‘‘They are called yellow allamanda,’’ said Guzman as he pulled the Jeep to a stop. ‘‘Allamanda cathartica is the Latin name.’’
‘‘Cathartica, as in laxative?’’ Arkady guessed.
‘‘The whole plant is poisonous. You’d swell up like a balloon if you were stupid enough to eat it. Then you’d foul your trousers for a day or two. Not fatal, though.’’
‘‘You didn’t bring me out here to look at flowers,’’ said Arkady.
‘‘No,’’ said Guzman. He walked down through the grasses of the sloping meadow to the cigar-shaped hump of risen earth at the base of the pyramid. He extended a hand dramatically. ‘‘I brought you here to show you this.’’
Arkady joined him. He looked.
‘‘It looks like the grave of the giant in the beanstalk story,’’ said the Cuban skeptically.
‘‘Funny, yes, but partially true.’’ Guzman stepped forward and pulled back a section of camouflage netting. Beneath the netting was a jagged opening. The edges of the opening were shining silver. Aluminum. Guzman eased himself through the opening and disappeared. Hesitantly, Arkady followed. Guzman switched on a hissing Coleman gas lantern. It was like being inside the belly of a metal monster, steel ribs curving left and right. Wires, heavy with mold, hung everywhere. Guzman crept forward, his back hunched in the cramped space.
‘‘There,’’ he said, lifting the lamp so Arkady could see clearly.
The object was almost fifteen feet long, tubular with stubby wings, held in some kind of heavy metal cradle at either end.
‘‘What is this?’’ asked Arkady, his voice low, fearing that he already knew the answer.
‘‘This is the midsection of the fuselage of a B-47 bomber, the one they used to call the Stratofortress. The item in front of you is one of Saddam Hussein’s hidden weapons of mass destruction. It was here all the time! Imagine that! Your president Bush was right all along!’’ Guzman bellowed with laughter, the sound tinny in the enclosed space.
‘‘It’s a bomb,’’ Arkady murmured.
‘‘It is more than that, Capitaine Cruz,’’ said Guzman. ‘‘It is a lever big enough to move the world. It is the future of your country, if you wish it.’’ The lunatic paused for effect. ‘‘It is a Mark 28 free-fall B28RN model 5, 1.45-megaton thermonuclear device. A hydrogen bomb.’’
‘‘Pizda na palochke,’’ whispered Arkady. ‘‘We’re in trouble now.’’
11
The Hispaniola made the run from Nassau to Bimini in an easygoing fifteen hours, arriving just before dawn and anchoring off North Rock in twenty-three feet of crystal-clear water. Miami wasn’t even a smudge on the horizon fifty miles to the east. The day was a jewel. There wasn’t much traffic except for a few overeager tourists and their guides in flat-boats looking for bonefish in the shallows, and no one seemed to pay them much attention.
On the other hand, Finn and Billy knew that word of their arrival would get around the little community on the fishhook-shaped island within hours. Bimini, like any small town, lived and breathed gossip.
‘‘It’s a bit like a dream,’’ said Billy, leaning on the main deck rail. ‘‘All this larking about, looking for ancient treasure maps and haring after Aztec gold. Not the sort of thing my father would have called honest labor.’’
‘‘What did your father do?’’
‘‘He was a member of parliament.’’
‘‘That’s honest labor?’’ Finn scoffed. ‘‘That’s like saying politicians never lie.’’
‘‘Still . . .’’
‘‘My father and my mother both spent their lives digging up the past. They made history live again.’’
‘‘Most people think history is a waste of time.’’
‘‘Then most people aren’t thinking straight. Everything we are now is the result of an accumulation of things we’ve done in the past. By examining what we did we can figure out what to do or not to do in the future. By looking for trade routes to the East the Spaniards discovered the West. Without them and the technology that allowed people like Cortéz to get here, there wouldn’t be a Miami over there.’’
‘‘That might be a blessing.’’
‘‘If we didn’t study the Aztecs and why they suddenly vanished, we wouldn’t understand modern ecology—they died out because of overfarming and famine, not wars. It’s all tied together, and it certainly is honest labor.’’
‘‘Is that what this is, or is it just a bunch of greedy sods looking for adventure?’’
‘‘You’re certainly in a mood,’’ said Finn, glancing at her gloomy friend.
‘‘I guess I’m having one of those ‘what is the meaning of life?’ moments,’’ murmured Billy.
It was Finn’s turn to sigh.
‘‘If we’d never met what would you be doing right now?’’ she asked.
‘‘Trying to sell some piece of the family estate so that I could buy a new bilge pump for my boat.’’ He snorted. ‘‘The one the buggers blew up almost under our feet in Amsterdam a while ago.’’
‘‘And that’s honest labor? Is that the meaning of life? Who says you can’t have some fun along the way? Who says the world doesn’t need a little more adventure these days?’’
‘‘I suppose it’s my Calvinist background,’’ said Billy. ‘‘Nose to the grindstone and all that.’’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘‘I suppose I thought I was going to mess around in boats until I noticed the first gray hair, then get down to serious business.’’
‘‘Doing what?’’
‘‘Something meaningful, I suppose.’’
‘‘You’ve got a postgraduate degree in Spanish literature from Oxford and you did your dissertation on the thrillers of John D. Macdonald. How meaningful is that . . . Dr. Pilgrim?’’
‘‘I suppose I’d have been a teacher.’’
‘‘Teaching other people how to be teachers,’’ said Finn. ‘‘I was brought up to believe it was the journey, not the destination.’’
‘‘I suppose you think I’m being silly.’’ Billy sighed.
‘‘No,’’ said Finn, ‘‘I know you’re being silly.’’
Eli Santoro stepped out of the deckhouse a few feet away.
‘‘We’ve got something on the side scan coming in,’’ said the one-eyed man. ‘‘Right where you said it would be.’’
Finn and Billy followed him back into the long low-ceilinged cabin. It was crammed with every possible kind of electronic device from monitor screens for the robot television cameras to GPS displays, weather radar, the magnetic anomaly ‘‘fish-finder’’ echo-sounding array and the side-scanning sonar.
Guido Derlagen sat in front of the color screen of the side-scan unit and tweaked the dials on the image. It looked like the print of an old hobnail boot, slightly wider in the center and narrower at one end.
‘‘Three masts. High at bow and stern. A nau, a carrack. About eighty or ninety feet long,’’ said the Dutchman. ‘‘Thirty feet down on a sandy bottom.’’
‘‘Aye,’’ commented Run-Run McSeveney from where he was perched on a counter by the door and sipping from an old enamel cup. ‘‘Or it could verra well be naught but a blodgy bit o’ coral where it oughtn’t ought to be.’’ His face screwed up. ‘‘Why hasn’t anyone seen it before if it was that easy?’’
‘‘It’s right there on the charts,’’ said Eli Santoro. ‘‘Shifting sandbars. It’s an undersea sand river. There’s been a lot of hurricane activity the last few years. Al Gore weather. It was probably buried before.’’
‘‘And it still could be a blodgy bit o’ coral.’’
‘‘You really are a sour old bugger, aren’t you?’’ Billy laughed.
‘‘I’m a Scot. We’re sour by nature. It’s the bluidy winters in Auld Reekie,’’ answered the skinny little man with a gold-capped grimace. ‘‘But I’m philosophical about it, which is the Chinee in me.’’
‘‘You’re all crazy,’’ said Finn. ‘‘Now, who wants to dive?’’
&
nbsp; She moved through the water smoothly, arms at her sides. The big Dacor fins pumped in a smooth slow rhythm, propelling her through the warm clear depths, the tanks on her back a comforting weight as she swam down the wreck site. The position on the side scan had been five hundred yards or so from where the Hispaniola was anchored, and they were using the twelve-foot Zodiac 420 they kept as a tender on the chart room roof for a dive boat.
Being in the water was a relief after the long jet trip from Heathrow and the journey across England and half of Europe that had gone before. Sometimes it seemed to Finn that she’d spent half her young life in some kind of academic surroundings, like universities and archives like the one in Spain, and while she enjoyed the challenge of research, sometimes she craved the adventure of being on-site. Her father and mother had been the same way: when they were annotating finds back in Columbus they were yearning for the jungle, and vice versa. Archaeology was like that: half the time spent looking and the other half spent studying what you found.
She smiled to herself around the silicone mouthpiece she had gripped between her teeth. Study was over, the hunt had begun, and the first scent of the quarry was right below her in the glowing sand at the bottom of the Florida Straits.
Briney Hanson stood at the rail on the flying bridge of the Hispaniola smoking one of his clove cigarettes and occasionally peering through the pair of binoculars that hung around his neck, a vintage Zeiss instrument he had owned for years and his last link with the old Batavia Queen. He smiled, squinting in the sunlight as he looked out to the Zodiac bobbing in the small waves a quarter of a mile away.
He’d come a long way from the little Danish coastal town of Thorsminde. He was the son of a herring fisherman by way of the South China Sea, and had spent his adult life piloting old rust buckets like the Queen on their tramping routes from one fly-blown island port to another, going nowhere slowly and calling no place home.
And now here he was, riding the tide off Miami Beach and master of a ship outfitted with everything except a hot tub. His home port was an island paradise, and except for occasional groups of Colombians in superfast cigarette boats trying to outdo Miami Vice, it was all relatively peaceful. It was almost enough to make him feel guilty.
He took a last puff on the Djarum cigarette and snuffed it out in the makeshift ashtray he’d duct-taped to the bridge rail—a coffee tin filled with beach sand, another holdover from his days on the Batavia Queen. Finn was forever giving him lectures about his nicotine habit, but he was a stubborn advocate. One of these days he was going to find himself being the last smoker on the planet.
He lifted the glasses again and looked out at the Zodiac. Finn, his lordship, and the Dutchman were all in the water; the little inflatable was empty. It was safe enough though; there were two buoys bobbing in the water on either side of the rubber boat, each flying the distinctive red and white ‘‘Diver Down’’ pennant.
He moved the glasses over the water. It was uniformly shallow, sunlight reflecting easily back from the sandy bottom, the terrain mottled with darker areas showing a few deepwater trenches and one or two of the circular formations called blue holes, which were relatively common in the Bahamas Banks.
The holes had been formed before the last ice age when the entire Bahamas Plateau had been above sea level, the limestone formations creating sinkholes as the rock weathered naturally over time. Because of the poor circulation of water in most Blue Holes, the water was anoxic—sometimes completely devoid of any free oxygen at all and utterly devoid of any marine life. According to the side-scanning sonar, the wreck Finn and the others were investigating was only a few yards from one of the formations. A little bit to one side and the ship would have slid into the hole and vanished, never to be found again.
Hanson refocused the binoculars and looked a little farther out. According to the information Finn and Lord Billy had been given by the antiquarian book dealer in Paris, the San Anton had gone down on a line between the shoals on the upper end of North Bimini Island, now called the Bluff, and a limestone formation three hundred yards out and only visible at low tide called North Rock.
According to the detailed charts, the water varied from twenty to thirty feet over most of the area, sloping upward to shoals at the island end and dropping off abruptly into water hundreds of feet deep on the Florida Strait side.
The captain’s log of the San Anton said the ship had been blown into the shallows during the hurricane, foundered on the shoals, and sank just offshore. Also according to the log, the San Anton had been carrying a small cargo of spices, mostly pepper, and had not been worth attempting any kind of salvage operation. On the other hand, as Lord Billy had pointed out, if the ship had no cargo worth salvaging, why had the captain made such a detailed report of exactly where she had gone down?
Hanson put down the glasses and lit another cigarette. The whole thing was beyond him; he was still getting used to a regular paycheck and a tropical home base, not to mention the joys of not having to deal with cargoes of banana chips, raw rubber, and once, a nightmarish load of liquid guano. He lifted the glasses and made another careful sweep of the surface.
There was nothing to see except the sun glinting brilliantly off the small turquoise waves stretching to the horizon. He closed his eyes and let his senses hold the moment. He smiled to himself, feeling the warmth of the tropical sun on his tanned, handsome face. This was what he needed, clear sailing and nothing looming on the horizon.
Finn floated above the wreck while Billy and Guido did a photographic survey, Billy using one of the big Nikonos digital cameras and Guido holding a two-meter graded survey stick for scale. Before giving up his job as a corporate lawyer in Amsterdam, the muscular Dutchman’s idea of adventure had been thrice-weekly visits to the gym. He hadn’t even known how to swim.
Like everything else he did, however, Guido never took on a challenge by halves. Eighteen months later and he swam better than Finn and was an expert diver to boot. On top of that he was reading anthropology and archaeology texts by the bushel, and was getting Briney Hanson to teach him celestial navigation.
Finn stared down at the shape in the sand beneath her. There was no doubt in her mind that it was the San Anton, lost here in July of 1521 under the command of Captain Gonzalo Rodriguez, the man who had kept the log shown to them by Pierre Jumaire in Paris. The ship was no more than eighty feet long and would have fit easily in the space between home plate and first base on a regulation baseball diamond.
The nau, which simply meant ‘‘ship’’ in Spanish, were the last of a long line of watercraft that went back centuries, the front and rear of the vessel literally built as forts from which archers and spearmen could engage other ships. In the case of the San Anton, the ‘‘fort’’ that made up the fo’c’sle, or forecastle, of the ship was eight or ten feet above the sand. The rear quarterdeck was not quite as clearly defined.
The main deck of the wreck was completely covered by sand and the only evidence that there was even a center portion was the stump of the mainmast poking up darkly from the tongue of sand, which lay like an unmoving river that pointed toward the lip of the blue hole less than a hundred feet away. It was clear that the ship was leaning steeply to one side, and Finn knew they’d had the luck of the Irish on their side. Another hurricane and the ship might well have been pulled inexorably into the depths of the vertical limestone cave and probably torn to pieces in the process.
Finn let herself drift down toward the ship as Billy finished up the photo survey. She swam the length of the wreck, looking for some way into the hull. If Jumaire was right, Captain Rodriguez knew that he was carrying something extremely valuable back to his masters in Spain, and he’d most probably kept it close.
If the copy of the Cortéz Codex really was on board, it would probably still be in the captain’s cabin, located under the quarterdeck. At first glance Finn couldn’t see an opening, which meant they’d have to break out the big vacuum pumps and hoses to flush the excess sand out of the way
. If they went deep enough they’d probably find a hole in the bottom of the ship created when she’d foundered on the nearby shoals during the hurricane, but coming in from the bottom in a shifting sandbar would be dangerous. Finding a way in from the deck would be far safer.
She paused, turning herself slightly in the water. She heard something in the distance, a faint vibration like a faraway drumbeat of thunder. A boat. She looked up automatically, searching for and finding the shadow of the Zodiac on the surface and the thin anchor line that led down toward the wreck. They’d been careful to put out Diver Down buoys, so she wasn’t really worried. It was probably just a local coming out to take a look at the Hispaniola. She turned back to her examination of the wreck.
Hanson heard the boat before he saw it; a heavy sound of big diesels somewhere to the east and the churning slap and heavy whisper of a bow wave. Even without seeing it, Briney knew the boat was large; there was no outboard whine or harsh slapping sound of a planing fiberglass hull smacking down into the water. A workboat of some kind. He turned the glasses toward the channel between North Rock and the Bluff, waiting apprehensively. With the buoys out and the Zodiac clearly visible, he wasn’t too worried, but any kind of large vessel in the area was potentially a problem, and accidents happened, even in perfect weather like this.
Suddenly the ship appeared. She was a shallow-draft trawler, half the size of the Hispaniola and old. The hull had once been painted smuggler’s gray but was now streaked with rust the color of old dried blood. She had a single funnel pumping black smoke in a stream behind her as her bow broke heavily in the pale water, throwing up an arc of foam. Both of her swinging booms were out and she was going full speed, her course clearly taking her directly toward the Zodiac.
The Aztec Heresy Page 8