Reef of Death (The Zone Unknown) Read online

  “What’s this about an Aboriginal girl and a sacred treasure?” PC asked, as they drove away from the airport.

  “It’s a long story. Complicated. Maruul—that’s the girl’s name—will have to tell you about it. She’s got partial amnesia now. She was out with her brother diving, looking for the treasure. We think he drowned. Maybe a shark got him. She must have seen it. That’s the part she can’t remember. We’re going to pick her up at the hospital now.”

  “Then what?” PC asked.

  “She wants us to take her back out to the reef. She’s stubborn. Also, she’s very good-looking and has big eyes that make you want to do things for her. Says she’s going to find out what happened to her brother.”

  Maruul looked up at the striped blue-and-red canopy over the entrance of the hospital. Whaaack. Whaaack. It snapped like a heartbeat in the hot wind blowing off Parramatta Park. “Take the straps off,” she ordered the nurse. Maruul felt like biting the mean, lanky woman in her starched white uniform and ridiculous matching cap.

  Nurse Van Dieman stayed behind the wheelchair, grasping its handles. She had the distinct urge to unbuckle the chair restraints and dump the girl onto the footpath. “You stay put until your ride comes. It’s hospital policy for discharges.”

  Maruul kept watch down Severin Street, hoping to see Cliff. He was late. In the next moment, tears swelled in her eyes. She found herself crying. Arnhem. What happened to you? Why can’t I remember?

  She had eaten the vile breakfast the hospital served. Burned eggs. Fried, hard ham. A seeded roll. She kept going over her life before the last dive. Remembering. Afraid another piece of her mind would click off. She was sixteen and would have graduated from her boarding school. She could have gone on to college. She had hopes of becoming a painter. Or a nurse.

  Maybe not a nurse.

  Another thought of Arnhem crept into her mind. A memory of her bravest and favorite brother. The elders had coated his body with white clay for his manhood ceremony. They had used the end of a twig, drawn the beautiful, intricate markings of the clan on his skin. The elders had woven bean vines and flowers into bracelets for his arms. They had made him into a living work of art, ready for his ten-day circumcision rite. Maruul remembered seeing Arnhem’s proud face—his majestic walk—when he returned from the bush as a full man.

  I’ll find what happened to you, Arnhem, she promised. I swear it.

  3

  TOWARD THE DREAMING

  Cliff slowed the Mercedes as they came into town  from the north beaches along The Esplanade, toward Marlin Jetty and Trinity Wharf. PC spotted the Cairns Ramada. Dundee’s Restaurant. Huge electric billboards advertised butterfly farms, wildlife sanctuaries, and parasailing.

  “The girl and her brother came from a village south of Milingimbi,” Cliff said. “We’re talking twelve, thirteen hundred kilometers from here.”

  Cliff looked over, saw PC pulling up a map of Australia on his laptop. “It’s west of the Cape York Peninsula in a region called Arnhem Land. Her brother was named after it. He was your age—seventeen. The girl’s from the Morga tribe.”

  PC moved the map grid across Ratboy’s screen, past Queensland and the Gulf of Carpentaria. He found Arnhem Land south of the Arafura Sea.

  “Why did they come to the reef?” PC asked.

  “They were chosen as arukas. That translates from her tribe’s language as ‘seekers.’ The elders of her village took her out of boarding school. She’s an aruka because she’s smart and speaks English. Her brother was the best swimmer. He had what they call ‘the water dreaming.’ Maruul will tell you about their religion. They’ve got lots of myths and folklore.”

  Cliff made a sharp turn by the railway station and onto Bunda Street.

  “How did Maruul and Arnhem find you?” PC wanted to know.

  “An Aboriginal man owns a dive shop near Cape Tribulation. He put them onto me. I had just bought a boat and diving equipment. They offered to work as crew in exchange for private dive time.”

  “They wanted to look for the treasure?”

  “Right. I leased a mooring platform on the reef south of Half Moon Island. The Reef’s hot now. Tourists pay five, ten thousand dollars for a charter-dive package.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m hooking up with hotels. Another month or so and I’ll have everything in place to be a first-class tourist diving operation. Eventually, I want to offer black marlin fishing. And swim with whale sharks. Everything.”

  PC’s cap began to lift in the wind. He swung the visor around backward. “Exactly what is the sacred treasure?”

  “Nobody knows. The girl’s tribe believes in a legend that some kind of fortune on the outer reef belongs to them. The tribe left it there a long time ago when they moved west. Now that the village is in trouble, Maruul and Arnhem were sent to bring a part of the treasure back. She says the village needs to buy food and hire lawyers.”

  “Why lawyers?”

  “A lot of big business guys and sleazy politicos are trying to steal the Morgas’ land. Maruul says most of Australia’s turned into a big pie, and everyone wants a piece of it. All kinds of crooks are coming out of the woodwork to cheat Aboriginal people out of their farmland and mining rights. One cartel destroyed the Morgas’ hunting by burning all the land around the village. The tribe needs to fight them in court. Maruul says children are starving. Her village’s holy man—their shaman—has disappeared. They think he’s been kidnapped, probably killed, by some company’s henchmen.”

  “Why didn’t the Morgas take the treasure with them when they left a long time ago?”

  “See, now, that’s a big thing with Aboriginal people,” Cliff said, swerving the car left to avoid hitting a mud-covered sow and her piglets. The sow squealed and turned onto the shoulder of the road. “They have this spiritual belief: Take from the land and oceans only that which you need, and no more.”

  “Sounds like they think of their treasure like a bank account,” PC said.

  “Right,” Cliff agreed. “From everything Maruul tells me about them, they’re really good people. She said we can have a share of the treasure if we can help find it—but I wanted to help them anyway.”

  Nurse Van Dieman released the wheelchair bindings the moment Cliff pulled the Mercedes up to the hospital entrance. Maruul stumbled woozily out of the chair into Cliff’s arms. “Don’t tip her,” she mumbled, as Cliff helped her into the backseat of the car. “She’s a creep.”

  Cliff took Maruul’s small, beat-up, blue-metal suitcase and put it in the trunk. PC grabbed her army-surplus knapsack and passed it back to her.

  “I’m PC,” he told her.

  Maruul looked at him, then at the open glowing screen of the laptop.

  “This is Ratboy,” PC said, smiling.

  She looked worn out and hassled, but she was as beautiful as Cliff had said she was. She’d woven her night-black hair into a cluster of long, thin braids, each one with an amber bead at the end of it. He settled back into the front passenger seat as Cliff slid behind the wheel.

  “The Coast Guard radioed the bush station that your brother is missing,” Cliff told Maruul. “There’ll be a message waiting for your dad whenever he comes in. You still want to head back up to the reef?”

  “Yes.” Maruul closed her eyes. Her thoughts were spinning and she felt dizzy. She decided to think of her family. She could imagine her father under a tall eucalyptus tree with his paintbrushes and bench. His eyes would be strained as he hunched over a wood-bark painting. She thought of her caring and loving twenty-seven mothers and thirty-two younger brothers and sisters back in her village. She thought of their hunger and the evil men burning the land around her village. Their greed and their hatred of the Aboriginal people. She thought of many things she would never be able to explain completely to the kind white man called Cliff. Or the boy

  PC.

  The strange-named boy who had come from the USA.

  On the drive north, PC saw men and ch
ildren fishing from rocky groines and jetties. Women dug for shellfish. There was a series of bridges that carried them over tidal waterways and lush banks covered with mangroves and twisting aerial roots. For a while he watched Maruul sleeping in the backseat.

  They arrived at Cape Tribulation at sunset. Cliff left his car parked at a private marina edging the south of the bay. He woke up Maruul. She and PC helped him carry the gear down to his boat slip.

  “This is it,” Cliff said, boarding the Sea Quest, a thirty-six-foot dive skiff. He pulled the canvas off the main bay. It was lined on both sides with air tanks and diving equipment. “All aboard.” He threw open a cowling to check the oil and gas feeds to the inboard motor.

  “It looks fast,” PC said.

  “It is.” Cliff started the engine. “Get the ties. I want us out at the mooring before dark.”

  PC threw off the bow rope, tossed it onto the decking. Maruul untied the stern. They jumped aboard. Cliff shifted into forward, then inched the throttle ahead. The boat cruised out into the mouth of the channel. After they were past the last of the coastal buoys, Cliff opened the throttle wide.

  The propellers roared, dug in, and lifted the bow above the horizon. The hull slapped noisily against the waves until the boat broke from the coast and into the main lagoon. Behind them, the beach was a white crescent at the foot of mountains of rain forest rising up to touch the clouds.

  Maruul and PC sat on the front deck, wind crashing into their faces. The small amber beads from her braids danced and clicked against each other. A dozen kilometers from the coast, the Great Barrier Reef lay beneath shallow waters like the body of a sleeping giant. PC saw the vast coral shoals and strips of patch rock that made up the reef. Finally, the skiff neared the outer edge where the reef met an infinity of dark-blue sea.

  “There it is!” Cliff shouted.

  PC saw the mooring platform and its stark white canvas fluttering in the breeze. Maruul looked toward the setting sun as Cliff docked the skiff next to the kayak. At the sight of the kayak, she remembered Arnhem and began to tremble.

  The sky was afire with crimson and gold as Cliff finished cooking steaks in the skiff’s galley. Maruul had managed to chop a lettuce-and-kiwi-fruit salad. PC set the table for them in the cabana.

  “Whose minisub?” PC called out as he finished checking the platform. He had found a two-person open submersible hanging from a pair of launch arms.

  “I bought it secondhand,” Cliff said, bringing the platter of meat and vegetables to the table. “You’re nobody in this business unless you offer tourists a submersible. You get wet, but it holds two. A battery powers a turbine with a lot more kick than the one we used off Mexico.”

  PC noticed the antishark bars curving over the sub’s cockpit. He remembered the minisub in Cancún. They had gone there to be part of a team photographing predatory sharks. That submersible had had a fully caged cockpit. PC had stayed in it, knowing he was safe. Cliff had taken chances, as usual, swimming out with the sharks. He wanted to show the dive master he was braver.

  Bolder.

  It was a trait of his uncle’s that PC knew could be dangerous.

  During dinner, PC caught Maruul staring at him. “Did you and Arnhem think about using the submersible?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “But Arnhem thought we should explore with the kayak first—to make certain we were in the right area.”

  “Were you?” PC asked.

  “Yes,” Maruul said.

  “How could you know?”

  “Show PC the painting,” Cliff said to Maruul. She got up from the table and opened her neon-blue metal suitcase. A photo of Maruul with a boy was taped on the inside lid.

  “Is this your brother?” PC asked.

  Maruul nodded. PC turned the case toward a lamp. Arnhem’s dark, handsome face stared out from the photo. He had a full, open smile. A single silver earring in the shape of a snake hung from his right ear.

  “Arnhem was given the silver earring at his manhood ceremony,” Maruul said. “A silver earring is a very great honor in the Morga tribe.”

  She reached in and took out a flat rectangle wrapped in an old, crudely woven blanket. She carried it to the table. Cliff brought an extra Coleman lamp from the skiff and turned it on.

  Maruul unwrapped a long piece of painted bark. The images of an ocher sun, violent blue water, and ghostly figures were striking. “Even our maps are paintings. Dreams. Visions from our minds,” Maruul said. “It is the same style in which my father was taught to paint, and he, in turn, taught me.” She pointed to a distinctive gold form at the top of the map. “We know from this land shape that this is Half Moon Island.”

  Cliff said, “It’s just north of here. Whoever made the map didn’t know distances, but they picked solid markers.”

  PC recognized the serpentlike shape of the reef between the hundreds of green lagoons and midnight-blue ocean in the painting. “But how could anyone know exactly where to look for the treasure?”

  “We speak and paint our legends and stories in pictures and symbols. But there’s a song-riddle my village’s elders have passed down through the years. It was taught to me in the language of my people. I’ve tried my best to put it into words a non-Aboriginal person could understand.”

  She began to sing in a delicate, haunting soprano voice:

  “Night will bring the mystery.

  Moonlight points the way.

  Sunset hides beneath the sea,

  But dawn the beast will slay.”

  “What does it mean?” PC asked.

  Maruul pointed to four tiny silver baby hands painted so they appeared to be clutching the bottom of the map. “Arnhem figured out the ‘points the way’ part,” Maruul said. “The silver baby hands. They each have a finger pointing.” Maruul pulled out a sheet of tracing paper and placed it on top of the map. She took a ruler, extended straight pencil lines up from each of the pointing fingers. They all intersected at one point on the bark.

  “That’s where we are now,” Cliff said. “At least, we’re very near it.”

  “Arnhem and I went out in the kayak,” Maruul said, her voice growing quiet and frightened. “I don’t know if I can remember anything more. …”

  “You were on the kayak looking for the treasure,” Cliff said.

  “Yes.”

  Maruul felt a pain in her head. She closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. She knew she had to try to remember. “Arnhem wanted to do a final deep dive alone. That’s all I see … my brother swimming deeper. #x2026;”

  Cliff looked to PC.

  “You said your father taught you to paint. That means you can draw, right, Maruul?” PC asked.

  “Yes.”

  She looked up and watched PC get his laptop and bring it to the table. He turned it on. “Let’s try something.” He brought up an art-board program, plugged in the stylus, and placed it in Maruul’s hand. “Draw.” “I don’t understand.”

  “Draw what you saw from the boat. What you saw in the water,” PC said. “Let your mind drift. Just do it. Don’t think about it.”

  Maruul lifted the stylus to the glowing screen. A thin black line appeared. She wiggled the stylus, then pressed harder, and the line expanded into wider, brushlike strokes. “I remember the kayak,” she said. “I can see Arnhem down deep. Alone. His mask.” She made zigzag lines, like a heartbeat on an oscilloscope.

  “What else do you see?” PC asked.

  “There is something …down deep,” Maruul said. “Something coming up… toward Arnhem … and me…”

  “Draw it,” PC said.

  “I can’t”

  “Try.”

  Maruul squirmed in her seat. Slowly, she made a form take shape on the screen. At first, PC thought it was a type of shark. But it was more primitive. A swollen thing with streamers hanging from it. Lumps on its back.

  Maruul’s arm began to shake as she moved her hand faster. She drew huge, ghastly eyes on the fish. Hornlike structures thr
ust out from its brow. She began to gasp, and tears filled her eyes. She gave the creature a mouth—a huge mouth with daggerlike teeth.

  A high-pitched wail rose from Maruul’s mouth, its pitch growing higher and higher.

  Until it became a scream.

  For a long while the three of them stared at the terrifying sketch on the computer screen. Cliff put his arm around Maruul’s shoulders. PC assured her the creature wasn’t real.

  “Cliff and I will dive wherever you want,” PC said. “A great white may have gotten Arnhem, but what you’ve drawn is from a bad dream. It doesn’t exist.”

  “He’s right,” Cliff said.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, dropping her head into her hands again. “I’m not sure at all.”

  PC stayed up long after his uncle and Maruul had gone to their bunks on the skiff. He wanted to think and stretched out on a cot in the cabana. He went over the bark painting with a fine-tooth comb and typed the song-riddle onto Ratboy. He ran each of the nouns through the computer’s thesaurus. Nothing struck him as having a trick meaning, and a lot could have been lost in translation. He concentrated on the second line of the riddle: “Moonlight points the way.” If Arnhem was right about the baby hands pointing the way, then there had to be a connection between “moonlight” and the baby hands. If he could find out what that was, he’d have a handle on the rest of the riddle.

  He turned off the Coleman. The grisly image Maruul had drawn still haunted him. And made him think about his greatest fear. The fear he never told to anyone. A fear that was always in the back of his head whenever he went on a dive.

  The fear of being eaten alive.

  Finally, after two A.M., jet lag socked into him and he fell asleep.

  4

  SECOND BLOOD

  Cliff was up early. He moved the mini-sub into tow position behind the skiff and checked the Sea Quest’s masks, wet suits, and diving fins. He had invested in two dozen 420-denier nylon dive vests resistant to punctures, with tank mounts and Velcro closures. He cleaned and calibrated three of the Spectrum XP regulators.