The Lost Island

by Douglas Preston

  “What is it?” Garza asked.

  “I didn’t want to say anything before,” Weaver said. “But now that I’ve actually seen these hair follicles and viewed the pattern of pores under the scope, I’m almost certain.”

  “Certain about what?”

  “About what kind of, ah, animal this vellum is from.”

  “Well?” Garza said. Why was he being so coy?

  Weaver licked his lips. “Human.”

  For a moment, the lab went silent.

  Brock laid down his pen. “You can’t be serious.”

  Weaver said nothing.

  “I’m sorry, but there must be some mistake,” Brock continued. “There are simply no examples of human skin being used for vellum.”

  Garza glanced over at him. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite. For monks to flay a human and use his skin for vellum is unthinkable. No Christian of the time would have done that, even to a pagan enemy. That sort of cruelty wasn’t invented until the twentieth century.”

  “What about Viking raiders?” Garza asked. “Or other pagan tribes of the time, perhaps? Maybe they made their own vellum from the skin of Christian monks.” He cast a smirk at Brock.

  “Absolutely not. The Vikings didn’t read books—they burned books. But more to the point, the desecration of the human body after death was not part of Viking or pagan culture, either. They might rape your wife and burn you alive in your house, but they would never mutilate a corpse.” Brock paused. “If you want my considered opinion, gentlemen, you are grievously in error.”

  Weaver looked down at the tiny box of clear plastic that held the two follicles. “Say what you will. I think it’s human.”

  “Get those tests started right away,” Garza said.

  28

  AMY AWOKE GIDEON at eleven thirty. The wind was still blowing, and the weather report indicated worse was on the way. He went through the usual first-mate chores of raising the anchor, arranging the paper charts in their proper order, and checking the electronics to make sure they were working properly. He was pleased at how quickly he had mastered these numerous but relatively simple chores.

  At midnight, they eased out of the mangrove swamp into the choppy waters of the bay. It was a dirty night, sand blowing across the water in stinging clouds, neither moon nor stars. It took another half an hour to reach the inlet, which was boiling from the storm surge—and then they were in the open sea.

  The swells were suddenly terrifying, great rolling beasts coming one after the other, the crests foaming white, spray and spume blown forward by the wind.

  “This is perfect,” said Amy, at the helm. She was adjusting the gain on the radar, back and forth.

  “Perfect? You’re joking, right?” Gideon was already feeling queasy. During the encounter with the Horizonte, he’d been too busy—and too scared—to feel seasick. That wasn’t the case at present. This was not going to be a good night.

  “The radar’s practically green with sea return, and the waves are almost as high as our boat. They’re going to have a hell of a time seeing us on their radar.”

  “If you say so.”

  The boat plowed through the water at ten knots. Beyond the pilothouse windows, hammered with rain, there was nothing—no horizon, no stars, no sense of orientation, just a thundering blackness. The swell was coming from behind, and each foaming crest shoved the bow down and pushed their stern sideways in a sickening corkscrew motion, Amy fighting the wheel to stay the course. The chartplotter showed them as a tiny black arrow on a sea of white, moving away from shore until their lonely speck was the only thing on the screen. Gideon tried to adjust the gain on the radar as Amy had previously showed him, but there was only so much he could do in a sea like this.

  About one o’clock, a strange sound came from below: a kind of stuttering vibration that shivered the hull.

  “Damn,” said Amy, looking at the dials. The boat started to slew sideways and she fought with the wheel, throttling one engine down and the other up.

  More stuttering, and the boat slewed again. Amy worked the controls, muttering under her breath, and then the shuddering stopped.

  “Port engine’s out,” she said. “I’ve got to go below. Take the wheel.”

  “Me? I don’t know what I’m doing!”

  “Listen to me: don’t let the boat go broadside. Every wave will try to push your stern around—you’ve got to turn the wheel the opposite way—push it back. But don’t overcorrect, either.”

  She pointed to the dual throttles. “You only have one engine—starboard, the right throttle. Try to maintain twenty-one hundred rpm. You might need to throttle up or down depending on whether you’re climbing and descending a wave. Got it?”

  “Not really—”

  She went below. Gideon grasped the wheel, peering into the darkness. He couldn’t even see the waves in front of the bow. But there was a growling sound behind him, and the stern began to rise with the hiss of breaking water. His hands felt frozen on the wheel. The bow was pushed down, down, the nose burying itself in the water. And then the stern was shoved sideways—violently.

  “Fuck!” He turned the wheel against the movement, goosing the throttle; the boat began to straighten out, and then abruptly swung the other way, the bow rearing up as the stern sank into the trough. Fighting the wheel to true it up, he could hear things crashing in the galley. He turned the other way, fighting his own overcorrection, easing off the throttle.

  That was only the first wave. Now the terrifying process began again.

  Even worse, he was about to be sick. Fumbling with the side window latch, he managed to get it open with one hand, the rain lashing in, trying to keep his other hand firm on the wheel. He stuck his head out the window and retched unhappily. He was hardly done heaving when the next crest shoved the boat sideways again, the water sweeping over the stern and jamming the bow down. He pulled the wheel around; the boat skidded, too much yet again, and he quickly swung it back the other way, the boat weaving drunkenly through the combers.

  He heard a muffled yell from Amy, below.

  The next wave he handled a little better, pausing to puke again between the swells. On the chartplotter he could now make out their destination, ten nautical miles distant, creeping toward them. This was crazy. They should have stayed in the bay, waited for the storm to blow over.

  And now something else was happening. He could hear a hesitation in the rumble of the remaining engine—a kind of stuttering sound. The needle of its rpm gauge began to chatter and drop. He throttled up but that only made it worse, the engine faltering. He quickly throttled back down and it seemed to stabilize. But the rpms had subsided to fifteen hundred—and he could feel the power of the sea taking over as the boat’s forward motion faltered.

  The next wave came harder, bashing the stern around and tilting the boat viciously. He threw the wheel to the left, and the boat came around—sluggishly. The next wave hammered them again, pushing the vessel farther around, almost broadside.

  The engine coughed, rumbled, coughed again.

  “Amy!” he cried. “What’s going on!” But the roar of the wind and sea snatched the words away.

  And then the engine quit totally. There was a sudden loss of vibration, a vanishing of the low-frequency throb—leaving only the roar of the sea and wind.

  The boat was abruptly shoved broadside, in a nauseating rotating movement, totally in the grip of the sea. Gideon hung on to the wheel for dear life. It was all he could do to stay on his feet. The lights flickered.

  Amy’s voice came over the intercom, supernaturally calm. “Go forward to the chain locker, deploy the drogue.”

  “Drogue—?”

  “The sea anchor. It looks like a big canvas parachute. Throw it overboard, run the line out a hundred feet, and cleat it off. Then come back and help me.”

  He abandoned the wheel and exited the pilothouse. Outside, the full force of the storm slammed into him, staggering him, the rain lashing his face, the dec
k heaving. Beyond, he could dimly see the ridges and foaming peaks of a mountainous sea rising above his head in all directions.

  Gripping the rail, he crawled forward to the chain locker set in the bow. The boat was wallowing, each swell tilting it up and throwing it down sideways, almost like a bucking horse, the hull shuddering. Water erupted over the rubrail and surged along the deck. Each time it did, he had to grip the rail with both hands to keep from being washed overboard.

  He made it to the bow, undogged the chain locker. With no light, he reached in and felt his way around blindly. There it was: something bulky made of thick canvas, to the left.

  A swell burst over him, knocking his body sideways and sliding him over the deck until his legs dangled over the side. With all his strength, he pulled himself back by gripping the rail. As soon as the swell had passed, he hauled the canvas thing out of the locker. It was all folded up and there was no way to be sure of what it was, but it was attached to a rope and he threw it overboard. Here goes nothing. It hit the water, the rope running out fast. It burned his hands as he arrested its headlong rush. He managed to tie it off to the mooring post, his fingers feeling fat and stupid.

  It was almost like magic. The line went taut; there was a groaning sound; and then the Turquesa began to swing around, bow pointing into the wind and sea. In a moment the boat was riding better—much better.

  Gideon crawled back into the pilothouse, soaked to the skin, hit by a series of dry heaves. Head pounding from the effort, anxiety, and nausea, he went below to where Amy was working on the engine. The compartment panels were off and she was on her back, her head and torso deep in the mass of machinery.

  “What now?”

  “Shut down those fuel lines, there.”

  Gideon turned the levers perpendicular to the lines.

  Amy continued issuing orders as she worked. The boat was riding much better, the big combers hissing past on either side. It was terrifying enough, but at least they weren’t broadside and spinning out of control.

  “Okay,” Amy said at last. “See if you can start the starboard engine.”

  Gideon went up, set the throttle and shift, and pressed the button. A few coughs and the engine roared to life. He felt a rush of relief.

  A moment later Amy appeared—covered in oil, her hair matted. She took the helm. “Raise the drogue. Wrap the line around the anchor windlass and I’ll winch it in. Leave it cleated in case we need to re-deploy.”

  Gideon did as instructed and a moment later the motorized windlass was hauling in the drogue. He manhandled it back into the locker.

  The boat swung around, a wave slamming over him as he crawled back toward the pilothouse.

  “We’d better get back to Bahía Hondita,” he said, coughing and shedding water. “Ride it out there.”

  “We’re two miles from Jeyupsi,” said Amy, quietly. “Let’s finish what we started.” She reached down and flipped a batch of circuit breakers, plunging the boat into darkness. The only light came from the dim glow of the electronics.

  Gideon stared at the isolated cay on the chartplotter, an irregular shape in the middle of nowhere.

  “We’re going to circle it at a mile, looking for our friends. If they’re not there, we go in and turn on the outside floodlight so we can verify it’s the right landmark. You’ll document it with photographs and video. And identify whatever might be meant by clue seven, the Devil’s vomit.”

  “And if they’re there?”

  “We turn and run.”

  “We only have one engine.”

  “We’ll see them before they see us. We’ll lose them in this sea. The crests of these waves are higher than our boat.”

  “Thanks, I hadn’t noticed.”

  The boat rumbled on, thrown back and sideways again and again. They circled the cay, seeing nothing on radar that might be a lurking boat.

  “Okay,” Amy said. “We’re going in.”

  She brought the boat closer to the cay. As they approached, Gideon could hear the roar of surf, like a continuous barrage of artillery, growing increasingly in volume. And then, dimly emerging from the darkness, a patch of ever-shifting, ever-boiling white.

  She slowed, circling until they were in the lee of the cay. The outline on radar sharpened, beginning to take on the approximate shape of the image on the map. Amy slowed still further, keeping the engine going just enough to keep the boat oriented.

  “Get ready with the floodlights,” she said. “Aim them at the rock. We’ll want to do this quickly.”

  Gideon grabbed the handles of the floodlights in the roof of the pilothouse and maneuvered them toward the vague outline, white with surf. The surf was so violent, the thunder of it shook the very air.

  “Now.”

  He threw the switches, and the bank of lights blazed into the darkness, brilliantly illuminating the cay. It was stupendous—a huge arch of black rock rising out of the water, lashed by surf, streaming white water. A long rocky shore extended along one side, about a quarter of a mile, raging with surf.

  But it was the arch itself that transfixed Gideon. With each wave, the sea rushed through the hole in the arch, cramming in and boiling into a violent maelstrom—and then vomiting out the other side, leaving a long trail of white spume on the surface of the sea that trailed off in a straight line into the darkness.

  Gideon grabbed the camera and began taking photos as the boat moved past, then switched it into video mode.

  “That trail of sea foam,” said Amy. “It follows the current. And we’re supposed to follow it. I’m taking a bearing now—that’ll be our new heading.” She gunned the engine, the boat swinging around to slip past the cay…

  Just as—suddenly, out of the darkness from behind the cay, churning at high speed—there came the Horizonte, its 50-caliber deck gun pointed directly at them.

  29

  AT THE HELM of the Horizonte, Linda Cordray gripped the wheel with whitened knuckles. There they were—right where she wanted them. Her men would hold their fire, as she had instructed.

  The ruse had worked perfectly. She had positioned the Horizonte in the lee of the cay, in a sheltered cove close enough to shore so their radar image would merge with that of the cay itself, causing them to look like just another rock.

  As she stared at the Turquesa, now turning in an ineffectual attempt at escape, a white-hot rage lanced through her. In the cabin below, wrapped in a blood-soaked canvas, lay her husband’s lifeless body. He had bled to death, screaming and sobbing before lapsing into the final coma as they chased the Turquesa. Cordray told herself, yet again, that even had she headed straight to the nearest port, he never would have made it. Nothing she could have done would have saved him. She told herself that several times.

  They’d shared a unique bond. Living outside the rules, two against the world. They were remarkably alike in their thirst for adventure, their loathing for the settled life. He was the velvet fist in her iron glove. They complemented each other perfectly. Ironically, the great physical difference between them just cemented the relationship.

  Their dream of the past five years had been to find the wreck of the privateer Compostela, laden with the fabled Treasure of Coromandel. It had been sunk off the Guajira coast back in 1550, and they’d narrowed down the possible locations to the point where it was almost in their grasp. A few more weeks of sidescanning, and they would have it.

  At first, they’d worried that the Turquesa was also looking for the Coromandel treasure. There had been others before—it was a celebrated treasure—and they had dealt with them. But during cocktails they realized the two, Mark and Amy, were instead looking for a different prize. A prize that was possibly even bigger than the Treasure of Coromandel.

  Five tons of gold.

  She realized that they weren’t the usual treasure-hunting idiots, out there on a song and prayer, with a leaky boat and some flea-market map. Oh, they had a map, all right—and she knew it was genuine the moment she saw it. Fake maps always looked the s
ame. This one had been unique. Totally unique.

  Her man, her partner, was dead in his blood-soaked shroud, but she could still hear his quiet voice in her mind. Advising her what to do. Telling her what he wanted. And what he wanted most of all was to get the map to the Spanish treasure—and then kill Mark and Amy Johnson. In that order. If she merely killed them, sank their boat—which she could do right now if she wanted—he would not approve. More important, Cayo Jeyupsi was big enough that you could spend a year digging on it. She needed that map.

  The Horizonte bulled through the swell, the deck heaving. Linda Cordray handled the helm smoothly, her instincts for the waves unerring, staring fiercely into the darkness ahead. The Turquesa had doused its lights, but she could still see it clearly on radar. It was eight hundred yards ahead, but they were going a lot slower than before. Engine trouble, perhaps—the vessel had taken some rounds.

  She had her four men. They were young, strong, instinctual, and merciless. They would board her, take the boat, and incapacitate the Johnsons. She would take over, get the map—this time with no mistakes. And then those two would die. Horribly.

  Seven hundred yards. She was close enough to blow them out of the water with the machine gun. But she wouldn’t deploy it yet. It wasn’t until her men had fired, willy-nilly, on that decoy launch and it went up in flames that she realized how much she needed that map. She’d had a bad moment then, realizing her mistake, thinking the map was gone. She was almost relieved to see it had been a ruse.

  She called in the first mate, Manuel. She told him exactly what the plan was for ramming and boarding the Turquesa. Manuel listened in silence. His face was dark. He was ready to kill. She explained the stakes. If they pulled it off, if they got their hands on that map, it would make him rich beyond his wildest dreams.