The Sam Reilly Collection

by Christopher Cartwright

By the fifth revolution, they slammed into the rock at the edge of the pool. In an instant, Tom shoved the two throttles forwards, sending the tank tracks spinning, until they met traction on the rock and sent the mole shooting up and over the next drop.

  Tom felt the entire contents of his stomach reach his head, as they free-dived into the deep pool of water at least ten feet below.

  Slamming into the deep water, the mole’s giant drilling nose acted like a high diver’s hands as it broke the surface tension, before submerging nearly twenty feet below.

  The mole popped its head above the water again, and started to gently drift down the river at a leisurely pace. James unbuckled his seatbelt, laughing like a demon as he leaned forward, and said, “That was great fun. Let’s go do it again!”

  Tom shook his head in wonder. Some people don’t even know when to be scared. Aliana, on the other hand, looked as though she might spew all over the mole, but was purposely forcing herself to sit up and take in her surroundings.

  “How you doing?” he said, looking at her.

  “Fine… Are we done with the rollercoaster yet?”

  “Almost. According to this, we should be just about to meet up with the part of the river where Sam has surveyed.” The river, now gradually moving forward with no ripples or violent waves, looked like it went on forever. “Is this a more agreeable pace for you?”

  “Much, thank you,” she replied.

  Tom left the tracks spinning slowly in a forward momentum, just enough to keep them facing forward as they drifted down the river.

  Up ahead, the river appeared to just cease.

  But rivers never end in a tunnel; they end in the ocean or large inland lakes.

  “Can anyone see where the river goes after this?”

  James casually buckled his seatbelt again. “I thought you said you had a map?”

  “It might have been just a little wrong,” Tom replied.

  “How wrong?” Aliana asked, worried that although there were no ripples, the current seemed to be increasing again.

  “Wrong enough that I only have one guess where all this water is disappearing to.”

  They were nearing the end of the river, and the flow was fast – like when it was about to drop off the edge of something.

  Tom now recognized the distant sound of constant thunder up ahead.

  “Hold on everyone.”

  Just before dropping off the end of the river into the unknown below, Tom pulled on a lever above his head, and the doors to the air ballast opened to completely. The heavy mole sank like a giant stone as he pushed the throttles fully forward again.

  Down, down, the mole submerged. In front of him, Tom read the depth gauge reach 80 feet, before he saw what he was looking for.

  An opening appeared at the base of the deep tunnel – too small to accommodate the vastness of the river. There, most of the water toppled over the top of the large rock face, whereas some still flowed below it.

  The tank tracks reached the gravel bottom with a jolt and kicked the mole into life as it started to drive along the bottom of the river.

  “Think skinny thoughts!” Tom said, as he lined up both tank tracks to drive straight through the hole.

  A loud thud could be heard as the mole’s tank tracks smashed through the rocky edge of the opening, and then they were out the other side. Above them, the sound of the waterfall, now on their side of the 80-foot rock, could still be heard hammering the water above them.

  Tom drove confidently along the now completely submerged river system. “Ah, now, we’re in the same subterranean river that Sam mapped earlier.”

  An hour later, the small team looked through the clear bulletproof dome above their heads to see the remains of a mining platform inside an enormous cavern.

  “This must be what Sam said was called the Mahogany Cavern. Up there you can see the dive platform they were working on.”

  “Are you sure they’re still out?” Aliana asked, noticing the lights within the cavern were still running.

  “Pretty sure, but don’t worry. – we’ll be ready if they come,” James said.

  Tom drove further downwards, towards the exit tunnel.

  The tunnel was longer than he’d imagined it, and for a moment Tom worried that he’d taken the wrong one. But then the depth of the tunnel started to decrease, until the tank tracks above their heads were occasionally scratching on the ceiling of the tunnel.

  The mole slowed, and then, like a four-wheel drive starting to become bogged in the mud, the tank tracks seemed to be turning at a rate faster than they were moving.

  “You want me to get out and push?” James asked.

  “Not just yet,” Tom replied. He pulled the lever above his head, which opened up every air compartment available, causing the mole to become extremely negatively buoyant.

  The tank tracks instantly sunk deeper into the sandy bottom with a heavy crunch and began catching again. And then they were through to the other side.

  Where the Mahogany Ship waited for them.

  *

  They approached the Mahogany Ship from the side, and quickly saw the large hole in its side, where Sam had been entering her bow. Aliana stared out the porthole to her right, where the ship stood. “Tom, you know what Sam would have used when he was diving here. Any sign of his equipment?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t seen anything. And seeing nothing can often be a good thing when we’re talking about searching for a lost cave diver.”

  “Sam’s not drowned,” James interrupted, frustration clearly displayed on his face. “There were a number of caverns full of air, and pockets of air throughout the tunnels on the way in here. There’s no way Sam could have drowned here. Heck, I bet the athletic bastard, could have managed the trip we just made, holding his breath between the underwater sections.”

  The statement was ridiculous, but Aliana was grateful for his reassurance.

  “Now what do we do then?” she asked.

  “We have a look at Rodriguez’s fake Mahogany Ship, and take his gold!” James’s eyes lit up with excitement.

  “What about Sam?” Aliana asked, feeling as though she were the only person capable of staying focused on their primary mission – to save Sam.

  “If I know Sam, he would have taken the same route out that we just took to come in,” James said.

  “Then why didn’t we see him?” she argued.

  Tom switched both tank track electric motors to off, parking the Mole, and then suggested, “Maybe he was already out?”

  “Not likely. We would have seen some sign of him at the river,” Aliana said.

  “Come on, let’s get the gold,” James pestered, with a big, stupid grin.

  “Are you serious?” Aliana’s eyes stared at him.

  “If Sam did escape, he would have left a note or something for us on board the Mahogany Ship. Besides, I’d really like to see to what lengths Rodriguez has gone to bring us here.”

  “All right,” Aliana said, “but only so we can see if Sam left us anything to go on. Then we’re back to searching for him.”

  “Agreed.”

  At the rear of the vehicle was a small airlock chamber, large enough to allow just one person at a time to exit the mole, in full dive gear.

  James was the first to leave, followed by Aliana, and Tom agreed to stay and keep guard. If Rodriguez and his men came back while the other two were away, he said he would run them over with the mole at best, and at worst, block the entrance to the Mahogany Ship so that the others could escape.

  By the time Aliana climbed through the opening in the ship, and reached the sandy area where the dozen or more footprints indicated others had been entering, she found James’s hand, reaching down to help her up.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Not a problem.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Yeah, I found it!” James said, showing her a number of Rodriguez’s gold coins. “This is going to really piss him off.”

  “What
about Sam?”

  “No idea. How about you have a quick look, and I’ll load up the Mole.”

  “You’re unbelievable James!” she said, deciding to look around the ship herself.

  “Thanks,” James said, as he put his dive mask back on his face and dropped back into the water with a bag full of gold coins.

  Aliana then looked through the first few rooms, quickly making certain that Sam wasn’t there, lying injured or worse – dead – before moving on to the next ones. It didn’t take her long to clear every room in the ship capable of being easily accessed.

  At the back of the ship, she saw that a large amount of sand had intentionally been removed. Shining her flashlight on it, she immediately saw how Sam finally determined the Mahogany Ship had been a fake.

  The massive wall of concrete had been buried with no more than a few feet of sand, to give the image of the back half of the ship being filled with sand.

  It was time to go. Nothing more could be achieved by walking around the fake shipwreck.

  “We’re out of here,” she said to James, who was hurriedly shoving the last of the gold coins in another big bag.

  “Okay, can you give me a hand with the second bag? I think I might have overloaded it, and I’d hate to leave Rodriguez with one of his coins.”

  Not bothering to get into another fight with the man, she picked the smaller of the two bags, and returned to the mole.

  After the water was expelled from the diving hatch, Tom helped her out of her dive gear, and then said, “I’m afraid, this is where the rescue mission ends.”

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “See the power gauge? We’re down to 65 percent.”

  “So, can’t we wait until it gets to 50 percent?”

  “No, it’s going to draw a lot more power to get back up those rapids,” Tom said. “Don’t worry. We’ll come back for him.”

  *

  Four hours later, the three were back on the surface, and Tom drove the mole back to the helicopter, ready to be unloaded. Aliana listened as James started whistling a happy tune to himself, while loading the several bags of gold Spanish coins into a safe aboard the helicopter.

  “Damn it, James, you’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  He stopped whistling and replied, “And why shouldn’t I be? Traversing a grade six black water run, in a cross between a tank and a submarine, while stealing gold from a rich asshole – and you know that gold is always one of the most favorite things to rich people, and I should know.”

  “You forgot the part about not being able to rescue your son, or have you forgotten?”

  James looked amused, and said, “No, of course not, how could I? You kept reminding me of it every few hours.” He then opened a prepacked lunchbox containing more than twenty sandwiches, and said, “Lunch anyone? I’m starving.”

  “Shouldn’t we be back down there trying to find your son?”

  “And why should we do that?”

  “Jesus, James, don’t you care for your son’s wellbeing, even just a little?”

  “Of course I do… but I’m sure he’s quite capable of coming out on his own. Honestly, sometimes I think you don’t really know my son at all, do you?”

  “How can you be so uncaring, and yet so certain that he will make it out on his own?”

  James smiled at her, only the slightest guilt visible. “Because he’s already done so.”

  “Sam’s already out of the subterranean waterway?” Aliana asked, too stunned by the news, to be angry.

  “Yes, got out a couple days ago.”

  “What do you mean, ‘he got out a couple days ago?’ We’ve been searching for him the past two days, and I was worried sick that he was dead. You knew he was out, but still we went in to get the gold!”

  “Yeah, something like that. If it makes you feel better, Sam told me to.”

  “He told you to. Really?”

  “Well, he did say to make sure to keep you safe and hidden, while he was away. So I thought, why not make Rodriguez pay in the process?”

  “I thought he was dead, you fucking asshole!” Aliana, for the third time in as many days, since meeting up with James, was ready to kill him. “Hang on. You said while he’s away… where the hell has he gone?”

  “Longjiang, China, of course.”

  “Oh, of course,” she agreed facetiously. “What the hell’s he doing there?”

  “Elise sent him.”

  “Why did she send him there?” Aliana paused, as she heard the words in her own ears. “And who’s Elise?”

  James smiled, speaking slowly as he would to a small child, while explaining something complex. “He’s gone to meet a man named Jie Qiang, who might just know exactly where the Mahogany Ship was left.”

  “And what about the other one… the woman you mentioned?”

  James stared at her, amusement on his face at her concern at the mention of another woman. “And Elise is a computer whiz that my son hired years ago. She used to consult for the NSA and the FBI until a disagreement on the term ‘freedom of information’ made her resign – but not without leaving a backdoor into their computer systems, granting her unhindered, and untraceable, access to an immeasurable amount of information.”

  “Okay… so why does Elise think Jie Qiang knows where the Mahogany Ship was left?”

  “Because one of his ancestors built it, while the other executed the last man to return from its fatal voyage.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sam took a commercial flight to China, using a local carrier, and under an alias passport that Elise had prepared for him. He read the email again on the long flight, and recalled the conversation he’d had with the man. Sam had almost deleted the message the first time he saw it, concerned that it might be a ruse orchestrated by Michael Rodriguez or one of his men.

  The email had been titled “In the unlikely event you haven’t been murdered yet.”

  He then had Elise look into the email account and run a check on where the message had originated. Determining that it had come from Longjiang, in the northern province of Heilongjiang of the People's Republic of China, she then discovered that the original sender came from a small fishing village, with no known ties to Michael Rodriguez. The only notable history that she could find on the man, was that his entire family had been murdered two years ago.

  Elise had suggested he read the letter, and then contact the man through an intermediary.

  Sam had read the letter carefully.

  Then read it again.

  He remembered thinking that, if it was a ruse, it certainly was a very clever one.

  By the time he’d finished the conversation, Sam had decided that he must fly directly to meet the man in Longjiang.

  Arriving at Qiqihar Sanjiazi Airport, Sam quickly cleared customs, and then took a taxi to a park in Longjiang, overlooking the water of the Long River.

  He paid the taxi driver and then, taking out three times the requested fee, asked the driver to wait for him. The driver, staring at the money, assured him he would wait.

  Sam walked through the park until he reached two sets of tourist chairs. Sitting down, he examined the large river ahead. Within minutes, another man came and sat next to him.

  “The river’s very pretty today, isn’t it?” Sam said to the stranger.

  “It is, but… I do not think I would like to go for swim,” the man replied, in broken English, confirming that he was the man Sam was looking for.

  Sam turned to face the man and said, “Okay, Mr. Jie Qiang. You have my attention; how did you know I was about to be murdered?”

  “Because, the man who murdered my family had already gotten what he wanted from you.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Your father’s attention,” Jie Qiang replied.

  “So he thought he could ransom me?”

  “No, nothing of the kind. He knew that if you advertised the fact that the Mahogany Ship had been discovered, your father would come there
to see it. And your father, Michael knew, was the only man on earth who held the key to finding the real Mahogany Ship.”

  “But that’s crazy. My father doesn’t know how to find it. He and I both tried ten years ago, and after many months, accepted that it was nothing more than a fabled story.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “If that’s so, where’s your father now?”

  A cold shiver went down Sam’s spine, as he thought about the question. His father had taken an unusual fatherly interest in his safety, while looking into the Mahogany Ship. He even felt loved when he called his father for help, only to discover that the man was already in Bendigo.

  Dad, what were you already doing there?

  Jie Qiang looked at his face, and said, “So, your father had already come to Australia, as Michael planned.”

  Sam ignored the question and then asked, “Why would Michael believe my father could help him find the real Mahogany Ship?”

  “Not the ship, only her most valuable possession.”

  “And what made Michael think that my father could help him in his search for it?”

  “The fact that your father was in possession of a map that showed him precisely where it was, but he lacked the ability to locate the first identifying symbol on the map.”

  “And Michael knows where that first symbol is?”

  “Yes, Michael paid me a small fortune to receive my map.”

  “How is it that you came to know where the Mahogany Ship met her demise?”

  “Because one of my ancestors built it, while the other executed the last man to sail her,” Jie Qiang replied.

  “Okay, if that’s the case, tell me, what was the most valuable thing the Mahogany Ship was carrying?”

  “A secret weapon,” the man had answered immediately. “A scepter with the ability to destroy anything in its path with intense heat, reflected from the sun.”

  “So you’re not lying. Okay, you have my attention. Why is it that you’re now willing to betray Michael?”

  “Two years ago I sold him the original map, taken from a man known only as Rat Catcher, a eunuch slave, who was the last person to see the Mahogany Ship, firmly stuck miles inland, in the large landmass that we now know to be Australia. He had returned to China to get reinforcements.”