I am looking for a YA sci-fi/fantasy book I read when I was a kid. I believe it came out in hardcover in the US in or around 1988. It was about 12 boys sent to a military/reform school, I think the school was called Kah Nagallah or something like that. I seem to remember that the story was told from the POV of a boy who was being sent to the school with his adopted brother, who was autistic. The faculty secretly trained the boys to go on a mission to a subterranean kingdom to retrieve a powerful object, I think it was called the Vroon. The boys started calling themselves ‘the Coyotes’ and their symbol was a nautilus shell with an arrow through it. The boys escape the control of the faculty and recover the Vroon for themselves and use it for good.
The book was long, over 300 pages I think. It had some b&w illustrations. The cover art was a drawing of the boys riding in a tracked vehicle with a dome through a cavern.
In the 3 weeks since I posted this I have thought of some more details from this book:
-The faculty at the school used military ranks, most wre Captains. One was named Al Smear, who tries to help the boys later in the book but is killed.
-During a class at the military school, the autistic boy (named Don, I think) takes off his clothes and starts spinning around for no reason.
-During the first part of their mission to the underground kingdom, the faculty make them wear collars that are two way radios, and also shcok collars. Every morning the faculty would wake the boys up by making the collars give the boys an electric shock.
-Later, the boys find a cavern filled with hard cyrstals, possibly diamonds, that are very sharp. they use these crystals to cut off the collars.
-When the boys do find the underground kingdom, they are told they can have the Vroon if they can defeat the enemy of the friendly underground dwellers. I think the enemy was called the Mord. The Mord was a machine that boradcast some kind of evil that would harm or control anyone who came near it. It was a series of 12 large metal disks that were connected by 2 loops of cable. the boys defeat the Mord by getting in the center of the circle, unscrewing the cables from their mounts and crossing them. this makes the Mord eventually explode.
-When the boys return, the narrator contacts his parents. They have been missing for weeks, and the boys make up a story about where they were, and how they were abused by the school faculty. No one can find the faculty, but some of them are trying to get the Vroon back from the boys. The narrator’s parents adopt the boys who are oprhaned, or whose parents can’t/won’t take them back.
Its crazy that I can remember so many of these details but not remember the title or author. Any help would be appreciated!
The book has been found! It is called “No Traveller Returns” by James S Wallenstein,