by Matthew Rief
Scott nodded. We were driving slower now and had the windows rolled down and the top collapsed behind us. The fresh warm air felt good whirling past us.
“Have you talked to Jack lately?”
“Yeah, just before I went to Colombia. He’s doing good. Still running the charter out of Key West.”
Jack Rubio had been a friend of mine since I was young, back when my dad was stationed at Naval Station, Key West. Years later I’d introduced him to Scott when we’d traveled to the Keys, and the two had hit it off as good as Jack and I first had.
“Can’t imagine him doing anything else. You ever think about that day near the Marquesas Keys? What you found wedged against the reef?”
My eyes grew wide with his words. “Yeah, sometimes.”
Of course I’d thought about it. It would have been impossible not to. I had just grabbed hold of a spiny-tailed lobster when I’d spotted something shiny beneath the shifting sand. I’d swum closer and realized that it was a gold coin, but it was wedged between a ledge and a large piece of coral. I’d let go of the lobster and grabbed my dive knife from the sheath strapped to my leg. My heart racing with excitement, I’d wedged the knife under the coin and pried it free, examining it for a moment with wide eyes and then closing my hand around it. Running out of air, I’d looked up and kicked for the surface. Scott had seen me on the way up and had raised his hands, wondering what had happened, but I kept kicking and held the coin tight, not wanting it to slip free.
When I broke the surface, Jack was sitting at the bow of the boat, his feet hanging in the water.
“What happened?” he asked. “I thought you had that one.”
I slipped my mask down to hang around my neck and caught my breath. Lifting my fist up to my face, I opened my fingers and watched the gold glistening in the Florida sun.
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
Scott rose suddenly out of the water about ten feet away from me.
“What the hell, Dodge?” he said. “That was a beauty.”
“Not as beautiful as this,” I said, showing him the coin.
His eyes grew wide and he swam towards me. He stared at it, and when I handed it to him, he rubbed it with his fingertips as if unable to believe that it was real.
We set it on the boat and examined it for a few minutes. It was unlike any coin I’d ever seen before. It was much larger, and it had strange markings around its edges. There was a person’s image etched craftily into the middle, though none of us had any clue as to who it might’ve been.
We’d spent the rest of the day swimming all around that ledge, searching for more gold. We spent hours looking around every corner, every crevice in the ledge and every space in the coral, but by the time the sun was setting, we hadn’t found anything else. A few days later, we took it to a dealer in Miami. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what it was or where it could have come from. But he did verify that it was gold and he offered us fifteen thousand dollars for it. It was difficult to see it go, but that had been a lot of money for me at the time, even after splitting it three ways.
Since that day in the Keys, we’d never been able to find anything about it, despite hundreds of online searches and numerous trips back to the place where we’d found it. Scott was silent for a moment as we drove down a road that was getting worse with every mile. Potholes littered the dirt road, and we maneuvered through sharp turns and up steep hills, surrounded by thick green jungle.
“What made you think about that?”
He glanced at the GPS open on his phone, then set it on his lap.
“I was in Dubai a few months ago and had dinner at a mansion owned by Arian Nazari,” he said. “You know, the billionaire oil tycoon?”
I nodded. I’d seen him in the news more than once and knew that along with being incredibly wealthy, he was also very controversial.
“Well, turns out Nazari is an avid antique collector. He’s got one of the biggest collections in the world. I was walking around after dinner with a few other representatives when I saw your coin sitting alongside a trove of other artifacts.”
“Are you sure it was the one we’d found?”
He slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out a coin, then handed it to me nonchalantly. As soon as I grabbed it, I knew that it was the one. It was the same size, had the same markings, and it had the same person’s image engraved in the middle. Also, it had the distinct patterns of coral on one of its sides from being pressed against the reef for so many years. I stared in awe at the incredible piece of treasure that I’d doubted I’d ever see again.
“How’d you get Nazari to part with it?”
Scott grinned. “Long story, but it involved a wager.”
“Did he know anything about it? Had he found out where it came from?”
Scott nodded. “That’s an Aztec coin. Dated back to the fifteenth century. The image is believed to be Axayacatl, the father of Montezuma the second. It’s incredibly rare. That’s why we weren’t able to find anything about it. In fact, that coin is the only one like it ever found, or at least it was up until a few days ago.”
“Someone found another one?”
“That’s why we’re here,” he said. “In 1519, when the Spanish first entered Tenochtitlan, Cortés marveled at the amount and quality of the Aztec king’s gold. He wrote that never in human history had so much gold been in one place, that not even Solomon’s treasures surpassed it. Massive rooms filled from floor to ceiling with gold bars, statues, chests, and coins. Cortés, desiring favor with the royal crown and wealth beyond his wildest dreams, wanted all of it. Even though Montezuma had offered a large portion of it as a gift, Cortés wanted more. His men stormed the city in 1521 and held Montezuma hostage in exchange for the gold. But when the king was killed, the whole city attacked the Spaniards. Cortés and his men were only able to take a small handful of the gold in their rapid escape from the city. The legend says that Montezuma had handpicked eight thousand soldiers, the greatest warriors in his army, to take control of the gold and defend it with their lives if anything ever happened. They supposedly took it out of the city and hid it in a secret location where it would be safe from the Spanish explorers. The eight thousand men then killed themselves so that they could defend the treasure as ghosts for eternity, or so the story goes.”
“And you believe they hid it in Sierra Gorda?”
“Well, the legend specifies that the men hid the gold underground. That they drained a lake, then dug through the earth up to a cave, hid the treasure, then filled the lake again, making the treasure inaccessible.” Scott opened the Jeep’s center console and pulled out a manila folder. He removed a picture from the folder and handed it to me. It was a picture of a coin. “That was found by a goat farmer three days ago.”
I grabbed the picture and stared at it in awe. Holding the coin in my other hand, I compared them. They were an exact match, the same coin down to the smallest details. The only difference between them was the coral marks on the one I’d found. Other than that, they were identical.
“Imagine, Logan, the greatest treasure in the history of mankind. And it could all be just a few miles away from us.”
“Do you really think this is the best use of your time, Senator?” I asked with a grin.
“Do you have any idea how far a treasure like that could go in helping the people here in Mexico? I’d say it’s a perfect use of my time.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “As long as it gets into the right hands when we find it. But who else knows about it?” I figured there was no way something like that could be kept a secret.
“A collector friend of mine in the city called me as soon as he saw it. It was the same collector I’d spoken to before, when I came here in search of answers a few months ago. He told me about it when he saw the coin yesterday.”
“Who else did he tell? We can’t be the only ones going for this.”
“That’s why I was in such a hurry to get here so we could look for it. It’s also why I use
d the code in my message. I’m not certain, but I think someone might be following me.”
“Any idea who?”
He shook his head. “No clue. It was a few different cars yesterday, but I haven’t seen them at all today. I also wanted to avoid anyone from my office knowing where I really was. Searching for gold in Mexico isn’t exactly typical politician behavior.”
I smiled, knowing that Scott was anything but a typical politician. He’d even run on the premise of fighting against the power that career politicians had abused for years.
There was one major piece to the puzzle that I couldn’t understand. If the treasure was from the Aztec capital in Mexico and hidden away in an underwater cave in Sierra Gorda, how had the coin in my hands ended up off the coast of the Florida Keys? I asked Scott what he thought, but he told me he didn’t know.
“No Aztec gold has ever been found in the Caribbean before,” he said. “At least, none that I’m aware of. But perhaps it was one of the many coins Cortés looted from the city in his rushed escape.”
It wasn’t a strong theory, but it was possible. I thought it over as we drove between two large hills covered in green shrubs and trees, then eased our way over an old rickety bridge with a white-water river below.
“It’s not much farther now,” Scott said. “Just on the other side of this hill, there’s a trailhead. It’s a few miles to the lake and another mile or so to the place he found it.”
CHAPTER
THREE
We rounded a sharp corner at the base of a hill and saw two trucks a half a mile ahead of us, parked in the middle of the road. We hadn’t seen anyone else over the last fifteen minutes of driving aside from a few locals on the side of the road. Scott pulled the Jeep over at a spot that offered a good vantage point but was still far enough away to go unnoticed. We both stepped out, and Scott grabbed a monocular from the backseat. It was a Leica Monovid with eight times magnification, one of the really fancy ones.
“The road’s closed,” he said as he stared into the monocular.
He pulled it from his eye and handed it to me. I held it up and quickly realized why. The two trucks were parked end to end, completely blocking the road. In front of the trucks, two guys stood, both of them holding AK-47s. On the side of the road, I saw three more guys sitting in chairs, smoking and listening to a radio.
“I don’t like the look of this,” I said.
“There’s five of them in all. I’d rather not start any trouble with these guys.”
“Is there another way?”
Scott opened the back of the Jeep and pulled out a tourist map of Sierra Gorda. Unfolding it, he pointed to where we were on the map.
“This road is the only way to this side of the lake,” Scott said. “If we drive back to the other side or just park here, we’re looking at a six-mile trek to where the farmer found it. That’s too far to carry all the gear.”
I examined the map and noticed a small line that branched off from the road about a quarter mile back.
“What’s this? It looks like it could be a service road of some kind.”
Scott nodded. “Possibly. If it is, I’m sure it’s severely overgrown, but it’s worth a shot.”
“That’s what the winch is for,” I said, patting it with my hand.
We turned around and drove back to the place where the service road was on the map. It took us a few surveys to find the road, but when we did, we realized that overgrown was an understatement. It was little more than a footpath, really, but Scott drove the Jeep over it anyway, flooring it through overhanging branches, up steep rocks and through creeks. Using the winch a few times, we managed to reach the other side of the hill, and we stopped when we found a good vantage point.
“There’s more over by the lake,” Scott said, staring into his monocular. “It’s a good thing we didn’t go all the way back and try the other side. We would have been met with a roadblock that way too.”
We searched the area as best as we could and formulated our plan to reach the place where the farmer had found the coin without being spotted. The lake was much larger than I’d expected. It stretched at least two miles at the base of the hill, and I couldn’t even see the other end of it as it wrapped around a steep mountainside. Both roads to the lake were blocked, and there were two boats, one near the edge of the lake and the other in the middle of it, both carrying armed men.
“That’s where we need to go,” Scott said, pointing towards a waterfall that plummeted down a steep cliff to the lake below. It was on the east side of the lake, about a mile away from us. “That’s where he found the coin.”
But the area appeared to be completely surrounded by men.
“Any idea who these guys are?” Scott asked.
“They’re definitely not Mexican military, that’s for sure. My bet would be one of the many drug cartels here got a whiff of the treasure and are looking to bring their operation to a whole other level.”
After looking over the lake and the rest of the landscape for a few more moments, we got an idea. We drove the Jeep down the hillside and parked it close to the main road, hidden behind the thick brush and almost impossible to spot while passing by. Scott opened the back door and pulled out two bags.
“Saddle up,” he said. He opened both bags, revealing two full sets of Draeger rebreather dive gear, including weights, masks, fins and wet suits. Rebreathers are similar to scuba equipment, but unlike scuba, your exhalations are recycled, which means no noisy bubbles dance their way to the surface and give away your position. I’d used them many times before and knew they’d be necessary if we were going to reach the base of the waterfall undetected.
He handed me a dry bag, and I filled it with two small flares and an extra set of clothes and boots before zipping it up and stashing it alongside the rest of the gear. Grabbing another bag, Scott removed a pair of Subgear Prolight flashlights and two Cressi dive knives. I checked the flashlight, then threw it and one of the knives into the front pocket of my bag and zipped it up. He also brought a satellite phone, which he stashed in his dry bag.
I grabbed the pistol and holster from under the passenger seat. Taking it out, I saw that it was a Sig Sauer P226, complete with a gold trident, the insignia of the SEALs, engraved on the slide. It had been standard-issue and the handgun of choice of Navy SEALs for years. I removed the magazine, making sure all fifteen rounds had been loaded, then put the gun back into its holster, strapped it to my leg, and threw my gear bag over my shoulder.
Scott slid the gun case from the backseat and pulled out an HK MP5N with a silencer, scope, and flashlight. He checked it over, making sure the chamber and sights were good and the mag was full. He handed me two extra mags, then put the submachine gun over his shoulder, strapped a Glock 19 to his leg and clutched his gear bag.
“Ready to roll,” he said, shutting the doors and locking the Jeep.
We moved quickly but quietly down the hillside and across the road, keeping our distance from the men forming the roadblock. The jungle was thick and the ground was rocky and covered in moss, with occasional steep drops. Not the easiest terrain I’d ever lugged gear through, but also not the hardest.
We stopped just above the lake to catch our breath and have a look around. I checked my watch and saw that it was almost fifteen hundred and the temperature was eighty-two degrees. Scott surveyed the area around us through the scope of his submachine gun. One of the boats was in view. It was a center-console, looked to be about twenty feet long and had twin Honda 150s pushing it through the water. The three men standing in the bow wore camouflage battle vests and surveyed the area surrounding the lake.
“They haven’t found it yet,” Scott said, smiling.
“How can you be sure?”
He motioned to the boats and the trucks blocking the road on the other side of the lake.
“They’re not hauling anything out,” he said. “If they’d found it, they’d be running trucks back and forth.”
“Or maybe they’re lo
ading it up now.”
Scott grabbed his bag and threw it over his shoulder. He motioned for us to move down closer to the water.
“Only one way to find out.”
We reached a spot near the water’s edge where overhanging branches and thick shrubs provided sufficient cover and donned our gear, starting with our wet suits, then moving into the pre-dive checks of our rebreathers. We started with a full integrity check, starting with the mushroom valves and ending with verifying that all hoses were fitted correctly. Then we made sure that the battery was fully charged and the CO2 scrubber didn’t need to be replaced. After warming up and testing both units, we did buddy checks to make sure neither of us had missed anything. Though rebreathers have advantages over scuba, they are much more complex and therefore require a much higher level of knowledge to operate correctly. We stowed our clothes and boots in dry bags and sealed them up, clipping them to our BCDs using carabiners. I strapped my dive flashlight to my wrist and holstered my Sig around my leg, making sure it was snug while Scott slung his submachine gun over his shoulder.
When both boats were out of sight, we slipped into our fins, strapped on our masks, and waded out into the lake. The water felt good as it filled my wet suit and cooled my body, which had been sweaty from the trek through the hot jungle. The visibility was about forty feet, making it easy for us to navigate underwater. Using our compasses, we quickly found our bearings and kicked our fins smoothly, gliding our way towards the waterfall.
We kept our eyes peeled and our heads on a swivel, looking out for passing boats and other divers. We leveled off our buoyancy at thirty feet down, and soon the lake floor disappeared beneath us. The lake was filled with brown trout, rainbow trout and bass that swam close enough to make me want to come back with a spear gun someday.
After we swam a few more minutes, the rocky bottom of the lake became visible again, and we could see the water getting even shallower ahead of us. Once we were in about twenty feet of water, Scott motioned for us to search the area, since we were close to where the coin had been found. We heard the distant rumble of the waterfall as we approached it, then saw the white clouds and sloshing water on the surface a few hundred feet ahead.