Treasure Hunters Read online

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Treasure Hunters

  The long barrel of a skeletal gun coughed streams of fire into the night. In a few moments the deck of the fishing boat burst into flame.

  Pat has joined his father on an old boat off the coast of a troubled Indonesian island to search for treasure. But as they follow a trail of clues to the world’s richest shipwreck the violence on the island coils around them.

  In this powerful, action-packed thriller, master storyteller Allan Baillie takes us on a quest where the dangers are real and the cost of a mistake could be life.

  also by allan baillie

  Adrift

  Little Brother

  Riverman

  Eagle Island

  Megan’s Star

  Mates

  Hero

  The China Coin

  Little Monster

  The Bad Guys

  Magician

  The Dream Catcher

  Songman

  Secrets of Walden Rising

  Wreck!

  Saving Abbie

  The Last Shot

  The Excuse

  Foggy

  Imp

  Picture Books

  Drac and the Gremlin

  The Boss

  Rebel!

  Old Magic

  DragonQuest

  Star Navigator

  Archie the Good Bad Wolf

  Non-fiction

  Legends

  Heroes

  Treasure Hunters

  ALLAN BAILLIE

  Puffin Books

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia) 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada) 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ) Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Books Australia, 2002

  Copyright © Allan Baillie, 2002

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.puffin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228156-8

  contents

  the ending

  1 the beginning

  2 matt

  3 fishes

  4 the mob

  5 token

  6 the tub

  7 morning

  8 trap

  9 fright

  10 the officer

  11 lump

  12 opening up

  13 taketigra

  14 cannon

  15 flor

  16 the fight

  17 the hit

  18 ghost ship

  19 the sinking

  20 chasm

  21 anger

  22 night

  23 dark water

  24 ali

  25 the drums

  26 thief!

  27 the village

  28 choice

  29 the wreck

  30 climbing back

  31 the race

  32 treasure

  33 footprint

  34 mist

  the ending

  the ending

  ‘The mist is lifting,’ Col said quietly.

  The words were lost in the dull drone of the outboard motor and the eleven other sodden people in the dinghy didn’t even glance at him. Then suddenly Pat was trying to shout desperately at him, but his words were jamming in his throat. He tried to swallow, failed, shook his head and finally stabbed a finger past Col’s shoulder.

  Ali, the only person standing in the dinghy, frowned down at Pat.

  Pat coughed. ‘There.’

  Ali shifted his hollow eyes across the water and softly clicked his tongue. ‘A girl lost the rope,’ he said.

  Without looking back, Col turned the outboard motor down to a low shudder. The slow ripples at the bow died.

  Ali cupped his mouth, calling in his language across the bobbing heads in the green sea to a man in the distance. The man waved a long arm and swam quickly towards a lonely girl further away.

  There were seventeen people in the water, clinging on to two ropes trailing from the stern. They were very tired but there wasn’t any more room in the dinghy.

  ‘Maybe I should be in the sea instead of her,’ Pat said.

  ‘Well ’’ Col sounded uncertain.

  ‘No.’ Ali shook his head firmly.

  ‘I’m fit, I can swim.’

  ‘You are the son,’ Ali said simply and looked into his eyes.

  Yes, Matt’s son, Pat thought. He tried to hold Ali’s stare but his eyes slipped to the disc around Ali’s neck.

  ‘I don’t think they would allow you,’ Col said quietly.

  Pat looked around the dinghy and realised everyone was watching him. Twelve sodden people in a dinghy that was made for five. Hurt old men sagging into the arms of old women, children squeezed on the edges of the seats, on the floor, between the adults’ legs. Ali’s mother had bunched up Ali’s shirt at his waist and water was still dripping from her clenched fist, but she was trying to smile a little bit at Pat.

  Everyone knew that the dinghy was sitting so incredibly low a sneeze could bring in the water. Nobody had moved in that boat for a long time and that was why Ali’s mother held her son so tightly as he stood as the swimmers’ lifeguard. They were surrounded by a bubble of mist over a sea as still as a moon desert, but they knew that Col had stacked the dinghy very dangerously. They knew Col was gambling that the sea would remain flat until the dinghy reached the far, far island and it was a terrible risk. They should have been staring at Col, not Pat ’

  Then Pat realised that nobody was looking at him.

  No, they were looking at Matt.

  Like Ali said, he was the son.

  Pat turned slowly from the crowded dinghy. Ah, no, he thought. Come on ’

  ‘She’s on the rope again,’ Ali said.

  Col nodded as he twisted the motor’s throttle. The motor rumbled, the dinghy moved slowly, the two ropes tied to the stern began to tighten. The ropes rose from the sea behind the dinghy, shivered like wet dogs and pulled the lines of bobbing heads through the sea.

  ‘Okay, we’re moving,’ Col said, then he saw Pat’s darkening face. ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘It is not fair.’

  ‘I know.’ Col looked up at the gathering shadow in the lifting mist. ‘Ali, we can see the island now.’

  Ali glanced over his shoulder and Pat saw him rubbing the disc with his thumb. Bringing the luck out.

  ‘We’re getting there,’ Col said. ‘If they can hang on.’

  Ali shouted to the people in the water, showing his finger almost touching his thumb. We’re almost home! A couple of the younger men tried to shout back but th
eir shouts were more like whispers.

  Col looked at Pat. ‘It’s going to get better.’

  ‘No,’ Pat shook his head. ‘Why did he do it?’

  ‘He had to do it. That simple.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t see it yet.’

  ‘No. Not in a million years.’ Pat stared hard at the island, clearing his eyes. Now he saw fingers of mist lifting from the sea and the jungled hills, leaving the brown smudges of the fires hanging in the air.

  Col said nothing for a while, leaving the drone of the motor as the only sound in the dinghy.

  A tangled point of land slid slowly towards Pat, then a high hill crept after it, until he could see the village. The village was only a black mark on the shoreline but he could almost smell it. He could hear the people around him beginning to sigh softly.

  It’s over, he thought.

  He moved slightly and a hard weight in his damp shirt swung against his chest. He frowned, fished in his pocket and pulled out a red stone that glowed in the rising sun.

  ‘Something?’ Col said.

  Pat showed him the red stone. ‘I didn’t know I had it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He must’ve shoved it into my pocket just – before.’

  Col picked his words. ‘You’re going to have to run through it all again, many times. You’ll have to. But after a while you’ll be able to choose the parts you want to keep. It’ll get better. A bit.’

  Pat shook his head.

  ‘These people, the village, they’ll never forget Matt. They own a part of him.’

  Pat looked down at the red stone, then across to Ali’s mother clutching him and saw Ali’s hollow eyes. ‘I guess.’

  A bright glint caught Pat’s eye and he glanced at the island’s main mountain peak. The sun had picked out, in the clinging bush, a high quartz outcrop in the shape of a leaping stone tiger.

  He breathed out softly. That, he thought, was the beginning.

  1 / the beginning

  Pat sat on the edge of his bed, holding a postcard in his hand. A shiver ran up his spine. It felt as if he was looking down from the pinnacle of a roller coaster just before the plunge.

  He had been staring at that postcard for six months and it wasn’t a good one. The colour was washed out, the image was blurred as if the photographer had been staggering, and it was too far away. It was just a jungled mountain peak with a hunk of quartz about to fall. You had to be told that the hunk of quartz was supposed to look like a leaping tiger for you to see it.

  But that was where Dad was, and now he was going there. And that made all the difference.

  Pat hissed softly to the postcard: ‘I’m coming, Dad. At last.’

  ‘You ready?’ Mum stepped into his room.

  ‘Almost.’ Pat hurriedly shoved the postcard into the open suitcase and slapped down his long yellow fins over his packed clothes.

  ‘Well, come on, Pat! At this rate you are going to miss your plane.’ She hesitated. ‘Mind you, that’s not a bad thing ’’

  ‘Aw, Mum,’ Pat looked up at her.

  That said: We’ve done this before, many times. You’ve had Dad on the phone for hours, you’ve sat on my bed talking with me until my ears hurt. But I’ve finished my scuba course – do you want to see my licence? – and now everything is worked out. Before, we were together, now it’s Dad’s turn ’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Mum waved a hand and looked tired. ‘Yes, I know it’s safe, everything is fixed. I know. But it’s not.’

  Pat closed the suitcase and sat upon it. ‘But it is. I get on the plane here, and get off at Jakarta. There’s a guy there holding a board with big letters saying “Pat” –’

  ‘And what if he’s not there?’

  ‘He will be! But if he’s not, okay, I’ve got the address for the hotel ’’

  ‘It all sounds very nice.’

  ‘It is. It’s like a Scout camp. Just further away.’

  Mum glared at Pat. ‘I wish ’’ She sighed for a moment.

  Pat clipped the locks of the suitcase and looked over his bedroom as if he wasn’t going to see it again. The computer with the dumb gorilla given to him by his mate, Robbie. Now, Robbie was such a nerd that when he spoke he bleeped, but when he was chatting on the computer somehow he was right there, in the corner. Robbie grinned down at Pat from a photo, holding a small fish that he had caught.

  There was the pile of games, the basketball, the 3-D dragon poster, the stack of CDs, the battered text books, the sketches of old ships and the big map of Indonesia with one small flag pinned to a sea ’

  Mum shook her head. ‘I wish Matt – your father – had grown up a little. Would just get over the accident and come back home. There, I’ve said it. Come on, come on. We’ve got to move.’

  Pat swung the suitcase off the bed and followed Mum down the corridor. Kilroy the white puppy was gnawing at the doormat, ignoring Pat. Pat dumped the suitcase in the boot of Dad’s grey Holden – now Mum’s car – and slid beside Mum. She didn’t talk much on the drive to the airport.

  What did she mean by the ‘accident’? Pat thought. Dad’s accident? Wasn’t really his accident anyway. Just a pack of boulders bouncing around on the road. What’s that got to do with anything?

  He shrugged and watched the road slide past. As if everything was moving away from him, Kilroy, Robbie, the rickety school, Mum ’ Everything! He drifted slowly from the car, carried his suitcase to the glass walls of the air terminal, nodded at Mum’s words without hearing her. Someone gave him his passport, the air ticket with a boarding pass, took his suitcase and skidded it on a black rubber river.

  ‘All right,’ Mum seemed to be speaking from a height. ‘You’re on your own. You are all right, now?’

  Pat’s tongue was somehow tangled in his mouth. He nodded.

  Mum swept her arms around him and crushed him against her. ‘You are going to be very, very careful out there. Just watch it.’

  Pat nodded again.

  Mum pulled away from him and looked hard at his face. ‘And you phone! You phone when you get into Jakarta, you phone the moment he picks you up. Right?’

  Pat nodded.

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘I’ll phone, I’ll phone.’

  ‘And make sure you do.’ Mum crushed Pat again and finally let him go.

  Pat walked through the security frame, along many of the moving walkways, to a crowded lounge where three small children were racing round seats.

  It’s not too late. You can still turn back, maybe catch Mum getting into her car ’

  Except there’s a great jumbo parked outside the lounge, with that grey trunk sucking people from the terminal.

  Pat joined the queue.

  It was a long flight. On a TV screen a mock plane dragged very slowly across a map of Australia. Pat watched the rolling green hills out the window and ate lunch next to a snoring man. Eventually the green hills became flat red earth and the mock plane was replaced by a funny movie. When the movie was over he looked down again and it was still red earth. But the mock plane reappeared, touching the north coast of the map.

  We’re still in Australia, he thought. You can call that stewardess and tell her you decided to go home. Drop you at Darwin. Oh yeah?

  But the mock plane slid over the line of the coast and the red earth fell away to a bright blue sea. He felt a slight shiver.

  You better be there, Dad.

  White clouds drifted to the jumbo, then he caught glimpses of jungled coast, small islands, and specks in the water through gaps in the clouds.

  We could be flying over Dad’s island, but we’re too high to see it.

  As the sun lowered in the sky the clouds turned pink, then the jumbo was slicing through them. The sea was replaced by a fine pattern of rice paddies on hills, and then the beginning of a sprawling suburb ’

  The man waved the cardboard sign the moment Pat walked past the barriers. He carried Pat’s suitcase to a polished green taxi and took him pas
t blocks of grey buildings, towers of glass, past streets of trees and flowers. He stopped at a shaded stone building that had a few bicycles leaning on its fence.

  It’s not all that much different than home, Pat thought. He followed the man with his suitcase into the hotel and a smiling woman took him to a small room with a fan ticking slowly around, a sheeted bed, and an old black phone.

  He phoned Mum and thought about food.

  The next morning the man was waiting outside the hotel. He took Pat by way of hooting, fuming freeways to another airport with smaller planes. After getting his suitcase loaded Pat followed the man to a streaked grey plane with two propellers. The plane was shaking a little on the tarmac.

  Like it was scared of the sky, Pat thought. Well you don’t want to go up there with it either.

  But he climbed the steps and wobbled inside. The plane coughed a couple of times as it climbed from the airport, from the city of Jakarta, but it was purring by the time it left the crowded island of Java. The plane remained far lower than the jumbo had flown, so much lower that he could see the sails of one of the old wooden cargo ships down below. He found that when he stared at a passing mountain he was looking up. But the sun glittering off the sea caught his eyes, washing across his face, until he began to doze ’

  The sea had gone. Now the plane was drifting over splintered crags and blue-green jungles with mists coiling from dark chasms.

  Pat yawned as he blinked his eyes into focus. Then suddenly he jolted in his seat and hissed softly.

  The little plane was sliding towards a quartz peak and he saw the leaping tiger. He could now see its head in the fractured white stone: the flattened ears, the bared teeth, even a couple of dark stripes. Then his eyes found the rest, the powerful body lunging from the deep jungle as one long paw reached out as if to swat him from the sky.

  He hunched in his seat.

  It was like the leaping tiger was a gate.

  On this side of the tiger is everything you have known. Mum, Kilroy, your room, your computer games, the photo of Robbie’s little fish, the bike that never worked properly, school, tests, pizza, footy, swimming – everything. Everything. Even including the flight in the jumbo and the night in Jakarta. All that is on this side of the tiger.