Seas of South Africa Read online

  “Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. And you heard me talking in there, didn’t you?”

  “I wasn’t listening.”

  “You weren’t listening? That’s a good one. A man talks about treasure, and you’re not listening? You’re a crafty one, my boy. Now, tell me a little about your boat. It must be a motorboat then, is it, because I never saw a sail, and I was looking. If there was a sail, I’d have seen it. But I could’ve missed a motorboat. Maybe you moored it in the shallows, did you? How long is it?”

  His arm was so strong it was like getting pinned against the wall by a horse. “It’s twenty-five feet.”

  “A twenty-five foot motorboat? Now we’re getting somewhere. It must be fast then, is it?”

  “It’s fast enough.”

  “I’ll bet it is. It’ll be a heck of a lot faster than what I’m sailing right now. Maybe we should trade.”

  “I’m not interested in trading.”

  “Oh, you’re not, are you? Listen boy, you just show me where your boat is, and I’ll see to it that nobody gets hurt. Do we understand each other?”

  He wasn’t a treasure hunter, he was a pirate. And he was trying to scare me. And it was working, but I couldn’t let him know that. I just had to get free of his grip, then I could run. He would never catch me; he was too heavy, and too old.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll show you.”

  “Of course you will. And I’ll show you something, just in case you get to thinking you might take a little run and forget all about me.” He pulled a knife from his jacket. “See that coffee sign on the side of that shack?”

  “Yah.”

  “See the picture of the girl?”

  “Yah.”

  He raised his arm and flung the knife. It flew straight to the sign and struck the girl in the face. He had amazing aim. He pulled me over to the shack and dug the knife out. Then, he let me go. “Show me your boat.”

  I started walking towards the water, and he followed me. I kept thinking, maybe I could run for it. But I also kept imagining the knife sticking into my back. The water was so close, just a run and a jump. But I’d be an easy target for his knife. I had to do something; I couldn’t lead him to the sub. Would I survive a knife wound? Not if it hit me in the head. And what if it struck me in the spine? It would cripple me. Then he’d probably just kill me anyway. There were no police here. I hadn’t seen a single person on the street. No witnesses. Nobody would ever know what had happened to me. I thought of Hollie waiting in the sub. If the man got into the sub, he’d kill him too. He didn’t look like the sort of man who would care much for a little dog. Seaweed would survive. He was up in the sky somewhere. Seagulls can survive anywhere.

  My chance to escape came at the very end of the street. I was almost close enough to jump. Just a couple of steps and I’d be clear. But was it a safe jump? I couldn’t remember if there were rocks at the bottom. I couldn’t jump if there were rocks. I tried to peer over the edge of the bluff as we approached the stairs that led down to the pier. My heart was beating fast. It had to be a split-second decision whether or not to jump. I had to catch him by surprise, before he could throw the knife. What should I do? Jump? Not jump? What were my other options? I tried to think. There weren’t any. I reached the top of the stairs, took a glance over the edge, took one step, and flung myself off.

  Air rushed into my face as I went down. The jump lasted only a couple of seconds, but it felt longer. I tensed my whole body to prepare for impact, and half expected to feel the knife stab me on the way down. It never did. But I never had a chance to jump with proper form, and hitting the water was almost like hitting the ground, except that it swallowed me up instead of flattening me out. Before I hit, I tried to grab a breath of air. I didn’t want to come right back up where he could see me. I was hoping to swim under water to the sub, climb in, and motor away before he knew where I was.

  But hitting the water knocked the wind out of me, and I couldn’t do it. It was too far. I wasn’t sure of the direction, either, and had to surface to look. I broke the surface as gently as possible, and gasped for air. Maybe he wouldn’t see me if I just stuck my face above the water. No, he saw me. He was coming down the stairs towards the pier. He was going to reach it before me. I took a breath, and went under again.

  Maybe I could trick him into thinking I was swimming down shore. I swam twenty feet or so, and surfaced. I waited until he saw me, then took another breath, and did it again. He must have thought I was swimming away, but he hadn’t left the pier yet. The next time I went under, I went right to the bottom and doubled back towards the pier. It was twenty-five feet deep. He couldn’t spot me. But this time I had to go all the way to the pier without surfacing.

  It was so far. My lungs were bursting by the time I reached the sub. I went under it and up the other side. I broke the surface and sucked air into my lungs as quietly as I could. Had he fallen for the trick and gone down the shore, or was he right above my head? I reached for the handle on the side of the sub and started to climb up. But the water that dripped from me made a small noise. There was a heavy shuffling of feet above me and a scraping sound. As I climbed onto the portal and reached for the wheel to spin open the hatch, I saw him drop his head over the edge of the pier and look down at me. “You! You! . . .” He was furious. I spun open the hatch, climbed in, and shut it. I jumped down inside, rushed to the control panel, hit the dive and battery switches, put the sub in gear, and steered out from under the pier. As we came out, we started down. We couldn’t dive more than fifteen feet, but at least we could get out of sight.

  As we cleared the posts of the pier, I felt a heavy weight land on the hull. He had jumped onto the sub! He was insane! What did he think he could do? Would he try to open the hatch? But we were already under the surface. If he opened it now, the sub would flood and sink. Hollie would drown.

  I had to pull us out of the dive because it was so shallow. We were going to hit bottom. We would hit hard, too, if we didn’t slow down. I had to shut off the power. We would still hit, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. It was a sandy bottom. It probably wouldn’t damage the sub. And then, I heard the wheel spin on the hatch. He was opening it! He was trying to sink us!

  I raced up the ladder and grabbed the hatch just as water started to spray inside. With my feet against the sides, I hung upside down and pulled down with all my might as he pulled up. He was so strong! The hatch opened an inch, and water poured in. I held on with all that I had. He was holding his breath under water. How long could he keep doing that?

  He was too strong for me. The hatch opened two inches, and water flooded in. We were going to sink. And then, finally, the sub struck bottom and the jolt knocked him off his grip and I pulled the hatch shut. I spun it quickly, sealed it, then waited to see if he would turn it again. He didn’t. He had gone to the surface for air. I jumped back inside, let enough air inside the tanks to rise off the bottom, engaged the batteries, and headed out to sea.

  There was a foot of water on the floor, but the sump pumps were running and would clear the water in a few minutes. Hollie had jumped onto my hanging cot, where it was dry. He was chewing on a piece of rope as if nothing had happened. He had seen water flood into the sub before. Seaweed was still out, up in the sky somewhere, so we couldn’t leave yet.

  A quarter of a mile out, I shut off the power, raised the periscope, and looked back. The crazy pirate had swum to shore. I saw him stagger out of the water. I surfaced, climbed the portal, opened the hatch, and took a closer look with binoculars. He went straight to an orange, rubberized dinghy with a small outboard motor. He pushed it into the water, pulled the motor’s cord, sat down, and sped off towards the small sailboat sitting a couple of hundred feet from the pier. It took him only a few minutes. He tied the dinghy to the boat, pulled up anchor and went inside the cabin. I scanned the stern of the boat for a name. Maggie’s Delight. There were flowers painted around the name and on the sides of the boat. That wasn’t his boat. There was
no way that was his boat. He must have stolen it. I wondered what had happened to the crew. Did he kill them? He wasn’t a treasure hunter at all; he was nothing but a pirate—greedy and cruel.

  When he came out, he started bringing her around. Was he planning to chase us? That would be ridiculous. That would be like a turtle trying to catch a bat. And yet, he made me nervous. He was the nastiest person I had ever met. I bet he would rather die than give up chasing somebody. I sure hoped we’d never run into him again.

  But we couldn’t leave until we had picked up our first mate. I shut the hatch, submerged, sat down at the control panel, and turned on the sonar screen. There he was in the sailboat, coming towards us. He was dreaming if he thought he could catch us. I engaged the batteries and sailed in an arc around him, so that by the time he reached where we had been, we were back in the bay where we had started. I raised the periscope and watched him sail away, searching for us. When the little sailboat disappeared around the point, I surfaced, opened the hatch, and waited for my first mate to return. Finally he dropped out of the sky with a noisy flapping of his wings. Instead of jumping inside and looking for something to eat right away, as he would normally do, he paused on the hatch for a moment, and stared at me as if I were a stranger. “What? . . . Oh yah.” I reached up and felt my head. “It’s me, Seaweed. I just had a haircut.” He twisted his head and stared at me as if I were from another planet. “I got skinned. So what?”

  At least I didn’t have a knife in my back.

  Chapter Three

  THE INDIAN OCEAN flows gently and warmly down the southeast coast of Africa. It’s a sleepy part of the world. The grass and palm trees are yellow and green, and the earth is brown and red. There are no mountains close to the water, but there are lots of beaches and lagoons and swampy areas along the shore. The coast is unbelievably shallow, the shallowest I have ever seen. In some places the drop-off is so far from the beach, you can walk out a mile in water up to your knees. Where we couldn’t bring the sub close to shore—when we wanted to get out and walk on the beach—I’d inflate the rubber kayak and we’d paddle in. Then Hollie would run around on the sand, collect sticks and bits of rope, and chase crabs into the water. But sometimes the crabs would raise their claws and stare him down. Then Seaweed would attack them and eat them. I don’t think those crabs had ever seen such a ferocious seagull before.

  I always searched for secluded beaches. It wasn’t that I didn’t like meeting people. I did. I just worried that they might report us to local authorities when they saw the submarine, although I hadn’t seen a single coastguard ship or police boat. There must have been some somewhere; I just hadn’t seen them.

  The people on shore were very poor, even poorer than in India. Sometimes I would sail close enough to watch them with the binoculars. Most lived in thatched bamboo huts. I saw old people sitting on the sand, staring at the water. I saw kids kicking soccer balls. The men fished in open boats they hauled up on the sand by hand, just as they did in India. But here, the boats were smaller; not much bigger than canoes. There were resorts here, too, for rich people and tourists, as in India, but fewer of them. And they were smaller, and not as fancy.

  I kept a lookout for Maggie’s Delight, but for three days never caught sight of her, although we were sailing as slowly as a sea turtle and spending more time on the beach than in the sub. I kept the hatch open the whole time, and Seaweed climbed in and out like a cat changing his mind. He flew quite a bit in the daytime, soaring above us like a kite. At night, he sat on the hull, keeping an eye open for trouble. Hollie created a salty pile of the loose bits of rope and sticks he had collected from the beach, and slowly chewed them into a frothy mulch. He liked the salty taste. The days were hot and muggy; the nights were warm and filled with stars. You would have thought we were sailing on a magical sea.

  Then, on the fourth day, I detected a vessel on radar about fifteen miles offshore. We were approaching Mozambique Island, a tiny island with an old Portuguese port from the days of tall ships, just like Fort Kochi in India, across the sea. But Mozambique Island had an imposing fortress, with cannons still pointing at passing ships. It was also connected to the mainland by a narrow bridge. I had read about it in my guidebook, and it sounded really cool. I wanted to see it. I just hoped I wouldn’t see that pirate there.

  The vessel on radar was sailing slowly, like a sailboat. And then, it stopped. That made me curious. I wanted to check it out anyway, just to make sure it wasn’t Maggie’s Delight, so I followed it. Raising the periscope a quarter of a mile away, I spotted the flowery hull. It was her all right. She had the orange dinghy in tow. It didn’t look like the pirate was intending to sail into Mozambique Island, being so far offshore at this point. But why had he stopped? Then, I saw why, though I could hardly believe it.

  He climbed the mast with a rope. The little boat tossed side to side with his weight. He reached up and tied the rope as close to the top of the mast as he could, and shimmied down. Then, he climbed into the dinghy, tied down the other end of the rope, pulled the engine cord, motored to the port side . . . then sped away! As the dinghy motored away, it pulled the mast of the sailboat down and swamped the boat. He was sinking her! She was too slow for him, and he was hiding the evidence of his theft.

  Once the boat was down, he untied the rope, coiled it up in the dinghy, and sped off towards Mozambique Island.

  I waited until he was out of sight, surfaced, and motored over to the boat. She hadn’t sunk yet. But she had rolled completely around, and her mast was pointing to the bottom. I always found it sad when a boat sank. I didn’t know why; it wasn’t a person. It still felt like a death to me.

  I opened the hatch, climbed out of the portal and, grabbing a handle on the side of the sub, I reached over with my foot and touched the hull of the sailboat. She would sink soon. I didn’t really want to see that, so I stood up and turned around. And then, I heard it. At least I thought I heard it. I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard a weak voice say “Maggie.” It was very faint. I stood still, closed my eyes, and listened carefully. There was a little wind, but no sound from the water. No, I didn’t hear anything. It was just my imagination. It bugged me, though. I reached over and tapped the hull again. Maybe one push was all it would take to send her to the bottom. I turned around, and then I heard it again. “Maggie.” Good Lord! There was someone inside the boat!

  I had to act fast; the boat was going to sink. But if someone was inside, why didn’t they climb out? Were they locked inside? Were they tied up? How horrible! Would that pirate do such a thing? I guess he would. “Act!” I said to myself.

  I jumped into the water, beat against the side of the boat with my fist and yelled, “I’m coming to help you!” Then I took a breath, and went under.

  I found the base of the mast where the keel should have been. The door to the cabin was behind it, near the stern. I swam over and pulled on the door. It was locked! It would take a screwdriver to pry it open. I had to return to the sub.

  If I were going inside the boat, I would have to go on a rope. Then, if it started to sink, I could pull myself out, so long as the rope didn’t get hung up. It would be dark inside, so I’d have to carry a flashlight. I’d also need both hands free. I stripped down to my shorts. I didn’t want any clothing to get caught on a hook or nail. I cut a piece of twine, tied it to the hook on the bottom of the flashlight, and hung it around my neck. Then I grabbed a long screwdriver. I took a fifty-foot coil of rope, climbed the portal, tied one end of the rope to the harness, and the other end to a handle on the hull of the sub, strapped the harness on, climbed out, and shut the hatch.

  I jumped into the water, took a breath, and went under again. There were windows in the cabin, but they were under-water. I couldn’t see inside them. I found the door, shoved the screwdriver into the jamb, and pulled as hard as I could. If the door opened, it was going to let a whole lot of water into the boat in a hurry. I would have to find whoever was i
nside, and get them out. But what if they were tied up? Or what if they were injured? What if I couldn’t save them?

  The door gave a little. Bubbles blew into my face. I kept at it, but was using up my air. I had to surface again. The boat had sunk deeper. It was going to plunge to the bottom any moment. I took a breath and went under again, found the door, jammed the screwdriver in, and pulled with all my might. The door burst open. Air rushed out and water rushed in. I clicked on the flashlight and swung it around the cabin. There was nobody here! And it was filling with water. I had to get out. I looked one last time. No, there was no one here. Strange, I was so sure I had heard someone. It must have been my imagination. I took a breath of the cabin air and got ready to leave. Then, I heard the voice coming from a small compartment in the bow. “Maggie!”

  There was someone locked inside a very small space. “I’m coming!” I yelled. “I will help you!”

  “Maggie!” came the voice again. But it was very weak. And it was strange. It almost sounded like a recording.

  “Hold on! I’m coming!”

  I moved towards the door, but the rope went taut and held me back. The boat was sinking now. No! I pulled hard, but the rope wouldn’t budge. Then, it pulled me back a few feet. The cabin was more than half full of water. The boat was going down.

  “Open the door!” I yelled. “I can’t reach!”

  There was no answer, and no sound from inside the compartment. Maybe it was filling with water, too.

  “Open the door!”

  No one answered. I tried with all my might to reach, but the rope just kept pulling me back. We were both going to drown if we didn’t get out now.

  “Maggie!”

  The rope pulled me back even further. There was no fighting it. I had to take the harness off. I knew I shouldn’t do that, but what choice did I have? Could I sail away from this boat knowing someone had drowned, but that maybe I could have saved them? Would I be able to live with that? No. I thought of Hollie and Seaweed. I was risking their lives, too, if I didn’t make it back. But what else could I do?