Lost Empire fa-2

by Clive Cussler

“As much as I’d love to explore, I think this is one of those ‘discretion equals valor’ moments.”

  Remi nodded. “This will take a full archaeological team and years of work.”

  They walked aft, their footfalls clicking dully on the deck and their murmured voices echoing off the bulkheads. They stepped through the berth-deck hatch and found themselves facing another mast, this one the main; on the other side of this were a bulkhead and a ladder leading up to the main deck.“Dead end,” Remi said. “Unless we want to push through to the main deck and tunnel our way aft to the wardroom.”

  “Let’s call that Plan B. According to the blueprints, on the other side of this bulkhead are the coal bunkers, the upper level of the engine room, then the aft hold. The Sultan was known to deal in illicit cargo from time to time. Let’s see if he made any covert adjustments to the layout.”

  The bulkhead was six feet high and ran the width of the thirty-foot deck. Using their headlamps, Sam and Remi scanned the bulkhead from one side to the other. Directly below the spot where the ladder pierced the deck above, Remi spotted a quarter-sized indentation in one of the planks. She pressed her thumb into it and was rewarded with a snick. A hinged hatch swung downward. Sam caught it, then lowered it the rest of the way. On tiptoes, he peered into the opening.“A crawl space,” he said.

  “It’s heading in the right direction.”

  Sam boosted Remi through the hatch, then chinned himself up and followed. They headed aft, knees and hands bumping along the wood.

  “We’re over the coal bunkers, I think,” Sam said.

  Ten more feet, and Remi said, “Bulkhead coming up.”

  They stopped. The sound of Remi’s fingers tapping and probing the bulkhead filled the crawl space.

  Snick .

  “Eureka,” she said. “Another hatch.”

  She crawled through this opening and disappeared. Sam heard the clang of her feet hitting grated steel. He crawled to the hatch. Directly ahead was a stanchion; he grabbed it and used it to ease himself out.They were standing on a railed catwalk. They walked to the edge and shined their headlamps down, illuminating shadowed shapes of machinery, girders, and piping.

  They walked along the catwalk to the aft bulkhead, where they found a short ladder leading upward to yet another hatch; once through this hatch, they found themselves hunched over in the four-foot-tall aft hold.Sam panned his light around, trying to orient himself. “We’re directly below the wardroom. There’s got to be another-”

  “I found it,” Remi called from a few feet away.

  Sam turned to see her standing before a dangling ceiling hatch. She smiled. “Crafty devil, the Sultan,” she said. “Do you think this was for his harem?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  Sam waddled over and formed stirrups with his hands. “Up you go.”

  ONCE ON THE DECK ABOVE, they found themselves standing in a thirty-foot-long corridor. At their backs was the Shenandoah’s third mast, the mizzen. Along the starboard side of the corridor were five doors. These would be officers’ quarters.Sam checked the first door. “The head,” he whispered.

  In turn, they checked the remaining doors. The second and third rooms were empty, but not so with the fourth and fifth. Lying faceup in each of the tiered bunk beds was a skeleton.“Buried alive,” Remi murmured. “My God, I wonder how long it took?”

  “However long it took, it must have been a nightmare.”

  AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR, they turned right through another doorway and into the port-side corridor heading forward. One side was lined with more quarters. On the other, a single door led into the wardroom.“Do you want to look?” asked Sam.

  “Not particularly. It’ll be more of the same.”

  “One more room to check, then.”

  They turned around. A few feet aft was a thick oaken door with heavy wrought iron hinges and a matching latch handle.

  “Captain’s quarters,” Sam said.

  “My heart’s pounding.”

  “Mine too.”

  “You or me?” Remi asked.

  “Ladies first.”

  Sam aimed his headlamp over Remi’s shoulder, helping to illuminate her path. She stepped up to the door, placed her hand on the latch, and, after a moment’s hesitation, depressed the thumb lever and pushed. Half expecting the cliched creak of hinges, they were surprised when the door swung noiselessly inward.

  From their research they knew the captain’s quarters aboard the Shenandoah measured eighty square feet: ten feet long by eight feet wide. Compared to the officers’ berths, and especially the enlisteds’ bunk rooms, it was luxurious.Sam and Remi saw him at the same time.

  Directly ahead of them, facing the four mullioned stern windows, was a rocking chair. Jutting above the chair’s headrest was a skull, bare save a few strands of whitish yellow hair and some bits of scabrous flesh.Remi stepped across the threshold. Sam did the same. Headlamp beams focused on the figure in the chair, they paced forward, then circled around either side of the chair.

  Winston Blaylock was dressed as they had imagined him for the past three weeks: calf-high boots, khaki pants, and a hunting jacket. Even as a skeleton, his stature was impressive: wide shoulders, long legs, barrel chest.

  His hands were lying palms up in his lap. Cradled there, staring up at Sam and Remi, was a football-sized maleo statuette, its facets sparkling green in their flashlight beams.

  WITHOUT A WORD between them, Sam gently reached down and lifted the maleo from Blaylock’s lap. They stared at the man for another full minute, then searched the cabin. They found neither a log-book nor documents, save three sheets of parchment. Blaylock’s neat scrawl covered both sides of each sheet. Remi scanned their contents.“Three letters to Constance,” she said.

  “Dates?” Sam asked.

  “August fourteen, August twentieth, and . . .” Remi hesitated. “The last one’s dated September sixteenth.”

  “Three weeks after the Shenandoah

  was buried here.”

  THEY RETRACED THEIR STEPS forward through the starboard corridor, down through the hatch, back through the engine room, and through the crawl space to the berth deck.

  Remi climbed up through their excavated shaft, waited for Sam to secure the maleo to the end of the rope, then hauled it up to the surface. She dropped the line back down, and Sam went up.Together, they collected an armload of twigs and small branches, then built a latticework over the shaft and covered it with loam.

  “It doesn’t seem right just leaving them down there,” Remi said.

  “We’ll come back,” Sam replied. “We’ll make sure that he’s taken care of-that they’re all taken care of.”

  EACH LOST IN HIS or her private thoughts, the climb back up to the plateau passed quickly. Three hours after leaving the Shenandoah they were picking their way down the trail Sam had hacked. Remi was in the lead. Through the trees Sam glimpsed the white sand of the beach.

  Their pinisi was gone.“Remi, stop,” Sam rasped.

  On instinct, he shrugged off his pack, unzipped the top pocket, grabbed the maleo, and tossed it into the brush. He donned his pack again and kept walking.

  “What is it?” Remi replied, turning around. She saw the expression on her husband’s face. She stiffened. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  From somewhere to the right, hidden in the trees, came Itzli Rivera’s voice: “It’s called an ambush, Mrs. Fargo.”

  “STEP BACKWARD,” Rivera ordered. “Five more feet, and you’re on the sand. Mr. Fargo, there’s a rifle trained on your wife. One more step, Mrs. Fargo.”

  Remi complied.

  “Drop your pack.”

  Remi did so.

  “Now you come forward, Mr. Fargo. Hands up.”

  Sam walked down the trail and stepped onto the beach. To the right, Rivera stepped from the trees. To the left, another man, armed with an assault rifle, did the same. Rivera lifted a portable radio to his mouth and said something. Ten seconds later a spe
edboat glided around the peninsula and into the cove. Six feet from the beach, it stopped. On board were two more men, also armed with assault rifles.“Did you find her?” Rivera asked.

  Sam saw no point in lying. “Yes.”

  “Was Blaylock aboard?”

  “Yes.”

  Sam and Remi’s eyes locked. Each one was expecting the same question to come next.

  Rivera said, “Did you find anything interesting?”

  “Three letters.” In Spanish, Rivera barked, “Search them,” to the man behind Sam and Remi. He came forward, snagged each of their packs, and dragged them ten feet away. He searched each pack and found their iPhones and their satellite phone. He crushed each one under the butt of his rifle, then kicked the pieces into the water. Finally, he frisked Sam and Remi.“Nothing,” the man reported to Rivera. “Just the letters.”

  “You can have them,” Rivera said. “In trade, I’m going to take your wife.”

  “The hell you are.” Sam took a step toward Rivera.

  “Sam, don’t!” Remi shouted.

  The man behind Sam rushed forward and slammed the butt of his rifle into Sam’s lower back just above the kidneys. Sam stumbled forward, dropped to his knees, then climbed back to his feet.Sam took a calming breath. “Rivera, you can-”

  “Take you instead? No thank you.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cell phone, and tossed it to Sam. “It’s prepaid and untraceable, with three minutes of talk time left. You’ve got twenty-four hours to determine the location of Chicomoztoc.”“That’s not enough time.”

  “That’s your problem to solve. When you’ve got the location, dial star six-nine on that phone. I’ll answer. At twenty-four hours and one minute, I’ll kill your wife.”

  Sam turned around to face Remi.

  He said, “Everything’s going to be okay, Remi.”

  She forced a smile. “I know.”

  Rivera ordered, “Take her.”

  At gunpoint, Remi was marched into the water to the boat. The two men aboard lifted her over the gunwale and shoved her down into one of the rear seats.

  Sam turned back to Rivera, who said, “Do I have to tell you not to involve the police or any of that nonsense?”

  “No.”

  “Your boat is anchored on the other side of the peninsula.”

  “I’ll hunt you down.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If you hurt her, I’ll spend the rest of my life and every penny to hunt you down.”

  Rivera smiled thinly. “I believe you’d try.”

  CHAPTER 45

  TWENTY-TWO HOURS LATER, SOUTHERN SULAWESI

  SAM’S EYES SCANNED THE GAUGES, CHECKING AIRSPEED, ALTITUDE, oil pressure, fuel . . . As was everything else aboard the airplane, the few dashboard labels that hadn’t worn off completely were in Serbian.

  The Ikarus Kurir seaplane, painted an ugly shade of gray-blue, was sixty years old, a castoff from the Yugoslavian air force. The windows leaked, the engine knocked, the wheeled pontoons were badly dented, and the controls were so soft there was a two-second delay between the time he pushed the pedals and the plane responded.He’d never been happier with a plane in his life.

  A thousand miles east of Jakarta, the Ikarus had been the only seaplane available for rent, purchase, or theft-and, provided he didn’t crash in the next hour, it would take him to Remi. Whether they stayed alive over the next few hours or days would depend largely on the credibility of the Hail Mary pass he and Selma had assembled.

  AS SOON AS Rivera’s speedboat had disappeared from view, Sam had retrieved the maleo statuette, grabbed his pack, and sorted through their belongings, taking only the essentials. Blaylock’s letters went into a Ziploc baggie. The swim back to the pinisi took just under seven minutes; the boat ride to the nearest civilization on the eastern coast of Lampung Bay, an excruciating ninety minutes. Once ashore and off the beach, he jogged a mile down a dirt road to a collection of Quonset huts on the outskirts of an industrial farm. He talked his way into the plant office and to a phone and called Selma, who listened, then said, “It’s not enough time.”

  “I know that. It’s all we have.”“Should we call Rube?”

  “No. There’s nothing he can do in time. Have Pete and Wendy get me back to Jakarta.”

  “On it.”

  “Now, tell me where things stand. What do we know?”

  “Virtually nothing.”

  FIVE HOURS AFTER he left Pulau Legundi, Sam touched down in Jakarta. He checked into the closest hotel with a Wi-Fi connection and a laptop to rent, then resumed his call with Selma.“I don’t care if we’re right about the location,” Sam said. “I just need to be able to sell it to Rivera and convince him we have to meet.”

  “I could create evidence. Wendy could Photoshop something-”

  “As a last resort.” Sam checked his watch. “We’re going to take six hours and work every angle we have. If we don’t get anywhere, we’ll go with your plan. Let’s run through it: Orizaga wandered off, presumably looking for Chicomoztoc. Did he stay on Sumatra?”“We don’t know.”

  “Both he and Blaylock were focused on the maleo. Orizaga said he’d know Chicomoztoc when he found a ‘hatchery of great birds.’ He had to have meant the maleo, agreed?”

  “It seems likely.”

  “Where are they found?”

  “They’re on the endangered species list. They’re limited to Sulawesi and Buton islands.”

  “How about five hundred years ago?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have Pete and Wendy put together a list of maleo experts.” “We don’t even know if there is such a thing.”

  “There are experts for everything. Ask about hatcheries, concentrations, migration . . . Okay, back to Sulawesi: It’s where the Malagasy lived prior to migrating to Madagascar, and we found Blaylock’s outrigger on Madagascar. That’s two votes for Sulawesi. What do we know about Sulawesi prior to the sixth century?”

  Sam heard the rustling of paper. Selma said, “Human settlements as far back as thirty thousand years B.C. Believed to have been part of a land bridge between Australia and New Guinea-”“More recent,” Sam said.

  “As deep as I’ve been able to dig in the past few days, I’ve found very little until the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese arrived.”

  “What about the language or the art? Any similarities to either the Aztecs or Blaylock’s Proto-Aztecs?”

  “Wendy’s working on a search, but we’re up against the same problem: Except for a few cities, Sulawesi is thousands of square miles of rain forest, dead volcanoes, and not much else. There are places on that island that have never been explored. There’s very little Internet and even fewer online art collections. If we had a few weeks-”“We don’t. Just do your best. If you find something that looks or sounds even remotely Aztec, flag it.”

  “Sam, you have to take a breath.”

  “When I’ve got Remi back. Let’s go back to the outrigger. You have the lab report. Remind me: What do we know about the materials used?”

  “The wood used was durian. We know where it exists today. I’m working on where it might have grown before the sixth century. Same with the rest of it-the rubber tree, the pandan leaf, the gebang palm . . .”“Let me guess: There aren’t many experts on those either.”

  “Not that I’ve been able to find.”

  “How about Blaylock’s letters?” “We’ve decoded them all. Unless there’s a code behind the code, there’s nothing else there. That applies to his journal, too. How about the Constance letters you found on the Shenandoah?”

  “They’re not coded. The first two letters discuss the voyage to the Sunda Strait. The last was probably written shortly before he died. You can read it when we get home. He tells Constance he wished he’d come home to marry her.”“So sad. How about the maleo statuette you found?”

  “It could be emerald or jade or any number of other gems I’m not familiar with. I’ll do a search for minerals endemic to Sul
awesi, but I don’t think it’ll solve our problem. I’m going to need access to our server so I can look at everything from here.”“Sure, give me ten minutes.”

  “Good, thanks. What are we missing, Selma?”

  “I don’t know, Sam.”

  “We’re missing something.”

  THREE HOURS PASSED. Sam and Selma talked every twenty minutes, discussing progress, dissecting what they knew, and rehashing what they suspected.

  At hour four, Selma called again. “We’ve made a little progress. We found a book by a Norwegian botanist that discusses both the pandan leaf and gebang palm. I talked to him on the phone. He thinks that around the fourth and fifth century, both of them were heavily concentrated in the northern third of Sulawesi.”“But not restricted to there.”

  “No.”

  “I just realized what we’re forgetting.”

  “What?”

  “The codex. Remember the bush the maleo is sitting on?”

  “Yes. Damn. How did I forget that?” “Doesn’t matter. Have Wendy do her thing: Enlarge the image, clean it up, and show it to the Norwegian.”

  Sam hung up and returned to his laptop. As he had been on and off for the last three hours, he was scrolling through the gallery of images and scans they’d collected. There were dozens of Constance letters, hundreds of journal pages, the Orizaga Codex, the Fibonacci spirals . . . They all began to blur together.He switched to Google Earth and continued his scan of Sulawesi, looking for anything that might ring the faintest of bells in his head. Minutes turned into an hour.

  He zoomed in on a secluded bay on Sulawesi’s northeastern coast. As it seemed with every spot around Sulawesi, islets and atolls were scattered like confetti.

  Sam stopped suddenly and tracked his finger backward, moving the map. He zoomed in again, paused, then zoomed some more. He squinted his eyes. Then smiled. “A hollowed-out flower,” he muttered.

  HE WAS REACHING for the phone when it rang. It was Selma: “You were right, Sam, there are experts for everything. I heard back from a zoologist in Makassar. She claims up until the early seventeen hundreds, maleos were more migratory. Every year they would congregate in the northeast part of the island for a few months.”On his laptop, Sam was switching between Google Earth and the photo gallery. “Go on.”