by Matthew Rief
“You make a move like that again,” Jefe barked as I stood tall, “and I’ll personally fill your body with lead. Understand?”
I nodded my dirt-covered forehead, then turned around and stepped towards the low spot where I’d discovered the flat stones. Dropping down, I grabbed my shovel, then struck its worn cutting edge in between two of the stones. With weary arms and calloused hands, I pried up one of the flagstones, then dug my fingers under and pulled it up out of its place. It was heavy, but I made quick work of it with my adrenaline still pumping after the confrontation. I set it aside with a thud, and to my astonishment, I gazed upon a dark open space beneath where the stone had been.
I grabbed a nearby flashlight and shined it into the space. I felt like I was looking through a window into another world as I gazed into the illuminated darkness. I saw that the space below opened up much wider than I’d originally thought. Just a few feet beneath me, I saw what appeared to be an old stone staircase that led down into the darkness.
“What is it, dammit?” Jefe said, his voice a combination of agitated and intrigued.
I moved back from the opening and wiped the sweat from my brow with the top of my forearm.
I let out a deep breath and said, “It’s a staircase.”
I moved back as Jefe climbed down the ladder and had a look for himself. A smile came over his face as he shined his flashlight into the opening, then he glanced down at his watch. I knew that it had to be around five in the morning and that daybreak would come soon. The island wasn’t exactly the biggest tourist attraction in the Keys, but it still attracted a lot of people who were interested in its history and plant life. The chances of someone wandering off on a guided tour and finding our operation was slim, but that didn’t make it impossible.
“Back to work,” Jefe said as he stepped away from the opening and reached for the rungs of the ladder. “I want all of these stones removed an hour ago.”
With aching, tired bodies, we all went back to work, digging and pulling up the flagstones one at a time and hoisting them out of the hole. After nearly an hour of sweaty, backbreaking work, we’d removed enough of the stones to climb down onto the stairs below.
“That’s enough,” Jefe said, shining his high-powered flashlight down into the opening we’d created.
The sun had already begun to rise, giving off an ever-brightening glow that allowed us to switch off our work lights. Jefe climbed down the ladder to the bottom of the hole alongside six armed thugs. Most of the thugs that had climbed down looked alike, and the only one that caught my eye was a monstrosity of a man who looked like Andre the Giant. I wondered if he’d even be able to fit inside he was so big.
“You first,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “I may need the professor, and I want you two traitors to see this treasure before I kill you.”
He motioned to Felix and Cesar, who stood beside me, then urged me forward. Clasping a flashlight awkwardly with my hands bound in front of me, I shined the light down over the ominous stone stairway. Under other circumstances, I would have been excited. Finding a long-lost pirate’s treasure trove is a fantasy most everyone probably has at least some point in their life. I know I had. But something about having my hands bound, guns aimed at my back, and people I cared about in harm’s way brought the thrill factor down a few pegs.
As I took my first slow step down into the darkness, Frank moved in behind me.
“Be careful,” he said. “And move slow. Pirates were notorious for leaving booby traps.”
“Booby traps?” Jefe said, listening to Frank and shaking his head. “What the hell kind of traps could these guys have constructed that would last for hundreds of years and still work?”
Jefe laughed, and he was quickly joined in by a few of his men.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Frank said flatly. As the thugs went quiet, he looked at me and added, “Just watch your step.”
I proceeded down with caution. If Frank said there would most likely be booby traps, then I knew that it was probably true. The fact that Shadow had also had a group of highly trained engineers wiggled its way into my mind too. The artifact had clearly said ten fathoms down, and we were not even half that far down. If the ten feet of dirt and thousands of pounds of flagstones were any indication of things to come, we still had a long way ahead of us.
I moved down slowly into the darkness, checking the ground and walls ahead of me before each step. The air was stale after having been stagnant for over three hundred years, and the stone steps were covered in dirt and rocks that had crumbled down while we’d dug out the stones. Frank and Jefe were right on my heels, followed closely by Cesar, Felix, and the six armed thugs.
“Looks like limestone,” Frank said, shining his light on the walls. “And it appears as though they used some kind of local concrete mixture to hold them in place.”
The walls looked well made, and aside from a few jutting edges and broken portions, they had remained relatively smooth even through the years. I shined my beam of light ahead and saw that the stairs flattened out a short ways down, leading into what looked like a corridor of some kind.
The rubber soles of my shoes made quiet contact with the coarse stone as I reached the bottom step and looked forward. The long passageway ahead of me appeared to dead-end about fifty feet away. As I moved forward, stepping down the long corridor, Frank suddenly grabbed my shirt from behind.
“What is it?” I said, glancing over my shoulder at him. Then I motioned towards the empty tunnel ahead of us and added, “There’s nothing here.”
“That’s what worries me,” Frank said, his eyes scanning over every inch of the corridor.
“What’s the holdup?” Jefe said, moving up behind me and shining his light over my shoulder. Upon seeing that the coast was clear, he added, “Come on, Dodge! Move your ass.”
Frank and I ignored him, and we continued to examine the ground. In a flash of realization, he stood up tall and glanced at me.
“It’s really something,” he said, and I sensed that there was a part of him that was excited, even given the circumstances. “The architecture is amazing if it’s true.”
“If what’s true?” Jefe barked. “What the hell is the holdup?”
“There are traps,” Frank fired back. “Portions of the ground ahead will give way under our weight.”
I kept my light forward, kept scanning over the ground until I saw it too. Some of the stones looked slightly different than the others. The variations were subtle, only noticeable upon careful examination, but they were there.
“What in the hell are you two talking about?” Jefe said, shaking his head.
I scanned my eyes over the ground ahead of us a few seconds longer, then said, “We need to bring down one of the flagstones.” Before Jefe could reply, I turned back to him and added, “We need to figure out where we can and can’t walk.”
Jefe paused a moment, then rushed alongside us and stared down the corridor. He looked at both of us like we were crazy, then cast his gaze to the ground. After looking it over, he ordered a few of his men to head back up and grab one of the stones. When they returned a few minutes later, they handed it to me and I muscled it up against my chest.
“If you cause this place to collapse, I’m going to kill you,” Jefe said.
“Right there,” Frank said, pointing at a portion of the ground in the middle that I too had noticed was strange.
I grunted, and with all of my strength, I hurled the stone. Moments later it crashed into the ground, shattered the stones beneath it, and crashed into a dark pit, disappearing from view. The ground crumbled free from one side all the way to the other, and Frank and I had to step back to avoid falling into it.
The heavy stones smashed and crumbled far below us, leaving a gap in the floor. Cautiously, Frank and I stepped towards the edge of the pit. As dust settled around us, I shined my flashlight down and saw rows of menacing wooden spikes extending up like the mouth of a hungry beast roughly twenty feet
below us.
“Holy shit,” Jefe said, glancing over our shoulders.
After shining his light over the spikes and seeing that we still had a long ways to go to get to the end of the corridor, he turned and ordered a few of his men to bring back more of the stones. One by one, I hurled more stones as far as I could down the tunnel, revealing two more traps along the way. The pits were wide, and in order to take on the first one, I got a running start, dug my right leg hard into the ground, and hurled my body through the dark air. I landed softly on a ledge between two of the pits, my momentum nearly causing me to fall off the other side. My body leaned over the side as I tried to regain my balance. My eyes grew big as I gazed down at the sharpened points of splintered wood that waited patiently for someone to drop down and be brutally impaled.
Once I’d recovered, I did my best to help the others. The group followed behind me, making the leaps and bounds with a few close calls, but no casualties. Once we’d reached the end of the corridor, I saw that what had looked like a dead end was really a fork, with dark, narrow passageways leading both to the left and to the right. I shined my light both ways, but they looked the same to me. They each branched out for about twenty feet, then cut at a ninety-degree angle back to the north.
Jefe took charge, pushing me aside and looking in each direction.
“One of them must be a trap,” one of Jefe’s thugs said.
“No shit,” Jefe replied. “The only question is, which one?”
He looked at Frank, expecting an answer. Frank examined both ways carefully, looking over the walls and hoping to find any kind of clue. But there was nothing.
“We can’t know for sure,” Frank said, feeling the walls with his hands as he looked back and forth. “My gut tells me we should go right. Most people are right-handed, including Shadow, and a right turn in a space as narrow as this would allow them to better fight off any attackers if they were ambushed inside.”
Jefe laughed and shook his head. “Well, there is one way to know for sure.” He took a step back, grabbed Cesar forcefully by his handcuffs, and pushed him down the right side. “You go right, and Logan will go left.” Then he paused a moment and added, “It’s pirate roulette.”
I faced down the corridor, shining my flashlight all around me. I didn’t relish the idea of walking right into an unknown pirate booby trap but fought to keep my sense about me. I’d been in dangerous situations many times before. I’d been beaten, outnumbered, and forced to defy all odds in order to make it out alive. Calming my breath and narrowing my gaze, I stepped forward.
“Emilio,” Jefe said. “Go with Logan.”
The guy built like Andre the Giant strode over beside me. I nodded at Cesar, then turned, shined my light ahead, and stepped into the darkness. I felt like a mouse stepping onto the wooden portions of a trap, knowing it was likely only a matter of time before I hit the trigger and ended up at the mercy of whatever cruel device Shadow and his crew had whipped up.
The passageway was narrower than the one we’d came from, and Emilio barely managed to fit as he lumbered with loud steps behind me. When I reached the turn, I shined my flashlight around the corner and saw that the way ahead of us shot upward at a ninety-degree angle roughly twenty feet away. There appeared to be indentations carved into the stone, and as they took shape, they revealed themselves to be a makeshift ladder of some kind.
Halfway down the corridor, I stepped onto a stone that surprised me when it displaced under my weight. I pulled my leg back, but it was too late. The stone sank into the ground six inches or so, causing my senses to go on the alert and my heart to race. I heard a sound up ahead in the darkness, and just as I shined my flashlight ahead, my eyes grew wide as I saw a large dark object with spikes rocketing towards me.
In the blink of an eye, I dropped to the ground, my body sprawling out as flat as possible just as the object accelerated and whooshed right over my head. The sound of tensioned old rope and creaking timbers was quickly replaced by the loud groans of the man behind me as the object crashed into his chest. His massive body hadn’t reacted as quickly as mine, and twisting my head back, I watched from just a few feet away as wooden spikes drove through his chest and slammed him against the wall behind us. His groans went quiet in an instant and his body went lifeless. Blood flowed down and pooled beneath his feet as I slowly rose from my position, scanning the light around me to make sure that that was the only trap.
Jefe called out from down the other corridor and I heard footsteps moving in my direction. I looked at the large object closely for the first time and realized that it was a wooden log, probably part of a ship’s mast, with sharp wooden spikes sticking out of it in all directions. The log was attached to old ropes that extended up and out of sight around the corner, making the trap invisible from our angle as we approached.
I moved back towards the group just as they arrived and gazed upon the horrific scene.
“Well, I guess we know which is the right way now,” Jefe said in a hard and unaffected tone. Then he motioned to me and added, “You’re leading the way again.”
I stepped through the narrow space between the bloodied dead guy and the wall, then moved past the group. Frank was looking at the corpse and the device that had killed him in amazement. I too was hard-pressed to believe that such a trap, built hundreds of years ago, would still spring today and function as it was intended to.
Heading in the other direction, I noticed a few differences to the corridor on the other side. The main one was that it was slightly wider and, once I made the turn around the corner, I saw that the way led down another set of steps instead of up. I moved slowly through the dark chamber that was quickly becoming a house of horrors. With light steps, I headed down the small staircase that only had four steps. At the bottom, the space opened up into a room with skeletons sprawled out at the corners and strange paintings on the walls. On one of the walls, the word Traitors was written in big black letters.
At the far end, there was a massive stone wall with a small space to the right of it. As we approached the wall, it quickly became clear that it was a door of some kind and that it sat loose from the rest of the structures around it. I stepped towards the space, which was only about six inches wide, and shined my light through.
“What’s in there?” Jefe barked as he moved up right behind me.
I didn’t reply. Instead, I just stared in amazement at the piles of old wooden chests stacked on top of each other against a far wall. Part of me couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There had to be at least a hundred of them and they were each just as large as the one I’d pulled out of the seafloor a few days earlier.
Jefe pushed me aside and looked through. A smile came across his face as he shined his light back and forth, gazing upon the riches of Captain Shadow.
THIRTY-TWO
Angelina woke up on a bed in a small dark room with her hands cuffed behind her back. The mattress was soft and the room was quiet. Once the hint of grogginess faded from her mind, her eyes went big and she sat up instantly.
Where am I? she thought as she took a look around the room.
There wasn’t much to it, just the bed she was on, a curtain covered window to her right, and two shut wooden doors.
Shifting her legs around, she scooted off the bed and came to her feet. The last thing she could remember was being chased on the Baia by a boat full of thugs. And the dart, she thought, pausing a moment as she remembered being struck by a high-speed tranquilizer dart shot from the rifle one of the thugs had been carrying.
Rage burned within her as she tried each of the doorknobs, knowing that the doors would be locked before she’d even grabbed hold of them. When she found herself unable to turn the knobs, Angelina took a moment to think through her situation. She was on the Yellow Rose. She had no doubt about that, and she was being held hostage by Black Venom, one of the most notoriously ruthless drug cartels in the world. Logan is probably close by, she thought, and the others as well.
&n
bsp; If they aren’t already dead, she thought, reminding herself of the dark but highly probable possibility.
She had to move; she couldn’t stay there and just wait like a useless captive or damsel in distress. The old stories she’d read as a child where the girl gets rescued by the prince had always made her mad. The girl just sitting by and waiting to be saved usually caused her to throw the book across the room, and it was a mentality she’d never had. No, Angelina was usually the one doing the saving, and the last thing she was going to do was just sit by and wait for something to happen.
She turned her attention to the two doors, and once she’d decided which door led into the passageway instead of a head, she went to work. It was a well-constructed one-and-three-quarter-inch-thick maple door, with a steel handle and locking device, as well as steel hinges that allowed the door to swing inward. She wouldn’t be able to kick it open, and the handle design meant that picking the outside lock was out of the question. But grazing her hands over the metal plate holding the handle in place, she got an idea.
Turning around, she scanned the dark room and spotted a few drawers built into the nightstand beside the bed. After searching through them, she found a stack of hairpins, grabbed one, and moved back to the door. She bent the small piece of metal then stuck it into the grooves of the Phillips head and began to twist.
The first few movements were the hardest, but once it started to go, the screw revolved easily out of place. It was slow and difficult with her hands bound behind her back, but one by one, she removed all of the screws, gathered them up, and put them in the drawer beside the rest of the hairpins.