River Odyssey (5 page)

ALL I COULD THINK
of was how to escape. And I would if I got the chance. I was pretty sure I could snap that cable if I could just get inside and dive. But the officer standing on the hull was carrying a machine-gun and watching me. He was wearing a grin of satisfaction on his face and shook his head at me. “That cable’s a lot stronger than it looks, son. You wouldn’t want to be pulling us to the bottom of the river now.”

How did he know what I was thinking?

“I wasn’t thinking that,” I said. “I was just wondering why you’re chasing me instead of the stowaways.”

The grin dropped off his face and he looked very suspiciously at me. “How did you know we were looking for stowaways?”

I was right. The stowaways had been spotted. He glared at me. He probably figured I had something to do with them. I pointed to the freighter. “They’re up there.”

He turned and looked up. The man who had crawled out of the container was dangling dangerously by one arm. He was going to fall. And then, he did! He dropped like a bird out of the sky. It was awful.

The officer looked over at his boat quickly, ripped the walkie-talkie from his belt and shouted into it.
“Found them!
”

He pointed to the stern of the freighter. Then he looked back at me. Then he looked back at the freighter, then his boat, waiting for a command. He didn’t know what to do.

“Rescue him!” I shouted.

He stared at me wildly, as if he couldn’t make up his mind. He shouted into his walkie-talkie again and looked expectantly towards the speedboat.

The officers in the boat shook their heads emphatically. Whatever he was asking, the answer was no. I felt an extreme impatience with him. What was he waiting for? I was ready to jump into the water and swim to the drowning man, but it was nearly two hundred feet still. He would be gone before I could get there.

“He’s
drowning!”
I yelled.

Didn’t he care? In frustration the officer grabbed hold of the cable and unhooked it from the sub. A wave of relief ran cautiously through me. He jumped back to his boat but turned angrily and yelled at me. “Don’t you even
think
of moving!”

I stared back but didn’t answer. They churned up the water with the powerful engines on the back of their boat and took off. I watched them rush to the spot where the man had hit the water. They were there in seconds. I hoped it was soon enough. I hoped the stowaway was going to be okay, but didn’t see how he could be. It was such a terrible fall.

There wasn’t anything I could do to help now. In fact, I was just in the way because I was a distraction to the rescue. No doubt those navy officers wouldn’t see it that way but there was no way I was going to hang around until they came back. I needed to get away and hide. I was already an outlaw; leaving wasn’t going to make it any worse.

And so I jumped inside, shut the hatch, hit the dive switch and went down to three hundred feet. A quick glance at the charts showed the bottom lying between seven and eight hundred feet. We had lots of room.

Anticosti Island was probably the best place to hide even though it was farther than the shore of Quebec. In the reef surrounding the island the sub could blend in with rocks and underwater formations that would make it nearly impossible to identify. And we could spend time on the beach and wait until they gave up searching for us. And Hollie would be happy with that.

But there was always the chance those speedboats were carrying sonar and could track us if they wanted to. Tracking a submerged, silently moving submarine from a noisy, racing speedboat was probably impossible. Sonar is far from a perfect science. But if they had other boats in the area and could spread out and set up a sonar net they would have a good chance of finding us. I didn’t want to give them that chance. I also didn’t want them to know which direction we were heading. And so, I engaged the batteries and motored due east. I sailed about five miles, surfaced and switched on radar. Now they could detect us. I wanted them to. A third boat was on the scene. As soon as we appeared on their radar, one of the three boats came speeding in our direction. I cranked up the engine full blast and made a show of running for the east, as if we were planning to leave the river mouth all together. As they closed to three miles, I switched to battery power again and slipped beneath the waves. Once we were under the surface, I went down to three hundred feet again, shut everything off, turned around, climbed up on the bicycle and pedalled as quietly as a sea turtle towards Anticosti Island.

I pedalled for hours. Hollie lay on his blanket with his head on his paws and watched patiently. He wanted to get out and run. Seaweed looked like he was watching with one eye open but was probably sleeping. I took short breaks, drank orange juice and tried to stay relaxed, but it was hard to when I couldn’t know if we were being tracked from above. Probably we weren’t. I knew that. But I also couldn’t know for certain if we were keeping a true course. Without sonar I couldn’t know if we had run into a current that had shifted our direction a few degrees. That was worrisome. But I didn’t want to turn on sonar because there was always the chance our sonar waves would bounce off a nearby vessel with a sensitive listening device and they would know exactly where we were. To stay calm and pass the time I opened a book on the handlebars and read about Anticosti Island.

It was bigger than Prince Edward Island but only two hundred people lived there; two hundred people and a hundred thousand deer. Wow! The island used to be privately owned until the Quebec government bought it in 1974. Adolph Hitler tried to buy it in 1937. Holy smokes! Imagine Hitler living in Canada. The Canadian government said no. Good thing. It was bad enough the island was a disaster for ships. Actually, it was a graveyard, just like Sable Island. I bet there were ghosts there.

According to Sheba it was difficult to get close to a ghost. That had certainly been my experience,
if
what I had seen was a ghost. Ziegfried didn’t think so. I still wasn’t sure.

Ghosts were timid creatures, Sheba said. They were like shadows or wisps of smoke or ripples on the water. She said that ghosts were the spirits of people who hadn’t completely left the world because there was something holding them back, something bothering them too much to leave. So, they just sort of flitted about for a while, visiting places and occasionally being seen by people who were sympathetic towards them and didn’t scare them. People like her. Well, I supposed that explained why people rarely saw them.

If any place would have ghosts hanging around, surely it was Anticosti Island? Not only had people drowned there when their ships smashed against the rocks, but there was a man, a couple of hundred years ago, who helped people escape their sinking ships, imprisoned them, killed them and ate them! Yikes! How creepy was that?

After three hours of pedalling I surfaced to periscope depth and continued by battery. I couldn’t know if we were within radar range of the speedboats and had to assume that we were. I was drop-dead tired now but couldn’t risk getting caught again. Besides, I had promised Hollie a walk on the beach. And so, I motored on for a few more hours, until the silhouette of the island appeared under the moon. I sailed in very cautiously with sonar, dropped anchor in thirty feet of water, inflated the dinghy and we climbed in.

According to the charts, the water was crowded with sunken ships, just as at Sable Island. Storms and undertows pushed those wrecks around, too, so that they could appear and disappear randomly, sticking out of the sand and water here and there like skeletons that kept changing their minds about where they wanted to be buried. I didn’t want to get the anchor tangled up in the timbers of an old wreck, and I didn’t want to strike one of the rocks that had deceived so many other sailors.

I pulled the dinghy onto the beach and Hollie jumped out and ran around like someone who had been locked up for years. He ran so hard he fell over and rolled like a ball. He was crazy. Seaweed was already on the beach, picking long stringy things out of the body of something dead. The sun was still two hours away but there was enough light from the moon to see silhouettes on the beach. The beach was littered with driftwood and rocks and reminded me of pictures I had seen of the surface of the moon, except that the silhouettes seemed to be moving as we walked. I knew they weren’t.

We went all the way down the beach, and I had the feeling we were being watched the whole time. We both kept turning around, and Hollie would sniff the air, but he would do that anyway. Eventually he ran the craziness out of his system and started behaving like a normal dog. He turned and looked at me as if he had just woken from a wild dream. What was
that
about?

“I don’t know, Hollie. You’re the one running around like a nut.”

Then we heard a noise and both turned our heads. “What was that?”

He sniffed the air. It had been a strange sound. I couldn’t describe it. It wasn’t a human sound. There were a hundred thousand deer on this island; maybe it was one of them. I listened closely but heard only the sound of the wind. Maybe what we had heard was a piece of falling driftwood. We reached the end of the beach, turned around and walked back. Hollie trotted beside me like a model dog. If there were any ghosts I thought we might see a bundle of light. But we didn’t. If there were any ghosts they were probably afraid of us anyway.

We climbed back into the sub, deflated the dinghy, pulled up anchor and motored a little way from shore. Anxiously, I switched on radar. If there were boats in the area they would know that we were here, or that
somebody
was here. If they came towards us to investigate we’d have to find another place to hide. But I hoped they wouldn’t. I was so tired.

The radar wave made a clean sweep across the screen. There was nothing out there. Yes! I started to look for a place to sleep. I took one last peek through the periscope at the beach we had just walked down, now retreating behind us in the dark, and saw a bundle of light! Yikes! Straining my eyes I saw a figure standing at the water’s edge, on the very spot we had just stood! It was watching us leave.

“We’re going back!” I said excitedly.

Now I was spooked.

IT DIDN’T SURPRISE
me that when I surfaced and opened the hatch the ghost was gone. I still wanted to go and stand on that spot. I planned to leave Hollie in the sub this time but he would have none of that. If I were going to walk on the beach again then so was he. So, I tossed the anchor, inflated the dinghy all over again, climbed in and paddled to the spot. This time, when we stepped onto the beach, Hollie growled. I looked around.

“What is it, Hollie? What do you smell?”

I couldn’t see anything, but what was that sound? Was it whispering? Was it the wind? And what was that smell? It smelled like burning leaves or something. Hollie continued to growl but didn’t bark. I went and stood where I thought I had seen the figure standing and I felt a shiver go down my spine. The air was cold. I closed my eyes and listened, but all I could hear was the wind and waves, and the little murmur of Hollie’s growl, growing fiercer and more afraid at the same time. And then, something coughed behind us.

I turned and saw a towering shape facing us. Its eyes were flashing with the light of the moon. Its head was enormous. It coughed again and snorted. Then I knew what it was. It was a huge buck with an enormous set of antlers. It was standing above us on the beach and pawing the sand with its front hoof. Was it going to charge?

“Bark! Hollie! Bark!”

Hollie barked. The buck snorted again. Then Hollie started barking and didn’t stop. It was such a pathetic little bark but the buck backed up and trotted away, snorting like a steam engine.

“Good job, Hollie. You scared him away.”

I bent down and patted him. He was trembling. Who would have guessed that a deer would be scarier than a ghost?

We returned to the sub, deflated the dinghy and climbed back in. But when I pulled on the anchor this time, it wouldn’t budge. In my haste to see the ghost, I had thrown the anchor too quickly. The current had shifted the sub, the anchor dragged and wrapped around something. Whichever way I pulled, it would not give. Rats! I would have to swim down and free it. The sun would be up soon. I decided to make a cup of tea and feed the crew first. Seaweed probably wasn’t hungry after his breakfast on the beach but he would eat anyway. Seagulls had bottomless stomachs. They were like garbage compactors.