Hell Ship

by David Wood

  “Is it a raft?”

  Dane shook his head. “No. Or if it was meant to be, he never finished it. There’s nothing to hold the logs together.”

  He knelt down and lifted one of the logs, revealing a shallow depression underneath. “It’s a roof! He built a shelter.”

  He pulled more of the logs aside, revealing a space easily large enough for a man to lie, protected from the elements. There was other evidence of habitation—brittle fragments of what could only be fabric, and a small heap of seashells.

  The others joined them a moment later and Bones gave a low whistle of appreciation. “That’s a pretty nice lodge. I’ll bet he had Indian blood.”

  Dane probed at the debris and uncovered a small red tag, just like the one on the grave marker. He rubbed the dust away and read the letters stamped there. “Hancock, T. I think that’s a negative on the Indian blood.”

  “He was here,” Alex gasped. “But where did he go?”

  She turned in a circle, looking for some other subtle indication of a human presence on the island.

  “Maybe he swam away again,” ventured Bones. “I would.”

  “You’re a real ray of sunshine,” said Dane.

  “Just keeping it real.” Bones turned to Gabby. “Let’s head back to Jacinta and get Baby’s metal detector. If our guy is here somewhere, then that plate in his skull is probably the only thing made of metal anywhere on the island.”

  Dane, surprised at Bones’ quick thinking, nodded his approval. As the oddly-matched pair marched back to the Zodiac, Dane tried once more to think like the castaway.

  “Okay, let’s be logical. You’re stuck here. You’ve got nothing. Even the clothes you’re wearing are rags. What do you do?”

  Alex pointed to the driftwood deck. “Basic needs. Shelter. And of course, food and water.”

  Dane snapped his fingers. “Yes. Where do you find food and water in a place like this?”

  “Fish?”

  “Maybe. He doesn’t have any tools, but maybe he can fashion something out of driftwood. A club, maybe even a spear. And there are dozens of tide pools around here. He could collect mollusks, maybe even fish that get trapped when the tide goes out. That takes care of food, but water’s the real problem.”

  “It’s the tropics. Rain?”

  “He would have to store it somehow; a catch basin or a cistern.” Dane felt like the answer had to be right in front of him; he just needed a new perspective. He scrambled onto the tall rock next the shelter. It was a change of only about four feet, but now he could see dozens of depressions pockmarking the island, any one of which might have served to catch rainwater.

  Then he saw something else.

  Bones kept his gaze on the Jacinta, nudging the tiller to stay on course as the little inflatable boat charged headlong into the surf. He eased off the throttle, allowing the craft to coast—or more accurately to drift backward, caught in the rush of a wave that had already broken—and then twisted the outboard engine’s throttle wide open. The burst of speed caught Gabby unprepared and she tumbled off her seat and landed half on his lap. Bones didn’t let the mishap distract him from the task at hand; with the engine at full power, he drove the boat directly at the rising face of an incoming breaker. The bow end tilted up as the craft started climbing the hill made of water, and then just when it seemed the wave would curl over, capsize the boat and slam them down into the sea once more, they broke through the crest and were rocketing down the backside of the wave.

  “Nicely done,” said Gabby, laughing as she used Bones’ thigh for leverage to pull herself upright.

  “Just call me the Big Kahuna,” Bones said with a grin.

  She took her seat again, this time facing him, but said nothing more until they were past the incoming surf. The subsequent waves hadn’t yet begun to crest and crossing them was considerably less dramatic, but even a momentary lapse in focus might result in them taking a dunk. Only when Bones had eased off the throttle a little, cruising through considerably smoother water toward the waiting Jacinta, did she speak again.

  “Your boss seems like a smart guy.”

  “Maddock?” He grinned to hide a twinge of jealousy. “Well, he’s what you’d call ‘book smart.’ But yeah, he’s definitely the brains of the outfit.”

  “Do you think he can find this medallion you’re looking for?”

  Bones shrugged. “If it can be found, Maddock will find it. He seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to stuff like this.”

  She nodded as if that was sufficient reassurance and swung her gaze around to watch the final approach to the larger craft. When the inflatable bumped against the dive platform, she nimbly hopped over and secured a mooring line to a cleat. She waited for Bones to join her, then ascended the stairs to the deck where Baby was stored, along with the cable spool that connected it to the operating console on the bridge.

  The little yellow submersible looked like the offspring of a spacesuit helmet and an air compressor, to which someone had added a robot claw hand and something that resembled the circular base of a floor lamp. The latter item was the business end of a Fisher underwater metal detector. Bones used his Leatherman multi-tool to cut the plastic zip-ties that secured the device to the ROV while Gabby went to work unscrewing the water-tight cable connector that joined the metal detector to the remote’s cable hub. Both finished their respective tasks in less than a minute. Bones casually propped the treasure finder over one shoulder as if carrying a rifle in a parade and started for the boat.

  Gabby called after him. “Hey, I’m gonna pay a visit to the head before we go back.”

  “Good thought. The island isn’t exactly equipped with modern facilities.”

  Gabby waited until Bones was on the stairs to the dive platform before ducking inside, but she did not go immediately to the lavatory. Instead, she entered the crew’s quarters and with the same economy of motion she’d employed to disconnect the metal detector, opened her duffel bag and took out an Iridium satellite phone identical to the one she’d seen Bones using two days earlier. She moved swiftly to the bridge, from which vantage she could see Bones, lashing the metal detector to the boat with bungee cords.

  Without looking away, she extended the phone’s antenna and punched in a number. There was an electronic click as the connection was made, followed by a brief lag as the signal traveled from its source, to a satellite orbiting in space, and back down to her handset.

  “Report.”

  “Be ready,” she said. “He’s very close to finding it.”

  The wait was interminable. She saw Bones glance impatiently up the stairs and drew back, away from the bridge window, even though there was no way he could see inside. The seconds seemed to stretch out into minutes. This is taking too long, she thought, and was about to sever the connection when she heard the voice again.

  “We’re on our way. Here’s what you need to do….”

  From even a short distance away, it was impossible to see the outline of a human skeleton. Fifty years of tropical rain and scorching sun had leached away minerals, partially dissolving the bones so that, from more than a few steps away, they looked like part of the landscape. Further obscuring the picture was the fact that the skeleton had no head. Where the skull should have been, there was a small pool, about two feet across, filled with water.

  Dane knelt beside the skeleton, trying to imagine how this man’s life had ended. He dipped a finger in the pool and tasted it. “Brackish. This was his catch basin, but it got contaminated. Or maybe he was waiting for it to rain, but it never did.”

  “So where’s his head?”

  “I think there are still headhunters in this part of the world. Maybe one of them visited and took a souvenir.”

  Alex shuddered.

  “Kidding.”

  Dane dragged a hand through the sediment at the bottom of the pool. He felt something hard, closed his fingers around it, drew his hand out. The sand fell away to reveal a piece of crab shell. He went
in again, raking the sand until he found something hard and crusty, held in place by the weight of sand and the suction of the muck beneath. He bent over the pool and stuck his other hand in as well, working his fingers underneath it until he felt water flooding into the space underneath. With an audible, sucking noise it came free and he lifted his prize out of the pool.

  A slurry of wet sand dripped away to reveal a spherical object, half-encrusted with barnacles, but nevertheless easily recognizable as a completely intact human skull. Dane dunked it in the water to clear away the rest of the sediment, and when he took it out again, something flashed in the sunlight. Affixed to the parietal bone, just above and behind where the man’s right ear would have been, was a triangle of yellow metal, slightly larger than the identification disks the man had carried as a soldier. Dane noticed that it wasn’t perfectly symmetrical, but was an obtuse scalene triangle, with one angle slightly wider than ninety degrees.

  Dane immediately noticed two things about the medallion. “There’s no oxidation or corrosion. I think this thing is gold. It’s too hard to be twenty-four karat, but definitely a gold alloy.”

  “There’s something on it.”

  That was the second thing Dane had noticed. Adorning the triangle was a simple but unique symbol: a Templar Cross.

  The cross was centered in the triangle, its vertical axis bisecting the medallion through the wide angle. A tiny nail had been driven through the intersection of the cross-arms to secure it in place, but this popped out with the slightest pressure from Dane’s thumbnail. The medallion itself took a little more effort, as if, even in death, Trevor Hancock was reluctant to part with the item that had been entrusted to him as a boy.

  Dane gently pried it loose and then set the skull next to the rest of the skeleton. “I’ll take it from here, Lord Hancock. Rest in peace.”

  Alex crossed herself, and then stuck out an eager hand. “Let me see.”

  She flipped it over, inspected the obverse, then rotated it in her fingers. “I think this was made to fit into one of the sigils on the map in the Templar chapel at Lord Hancock’s estate. Each of those sigils marks a Templar fortress. Whichever one it fits is where they hid the treasure.”

  “I don’t suppose you remember where this one goes.”

  She closed her eyes, as if trying to visualize the map, but then shook her head. “I wish I had that kind of memory.”

  “Then I guess we’ll have to pay him another visit. Think he’ll be happy to see us?”

  She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” he went on. “I don’t think so either.”

  “Do you think it could really be that easy? Just find the right slot, put the triangle in and…Presto! Dig here for treasure.”

  “If I had that access to that map and knew that there was a treasure in one of those places, I wouldn’t waste time waiting to see if this thing turned up. I’d go to every single location on the map and tear them apart until I found it.”

  She grinned at him. “Something tells me you’d be able to narrow it down and find the right place on the first try.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  She held the medallion close to her eyes, searching for some hidden inscription. “Maybe there’s more to it than just knowing where to go. Maybe once you get to the right place, you have to use the key again.”

  Dane held his hand out, palm up. “Doesn’t matter. This triangle is what everyone wants. It’s our leverage.”

  “Leverage?” She handed him the medallion. “What kind of treasure hunter are you?”

  “I’ll let you know when I figure that out.” He looked out to where Jacinta was anchored, and then saw Bones and Gabby aboard the Zodiac surfing the breakers on their return trip. “Come on. Let’s go tell Bones he wasted a trip.”

  As the wave started to pick them up, Bones gripped the side of the Zodiac and shouted: “Now!”

  Gabby, seated at the stern, twisted the throttle and the inflatable craft started forward. For a moment, it seemed that they would lose the race; the wave was relentless, inexorable, while the puny outboard was struggling to overcome the Zodiac’s inertia. The nose tilted down, the boat sliding up the face of the wave…but then, just when it seemed they would lose the wave altogether, gravity gave them an assist. The Zodiac dropped down the face of the breaker like it was a roller coaster.

  “Cut it!”

  Gabby let go of the throttle, allowing the engine to idle, but even though the screw was no longer turning, they were picking up speed. She angled the tiller so that the boat veered to the right, shooting along the base of the wave as it curled and broke right behind them.

  “You’re surfing!” cheered Bones.

  Gabby shrieked with delight. “Let’s do it again!”

  “Business before pleasure. Besides, first we’d have to get past the incoming breakers to get back out, and as you’ve seen, that’s the hard part.”

  “I want to try. Show me how.”

  “Let’s drop off our package first.”

  She stuck out her lip in a pout. “I thought Maddock was the stick-in-the-mud.”

  “Hey, I let you drive, didn’t I? Some gratitude would be nice.” He turned his attention to the beach where Maddock and Alex stood waiting. Even from fifty yards out, Bones could see the look of triumph on his team leader’s face. “Uh, oh. Either Maddock got lucky, or he found what he was looking for.”

  As the wave collapsed to white froth beneath them, Gabby engaged the screw once more and turned the Zodiac toward the place where the others waited. Bones sat near the prow, poised to leap out as soon as the fiberglass hull scraped against the sand.

  The engine noise cut out as Gabby abruptly let off the throttle again. Bones turned to admonish her, but before he could say anything, she had twisted the throttle in the opposite direction, reversing the screw.

  “Not yet—” Bones started to say, but then he was thrown off balance by the sudden deceleration. He saw Gabby reach out to him, but instead of trying to catch hold of him, she gave him a hard shove, toppling him forward over the prow.

  The water was hip deep, but he went in face first and it took him a few seconds to right himself. He came up, sputtering, not really angry but ready to meet her unprovoked horseplay with equal and appropriate mischief. The Zodiac however was already thirty yards away, skimming the incoming whitewater and headed for the breakers. He shouted her name, but she didn’t look back.

  Maddock splashed out to meet him. “What did you say to her?”

  Bones shook his head. “Women. Who can figure ‘em?” Then he realized Alex was there and added. “I mean, she’s just a kid.”

  “Well, tell her to quite goofing off,” said Maddock. “We found it.”

  Bones wheeled around. “Seriously. I mean, I knew you could do it, but…seriously? You found it?”

  Maddock held up a piece of shiny yellow metal.

  Bones shook his head in amazement. “A needle in a haystack, and you found it. You’re buying me a lotto ticket when we get back, because you must be the luckiest bastard on earth.”

  Maddock nodded to the Zodiac which was fighting its way through the incoming surf. “One of us has to be. What’s she doing?”

  “Trying to hot dog, I guess. If she’s not careful…” He didn’t finish the thought aloud. He had been about to say that if Gabby wasn’t careful, she’d be going for a swim, but the awful truth was if she failed, there was a good chance the Zodiac would be wrecked, and then they’d all have a rough swim to get back to the Jacinta.

  He held his breath as she made her charge, a couple seconds too soon for his liking, but the wave was smaller than the one he’d charged and she actually made it look easy. The inflatable slid down the shallow back of the wave, momentarily disappearing from view, but when the wave flattened out, he was surprised to see the Zodiac heading for the anchored vessel. Gabby pulled the inflatable up to the diving platform, tied it off, and ascended the stairs.

  “Ah, Bones?” There was an
anxious incredulity in Maddock’s voice, a sentiment that Bones felt as well, and with each passing second, his dread increased. Something was very wrong.

  Any doubts to that effect were swept away when they heard the distant but unmistakable sound of helicopters in the sky.

  CHAPTER 14

  Dane followed the roar of the approaching turbines and scanned the horizon until he spied the three aircraft. They were moving in low, almost skimming the water, probably to avoid radar detection. As they got closer, Dane could see that they were a motley assortment, different makes and vintages with no uniformity in terms of paint scheme and no visible identifying markings. One bird looked like a Bell 204 or more probably, its military variant, the UH-1 better known by its nickname the “Huey” and Dane wondered if it was a working leftover from the Vietnam War era. It was a passing thought, quickly swept away in the fight or flight cascade triggered by the realization that their enemies had found them.

  Bones had assumed a similar posture, every muscle in his six and a half-foot tensing in anticipation of a deadly confrontation. “Damn. She sold us out, didn’t she?”

  “Don’t sweat it.” Dane tried—and failed—to affect a care-free tone. Part of him wanted to rage at Bones for being so quick to trust Gabby, for being too easily seduced by her flirtatious manner. But was he any different? His instincts hadn’t picked up on the slightest whiff of treachery, and he’d extended his trust to Alex almost as freely as Bones had to Gabby.

  Alex.

  He faced her, wondering only now about her loyalties and motives. What did he really know about her? She stared back, anxiety writ in her expression, but when she spoke her voice was steady and calm, as if she didn’t entirely grasp the seriousness of the situation. “Do you think it’s the Templars?”

  “I think we’re about to find out.”