I know that sounds crazy, but I had no other options. Besides, Aunty Erin’s boyfriend is an electrician and he told me that you can actually touch a live wire and not be electrocuted if you aren’t standing on the ground or touching something that’s connected to the ground. It seemed like a useless piece of information when Alby told me, but now it might just save Jordan, Myrtle and me from being fried to a crisp.

  I wasn’t standing on the ground, and the balloon wasn’t connected to anything except the wire. So, according to Alby, I wouldn’t be electrocuted. Hoping with all my heart that he had his facts right, I swung myself up onto the edge of the basket and swivelled around so my top half was inside and my feet were dangling out. I had to hold on tight because the basket was bouncing all over the place.

  ‘Sam, what are you doing?’ Jordan asked weakly. He had one arm around Myrtle’s neck and was looking up at me with big scared eyes.

  ‘I’ve just got to check something out,’ I said lightly. The less he knew, the better. He’d been bitten by a funnel-web spider and was supposed to be staying calm.

  I felt anything but calm as I looked over my shoulder and saw the golf course far, far below. Some tiny people were down there looking up at me. The smallest one was waving. Gritting my teeth, I lowered my sneakers until they were four or five centimetres above the thick grey cable. Then I hesitated. Alby, you’d better be right, I thought, and lowered my feet, millimetres at a time, until … they … finally … touched.

  Nothing happened. I was standing on the wire and I was still alive!

  The wire was alive, too. I could feel a tickly buzz through the rubber soles of my sneakers as 30 000 volts hummed beneath them. The wire was wrapped around one corner of the basket, snagged in a deep groove – it must have sawed its way into the cane when we crashed into it. When I tried pushing with my feet, the wire wouldn’t come loose.

  I clung to the rim of the basket as the balloon lifted us upwards. Then I held on as we swung back down. The wire pressed against my feet. This was insane. There I was, seventy metres off the ground, standing on a wire, with only the thickness of my sneakers’ worn rubber soles between me and 30 000 volts!

  I waited for three more swings, counting off the seconds from the basket’s lowest point to its highest, until I had my timing exactly right. Then, halfway up the next swing, in the moment when the wire had the least pressure on it, I pushed against it with all my might.

  Twang! The wire shot out from under me like a released bow string. I nearly went with it, but luckily I was clinging tightly to the edge of the basket. My swinging feet came perilously close to hitting another wire, then the balloon pulled me up and away.

  The basket had been caught on the wire for over a minute. During that time both burners had been going full blast. Suddenly freed, the huge overheated and over-inflated balloon shot up like a cork under water, so fast that I had trouble dragging myself back into the basket. I went in headfirst and landed awkwardly between Jordan and Myrtle.

  ‘What happened?’ Jordan asked in a small, shaky voice.

  I pushed Myrtle’s wet nose out of my face and sat up. ‘We got tangled in some wires, but I managed to get us free.’

  ‘Is Harry okay?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said, remembering the tiny figure waving to me. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m still a bit cold.’

  Even with the roar of the two gas burners, I could hear his teeth chattering. I struggled out of my T-shirt. ‘Here, Jordie, put this on.’

  I helped him into it. Two big, wobbly tears dribbled down his cheeks. ‘Am I going to die?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Harry said the spider was a funnel-web. He said you die if they bite you.’

  Harry should learn to keep his mouth shut, I thought. ‘They’ve got medicine now. It’s called antivenom. It’ll make you good as new.’

  ‘Are we going to the hospital to get it?’ asked Jordan.

  I almost ruffled his hair, then remembered the spider bite on his scalp and touched him on the cheek instead. ‘That’s exactly where we’re going, bro. We’ll land on the roof!’

  I wondered if that were possible. There were a lot of hospitals in Sydney and I knew some of them had heliports on their roofs. A good pilot might be able to put a balloon down on one, provided the wind was favourable. I scrambled upright and looked over the side of the basket.

  Ohmygosh! We were soooooooo high! The houses looked no bigger than bits of Lego. They were slightly hazy because a thin layer of misty air was passing beneath us. The balloon was almost in the clouds. And it was still going up. I reached above me and switched off both burners.

  There should have been almost total silence. The only sounds I should have heard were the creak of the basket and the whisper of the wind. But there was another noise, a high-pitched whistling sound that grew louder with every passing second. It was impossible to tell which direction it was coming from.

  I turned in a slow circle, searching for the source of the noise. Straight ahead was the city centre, looking much closer than before. The top of Centrepoint Tower poked into the clouds. In the other direction was Botany Bay and the airport. I could see a big runway lined up almost exactly with our present position. It’s a pity we’re not in an aeroplane, I thought. I could fly down and land.

  Then I had another thought: Uh oh!

  The whistling sound increased to an ear-splitting roar. I glanced over my shoulder and my worst fears were confirmed. Five sets of enormous wheels descended out of the clouds, followed by a huge white shape that stretched from one side of the horizon to the other. It was a 747 – a jumbo jet – on its final landing approach to Sydney Airport.

  And we were directly in its path.

  12

  DEATH ROLL

  A fully laden jumbo jet weighs two hundred tonnes and its landing speed is 180 km/h. It can’t slow down without stalling and it needs about a kilometre of clear air ahead of it to change direction. We were about three hundred metres ahead of it. The pilot couldn’t do anything to avoid a collision.

  It was up to me.

  I hit both burner valves, cranking them wide open. Then I shouted at Jordan to hold on and grabbed one of the burner struts for support.

  The jumbo jet came thundering towards us, its huge engines churning the air like four massive blenders. It looked as big as a shopping centre. It was the scariest sight I had ever seen.

  I’ve been attacked by giant crocodiles, bitten by a blood-crazed tiger shark, stalked by starving dingoes and tossed by a mad old bull, but on a fear-factor scale none of them gets a perfect score. Only that 747 earns the full ten points. Because you can’t defend yourself against a jet airliner. You can’t whack it with a buffalo bone, or deliver a power shuko to its eye, or fight it off with burning spinifex, or show it who’s boss with a stick and a rope. You can’t do anything to protect yourself. All you can do is hang on and pray.

  But there wasn’t time to say a prayer. The jumbo jet was coming too fast. No way was it not going to hit us!

  I actually saw into the flight deck. Two startled faces – - the pilot and copilot – gawked at me through a cockpit windshield that grew bigger and bigger, then shot past almost close enough to touch. The huge white fuselage followed, in a flickering blur of windows like a speeding train going past. Next came a wing the size of a football field – missing the bottom of the basket by no more than a metre – and finally the tail, its flying kangaroo emblem as big as a billboard. Then the jumbo jet was gone.

  Made it! I thought.

  And that’s when the fun started.

  As the enormous jet thundered into the distance, the full blast of its four massive turbofan engines suddenly hit us. The engine wash from a 747 is equivalent to a force twelve gale. It’s enough to uproot trees and knock over small buildings. No balloon ever made was designed to fly in winds like that.

  It was the wildest ride I’ve ever experienced. Ten times as bad as anything at the theme parks on the Gold Coast. I couldn’t see what was happening because the jet wash blew me into the bottom of the basket with Jordan and Myrtle. But I could see what was above us: the ground! It didn’t make sense. Why were those tiny toy houses, toy cars and toy streets above the balloon?

  Then I worked it out: we were upside down. The balloon was looping the loop!

  I thought we were going to fall out, but the G forces pinned us to the basket floor. If Harry was there, he probably would have raised both arms above his head and let out one of his Captain Amazing yells. But there’s only one Captain Amazing and Jordan and I are both scared of heights. We remained grimly silent, holding on to each other as the balloon continued its crazy somersault. Over it went in a seemingly endless, dizzying, gut-churning death roll, until the sky appeared above us again.

  But the nightmare ride wasn’t over yet. The balloon swayed back and forth like a giant pendulum for another twenty or thirty seconds. Each swing was slightly less pronounced than the one before. Then we finally settled back into a balloon-up-basket-down position, and the only movement was that of the wind pushing us gently along.

  ‘Phew!’ I said, giving Jordan a gentle squeeze and patting Myrtle with my other hand. ‘Wasn’t that fun, guys?’

  ‘I think I’m going to chuck,’ Jordan said.

  13

  FLYING SAUCER

  I helped Jordan to his feet and supported him while he hung his head over the side of the basket. He was shivering violently. I was the one who should have been shivering – I was bare from the waist up. Jordan was wearing two T-shirts – mine and his – yet he was still cold. It must have been because of the spider bite.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  He coughed a couple of times, but didn’t throw up. ‘A bit better now,’ he whispered.

  ‘Do you want to sit down again?’

  Jordan shook his head. ‘Where’s the ground gone?’

  I looked over the side. There was nothing below us but clouds. Nothing in any direction but clouds. We were flying blind.

  ‘Um, down there somewhere,’ I said uneasily. I didn’t like not being able to see. ‘I think I’ll take us down a bit.’

  I reached up to turn off the burners, but stopped halfway. Huh? The gas was already off. Or the flames were, anyway. The burners still made a loud hissing sound, but instead of fire coming out, two jets of spray squirted up into the balloon and dissolved in a swirl of white mist. The engine wash from the jumbo jet must have blown the flames out. I desperately tried the valves, turning them off, on, off, on, off, on, but the spray refused to burn. The pilot lights had blown out, too.

  If only I’d used my brain. If only I’d looked more carefully. There was a little red ignition button underneath each burner. All I had to do was press them. But I was in a panic, and blind to what was right there in front of my eyes.

  Matches! screamed a little voice in my head. I need matches to light the burners!

  There weren’t any in the basket. There was a fire extinguisher, which was kind of ironic, but no matches. We were in deep trouble. A hot-air balloon without working burners soon becomes a cold-air balloon. And a cold-air balloon won’t fly; it’ll crash.

  I had already crashed once that morning. Dropping roughly fifteen metres from the Norfolk Island pines had been bad enough. But dropping a thousand metres? It was going to be nasty. Possibly fatal.

  ‘Jordan,’ I said, looking my little brother in the eye, ‘if something happens to me and you get rescued, promise me you’ll tell them about the funnel-web spider.’

  He shuddered. ‘What will happen to you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘But just in case.’

  I looked over the side of the basket. All I could see were clouds. Were we high enough? A plan was forming in my mind.

  Before we went into the clouds, the balloon had been drifting in a north-easterly direction. Straight towards the centre of Sydney. Provided the wind didn’t change and we stayed in the air long enough, we would pass directly over the city. And then drift out over the harbour.

  We could land there, I thought. I could open the vent and put us down in Sydney Harbour. It would be a nice soft landing. There’d be no freeways to worry about, no trees to get stuck in, no powerlines, no train tracks, no steep rooftops, just a nice gentle splash-down on the water. I wasn’t worried about drowning because someone would rescue us – there’d be ferries on the harbour, even this early in the morning; people used them to go to work. Besides, the basket would probably float.

  But first we had to reach the harbour. Were we even moving?

  When you’re in a balloon and the balloon is in the clouds, you have little or no sense of movement. Unless your flight path brings you into close proximity with something very tall.

  At first it looked like part of the sky, a slight thickening in the murk ahead. Then it became an eerie yellow shadow that still looked more like clouds than anything solid. Finally it morphed into an enormous golden cylinder that seemed to float in the air with no visible means of support.

  ‘It’s a UFO!’ Jordan gasped.

  I didn’t contradict him. It did look like a UFO. Myrtle seemed spooked by it, too. Standing up with her front paws resting on the edge of the basket, she bared her teeth at the strange object and growled.

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said, holding her by the collar in case she tried jumping out. ‘It’s only Centrepoint Tower.’

  We drifted slowly past, so close that I saw our reflection in the four tiers of golden windows around its huge circular turret. And I noticed something else: the windows seemed to be going up. Which meant we were going down.

  Suddenly we dropped below cloud level.

  I looked over the edge of the basket. Big mistake. Toy skyscrapers pointed up at us like grey rectangular fingers. Rows of traffic nudged through the deep canyons between the buildings. Pedestrians looked like ants. Jordan made a gagging noise, like he really was being sick this time, and sank down onto the basket floor. My stomach felt weak, too, and so did my knees. I felt like I was about to pass out.

  Stop looking down, you idiot! warned the little voice in my head, and I pulled myself back from the edge of the basket, away from the dizzying view.

  The view ahead was better. Less than a kilometre away, through a gap between two skyscrapers, was an enticing glimpse of blue water. Sydney Harbour. But were we going to reach it? The wind was pushing us in the right direction, but the air in the balloon was cooling and we were losing altitude fast.

  I took another look down. It wasn’t a reassuring sight. Even if I could steer the balloon, there was nowhere to land. The tops of all the buildings bristled with chimneys and ventilators and aerials, and there were cables, phone lines and electricity wires strung like spider webs over the streets.

  The harbour was our only hope. I did a rough guesstimate, comparing our speed and angle of descent against the distance to the water. It was too far. We weren’t going to make it.

  14

  BOMBS AWAY

  I saw an old movie once where they made a balloon go up by throwing out bags of sand. The bags were called ballast. In the olden days, before balloon-makers had worked out how to make burners that turned on and off, ballast was part of a balloon’s standard equipment. But modern hot-air balloons don’t have ballast, they have big gas bottles instead.

  The bottles looked heavy.

  ‘Jordan, give me a hand,’ I said.

  I had already undone the wide velcro straps holding the two big silver bottles to the side of the basket, but I couldn’t undo the gas-lines because they were screwed on too tight. I figured it didn’t matter – the weight of the gas bottles would tear them free. I hoped so, anyway. If I was wrong, our number was up.

  Jordan and I positioned ourselves one on either side of the first bottle. My little brother looked pale and trembly and weak. He was supposed to be taking it easy until I got him to a hospital, but this was an emergency. If dogs had hands, I would have got Myrtle to help, too. The bottles were nearly as big as me, and probably twice as heavy.

  ‘One, two, three, HEAVE!’ I said.

  The gas bottle was heavy, all right. I lifted nearly all its weight, but without Jordan’s help I wouldn’t have got it all the way up to the edge of the basket. We balanced it there for a moment, then gave it a push.

  ‘Bombs away!’ I yelled, and both of us ducked. It was lucky we did. There was a loud bang as the gas bottle ripped the reinforced rubber hose out of its fitting beneath the burner and dragged it over the side. Liquid propane sprayed in all directions. It was freezing cold. It turned to ice crystals on our hair and hands and clothing. If we hadn’t ducked, it might have blinded us.

  We got rid of the second gas bottle in the same way, being very careful this time to shield our faces and eyes. When the icy spray cleared, I looked over the side, hoping the bottles didn’t land on anyone. I didn’t see where the first one hit, but the second bottle exploded spectacularly in the middle of Martin Place. Luckily there was nobody close enough to get hurt, but I saw people taking cover as far away as George Street.

  ‘Why are we trying to bomb people?’ Jordan asked.

  ‘We’re not. We’re making the balloon lighter so it won’t crash in the city,’ I explained, gauging our rate of descent against a big office building to our left.

  It had worked. Without the gas bottles aboard, we were no longer falling as fast as before. But we were still losing altitude. The tops of the several buildings were higher than us now. They loomed on either side of us like glass and concrete cliffs. The balloon drifted silently through the narrow canyon between them. I could hear the traffic below. A bus engine rumbled, a motorbike went speeding along a street, a car tooted. I heard sirens, too. Had someone called the emergency services? I hoped so. But until we reached the harbour there was nothing anyone could do to help us. I could see the water glinting between the two skyscrapers ahead. It was no more than three or four hundred metres away. But there were several smaller buildings we had to cross first. Were we high enough?

 

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