Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) by Scott Mariani

Author:Scott Mariani [Mariani, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9780007486205
Amazon: 0007486200
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2016-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 32

Something was tap-tap-tapping against Ben’s head. He opened his eyes, and found himself squinting blearily into the black eye of a seagull. He jerked his head up off the hard, uncomfortable surface it was resting on and shooed the gull away. It flapped off on broad wings, low over the water, then looped up high and circled overhead.

Ben eased his aching body into a sitting position and gazed around him. The sun was rising over a calm, flat ocean and rising slowly into the cloudless sky. It was as if the storm had never happened, except for the absence of the ship and the remnants of the slick of wreckage that floated on the water. The only sound was the soft whisper of the ocean and the creaking of the makeshift raft Ben was sitting on.

His recollection of the cyclone was hazy, like half-forgotten snatches of a nightmare that returned to him in flashes. That last towering wave was still vivid in his mind’s eye, and the crush of the water as it crashed down. The pain in his skull was a reminder that he’d whacked his head against something hard as he went under; but after that his memory was blank and there was nothing more until he’d snapped awake, drifting alone on a calm sea under a brightly starlit sky, an arm and a leg still hooked through the piece of deck railing that had somehow become snagged on a half-submerged cargo container and kept him afloat. Just him and the wide open sea and the vast dome of space stretching overhead, its billions of twinkling lights shimmering on the spangled ocean, broken here and there by the bobbing dark rectangles of scores of loose shipping containers that trapped enough air inside their iron shells to keep them afloat, drifting slowly outwards in a spreading circle half a mile or more across. They were a strange, surreal sight. Like floating tombstones, markers for the dead at sea.

At first he’d thought he was the only one to have made it, and his despair almost made him let go and allow the depths to swallow him up, too. Then out of the darkness he’d heard a voice calling his name, pulling him back from the brink.

Jude’s voice.

Ben had powered splashing across fifty metres of cold sea and discovered Jude clinging to another container, submerged up to the neck and treading water. Ben had cried as he held him, and Jude had cried too, though that was something neither of them would talk about for as long as they lived.

Then, through the hours of night that followed, the rest of the survivors had gradually come together. Or what was left of them. Two became four when Jude spotted Lou Gerber’s white, balding head struggling to stay afloat with the dead weight of the injured, semi-conscious Condor dragging him down. Ben and Jude had swum out together to haul them to safety. Then four became seven when, with a triumphant yell,

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