The Bone Hunters

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “Can you land the boat?” asked Macaulay.

  McGandy shook his head. “It’s too shallow for me to do more than get close and I don’t want to anchor here in case the wind shifts direction.”

  Reaching under the steering console, he picked up a handheld electronic device. Turning it on, he handed it to Macaulay. It was a two-way radio.

  “A Motorola weatherproof with a range of ten miles,” said McGandy. “I’ll be monitoring you on channel twelve if there is an emergency. You’ll be in the clear, so just say the word Keira and I’ll meet you back here at the head of the path.”

  “Why Keira?” asked Lexy.

  “That’ll be the name of our daughter.”

  “Just in case there are visitors, do you have any firepower aboard?” asked Macaulay.

  “Yeah,” said McGandy, “a souvenir from my days on the joint drug interdiction task force down here.”

  “Let’s get going,” said Lexy.

  “Dr. Finchem,” said McGandy, “I think it would be a good idea for you to wait here with me until they find out if it is even there.”

  “Thank you for your kind assessment,” said Barnaby, “but if you think I’m going to wait here on this rocking horse after surviving that trip from hell, you’re mistaken. Believe it or not, I am only seventy. That’s the new forty. Besides, General Macaulay here is loaded with enough weapons to hold off the Cossacks.”

  Standing in her oilskins under the driving rain, Lexy couldn’t help smiling as Macaulay lifted the canvas duffel bag and said to McGandy, “How do we get the intrepid Dr. Finchem over the side so he can unleash his investigative skills?”

  McGandy walked to a locker built into the exterior bulkhead of the wheelhouse and unstrapped a small cylindrical container that was mounted above it. The container was constructed of molded white plastic and had a red handle connected to one end. He laid it on the deck. When he pulled the red handle, the container split open and the four-man rubber life raft that was inside quickly inflated itself with a loud hissing sound.

  “Voilà,” said McGandy.

  THIRTY-SIX

  30 May

  Dieter’s Island

  Off Devil’s Backbone

  North Eleuthera

  Bahamas

  Macaulay dragged the raft up along the path from the edge of the brackish water in the lagoon and secured it to the trunk of a mangrove tree. Unzipping the canvas duffel bag, he handed Lexy one of the light machine guns.

  After sliding a .45-caliber pistol into the hollow of his back inside his jeans, he picked up the second machine gun along with the backpack holding the spare ammunition magazines. He could hear McGandy reversing the engines on his dive boat and retreating across the lagoon to calmer waters. Macaulay motioned to Barnaby and Lexy to follow him up the narrow path that led through the swamp.

  To Lexy, it looked like the mangrove trees were growing on stilts, with the aerial roots holding the trunks and branches above the water line and the root structures buried in the mud and briny water. Farther in, she stepped on what she thought was a rain-slick branch lying across the trail. The six-foot-long snake slithered across the mud and disappeared into the dense tangle of vegetation covering it.

  A canopy of red and green leaves formed by the intertangled branches from both sides of the trail was thick enough to blot out most of the daylight and divert the rain from their heads. The wind was reduced to almost a whisper.

  The smell inside the mangrove swamp was overpowering, a mixture of decay and rot and living and dead marine creatures. Someone, presumably Dieter Jensen, had spread a narrow bed of crab, oyster, clam, and snail shells along the path to provide better foot traction above its muddy surface.

  Fifty yards farther along the path, the dense mangrove vines thinned out and gave way to a field of three-foot-tall saw grass. The boggy field bordered both sides of the path. Now that they were in the open, they were buffeted again by the rain and wind.

  Off to their right, Lexy saw a stand of fan palms and Caribbean pines, the branches being whipped into a frenzy. Beneath the trees, she saw what looked like a clump of vertical poles sticking out of the ground. Wiping the rain from her eyes, she saw the poles had cross members too. They were crosses. A crudely made fence boxed them in.

  Macaulay came to a secondary footpath that led off toward the pines.

  “Mike told me he thought the old man’s hut was on the only piece of high ground near the middle of the islet,” said Lexy.

  “That’s where this path is headed . . . toward the center,” said Macaulay.

  He held his machine gun at the ready as he led them forward again. Lexy carried the second one over her right shoulder. The trail took them through a grove of twenty-foot-high Chrysophyllum trees that screened the path ahead of them. On the other side of the grove, they came to successive rows of fruit trees and citrus plantings.

  “He’s cultivated a tropical fruit farm out here,” said Barnaby admiringly as they passed ripening banana and orange trees, followed by crude wooden arbors as tall as a man that were choked with grapes. Barnaby plucked a handful and began to munch them as he walked behind the others.

  His eyes were drawn upward to the top of the grape arbor. A gigantic frigate bird was perched on the upper frame. Barnaby recognized the familiar red pouch on the throat skin below the lower mandible of his beak. It silently gazed down at him as he went by.

  “I think I can see his place,” said Macaulay, peering ahead through the curtain of rain.

  The hermit’s home was no more than four or five feet high and appeared to be entirely constructed from cut coquina rock. Aside from a door, there was a small narrow window slit on one wall of the structure that Macaulay could make out. The slit was dark.

  “Maybe only one of us should approach the house,” said Lexy. “That might be less threatening.”

  “Put down your weapons,” ordered a loud voice behind them.

  She turned with the others. A man emerged from behind the grape arbor. Lexy saw it was the same one who had driven them off before. Drenched by rain, he now looked like the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

  Owl-like eyes bulged out of his face under a broad-brimmed, leaking straw hat. He was barefoot, his tattered white shirt and trousers plastered to his skin. His ancient Lee-Enfield .303 was pointed directly at Barnaby’s chest. Barnaby slowly turned his head toward Macaulay.

  “Please put down your toys, General, before he blows a hole the size of an armadillo in me,” said Barnaby in an even tone.

  Macaulay placed the gun down on the path. Lexy removed the one strapped behind her shoulder and placed it next to Macaulay’s. Macaulay let his arms fall to his sides, his right hand inches from the .45 hidden in the hollow of his back.

  “I’ve seen you before,” said Dieter Jensen. “I told you what would happen if you came back and you did anyway . . . with guns.”

  “How did you know we were here?” asked Barnaby, trying to buy time.

  “I heard your boat engine, mon,” said Jensen in the Bahamian patois he had developed after living there for more than seventy years. “Is that McGandy’s boat?”

  “Yes, and he is waiting offshore for us now,” said Lexy. “We are not here to harm you. We only want to talk.”

  “Nothin’ to talk about,” he said.

  “We know you are Dieter Jensen and that you have lived out here since you fell from the U-boat 113 in 1942,” said Lexy.

  Jensen’s owlish eyes suddenly looked crazed. A moment later, he swung the weapon toward Lexy. Macaulay was sure he was about to fire and was reaching for his .45 when Barnaby stepped between Lexy and the gun barrel and started walking toward Jensen.

  Barnaby watched as the old man’s index finger found the trigger. Reaching out with his right hand, he grabbed the barrel and shoved it upward. The explosion in his ear was deafening as he felt the shot
sear the skin on top of his shoulder.

  Still holding on to the barrel, Barnaby pulled the rifle out of the old man’s hands. Jensen didn’t appear to realize he had even fired the gun. His confused eyes went back to Lexy and he started to cry.

  “How could you know that about me?” he said, his voice quavering.

  “We don’t want to hurt you, Mr. Jensen,” said Lexy. “We came to ask you a few important questions. If you will answer them honestly, we will leave and not come back. You can return to your life.”

  “Let’s get out of this rain first,” said Macaulay.

  He picked up the two guns as Lexy took the old man’s hand and began leading him toward the coquina rock structure. Barnaby held out the Lee-Enfield rifle he was still holding by the barrel.

  “What about this one?” he asked Macaulay.

  Grinning, Macaulay said, “I think you’re supposed to hold it from the other end. But you did just fine with it, old man. You saved her life. Maybe mine too.”

  “All in a day’s work,” said Barnaby, carrying it along. The frigate bird leaped down from his perch and followed behind him.

  As they approached the rock house, Lexy saw that the stone roof cleverly concealed a cistern that caught and contained rainwater. There was only one window and it was a narrow slit like the kind in a fortified medieval castle keep. The walls were four inches thick.

  The stout plank door into the structure was set at the bottom of three steps cut into the rock foundation. Although the walls of the house were only five feet above ground level, the excavated room below was high enough for her to stand.

  Jensen’s home consisted of a large room with a single window slit facing the path. The window opening had no glass. The thick wooden door was secured with a plank of wood fitted into two iron braces.

  Inside, Jensen had constructed a crude table from raw lumber planks set on two stumps. A handmade chair with a soft cushion was tucked underneath it. An unlit kerosene lantern stood on the table.

  After helping the old man into his chair, Lexy found matches next to the lamp and lit it. Macaulay and Barnaby came into the room and shut the driftwood door behind them. Neither could stand erect in the room. A narrow wooden bed platform supported a straw mattress along the far wall. Barnaby went over and sat down.

  While Barnaby checked his grazed shoulder, Macaulay stood bent over and briefly explored the room. The old man might not have had much, but what he did have was organized efficiently and well.

  A plastic water line was connected to the cistern on the roof, and a petcock at the end of it fed fresh water into a tin basin. A stone fire pit vented with a tin pipe provided warmth and a flat iron cooking surface. Dented pots and pans hung from racks above it. A homemade chemical toilet occupied a corner. It was also the perch of the frigate bird, Macaulay realized, as it hopped up on the seat and settled on it.

  Two of the walls had floor-to-ceiling shelves that contained a variety of supplies. They reminded Macaulay of the fruit cellar in his grandmother’s farmhouse. Neatly labeled glass jars of canned fruit and vegetables filled the spaces. An old CB radio powered by a hand-cranked generator provided him with communication to the outside world.

  “We know you saved the life of a wounded man from the ship that your U-boat sank in 1942,” said Lexy, looking into the old man’s still-confused blue eyes. “Somehow you were able to get him to a place where he was picked up by a rescue ship that took him to Florida. You gave him the chance to live a long life. It was a very brave thing to do.”

  “Is he still alive?” asked Dieter Jensen.

  As Lexy considered her response, the terrifying vision of what had been done to Sean Morrissey in the basement of his home burned through her mind.

  “He died less than two weeks ago,” she said. “He is the reason we’re here to see you today.”

  The room was suddenly lit by a bolt of bluish white lightning. Through the window, Barnaby saw its jagged arc of crackling fire across the blackened sky followed by the loud slam of thunder.

  “How did you reach this island from the sunken ship?” asked Lexy, her face only inches away from the old man’s.

  “We . . . floated on a piece of wreckage,” said Dieter Jensen, his eyes starting to focus clearly on her for the first time.

  “Alexandra,” said Barnaby from Jensen’s bed frame.

  Her eyes followed Barnaby’s to the wooden shelves holding the glass jars of fruits and vegetables. The vertical section of the built-in shelf facing her had once been painted red. Parts of it were still bright and glossy. What looked like a symbol of some kind was painted over the red section in black. She realized it was Chinese.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  30 May

  Casa Grande Brugg

  Dunmore Town

  North Eleuthera

  Bahamas

  “I ask you to judge this for yourself, Lord Wui,” said Juwan Brugg, confusing Zhou’s first name with his last.

  They were sitting on the couches in Juwan’s Stargate Atlantis replica movie theater on the mansion’s third floor in front of its ten-foot-diagonal circuit screen. Zhou could hear the wind outside intensifying as he sat next to Li while waiting for news from the ongoing search.

  Juwan had invited them to watch the original live coverage of the NBA All-Star game in which his basketball career had come to a sudden end. In response to Juwan’s pleading, Varna had finally emerged from their bedroom to join them.

  “Look at the way they kept fouling me,” said Juwan. “I know now those refs were paid to look the other way.”

  To Zhou, he looked like Gulliver fighting off the Lilliputians. The other All-Stars kept flailing away at his arms and face. A hard elbow to his ribs brought a mighty bellow of pain, which reverberated through the theater’s Klipsch THX speaker system.

  In the darkened room, Li was able to keep his eyes averted from the grunting and sweaty bodies. On the ceiling above the screen, there was a fiber-optic star scape that offered the view of a new comet streaking across the sky every minute or so.

  “I could have broken every record in the book, Lord Wui,” said Juwan as the final minutes of the game played out.

  Li wondered how long the imbecilic game would continue. He stared across the theater to Varna on the other couch. Varna refused to look back in his direction. The Panamanian was wearing loose-fitting workout clothes and sitting very close to Brugg.

  Getting rid of his mother had not been easy. Together, he and Varna had managed to roll her inside the ultra-king-size duvet from the bedroom and then lift her into the laundry cart that Li had found in the fourth-floor service pantry.

  They had wheeled her to the freight elevator at the end of the hallway and run her down to the first floor. Varna unlocked the armory, a cavernous room beneath the terrace where weapons for the guard unit were maintained and stored. There was a separate lock system for the airtight ammunition locker and Varna knew the code. After wheeling her inside and relocking the door, Varna broke down again.

  The theater speaker system resounded with what sounded like a bowling ball being dropped from a great height. Li looked up to see two men in striped shirts lying lifeless on a hardwood floor as people screamed and shouted.

  The hallway door to the theater opened and Lieutenant Alvarez came in, followed by Colonel Mu. Alvarez looked at Juwan nervously before the big man hit the pause button on his remote device.

  “You asked me to inform you of any developments,” said Alvarez. “We just received this transmission.”

  Juwan opened the envelope and scanned the pages inside.

  “This is in fucking Chinese,” he barked at Alvarez.

  Colonel Mu had another copy of the pages and handed them to Zhou, who put on his glasses and began to read. Li sat beside him, silently fuming. He was in command here, not his father. It was his right to read the document first. Zhou sat b
ack and smiled up at Juwan.

  “This could be enlightening, Mr. Brugg,” he said. “My satellite telecommunications company in China has monitored and decrypted five unusual telephone transmissions that were sent and received from this area of the Bahamas since our arrival. These are the decrypted messages.”

  Juwan was still staring at the incompetent Alvarez. As soon as his mother returned, Juwan planned to ask her to find replacements for both Alvarez and the missing Bardot. Juwan had thought the Haitian had all the right talents, but he had obviously been wrong.

  “Allow me to translate for you,” went on Zhou.

  “One moment,” said Juwan. “Varna, please give us a few minutes alone.”

  Li watched as the Panamanian got up from the couch and obediently went to the door. It was clear that Juwan did not want Varna involved in his business activities. At the door, Varna turned and briefly glared at Li with a look of such hatred that Li thought the others might pick it up. Zhou waited until the door closed again.

  “Four of the messages relate to desperate transmissions made to and from a pleasure yacht named Hoops Heaven. Apparently, the owner is a famous American sports millionaire who disappeared two nights ago. In one transmission, the owner’s wife is asking someone at the White House to send troops to find him.”

  “That doesn’t involve us,” said Juwan firmly. “What about the other one?”

  “It was an encrypted telephone call that originated in Montevideo and went to someone here in Dunmore Town,” said Zhou. “Only the last part of the transcript is complete. It concerns a man named Dieter Jensen who was lost overboard from a boat when he was fifteen years old. He is referred to as a mascot of the crew. The last line reads ‘June is dead.’”

  “I don’t know any June,” said Juwan, “but there is a hermit named Dieter who lives on a small island beyond the Backbone near Spanish Wells.” Turning to Alvarez, he said, “Call Ames at the police station and find out the last name of Crazy Dieter.”