Caribbean Gold

by David Leadbeater

  So much for the power of television. Without hesitation someone lifted a vase and threw it through a patio door window. Someone else wrenched at the frame, drawing blood and shrieking. A young man saw the blood and leaped away.

  Crouch pushed open the door and looked down, shone his flashlight. “Appears to be a cellar. Some steep steps here so watch out.”

  The team descended into the inky, creepy blackness, taking care and wondering what might lurk in the far corners of the room. Pitch black and utter silence fell over them, making Alicia feel smothered. The stairs were their only safe harbor, the rest of the room could have been a pit leading straight to Hell. Russo took point, followed by Crouch, Caitlyn and Alicia, who made sure she closed the door at their backs. They didn’t want anyone falling through an open door by accident.

  “Watch out for any other traps,” Crouch said.

  Russo grunted, finally reaching solid ground. The cellar was a vast place, the walls just rock and chipped stone, with the roots of a desiccated tree running through. Alicia immediately got an impression of age, refuted by the modern strip-lights and piles of boxes, cans and drinks, but it was the overlying feel of the place that spoke to her bones. This cellar had been hewn at the same time they built the house.

  Still, it was just one big oblong room. No passageways leading further underground. No doors that they could see. And no clear footprints to follow.

  “Split up,” Crouch said. “Examine every nook and cranny.”

  Alicia brushed a spiderweb away to reach into a far corner. The walls were solid. Caitlyn called them over to investigate a niche at the bottom of the far wall, but no seams were evident. They moved boxes and crates but found nothing, the light from their tiny flashlights barely any use at all. In the end, Crouch sat on a crate and let out a long, frustrated breath.

  “What are we missing?”

  “Dinner,” Alicia breathed back. “I really missed that last night, and pretty soon I’m gonna be missing breakfast too.”

  “Proper tools would help,” Caitlyn said. “We could check for spaces behind these walls.”

  “An awful lot can happen in four hundred years,” Crouch said. “Maybe this was where Morgan left his treasure.”

  “And somebody found it? Kept it quiet?”

  Crouch shrugged. “Maybe. It would be a fitting end to this bloody quest.”

  “I don’t think so,” a voice said from the shadows. “It would be too damn easy, Michael.”

  Jensen leapt for Crouch, aiming for the man’s throat. The deeper shadows erupted with figures, arms and legs and twisted faces, like demons leaping up from the caverns of Hell. They wielded knives and their eyes flashed in the reflected flashlight beams. Alicia stumbled back in shock, tripping over Caitlyn and falling to the floor. Russo almost managed to cover a little shriek, at the same time stumbling across a crate of water bottles.

  The fiends were upon them.

  CHAPTER FORTY THREE

  Crouch struggled to breathe, gasping. Jensen squeezed harder, intent on watching his opponent’s face turn from pink to red, purple to black. His own face was feral, possessed. Alicia kicked out as shadows flitted to and fro through the meagre pinpricks of light. One struck at her leg and then her ribs, making her groan. One more kicked Caitlyn in the mouth, drawing blood. Caitlyn fell back, striking her head on the floor.

  Alicia groaned, saw another motion of dark and managed to block a harsh blow. The flashlights were rolling around and useless, the demonic figures somehow used to the dark. It was chaos, savage, malevolent. It was the nameless and the unfamiliar that disrupted their focus. Alicia had never been in such a situation, faced with enemies that she could not identify nor clearly see. The bizarreness of it all beat at her as hard as any fist.

  Crouch fell off the crate he’d been sitting on, causing Jensen to lose his grip and utter a curse. That single act penetrated Alicia’s odd fugue.

  Darkness struck at her.

  Alicia caught its left boot, twisted, and threw it sprawling to the floor. Listened to it cry out in pain. Saw it rise up in the shape of a young man and hit it hard around the ribs. A crack attested to its fallibility, a scream to its humanity. She smashed its throat with her elbow, wrestled the knife away and then searched the face for clues.

  Night goggles.

  She wrenched them away, threw them immediately to Caitlyn. “Call it!”

  A patch of night struck her chest, then her face. Alicia tasted blood. No need to call this one. Three strikes and the apparition was down, passing again through rolling flashlight beams, shapeless and alien. Caitlyn pushed the goggles over her head and began to shout instructions.

  “Russo! Two feet dead right. Coming at you. Alicia, at your feet, rising now. Michael, take that fucker down!”

  Crouch rolled and rolled, finally breaking Jensen’s hold. Though bruised and panting he wasted no time in recovery, just kicked out and rolled again. Still keeping hold of his flashlight, he shone the light straight into Jensen’s eyes.

  The head whipped away, the goggles flaring. Crouch launched an attack faster than an RPG, crashing into Jensen’s midriff and taking him to the ground. Caitlyn whipped her head back to where Alicia and Russo struggled.

  “Behind you, Alicia. Three, two, one . . . Russo—duck!”

  With the ongoing instruction and the sure knowledge of what they fought, the soldiers soon showed their superiority. Alicia realized they faced local thugs high on something. But their blood flowed as well as any enemy’s. Russo finished his last opponent, winded and slashed, but went immediately over to where Crouch fought Jensen.

  Alicia, maddened by the shadowy battle and uncertain source of it, annoyed with herself for succumbing to doubt, picked her final opponent up by the hair and launched him bodily at Russo.

  “Here. Throw that in the bloody bin.”

  Russo caught the human projectile, hefted and increased the momentum, flinging him across the room and into a ceiling-high, double-row of old barrels. Alicia watched them fly apart, timbers sparring away, as she jumped to Crouch’s aid.

  Dark liquid flooded the cellar floor as the local thug groaned.

  Crouch found a blow that struck under Jensen’s chin, snapping his head back and sending him to the floor. Caitlyn gathered up all the flashlights and made a double-sweep of the cellar.

  “No more . . . Welsh fairies.”

  Crouch pushed his body to its knees and crawled over to Jensen’s side, voice rasping. “Where?” he grated. “Where’s the goddamn treasure?”

  “Dunno,” Jensen all but laughed. “We were waiting for you.”

  Crouch’s head hit the floor. “Bollocks.”

  Caitlyn passed night goggles out among the team. Everyone slipped a pair on and then sat back on their haunches. Truth be told, to Alicia, everything looked pretty much as she’d expected. No secret doors or hidden ledges, no suspicious veins in the rock. The floor looked solid, but she guessed they’d have to move everything aside to get a proper take.

  Caitlyn’s voice was a whisper. “Guys.”

  Crouch looked up, face creased, old and bloodied, eyes only for Jensen. “At least you will get all you deserve,” he said. “And a long time coming.”

  “I escaped once . . .” Jensen rasped.

  “Guys . . .” Caitlyn said a little louder.

  Alicia reached out for Russo. “You okay there, Rob? Look a bit cut up.”

  The big soldier held his arms out, streaked with blood. “One of those sneaky bastards got past me. Early on.” He added the last as if that explained the slip-up.

  “Um, guys . . .”

  The door at the top of the stairs opened. A man looked down, saw the figures and perhaps the blood in the flashlight beams. His next words: “I’m calling the police!” confirmed it.

  “Thanks,” Crouch said and meant it.

  “Fuck! Guys!” Caitlyn screamed so loudly now Alicia jumped a foot off the floor.

  “What the hell is it?”

  The resea
rcher just pointed. Alicia followed her gesture and saw the unfortunate man Russo and she had thrown against the wall. And the stack of barrels. It was the barrels that drew the interest though. Destroyed, splintered and leaking a dark liquid Alicia could only guess to be rum, they revealed that which had been hiding behind their heavy bulk.

  A door. Clear through the goggles, but invisible in half-light. Crouch stared hard at it.

  “Could be,” he muttered excitedly. “Could be.”

  Alicia felt hope but then Russo dashed it. “I find it hard to believe it’s been there four hundred years behind all those barrels.”

  “So do I,” Crouch said with half a smile. “So ask yourself why all those hefty barrels are stood in front of it.”

  Russo’s lips moved but nothing came out. Alicia pondered the rather interesting line of reasoning.

  “Because when it became a pub the new owner checked behind it . . . and found nothing?”

  Crouch nodded. “Let’s go see.”

  They slogged through the spilt rum, finding it a little ironic considering in whose footsteps they were following, and wrenched open the locked door after finding a crowbar. They took Jensen with them, held by Russo. Crouch flung the door open and used the night-vision goggles to peer inside.

  “Well, it’s a storage room, I guess. But small. So small you’d be hard-pressed to fit more than a few crates in here.”

  Crouch sounded depressed. Alicia handed him the crowbar. “Dig around for a bit.”

  Under the six-hundred-year-old pub, under the very earth that had once belonged to Captain Henry Morgan’s father; inside the dwelling where the young boy had grown and returned only once as a man and a condemned pirate, the Gold Team dug and pounded and searched. They gouged every wall, slammed every surface. They broke bricks apart, shattered stone. Crouch wedged the wrecking bar further and further into a hole he’d made and eventually found no more resistance.

  “People,” he said. “I just found air.”

  Air was good. It meant there was space beyond the broad wall that made up the back of the storage room.

  “Six blocks thick.” He panted. “If I hadn’t been so bloody desperate I would never have kept going.”

  The dark, old, untouched mortar came apart. The stones fell inward. Crouch passed them to the others, working hard and sweating profusely. Soon a space had been made large enough to fit his head and shoulders through. The boss then turned to Caitlyn.

  “Would you like to do the honors? For Zack?”

  She smiled and nodded, fitted her slender top-half into the hole and looked around. When she returned she took off the goggles and flashed a pair of eyes so bright they might light up the cellar.

  “A tunnel,” she said as if it were a golden headdress. “Wide enough for all of us and descending slightly. Shall we?”

  They dragged Jensen between them, forcing him into the gap though, in truth, the man appeared eager to tag along. Probably still looking for a chance to get free, Alicia knew. But then maybe he also wanted to see Henry Morgan’s treasure.

  Far from the place he called home. Far from the place Morgan called home. How ironic. Alicia wondered how many times Morgan had pined for it, yearned for it as he sailed back and spent those years governing Jamaica. Maybe the man actually died of a broken heart.

  The tunnel was hard on the palms and knees but spacious enough. It angled downward and grew warmer at first, then decidedly cold. Crouch thanked Jensen for the night-vision goggles. They certainly wouldn’t have been able to progress so quickly without them.

  At length, they came to what could only be described as a chute. A wide passage down that was vertical enough to ask a whole lot of faith for any would-be explorer.

  “Whoa,” Alicia eyed it doubtfully. “We should chuck the criminal in first.”

  Jensen wriggled.

  Crouch held a hand up. “As you said previously, Alicia, we’re in this because of me. Because of my lifelong search for long lost treasure. I’ll take the plunge.”

  Nobody offered up any objections. Crouch maneuvered himself so that his legs dangled over the edge and then looked back. “Cross everything.”

  “Good luck,” Alicia said and meant it.

  The boss pushed himself away, falling down the chute and unable to stop a shriek escaping from his throat. Alicia glanced at Russo.

  “You think that was a happy shriek? Or a fuck me, I’m dead, shriek?”

  Russo shrugged. “Hard to tell apart. You’ve heard both, I take it?”

  “Well yeah, but only in the bedroom.”

  Russo turned away. The team heard a scraping from below and then Crouch’s thin voice echoing back up.

  “It’s . . . okay. Come on down.”

  Alicia jumped up first. “He doesn’t sound so sure, so let’s get this over with.”

  She pushed herself off, gliding fast down the rocky tunnel, gathering speed and feeling her body start to shift from side to side. She tried to arrest the momentum. The chute was incredibly smooth. Gray rock flashed past her goggles, unending. The journey down seemed to go on forever; forward vision nil, side vision nil. Just a steep fall and her beating heart and the cry she just couldn’t stop escaping.

  Then the bottom. A sudden end to the chute and darkness. She found herself sailing over the edge and landing on a hard surface, jarring the bottom of her spine. Knocking the breath out of her lungs. It took a moment to recover.

  Crouch held a hand out. “You okay?”

  Alicia ignored the offer. “Yeah. But how am I gonna explain the bruises on my ass?”

  “I’m pretty sure Drake’s used to it.”

  “Shit, boss, what do you think we get up to?”

  Jensen then flew out of the chute, landing hard. Alicia checked for broken bones and then left him lying there, wondering aloud if they might use him as a cushion for Caitlyn and Russo. But Crouch was already headed off, spotting an underground stream off to the right and following it toward a jagged row of rocks. The tunnel was now the height and width of two men. When Russo and Caitlyn arrived and dusted off they all followed Crouch.

  Caitlyn showed again she was the sensible one. “Guys, how are we ever going to get back up?”

  They ignored her, traveling further into the earth below Wales. Time stretched behind them without measure, a thin skein that held no sway down here. The row of jagged rocks continued for entire minutes. Sharp stones jutted up from the floor, forming trip-hazards as well as lethal weapons if anyone fell. They picked heir way carefully. Then, a wide stream barred their way, flowing crosswise to the path. Crouch bent down so that he almost touched the surface and looked both ways.

  “Any traffic?” Alicia asked.

  “No. Just darkness both ways. We’re gonna have to jump it.”

  Alicia looked dubious. “Water and I don’t get on. You go first.”

  Crouch gave her a look as if to say of course, then took a running jump. No way was he ever going to make it and the flow of the stream was enough to carry him away into eternal blackness, but still he tried, starting to build back up the wall of respect Alicia once had for him.

  He landed short, came down hard and spluttered as he realized he’d hit a submerged ledge on the other side. Crouch crawled out of the water and waved. “You saw what to do. Let’s go.” He moved away at pace.

  One by one they jumped and joined him. Russo allowed Jensen to make the jump alone with Alicia waiting on the other side, but the man put up no fight. Soon, they caught up to Crouch, the leader of their team taking time to examine everything as he went. They became used to walking, stumbling, traipsing on through the cavern and the odd light. It came as a surprise then when the tunnel floor abruptly ended and gave way to a terrifying vertical drop in the dark.

  Crouch faltered into it, foot slipping over the edge and going straight down. Senses aware, he felt the nothingness and flung himself backwards. Still the momentum carried him forward an inch at a time, the incline sucked him down. He landed on his back, s
lipping over the edge.

  Caitlyn grabbed the shirt over his shoulders. Alicia caught his buckle as she flung herself headlong, her own face coming close to the drop-off. Together, they hauled Crouch back to safety.

  “Close,” he breathed, untroubled.

  Alicia didn’t hear a thing, because it was she that saw it, she that found it, she that realized exactly what lay at the base of the twenty-foot drop.

  “Oh, wow. You have to come and look at this.”

  Crouch crowded forward and then Caitlyn, Russo asking them to hurry up so he could take a turn. Alicia grinned as she leaned out over the ledge.

  Below, illuminated by veins in the rock, by its own radiance and by the team’s four faint flashlights, sat the biggest pile of golden treasure any of them had ever seen. Riches piled upon riches; so many gold doubloons they were uncountable, cutlasses and medallions, necklaces and bracelets and chains of brilliant gold. Gems that were the hue of emerald and ruby, and precious visions of amber and jade, all mingled within the hoard. Almost ten feet high it rose until Alicia felt she could probably jump from the ledge to the top of the golden mound and slither all the way to the ground. Crouch saw it too and the reckless intent glimmered in his eyes.

  Caitlyn held out a hand. “No—”

  “Fuck that.” Alicia leapt first, eyes and heart and soul taken over by the wondrous sight before and below her. The leap was full of danger but she hit the top of the pile hard, the coins a solid weight against her ribs. She found purchase with her feet and slithered right down, doubloons and medallions showering around her, bouncing off her shoulders and skull and falling like rain. The bright edge of a cutlass drew blood from her arm, a sword flipped up and catapulted past her forehead. Still she fell, feet first, soles gouging a path through the chattering, gleaming pieces, displacing a mountain of wealth to each side. At last she hit the floor and rolled; rolled through jewelry and ornaments, more plunder than she had ever dreamed of.