Escape (3 page)

No way! It was all in his imagination. And no wonder, with Lyssa moping around, looking at him like he was dying. He was perfectly okay. He could be helping —contributing] Not cutting up some fruit with a name that sounded more like a pediatrician.

Dr. Mongosteen will see you now.

He looked around the beach. Everyone was busy. Even J.J. was fishing. Lyssa was fiddling with the lifeboat’s broken radio. If they got off this island, Lyssa was probably going to end up the hero somehow. It was just the way things went for her — Lyssa, the beautiful, talented, straight-A student. And her older brother, the awkward, freckled slug.

He could picture his sister on the front page of every newspaper. Even on TV:

“Lyssa, how did it feel when you fixed the radio and made a long-distance antenna out of a banana to call in the marines to save you?”

After a long interview, the cameras would turn to Will. “Weren’t you shipwrecked too? What was your job on the island?”

What would he tell them? Oh, / safaround and cut up mangosteens .

And the reporter’s face would go suddenly blank. “Cut up whaf?”

That was the story of his life with Lyssa. Will never had a chance to succeed. What kind of contribution could you make by sitting on a beach staring off into space?

And then he saw the black speck move. It was just over the horizon and getting larger every second.

Forgetting his wound, he leaped to his feet and immediately crumpled back to the raft.

“Plane!” he bellowed. “Plane!”

On the surface, it looked like pandemonium. But in reality, it was a carefully planned and well-practiced drill. Lyssa and JJ. dropped everything and raced to fill pots with seawater. Ian ran for the tarpaulin in the jungle. It was made of four rain ponchos sewn together and filled with dead leaves. He grabbed it and hauled it over to the bonfire.

If those leaves were thrown on the blaze and then the water dumped on top, the result would be a column of thick gray smoke that would extend hundreds of yards into the sky — an SOS that would be seen for miles around.

It was a moment the castaways had played over in their minds dozens of times — their chance at rescue.

Will had never felt more helpless. This could mean his life — all their lives! And he couldn’t even walk. He got on his hands and knees and crawled across the sand to the bonfire.

Don’t blow it! he tried to will the others. Doeverything exactly right !

Still, they hesitated. They did not dare signal until they knew for sure whom they were signaling to. If they sent up the smoke, and the plane turned out to be carrying the smugglers, they’d be giving away their presence on the island. And that would be fatal.

Lyssa peered through the binoculars that had come with the survival kit.

Will tugged at the legs of her fatigues. “Can you see it? It’s rescuers, right?”

She shook her head. “They’re still too far off.”

“Let’s just go for it,” urged J.J. “Get this over with one way or the other.”

“Don’t you dare!” snapped Lyssa. “Maybe you’ve got a death wish, but the rest of us want to live to grow up.”

“This is awful,” said Ian. “I wish we could justknow .”

“Wait a minute.” Lyssa squinted into the binoculars. “It’s banking to the side

it’s definitely a floatplane

oh, my God!”

“What?” squeaked Ian.

“It’s them! The smugglers!”

“Are you sure?” Will asked breathlessly. “All planes look alike!”

His sister shook her head. “Single engine, with a fat cargo hold underneath. It’s them, all right.”

Her words triggered more frantic action. But if the last drill had been fueled by hopeful anticipation, this one was driven by disappointment and dread. The castaways, even Will, began throwing sand on the bonfire. Soon the flames were smothered to nothing, and not a trace, not so much as a whiff of smoke, remained.

Will held on to his sister’s shoulders and began to hop toward the lifeboat under cover of the trees. JJ. was hot on their heels. Ian brought up the rear, brushing their footprints from the sand with a leafy branch.

All four looked up. Through the canopy of the rain forest, they watched the floatplane descend over the island. As it swept overhead, suddenly one of the doors burst open. A dark object fell out and plummeted to the jungle below.

The castaways ducked, even though the thing was nowhere near them. They stayed down, bracing for — what? An explosion?

“Was that a bomb?” hissed Will.

“How could it be?” scoffed Lyssa. “They don’t even know we’re here!”

J.J. was the first to get up. “We’re such saps. The guy was probably having a Big Mac and he tossed the bag so he wouldn’t have to mess up the air base.”

All at once, Lyssa froze. “The air base!” she exclaimed. “That’s where Luke and Charla are!”

Will frowned. “What are they doing way over there?”

“Looking for medicine/’ she replied. “For you.”

Day 17, 5:35 p.m.

Whackl Whack! Whack!

Luke hacked at the rusty padlock with a sharp rock. With every blow that fell, a cloud of dust and cobwebs swirled up around him, making him cough.

The dispensary was set up like a doctor’s office, with a single desk and chair, cabinet, and examining table. Nothing else had been needed. This small installation had never been home to more than thirty people. These had been the crew, pilots, technicians, and officers required to do a single job — to deliver an atomic bomb to its target.

Whack/

In a shower of rust flakes, the lock smashed and fell to the floor, disappearing in the weeds and rotted planking.

Luke opened the cabinet. “Jackpot.” On the shelves stood dozens of medicine bottles.

Charla grabbed a couple and examined the labels. She looked up, her face blank. “How do we know which of this stuff could help Will?”

Luke grabbed the pillow from the examining table, dumped out the stuffing, and began tossing bottles into the case. “We’ll take it all,” he decided. “With any luck, the Discovery Channel did a show on medicines.”

“Right.” Charla joined him. “Let’s hurry up and get out of here. We don’t want to be stuck in the middle of the jungle in the dark.”

Luke tossed in a box of tongue depressors. It was dumb, he knew. Will had a bullet in his leg; no one was going to ask him to say “ah.” He paused over a tray of surgical instruments.

Charla read his mind. “God forbid!”

But they took the tray anyway. They took everything, even the medic’s journal, yellowed and tattered around the edges.

“You never know what might come in handy,” Luke explained.

Charla nodded grimly. She no longer argued with any statement that began, “You never know

“

They were halfway out the door when the shouting began — loud, furious, and too close for comfort. It was so unexpected that, for a second or two, they froze, right in the open.

Charla snapped out of it first. She dragged Luke back inside the dispensary and pulled the broken door shut. They dropped to their knees and peered through the mud-streaked window.

It was the smugglers! While Luke and Charla had been working in the Quonset hut, they had missed the sound of the floatplane landing. And now they were trapped

The leader was a hugely fat man in a pale green silk suit and matching fedora. His nickname had come from J.J.: Mr. Big. He was fatter than ever and in a towering rage about something.

“I don’t care if he hadfive aces up his sleeve! You don’t start a fistfight in a moving plane!”

“I’ll find it! I’ll find it!” promised a gravelly voice with a British accent.

In an amazingly graceful move for such a huge man, Mr. Big wheeled. As he turned, he pulled a large handgun from his pocket and pistol-whipped his unfortunate associate.

The sound of the blow, metal against human flesh, was a sickening thud. Huddled inside the dispensary, both Luke and Charla flinched.

The victim went down, and a third man quickly stepped between him and his boss.

Mr. Big wasn’t finished yet. “You’ll find it,” he agreed, “or the next thing you’ll find will be a bullet in your head!”

“It’s too late now, boss,” reasoned the third man. “It’ll be dark soon. We’ll have to look for it in the morning. What can happen to it? There’s nobody here but us.”

In the gloom of the dispensary, Luke and Charla exchanged an agonized look. Neither of them dared speak until the voices of the three men faded.

“Where are they?” asked Charla in something much less than a whisper.

“Probably in the main building/’ breathed Luke. “Or maybe down by the beach, getting stuff from the plane. Either way, we can’t risk leaving now.”

She nodded. “But when?”

In the diminishing light, she felt rather than saw Luke’s shrug.

Night fell quickly in the tropics. With the thick rain forest blocking even starlight, the darkness in the dispensary became total and suffocating. There was an isolation to it, Luke thought. He knew Charla was only a few inches away, but he could not see her at all. They wouldn’t make it ten feet in the jungle in this blackness.

They were stuck here until morning — stuck here together, yet separated by a complete absence of light.

He felt her hand steal into his. Her fingers were cold as ice.

Day 18, 5:50 a.m.

Fear.

Charla couldn’t believe some of things she used to consider fear. Like the butterflies as she crouched in the blocks, waiting for the starter’s gun in an important race.

Tension, sure. Doubts, always. But fear?

These last few weeks had taught her the true meaning of fear: losing the captain at sea, dangling like shark bait from a tiny raft, facing a lifetime marooned.

And now cowering in the pitch-black of the dispensary, hiding from certain death.

That was fear.

All through the terrible night, she revisited her old anxieties: that moment, still in midair after the dismount from the balance beam, not yet knowing if she could stick the landing.

Nerve-wracking? Of course. Gut-wrenching? Maybe. Fear? Not even close.

Even her ultimate old fear — the disappointment on her father’s face as he held up the stopwatch: “Now that wasn’t exactly a personal best, was it?” — made her smile in the darkness. In this place, this situation, who cared about a few hundredths of a second?

Her whole life so far had consisted of training and striving for athletic perfection. And right now that seemed about as important as ice cubes in the Arctic

“Charla — wake up.”

Luke knelt before her, one hand over her mouth, the other shaking her by the shoulder.

She looked out the smeared, cracked glass. It was still dark, with just the first few tendrils of dawn creeping across the sky.

“Let’s get out into the trees,” Luke whispered. “Then we can wait for the light and take off.”

They invested precious seconds closing the rickety door, determined that the dispensary should look as if no one had been there for decades. Then they were crawling through tightly woven underbrush, praying that the screeching of the awakening birds was covering the rustle of their movements.

They were well away from the Quonset huts by sunup. They found the broken concrete of the old runway with a minimum of wandering. From there, they were able to point themselves in the direction of their own side of the island.

Charla let out a mournful sigh. “Can you believe that they’re back so soon? We almost walked out of the hut right in their faces!”

“I thought we’d have more time,” Luke agreed, hefting the pillowcase over his shoulder. “Man, was our signal fire a bust or what? We didn’t even see a plane or boat, much less get rescued!”

“Nobody’s looking for us,” Charla reminded him. “We’re dead, remember?”

It was true. Mr. Radford, thePhoenix’s mate who had abandoned them, was safely back on dry land. The smugglers had left behind aUSA Today with the whole story — Radford telling the world that the six kids in his charge had all died in the shipwreck.

“Great guy, that Rat-face,” said Luke bitterly. “He has the same warm, fuzzy personality as the Green Blimp back there.”

Charla shuddered visibly. “That was awful! I can still hear the sound it made when he hit that man! I wonder what they lost.”

“It must have been something important,” Luke said grimly. “Mr. Big wouldn’t threaten to kill somebody just to scare him. He’s really ready to shoot that guy.”

They walked in silence for a few moments, listening to the rustling of the palms as a slight wind blew. Luke reached up to brush a bug from his cheek. But instead of an insect, he felt his hand close on a small piece of paper.

Litter? In the jungle?

He looked down and saw Benjamin Franklin staring back at him. This was ahundred-dollar bill’t Wordlessly, he showed it to Charla.

“Money!” she breathed.

Then they saw it, lying in the underbrush, its lock sprung — a black suitcase. It gaped open, and out of it poured neat bundles of bills, all hundreds.

“Oh, wow!” Luke groaned. “Now we know what they lost, and why they’re so upset about it.”

Mesmerized, Charla dropped to her knees and ran her hands over the pile of money. “In my neighborhood,” she whispered, “this could buy — my neighborhood!”

“There’s got to be a couple of million at least.” Luke nodded. “They’re going to come after it, no question.”

Charla looked stricken. “Yeah, but it’s like finding a needle in a haystack! It was a total accident that we found it! They’ll have to search the island fern by fern. They’ll stumble on our camp twenty times before they ever track down this suitcase!”

Luke crouched beside her and began stuffing bundles of bills back into the luggage. “That’s exactly why we have to help them.”

“Help them?” Her voice was shrill. “We’re dead if they even find out we’re here! How can we help them?”

“By making the suitcase easier to find/’ Luke explained. “We just have to put it somewhere they’re bound to notice.”

“We can’t lean it up against the door of the Quonset hut,” she pointed out. “They’ll know something’s fishy.”

“I’m not that stupid,” said Luke. “We’ll just take it closer to their camp and leave it out in the open. The sooner they find it, the sooner they stop looking.”