by Mack Maloney
They moved the DUS-7 to within a hundred feet of the moored seaplane. One more check of the surface radar told them they were still alone on this side of the island. A scan of the nearby shoreline also turned up nothing.
Gunner had been manning the M102 field gun since the seaplane was spotted. He took it very personally when someone shot at him. This would be his measure of revenge.
When Nolan gave him the signal from the bridge, Gunner loaded the weapon, closed the breech, eyeballed the aiming guide and fired the gun. The crashing waves masked most of the sound as the shell hit the seaplane below the wing root, blowing it to pieces and collapsing the fuselage in on itself. The plane sank in mere seconds, going down with one big glub. A cheer went up from the DUS-7. It had been a perfect shot.
“He’s getting pretty good with that shooter,” Batman observed.
Watching it all from the railing with the rest of them, Twitch said: “I hope we didn’t need that thing to get out of here.”
* * *
The DUS-7 continued its way around the island. Reaching a large outcrop of rock in the southwest side, they picked up a small blip on the sea surface radar. Peering through the fog, they could see some type of vessel anchored on the far end of the island.
It was important that they keep their presence here secret, so Nolan ordered the DUS-7 to back away out of sight. Then he and Batman went out in a small boat and paddled up to the rocky outcrop. Using it as cover, they were able to see the vessel, anchored about 1,000 yards away.
It was a catamaran — a large one. Easily 200 feet long, it was two hulls connected by a bridging section and a large bow structure.
“Seaplanes? Catamarans?” Batman said. “Is there a casino out here?”
Nolan studied the catamaran and concluded it was probably built as a car ferry. But at the moment, it wasn’t cars but digging equipment being offloaded from it. They could see a work barge transporting a front-end loader and a small army of men with shovels to the shore.
“Whoever these guys are, they’re not screwing around,” Nolan said. “They got enough stuff to dig up every inch of this place.”
“Which gotta mean they’re looking for the same thing we are,” Batman replied.
They returned to the DUS-7 and had the Senegals bring it back around to the northeast side of the island. Here they found a small cove surrounded by high coral reefs. Large waves were crashing onto these reefs, however, making the inlet’s entrance an extremely hazardous passage.
Nolan asked the Senegals if they thought they could maneuver the DUS-7 past the reefs and into the cove, in order to hide it close to shore. They assured him they could. But from that commenced ten minutes of high drama as the West African sailors inched the freighter through a channel barely thirty feet across. The DUS-7 itself was twenty-five feet wide; the clearance was so small, both sides of the ship scraped against the cement-like coral going in. It was brutal to watch, but in the end, an amazing feat of seamanship.
Once inside the calmer waters of the inlet, the ship nestled itself near some overhanging flora, practically unseen from the waters beyond the reefs.
They had their hiding place.
* * *
They went ashore in two boats.
Nolan, the doctor, Squire and Crash went in one; Batman, Gunner, Twitch and one of the Senegals in the other. The rest of the Senegals remained on the DUS-7, their weapons ready, with the engines muted on idle.
The two boat parties hooked up and immediately plunged into the jungle. The island was about a half-mile around and, besides the rocky beaches, it appeared to be all jungle and one volcanic mountain. Some streams ran through it, but their water was curiously the color of blood.
Not two minutes into the jungle, they came upon the wreckage of a small two-engine De Havilland seaplane. It had crashed into a thick tree bank and had made it to the ground remarkably intact.
The passenger compartment was empty, but the two pilots were still in their seats, still wearing their company uniforms and even their hats and headphones. Their skeletal hands still clutched the controls, condemned forever to fly a doomed plane.
“This must be the crash the mystery man survived,” the doctor said. “That means it all started right here.”
They continued through the jungle, heading south, walking carefully with their weapons up, ever aware that they weren’t the only ones on the island. Twitch was in the lead, scanning everything around him with each step.
He suddenly held up his hand, bringing the team to a stop. He said not a word, just pointed to the ground about two feet in front of him. Nolan looked over his shoulder.
Barely visible in the heavy foliage was a large square pit dug into the hard sand. It was about ten feet deep. At the bottom were a dozen bamboo sticks, sharpened ends pointing up.
“Punji sticks,” Twitch said. “Looks like monkey shit on the tips. If the fall doesn’t kill you, the infection will.”
Nolan looked deeper into the pit and saw bones at the bottom. Animal? Human? It was hard to tell. But his guess was the booby trap had been here for a while, probably set up by pirates or drug dealers. Because of its location right off the beach, it was meant as a cruel warning to anyone who would come here looking for buried treasure — of any kind.
Once the rest of the team saw the trap, Nolan told them, “We all got to watch our step. These things are guaranteed to ruin your day.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, they reached a clearing, only to make another gruesome discovery: three bodies stuffed under some rubber trees, barely hidden in the brush. Each had been bound and gagged; each had two bullets in the back of the neck. The bodies were still warm.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Batman asked Nolan.
Nolan nodded grimly. “I’m guessing these guys are what’s left of our seaplane crew,” he said. “They were hired guns who were paid to sink or at least turn away anyone who came close to this island. But it’s like what usually happens with rookie hit men: their employers get rid of them to keep them quiet, whether they’ve succeeded or not.”
“But who whacked them?” Crash asked.
Nolan checked the ammo clip in his M4.
“Let’s find out,” he said.
* * *
They stole up onto the beach near where the huge catamaran had anchored. Dr. Stevenson carefully studied the men on shore nearby. All were dressed in black battle suits and stocking caps. He immediately recognized them as fitting the description of the armed men who’d invaded the Jersey Island pub that night.
“My guess is they’re South Africans,” the doctor said. “The witnesses in the pub that night were mostly tourists. They said the raiders spoke with British accents, but strange ones.”
The team watched as the catamaran crew tour off another front-end loader and more stacks of digging tools. Team Whiskey, by contrast, had brought only hand shovels and entrenchment tools.
“Frigging guys are serious,” Batman said. “And if they spot our tub and know that we’re on the island, they’ll hunt us down like…”
His last few words were drowned out by a loud whistling sound. A moment later, a flash of metallic light passed over their heads and landed squarely on the work barge bringing the front-end loader to shore. The explosion was so large it knocked everyone in Team Whiskey’s group to the ground. They wisely remained there and waited. When the smoke cleared, they looked back to the beach and found nothing left of the barge, the front-end loader or the men accompanying it.
Suddenly, more shells came screaming through the air. This was not their M102 firing; these were large-caliber naval gun shells going over their heads. The barrage hit the beach, causing another minor earthquake.
Nolan jumped up, climbed the nearest tree, and — using his special spyglass — spotted a military ship coming toward the island from the east, moving very fast. He reported this to the team below.
“Who the fuck could it be?” Crash asked.
“Can
you ID it?” Batman called up to him.
Nolan was able to read the numbers on the side of the ship.
“P331,” he said. “It’s a destroyer.”
Batman pulled out his BlackBerry, called up a special foreign navies app and started typing in Nolan’s information.
“God damn,” he said after a few moments. “Who ordered the khoresht?”
Nolan couldn’t believe it. “That’s an Iranian ship?”
Batman confirmed it: “It’s the Jamaran. Fifty-eight hundred tons. Guided missile destroyer. It was deployed to the Gulf of Aden a few months ago to help control the pirates. Looks like it’s gotten involved in some extracurricular activities instead.”
As he was speaking, the Iranian vessel unleashed a ferocious barrage of ship-to-ship missiles. They all hit the catamaran, blowing it to pieces. It was a frightening demonstration of enormous naval firepower.
“Christ — we’ll be part of tomorrow’s shish kabob if they find us out here,” Crash said. “And we got no way to call for help.”
“So what else is new?” Twitch said.
* * *
The Iranian destroyer anchored close by the wreckage of the catamaran.
It lowered four boats and began ferrying people to the shore, about two hundred and fifty feet away. The personnel in the boats were all dressed in civilian clothes; none was wearing a military uniform. Each had a shovel or a pick, and in that way they looked like an army of archeologists. But each was also carrying an assault rifle or a machine gun. Some were also lugging military-style metal detectors and even portable ground-imaging radar sets. Looking like a large jackhammer, each instrument required three men to drag it across the ground while a fourth took readings of what it saw beneath the surface. Like a very elaborate mine detector, it could spot things buried almost ten feet underground.
The sun was starting to go down. The men who were ferried ashore worked on setting up a base camp and building two huge bonfires, using wood already gathered by the people their naval guns had just obliterated.
Watching all this from the jungle nearby were Nolan and Batman; the rest of the team had returned to the Dustboat.
This was a disturbing development. There had always been a chance that they could dig up the treasure and avoid the people in the catamaran. But trying to get away from the island — treasure in hand or not — would be almost impossible with the Iranian warship on the scene.
“There’s got to be about a hundred and fifty of those ass-holes already on shore,” Batman said, eyeing the Iranian base camp. “And what? Another three or four hundred still on the ship?”
“At least,” Nolan replied, studying the situation with his special spyglass. “I’m guessing these guys on the beach are Pazdaran. The top Iranian special ops group? Remember them from the Battle of Herat?”
“Just barely,” Batman replied. “And, you know, for this being a secret treasure, a lot of people seem to know about it.”
“Well, maybe these guys don’t know exactly where to dig for it,” Nolan theorized. “I mean, why else would they have so many people with so much equipment?”
“They do seem to be settling in for the night,” Batman said, noting the Iranians were building several more bonfires and setting up tents. “If you’re right, they might not start searching for the treasure until tomorrow morning.”
Nolan checked his watch and said, “Which means we only have a few hours to find it — in the dark.”
“But finding it will only be half the battle,” Batman said. “We still have to get away.”
Nolan thought a moment, then packed up his spyglass.
“Let’s find the damn thing first,” he said. “Then we’ll figure out how to get out of here.”
* * *
They returned to the DUS-7 and helped cover it completely with tree branches and vines. Then, leaving the Senegals on board, the rest of the team went back into the jungle, following the map found on the faux BlackBerry.
Again, the fact that the Iranians had come ashore with metal detectors and portable ground radar imaging units suggested they weren’t really sure where to start digging. Whiskey barely had a shovel and some entrenching tools. However, they did have the original map. They were hoping this gave them an important advantage.
The map, crudely drawn, had been scanned and downloaded to the mystery man’s device. Though not elaborate, the version Dr. Stevenson had been able to recover did list some GPS coordinates as longitude and latitude. So in a way, looking for the treasure would be an exercise in “geocaching”—hiding an object at specific GPS coordinates to be found by someone else.
But the map actually showed three sites where the treasure could be buried — just why the dead man had chosen to give more than one location was a mystery. Most likely he wanted to make it harder for anyone who eventually found the map. The only real clue was a note that said the real treasure was buried in a “black spotted bag.”
After a tough slog through the heavy jungle, the team reached the first GPS point indicated, praying they would hit paydirt right away. The site was on a small hill on the north end of the island, not far from where they’d sunk the seaplane. The hill was covered with heavy vines, and the sandy ground was almost solid with roots. In fact, it was hard to tell where the vines ended and the ground began.
Using their night-vision capability, they were able to locate a spot near the GPS coordinates that appeared to have been dug up relatively recently. Still, the re-digging was arduous — much worse than what they had to do back in the Mirang Island graveyard, Crash reported. Their shovels were practically useless here; at least the entrenching tools were sharp on the business end, allowing them to cut through the vines that had grown over the recently disturbed ground.
They took turns on the entrenching tools while Gunner kept watch. It was during a turn by the doctor and Batman that they hit not another tangle of vines but a piece of solid wood.
“Bingo,” Batman whispered, quickly adding: “I hope…”
They’d hit the top of a long, narrow wooden box — a coffin, they thought at first. But further digging revealed it to be a wooden shipping crate bearing U.S. military markings.
They pried off the cover and found within a pair of Stingers, the small portable surface-to-air missile that allowed a single person to shoot down an aircraft as big as an airliner. There were four more boxes under the one they’d uncovered, equaling ten Stingers in all.
“Jackpot!” Crash cried. “Right?”
At first, they all thought they’d guessed right by digging here. But then reality set in.
“This isn’t it,” Stevenson said. “Stingers are available all over world — and can be had on the black market fairly easily. Our dead courier friend didn’t deal in things so pedestrian — and let’s face it, this is hardly a pot of gold worth sending a Iranian warship to uncover.”
Plus, on closer examination, they determined the missiles were old, rusty and probably unworkable. At the very least they’d have to be recalibrated and expertly cleaned before anyone even thought of using them.
“He’s right,” Nolan said. “No way everyone got so hot and bothered about ten old missiles.”
* * *
They moved on to the second dig site.
Their GPS device told them it was on a beach on the western edge of the island, about a quarter mile from where the catamaran was sunk. The digging here was just as tough. The beach was rocky on top and muddy beneath, so with every two swipes of the entrenching tool, the mud flooded back in, filling half the hole again.
But after some heavy work, they finally hit something that was not mud. It was a large metal box this time, almost the size as the crate the Stingers were in. It took all their muscle power to pull it out of the ground, after which they discovered it had not one, but two combination locks on it. This presented a problem: Shooting the locks off would make too much noise; the Iranians were not that far away. Plus, if this box contained Stingers as well, a bullet i
n the wrong place would blow them to Kingdom Come. But they were running out of time.
Gunner stepped forward, indicating the others should move back. He studied the two locks, but then put his fingers under the box’s lid and began to pry it open. It seemed impossible at first; the box appeared to be solid metal. But Gunner was incredibly strong and eventually, he was able to bend the lid away from the combination locks and off the box completely.
The others were amazed.
“Fucking guy eats his Wheaties,” Batman said to Stevenson.
Beneath the lid was an old woolen blanket. Nolan pulled it away to reveal a large stash of brilliant, shimmering coins.
“Jesus Christ!” Crash exclaimed. “Are those gold?”
As it turned out, the answer was no.
Batman studied the coins — and then started laughing grimly.
“These are Soviet-era rubles,” he declared. “The Russians used to make them in both coin and script. They look like gold, but…”
“But?” Nolan asked.
“But,” Batman went on, “they are possibly the most useless currency on the planet at the moment.”
There was a collective groan from everyone on hand.
“Strike fucking two,” Crash said, throwing a handful of the coins into the water.
“This dead guy is dicking with us,” Gunner declared ominously. “The shitty Stingers, and now this worthless Russian crap? Has anyone considered that this whole thing might be a gag?”
A gloomy silence fell over them. No one wanted to think that.
Finally Twitch said: “Well, if it is, it’s a long way to go for a fucking joke.”
* * *
They grimly moved on to the third site, highly suspicious that they were on a wild goose chase. Finding and digging up the first two sites had taken much longer than they’d expected. The night had slipped away, and it was now only ninety minutes to dawn. The team was sure the island would soon be crawling with Iranian Special Forces.