Betrayed in the Keys

by Matthew Rief

  I supported myself against the seafloor beside Oscar as he removed his fins, hunched over, dug his booties into the sand, and tried to pull the chest free. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the other guys came over, dug more sand away, and helped him pull it loose. To my astonishment, the chest held together, and within ten minutes, we had it carefully moved back to the yacht and loaded onto a mesh net.

  The excitement was palpable as we broke the surface, my pressure gauge indicating a dangerously low two hundred pounds. Careful not to damage our find, we hauled it up out of the water, where it was grabbed by a few men aboard the yacht and set onto the deck.

  After sliding my mask down to hang around my neck, I removed my fins, climbed out of the water, and slid out of my BCD. Within a few seconds, we crowded around the chest, our wetsuits still dripping as Felix stood beside it and looking it over.

  “What’s happening?” he said, taking a step back and pointing at the chest.

  I moved closer and saw that the metal braces were disintegrating rapidly from the inside out.

  “It’s turning to orange dust,” I said. “This chest has been underwater for over three hundred years. It’s amazing it’s managed to be in such good shape after all these years.”

  A few of the guys must have thought I was joking as they stared at the sorry excuse for a chest that looked like nothing more than a few pieces of dirty, rotten wood.

  Cesar grabbed a crowbar from the corner of the room, his wetsuit still dripping onto the fiberglass deck as he walked over and handed it to Felix. Felix didn’t hesitate. He grabbed the crowbar with one hand, wedged the end into what remained of the lock, then broke it to pieces with one strong jerk. The remnants of the lock rattled to the deck and Felix bent down and lifted the cover. The thing came off, the old hinges no longer able to hold it in place, and Felix set it aside.

  We all moved closer, hoping to gaze upon the first haul of treasure from the famous pirate shipwreck. But the chest didn’t contain any gold doubloons, silver bars, or rubies. The chest was completely empty aside from a rusted hunk of useless metal that had corroded to such an extent that it was impossible to tell what it originally had been.

  Felix didn’t say a word at first. He just bent down, grabbed the metal object, and quickly dropped it back down, his hands covered in dark gunk. Then he stood tall and gave out a frustrated sigh.

  “Twenty-four hours,” he said, first looking off in the distance as he wiped his hands with a towel, then turning to look at me. “And then I’m giving up this venture and handing you over. Best figure out where the pirate buried his treasure.”

  As Felix stormed out of the room and the group dispersed away from the chest, I moved in for a better look at the object. It was roundish and flat, and at first, I thought it was some kind of strange oval-shaped dinner plate. Holding it carefully, I did my best to wipe away the grime, but it was no use. The shit was caked on strong, and my Naval salvage training suddenly kicked in.

  As the three other divers struggled out of their wetsuits and worked to rinse the gear, I put the strange piece in a large plastic bag, then joined them. Once I’d changed and toweled off, Oscar put my handcuffs back on, this time even tighter than before.

  “Nice job, dumbass,” he said. “And you looked so excited finding that thing.”

  The fat thug shook his head as he walked out of the room, leaving me behind with Cesar and Antonio.

  “That’s it for tonight,” Cesar said. “We could night dive, but it seems pointless right now.” He stood up alongside Antonio and motioned for me to rise. “Alright, Felix wants you back in the map room. Back to square one, I guess.”

  “Maybe,” I said, standing beside him. “Or maybe not.”

  He looked visibly agitated and shook his head.

  “How the fuck is this not square one?” he said, pointing at the rotted chest resting broken and lifeless beside us.

  I thought for a moment, then said, “Get me a few pounds of salt, a plastic bucket, and a medium-voltage power supply and we can find out for sure.”

  “What are you gonna do, Navy SEAL?” he said. “Use some kind of acid to burn through your handcuffs? And then what? You realize we’ve got over twenty well-armed cartel members on this yacht. I mean, you seem like a confident guy, but I sure as hell wouldn’t bet on your ass.”

  “It’s not for the cuffs,” I said. “It’s for that.”

  I pointed at the bagged piece of seemingly rusted junk beside me.

  Cesar laughed. “It would take a damn miracle to bring whatever the hell that thing is back to its original self.”

  “Not a miracle. Just science. Trust me.”

  “Alright, I’ll talk to some of the ship staff and get you the stuff you need. But I’ll be watching you, Dodge, so you don’t get any ideas.”

  When cleaning old, encrusted metals like copper or brass, there are three main methods often used. The first is placing the item in an acid bath, usually a fifty-fifty mixture of muriatic acid and water. The downside to this common method is time, as it takes a few days for the acid to do its work and another month or so of submerging it in freshwater to remove the acid. The second is sandblasting, but since the yacht didn’t have a sandblaster, that wasn’t exactly an option. The third, and the method I chose to use, was electrolysis.

  An hour after the dive, Cesar and a few of the ship’s staff had my equipment in place up in the map room. It included a ten-gallon plastic tub, a five-pound bag of salt, a laptop charger, and a pair of large alligator clips. I put everything into the bucket as best as I could with my hands cuffed, then picked it up.

  “Where are you going?” Cesar said, shaking his head.

  “The fumes from the chemical reactions are toxic,” I said. “I need a well-ventilated area.”

  Cesar nodded and walked just ahead of me, leading up to the deck. There was one more piece of equipment I would need to make it work, and as I passed a set dinner table, I picked up a big soup spoon and looked at one of the staff.

  “Is this steel?”

  The waiter, dressed in his all-white uniform, nodded.

  “Yes, sir.”

  When I turned back towards Cesar, I saw that he had a confused look on his face, but he just shrugged and we headed out a sliding glass door into the fresh night air. We stepped onto the basketball-court-sized deck that faced the sunset over the stern of the yacht. Moving aft, I set the bucket on a space between a fancy hot tub and two rows of luxurious outdoor furniture. After emptying the bucket, I filled it three-quarters of the way full with water using a hose that popped right out of the deck. Then, I added the salt and mixed it until most of it had dissolved into the solution.

  Grabbing the big alligator clips, I used the black one to clamp the dirty object to one side of the bucket, then used the red one to clamp the big steel spoon onto the other side. I arranged them along the edge in such a way that it ensured both the spoon and the artifact were completely submerged, then reached for the laptop charger.

  Usually, when I’ve cleaned copper pieces using electrolysis in the past, I used a simple five-volt cell phone charger. But since the piece we’d found was large, I would need a higher voltage to achieve the appropriate current in order to effectively remove all of the grime from its surface, so I’d decided on the twenty-volt laptop charger.

  Once everything was in place, I plugged in the charger, then watched and waited with Cesar and two other guys hovering over me. Within just a few minutes, small white bubbles began to form around the object. The current running through the two metals and the solution causes all of the grime to be released from the copper and stick to the sacrificial piece of steel, which in this case was the spoon.

  “How long does it take?” Cesar asked as he stared at the reaction.

  “We’ll check back in an hour,” I said. “From my experience, I’d say around two hours should probably do it.”

  We left the bubbling bucket and headed back inside. Felix was sitting in front of the digital tabl
e when we entered the map room, and we explained to him what we were doing with the artifact.

  After just over two hours, we checked the bucket a second time, and I saw that, though the object was still bubbling, it wasn’t nearly as much as it had been earlier. It’s amazing what just a few hours can do to reverse the effects of hundreds of years of being submerged in seawater. The grimy, dark, strange-looking object that I’d clipped into the water a few hours earlier had been revived. The grime and caked-on gunk had almost completely been transferred to the spoon, which was now a black glob instead of a shiny eating utensil.

  “That’s incredible,” Cesar said, watching me as I de-energized the charger and lifted the object out of the water with a rubber glove.

  I set it softly on a towel, then examined it with wide eyes. What had initially appeared as a rusted hunk of junk had revealed itself to be an intricately designed piece of art. It had distinctly round edges, but formed an almost triangular shape and had grooves covering the flat surfaces on both sides.

  Though the electrolysis had performed its magic well, the object still had a few patches of grime and dirt. I grabbed a toothbrush and cloth and scrubbed away. After a few minutes or cleaning and rinsing, I realized that the grooves carved into its surface weren’t patterns or symbols, but letters. Spanish letters.

  My Spanish wasn’t great, but I’d spent enough time in South America working as a gun for hire that I’d learned more than enough to communicate. After reading a few of the words I motioned to Cesar, who knelt down and stared in awe.

  “I’ll tell Felix,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the object for a few seconds before rising back to his feet.

  As he left, I read the few words I could make out aloud.

  “Thirty paces north of the heart. Ten fathoms down.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I knew that it would take me some time to figure out what the words meant, if I even ever could. It was a riddle, secret directions to the treasure that I couldn’t understand at face value. After spending eight years in Naval Special Forces and another six as a mercenary, I hadn’t spent a lot of my time studying history.

  When Felix walked into the room and saw me cleaning the artifact, he leaned over my shoulder, read the words, and then asked me what they meant.

  “I don’t know,” I said as I continued to clean.

  The piece was as strange as it was intricate. It looked like the artist who’d built it had dedicated many hours to it, and yet I had no idea what it was supposed to be. Carved around the words on the sides were detailed images, depictions of the ocean, palm trees, swords, skulls, and a pirate ship in the middle. Some portions of the artifact were in much better shape than others, but no matter how deep I cleaned it, the only words I could distinguish were the same ones I’d read multiple times aloud.

  Thirty paces north of the heart, I thought. I wondered what it meant by heart, wondered whether it was a place or a metaphor of some kind. Sitting down on one of the outdoor couches and looking out over the dark ocean, I thought about Frank and wished that he was there to see the artifact and give his opinion. After all, he knew more about Shadow and his ship than anyone in the Caribbean, especially after his recent trip to the Maritime Museum in London. He was the one who’d convinced me that the treasure most likely hadn’t gone down with the ship, that it had been systematically hidden by a team of some of the best engineers of the time.

  It was nearly midnight when Felix and Cesar, tired of looking over maps and theorizing about the artifact, escorted me down and locked me in my cabin. Mixed emotions overtook my mind as my head rested on the plush pillow. I thought about Ange and hoped that she was still okay. I thought about the artifact, playing the words over and over again in my head. And I thought about what would happen if we didn’t find the treasure the following day.

  I pictured the old, gray-haired man from the television screen in my mind’s eye. I’d dealt with evil men many times before, and I knew that he was right up there with the worst of them. I was sure that he had a long list of plans for me and decided that if we didn’t find the treasure and we cruised across the Gulf for me to be handed over to him, I’d make my move before ever reaching land. It would be better to die fighting than at the hands of the sadistic, murdering leader of a massive cartel.

  What felt like just a few seconds after my mind finally relaxed and my body fell asleep, I heard a sound that woke me up instantly. My eyes grew wide and I sprang out of the bed. Then I heard it again. It was the sound of a woman struggling and trying to scream, but her sounds were muffled by something.

  I stepped towards the forward bulkhead, quieted my breathing, and listened. It came again, and I realized that the sounds were coming from the cabin right next to mine. I pressed my right ear up against the bulkhead, listening to the sound of the woman’s cries and the shuffling of feet and moving of bodies. A deep, all-consuming rage took over and my feet instinctively moved me towards the door. My hands were still handcuffed and the door was locked, but I didn’t care.

  Knowing there was no way I could break the door off its hinges, I narrowed my gaze on the porthole style window instead. I leaned my upper body back, planted my bent left leg firmly into the deck, and forced my right foot high into the air. With all my strength, I slammed my right heel into the window and shattered it with a loud crash.

  With the window in pieces, I slid the small chair across the room, stood on top of it, and reached with both hands through the porthole, extending down towards the handle and opening the door from the outside. The sharp glass remnants that remained attached to the window frame cut up my forearms, but I didn’t feel any pain. My adrenaline was pumping as I pushed the chair aside, then slammed the door open and stepped out into the passageway.

  Just as I stepped out, one of the guards came running around the corner holding a pistol in his hands. I pounced on him before he could level it on me, slamming his gun hand against the wall beside us. As it rattled to the floor, I grabbed hold of his shirt collar with a firm grasp, bent my knees, and hurled his body over mine. He slammed onto the deck with a loud thud, and I watched his body go motionless as he groaned in pain.

  With my heart pounding in my chest, I stepped towards the door where the woman’s cries had come from, wrapped my hands around the doorknob, and flung it open. The room was dark, but I could see the outline of two people on the queen-sized bed, a man on top of a woman. He was struggling to hold her down as he tried to remove her clothes, but hearing the door crash open, he jerked his head to look at me.

  Even in the darkness of the room, I could tell that it was Oscar. His round build and long braided hair were unmistakable. Without thinking or hesitating for even a second, I lunged towards him, grabbed him by his leather belt, and forced him off the woman. Throwing his body with all of my strength, I slammed him into a nightstand and shattered a mirror with his head.

  His large and awkward frame twisted, and he barely managed to keep himself on his feet. As I forced my right knee up towards his chest, he hit me with a quick elbow to the side of my face. Pain surged as my head whipped sideways, but I kept driving my knee up until it made contact with his abdomen. As I shook off the blow, he gave a loud grunt of air from his lungs and lurched forward.

  At first, I moved around his massive body and positioned myself for a strong takedown. Then I spotted my dive knife sheathed and strapped along the side of his belt. As he struggled and threw a mean left hook at me, I dropped down and let his fist slam into the wall just over my head. Reaching for the knife, I slid it out of its sheath, rose along his right side, and accelerated the tip of the blade towards his neck in one quick motion.

  The knife sliced through Oscar’s soft tissue effortlessly and relentlessly. The rest of his body shook, and he gave a loud and powerful shriek as blood spewed out like water from a damaged pipe. The five-inch titanium blade had cut through to the other side, destroying his windpipe and severing an artery.

  I pulled the blade free, then maneu
vered around his shaking body and kicked him to the floor. He yelled violently and shook side to side with his hands pressed firmly against his neck. His dark, menacing eyes stared into mine as he tried to keep himself alive, but it was no use. In a matter of seconds, enough blood had flowed out to surround his dying body in a pool of deep red.

  Just as his body stopped moving and the life drained from his eyes, Cesar ran through the doorway, followed closely behind by two more guys. He held his Desert Eagle in one hand, and his eyes were wide as they traveled from Oscar to me, and then to the young woman, who was still on the bed. She sat on the other end with her back against the port bulkhead. She covered her body with a blanket and looked scared out of her mind.

  Cesar calmed himself, then slid his revolver into its holster and stared at me.

  “Give me the knife,” he said, holding out his right hand.

  I glanced down at my dive knife in my right hand, then looked at the big dead thug at my feet. The asshole had stolen it, and sometimes karma really can be a bitch. The blade was still dripping with blood as I handed it to Cesar, handle first. After grabbing it and wiping the blade with a rag, he told the two guys behind him to deal with the body. The two thugs went to fetch a body bag, and Cesar turned back to me.

  “Come with me,” he said in a stern voice.

  I turned and looked toward the scared woman in the corner. Focusing on the top corner of her shirt momentarily, I saw the name Penelope in black letters. I wanted to help her, to tell her that it was over and that everything would be alright.

  “Don’t worry about her,” Cesar said, reading my mind. “She’ll be fine. We need to talk to Felix and see what he wants to do about this.”

  Like hell she’ll be fine, I thought as I glanced again at the man who only moments earlier had been trying to take her by force. Cesar grabbed my arm with his left hand while his right gravitated to his holstered Desert Eagle. He motioned towards the door. I gave one final look at the young, wide-eyed woman, mouthed that everything would be okay, then turned and followed Cesar.