The Aztec Heresy

by Paul Christopher

  ‘‘Let’s just say you’re not alone in your interest, ’’ said the old man coyly.

  ‘‘You’re making this sound like a dangerous proposition,’’ said Billy.

  ‘‘Cavallo Nero has been known to be somewhat extreme in its methods,’’ agreed Jumaire.

  ‘‘So you’re warning us off?’’

  ‘‘No, merely informing you of the reality of the situation. Cavallo Nero is of the opinion that they are sanctioned by God Himself.’’ Jumaire glanced at Finn with a smile. ‘‘Or Herself. Thus anything they do can be justified. The Inquisition can do no wrong since they are in fact the arbiters of what is right. An extension of Papal infallibility. Very convenient.’’

  ‘‘Do you know where the San Anton sank?’’ Finn asked bluntly. ‘‘I want to know what all the fuss is about.’’

  ‘‘So be it.’’ The old man paused. ‘‘By most estimations it sank off Key West, Cayo Hueso as it was known then, the Island of Bones. In fact, the likelihood is that it managed to turn north and run before the hurricane for some time before it sank.’’

  ‘‘Which was where?’’

  ‘‘The North Cape of Bimini Island, fifty miles off Miami.’’ He smiled, this time unpleasantly. ‘‘Coincidentally, less than a thousand yards from the Bimini Road.’’

  ‘‘The Bimini Road?’’ Billy frowned.

  ‘‘Edgar Cayce. Atlantis.’’ Finn sighed. ‘‘Woo-woo territory.’’

  ‘‘Very impressive,’’ said Jumaire.

  ‘‘That Ohio - public - school - education - thing again,’’ said Finn. ‘‘You can’t beat it.’’

  ‘‘Woo-woo?’’ Billy asked.

  There was no direct flight from Paris, so Finn and Billy headed back to London through the Chunnel, caught a BA jumbo out of Heathrow, and then spent ten hours and four time zones droning down the entire length of the North Atlantic Ocean eating stale food on plastic trays and alternately listening to Bruce Springsteen and watching Bruce Willis save the world again, this time without any hair at all. Columbus had a hard time getting to the Caribbean, but by the time Finn arrived in Nassau she was pretty sure she’d rather have sailed on the Santa Maria than flown on British Airways.

  They arrived, bleary-eyed and yawning, at Lynden Pindling International Airport at ten in the morning local time. After going through customs they walked into the scruffy waiting room and headed for the doors. A pair of workmen were shifting a big Kalik Beer display while an airport janitor dusted off a huge fading cardboard effigy of Daniel Craig as James Bond that had been there since the movie opened and refused to leave. Some joker had scribbled ‘‘mashup boy’’ across the figure’s chest in marker and added a Hitler mustache to 007’s upper lip. The superspy wound up looking like a very stern version of Charlie Chaplin with a gun.

  They stepped out into the bright hot sun in front of the airport. The air was like a physical blow and Finn dragged in a lungful of the island scent; a mingling of rotting vegetation, exotic perfumes, and the salt of the surrounding sea. As promised, Sidney Poitier was there to meet them in his battered old Toyota taxi.

  ‘‘Good mornin’, good mornin’, how are you this mornin’?’’ The old man shook his head. ‘‘This what worl’ travelin’ does for you then I want no part of it,’’ continued Sidney, eyeing Finn and Billy as they dragged themselves into the old car. ‘‘You look like somethin’ unhappy the kitty-cat put in the sandbox.’’ He peered at them in the rearview mirror. ‘‘You going to the boat?’’

  ‘‘Please,’’ said Finn, letting her head fall back against the seat. Sidney industriously hammered the car into gear and jerked away from the curb. The old man wrestled the rattling car around Killarney Lake, then brought it staggering down John F. Kennedy Drive to West Bay Street and the string of aging hotels that stood in a long, well-manicured row along Cable Beach, the unbelievably turquoise ocean stretching out to the horizon beyond.

  They reached the outskirts of Nassau ten minutes later, which was like coming in the back door of any small town in the Caribbean: pastel-colored buildings surrounded by crumbling stucco walls topped with razor wire, classic, old-fashioned resort hotels on the beach side of the street, and potholes everywhere. They passed a few of the pint-sized, privately owned jitney buses ferrying tourists into town from Cable Beach, tumbling out rake-and-scrape and goombay music from blaring loudspeakers set over the windshields. Through breaks between the buildings and the palms, they saw half a dozen overweight-looking cruise ships, sparkling white except for the crimson blot of the old Big Red Boat, once the Disney flagship but now owned by an obscure cartel of Spanish businessmen.

  Poitier guided the rattletrap taxi through a quick set of left and right turns, finally coming out onto Bay Street again, now one way with all the traffic pointing east toward the bridge to Paradise Island and the Atlantis resort with its enormous aquarium and even larger casinos. Until the building of Atlantis, Bay Street had been the relatively civilized two-way main thoroughfare of Nassau, but the one-way change had turned traffic into a chaotic choked parade of taxis, jitney buses, and private cars turning up and down narrow side streets in an almost impossible effort to go in any other direction but east, through the center of town.

  Poitier managed to get them out of the morning rush-hour hell past the banks and souvenir shops that lined both sides of Bay Street, past the government buildings and the brooding, funereal statue of Queen Victoria, finally heading down to the commercial docks and warehouses at the foot of Armstrong Street, just before the bridge to Atlantis.

  Back down Bay Street at the Prince George Wharf, where the cruise ships docked, there was everything from a marketplace for stuffed barracuda heads, polished conch shells, and straw hats to half-naked men who’d behead a coconut for you with a single swipe of their machetes and twelve-year-old girls who’d give you cornrows for a dollar a plait. At the Armstrong wharf there was an old fireboat, a few conch-fishing trawlers, a couple of bottled-water barges from Miami, and two bottom-of-the -barrel deep-sea charters, wooden boats from the fifties, paint peeling, teak decks bleached bone white after half a century of salt and sun.

  And then there was the Hispaniola. They’d argued about the name for weeks, trying out everything from the Gold Bug to the Dawn Treader—and every other fictional ship name in between from the Witch of Endor to the Orca, from Jaws. In the end the only one they could agree on was Hispaniola, the ship that had taken Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver to Treasure Island, although, according to Billy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s nephew had unilaterally decreed that his uncle should not put any girls into the story, which Finn resented, just a little.

  The Hispaniola had a history older than either Finn or Billy. Dutch-built by J. T. Smith & Zone in 1962 for a British owner and originally named M.V. Severn, the Hispaniola was a 175-foot -long oceangoing tug that spent most of its early working life dragging oil rigs around the North Sea. She had been bought and sold several times since but had been rescued from the scrap yard by their lawyer, friend, and junior partner, Guido Derlagen, the stuffy Amsterdamer who’d thrown off his bureaucratic ways and now did all their legal work for them wearing unbelievably wild Tommy Bahamas tropical shirts and sunbathing on the bridge deck. Guido, who managed the incredible wealth they’d discovered in the secret room of the ancient house Billy and Finn had inherited on the Herengracht canal, got a respectable deal on the thirty-five-year-old tug, and eighteen months later it was reborn at Scheldepoort in Flushing as a free-ranging explorer yacht that could take its new owners around the world and back again, her twin diesels cruising at a respectable twelve knots through any seas you could throw at her. The only problem with the ship was that the engines never gave Run-Run McSeveney, their half-Scot, half-Chinese engineer, any trouble at all, a fact that made him even more cranky than usual. Of the original crew of the old Batavia Queen, the rusting freighter they’d lost during a China Sea typhoon two years before, McSeveney, Briney Hanson, the master, and Eli Santoro, the eye-patch -wearing thirty
-year-old ex-U.S. Navy first officer, were all that was left, but after her refit the Hispaniola had been equipped with every piece of automated marine equipment you could think of, and under ordinary circumstances she was relatively easy to operate. With the addition of Lloyd Terco, an old Bahamian friend, as cook and able seaman, the seven-person crew was complete.

  ‘‘Home again, home again,’’ said Sidney, pulling the Toyota to a shuddering stop on the pier. Beside them, the black-hulled Hispaniola loomed over them, her superstructure blinding white. A warehouse beside them breathed rotten fruit. The harbor smelled of diesel oil and dead fish. On the tin roof of the warehouse you could still read the old painted slogan used by the tourist authority, faded away almost to nothing: ‘‘It’s Better in the Bahamas.’’

  Finn and Billy climbed out of the taxi and stretched. Under a makeshift awning set up above the bridge deck, Guido waved a cheerful welcome, his tanned bald head covered by a raffia Shady Brady fedora, his torso covered by a loose floral-print shirt.

  ‘‘Feestelijk inhalen!’’ Guido called out enthusiastically.

  A split second later Run-Run McSeveney pushed out through the chart room door directly below Guido’s perch and glared up at him. ‘‘Speak English, ya bluidy tulip seller! I’ve told ye that a hunnert times. This is one of Her Majesty’s colonies and ye’ll speak her tongue when ye’re here, mind!’’

  ‘‘Loop naar de hel, eikel.’’ Guido laughed.

  ‘‘What did he say?’’ Billy asked.

  ‘‘I think eikel means ‘dickhead,’ ’’ said Finn. ‘‘I don’t know about the rest of it.’’

  They took their bags out of the Toyota and Sidney drove off. The two young people climbed up the companionway and stepped onto the main deck. Everything looked exactly the way they’d left it. Briney Hanson, the Hispaniola ’s master, came down from the deck above and they headed into the main lounge amidships. Lloyd Terco appeared, stringy as ever wearing flip-flops and one of his signature wife-beater undershirts. He gave the two a happy smile, welcomed them back, and took their bags down to their cabins.

  The lounge was fitted with built-in couches, a few old leather chairs, and had a Ping-Pong table at one end and a vintage Bally pinball machine and a soft-drink machine at the other. On Billy’s standing order the soft-drink machine only dispensed cans of Kalik beer.

  Hanson guided them to a pair of comfortable club chairs, then sprawled on one of the couches and lit one of his clove-scented cigarettes. The deeply tanned, dark-haired, muscular-looking Dane eyed them curiously.

  ‘‘Your e-mail was pretty vague. Did you find out anything?’’

  ‘‘The Bimini Road,’’ said Billy Pilgrim. He nodded toward Finn. ‘‘Our fearless leader is about to take us into the realm of the supernatural.’’

  ‘‘You’re kidding,’’ sighed Hanson.

  ‘‘Atlantis, actually,’’ Billy said and laughed. ‘‘Which apparently was located about a hundred miles east of Walt Disney World.’’

  ‘‘It figures,’’ said Hanson, sighing again, with feeling.

  9

  The old Foxtrot submarine surfaced in the predawn darkness, the jungle coastline of the Yucatán Peninsula a darker shadow on the nighttime horizon barely a mile away. Water streamed from the rounded shoulders of her pale sleek hull as it heaved itself into the air. Bright foam swirled around the conning tower as it broke through the turquoise swell, leaving a phosphorescent scar in the troubled water.

  Enrico Ramirez, Arkady Cruz’s second in command, knocked on the bulkhead beside the curtain over the entrance to the small niche that passed for a cabin on board the Babaloo. Cruz came awake almost instantly.

  ‘‘Yes?’’

  ‘‘We’re here.’’

  ‘‘What time is it?’’

  "O five hundred.’’

  ‘‘How much under the keel?’’

  ‘‘Sixty fathoms, sir.’’

  ‘‘All right.’’ Cruz slipped out of the built-in bunk fully clothed and pulled open the curtain. Ramirez, stoop-shouldered with his gray hair buzzed short like a convict, stood calmly, holding a steaming mug in one hand. He handed the mug to his captain. Cruz accepted it gratefully and took a long swallow of the thick, sweet cafecito. Cruz smiled. He commanded the only submarine in the world that had its own espresso machine.

  ‘‘Any sign of the Mexican?’’

  ‘‘Not yet.’’

  ‘‘This isn’t my favorite part of the game,’’ said Cruz.

  ‘‘No, sir.’’

  Cruz emptied the mug and handed it back to Ramirez.

  ‘‘Let’s go.’’

  He heaved himself up off the bunk, grabbed his peaked cap off the hook on the bulkhead, and jammed it down on his head. He followed Ramirez down the claustrophobic corridor that ran the length of the old boat, ducking as he pulled himself through the narrow bulkhead doors. He reached the control room, nodded to the few officers of the watch, then went after Ramirez up the ladder through the conning tower to the bridge lookout.

  ‘‘Why do submarines always smell like your feet, Ramirez?’’ Cruz asked, grinning and breathing in the sea air.

  ‘‘My feet smell like the revolution, Capitaine. It is a mark of patriotism to have feet that smell like mine. Che himself said so.’’

  ‘‘You knew Guevara then?’’ Cruz answered, continuing the old joke.

  ‘‘I washed his feet, Capitaine. I have endeavored to make my own smell exactly as his did.’’

  ‘‘Good for you, Ramirez. Fidel would be proud.’’

  ‘‘I thought the Great One had been stuffed and mounted over his own mantel,’’ said Ramirez.

  ‘‘Don’t believe everything his brother Raul tells you, Ramirez.’’

  ‘‘No, sir.’’

  ‘‘Hand me my glasses.’’

  ‘‘Yes, sir.’’ He handed Cruz a pair of Russian-made Baigish night-vision binoculars. The captain took them and scanned the water between the waiting submarine and the shore. Five minutes passed. It was definitely getting lighter. Cruz swore. If the crazy bastard thought he’d wait until broad daylight he had another thing coming.

  ‘‘Time?’’ "O five fifteen.’’

  ‘‘Deirymo,’’ muttered Cruz in Russian

  ‘‘Cono,’’ agreed Ramirez in Spanish.

  ‘‘There he is,’’ said Arkady Cruz, pointing.

  ‘‘Asshole,’’ said Ramirez in perfect, unaccented English.

  The boat was a Canadian Grand Marine inflatable S650, twenty-one feet long and overpowered beyond specifications with two-hundred -and-fifty horsepower Evinrudes capable of ripping the no-draft boat through the water at speeds in excess of seventy miles per hour. The boat had zero radar reflectivity and a fourteen-hundred-kilo cargo capacity. There was a single .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the bow. Angel Guzman had more than a score of the big rubber boats hidden in the mangroves along the coast from Isla Mojeres all the way down to Chetumal and the border of Belize. Like the Babaloo, the boat racing toward them out of the rising darkness was colored pale blue and was almost invisible on the water. Each one was equipped with two camouflage awnings made out of heavy netting, one for the open ocean and one for the jungle swamps. Each carried enough fuel to give the boats almost a five-hundred-mile range.

  The boat turned harshly, throwing up a rooster tail of spray, and abruptly stopped beside the low-riding hull of the submarine. The machine gun in the bow was unmanned. There was only one person in the boat: a uniformed man at the wheel. The uniform was standard jungle camouflage, fatigues neatly pushed into combat boots, a canvas-holstered sidearm on the hip. The only thing out of the ordinary was the bloodred beret the man wore, the mark of an officer in the army of Angel Guzman, an Angelista, as the American DEA referred to them.

  ‘‘Time to go,’’ said Arkady. Ramirez nodded. ‘‘Take her down to the bottom and keep her there. Unless Signor Guzman decides to boil me in a pot for his breakfast or carve my heart out as a sacrifice to one of his gods, I should be ba
ck by nightfall. Keep a candle burning in the window.’’

  ‘‘It shall be done, master,’’ said Ramirez, his expression bland. ‘‘Although I fear it will get damp.’’

  ‘‘You’re such a joker, Rico, a regular Billy Crystal,’’ said Arkady Cruz, who was a fan, particularly of both City Slickers as well as The Princess Bride.

  ‘‘Geraldo Seinfeld,’’ said Ramirez, who had all nine seasons on a bootleg set from China.

  Cruz gave his friend a quick salute then slid down inside the conning tower ladder to the bridge deck. He popped open a watertight bulkhead door at the foot of the conning tower, then stepped out onto the ribbed, slightly pitching deck. He dogged down the door behind him, crossed the deck, and dropped down into the inflatable, taking a seat in the stern. A few seconds later the huge twin outboards roared into life and the rubber boat spun around and headed toward the shore. Behind them the Babaloo blew her main ballast tanks with a hissing roar and sank beneath the waters once again, disappearing from view just as the first rays of the rising sun came arrowing out of the east across the wide blue sea.

  While Briney Hanson guided the Hispaniola out of Nassau Harbour past Montagu Beach and turned the big tug into Hanover Sound, the rest of the crew gathered in the Main Salon.

  ‘‘What exactly is the Bimini Road?’’ Eli Santoro asked. He was in Johnny Depp mode today, wearing a ragged pair of cutoffs, a black skull-and-bones T-shirt, a bandanna over his dark hair, and his leather eye patch. He’d lost the eye in a barbecuing accident while serving with the U.S. Navy in Guam, and the deficient sight had lost him his commission and his future. Rather than take a desk job in the navy he’d chosen the life of a crew bum and wound up as Briney Hanson’s first officer on the old Batavia Queen. The rusted-out hulk of a freighter had gone aground in the middle of a China Sea typhoon, and when the smoke cleared and Finn and Billy decided to start their Treasure Seekers venture, he and Briney had been the first to sign on as crew.

  ‘‘Bimini Road is a rock formation off the island of North Bimini,’’ said Guido Derlagen. As well as being the group’s maritime lawyer, cook’s assistant, and the only one on board who knew anything about computers, the Dutchman had also become their unofficial researcher. ‘‘It is about half a mile long at a depth of thirty feet. Generally it can only be seen from the air. It was discovered by a pilot in 1969, which conforms to the prediction made by the American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce in 1938.’’