Deadly Sky (ePub), The Read Online Free Page A

mum. She jabbed him with her elbow.
    They powered along the runway, lifted up over busy roads and railway lines. No harbour bridge or opera house this time: after a few seconds they were over the sea, Australia already behind them.
    A guy five or six years older than Darryl sat across the aisle. He wore blue jeans and a blue shirt, and looked foreign. He also looked bored, like he flew toanother country every day. Darryl decided he didn’t like him.
    He gazed down at his own khaki-grey trousers and cream shirt. He wished he had some jeans like the guy across the aisle. How hot was it going to be in Tahiti? And that other island, Mangarora. No, Mangareva. He’d looked it up in the atlas and it was way south of Tahiti, in among a whole lot of other islands. He hadn’t realised there were so many of them.
    What was he going to do in Tahiti, anyway? His mum would be visiting schools and talking to her groups, and she’d told him he was welcome to come along. Come along to a lot of girls’ schools? Darryl had thought: I wouldn’t mind. Out loud, he said ‘Hell, no’, and his mother laughed.
    The meal on this flight was different from the first one. There was fish, and a crisp bread roll, and cheese. It looked French, somehow. ‘Would you like a glass of wine,
monsieur?
’ the air hostess asked him, and he didn’t know what to say.
    ‘Go ahead,’ his mother grinned. ‘Try it.’ It tasted like cough medicine, he decided after three sips; he wished he’d got a Coke instead.
    Then he realised his mother was signalling to the air hostess. ‘I think my son would like a Coke.’ He said nothing, but felt grateful.
    There was a man sitting between them and thewindow, so Darryl couldn’t see out. It was just ocean all the way to Tahiti now, anyway, and it was starting to get dark outside. This guy was asleep with his mouth open, too. Planes seemed full of men sleeping and showing their fillings.
    He read a bit more. After the United Kingdom and the United States (and the USSR, up in Siberia), France had also begun testing nuclear weapons. First in the Sahara Desert, then on some of the Pacific Islands.
    There was a map in
Deadly Cloud
showing Mururoa, away south of Tahiti, too. How far was it from the place they were going to? Mangareva? He couldn’t tell from the map. He …
    Darryl grabbed the book as it almost dropped. He’d fallen asleep, he realised. Settling himself back in his seat, he glanced at the hands of his watch. They had been flying for nearly three hours. Another six-and-a-bit to Tahiti. The cabin lights had been dimmed. A different air hostess was coming along the aisle, asking people to pull down the window shades. Darryl reached past the Sleeping Non-Beauty and lowered theirs.
    He hoped those four engines all kept working. And he hoped his own mouth didn’t fall open. His mother was asleep, too.
    The engines droned on. The cabin grew cooler. He half-woke, feeling excited but still sleepy, and closed his eyes once more. Then he heard someonespeaking, the voice getting louder as he surfaced from his dream. Someone with a French accent. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ it was saying. Darryl jerked and forced his eyes open. The lights were on; people were stirring and stretching. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ the voice said. ‘We will shortly be landing at Papeete Airport.’

FOUR
    As they came down the steps from the plane, smiling, dark-haired women placed circles of flowers – leis, they called them – around their necks. ‘
Bonjour
,’ they went. ‘’Allo. Welcome to Tahiti.’ A couple of teenage girls were there, also: Darryl saw one of them giving flowers to the young blue-shirted guy from the plane, who looked as though this happened to him every day as well. Yeah, Darryl decided. I
definitely
don’t like him.
    Dawn was breaking as they walked towards the terminal, but it was warm already. Inside, the Customs and Immigration Officers sounded just like the crew on the plane. ‘Any-theeng to