Devil Danger Read online

  DEVIL

  DANGER

  My skis left the ground as the mountain

  dropped away below me. I was flying.

  And there – right where I was going to land! –

  crouched a Tasmanian devil.

  I don’t know who got the bigger fright, me or the devil.

  But the animal reacted first. Baring its teeth like a giant black rat,

  it spun around to meet me.

  You can’t change directions when you’re airborne. All I could do was part my legs so my skis landed on either side of the devil.

  But not out of range of those fearsome jaws.

  Snap!

  Puffin Books

  Extreme Adventures:

  (can be read in any order)

  Crocodile Attack

  Bushfire Rescue

  Shark Bait

  Scorpion Sting

  Spider Bite

  Man Eater

  Killer Whale

  Anaconda Ambush

  Grizzly Trap

  Watch out for the latest book in the

  Extreme Adventures series! Coming soon.

  Also by Justin D’Ath

  The Skyflower

  Gold Fever

  Topsy Turvy

  Snowman Magic

  www.justindath.com

  DEVIL

  DANGER

  JUSTIN D’ATH

  Puffin Books

  For Josh, Ben, Charlotte and Dominic

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2009

  Text copyright © Justin D’Ath, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ALL rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  puffin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228657-0

  1

  SHISHKEBAB!

  I shot over a snowy crest. My skis left the ground as the mountain dropped away below me. I was flying.

  And there – right where I was going to land! – crouched a Tasmanian devil.

  I don’t know who got the bigger fright, me or the devil. But the animal reacted first. Baring its teeth like a giant black rat, it spun around to meet me.

  You can’t change directions when you’re airborne. All I could do was part my legs so my skis landed on either side of the devil. But not out of range of those fearsome jaws.

  Snap!

  Luckily I was wearing double-layered ski boots. The hard outer shell deflected the devil’s razor-sharp teeth. But the impact flicked my right ski sideways. I nearly wiped out. Somehow I stayed upright. Thirty metres past the devil, I slewed to a standstill in a spray of flying snow.

  My heart was hammering as I looked back up the slope. I was in Tasmania on Devil’s Mountain, but I hadn’t expected to see one. Weren’t they nocturnal? There was a narrow opening under the lip of the ridge. I must have surprised it on its way home.

  Then I stopped thinking about Tassie devils, because the sound of voices carried to me on the crisp mountain air. Surprised, I turned to look. I’d thought I had the steep, narrow valley all to myself.

  Halfway up the far slope, a pair of white-painted snowmobiles was parked at the base of a pylon. Two men stood beside them. Like their vehicles, the men’s ski suits were completely white. No wonder I hadn’t noticed them in the snowy landscape. They hadn’t noticed me, either, because both men were peering up into the sky.

  I looked up, too.

  High overhead, a solitary cable car inched across the valley. I watched its slow progress. Something didn’t seem right. Even though there wasn’t a breath of wind, the big, suspended car bounced and swayed on its cable.

  Suddenly there was a thump from the cable car. Its door burst open and I heard a muffled cry.

  For a frozen half-second, I saw a young woman’s face framed in the doorway. She seemed vaguely familiar. But there wasn’t time to think about where I’d seen her before. Too much was going on. Hands were madly trying to stop something from rolling out through the cable car’s open door. They were too slow.

  The woman screamed, a long, loud wail of despair, as a small doll-like shape plummeted out of the sky.

  My heart did a double whammy.

  Shishkebab!

  It wasn’t a doll – it was a baby!

  2

  WIPE-OUT

  The baby dropped like a stone. It didn’t make a sound. All I could hear was the hiss of my skis.

  The instant the baby fell, I’d launched myself down the mountain with a double pole push.

  I was wearing my slalom skis. They’re shorter and more manoeuvrable than downhill skis, but not as fast. The terrain worked in my favour. The secluded valley where I’d come to practise for tomorrow’s skiing competition was on the western face of Devil’s Mountain. The late morning sun hadn’t touched it yet. There was still a crust of slippery ice on the snow’s surface. Perfect for building up speed.

  I crouched into a tuck – knees bent, head down, arms pressed close against my sides – and went for it.

  In perfect conditions, and wearing racing skis, an experienced ski-racer can reach speeds of over a hundred-and-forty kilometres per hour. That’s faster than the speed limit on any road in Australia.

  If there was a speed limit on ski slopes, I probably would have broken it.

  I reckon I was going over a hundred when I reached the falling baby. It was going about two hundred.

  Luckily both of us were travelling in more or less the same direction. Down. The baby was going straight down, and I was going down at a forty-five-degree angle. So the impact, when we came together, wasn’t as bad as it might have been.

  WHOMP!

  The baby hit my chest like a big, soft football. I let go of my ski poles and grabbed it.

  Gotcha!

  But we weren’t out of trouble yet. I was schussing down the steepest part of the valley, faster than I’d ever skied before. With a baby in my arms!

  And there were trees ahead.

  I was going too fast to stop before I reached them. It was too late to turn. I only had one option – to sit down.

  It must have looked spectacular. From the point where I sat down to the point where I finally stopped somersaulting was roughly fifty metres. I don’t remember much of it. All I remember is curling myself int
o a ball around the baby as I tumbled down the mountain like a human snowball.

  I ended up sprawled chest-down in the deep snow between the ice-flecked trunks of two trees. I’d lost my skis and my goggles, and my right sleeve was filled with snow all the way up to the elbow. But nothing was hurting. I seemed to be okay.

  What about the baby? asked a little voice in my head.

  My hands and arms were empty.

  Pushing myself up onto my knees, I blinked down at the sprawling human shape stamped into the snow by my body. The baby wasn’t under me. Thank goodness.

  So where was it?

  I didn’t want to go out looking. I was too scared of what I might find. Nobody that small, that helpless, could have survived such a massive wipe-out.

  Then I heard something behind me – a faint mewing cry, like a newborn kitten. I lurched to my feet and fought my way uphill in my big, clumsy ski boots.

  The baby lay half buried in the snow just above the tree-line. Its red quilted jacket had turned inside-out, covering its head and face. As soon as I pulled the jacket down, the baby screwed its eyes tightly closed, opened its mouth into a big, wide O, and howled.

  The baby’s cry brought an instant response.

  ‘TOMMEEEE!’ screamed a woman’s voice.

  I looked up and saw that the cable car had stopped. Two men in blue uniforms were clambering out onto the pylon. Behind them, the woman was hanging out of the cable car’s door, her tear-streaked face turned in my direction.

  ‘TOMMEEEE!’ she screamed again.

  I picked Tommy up. He was pretty upset, bellowing his little lungs out, but he didn’t seem hurt.

  ‘HE’S OKAY,’ I yelled.

  ‘PLEASE DON’T TAKE HIM AWAY!’ the woman cried.

  What was she talking about?

  ‘OF COURSE I WON’T TAKE HIM AWAY,’ I yelled back.

  The young woman brushed the hair off her face and suddenly I remembered where I’d seen her before. On TV.

  In the newspapers. On the covers of magazines.

  It was Princess Monica. The magazines called her Australia’s Princess – even though she no longer lived in Australia. She was just an ordinary girl from Tasmania, until she met Prince Nicklaus when he was over here on a skiing holiday. They fell in love and got married. Now they lived in a huge palace on the other side of the world. But they’d returned to Australia for a holiday so Prince Nicklaus could compete in the famous Devil’s Run Skiing Championships in Tasmania. I’d read all about it in the competition program. In two days’ time, provided we both got through our heats, I’d be racing against Prince Nicklaus in the final.

  ‘AREN’T YOU ONE OF THEM?’ Princess Monica cried, looking back at me and pointing at the two uniformed men climbing down the pylon.

  She wasn’t making any sense. But before I could ask what she meant, one of the snowmobiles roared into life.

  The other two men – the ones in white ski suits – had jumped onto it. They came flying down the white slope towards me.

  Princess Monica was calling out to me again, but the combination of Tommy’s crying and the roar of the approaching snowmobile was too loud. For a couple of seconds I puzzled over what she’d said: Aren’t you one of them?

  One of who? I wondered.

  I looked down at the small crying baby cradled in my arms. And realised I’d seen him before, too. On TV. In the newspapers. On the covers of magazines. He was Prince Nicklaus and Princess Monica’s baby boy, four-month-old Crown Prince Thomas.

  I was holding a prince!

  Then I remembered the other strange thing Princess Monica had yelled at me: Please don’t take him away. Suddenly everything made sense.

  The two men in blue uniforms were kidnappers! They had dressed up as guards so they could get into the cable car with Princess Monica and kidnap the baby prince. But something went wrong. Princess Monica must have tried to resist them. In the struggle, Prince Thomas fell out of the cable car.

  Luckily, I’d been there to catch him.

  The snowmobile raced down the slope towards me. Lying in its path was one of my skis. The driver would have seen it, but he drove straight over the top.

  It was a two hundred dollar ski!

  Shishkebab! The men in white were kidnappers, too! They’d been waiting at the pylon with two camouflaged snowmobiles so all four gang members could make their getaway with the kidnapped prince.

  It was too late to run. The snowmobile slid to a stop just up the hill and the driver jumped off. He came wading through the knee-deep snow towards me.

  ‘Give me the baby,’ he said.

  3

  DEEP TROUBLE

  Sometimes you act without considering the odds. They were stacked heavily against me. Four men against one fourteen-year-old boy.

  But I couldn’t let them get the baby prince.

  I spun around and headed for the trees.

  ‘LOOK OUT!’ yelled Princess Monica.

  I glanced over my shoulder. My pursuer had thrown himself flat on the snow and was sledding down the slope on his chest like a giant penguin. It was a smart idea. He could move much faster like that. But it left him wide open to a counterattack. I waited until he was close, then sidestepped and kicked a spray of snow into his face. For a second the sliding man couldn’t see where he was going. He shot past me and slammed head-first into a clump of saplings. Crunch! A pile of snow fell out of the branches, burying him.

  Now was my chance. Hugging the crying baby to my chest, I made a break for it.

  ‘STOP RIGHT THERE!’ shrieked Princess Monica.

  At least I thought it was the princess, until I turned around.

  The snowmobile’s passenger had removed her ski mask and goggles. It was a woman. She was pointing a small black pistol at me.

  ‘Bring me the baby!’ she called down through the trees.

  Here’s what went through my mind at that moment: There was only one reason why anyone would want to kidnap Prince Thomas – ransom. And the ransom for a crown prince would be huge. Millions of dollars.

  But the kidnappers would get absolutely nothing if he was dead.

  So they wouldn’t risk shooting at me when I had Prince Thomas in my arms. I hoped.

  Heart in my mouth, I ducked behind the nearest tree.

  My gamble paid off – the woman didn’t shoot. Her companion was digging himself out of the snow, wheezing and cursing. He was a small man, hardly bigger than me, but he had a pistol too.

  Keeping the tree’s lower branches between me and the kidnappers, I went ploughing down into the snowy forest as fast as I dared. Which wasn’t very fast. I was wearing ski boots. They aren’t made for running. And I couldn’t risk falling and hurting Tommy.

  He’d started crying in earnest now: Waah waah waah waaaaaah! He sounded really upset. But there was nothing I could do about it. I had to keep going.

  ‘Shhhh, little guy!’ I whispered down at Tommy’s small, scrunched-up face. ‘They’ll hear you.’

  But it made no difference whether we were noisy or not. Behind us, my boot tracks went zigzagging through the trees like the trail left by an elephant. A blind man could follow it.

  But could a snowmobile?

  The trees were getting very close together. I wondered if the kidnappers would be able to manouevre their bulky snowmobile through the maze.

  I soon found out. From further up the valley came the whine of a two-stroke engine. It grew steadily louder.

  Soon it was nearly as loud as Tommy’s wailing.

  Looking over my shoulder, I glimpsed two white-clad human figures on a white snowmobile dodging through the trees.

  ‘We’ve got company,’ I muttered.

  A massive snow-capped boulder loomed above the treetops ahead. It was bigger than a house. Surrounding it was a tangle of bent-limbed snow gums, chest-high saplings and leafy bushes, all powdered with snow. A perfect hiding place. I lumbered towards it, sweating inside my heavy ski clothing. My breath made white clouds around my face. The sn
ow dragged at my boots. Was I going to make it? The sound of the approaching two-stroke engine grew louder and louder. At any moment,

  I expected to hear a shout behind me.

  Or, worse, a gunshot.

  But nobody called out. Nobody shot at me. I made it to the bushes. Shielding Tommy with my arms, I put my head down and bulldozed through the leafy tangle. Luckily I was still wearing my ski helmet; it protected my head from the scratchy branches. My Gore-Tex ski suit covered my arms, my body and my legs. I burst out the other side and nearly collided with a wall of damp, black rock.

  If I could have kept right on going and magically entered the rock, that’s what I would have done. The tangled undergrowth might stop a snowmobile, but it wouldn’t stop the kidnappers. It would just slow them down.

  I crouched in the snow next to the boulder and tried to catch my breath. The sound of the snowmobile grew steadily louder. And the louder it became, the harder Tommy cried.

  ‘Shhhh!’ I said softly.

  He was probably cold. I should have thought of that before. Even royal baby clothes aren’t designed for going out in the snow for too long. Unzipping the front of my ski suit, I slipped Tommy inside my jumper like a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch. I pulled the zip back up so just his head was showing.

  ‘Is that better?’ I whispered.

  Tommy hiccupped, then started crying again. I had to do something or the kidnappers would hear him. They were getting really close.

  Maybe he was hungry? I couldn’t do much about that. But I remembered what Aunty Erin did once when Nissa, my little cousin, was a baby. They were over at our place and Aunty Erin had forgotten to bring Nissa’s dummy, so she let Nissa suck on her fingertip.

  I whipped off one glove and offered Tommy a finger. He latched on like it was a dummy and started sucking. It stopped him crying in the nick of time.

  The snowmobile came to a standstill on the other side of the bushes. It was only a couple of metres away, but the kidnappers didn’t know we were there. I could hear snatches of conversation above the idling engine.

  ‘… can’t see anything …’

  ‘… out the other side …’