We will be long dead by then, he thought grimly.
Carmen shielded her eyes against the glare and scanned the sea to the north and west. “There won’t be any commercial fishermen in this area and probably no recreational fishers either,” she said.
“No, so all we can hope for is another research vessel or some passing tourists,” Andrew replied. It also came to him that their little island was in the wrong place.
It is over half a kilometre to the north edge of the reef near the Challenger Channel. A ship could pass through and not even see us, he thought.
That led to more unpleasant thoughts. To try to reach the north end of the reef would be a painful and difficult undertaking. With the reef exposed it would mean walking across the coral with all the risks of injury that entailed.
And if the tide is in and we have to swim the current will make things really hard and we will be very difficult to spot in the water, he thought gloomily. The thought of going back into that water chilled him as all his usual phobias about sharks resurfaced.
It was demoralising, but he did not want to voice his doubts. But what he was now painfully aware of was that he was not only very hot and thirsty but was getting badly sunburnt. A glance showed his arms, chest and shoulders to be bright red. His skin felt tight and tender and he shivered and knew it was from feeling sick, not from the breeze.
We are really in trouble, he thought. Dread clutched at his insides and he began to quietly pray.
To try to get some shade Carmen suggested they dig into the east side of the sand cay at the steepest part. They tried this but quickly gave it up as the sand was so dry that it kept crumbling into the hole almost as fast as they dug it. As Andrew pointed out the effort was making them sweat more than if they just sat quietly. By this time their arms were too tired to hold the wetsuits up as shade cover so instead they just sat with the suits draped over their head and back and faced away from the sun.
After a while Andrew walked around to the other side of the cay, cooling his feet in the puddles as he went. Once he was out of sight of his sister he relieved himself. To his concern he had very little urine and it was a bright yellow colour.
That is not good, he told himself. It should be almost clear.
The image of the colour chart they had been shown on the Sea Survival course rose to cause more chest-tightening apprehension.
Thinking about the possibility of dying of thirst sent little tremors of anxiety around Andrew’s stomach.
Like rats scrabbling for food, he thought. And then his stomach grumbled as he had not had lunch. It is a long time since breakfast, he thought. But his rational mind told him that food was not critical. People can go for thirty or forty days before they die of hunger. Thirst will kill us in a day or two.
Once again, he scanned the horizon in all directions and found it empty. Then he became conscious again of the savageness of the tropical sun as it burned his skin. After splashing some water on it to cool it he walked back to re-join Carmen. She gave him a smile, but Andrew could see the worry in her eyes and knew she was scared as well.
No sooner had he sat down and pulled his wetsuit up over his shoulders that he heard an aircraft. He went tense and cupped his hand to his ear. Yes, an aircraft! he thought. He sprang up and began searching the sky. Then the sound came more distinctly above the whiffle of the gentle breeze and he scanned the sky to the northeast.
“There it is!” Andrew cried, pointing northwards at a tiny spec that was growing rapidly larger. His hopes went rocketing up and he sighed with relief and began to wave his arms. Carmen joined him and they both signalled frantically.
It was a Coastwatch aircraft—but it was at least five or six kilometres to the east. It appeared to fly directly over Prescott Island and then headed south across the Challenger Channel towards the wrecks on Longbow Reef.
“It isn’t coming this way,” Andrew commented, his hopes clashing with apprehension.
It was quickly obvious that the aircraft was not searching for them. It kept flying southwards in a direct line and was soon over Longbow Reef. Carmen let out a little sob of disappointment and then said, “We need a mirror to attract their attention.”
“Mirror?” Andrew replied, his thoughts now in a jumble as fear began to overwhelm hope.
“Face mask!” Carmen cried.
They both dashed back to where the diving equipment lay. Carmen got there first and snatched up the facemask. Then she held it close to her with her right hand and extended her left hand to arm’s length with a finger upright. She then aimed the finger at the aircraft and began moving the goggles of the facemask to try to get sunlight to reflect off them.
“Get the sunlight on your finger!” Andrew cried, remembering the instructor on the Sea Survival course. He reached towards the facemask, his fingers twitching with anxiety. An almost frantic urge to snatch the facemask from Carmen welled up and he had to consciously restrain himself.
She is a Chief Petty Officer. She has been trained at this stuff too,’ he reminded himself.
“The angle’s all wrong!” Carmen wailed.
Andrew understood the problem. The sun was coming from almost directly behind them and she was finding it very hard to get anything lined up where her own shadow did not block the sun’s rays. Nor could she get any strong reflections and every second the aircraft flew further away southwards.
Within a minute the aircraft was just a speck in the southern sky. Andrew felt a sickening feeling of dread grip his stomach as his hopes came sliding down.
Carmen shook her head and muttered, “Sorry!”
“Not your fault, sis. We will be ready next time and know what to do,” Andrew replied. But it was a terrible blow and they stood in silence and watched until the aircraft vanished. Then the sound of its engine died away. For something to say to try to lift his sister’s spirits Andrew said, “I wish they’d flown over when that sub was here. They might have spotted it. They would certainly have seen the crook’s boat and would have come to fly around it to investigate a fishing boat in a restricted zone.”
“Yes, they would have,” Carmen agreed.
Andrew thought of submarines and things he had read about them. He said, “I read somewhere that during the Second World War the Japanese never sent a submarine inside the Great Barrier Reef. I always used to wonder about that because they certainly sent them to sink ships off the coast of New South Wales and South Queensland.”
“Yes, they sank that hospital ship, the Centaur out from Brisbane,” Carmen agreed.
“Now that I think about it I can see why they didn’t come inside the Great Barrier Reef. It isn’t that the water inside the reef isn’t deep enough. It is. Their problem was navigation. To try to find one of the gaps in the reef at night would be almost impossible, even by sonar and during the day they would have to be at periscope depth to try to spot the waves breaking on the reef and that would make them very visible to our anti-sub aircraft,” he said.
Carmen nodded. “Even in daylight it would have been pretty tricky finding an opening,” she said. “They would really need to be good navigators and pick the tides because there are some really strong currents through some of these channels.”
An idea came to Andrew and he clicked his fingers and pointed. “You’re right! They would’ve needed a visual reference. No GPS navigation in those days. That’s why they’ve chosen this place.”
“Why?”