Black Gold

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Authors: Chris Ryan

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Table of Contents

Meet the team:

A
lex – A quiet lad from Northumbria, Alex leads the team in survival skills. His dad is in the SAS and Alex is determined to follow in his footsteps, whatever it takes. He who dares . . .

L
i – Expert in martial arts and free-climbing, Li can get to grips with most situations . . .

P
aulo – The laid-back Argentinian is a mechanical genius, and with his medical skills can patch up injuries as well as motors . . .

H
ex – An ace hacker, rarely without his beloved palmtop, Hex is first rate at code-breaking and can bypass most security systems . . .

A
mber – Her top navigational skills mean the team are rarely lost. Rarely lost for words either, rich-girl Amber can show some serious attitude . . .

With plenty of hard work and training, together they are
Alpha Force
– an elite squad dedicated to combating injustice throughout the world.

In
Black Gold,
Alpha Force are in the Caribbean. They are there to improve their scuba diving skills, but a tanker disaster and an assassin's bullet soon mean they have a new mission to undertake . . .

www.
kids
at
randomhouse
.co.uk/alphaforce

Don't miss any of the missions in the
Alpha Force series:

SURVIVAL
RAT-CATCHER
DESERT PURSUIT
HOSTAGE
RED CENTRE
HUNTED
BLOOD MONEY
FAULT LINE
BLACK GOLD
UNTOUCHABLE

Also
available by Chris Ryan, published by
Arrow, for adult readers:

STAND BY, STAND BY
ZERO OPTION
THE KREMLIN DEVICE
TENTH MAN DOWN
THE HIT LIST
THE WATCHMAN
LAND OF FIRE
GREED

Non-fiction:

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

(the story of his experiences in the SAS and in Iraq)

CHRIS RYAN'S SAS FITNESS BOOK
CHRIS RYAN'S ULTIMATE SURVIVAL GUIDE

H
ERE'S WHAT READERS
THINK OF THE
A
LPHA
F
ORCE SERIES:

'Instantly readable, and I found it hard to put down. A cool read!'

Chris

'All the Alpha Force series are great. Keep writin', Chris, the world of books will be boring without you!'

reader from Leeds

'A really gripping read that is bound to keep your fingernails short'

Andrew, from New Zealand

'This book had me hooked from the start: it was really cool . . . it was so amazing I went and bought the next one in the series!'

Lisa, from Wiltshire

'To describe the book in one word – only one word suits the job, GREAT!'

reader from Cornwall

'From the first page you are drawn into the story and you can't put it down. I was excited by every word. This book is amazing! Chris Ryan builds suspense better than J. K. Rowling! This gripping novel keeps you reading for hours and is ideal for 11-16-year-old boys and girls alike'

'Bookworm' Lizzi

'I enjoyed this book because the characters were fun and the plot was interesting. The reader also finds out things that the characters do not know, so they act unpredictably creating unexpected twists and turns. I would recommend this book to teens because this is an action book where the heroes are teens themselves. It also contains the added bonus of Chris Ryan's top SAS tactics'

Thomas, from Middlesex

'I bought this book for my brother and ended up reading it myself!'

Clare, from Plymouth

'It keeps you wondering what will happen and has twists and turns all the way through'

Luke, from Lincolnshire

'I love these books and think they're really great. It's really great how Chris Ryan can write about such adult matters yet still make them young adults' books; they're a real inspiration! Rating: 10/10'

Kelly, from Edinburgh

Chris
Ryan

ALPHA FORCE
BLACK GOLD

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 9781407049861

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

ALPHA FORCE : BLACK GOLD
A RED FOX BOOK

ISBN: 9781407049861

Version 1.0

First published in Great Britain by Red Fox,
an imprint of Random House Children's Books

This edition published 2005

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Copyright © Chris Ryan, 2005

The right of Chris Ryan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Typeset in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire

Red Fox Books are published by Random House Children's Books,
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,
A Random House Group Company

Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited
can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

THE RANDOM HOUSE GROUP Limited Reg. No. 954009
www.
kids
at
randomhouse
.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Prologue
C
OLLISION
C
OURSE

The oil tanker ploughed a furrow through the Caribbean Sea. Its deck was the length of three football pitches, the living quarters rising out of the stern like a four-storey building, topped by a cluster of radio transmitters, whirling radar masts – and a flag bearing the red insignia of ArBonCo Oil.

Inside, at the very top of the tower, Tomas Amurao pushed open the door to the bridge and manoeuvred his mop and bucket inside. As he did so, he heard shouting. Two men – the captain and the second-in-command – were standing at the control station. The second-in-command was pointing to the radar screen, which showed a glowing dot touching the crosshairs of the screen. There was something out there, right in their path.

Out of the window Amurao could see the sea, a long way down, and a gleaming white passenger cruiser gliding past. It was a big ship with four decks, one with a glittering turquoise square of swimming pool, but the tanker towered over it like a skyscraper.

Amurao was Filipino and didn't understand the language the Dutch crewmen were speaking – but he couldn't mistake the meaning. They'd nearly hit the cruiser. How? He knew that there were numerous automatic systems to stop them colliding with other objects in the water.

He began to mop the floor by the door. The shouting stopped, and it was then that he realized what was so odd.

It was far too quiet.

Usually the bridge was noisy, the ship's control systems constantly bleeping and beeping, like birdsong in a jungle. But today they were silent. The only sound was the faint throb of the massive engines, deep below the water line.

What was going on? Amurao had spent two years as a deckhand on oil tankers and he'd never known one travel with the automatics off. Perhaps there had been a malfunction?

He took his bucket to the control area and mopped around the big metal lever that rose from the floor like a giant gearshift; the two men moved their feet out of his way. They paid him no attention but talked to each other in low, urgent voices.

Out of the window on his left Amurao could see the white coral beaches of an island. Green hills were studded with pink stuccoed houses and he recognized where they were – Curaçao, the largest of the ABC Islands or Netherlands Antilles, forty-four miles off the coast of South America. On their way to the offshore oil refinery at the other end of the island.

Working his way around the room, he felt a change in the throbbing of the ship's engines. They were turning. He looked up. The captain was gripping the semicircular metal steering column that rose from the centre of the control panel, turning it hard left.

Out of the window the view had changed. They had come a lot closer to the island.

Amurao stopped mopping.

The captain nodded at his colleague. His second-in-command grasped the big lever in the floor and pushed it forwards all the way. A buzzer sounded and the eight-cylinder engines far below responded like a huge jet. The propeller bit into the dark sea, driving the great ship on.

On the radar screen, an amber bar swept around like a second hand, picking out the glowing outline of the coast. With each revolution the coastline was moving closer. A stopwatch counting down to disaster . . .

1
M
AGIC
W
ORLD

The eel's jaws were big enough to encircle Li's entire body. As the creature yawned towards her in the water she glimpsed three vicious sets of teeth and two round eyes, orange and yellow psychedelic discs with inky black pupils. She could hear nothing but the rasp of her own breath in her aqualung and the steady rumble of bubbles as she exhaled through her regulator. The hideous prehistoric face lunged towards her in eerie silence, its jaws snapping open and shut like an alligator.

Li tumbled out of the way and the eel slid harmlessly past, still snapping its jaws. It wasn't trying to attack her; this was how it breathed. She curled around in the water, lifted her video camera to her masked face and filmed it – the pointed, primitive face like a sea-going snake, bubbles escaping through small holes in its head. The body was nearly three metres long from pointed snout to arrow-like tail and as thick as a telegraph pole.

Up above her on the surface was the
Fathom Sprite,
the eight-metre motorboat they had hired, tethered and flying a blue-and-white flag to show there were divers in the area. She and the four other members of Alpha Force had come to the Fathoms Dive Centre in Curaçao to train in advanced diving techniques. For now, their first afternoon, they were enjoying the island's coral reef and reminding themselves of the basic rules of diving.

The coral reef was vast, an underwater cliff that stretched down for ever. It was far too deep to explore with basic scuba equipment, so rule number one was to make sure you knew how far down you'd gone. As Li swam around she kept a close eye on the dive computer on her wrist to check that she never went deeper than thirty metres. Later in the week, with different equipment and more training, she hoped they'd be able to go deeper.

So far, though, there was so much to see that Li didn't feel shortchanged. Her Anglo-Chinese parents were naturalists and she had inherited their love of the natural world. She hung in front of the wall, the gentle current fanning her black hair out in a rippling flame behind her. 'Wall' somehow seemed the wrong word. It looked like a bluish, brownish rockery full of plants and weeds, but the coral was actually all made of living animals. She swept her torch over it and the muted colours became bushes of bright red, yellow and jewel-like purples. There were delicate white structures that looked like the vein structures of giant leaves. In between them all were pale ripples of hard corals like human brains. The textures looked so alien and beautiful she wanted to touch them, but some of them were poisonous. In any case, the whole reef was a conservation area and divers were forbidden to touch anything in case they upset the ecosystem.

Diving this reef was like being a bird. She could hover, or move up and down effortlessly with a flick of her fins. With the endless deep blue below her, it was like dreams she'd had of being able to fly. A talented gymnast, martial artist and climber, Li adored anything that felt like defying gravity.

Strange, though. It was no longer as quiet as it had been. As well as the gentle sound of her own breathing she could now hear a deep sort of rumbling sound, like very muffled thunder. She couldn't say when it had started, but she was sure it hadn't always been that loud.

Li checked her luminous watch. They had been underwater for about ten minutes. Diving rule number two was to keep an eye on how long you'd been down because you didn't want to run out of air. But Li felt like she could spend for ever down there.

All the time she had been keeping track of the others. They all carried torches so it was easy to see where they were. That was diving rule number three – don't go off on your own. You always had a dive-buddy to look out for you. Today, she had two – Paulo and Alex. Time to film them for a while, she thought.

She picked Paulo out easily by his powerful build and dark wavy hair billowing up in a soft halo. He was above her, suspended in a ring of silvery fish, as though he had charmed them out of the reefs. He saw Li pointing the camera up at him and gave a big, theatrical flourish with his hand. The fish parted in a tunnel. He withdrew it again and they closed around him like a giant rotating lampshade.

Typical Paulo, thought Li. He had grown up on a ranch in Argentina and was supremely confident with animals. Here he was, orchestrating the movements of at least two hundred fish. Any minute now he's going to give a big show-off grin and then his regulator will fall out of his mouth. Or he'll breathe through his nose. She made sure she got a close-up of his bouffant hair; that would make amusing viewing later.

Alex had been watching. He swam past Li, his blond hair rippling around his face, and copied Paulo's flamboyant gesture. Li filmed him, knowing what no-nonsense Northumbrian Alex would be saying about Paulo if his dive equipment allowed him to speak: 'posing as usual'. As he swam off Li took a few quick frames of Alex's billowy hair too.

Amber and Hex were easy to spot. Hex's fins were pale in the blue light, edged with black like a dangerous fish; Amber's were as black as her skin, making her already long legs impossibly sleek. They were swimming as a pair at ninety degrees to the coral wall, as though they had forgotten which way was up. Several fish seemed to have been fooled too and were swimming along beside them. To anyone who knew them they would seem unlikely dive-buddies – Amber, a privileged rich girl from America, and Hex, a computer hacker from a rough part of London – but the two had clicked. Now they swam closer to the coral wall, changing direction in sync like a pair of seahorses, bubbles rising from their masked faces like thought clouds. Both had close-cropped short hair – no potential there, Li thought, for embarrassing underwater hairstyle videos.

Amber poked Hex in the back as they swam along. He whirled in the water looking for his attacker, obviously imagining sharks. Amber hovered beside him, the tubes on her air tank quivering and bubbles shooting fast out of her regulator. So that was what someone looked like when they laughed in scuba gear, Li thought. Hex reached across to poke Amber in return and she scooted gracefully away. He gave chase. And still they swam as though the world had been turned on its side.

That was another of the rules of diving; always know which direction you're going in. It was easy to become disorientated in the water. On night dives particularly, you might think you were surfacing but in fact be swimming endlessly down. All five members of Alpha Force were well trained in navigation techniques. Sometimes their lives had depended on it.

Alex came into Li's viewfinder again, now swimming alongside a gigantic grouper fish. It was the size of a small car and made him look as though he had swallowed a shrinking potion. In the light from her torch she could see that the fish was orangey red with mottled pale lines. The perfect portrait of Alex. His father was in the SAS and Alex seemed to have found the one sea creature that wore desert-issue camouflage.

The big fish fluttered its tail and darted away. Alex stopped and looked around, puzzled.

Li realized the booming sound was much louder. Paulo's cloak of silver fish suddenly deserted him and Hex and Amber stopped too. For a moment the five friends looked around at each other questioningly, treading water. The sound had been growing and growing but was now so loud that they could no longer hear their own breathing.

Where was it coming from? When they looked around, all they could see was wide blue sea and the flowing vertical garden.

Then a huge shape loomed over them in the water like a thundercloud. An enormous ship. It rumbled over them, the throbbing of its engines resounding on every metal item in their kit. Paulo, Alex and Hex were pointing up at it, frantically miming a movie camera to Li. They wanted her to video it. What was it with boys and machines? she thought – but to humour them she lifted the camera. A red light flashed. Out of batteries.

The rear of the boat finally came into view, its mighty propeller spinning in a round opening as tall as a man. The sea behind it boiled into tiny white bubbles. Then the sunlight poured back into the sea again.

They looked at the retreating shadow, then Alex tapped his watch. Time to go. They turned and swam upwards. At the top of the wall was a sandy shelf, the start of the shallow waters near the island. The noise was receding but it was still loud, the boom of the ship's engines like the throbbing of a great heart.

They began to swim back to their boat, the current from the ship's wake pulling them along. Then, like a shoal of fish, they all stopped suddenly. Twenty metres away in the water they should have seen a black diagonal thread – the anchor line. Instead the thread was waving loose in the water.

They swam over to it. The anchor line had snapped and was curling in the current like a slender eel.

Alex swam upwards. As he surfaced he found himself bobbing around like a cork. The sea was still choppy from the passing ship. But he wasn't the only thing being tossed around. Where the boat should have been the water was scattered with debris. The
Fathom Sprite
had been hit – and shattered like a toy.

The tanker was already a good distance away, heading for the white coral cliffs of the island.

Li and the others came up in a rumble of bubbles, exploding onto the surface as though they were coming to the boil. They looked around at the bobbing white pieces of their boat, too stunned even to take their masks off. Paulo felt something knock into him – the boat's engine, nudging at his back like a questing fish.

'Mind out!' Amber's shrill voice pulled them back to practicalities. Her regulator was dangling over one shoulder and she was holding onto a yellow object like a folded canvas pillow. She found the ripcord and pulled. There was a hiss of compressed air and it inflated, unfolding to three times its size.

Li saw the life raft about to engulf her and dived out of the way. When she broke the surface again the first thing she saw was the tanker. It was running, at full speed, into the white cliffs.

The noise was terrible – a dull metallic boom, then the sound of grinding metal, on and on like it was in slow motion. Everyone froze: Amber, holding onto the ropes on the raft, pulling Hex in; Alex, also in the raft, turning to help Paulo up; Li, only her head out of the water. In that moment, her vision became a split screen, her mask half submerged, half out in the air. Below was the tranquil world of rippling blue with black stingrays banking and turning like cloaks. Above were the clouds, the tropical island – and a huge, rust-spattered tanker full of thick black oil subsiding into the sea . . .

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