Black Gold (5 page)

The vet took the bird from Amber and went behind the screen. Amber looked away. Out in the bay the pink and yellow sorbent booms were already dark brown and the air was filled with hissing as the red-suited figures washed the oil down into the water with high-pressure hoses. Amber was beginning to recognize some of the other volunteers now: the guy who delivered the vegetables from the market; some off-duty staff from the medical centre. The whole community was involved in the clean-up.

The hoses stopped and in the silence Amber heard the chink of instruments and bottles as the vet worked. There was a rasping noise as the bird's oily feathers spasmed against the vet's rubber gloves, like a last-ditch attempt to escape. Then the hoses started again. The vet laid the bird in a black plastic sack.

Amber was about to go back down the beach when she saw Li, Alex and Carl waving to her from inside the bar. She took off her mask and went over to talk to them.

'Did you get anything from Greg?' she asked Alex.

Alex shook his head. 'No records. Only if there had been a mayday call or they'd caused an accident. But—'

There were books lying open on the bar and Amber noticed that some showed maps and others seemed to be ornithology texts. Li grabbed her arm and squeezed. 'Amber, you've cracked it.'

'How?'

'The birds,' said Carl hurriedly. 'We've found a lot of mature tropicbirds. Normally they live way out at sea but they come back to nest – and – get this – they only nest on
remote
cliff faces.'

'Yes?' said Amber.

Carl continued. 'There aren't a lot of those habitats left now, but there's one place in Curaçao where they're protected.'

Alex pulled out the map and pointed to a spot. 'Here.'

Amber looked. He was pointing to an area not far from the tanker. 'But we thought the mudslick came from further out.'

'Yes,' said Li, 'but here's the clever bit. Although these birds have their nests here on the coast, they fly out to hunt. They'll only go out a limited distance to get food.' She pointed to the map.
'That's
where we need to look.'

'Those two have been out there for a couple of hours,' said Alex, indicating Hex and Paulo, who were still outside with the digging party. 'It's time for me and Li to do a bit – but Amber, why don't you join them for a long break on the water . . . ?'

Amber, in shorts and her favourite burgundy bikini, checked that the
Fathom Sprinter
was securely anchored. Paulo and Hex were clicking away at their dive computers. This would be a great opportunity to practise all they had recently learned about decompression. They were going down deep – to sixty metres.

The boys were kitted up in BCDs, each with two large tanks. The dive computers were chunkier and more complex than the dive computers they had been using so far, and the tanks were dull green instead of the normal yellow because the mix of gases for deep diving was different. They wore full-length wetsuits and hoods, not only for protection but also for warmth because they would be spending a lot of time waiting in the water for their bodies to adjust as they came up. The dive computers would give them precise instructions and they had to obey them to the letter.

Despite all they had to remember, the two boys looked excited as they made their calculations. They were the most mathematically adept of the group and were the natural choice to be first to try the activity.

'With decompression we need to stay down ninety minutes in total,' said Paulo. 'So that leaves us with about fifteen minutes to get there and fifteen minutes to video the site.'

'That's not much time to find it,' said Amber. She then wished she hadn't said anything because the look on Hex's face was just a little too smug.

'It isn't if you have to search for the site,' he grinned. 'But if you have a genius who can look up the currents and calculate where the slick is and where it's likely to have come from—'

Paulo interrupted. 'What games have you got on your dive computer, Hex?' He wasn't joking; the dive computers had games to help them while away the time on the way up.

Hex pulled a face. 'They're really naff. I'm not going to look at them.'

'They're better than nothing,' protested Paulo.

'They're crude,' said Hex. 'I don't want to rot my brain with that rubbish. They're hardly
Half-Life.'

'Well, it looks like you'll be counting fish for an hour,' said Amber. 'Try not to fall asleep.' She kneeled down and clipped their fins on while they did a final kit check. Then she settled back on a cushion with a good book and a sunhat.

Hex checked the video camera was fully charged. Then the boys moved from the central bench to the one around the edge of the boat. The boat sank alarmingly on that side: the kit was really heavy. Hex put his regulator in his mouth, then tipped over backwards into the water, followed by Paulo.

The sea out here was different from that in the shallows. There were fewer creatures, and the bottom was invisible, with the water below them dimming to black before they could see any signs of the sea bed. Paulo and Hex turned their torches on and headed down. It was eerie. Hex tried not to think about it but, being naturally claustrophobic, he felt as if he was being swallowed by a vast, cold blackness and he was very glad Paulo was with him.

A school of barracuda followed them in a menacing silver cloud. Paulo knew they were just attracted by the lights and wouldn't attack but it was still unnerving. One swam beside him, a long thin strip of silver with a grim face like a mouth carved into a rifle bullet.

They descended and left the barracuda behind. It was colder, a vast expanse of black. They kept checking their dive computers – to keep a sense of direction and to make sure the currents weren't taking them off course.

The bottom loomed up palely, like an area of fog, then became solid.

Paulo's torch beam caught a bubble of oil. He turned to Hex and pointed. They must be close. They could feel the current pushing against them. Another bubble went past. The current was definitely going north.

They would have to swim against it.

The bottom was bare rock like the surface of the moon, with no sign of a drill site. Hex checked his dive computer. They were slightly off course. They had drifted after all. He pointed with his torch. Paulo followed him.

The drill site loomed up like everything else, as a blur that gradually became solid. Something upright that didn't look like the moonscape elsewhere became a dull red metal pipe fifty centimetres long, sticking right up out of the sea floor. When they got up to it, they could see how big it was – a good two handspans wide. About five metres away was another, and after that another. It reminded Paulo of a plantation of trees. There must have been at least eight boreholes – and possibly more that they couldn't see. But one was clearly leaking – oil bubbling out into the sea like a black tongue.

There was debris scattered between the boreholes – more big lengths of pipe – as though someone had dismantled some scaffolding on the sea floor and just left it there. Hex filmed it: filmed the collar of cement that held the borehole in place, the dark oil swelling out of the top and breaking into bubbles. He filmed Paulo scooping the oil into Mara's sample tubes. Then he reached for Paulo's wrist and filmed the compass on his dive computer – that way they would have a grid reference to show exactly where the boreholes were.

Paulo looked at the borehole. How could it have been left like that? Surely there must be some sort of cap. He shone his torch in the top of the borehole and saw a big metal cap inside the pipe. It had been sealed, but not very well. He swam over to the next one. So had that. They all had. The oil that was coming onto the shore must be stuff released during the actual drilling and sampling and the residue left on this equipment. Although there was still some oil dribbling out where the seals were weak, the original leak had been plugged and the oil would soon stop coming ashore. To crash a tanker ArBonCo must have wanted to cover up what they'd been doing very badly. Maybe they didn't want anyone to know how much oil was there; how big an operation the drilling would be.

He looked at his dive computer again. One more minute and they had to ascend to their first decompression stop. Hex was swimming around the site, making sure he'd filmed all the evidence. The pictures would be astounding – the site was much bigger than they'd thought.

Hex looked at his dive computer too. Time to go up. He clicked off the video camera and hung it on his BCD. His computer gave him his first instruction: go up to thirty metres and stay there for six minutes. As Paulo signalled
Up,
Hex pushed away strongly from the bottom. But something pulled him back—

He dropped his torch. It swung from its cable, bouncing light around the dark water. Something had him. He didn't even know what part of his body had been caught, just that he couldn't move. His breathing rasped in his ears, bubbles streaming out of his regulator. He kicked furiously. His legs. It was like they were being held by some long-armed creature. In the dark all he could feel was this . . . thing. His hands flailed to catch his torch.

Paulo saw Hex's light jerk wildly. He powered towards him. Immediately comforted by Paulo's light, Hex stopped struggling and stayed still, but at first Paulo couldn't see what was wrong. There were the discarded pipes, but Hex wasn't touching them. Yet he clearly couldn't move. He tried to touch Hex's fins. And then he felt it. A nylon fishing net, no more visible than a cobweb in the water, tangled around the discarded pipes – and around Hex's legs. Fishing nets were the bane of divers' lives. They were hard to see, incredibly strong and took ages to untangle. This was how dolphins often died, trapped by tuna nets and held under until they drowned.

Paulo pulled a piece of the fishing net up so that Hex could see it. Hex nodded; he understood. Paulo unsheathed his knife and began to cut the net. He had to saw to and fro to get through the tough nylon, but even when he signalled to Hex to move his fins, Hex was still trapped. The fins had sharp edges and ridges on them, like ribs, with a metal clip to hold them on. Hex pulled his gloves off to get a better grip, leaned over, grabbed a handful of the netting and started cutting too. A sharp pain made him pull away, his hand throbbing and sharp as though he had closed it around a blade.

Paulo saw him recoil. Had Hex cut himself? That was the last thing they needed. He shone his torch on Hex's hand. He looked at the net and there, trapped in the nylon web, barely visible, were long ghostly filaments like see-through strings. What were they?

Hex was shaking his hand as if that would stop it hurting. It looked very painful. Paulo had to finish the cutting himself.

At last Hex was free and the two rose up gratefully, looking at the dive computers to check their depth. They were blinking. They had stayed at the bottom too long – about five minutes too long.

They wasted no time in swimming to the first decompression stop, thirty metres up. They found the anchor chain, a black slanted line in the water, and hung there, one arm wrapped around it.

Both their dive computers were blinking red warnings.

Hex wrote on his slate:
Down too long.

Paulo nodded.

Hex showed Paulo his dive computer. It had recalculated their decompression time. That extra five minutes down translated into another fifteen minutes necessary to decompress. They had allowed more air for emergencies, but not that much. They would not be able to do the last ten minutes of decompression.

Paulo wrote on his slate:
Follow plan. Shorten last stop.

Hex nodded. The lower stops were most important; shortening the last stop wasn't exactly a good idea, but it was the best they could do.

Paulo started to play the game on his dive computer. Hex looked around in the gloom. His display kept on blinking, telling him he didn't have enough air to decompress properly. He'd have to shut it up. He clicked to the game. Rubbish – just a 2D platformer. But while he was thinking about how bad it was, at least it shut out the immediate problem. They might be about to do themselves a lot of damage. And his hand was really painful.

It was getting cold. Hex clicked away faster, hoping the time would go more quickly. But he kept seeing an image in his mind – an image of a viper with a bubble in its eye . . .

A sharp bang reverberated off the headland and out to sea. Amber threw her book down and grabbed the binoculars.

In the distance was the tanker – the only place it could have come from. The tanker itself still looked much the same, but figures on the shore were running about in a panic. Obviously something had happened on board. She shuddered. Was that the explosion Greg had warned them about?

She opened a compartment and pulled out the charts. As the tanker was between them and the dive centre bay, she began to work out somewhere else they could land, so that they could then call Danny and get him to drive the boat back on a trailer.

Paulo was wishing they hadn't done their homework so well. They were at the last stop, ten metres below the surface, their air gauges nearly at empty – and they were about to cut short their decompression by ten minutes. Cold pages of clinical text swam before his eyes: nitrogen bubbles floating in his veins and arteries, attacking tiny blood vessels, then rupturing bigger vessels in the lungs, causing heart attacks and strokes.

Hex wrote on his slate and turned it so Paulo could see:
Medic centre. Decomp chamber. ASAP.

Paulo nodded. He took a breath but got nothing. His tank was empty. He let go of the anchor cable and went up.

The two boys exploded onto the surface, gasping.

Amber lifted her head from her book and looked at them. 'About time too.' But then she saw something she didn't like. When Hex and Paulo took their masks off, they put them on top of their heads instead of round their necks. Some people did that by mistake, but it was a move you were supposed to save for when you were in trouble and there was no way that Paulo or Hex would be that undisciplined.