The Danger

  Star’s eyes were haunted. There was no way of knowing what was going on below.

  “Say something, Marina. We know you can hear us!”

  The weary voice of Tad Cutter echoed inside the sealed environment of the one-atmosphere suit. Marina continued to ignore him, scanning the darkness for a sign of the missing intern. What was there to talk about, after all?

  She wondered how her two partners had learned that she had been behind the sabotage of Deep Scout. It didn’t matter. They had already ratted her out to English’s crew. Which meant that the partnership was at an end.

  Unease began to seep into her usual confidence. This was not going the way she’d planned it. She’s lost the gold bar, the proof of their find. The lift basket was out of reach, and English had destroyed Tin Man’s lighting array. Now she was working blind.

  “Give it up,” Cutter pleaded. “You’ve already gotten us mixed up in one murder.”

  The words were out before she could hold them back. “Do you really believe I thought somebody was going to get killed? All I wanted to do was flub the dive!”

  “But why?”

  “Because we were losing!” she raged. “We’re still losing! To a bunch of snot-nosed kids!”

  “It’s just money, Marina. It isn’t worth people’s lives.”

  “It’s a billion dollars!” she shot back. “It’s worth anything!”

  Inside the armored suit, she stiffened like a pointer. There in the black void of the deep ocean, a faint light flickered.

  The missing intern.

  The plan came together in her mind. She would trade this teenager for the bar of gold English had taken from her. It wasn’t too late! She could claim this treasure yet.

  As her finger operated the miniature controls for Tin Man’s thrusters, Tad was still raving about how it was all over, and she should give herself up.

  She cut the comm. link. He had nothing to say anymore that would interest her.

  * * *

  Kaz came awake, shivering with cold. He remembered the altercation with Marina in Tin Man, recalled clearly the savage blow she had dealt him.

  But why am I freezing to death?

  He wriggled within his dry suit and felt no warmth from the hot-water tubes that crisscrossed the fabric. The hit he had taken must have damaged the heating hose in his umbilical.

  What about communications?

  “English?” he ventured. “Guys? Topside?”

  No answer. Comms. were out, too.

  With awareness, fear also returned. He could see nothing in the inky sea except for the bell, hanging in a corona of light. There was no sign of the others. Were they waiting in the pot or out looking for him? And Marina? Had she gotten away with that gold bar?

  He panned the sea with his light, but the small torch barely made a dent in the blackness.

  Then the glowing bell disappeared, and the huge dark shape of Tin Man loomed over him, claws reaching.

  He fled right out of his weighted boots, leaving them rooted in the mud. As he swam, he realized with a sinking heart that he would never outrun Tin Man’s thrusters. He needed a hiding place. But where?

  He was nearing the point where the shelf ended, and the ocean floor sheered up into the slope that marked the edge of the Hidden Shoals. He was just about to douse his torch and try to lose himself in the darkness when he spotted it — a large gash in the joint formed where the ledge met the grade. Switching off his light, he kicked his way inside.

  The darkness was total, almost choking him. The terror of the moment was truly paralyzing, for he knew that he would never see Tin Man’s powerful pincers. He would not realize the hunter was near until he was already taken.

  There he cowered, hugging the mud bottom for any trace of warmth, listening to the chattering of his teeth and — another sound. Was it the whir of Tin Man’s thrusters? No, it didn’t seem to be mechanical. It was more like a low, steady gurgling.

  What could it be? There’s nothing down here!

  After what seemed like an eternity, he worked up his courage and switched on his torch.

  What he saw turned his limbs to lead and brought him to his knees in the sand. The opening in the sea floor formed a large grotto with a silt bottom and a rocky ceiling. The gurgling turned out to be an underwater vent that sent an explosion of bubbles coursing through the cave. But it was not this natural phenomenon that churned his stomach to Cool Whip.

  It was the sharks.

  Kaz knew a lot about sharks. Their cold black eyes, torpedolike bodies, and gaping jaws full of razor-sharp teeth had haunted his dreams as far back as he could remember. His phobia had been cranked higher and tighter over the years by a personal library of books about the notorious sea predators, constantly read and reread. Kaz knew, for example, that all sharks had to swim to survive. There was only one exception to this rule: when an underwater vent created a stream of bubbles that could aerate the gills of a “sleeping” shark.

  There were six animals assembled along the path of bubbles, hanging perfectly still. Five were blue sharks, ranging in length from four to seven feet. It was the remaining one, the biggest, that drew his eyes and filled him with unspeakable horror.

  Clarence, the eighteen-foot tiger shark of local legend. Two tons of destructive power, with a mouth large enough to swallow a fourteen-year-old hockey player whole.

  For weeks, the interns had pondered what had kept this monster in the waters around Saint-Luc while other tigers wandered the oceans. They had questioned what had lured it from the abundant food of the reef down to the empty depths. At last, the mystery was revealed — this vent, this special place.

  Yet there was no moment of enlightenment, no finger-snapping understanding. Kaz realized too late that his light had been shining directly into Clarence’s unhooded black eye. The crescent tail moved first — just a twitch. That muscle contraction traveled all the way along the eighteen-foot body. The head swung toward him, giving Kaz a view past the forest of serrated teeth, clear into the predator’s cavernous gullet.

  He felt his grip on reality starting to slip away. In that instant, he forgot Marina in the one-atmosphere suit, and a billion dollars in treasure. His universe became, quite simply, the nine feet of water separating him from his ultimate nightmare — to be ripped apart and devoured as prey.

  And then the mouth opened like a garage door as the huge shark attacked.

  Kaz did the only thing he could think of. He tried to insert himself into the floor of the grotto. To his immense shock and relief, there was a space for him, a fine groove in the rock beneath the silt. He wriggled into it, thinking small.

  The flat snout slammed against his hip. Impact. Pain. He waited for the crushing bite, the tearing wrench of the monster’s jaws.

  It didn’t come. The sawing teeth could not reach him! He switched off his light and huddled in the tiny niche, smothering in his own bottomless dread.

  Go away. His mind could conjure up no other words. Go away, go away, go away. Shaking with hypothermia and fear, he clung to his hiding place with mindless intensity. He didn’t think about the others, the bell, rescue. Here was safe; here was good. That was all that mattered.

  Time passed. Seconds? Minutes? There was no clock on his terror.

  It happened without warning, not a hiss, not a click. The supply of breathing gas to his Rat Hat simply stopped.

  No!!!

  His first notion was completely irrational — that Clarence, unable to pry him from the gash in the rock, had bitten through his umbilical in order to draw him out.

  Impossible! A shark’s too dumb to come up with a plan like that!

  Amazingly, the crisis forced his unreasoning panic to the edges, leaving room for rational thought. This was a diving problem. He was trained for that. Kaz carried a backup tank of heliox for emergencies just like this one. But he would be unable to reach it without coming out of the crack.

  With a silent prayer, he switched on his torch. The blue sharks still slumbe
red in the bubble stream. There was no sign of Clarence.

  Water began to dribble into the Rat Hat as the gas remaining in the hose was used up.

  Holding his breath, he climbed out of his hiding place and snapped the hose from the bailout bottle to the intake valve on his helmet.

  The metallic tang of heliox. But for how long? At this depth and pressure, gas was gone in the blink of an eye. This tank might last an hour on the surface. But here at twenty-two atmospheres — he did the math — less than three minutes. If he couldn’t get to the bell in that time, he would die.

  He paddled out of the cave, legs kicking madly. He would have given anything for a pair of flippers. But there was no time to think about that now.

  There it was — the bell, glowing like a distant diamond off to his left. He pointed the Rat Hat in its direction and kicked for his life. Maximum speed on minimum heliox — that’s what he needed.

  He was breathing too fast, he was sure.

  But I can make it!

  A dark shape moved in front of the gleaming sphere of the bell. Kaz’s hope disintegrated in a puff of precious gas. Tin Man! Marina Kappas stood in the sand of the shelf between him and his goal.

  It all came clear. Marina had cut his umbilical to bring him out of hiding. And now he was swimming right into the clutches of Tin Man’s powerful hydraulics. It was virtual suicide. But he had no choice. He was already running low on gas. All he could do was make for the bell.

  And pray.

  Another half breath, and the tank went bone-dry. Kaz swallowed hard and stroked on.

  Tin Man’s armored limb swung out to meet him. The claw opened, ready to strike.

  A wall of water moved, and the tiger shark was upon them, exploding out of the darkness.

  Kaz went rigid, and the mechanical pincers missed him by inches. Clarence’s titanic maw yawned open and snapped shut on Tin Man’s aluminum plating. A single jagged tooth found a weak spot in the knee joint. It knifed between two pieces of metal, penetrating the suit’s one-atmosphere seal.

  There was a pop, and the weight of seven hundred feet of ocean blasted into Tin Man with the force of a battering ram. Marina never had a chance to scream. She was crushed to death in an instant.

  A pectoral fin the size of a car door smacked into the empty tank on Kaz’s back, sending him careening. By the time he’d recovered, his vision was darkening at the edges. He needed to breathe, needed it now. He could already feel himself slipping into a void far darker than the depths.

  A thought came to him, one that he assumed would be his last: He had survived Tin Man, had even survived Clarence, only to suffocate just a few feet from the open hatch of the bell.

  Something below him in the water was pushing him upward. With a burst of strength that was barely human, Menasce Gérard heaved him in through the work-lock. Limply, Kaz crashed to a pile of wet umbilicals on the curved floor.

  Adriana and Dante yanked off his helmet.

  Bobby Kaczinski took the sweetest breath he would ever remember.

  08 September 1665

  Captain James Blade came to regret his decision to have his Spanish prisoners put to death. This was not out of any sense of compassion. Rather, he now realized that he could have used them as slave labor to move the enormous treasure from Nuestra Señora to the barque.

  The treasure. For the likes of Samuel Higgins, who had never held in his threadbare pockets more than a few coppers, the galleon’s hold was the king’s counting house. There could not possibly be more wealth in all the world. The gleaming silver pieces of eight made a mountain thrice the height of the tallest man aboard the Griffin. There were enough gold bricks to build a palace. Pearls and gemstones spilled out of huge chests. Just the loose objects on the deck planking, lying where they had fallen like so much garbage, would have bought and sold empires.

  The gold bricks were the heaviest. Each one seemed to weigh four times what it should have, and even the smallest armload was almost too much for the exhausted and wounded privateers. Only forty men remained. Of their number, five were too grievously injured to work. One thing was certain, though. There would be no amputations now. York the barber had fallen in the battle for Nuestra Señora, a musket ball having pierced his heart.

  Samuel thanked God that the bone-handled whip had been flung into the sea, for surely they all would have tasted it at some point during their labors. The work was slow, and the captain was not a patient man.

  As the sun rose high over the yardarm and then began to set, Blade stood by the makeshift gangway that connected the Griffin to the much higher deck of the galleon. From that vantage point, he took stock of every coin and candlestick, cursing and berating the seamen who bore the burden of his newfound riches.

  “Stir your stumps, you lice-ridden scum! I intend to be many days from here when the Spanish fleet comes looking for this rubbish barge!”

  The captain would not even take the time to move the treasure below to the barque’s hold, so anxious was he to be away. With the wealth of the East and the New World piled about the deck among coiled lines and water barrels, he gave the order to set fire to Nuestra Señora de la Luz.

  Dusk was falling as the Griffin pulled away from the blazing galleon. James Blade straddled his deck, chortling with triumph.

  “Aye, Lucky is the name for you, boy. Fortune smiled upon me the day you came aboard this vessel.”

  A figure suddenly appeared amid the smoke of the burning ship. The Spaniard was not much older than Samuel, a cabin boy who had hidden himself deep in the galleon’s many lower decks.

  With a howl of defiance, the boy twirled a smoking ceramic firepot in a sling over his head. And then the flaming weapon was flung into the air, a streak of orange in the darkening sky. Every soul aboard the Griffin saw it, and yet it could not be stopped. It struck the deck not ten feet from Captain Blade and Samuel. As the earthenware pot shattered, the burning matchsticks ignited the packed gunpowder at its core.

  There was a sharp report as the device exploded, spraying hot pitch in all directions. Cries of pain went up among the crew as the searing brimstone splashed onto exposed flesh. Samuel felt a hot stab on his beardless cheek. The captain bellowed in agonized fury.

  As the embers flew, a single fleck of fiery sulfur found the collapsed area of deck in the barque’s stern. Directly below were stored the ship’s powder kegs.

  No attacking navy could have had the effect of that single speck of flame as it settled upon the vola-tile barrel stacked among two and twenty others.

  The Griffin blew herself to pieces. In a matter of seconds, Samuel found himself in the water. It was that sudden.

  Like most of the crew, he could not swim. He floundered in the waves, splashing wildly for just a few seconds before dipping beneath them.

  This is it, then, he thought. What a strange place for an English climbing boy to end his life.

  That life had not been a happy one. Yet as he sank deeper into the blackness, he realized wistfully how very much he wanted to live.

  Suddenly, he was struck in the chest by a hard object rising from below. Instinctively, he clasped his arms around it, and it bore him upward. He broke to the surface, gasping and choking, and stared at the object that was keeping him afloat. It was a piece of the ship’s carved figurehead, broken off in the explosion.

  “Boy — Samuel! Over here!”

  A short distance away, the captain flailed at the water in some semblance of swimming.

  Samuel stared. There were no other cries for help, no struggling sailors. Of forty men, he and Blade were the only two left alive.

  “Samuel — hold on, lad, and kick your way over to me!”

  In this most dire of circumstances, Samuel thought of the murdered Spanish prisoners, the victims in Portobelo, the abused crew of the Griffin, and of Evans the sail maker, who had died at this cruel man’s hands.

  “Hurry, boy! Your captain needs you!”

  Without hesitation, Samuel began to paddle in the op
posite direction. He paid no attention to the volley of threats and oaths that were hurled after him. And when the tirade stopped, Samuel looked back and noted that James Blade had disappeared into the sea.

  Dawn was breaking through the overcast as the storm moved off to Martinique and points east. Captain Bourassa and the skeleton crew aboard the Adventurer set about repairing the ship’s fried electrical systems.

  Star paced the deck like a caged tiger, her limp barely noticeable because of her speed and grim tension. It had been four hours since they had last been able to speak to the bell. And then the divers had been involved in a life-and-death struggle against an adversary in a half-ton suit.

  “How soon till we get comms. back up?” she asked for the fifth time that hour.

  Henri had the console open and was soldering burned wire. “No sooner for the asking so much,” he replied, and added kindly, “English, he is the best. If anyone can bring home your friends — ”

  That was the problem, Star thought. English was a great diver, but he wasn’t all-powerful.

  If anything’s happened to them, I’ll never forgive myself for surviving!

  What a weird twist — that getting bent might have saved her life.

  She bit back her impatience, and frowned as the Ponce de Léon approached out of the morning mist, and began to draw alongside. Through the haze, she could make out both Cutter and Reardon on deck.

  A deep resentment welled up inside Star. Cutter had been the enemy from the beginning. Why trust him now? True, he had warned them about Marina. But what if that was a trick? A lift basket stuffed with a fortune hung dead in the water, somewhere below the Adventurer, waiting for power to be restored to the winch. Any piece of that load could be used as evidence in court for a treasure hunter to claim the wreck as his own.

  At that moment, Star didn’t know what ordeal her friends might have been through, or even if they were alive or dead. But she could be certain of this: They would never forgive her if she allowed their find to fall into the greedy hands of Tad Cutter.