The Shark Rider (20 page)

“See what?” Sam asked.

“Something just swam under the boat.”

The other campers leaned over and stared nervously into the water. Rainwater dripped from their hair and noses. Hugh shivered. Something dark and about four feet across swam by. In its wake was a sparkling trail of blue-green light. Another form passed by, its whole body outlined in glowing, glimmering light.

Tristan breathed a sigh of relief. “Rays.”

Now that he knew what to look for, Tristan's eyes adjusted, and he could make out the wide, diamond-shaped forms swimming beside the boat. “Three of them.”

“Maybe they want to help,” Sam suggested.

“Maybe.”

“Well, we're not going anywhere anytime soon, Hunt,” Coach interjected. “Hop on in and find out.”

Tristan glanced at the others and then at the dark, choppy water.

Hugh seemed to know what he was thinking. “Uh, we don't know what else is out there.”

“C'mon, the rays wouldn't be here if there was, like, something bad down there,” Ryder scoffed.

“Then you go in,” Hugh countered.

“Remember, dude, I can't speak ray.”

Tristan took a deep breath and reminded himself of his vow to be more confident. “No, no, I'll do it.” He swung his legs around to the outside of the boat and turned to Coach Fred. “You don't happen to have any Sea Camp water with you, do you?”

“No, but I have something else that might work just as well.”

The campers all turned to him.

“Our new chemist at camp has been working on this for months. Granted, it's still in the experimental stage, but worth a try.”

Sam turned the dive light toward Coach. He pulled a small plastic bag out of his pocket. Inside were some
red, rubbery-looking pills. “It's Sea Camp water in a concentrated pill form—we think.”

He handed a pill to Tristan, who said, “You
think
? Is it safe?”

“Yeah, yeah, Hunt, nothing to worry about.”

“Go on, try it,” Ryder urged. “I would.”

Tristan rolled his eyes and then looked to Sam and Hugh. They just sort of shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

He swallowed the pill and waited, hoping he wouldn't choke or go into some kind of tongue-chewing convulsions.

“How long before it starts working?” Hugh asked.

“No idea,” Coach answered.

The sound of a powerful boat engine somewhere in the distance interrupted the conversation.

“Quiet!” Coach urged, cocking his head and listening intently.

For several minutes, nobody said or did anything. Tristan sat on the side of the boat and waited. The engine noise got noticeably louder.

“It's headed this way,” Coach told them.

“Should be some emergency paddles in here,” Meg said urgently. “Anyone see them?” She looked to Sam. “Keep waving that light to let them know we're here.”

It was a quick search. No paddles. And from the sound of it, the oncoming boat was big and bearing down on them fast.

“Use your hands, start paddling,” Coach ordered. “We need to get into shallower water and out of the boat channel.”

The teens leaned over the sides of the boat and began paddling. Simultaneously, Coach shoved Tristan into the water. “We could use that help right about now.”

Tristan popped up and floated beside the barely moving boat, letting his vision adjust to the darkness. He looked for the rays. They were circling nearby. Two had white spots on their backs, which made them easier to see. The other ray was larger, solid black on top and white underneath. It had two weird, flat projections in front of its mouth. Tristan recognized it—a manta ray. He glanced around, wondering if anything else was out there.
Don't think about it
, he said to himself. Tristan then silently said hello to the rays.

The manta ray swam directly at Tristan. It turned abruptly, flashing its white underside.

In his head, Tristan heard the ray.
Who are you, and what are you doing here?

Man
, Tristan thought,
the animals around here sure aren't very friendly.

The manta made another pass.
Who do you work for?

I don't work for anybody. We're just here to help figure out why things are dying.

The manta circled in close.
Yeah, that's a bit dodgy. But you don't look like those other wonky chaps and I can't talk to them. Why are you skulking about out here at night?

Skulking? We're not skulking.

Either way, you blokes better bloody start moving. There's a big ol' boat headed this way.

Tristan rolled his eyes.
I know that. That's why I got in. Our engine's dead, and we could use some help getting out of the way.

The sound of the approaching boat was now disturbingly loud, and Tristan could feel the thrum of its propellers in the water. On the inflatable, Sam was frantically waving the dive light back and forth. The others paddled harder, but the boat was heavy and they were fighting against the remaining breeze.

“Hey, uh, Tristan?” Hugh shouted. “Hurry it up, buddy.”

The manta ray made another pass by Tristan. He knew it was trying to decide if they were trustworthy. After an excruciatingly long few seconds, the ray told him what to do. Tristan popped up and told the others.

Coach speedily tied a wide loop in the line from the bow and tossed it to Tristan. “We need to move
NOW
.”

On the inflatable, they could see the hull of a large white powerboat headed straight for them. Sam aimed the light directly at the boat, swinging it from side to side.

Tristan grabbed the rope from Coach and kicked to the front of the inflatable. With his webbed feet, he shot forward—the pill had worked. He held the loop out so the wide manta could swim through. He let go, and the rope lay hooked under its two weird front flap-like projections and around its outstretched, wing-like fins. The two eagle rays picked up the back of the loop in their mouths. The rays waved their broad, powerful fins and swam forward. The inflatable resisted. Then,
slowly, it began to move. Tristan grabbed the line to help pull, kicking hard.

The powerboat was nearly on top of them. Someone else leapt into the water from the boat. Ryder grabbed the line. He nodded to Tristan and began pulling as well.

Tristan felt a powerful rumble in the water. He kicked even harder, not wanting to be crushed under the boat or ripped to shreds by the propeller. He couldn't understand why the boat hadn't turned away; they must have seen the light Sam was waving. Tristan glanced behind him. A huge, glowing wave of white water at the boat's bow was almost on top of them. He turned back, kicked, and prayed.

Either the powerboat turned at the very last minute or its bow wave pushed the inflatable just enough, because somehow they escaped being run over or sliced in half. But it had been dangerously close. Seconds after the boat passed, its giant wake hit them like a tsunami. The inflatable rocked violently and nearly flipped. Sam was tossed out, and the others were thrown to the deck in a twisted pile of limbs and bodies. The team up front stopped pulling.

Coach Fred jumped up quickly to check for injuries: a few bumps and a cascade of bruises. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt. But they'd lost the handheld radio overboard.

“I'd like to know who was driving that boat,” Coach Fred said angrily. He called to the teens up front, “Nice work, boys. Do you think you could get us back to the ship?”

While Tristan asked the rays, Sam looked up from the water. “Hey, Coach, I'm in the water already. Can I pull too?”

Coach handed her a red pill, and she passed him the dive light.

With the team pulling up front, the inflatable now moved slowly but steadily. They glided out of the Gorda Sound boat lane and toward Mosquito Island. For the most part, Tristan was too busy pulling to talk to the rays. But once, when the water got scarily shallow, he asked the manta not to run them aground. The manta ray responded by saying something about a reef, a shortcut, and not to worry. The rays then swung them into a narrow channel lined with thickets of branching coral. Tristan popped his head up and watched uneasily as they passed frighteningly close to the sharp coral. Rounding the tip of Mosquito Island, the
Reef Runner
came into view, lit up by its bright stern deck lights.

Tristan let out a long, tired sigh. Just before they reached the ship, he thanked the rays for their help. Tristan also asked why the animals in the area were acting so funny and if the rays knew anything about the die-offs. The manta ushered the eagle rays off and then paused. It told him it would come back in the morning when it was alone. Tristan climbed into the inflatable with the others.

Now alongside the
Reef Runner,
Coach Fred threw the line from the bow to the first mate.

Captain Hank strode up to the rail and angrily pushed Charlie aside. “Where've you all been?”

“Engine problems,” Coach answered.

“How'd you make it back?”

“We tried the radio, repeatedly, before it went overboard,” Meg replied. “Lucky these kids are strong swimmers. They pulled some, and we walked the boat through the shallow areas.”

The captain eyed them suspiciously. It was not the reaction Tristan had expected.

The first mate bowed his head and shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, found these tucked away under some lifejackets. Thought they were in the boat.” He was holding up two narrow plastic paddles. “I'll check out the engine.”

“You do that,” the captain huffed. “Hard to get good help around here. At least you made it back without damaging my boat, but I'll want a replacement for that radio.”

What about us, like, not getting run over and chopped up or anything?
thought Tristan.

“Yes, thanks,” the scientist said sarcastically. “
We
all made it back safely.”

Wet, freezing, and totally exhausted, Tristan could think only of jumping into a warm, dry, non-hazardous-to-your-health bed. The rush of adrenaline during the near collision had faded, and the food he'd consumed at the Bitter End weighed heavily in his stomach. He and the others made a beeline for their bunks. Sam was the only one who even took a shower before climbing under the covers.

Tristan lay in his bed, wrapped snugly in the sheets and blanket. His eyelids felt so heavy he could hardly
keep them open. But he wasn't quite ready to go to sleep. He looked down at Hugh in the bunk below.

“Hugh,” Tristan said softly. “Hugh?”

No response except a gentle snore. Tristan lay back and let his eyes close, thinking. The animals were acting awfully strange, and the campers had had two near-death accidents in just one day. Was that normal for a mission? Did campers nearly get killed on a regular basis, and it was just something the director neglected to mention? Or were they just having a really, really bad day? Right before he fell asleep, Tristan decided it must be his serious bad luck. Though somewhere back in the recesses of his mind, he wasn't so sure.

16

HERDED BY SHARKS

S
HORT BUT POWERFUL SQUALLS SWEPT THROUGH
the British Virgin Islands throughout the night. They'd spun off a low-pressure system building in the Atlantic Ocean. No one in the islands paid much attention to the storms, as it was early in hurricane season.

As morning broke over Mosquito Island, the rising sun turned the fish-scale clouds overhead a fiery orange-red. The air was already thick with humidity. The teens sat eating quietly in the main salon. Tristan was sure Coach Fred had asked the steward to bang the pots and pans even louder that morning. Still, the campers were more asleep than awake at the table, tired from the previous night's adventure. He'd seen Rosina doze off and nearly drown in her cereal bowl. After breakfast, Coach Fred ushered the group to the stern deck.

“Snappers, muster up,” Coach barked. “Earlier this morning, a boat towed Charlie in the inflatable to the Bitter End to flush out the engine and lines. Looks like our problems last night were caused by water in the gas. Once Charlie comes back, Meg and I will be heading out to Cockroach Island to recon the site of that last fish kill. Probably won't be till sometime this afternoon. In the meantime, I've got a call with the director this morning to discuss yesterday's events and what our options are.”

Through his early-morning fog, Tristan picked up on the fact that Coach had said that just he and Meg would be going out in the afternoon. “Aren't we all going to Cockroach Island? Not that I really want to go to an island named after cockroaches.”

“The senior campers have returned from the dolphin stranding, so we thought they could—”

Tristan was suddenly wide awake. “What?”

“But wait, you're going to bring them here?” Sam questioned. “And send us home?”

No way
, Tristan thought. After all they'd already been through and done . . . now they were going to be replaced with senior campers? Just the thought made Tristan want to either scream or puke; he wasn't sure which. They'd never live it down. They'd be the laughingstock of Sea Camp. He'd been nervous before, at times scared, but now he was mad.