Mission Dragon, page 7
The dragon hissed at them and snapped its powerful jaws. Beck was closest to it, and the two of them stood, locked in a mutual stand-off. Without moving his head, Beck tried to locate anything he could use as a weapon.
“Look!” Ju-Long called.
Another dragon emerged from the dark, just long enough to snatch the rest of the fish off the rock where Beck had left it.
Then both dragons turned and wandered off into the darkness.
Beck kicked sand after them.
“Wow, those dudes don’t mess about. And that was our dinner.” But then he noticed something much more important. Ju-Long was helping Jian to his feet. The older boy clutched his injured arm to his chest and his face was frozen with suppressed pain.
“Jian, are you all right?”
“I think so.” Jian straightened up slowly, but kept holding his hand. “I moved too quickly for my bones to catch up. They are complaining very loudly but they are getting quieter.”
“Were those the same two you saw earlier?” Ju-Long asked.
“I think so, or at least, I hope so,” Beck said. He still felt adrenaline pumping. And he still felt angry. It was the time and the effort gone into catching that fish, just to give two dragons a meal they hadn’t worked for at all – and it was the fact that he himself hadn’t thought of keeping a proper watch. He had already known they were on the island. He should have been more aware.
Ju-Long picked up the stick she had used to hold the fish to the fire.
“I was looking forward to that,” she said sadly. “I suppose we can go hungry for a night.”
“No flipping way are we going hungry,” Beck vowed. He glared out into the darkness, in the direction the dragons had taken. No, he was not going to give those wretched creatures the satisfaction.
“Are you going to go diving again? In the dark?” Jian asked. Beck shook his head and looked out to sea.
“Not quite. I won’t be diving, and it won’t be dark.”
*
The tripod stood in half a metre of water, just off the shore. It was almost identical to the signal beacon – perhaps a little smaller. Beck had raided the pile of driftwood to build it – three legs, and a platform halfway up its height where a small fire now blazed.
Conditions were just right. Its feet were weighed down with rocks to stop it rocking in the gentle swell. Beck had covered the platform with a layer of sand to stop it burning through, and the light lit up a circle of sea all around it. A few metres away the water was black, but it slowly glimmered into life the closer it got to the platform. This close, it was almost transparent.
Ju-Long and Jian waited on the shore a few metres away. Beck stood in his shorts with the water just lapping up to his thighs. He could see his bare feet, and he could see the water grow hazier as plankton came in – small clouds of microscopic creatures drifting mindlessly, attracted by the light. And where the plankton went, fish followed.
He stood stock still while he took his pick of the prey, letting the fish think he was some kind of rock. There were the usual tiddlers, sticking together for security. A crab sidled around the edge of the light, maybe not wanting to get too close. Sensible crab, Beck thought.
And then the first likely candidate for dinner came casually swimming into view. It nosed at the legs of the tripod and drifted away with a flick of its fins. Beck stayed exactly where he was. It had to come in front of him. Any motion by him now would just scare it off.
The fish was in no hurry. The smaller fish had disappeared and it was obviously confident in its size.
Beck slowly lifted the spear, ready for the thrust.
“Come on, my beauty,” Beck murmured. “There we go!” He brought the spear down with lightning speed.
“Bingo!” he shouted as he heaved the fish onto the beach.
This time only Jian cooked the fish, while Beck and Ju-Long faced the other way, backs to the fire, wooden clubs in their hands, eyes peeled for dragons. None came. They continued to keep watch while they ate their portions, bit by bit. The dragons were obviously satisfied for the time being.
“What worries me,” Beck said quietly, “is them learning to associate us with food. Then they’ll never let us alone.”
“They are big enough to get onto the platform,” Ju-Long said.
“Yup. So we don’t give them any reason to. Eat up.”
There was no point staying awake after their delayed meal. It had been a long, long day. Even though they all felt keyed up with nervous energy, Beck knew it would vanish pretty well the moment they lay down and let themselves relax.
But, thanks to the dragons, there were a couple more things to do.
First, he and Ju-Long arranged an anti-dragon device on each side of the platform. At each end of each side, they put down a bit of driftwood, sticking over the edge and weighed down at the platform end with a rock. Beck balanced longer bits of wood across the other ends of each pair. Any dragon that tried to climb onto the platform would put its weight on one of the long bits of wood. It would weigh more than the stones holding it up, and flip the anti-dragon device off the platform. The noise would wake them up, and hopefully the surprise would be enough to deter the dragon from getting any closer without the humans having to take any further defensive measures. It was simple and ingenious.
And just in case that wasn’t enough, they hung the net from the roof supports, around all four sides of the platform. They would sleep inside its protection. The world’s worst mosquito net, Beck thought.
Just before climbing onto their platform they piled up several large bits of driftwood onto the fire. Some of the heat and smoke would drift over them during the night, helping deter mosquitoes, keep the three survivors warm, and hopefully keep the dragons away. Fire has always been mankind’s greatest weapon and also the most potent way of stopping predators from entering your domain.
They clambered onto the platform to sleep. Jian with his one good hand could only prop his backside on the edge and then lever himself up. They arranged themselves top-to-tail on the layer of palm fronds, with Jian in the middle, lying on his back, all of them huddled together to share warmth. Jian and Ju-Long used the life buoys as pillows. Beck used the block of polystyrene.
He lay on his side, eyes open, thinking about the day past and planning for the one to come. First thing in the morning, he would –
No, stop that, he told himself. You already know what to do. You don’t need to be thinking about it now. Sleeping is more important…
And sure enough, he felt the drowsiness steal up on him and his eyes grow heavy.
He could tell from the sound of Jian’s breathing, and the impatient shifting of his body, that the older boy was nowhere near falling asleep. Uncomfortable, and probably in more pain than he would admit to. There wasn’t much Beck could do about that.
“The fire should last until morning – well, at least the embers. But toss a log on if either of you wake up in the night, eh?”
And with that, Beck fell asleep.
Beck felt someone tap him awake. He opened his eyes to see a smiling girl with dark hair like his, shoulder length. She sat on the edge of the platform and gave him a playful prod.
“Dian?” Beck found he was staring at her, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Is that you? I always wondered what you’d look like.”
“You can’t have always wondered. You haven’t thought about me for ages, until tonight.”
She stood up and wandered around the edge of the platform, peering into the sleeping faces of his two Chinese friends. “They’re very dear to you, aren’t they? All your friends are.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t feel guilty about not thinking of me. You’ve been brought up not to dwell on the past. To always look forward. That’s what makes you Beck Granger. You know, we’ve always stood beside you, Beck – Mum, Dad, me and many angels. Even when you forget me, I won’t forget you. You’ve never been alone. That’s faith.”
Beck reached out to touch Dian, but then a sudden sound jerked him awake. He sat bolt upright, shaking. Jian and Ju-Long were both asleep.
He couldn’t tell if the noise had been another dream thing or an actual noise in the real world. He propped himself up on one elbow and frowned blearily into the darkness. In the absence of firelight, he couldn’t make out a thing. The anti-dragon device hadn’t moved – there would have been no mistaking that. There was nothing caught in the net. The waves were further off than they had been – in fact (he checked his watch) it was past midnight, so the tide was almost as far out as it could go. Nothing else seemed to have changed, and even though he strained his ears into the night he couldn’t hear anything else.
Beck slowly, almost reluctantly, lay back down and allowed his thoughts to drift back into slumber. He prayed that Dian would come to him again in his sleep, in his dream. But she didn’t.
In the morning, in the light of a new day, the three of them stood mutely and looked at their trampled collection of water bottles. During the night, a dragon must have felt like having a drink. It couldn’t have been after the bottles – it probably just wanted to lick the stone, like the humans had. But in the process, all of the bottles had been tipped over, and a couple were actually punctured by claws from where the dragon had trampled on them.
A seething Ju-Long silently handed the undamaged bottles around, and they each drank what they could from what was left in them. Then she set them up to refill.
Beck thoughtfully rolled one of the punctured bottles in his hand and gazed into the forest. So, they were on an island with creatures that seemed determined to deprive them of food and water.
“You, mate, are becoming a real pain,” he murmured.
Chapter 19
Breakfast was equipped with a barb – a long, pointed spine, which could cause a nasty injury. It came swimming lazily along the rocky gully of the inlet where Beck had caught last night’s dinner, and he knew with one glance that it could kill him if he wasn’t careful.
“Whoah,” he murmured to himself.
Survivors shouldn’t take unnecessary risks – but at the same time, they shouldn’t pass opportunities up. He could have waited for something less dangerous. On the other hand, he was hungry.
It was a ray. It had a flat, diamond shaped body about half a metre across, and it moved through the water by gently flapping its two pointed wings. Its eye sockets were a pair of bumps on its top and they reminded Beck of twin gun turrets, panning slowly from side to side.
The barb trailed behind it and it was the ray’s main defence. If a predator came too close, it could whip the barb up and stab its attacker, delivering a shot of venom into the bargain. The naturalist Steve Irwin, some years ago, had been killed by a creature like this, Beck remembered. He had swum up behind it and the ray had probably mistaken him for a predator, so it had flipped its sting up and speared him right in the chest.
But Beck’s spear was longer than the barb.
So, if I attack from the front, and get it right first time, I should be fine…
He paused, shifted his feet on the rocks to get the right balance, poised – and dived.
Once again, he was blind, guiding himself by sense of direction and gravity. Like the last time, he drove the spear ahead of him with all the weight of his body. He felt the shudder in his arms and shoulders as it grounded against something solid. Had he pinned the ray down? He couldn’t see anything and he was aware that somewhere out in that rush of bubbles and blinding salt water, there was a poisonous spine whipping around.
But when he lifted the spear up, he could feel there was something on the end of it, and it wasn’t moving. He kicked up to the surface, holding the spear at arm’s length, and shook the water from his eyes. And there it was – the ray, draped over the triple prongs, not moving. Its wings and barb hung limply.
“Nice!” he said happily, to no one in particular. “Breakfast is served!”
He headed back to the beach, letting the sun dry him off naturally, with the ray still skewered on the end of the spear.
“Jian?” he asked, looking about when he got there. The other boy was conspicuously not there. Ju-Long had just finished gathering wood for a new fire. There was no sign of dragons.
“I helped him up to the signal point,” she said. “He said he is happy to take the watch permanently. He said it is about all he feels able to do, and he does want to be helpful so much.”
She noticed him start to frown.
“And I left him with a club, in case of dragons, and I set the plastic net up across the narrow part of the point.”
“Good job.” It sounded like Jian would be safe on his own, but still Beck frowned.
“What is it?”
Beck sighed and decided to share what was on his mind.
“Jian was so full of life when we first met him. Enthusiastic about everything. Now…”
“Think of everything he has been through,” Ju-Long said reasonably. “Losing the boat, and then because of his hand it means he cannot be as helpful as he would like.”
“Exactly! And I know he didn’t sleep well – with all the pain and fretting – and that won’t help his state of mind. Basically, I think we should make sure at least one of us is with him, as much as we can, just so he doesn’t start to mull over things too much. When you’re tired, thirsty or injured, plus feeling guilty, it can be a dangerous cocktail. We need to keep him upbeat.”
“I understand. I guess none of us slept well,” she admitted. “Dragons on the mind.”
“Hm. Yeah.” He decided not to let on that he had had a conversation with his dead sister. He took a much-needed drink from one of the refilled water bottles, and held up the food offering.
“We can start by cooking this up there. He’s got the fire steel anyway…”
He paused, cocked his head. Had he heard someone shout? A male voice… And there was only one other male on the island.
“Look!” Ju-Long exclaimed. At the same moment, Beck distinctly heard the voice again. It was Jian – but not shouting in alarm. He was shouting to catch attention.
Ju-Long scrambled to her feet. “Come on! Quick!”
From the other side of the island, a column of thick black smoke was rising up above the trees.
Chapter 20
The boat was about a kilometre away. It was what Uncle Al would have called a gin palace – three or four decks, sleek and streamlined, white and glittery. The regular throb of its diesel engines came drifting across the water as it cruised slowly by, pitching gently through the waves, probably doing just a fraction of the speed it could make if they let the engines rip.
The signal fire was in full flow, black smoke belching up from the pile of burning flip-flops.
Jian was slumped against a rock, still shouting, in a voice growing hoarser and weaker. He was clutching his injured wrist to his chest and his face was pale. Beck immediately diagnosed what had happened – he somehow managed to light the fire even with his injured hand and he was in agony now.
Jian stopped shouting when he saw Beck and Ju-Long burst from the undergrowth, and just gave a tired nod towards the boat. Ju-Long ran to the very edge of the point and began to jump, waving her arms and shouting in a mixture of Chinese and English.
“Hello! Help! Over here!”
Beck took a moment to check Jian was okay. The older boy’s face was sweaty and sheet white, but he reacted to the question on Beck’s own face before Beck could say anything.
“I will be all right. Help Ju-Long.”
Ju-Long was doing fine, Beck thought. Instead, he ran to the tripod. The fire on the platform was starting to slump down. He found a stick to poke the burning brands back into shape, and to shift the black, molten masses that were the flip-flops back onto the flames. The stink of burning foam was revolting but the black smoke was everything he had hoped for.
Then he hurried back to the undergrowth, and pulled a couple of branches that were thick with leaves off a nearby bush. He dragged them both to the end of the point and tossed one to Ju-Long.
“Here.” He heaved his own branch above his head and waved it from side to side.
“Come on!” he shouted, with all the force his lungs and throat could manage. “Over here! Come on!”
Surely, with the smoke, and the shouting, and the branches – surely they would get the boat’s attention now?
Ju-Long redoubled her efforts. Even Jian came to stand alongside them, still half bent over and holding his arm, adding what voice he could to their efforts.
But the boat continued past the island without changing course. Beck could see no one on deck. Probably all enjoying a lie-in in their air conditioned cabins, he thought bitterly. He could see even more of the boat’s stern now – it was definitely drawing away from them.
He gave the signal fire a final poke, which sent up a last burst of smoke. The embers continued to smoulder but there was no more of the thick black stuff that he had been counting on to attract attention.
He let his branch drop.
Ju-Long had shouted herself hoarse. Her voice died away but she kept waving, until even she had to let it go.
“They didn’t see us,” she said bitterly.
Beck shot a final look at the boat as it disappeared into the haze. Maybe they did see us, he thought. Maybe they sent off a radio message to the coastguard and they’ll be here in a helicopter any time soon…
But he had to admit he couldn’t make himself believe it. The boat hadn’t even wiggled a little – they hadn’t even wanted to come in closer to have a look at the three people on shore. They just hadn’t been looking.
Or maybe the people on the boat had seen them, but they thought that letting off black smoke and waving branches at passing vessels was something the locals on these islands did for fun.
There was no point in obsessing about it. What was done, was done.
“Okay,” he said heavily. “We’ll rebuild the fire and we’ll give it another go with the next boat. At least we know boats do come by. Sorry we don’t have any more flip-flops, but we’ll use extra foliage or some of the packing foam for smoke and that should be almost the same. And meanwhile, I got us some breakfast. You two wait here – I’ll go and get it and we can eat it together. Right?”
