Dead Heat, page 27
A surge of elation rocketed through her when she saw the aerial. You pathetic, panic-stricken idiot, she told herself, both you and Daniel will be rescued within the hour. It’s a Personal Locator Beacon! Activated the second it hit sea water, she knew it would already be transmitting her location on the international distress frequency. An airplane might hear it, and the police and coastguard certainly would.
Georgia settled back inside the raft. Help is on its way. Help is just around the corner. Thank you, God.
*
Later. Maybe an hour or so, it was difficult to tell. She was shivering with cold, but through her numbed senses, she kept seeing Daniel’s strained face, hearing his voice.
We’re on Lee’s boat. The Chens . . . They would have heard he was planning to set sail . . . Who knows what else they’ve done?
Huddled in her icy raft, arms wrapped around herself, she tried not to think where she was but about what had happened instead. She knew now for certain that the Chens wanted Lee dead, hence blowing up his boat. Had they tampered with the Piper’s wire-lock as well? But she couldn’t deny Jason Chen’s surprise when she’d mentioned the airplane’s sabotage. The Chens had destroyed Songtao in revenge for Lee killing Ronnie Chen, annihilating their plans to team up with the Dragon Syndicate and ‘stealing’ Suzie, but who had destroyed Bri’s airplane?
*
It was the middle of the night and Georgia’s body was racked with shudders. Her clothes were sodden, her body slopping in the water on the floor of the life raft. She’d never been so cold. Crawling to the entrance, she peered outside. Where was the coastguard? They should be here by now. It was at least two hours since the PLB had been activated. Was it working?
She checked the aerial. It seemed all right and although it wasn’t exactly erect, more pointing dead ahead than into the sky, she didn’t think it would prevent the thing from functioning. What if it wasn’t working? No, don’t think of that. There was no point in panicking. She had no control over it.
The wind started to rise and whistled through the entrance of the life raft’s canopy, cold as a blast from the Arctic. She took in the froth whipping off the tops of the waves, the way the life raft was rising and rolling more violently and thought, God, please blow the storm out, they’ll never find me in a storm, let alone Daniel.
It didn’t take long before a gale was sweeping in and the life raft scudded up and down waves that were rapidly growing into mountains. A rush of water poured through the entrance and she yelped, scrambling to close the canopy. Gradually the waves and wind grew more fierce and the raft began swooping into troughs that grew steeper and steeper, until sometimes it stopped dead against a wall of water before rising high once again to fall into another endless valley.
She heard a low grumbling sound start to approach, and her lips were trembling, her whole body shaking, as the centre of the storm approached, growing louder and louder, the seas higher and higher.
Thank God for the drogue, she thought. It would be acting as a stabiliser, preventing the raft from capsizing, being tipped over . . . Don’t even contemplate the thought . . .
The raft was bending around her like plasticine against the somersaulting waves, and Georgia hunched there, too scared to do anything but sit tight and pray for the storm to pass quickly. A wave broke beneath the raft and gallons of water gushed inside. She grabbed the fishing tin and started to bail. The ocean battered and punched the raft, the wind a howling, shrieking creature that relentlessly rattled the entry flap.
Throughout the night, Georgia alternately bailed and rested, bailed and rested, the sickening smell of talcum powder making her feel endlessly nauseous. The storm never lessened, raging and roaring against her and the life raft, lifting them high for a second before dropping them down a steep bank to be pounded wildly before lifting them high again.
The light inside the raft turned from black to grey, the only indication it was day. It was Saturday, the day before the deadline. She peeped outside to see waves tall as houses towering high, the clouds a deep black and racing overhead, the sky dark.
Inside the raft, Georgia shivered in a sodden, waterlogged world that churned and boiled around her. She drifted into unconsciousness throughout the day then woke with a terrified jerk when a larger wave slammed into the raft. The day felt as long as a year, the storm endless until the waves started lessening, easing from their towering mountains into hills, and it was finally passing.
She wondered briefly where she was but she knew there was no point thinking about it as she had no choice but to sit and let the life raft take her where it would. The drogue would only have stabilised her to an extent. She could be miles from Songtao’s wreck.
Her mouth was parched from salt water and she took her first sip of fresh water and rolled it round her mouth before swallowing. Then she sank against the raft’s tube, her thoughts returning to Songtao, the explosion, Daniel’s final yells, the water pouring over the top deck. A rush of desolation. Where was Daniel now? Had he really caught the life jacket she’d thrown him? She hoped so much he’d put it on, that it was one of those belts with a drogue and that he’d been picked up before the storm hit and was now ashore, tucked up in a warm bed with a hot cup of his too-strong coffee.
She fell into an uneasy doze and when she awoke it was night again, a second interminable night of sodden shuddering and shaking in a rising and rolling world of rubber.
Finally, dawn broke. Peeking over the horizon, the yellow crescent of sun turned the sky a pale cotton-wool blue. Not a cloud could be seen. A soft breeze had replaced the gale and Georgia found herself filled with amazement that not only had she survived the storm, but that the drogue was still in place and her plastic Price’s watch still working. The bright fruit face cheerfully informed her it was 6.20 a.m.
It was the morning of the Chens’ deadline. Today was Sunday. Desperately she turned her mind to Lee, what he’d said when he was standing outside the caravan park, smoking his long cigar.
Linette’s more valuable to them alive than dead.
She had to cling on to that, and pray the Chens wouldn’t jettison her mother just because she’d fled on the boat they’d blown up, and hang on to her as a precaution, in case Georgia survived.
An image of Lee flashed across her vision, the starbursts of scars on his knuckles, and her mind froze briefly in a shock of awful realisation. She hadn’t wanted to face it before, but she knew Lee was in trouble, had known it the instant he hadn’t rung her when she arrived in Nulgarra. She’d been in denial.
Gazing across an ocean shimmering like blue mercury under the rising sun, she felt a stabbing pain of something that felt like guilt beneath her diaphragm, near her heart. She’d been so angry with him and only now could she see his silence meant he couldn’t ring her, was unable to, and she could almost see his face drawn white as he lay on the ground with a bullet lodged in his chest, bleeding into the dirt. For her. For her mother. Living out some debt his wizened granny had warned him against. Sweet Jesus. Lee and Daniel. One a criminal. The other a cop. Two men she cared for were in danger and there was nothing she could do for them.
Would they survive? Were they both already dead?
They were in fate’s hands. So was she. And she was going to survive. She’d lived through the storm, hadn’t she?
Despite her initial optimism, when she looked at the aerial Georgia felt her spirits plummet. The PLB was obviously broken. Christ. Tears ballooned in her throat and she fought them down. She tried to pull the aerial erect, but it remained at its half-cocked angle. Bloody, bloody thing. My life depends on you and you’re not bloody working, you piece of shit.
To distract herself, Georgia concentrated on the instructions for the dye, which she had saved, and soon there was a great slick of fluorescent green spreading across the waves. Excellent, she thought. Should a plane pass overhead right now, they wouldn’t miss it, but the waves would eventually disperse the stuff. She hoped someone would fly over soon.
It was already hot and as the sun rose it grew hotter, and she could feel her skin drying out, tightening, flaky with salt. She wanted to sit outside, away from the loathsome rubber smell, but she would burn badly without the canopy so she stayed inside, forced to sit in water like a piece of chicken broiling in an oven.
She felt sweat trickle down her flanks. Loss of water. Loss of precious water. She couldn’t think what she could do to prevent it so she rummaged through the survival kit. No idea came to mind.
Already she was incredibly thirsty. She didn’t know how much water it took in these sorts of conditions to stay alive but reckoned on a litre taken in sips, slowly, throughout the day, which meant she had to eke out her single litre for as long as she could.
She took a small mouthful, rolling it around her teeth and gums before swallowing it in little gulps. The urge to upend the can’s contents down her throat was so overbearing her hands were trembling. She had to force the tin immediately out of sight and in the bag.
Flopping back in the raft, she leaned against the tube, and closed her eyes.
She awoke when something hit her. It came from beneath, and struck her full on her thighs. She catapulted to her knees in shock, her vision blurred. She tore the entrance open. White glare all around. Her heart was pounding in shock.
Blinking, scanning the emptiness of water, she saw a fin break the surface of the sea to the left of the raft. Georgia scrambled to the side, squinting hard. Please, not a shark, she prayed, not a shark.
Nothing. No fin, no shape in the water.
Still she scanned, terror sitting like a sack of stones in her stomach.
There! A slice of fin, cutting cleanly through blue. A rush of relief. It was a bonito. A fish.
Georgia sank back in the raft, suddenly exhausted. The sun was at its zenith and thumped down like a massive piledriver. Her tongue had thickened, and her lips were already sore and swollen. She took another sip of water. This time she couldn’t resist it, and she found herself on her third blissful liquid roll-of-the-mouth before sanity kicked in.
They might not come. They might miss me. I might be way off course. I have to save water. This is just the second day. There might be more.
She pushed the water out of sight and lay in the sauna of raft and canopy. Drifted and dreamed. A vague awareness of heat lessening. Night drew in, and as she began to shiver she realised Sunday was over. Had the Chens killed her mother? Huddled on the floor of cold rubber, she tried not to think about Jason Chen’s secateurs, or Sergeant Tatts lying on a rubbish tip bleeding to death.
She didn’t want to cry. Not when she needed every drop of water to remain in her body. And she knew her mother would be exhorting her not to cry too, to hold tight until she was safe, but she couldn’t help the tears trickling from her eyes. She scooped them carefully with her fingertips and licked them. The gesture steadied her. Her tears dried up.
Another endless night spent shivering with stars speckled above. The floor of the raft like chilled putty. Skin cold as marble. Shivering. Shaking in a little rubber cave on an ocean of nothing.
Day three, another dawn. Same dawn. Same soft cotton-wool blue melting into identical, relentless sun and heat. She decided there wasn’t any point in using the remaining night-and-day flares unless she actually saw another craft.
Taking off her bandage, Georgia inspected her stump. In the heat it had puckered and was tight and dry and clean-looking. To avoid it sweating, she left it unbandaged. The wound in the pad of her palm from the air crash was a raised pink worm and she wondered what a forensics department would say about her scarred and damaged hand should her body end up on a beach somewhere.
The sun rose and she started to sweat. More water torment. She was violently hungry, but all she could think about was water. Water in Evian bottles. Water running from a tap. She’d stick her head down a toilet to drink the water, no problem. Cookie would do just that if she were as thirsty.
A day of remorseless discipline. She wondered where it came from. Why not drink every drop from the tin, then take whatever came as it may? Was her survival instinct so strong? Why? Why not just gorge for an instant, then let go?
She sank into a disturbed sleep, her hips and knees rubbed raw from the soaking salt-caress of rubber.
Mid-afternoon, Georgia struggled to survey the gleaming hard blue water. A haze hung in the distance and she concentrated on it, wondering if it heralded land, and as she stared, a tiny white dot appeared on the horizon. For a second she thought it might be a giant ray flipping out of the sea, showing its white underbelly like a big square handkerchief, but after she had blinked a couple of times, it hadn’t dived back into the ocean. It was still there.
She squinted at it, waiting for it to vanish. When it didn’t, she set off a night-and-day flare, holding it high so the smoke poured skywards. Heart pumping, she watched the little white dot, but it didn’t seem to move.
With a small sputter, her flare died, but the white dot remained.
She knew it could be nothing, or a supertanker, perhaps, barrelling past with its crew absorbed in watching videos down below, or a fishing boat heading in the opposite direction, nets full.
Georgia looked around at the expanse of hard white sky and endless eye-creasing ocean and decided to go for broke.
She lit her last flare.
The white dot remained on the horizon and eventually her flare spluttered out, and died.
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought the white dot was growing. Slowly, tantalisingly, it was getting bigger. Georgia lay at the entrance of the raft and watched it gradually expand into a triangle that she realised was a mainsail. For a second, she couldn’t believe her eyes. It was a yacht.
Rocketing to her feet, she nearly overbalanced into the sea when the rubber of the floor dipped violently. The yacht was heading straight for her! Whooping out loud, she jigged on the spot. She was saved!
Grabbing the tin of water she took a huge gulp of water. She desperately wanted to drink the lot but didn’t dare, not until she was absolutely sure she was rescued.
The yacht was closing fast and she had taken another gulp of water and was grinning. The sores on her lips had cracked and she tasted blood in her mouth, but she couldn’t stop grinning, hopping up and down and whooping like a madwoman, willing the yacht closer with every breath.
The yacht gave a blast of its horn.
This time she didn’t hesitate. She upended the tin and swallowed the remaining water straight down, half-spluttering and gasping in her haste as she watched the yacht creaming through the water. It was big, an ocean-going yacht, about ten metres and broad, with a blue stripe from bow to stern. One man stood on the bow, another at the helm. Both wore matching shorts and T-shirts. Just a hundred yards away now. She could hear the hiss of the sea against the hull. The helmsman was shouting. She stood up and waved her arms furiously above her head.
Both of them waved back, just as furiously.
She was crying in elation and joy and relief. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it! I’m going to live!
Thirty-six
The yacht was nearly upon Georgia when the man at the helm yelled and the man on the bow leaped into action. Sails snapping, ratchets grinding, the yacht slid effortlessly to rest beside the raft.
Two brawny, fit-looking men looked anxiously down at her.
‘Hello,’ she rasped.
‘My God,’ said the man from the helm. He had a red baseball cap with ‘Fireball’ stitched on it in yellow, and wrap-around sunglasses.
Nobody moved for a few seconds, or said anything. Finally Mr Fireball said, ‘You don’t happen to be Georgia Parish, do you?’
‘Yes! That’s me. I’m her.’
‘Bugger me,’ he said, looking lost for words. ‘You wiped out Micky’s Dream, then vanished. They’ve been going crazy looking for you. The coastguard, Micky’s crew, and some reporter who’s been doing her nut on the telly, radio, whatever, and here you are.’
‘Here I am,’ she agreed.
‘Can we take you ashore?’
‘Yes, oh, yes, please.’
Mr Fireball uncurled a length of rope and dropped it inside the raft. She grabbed the rope and wound it around her arm and let them gently pull and guide her to the yacht’s stern. Gentle, careful hands lifted her inside. They looked appalled, and spoke in hushed tones as though a loud voice might shatter her.
‘I’m okay, honestly,’ she said.
‘Of course you are,’ Mr Fireball said, trying not to stare at her stump.
‘Thank you so much.’
‘Thank Stevo – he was the one who spotted you.’ He introduced her to a blond man with reddish stubble and freckles, adding, ‘I’m Des. Des Bailey.’
Des and Stevo. Her saviours.
‘I can’t believe I’m here.’
They grinned broadly at her. ‘We can’t either,’ said Stevo. ‘It’s not often we get to rescue shipwreck survivors.’
‘You bloody trouper,’ Des said, and shook his head admiringly. ‘Bloody good on yer.’
‘There’s someone else out there,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to find him.’
Des listened intently as she told him about Daniel. She could tell from the look on his face he didn’t think Daniel would have survived.
‘Last we heard, he hadn’t been picked up. That reporter woman grabbed a chopper and started looking for you straight away, but the search didn’t start officially till some of Songtao’s planking turned up on Kee Beach.’
He looked at her raft. ‘You’re nowhere near where everyone’s been looking for you, though. The storm came from the south-east and they reckoned you’d be swept along with it, back to Nulgarra, but you obviously hit a rip, maybe an ocean current or something, ’cos you’re way south of where they’ve been searching. I’ll radio in and get the score and organise another search for your friend round here, pronto.’
She was so grateful she found it hard to speak. ‘Thank you.’
