Chapter 2

Two days earlier

“Beck! Look out!”

Beck was in the bows; Li Ju-Long was at the wheel, at the other end of the boat. He just had time to see the alarm stamped all over her face, and to hear her shout.

As his head whipped round, he felt the deck pitch down beneath him.

A wall of water almost as tall as him was rising up right in front of him. He flung his arms around the forestay of the yacht, the steel cable that ran from the point of the bows to the top of the mast, and clung on for dear life as the boat cut into the wall of water. It shuddered as it hit, and foam and spray flew past his head.

“Yee-hah!”

He couldn’t help it. He whooped.

The wave passed beneath them and the yacht rose up, then plunged down again into the dip after it. Water foamed away on either side of the bows, but this time none came on board. They were through the worst of it. Beck could finally do what he had come forward to do in the first place – free up the foresail.

Dolphin was a modern thirty foot yacht with roller reefing, which meant the foresail was rolled up around the forestay. To haul it up, someone in the cockpit just pulled on a rope attached to the clew, the free corner at the bottom, and the sail unrolled. But it had to be released first. Now the yacht wasn’t trying to throw him into the ocean, Beck could undo the plastic tie in a second, quickly and efficiently. He tucked it into his pocket and waved a hand at Zhou Jian, Dolphin’s young skipper, who waited at the front of the cockpit for the signal. The lanky, grinning teenager nodded and hauled back on the rope. Jian obviously loved the sea and appeared totally at ease as captain of this small yacht for the day trip. The foresail slowly unfurled, crackling and snapping at them as the canvas filled with air. Jian wound rapidly on a winch to tighten it against the wind.

They had already hauled up Dolphin’s mainsail and the yacht was leaning over in the steady breeze. Beck felt the difference in the yacht’s motion as he picked his way back to the cockpit. They had motored out of harbour at first light with the diesel engine, and Dolphin had just moved like any boat, pushed by its propeller. When they put the mainsail up, the yacht had started to lean over and to protest. The engine wanted it to go one way while the wind hitting that broad expanse of canvas had had other ideas. But now, with both sails up and biting into the wind, a new thing happened. The sails were no longer in the wind’s way. The boat moved with the wind, gracefully and easily, doing what it was designed to do.

Jian cut the engine and the transformation was complete. The vibrations died away and Beck’s ears were full of the sound of wind and rushing water. Dolphin leaned over at about twenty degrees under the force of the wind and moved through the water as naturally as the animal it was named after. They were sailing.

“Awesome…” Beck breathed.

So much of what he did as a survivor meant working with your environment, not against it. Using what the planet gave you but not taking anything from it. The wind came because all of planet Earth’s atmosphere was in constant motion, and here they were using it to get from A to B without the planet even noticing. It felt so right.

The day was sunny, with a stiff breeze blowing over blue, sparkling water. The mainland of China was receding behind them. It was a far cry from a week ago, when the sky had been dark and the waves churned by the hundred-mile-per-hour winds of Typhoon Liling. Beck had seen news reports showing this stretch of water, the twenty-kilometre-wide Zhujiang river estuary between the ports of Macau and Hong Kong, and was very glad to have been on land. Now, despite the wind, it was warm enough for them all to be dressed very simply: sweat tops, light trousers and deck shoes – comfortable leather slip-ons designed to get a good grip on a wet deck. They also had dark glasses and peaked caps to keep the glare out of their eyes. Jian had made them attach their caps to their bodies with loose loops of string around the neck, for those inevitable moments when the wind flipped them off.

“That was wild!” Beck shouted happily as he clambered back into the cockpit.

“I’m sorry about the wave, Beck,” Ju-Long said. She looked torn between a genuine apology, and the same exhilaration he had felt as the yacht bucked beneath them. Beck hadn’t exaggerated – it had been wild.

The red flag of China flew proudly from the stern behind her, and she never quite took her eyes off the horizon. Ju-Long was a slender girl of almost fourteen, just a little younger than him. She and Beck had met as junior leaders with the International Youth Trek Organisation only the previous week, then unexpectedly had to learn to trust and rely on each other without question when a landslide had left their trekking party stranded on a ledge high up a cliff face. They had been the only ones on the other side of the landslide, which meant that only they could climb to safety and go for help. It had meant twenty four hours of trekking through the jungles of Guangxi province, surviving thanks to Beck’s skills, while the expedition’s ledge slowly crumbled beneath their feet. But they had got help, and the rescuers had been able to get everyone off the ledge with only seconds to spare. A few minutes later, quite literally, and it would have been too late to save anyone.

“Hey, no worries,” Beck said equably.

“It wasn’t your fault, Ju-Long,” said Jian, still laughing. “Blame him.”

He pointed at a giant, dirty ore freighter half a mile away. The water foamed at its bow in a wave that was three metres high. Dolphin had been caught in its wake.

There were other boats about, of all shapes and sizes. Crammed between two busy ports, the estuary was a busy place. Beck could probably see thirty or more vessels without moving his head. The largest were a couple of massive tankers that made him think of floating skyscrapers moving horizontally through the water. They were so heavy that they would hardly notice the largest waves. They could ride as smoothly as if they were on hidden rails.

Then there were other ships – liners and freighters and fishermen – all the way down to small fry like Dolphin, which was just large enough for a small main cabin, a smaller forecabin, and a cockpit at the stern. The boat could probably sleep five people if it had to, though this was just a day trip.

Jian, their captain, was older than either of them – Beck guessed maybe eighteen or nineteen – but very easy to get on with, and determined to show his gratitude. His father, Mr Zhou, had been the adult left in charge of the stranded expedition, after the landslide killed its leader. Mr Zhou knew better than anyone else how close the expedition had come to disaster, and he had made sure Jian knew it too. They were both eternally grateful to Beck and Ju-Long.

There was a delay in the next stage of the expedition after the accident, because some of the authorities thought that not only should it be cancelled altogether but the International Youth Trek Organisation should be wrapped up. The members had been put up in a hotel while it all got sorted out, but Mr Zhou had insisted that Ju-Long and Beck themselves should come and stay in his own home. Beck had checked with his Uncle Al, back home in England, and Al had been happy to allow it. It wasn’t just that he wanted Beck to have a holiday – he also wanted the IYTO to continue, and so he didn’t want Mr Zhou to have any distractions.

And the Zhou family had Dolphin, the pride and joy of father and son. Jian was a trained yachtsman and had been sailing all his life. When Mr Zhou was called up to head office, Jian had asked if they could take the yacht out to pass the time. And here they were.

“So, where are we going?” Beck asked. He and Ju-Long had been Junior Leaders with IYTO, and he had ended up leading an emergency expedition down the river. Now he was perfectly happy to let someone else be in charge.

Jian ducked quickly into the cabin, and came up again with a chart which he unfurled on the cabin roof. Unlike a normal map, which showed rivers and roads and hills and towns, the land on this was just a single blank shade. It was the sea that had all the differences, with different colours showing the range of depths and currents and obstacles.

“Somewhere with fewer ships. Down here.”

He tapped the bottom of the chart. Small, irregular shapes were scattered across the bottom, from the size of a large coin to little specks of ink.

“This is the archipelago,” Jian said. “You can see the islands are all kinds of sizes. Tourists enjoy the bigger ones.” He waved a finger over the larger blobs at the eastern end. “But we are going this way.” Now he showed the smaller specks to the west. “Most of them are uninhabited and it is too shallow for the larger ships – so, nice and solitary. We will have a good day’s sail and be back home in time for dinner!”

It was obvious from his smile that to him ‘a good day’s sail’ was the best thing anyone could hope for. His enthusiasm and his love of the sport were infectious.

“Well,” Beck said with a grin. He lounged on one of the benches and stretched his arms out on either side of the cockpit coaming. “No hurry!”

No hurry at all, he thought.

Back home in Britain, he had made a bit of a name for himself. He had never wanted it – it had just sort of happened. There were upsides, and he tried to use it to push the messages and the values that he believed in, which matched those of organisations like IYTO – but it was also a pain when some magazine called asking for a comment or opinion about some boy band or YouTube sensation that he had never heard of. He was learning how to positively say no.

Coming to China was meant to have been a break from all that, and it had been – right up until everything went sideways on the expedition.

Maybe now, just for one day, he could sit back and enjoy letting the wind do all the work…