CHERUB: Shadow Wave (11 page)

In the back seats, hotel owner Mrs Leung sat with the mud-spattered Wati on her lap. Squeezed alongside were Iona, Dante and two other trainees, while the cargo area behind had been hastily packed with first-aid kits and emergency medical equipment from supplies meant for the aborted canoeing exercise.

The three-kilometre drive took them on a slight curve. The wave that Kyle saw hitting the Starfish Hotel head-on had swept towards Aizat’s village at an oblique angle, having first hit the adjacent construction site.

The village’s traditionally designed houses were elevated on wooden poles and their lightweight flexible structures withstood storms and tidal waves better than western influenced designs made from brick and metal. But they’d been less able to cope with debris and construction equipment washed off the building site, including a four-storey scaffold carried across in the rush of water.

Of the eleven huts in the village, the four closest to the construction site had been seriously damaged. The rest had all suffered some degree of damage from floating boards and sheets of corrugated metal.

‘What’s the situation?’ Kyle asked urgently, as he pulled up in front of Aizat’s hut.

Aizat’s boat lay broken between two distant palm trees, while a cement mixing machine had damaged several of the hut’s main supports and lay wedged deep under the building.

Aizat’s legs were spattered in mud. He’d dragged two elderly women from a damaged hut and laid them out on a metal sheet from the hotel site. Both were cut and one had an obviously broken arm. The lads who’d been playing football earlier stood about with no sense of direction and stared hopefully at the new arrivals.

Aizat pointed at the four severely damaged huts. ‘I haven’t even walked over that side yet. Are we expecting more waves?’

‘We don’t think so,’ Kyle said. ‘We’re listening to the radio and we’ve got satellite phones working. But nobody warned us about the last wave, so you can’t be sure.’

A jolt of adrenaline had sobered Speaks up and she quickly checked out the two elderly casualties. Once she saw there was nothing life-threatening about their injuries she turned towards the trainees.

‘Use your first-aid training,’ Speaks ordered. ‘Clean the cuts. Seal any that are bleeding badly with compression plasters, splint and wrap the broken arm. Give her pain relief if you think she needs it.’

As the four trainees grabbed kit from the back of the car and became medics, Kyle and Speaks followed two teenage villagers who were particularly anxious to show them one of the wrecked huts. They barely spoke English and Kyle and Speaks knew no Malay, but it didn’t take much to work out that the girls thought there were people trapped under the collapsed roof.

The scaffold had hit the hut at speed, ripping off the veranda and knocking the entire structure backwards on its supporting stilts. The wooden frame had caved in, leaving a tangle of planks topped off by the remains of the metal roof. The only reason the structure hadn’t collapsed entirely was that the front of the house now balanced precariously on part of the buckled scaffold tower.

Kyle pushed against the side of the building to see if it was stable. The entire structure creaked alarmingly, making one of the girls scream in panic.

‘Just checking it out,’ Kyle said, backing away and raising his arms to calm the girls down.

Miss Speaks held up her fingers like she was counting. ‘How many people?’

The taller of the two girls held up two fingers, but then she linked hands and rocked them from side to side indicating that one or both was a baby.

Kyle looked at Speaks. ‘It’s too unstable to clamber under that roof. We’ve either got to brace the structure or knock it down.’

He’d hoped that Speaks had a better plan, but she stayed quiet.

‘Knocking it down is easier, but if it shifts it could crush anyone trapped inside,’ Kyle added.

Speaks leaned under the structure and made a thoughtful inspection of the steeply angled rear posts. ‘The scaffolding at the front is wedged at an angle. If it collapses, it’s going backwards. So, what if we get the Land Cruiser up here and back it up against the building, so that it can’t topple?’

‘Will that hold it?’ Kyle asked.

Speaks nodded. ‘It’s a heavy car. It’ll hold for a while if you’re gentle on the throttle.’

‘Me?’ Kyle gulped.

Speaks inflated her huge chest and bulky arms. ‘Unless you want to get up there and try lifting up that roof. But I reckon that’s my department, don’t you?’

Speaks wasn’t just muscular, she’d been a champion weight-lifter which made her pretty much the ideal person to have around under the circumstances.

Kyle hurriedly explained the plan to Aizat as he jogged back to the Land Cruiser.

‘They’re twins,’ Aizat explained. ‘Two boys, eleven months old.’

‘It scares me that we can’t hear them yelling inside,’ Kyle said. ‘We’ll try, but I’m not optimistic.’

It was tricky driving the Land Cruiser up the beach and reversing over debris, down a narrow alleyway between the wreckage of the two most seriously damaged huts. Fortunately the families that owned them worked on the mainland and both had been empty when the wave struck.

By the time Kyle parked with the back of the Land Cruiser aligned to the rear of the teetering house a gaggle of villagers was watching, along with two painters from the construction site who’d come by to help.

Kyle leaned out of the car window. ‘Ready?’ he shouted.

Miss Speaks looked around at Dante, who’d donned a yellow safety helmet with a powerful rescue lamp fitted around it.

‘I’m fine,’ Dante said, before smiling nervously.

‘Roll her back,’ Speaks ordered.

Kyle switched on the Land Cruiser’s low-ratio gearbox, giving it the kind of torque required for climbing muddy hills, or hopefully supporting the weight of a teetering pole house. He let out the handbrake and gave the accelerator the lightest of touches.

Kyle looked back over his shoulder as the house’s wooden beams creaked. The Land Cruiser’s back window shattered and the suspension sank into the mud as the rear end braced the weight of the wooden structure. This was the moment of truth. Would the car pushing backwards support the teetering house, or cause it to collapse and possibly crush the babies trapped inside?

‘Enough,’ Speaks shouted.

To Kyle’s relief the big 4x4 seemed to be propping up the house, but sweat was pouring down his brow. The ground beneath the tyres was slippery and he had to strike a difficult balance between skidding forwards in the mud, or pushing the throttle too hard and knocking the house forward on to the scaffolding.

Speaks clambered up the side of the house and wedged her hands under a section of the collapsed roof. The corrugated metal roofing was light, but the wooden frame and joists to which it was attached needed all the strength in her beefy arms and tree trunk thighs.

As soon as there was a decent gap between floor and roof, Dante shot through into the hut’s collapsed interior. The roof and sides seemed to be propped up by pieces of furniture. He found himself with a pair of cheesy thongs in his face, looking under a couch with his lamp illuminating empty cigarette packets and dead cockroaches.

‘What can you see?’ Speaks shouted, straining under the weight of the roof panels.

Dante’s world shuddered as Kyle dabbed the Land Cruiser throttle a little too hard. At the same moment his nose caught an alarming whiff of cooking gas. According to the girls, their baby nephews had been asleep in a cot near the centre of the house.

Dante crawled in deeper. To his relief there was half a metre between his back and the roof over the middle of the house. His helmet-mounted lamp wasn’t needed because sunlight blitzed through small gaps between the collapsed sections.

‘I see them,’ Dante gasped, as he rounded the end of the sofa and spotted a cot.

‘Are they OK?’ Speaks shouted.

Dante had a younger sister, so he knew about babies and was alarmed by what he saw. It was stiflingly hot, and the two tiny boys lay together, covered in a fine layer of dust. He slid his arm between the bars of the cot and touched one boy’s hand. It felt warm and the tiny fingers reacted to his touch by curling into a fist.

‘I think they’re both alive,’ he shouted.

Both boys had red faces, and Dante guessed they’d screamed themselves into a state of exhaustion and passed out in the heat.

‘Bring them out quickly,’ Speaks ordered.

But Dante cursed as he looked up and saw that the wooden sides of the cot were supporting the collapsed wall panel above his head. At a stretch he could reach around the top of the cot and get his arm in to touch the babies, but the gap between the top of the cot and the collapsed wall wasn’t enough to lift their bodies through.

Dante pushed upwards, trying to raise the wall, but it was pinned down beneath the hut’s roof and would take several strong adults to lift off.

‘Get me a saw,’ he shouted.

It was almost two minutes before Aizat brought a small hacksaw from his hut. During the wait Kyle had another accident with the throttle and Dante got horribly claustrophobic as he imagined the walls collapsing on top of him.

The only relief came to Miss Speaks, whose muscles were replaced by wooden props hammered in by the two painters to keep Dante’s escape route open.

Once he had the saw, Dante crawled back to the cot and began using it to cut through a wooden side bar. The noise and dust disturbed the babies and after a brief instant of curiosity the pair began screaming in the confined space less than thirty centimetres from Dante’s head.

The first rail twisted out of the cot frame once Dante had sawed through and he threw it down in the puddle of sweat that had dropped off his brow. He reckoned he’d need to take three rails out to make a gap big enough to get the babies through, but he was acutely aware that by removing rods he was weakening the cot frame supporting the roof over his head.

Back in the Land Cruiser, Kyle had been balancing throttle and brake pedals for five minutes. His knees hurt and his right calf was numb. Despite the pain he was getting a feel for what the car would do, but just as he thought he’d got the hang of it the biggest hornet Kyle had ever seen buzzed through the side window and dive-bombed his head.

Kyle instinctively flinched and in doing so jammed the accelerator pedal hard. The car shot back violently and the onlookers gasped as the entire hut groaned. At the front, one of the scaffolding sections twisted and began to buckle.

‘Kyle, you crazy idiot,’ Speaks shouted. ‘What are you doing?’

He still had the hornet buzzing around his head and after several attempts to bat it away Kyle took a hand off the steering wheel and threw the driver’s door open, hoping that the huge stinging insect would fly out.

Inside the house, Dante was terrified as the tangle of wood and metal over his head rumbled and began to shift. He thought about turning back, but he was tantalisingly close to freeing the babies. Then the props snapped, sealing his exit and bringing the roof even closer to his body.

As Speaks jumped on to the tilting structure and tried to lift the roof again, Dante saw a new opportunity. The jolt had shifted everything and a divine light shone through a hole directly above the cot.

Dante abandoned his saw, hurdled his way into the cot and stood up in the newly formed opening, being careful not to step on the babies down by his feet. The crowd gasped as they saw Dante’s head, but this time it was horror not relief. The entire structure was shifting forwards.

‘Somebody grab ‘em,’ Dante shouted, as he reached down into the cot and grabbed the screaming pair by their nappies.

Speaks was heavy and feared that her weight would collapse the roof, so Iona clambered desperately over the wreckage and grabbed the babies.

The two tiny boys screamed their heads off as they were manhandled and passed down into the waiting arms of Miss Speaks. Iona was about to jump down when she realised that Dante couldn’t pull himself up through the hole and out on to the roof.

Iona was smaller than Dante, but basic training had made her strong and she yanked Dante out of the hole just as the scaffolding holding up the front of the house completely gave way. The onlookers dived clear as the section of roof on which Dante and Iona now stood began sliding towards the ground.

Dante considered jumping off the side, but Iona had a better tactic and he copied her, riding the metal roof panel on which they stood like a giant surfboard as it crashed down into the silt in front of the house.

The hornet had finally flown out, but Kyle couldn’t see around the sides of the house. He had no idea what was going on and felt sick when he saw that the building was collapsing. Then he saw one of the other trainees giving him a thumbs-up.

‘They’re out. Drive off!’

Kyle flipped the Land Cruiser into a forward gear and the big car flexed with relief as it skidded off up the beach. In the chaos, Kyle had forgotten that his door was open and it smashed against a tree trunk, slamming shut and leaving a huge dent in the metal.

By the time he’d moved twenty metres clear the entire hut was straining. The scaffold at the front was dragging it one way, while the release of the Land Cruiser at the back pulled it the other. After several seconds making up its mind, both ends buckled simultaneously and the entire structure collapsed straight down on to its stilts.

Moments later Dante breathlessly approached the two teenage aunts who each held a screaming baby, while an elderly villager carefully wiped the dirt off their faces using bottled water and cotton wool balls, being extra careful that nothing ran into their eyes.

‘You did good,’ Miss Speaks beamed, giving Dante an almighty thump on the back. ‘It’s a shame you’re not on a mission or you might have just earned the fastest promotion to navy shirt in history.’

The afternoon brought tropical storms, with ping-pong-ball-sized droplets pelting the silt and turning the village into streams of ankle-deep mud. The village’s only serious casualties were the broken arm and an elderly man whose back had been speared by a scaffold rod. One small girl had been washed several hundred metres but escaped injury, and a headcount revealed that the kids who’d been playing by the sea had all made it to the huts before the wave hit.