They hoped.