Lost Empire

by Cussler, Clive;Grant Blackwood

  Sam muttered, “Son of a—”

  Remi said, “He’s got something.”

  “What?”

  “In his hand! He’s holding something!”

  Sam slammed on the brakes. The Land Cruiser slewed sideways and shuddered to a halt. Sam shifted the transmission into reverse, his foot ready to move from the brake to the accelerator.

  His eyes never leaving theirs, Rivera smiled grimly, then reached up, pulled the pin on the grenade, turned, and tossed it into the Andreyale. Ahead of a rooster tail of water, the Rinker shot away from the quay and headed for the Njiwa.

  With a dull crump, the grenade exploded. A geyser of water and wood splinters shot upward and rained down on the quay. The Andreyale settled lower in the water, then slowly disappeared beneath the surface in a cloud of bubbles.

  AFTER BACKING THE SUV over the sand and dunes to the road, they watched Rivera and his men tool out to the Njiwa. Within minutes the anchor was weighed, and the yacht got under way, heading south down the coast.

  “I’d started to grow attached to that bell,” Sam muttered.

  “And you don’t like losing,” Remi said. When Sam shook his head, she added, “Me neither.”

  Sam leaned sideways across Remi’s lap and retrieved the H&K P30 from the glove box, then said, “I’ll be right back.” He climbed out, walked down the road to the villa, then slipped inside. He emerged two minutes later and gave Remi the OK sign. She scooted into the driver’s seat and pulled the Toyota into the driveway.

  “Did they toss the house?” she asked, climbing out.

  Sam shook his head. “But I know how they found us.”

  He led her through the villa to the guest room where they’d been keeping Yaotl. Sam walked to the headboard and pointed to the loop that had been secured around their guest’s left wrist. It was stained a dark reddish brown. The remaining three loops had been untied.

  “That’s blood,” Remi said. “He worked his way free.”

  “Then called Rivera,” Sam added. “I’ll give him this much: He’s got a high tolerance for pain. His wrist must be raw down to the bone.”

  “Why didn’t they ambush us?”

  “Hard to say. Rivera’s no dummy. He knows we’ve got Yaotl’s gun and didn’t want to risk attracting the police.”

  “I think we’re a secondary concern. They got what they came for. Without that, all we’ve got is an interesting story. Sam, what in the world can be so important about that bell?”

  ERRING ON THE SIDE of caution, they agreed the villa was no longer safe. They packed what few belongings were left inside, got back into the Toyota, and drove eight miles south to Chwaka, a small town whose only claim to fame seemed to be that it was home to the mysteriously named Zanzibar Institute of Financial Administration. They found a beachfront restaurant with air-conditioning and went inside. They asked to be seated in a quiet area near an aquarium.

  Remi pointed out the window. “Is that . . . ?”

  Sam looked. Two miles offshore they could see the Njiwa, still steaming south at a leisurely pace. Sam grumbled a curse under his breath and took a sip of ice water.

  “Well, what do you want to do about it?” Remi prodded.

  Sam shrugged. “I can’t decide if my ego is just bruised because they stole something we worked so hard to get. That’s not much of a reason to put ourselves back in their gunsights.”

  “It’s more than that. We know how badly they don’t want people to know about the bell or the ship it was attached to. They probably murdered for it. They’re going to either destroy it or dump it in the deepest part of the ocean, where it’ll never be found again. It’s a piece of history, and they’re going to treat it like garbage.”

  Sam’s phone rang. He said, “Selma,” to Remi, then answered and tapped the Speakerphone button. As was her way, Selma jumped in without preamble: “That bell you’ve got is an interesting find.”

  “Had,” Sam replied. “We don’t have it anymore.” He explained.

  Remi said, “Tell us anyway, Selma.”

  “Do you want the fascinating news or the astounding news first?”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Wendy used her Photoshop wizardry skills and ran the pictures through some filters or something. Most of what she said was Greek to me. Under all that marine growth there’s engraved writing.”

  “What kind?” asked Sam.

  “We don’t know for sure. There are bits of symbology, some words in Swahili, a smattering of German, pictographs, but not enough of any one of them to make sense. From the looks of it, most of the bell’s interior is covered with it.”

  “Okay, now astound us,” Remi said.

  “Wendy was also able to pull a few more letters from the name beneath the Ophelia engraving. In addition to the first two—S and H, and the last one, H, she was able to pull two letters from the middle: a pair of Ns separated by a space.”

  As Selma had been talking, Remi had grabbed a napkin from the holder, and she and Sam were working the anagram.

  Selma continued: “We fed the letters and arrangement into an anagram program and cross-matched the results against our shipwreck databases and came up with—”

  “Shenandoah,” Sam and Remi said in unison.

  CHAPTER 14

  ZANZIBAR

  THE CONFEDERATE STATES SHIP SHENANDOAH HAD LONG FASCINATED Sam and Remi, but they’d never had the time to explore the mysteries behind the saga. Now it appeared fate had handed them a bronze invitation in the form of a ship’s bell.

  A 1,160-ton steam cruiser, Shenandoah was launched at the Alexander Stephen & Sons shipyard in River Clyde, Scotland, in August of 1863 under the name Sea King. Iron-framed, teak-planked, and black-hulled, Sea King was fully rigged for both sail and auxiliary steam power, designed as cargo transport for the East Asia tea trade routes. Tea hauling did not lie in her future, however.

  A year after her commissioning, in September 1864, Sea King was covertly purchased by agents of the Confederate Secret Service, and on October eighth she sailed with a full complement of merchant sailors, ostensibly headed for Bombay on her maiden trading voyage. Nine days later Sea King rendezvoused near the island of Madeira, off the African coast, with the steamship Laurel, which had been lying in wait. Aboard Laurel were the officers and the nucleus of the Sea King’s new crew, all loyal and experienced sailors, either Southerners or sympathetic British citizens. Their captain was Lieutenant James Iredell Waddell, a forty-one-year-old North Carolinian and graduate of the United States Naval Academy.

  The Laurel’s cargo of naval guns, ammunition, and general stores were quickly transferred aboard Sea King, whose dumbfounded and angry crew were given the option of joining this new expedition at higher wages or being transferred to the Laurel and subsequently deposited on Tenerife, an island in the Canary Archipelago off the coast of Morocco. In the end, however, Waddell was only able to enlist enough of Laurel’s seamen to bring the newly commissioned commerce raider Shenandoah to half her normal sailing complement. Despite this, Shenandoah left the Madeira Islands on October twenty-first and set about her task of destroying or capturing Union ships wherever she found them.

  Through the fall of 1864 and into the winter of 1865 Shenandoah sailed through the South Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into the Indian Ocean and across to Australia, destroying and capturing Union-flagged merchant vessels before setting her sights on the Union’s Pacific whaling grounds, sailing north from New Guinea into the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.

  In the nine months Shenandoah sailed under the Confederate flag as a warship, she accounted for the destruction of some three dozen enemy ships. On August 2, 1865, some four months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Shenandoah learned of the war’s end by the passing British barque Barracouta. Captain Waddell ordered Shenandoah disarmed, then set a course for Liverpool, England, where he and Shenandoah’s crew surrendered in November 1865. The following March she was sold through intermediaries to Sayyid Maji
d bin Said al-Busaid, the first Sultan of Zanzibar, who renamed her El Majidi, after himself.

  For Sam and Remi it had always been this part of the Shenandoah’s history that they found so intriguing. There were three accounts of El Majidi’s final disposition. One had her being scuttled in the Zanzibar Channel shortly after being damaged in the 1872 hurricane; the next, her sinking six months later while being towed to Bombay for repairs; the last, her going down in November of 1879 after striking a reef near the island of Socotra on the way home from Bombay.

  “This raises more questions than it gives answers,” Sam said. “For starters, was it Blaylock or someone else who renamed her Ophelia?”

  “And why was she renamed?” Remi added. “And why is there no record of her anywhere?”

  “And the biggest question: Why did we find the bell at all?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Remi.

  “After Waddell surrendered the Shenandoah, wouldn’t she and everything aboard her have been the property of the Union?”

  “Including the bell.”

  “Including the bell,” Sam echoed.

  “Maybe the Union sold her to the Sultan of Zanzibar, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “Could be. But that was in 1866. The El Majidi didn’t sink for another six or thirteen years, depending on which account you go with. Hell, the Sultan named the ship after himself. Does he sound like someone who would hang on to a bell with another ship’s name on it?”

  “No, he doesn’t. Maybe whoever refitted her just tossed the bell overboard. For the sake of expediency.”

  Remi was the devil’s advocate of the couple. She often did her best to poke holes in their thinking; if after going through the “Remi Gauntlet” the theory remained afloat, they then knew they were on to something.

  Sam considered this. “Possible, but I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of the Sultan’s shipfitter. He’s probably not the wealthiest of guys—overworked and underpaid. Unsurprisingly, the Sultan demands the ship meet his royal standards, including a shiny new bell. What would this shipfitter do with a ninety-pound, solid bronze bell?”

  “Sell it,” Selma chimed in.

  “Let’s put a pin in that,” Remi said. “It seems safe to assume Blaylock himself came across the bell at some point. If it was still attached to the vessel, he either bought it or stole the ship, then changed the name to Ophelia. If the bell had been discarded by the Sultan, it means Blaylock salvaged the bell, blotted out the Shenandoah name, and engraved it with Ophelia.”

  “And did what with it? Stared at it?”

  “The charcoal sketch at the museum suggests he saw that ship as the Ophelia.”

  Sam snapped his fingers. “We’re overthinking this. Remi, boot up your laptop. Selma, e-mail us pictures of the Shenandoah and the El Majidi.”

  As they were waiting, Sam plugged his camera into Remi’s laptop, and she called up the photo they’d taken of the Ophelia sketch. “No Wi-Fi signal,” Remi said.

  Sam stood up and walked around, checking beneath nearby tables. “There are Ethernet plug-ins,” he said, then walked toward the hostess. He returned two minutes later with an Ethernet cable, which he first plugged into Remi’s laptop, then into the closest plug. “It’s dial-up Internet, but it should do,” Sam said.

  Over the phone, Selma said, “Images on the way.”

  It took four minutes for the JPEG images to load. Remi arranged the pictures on her screen, and they spent a few minutes rotating and zooming and playing with colors until they were certain. “Same ship,” Remi said.

  “I agree,” Sam agreed. “Blaylock’s Ophelia is also the Shenandoah and the El Majidi. The question is, at what point in the time line did Blaylock appear and why are there no records of any of this?”

  “Clearly, Rivera and his friends are interested in our bell. But is it the bell itself or the ship or ships it had once been attached to?”

  “There’s only way to find out,” Sam said. “We have to steal it back before Rivera destroys it or loses it.”

  THEY IMMEDIATELY REALIZED that, like many things in their line of work, this task was much easier said than done. Sam rummaged around in his pack and came up with a pair of binoculars. He stood up and aimed them out the window. After thirty seconds, he lowered the binoculars. “She’s still headed south, about to slip behind Pingwe Point. Still in no big hurry.”

  “They know they’ve got us beat.”

  Sam grinned. “Never say die.” He picked up his phone and dialed Rube Haywood.

  “Sam, I was just about to call you,” Rube said.

  “Great minds. I hope we’re on the same wavelength.”

  “I have information on the yacht, the Njiwa.”

  “Bless you.”

  It belongs to a guy named Ambonisye Okafor. One of the ten richest men in the country. You name a Tanzanian export, and he’s got a major stake in it: cashews, tobacco, coffee, cotton, sisal, precious gems, minerals . . .”

  “How did a hatchet man like Rivera get hooked up with someone like Okafor?”

  “Hard to say, exactly, but I did a little digging. In the last five years, the Mexican government has sharply increased its importation of Tanzanian goods, most of it from companies controlled by Ambonisye Okafor. That tells me Rivera has powerful friends in Mexico City. Sam, you two aren’t up against a few mercenaries. You’re up against a government and a Tanzanian millionaire with a whole lot of influence.”

  “Trust me, Rube, we’re not going to ignore that, but right now all we want is to get back that bell—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They stole it. All we want is to get back the bell and head home.”

  “That may be easier said—”

  “We know. What else can you tell us about the Njiwa?”

  “It’s one of two yachts Okafor owns. This one is homeported on Sukuti Island, about thirty miles south of Dar es Salaam as the crow flies. Okafor has a vacation estate there. Owns the whole island.”

  “Of course he does.”

  Over the years Sam and Remi had found one of the most common traits among megalomaniac millionaires was their aversion to fraternization with the “great unwashed masses.” Owning a private island was an exceedingly effective way to accomplish this.

  Rube said, “I don’t have to ask what you’re going to do next, do I?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Okay, but I’m going to throw in my obligatory ‘Be careful.’”

  “We’ll call you when we can.”

  Sam disconnected and recounted the conversation to Remi. After a few moments’ thought, she said, “Can’t hurt to check it out. On one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “That discretion will trump valor. If we get in over our heads—”

  “We’ll retreat.”

  “Of course, we’re assuming the Njiwa is headed to Sukuti.”

  Sam nodded. “If she’s not, we’re probably out of the game. If she is, we need to get to the bell before they do something nasty to it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  TANZANIA

  THE NJIWA’S NEGLIGIBLE HEAD START QUICKLY BECAME INSURMOUNTABLE as Sam and Remi came up against Tanzania’s geography. Where road travel along the coast and in between population centers was fairly easy, they realized navigating off the beaten path would be a nightmare. The only passable road heading south from Dar es Salaam was the B2, which ran the length of southern Tanzania, never straying closer than ten miles from the coast until it reached Somanga Village, ninety miles south of Sukuti Island. After realizing they would neither reach their destination by road, nor before the Njiwa, they mentally regrouped. Now aware Rivera had some powerful friends on his side, they decided to err on the side of slight paranoia. If Rivera was playing the worst-case-scenario game, he might assume they’d take up pursuit from Zanzibar or Dar es Salaam, and, having come to the same conclusion about road travel as they had, he would expect them to arrive by boat.

  By nightfall, aft
er half a dozen fruitless phone calls, they found a bush pilot who agreed to take them from the Ras Kutani airstrip outside Dar es Salaam to Mafia Island’s airstrip the next morning. From there it would be a half day’s boat ride north to Sukuti Island, a detail they left in Selma’s expert logistical hands.

  Such was Africa, the Fargos knew. Though they’d heard the term “African mile” before, this was the first time they’d experienced it firsthand. What elsewhere would have been a thirty-mile jaunt down the coast had turned into a convoluted hundred-fifty-mile journey.

  WITH A NIGHT TO KILL, Sam kept his promise and booked them into the Presidential Suite at the Moevenpick Royal Palm overlooking the ocean. Following an afternoon in the hotel’s spa, they shared a late dinner in L’Oliveto, the hotel’s Italian restaurant.

  “It feels like we’ve been away from civilization for months,” Remi said across the table.

  “You don’t look it,” Sam replied. Ever resourceful, Remi had found a simple but elegant Zac Posen “little black dress” in the hotel’s boutique.

  “Thank you, Sam.”

  The waiter arrived, and Sam gave him their wine selection.

  Sam said to Remi, “I saw you were reading Blaylock’s biography at the spa. Any revelations?”

  “It’s slow going. It wasn’t written by Blaylock, I can tell you that much. Unless his grasp of English was tenuous at best. I’m guessing Morton penned it. But from what source? One thing that struck me: There’s no mention of Blaylock before he arrived in Africa. It begins the day he set foot in Bagamoyo. No personal details about his life up to that point.”

  “Interesting. How’s the index?”

  Remi shrugged. “What you’d expect. I’m sure Selma, Pete, and Wendy will have more luck with it. I did check for any mention of the bell or the Ophelia. There was nothing.”

  “Odd. If he’s the one that took the time to inscribe all the hieroglyphics on the bell, you’d think it would at least warrant a mention. Sounds like a man trying to hide a secret.”