“Yeah, but how do you know he won’t change his mind?”
“He won’t. He’d wind up on the hot seat himself for not calling his boss when I showed up.” Another head shake. “Shit!”
“Well, Tom. I’m sorry about this.” And he was. “But there’s nothing to be done, so let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”
“No, wait. There is something to be done. But not about my account.”
“Then what?”
“The Sombra.”
“Oh no.” Jack backed away. “No-no-no-no.”
“Jack, it’s a chance—my only chance right now.”
“It’s not a chance. It’s a pipe dream. Look, I’ll lend you money, help you get a new identity. I’ll even—”
“Help me a different way: Help me find the Sombra. Help me find the Lilitongue of Gefreda.”
This was crazy. What was he thinking?
“Look, Tom, even if I had time to help you—and I don’t because I promised Gia I’d be back day after tomorrow—how can two men excavate a sunken ship?”
“That’s exactly how most of those three hundred fifty wrecks were uncovered: by two-man teams. We’re not talking the Titanic here. The damn ship was only seventy-five feet long. And excavating is an amazingly simple process.”
“Shoveling sand? Underwater? Are you crazy?”
Tom smiled. “Underwater, yes. But no shoveling. There’s a much easier, better way. You just—”
“News bulletin: I’ve never scuba dived. Not once.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Never had a need to. Not a frequently called-upon skill in New York.”
“I’ll teach you. Nothing to it. We’ll only be down about forty feet, so you can learn all you need to know in twenty minutes, tops.”
“I can learn all I need to know in zero minutes because I’m not going.”
“Jack, I need your help on this. I can’t do it alone. You promised you’d help.”
“And I will help. But not on a wild goose chase.”
“The ship’s there, Jack. I know it. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on the map. And if it contains anything of value, it’ll make up for my frozen account.”
“Let’s be sensible here. This map’s been around for four hundred years and no one decided to go looking for the ship before you?”
“Well, it was hidden away most of those centuries. And the few who understood it probably figured it was fake.”
Smart folks, Jack thought.
“Everyone except you.”
“Right. And Wenzel’s research confirmed it. He had no interest in the ship; the map itself was his prize. He’d researched it thoroughly and believed whoever had made it was sincere.”
“Crazy people can be sincere. Some of the most sincere people I’ve ever met have had their receivers off the hook.”
“I won’t argue that. But I’ve been to the spot on the map. Last time I was here I went out with a handheld GPS unit and found it. I dove it. It’s a deep sand hole.”
Jack couldn’t hide his surprise. “If you’ve been there already, what do you need me for?”
“Because I couldn’t find it.”
“And you think I will?”
“We will. I’ll bet my butt it broke apart on the reef and what’s left of it is still in that hole, covered with sand. And you and I are going to excavate it.”
A perking suspicion bubbled to the surface.
“Was this your plan all along, Tom?”
He looked puzzled. “What?”
“A bait and switch. Do you really have a secret account in there? Or did you make me think I was helping you run some money when all along you wanted to rope me into a sunken treasure dive?”
Tom raised a hand. “Swear to God, Jack, I absolutely do have a frozen account in that bank.”
“Then why make such a big deal of the map on the trip out?”
Tom reddened. “I did not make a big deal. I just thought it would interest you.” He looked away. “Okay… I suppose I was hoping to pique your interest enough to get you to dive it with me as, you know, a lagniappe. We’d split whatever we found.”
Bullshit or not? Jack could no longer tell truth from fiction with this guy.
Tom looked at him again. “But we’re not talking bonus anymore. We’re talking desperate necessity.”
“Tom… no.”
Tom’s mouth twisted. “Fine. You want to head home, go to it. But you’ll be going without me.”
“What?”
“And if you leave me here, I’m stuck here. The only way I’ll get back to the States will be in handcuffs. I’d hope you wouldn’t do that to me.”
“Staying will be your choice.”
“And you—how far do you think you can take the Sahbon without me?”
Good question. Jack didn’t know if he could pilot the boat through the reefs, let alone all the way back to North Carolina. He’d learned enough on the trip out to hazard a try, but couldn’t guarantee that the Sahbon wouldn’t end up on Bermuda’s shipwreck map.
And if the Bermuda coast guard or whatever they were called had to pull him off the reef, they’d want some ID, they’d want to see his passport.
Shit.
Tom’s tone shifted from challenging to pleading. “Two days, Jack… two freaking extra days. If we haven’t found anything by sundown Friday, we head home. I swear—I swear on Mom’s grave.”
Jack could feel himself being backed into a corner.
An old saying came to mind: No good deed shall go unpunished. Right.
Never should have come.
“You’ve got to take my back on this, Jack. I hate to bring up Dad again—”
“Then don’t.”
“—but I have to. If he were here he’d say, What’s two more days in the grand scheme of things if you can help your brother out of the worst jam of his life?”
Jack knew full well the guilt trip Tom was laying on him, but that didn’t make it any easier to shake off.
Yeah, Dad probably would have wanted him to help Tom get another chance.
Jack held up his hands in a surrender gesture. He knew he was going to regret this.
“Okay, okay. If Gia’s cool with me gone a couple of extra days, I’ll stay. But only till Friday. Not a moment longer.”
Tom sagged against the bank’s pink stucco wall. “Thanks, Jack. You don’t know what this means to me. I’ll owe you the rest of my life.”
Jack didn’t want Tom to owe him anything.
* * *
3
By midday they were ready to get to work.
Gia hadn’t minded his being away two extra days, but she had minded the scuba part. He’d promised he’d be careful.
After that the rest of the morning had been frenzied activity, starting with hiring one of the local minivan taxis to take them to St. George’s Parish. Tom had called around and found a place there that had what they needed.
The cab dropped them at a salvage company were they picked up a small pickup loaded with a diesel pump and coiled lengths of ribbed plastic hose. The rental charge went on Jack’s card.
A block away they rented two scuba setups: wet suits, vests, weights, air tanks, masks, snorkels, flippers, and regulators. That charge too went on Jack’s card.
Good thing he had a high limit.
The credit card company regularly offered John Tyleski a higher credit limit. And John, good consumer that he was, kept accepting.
Then came the harrowing trip in the truck from St. George’s at the base of the shaft all the way around to Somerset Parish near the barb on the hook where they’d left the boat.
The accent wasn’t the only thing British about Bermuda. Here too they drove on the wrong side of the road.
Tom did okay navigating the narrow, two-lane roads in the left lane, saying you adapt pretty quickly. The only time he seemed to have a problem was at the roundabouts. He started to turn right at the first. He was looking left when he should have been loo
king right. Jack’s last-minute warning yell saved them from a head-on with a taxi.
And Gia had been worried about scuba. The reefs would be a picnic compared to the roads. It might have been off season, but they were busy. No speeding and few passing opportunities on these tight strips of asphalt, and no shortcuts—at least none known to nonnatives—on this narrow string of islands.
The ten-mile trip took almost an hour, but they’d made it.
Jack immediately started his scuba lessons off the Beresfords’ dock.
Tom had told him it was easy, that they’d be down in that sand hole by midday. Piece of cake.
Sure. Piece of cake.
But he had to admit his brother was a good teacher. And Tom had been right about it not being rocket science: Breathe through the mouthpiece, inflate your vest when you want to rise, deflate it when you want to descend. Know how to clear your mask and equalize your ear pressure every three feet or so as you descend.
In less than an hour he was reasonably functional with the gear and fairly comfortable in the water.
Jack wondered why no one had ever told him about the wonders of scuba diving. Of course, not many of his acquaintances were the scuba type, and Manhattan wasn’t exactly a dive mecca. Still…
No number of Jacques Cousteau specials or repeat viewings of The Deep could convey the magic of becoming part of the sea habitat, of hanging out with the fish and the mollusks and crustaceans and all the graceful, undulating plants in their own world.
But it was more than hanging out. It was becoming one with them. To sink beneath the surface and be able to stay there, to float weightless, still, silent, watching. The peace, the serenity, the solitude… like nothing he’d ever experienced.
He loved it.
Then they’d boarded the Sahbon and Tom steered them out of the sound and toward the reefs, using his GPS doodad to guide them to the spot that supposedly contained the remains of the Sombra. They’d anchored over a sand hole and suited up.
“Ready?” Tom said.
With his skinny arms and legs arrayed around a big gut stretching the neoprene of his hooded wet suit to its tensile limits, he looked ridiculous. All he needed were a couple of Ping-Pong eyeballs and he’d be ready to play one of the aliens in Killers from Space.
“What if I said no?”
Sinking beneath the surface off the dock and jumping off a boat eight miles from shore were not quite the same. Not even close. He looked back at the roofs on the islands gleaming in the midday sun.
“Jack…”
“Okay, I’m ready,” he said, then added, “You sure this is the place?”
Tom nodded. “Sombra waits below.”
“If you say so. What if we see a shark?”
Tom gave a dismissive wave. “If you do, it’ll be a harmless variety. Now, here’s how it’s going to work. See the way we’re pulling on the anchor line? That’s the way the current is running. We’re situated over the upstream end of the sand hole. That’s the way we’ll work: Start upstream and slowly move downstream. Got it?”
“Sure. Instead of kicking sand in our own faces, it’ll all float downstream.”
“Exactly. One of us handles the hose while the other stays low and watches for artifacts—preferably of the gold and silver variety.”
“And that’s going to uncover the wreck?”
“I know it sounds simplistic, but that’s the way it’s done. The intake hose brings seawater to the pump; the pump then shoots it through the outflow hose; the stream of water from the nozzle sweeps away the bottom sand a layer at a time. It’s simple but ingenious.”
Jack looked around. The Sahbon sat alone on the glittering water. The coast of St. George’s lay seven or eight miles to the south. To the north, past the outer rim of the reef, the bottom dropped off to six hundred feet, and then a couple of miles down to the base of the Bermuda rise.
He felt exposed out here.
And uncomfortable.
Clear sky, clear air, clear water, gentle breeze, glittering waves… where did this vague unease come from?
“Tom, what are we really doing here?”
His brother’s face was a study of innocent perplexity. “I don’t know how to answer that, Jack. We’re starting an impromptu archaeological excavation in search of long-lost treasure in an attempt to save my ass. What other reason could there be?”
Jack couldn’t think of one. But he sensed one.
“All right. Let me ask you once again: If the Bermuda coast guard or navy or whatever they use to patrol these waters stops by and asks who we are and what we’re doing, what are we going to say?”
He’d posed this to Tom a number of times since this morning but had yet to receive a satisfactory answer.
“They won’t. No reason they should. We’re anchored well outside the reef preserve, we’re nowhere near any of the protected wrecks. We’re just a couple of divers.”
“But just say they do a random check. We are, in a very true sense, illegal aliens. I don’t want to end up in that prison.”
“Will you stop worrying? You sound like a nervous old biddy.”
Attention to details, anticipating potential problems before they became real… it had kept Jack alive and on the right side of jail bars. So far.
Tom stepped over to the pump. They’d placed the heavy, steamer-trunk-sized contraption near the transom. The hoses were in the water and ready to go. The short feeder had a weighted end that hung over the port side and drifted a couple of feet below the surface; the coils of the longer one, a fifty footer, floated on the starboard side.
A touch of the starter button brought the pump’s diesel engine to sputtering life. The end of the longer hose began bubbling and snaking about as it filled with water drawn through its shorter brother.
Tom fitted his mask over his face. “See you downstairs,” he said in a nasal voice.
He stuck the mouthpiece between his lips, waved, then fell backward into the water. He hit with a splash, righted himself, then grabbed the end of the hose. He motioned Jack to follow him, then kicked away toward the bottom.
Jack adjusted his own mask, then took a test breath through the mouthpiece. Everything seemed to be working, but he hesitated. He was about to jump into a hole and couldn’t help but remember another hole, the one in the Everglades, the one that had no bottom…
Shaking it off, he seated himself on the gunwale, tank over the water and—here goes—toppled backward.
He hit the water and let himself sink. Immediately the tank and the weight belt became weightless, the clumsy, unwieldy, uncomfortable gear became lithe and supremely functional. He held his nose and popped his ears, then kicked toward the bottom, following the hose down to where Tom hovered and waited forty feet below.
This sand hole was a forty-foot-deep oblong depression in the reef, about half as wide as it was long. They’d anchored near the upstream edge, so as Jack dropped through the crystalline water, popping his ears whenever the pressure became uncomfortable, he checked out the nearby coral wall.
Something strange here.
He drifted over for a closer look. The coral looked bleached and barren—no sea grasses, no algae, no vegetation at all. No sponges or anemones, no starfish or sea urchins. A closer look showed not a single living coral polyp.
The reef was dead.
Jack had heard of coral blights that wiped out entire reefs. Maybe that was the story here. He looked around and could not find a single fish. Even in the shallow water by the dock he’d been accompanied by a wide variety of brightly colored fish. He’d been able to identify a parrotfish and an angelfish, but the rest were strangers.
Here, on this reef, however… no movement, no color.
In a way that made sense. The coral polyps were the bedrock of the reef ecosystem. When they died, the hangers-on went off in search of greener pastures.
But you’d think you’d see at least one fish.
Jack did a full three-sixty. Nope. Not one. Nothing alive in t
his sand hole except Tom and him.
He shook off the creeps crawling up his back and kicked down toward where Tom was impatiently motioning him to come on!
When Jack reached him, Tom signaled him to sink closer to the bottom. When Jack was down, almost prone, Tom aimed the hose at the floor. The invisible stream of water stirred up the sand, billowing it up to then drift downstream, leaving a smooth depression in the floor.