Their work was as exhausting as it was boring, but this was the only way to excavate a shipwreck long buried in a living reef: First, use Diplodocus as a blower in order to blast the weakened coral to bits, kicking up all the mud and artifacts trapped underneath. Then, vacuum up the debris and search for something of value.
That was what Cutter and Marina were doing. The backwash from the airlift was deposited into a huge wire-mesh basket that floated off the Ponce de León’s stern. Load by load, the two treasure hunters winched the tons of broken coral on deck, combing painstakingly through it, breaking up larger chunks with hammers.
So far, they had recovered a great deal of items in this way — ceramic cups, bowls, and plates, glass bottles, brass buttons and medallions, rusted metal nails, hinges, pulleys, buckles, musket shot, and cannonballs. Old ballast stones littered the deck of the research vessel. An anchor and the coral-encrusted barrels of two cannons lay out of sight in the ship’s hold. They had found every sort of artifact — with one exception.
“Where’s the treasure?” roared Cutter, tapping at a lump of coral with half a saucer encased in it. “We didn’t go through all this for a boatload of broken dishes!”
“The kids found a piece of eight,” Marina pointed out, tossing a ball of grapeshot on top of a pile of the stuff.
“Yeah, one coin out of a king’s ransom,” Cutter said disgustedly. “Nuestra Señora de la Luz was packed with silver and gold. That fleet carried the wealth of Asia and South America for an entire year! Where is it?”
Marina frowned. “Can we be sure this is Nuestra Señora de la Luz?”
“It has to be. Every knickknack we pull up is Spanish in origin. There was only one galleon lost off Saint-Luc in the mid-seventeenth century. Most of the treasure fleets took the northern route, via Havana and the Florida Straits.” He sighed. “I guess we’ll just have to dig harder.”
He signaled Bill Hamilton, captain of the Ponce de León, who activated the winch. The small crane hoisted the basket up off its raft, and another load of debris hit the deck between the two treasure hunters.
Cutter stared. Buried amid the coral fragments was a dive mask.
“Chris!” Marina shouted.
They rushed to the gunwale and peered below. Reardon wasn’t technically scuba diving. He was breathing through a long hose connected to a Brownie compressor that floated beside the boat. Marina grabbed the safety line and gave two sharp tugs, the UP signal.
They waited — a breathless wait.
Marina looked nervous. “Decomp?”
Reardon had been on the bottom at sixty-five feet for nearly an hour — long enough to start thinking about decompression. Maybe he had paused during his ascent.
The alternative was too awful to think about: If he had somehow gotten his head caught in the airlift’s nozzle …
And then Reardon broke the surface with a splash. His swimming was awkward because of his heavy belt and boots, but he managed to struggle to the Brownie.
“What’s the problem?” he called.
Seeing the mask on their partner’s face, Cutter and Marina exchanged a confused glance.
Marina cupped her hands to her mouth. “Did you see anything down there?”
“Are you kidding?” came the reply. “When that monster’s on, I can barely see my hands in front of my face.”
Cutter turned to Marina. “This is a popular dive spot. That mask could have been there for years.”
She examined the faceplate, molded plastic, and rubber headband. There wasn’t a speck of coral, algae, or anemone growth anywhere.
“Yeah, probably,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
* * *
After some frantic searching, the divers were able to locate their DPVs in the murky water. Adriana never found her mask.
It was a tense ride back to the station. The interns barely noticed the spectacular colors of the reef, or the multitudes of creatures that darted around, agitated by the airlift’s tempest. All thoughts were riveted to their near miss. No serious injuries, and Reardon hadn’t seen them. But it had been close. Too close.
Star’s eyes never left the glowing dial of the compass on her dive watch. She led the way until she reached one of the fixed navigation lines that fanned out from PUSH. There they turned left and followed the white rope until the familiar shape of the habitat appeared out of the blue.
Dante was last up the ladder, but he was already babbling excitedly the instant his mouth cleared the water in the wet porch. “Man, what hit us, an underwater tornado?”
He was interrupted by a low, muffled banging.
Adriana started. “What was that?”
But there was the sound again, like someone knocking on glass.
Dante peered out the viewing port.
“Who are you looking for?” Star asked in an amused tone. “The Avon lady?”
And then a loud, tinny amplified voice blared, “No! Over here!”
The four interns jumped. Dr. Ocasek peered out at them from the round window of the station’s decompression chamber.
“Sorry to startle you,” the scientist chuckled through the intercom. “I know you weren’t expecting to find me in here. I have to rush topside.”
In PUSH language, rushing meant getting there seventeen hours later. It took that long for the chamber to bring an aquanaut back to surface pressure without risk of the bends — decompression sickness. The interns would have to go through the same treatment when their stay was over.
“I thought you were here for another week,” Kaz said.
“It’s kind of an emergency,” Dr. Ocasek admitted. “A small explosion in my part of the lab up there. I can’t understand it. My experiments hardly ever explode.”
“Is it safe for us to stay here on our own?” Dante asked uneasily.
“Oh, they’re sending someone else down. I assured them that you kids are totally independent. But you know what a worrywart Geoffrey can be.”
“Right,” said Kaz. They were certain that Dr. Geoffrey Gallagher couldn’t have cared less about the four of them. If Poseidon’s director was worried, it was over the bad publicity that would fall on the institute if anything happened to four teenagers on their guest staff. That kind of black eye might even shut down production of the documentary film that was going to make him the next Jacques Cousteau.
They shrugged out of their gear and filed through the pressure hatch into the station proper.
“You’ve got to be more careful,” Star admonished Dante. “You almost spilled the beans in front of Iggy back there.”
Kaz was shocked. “You think Iggy’s in with Cutter and his people?”
“Of course not,” Star replied. “But if we keep quiet, there’s less chance of word getting back to Cutter that we’re onto him. For all we know, Iggy is Poseidon’s number one blabbermouth. We don’t want him spreading it around that Reardon’s down on the reef with something that nearly blew us up.”
“I think that thing was an airlift,” Adriana said. “Some of the underwater archaeologists at the British Museum use them, but only as a last resort. They’re so strong that they sometimes smash more artifacts than they collect.”
“They smash innocent by-swimmers too,” Dante added.
“We were lucky,” Adriana said solemnly.
“How do you figure that?” asked Kaz.
“An airlift works like a vacuum cleaner. We got to Reardon when it was blowing out, breaking up debris. If we’d come along when the nozzle was set to suck, somebody could have gotten killed.”
“That’s our treasure they’re vacuuming,” Dante complained bitterly. “If they get rich off our discovery — ”
“They won’t,” Star promised. “But first we’d better see exactly what they’ve found over there.”
“What are we going to do?” challenged Kaz. “Swim up and tell Reardon we’re stealing back our shipwreck?”
“No,” replied Star, “we wait till he goes home and then steal
it back.”
“But you know Cutter’s schedule,” Dante protested. “He’s on that reef from the crack of dawn till after dark. The only time to avoid him would be the middle of the —”
The others stared at Star in dismay. Was she suggesting that they navigate all the way to the excavation and back again in the inky blackness of underwater night?
She looked at them pityingly. “They’re called lights, guys. Maybe you’ve heard of them.” A broad grin split her delicate features. “And just wait till you get a load of the ocean at night.”
Kaz peered nervously down at the black water at the bottom of the hatch. He was afraid, no question about it. Not of the usual night hazards — becoming lost or disoriented. Or torch failure, which could strand a diver in a silent world of infinite dark.
No, Kaz’s fear stemmed directly from the object of his greatest childhood interest and obsession: sharks.
Sharks are night feeders. It was in every single volume of an entire home library dedicated to the sea predators. Did that mean nocturnal divers were in any extra danger? Even the experts weren’t sure.
Kaz had never truly understood his lifelong fascination with sharks until he’d come face to face with them in the waters of the Hidden Shoals. That had cleared it all up: He was scared to death of them.
Most of the local sharks were nurse and reef sharks three or four feet long — pretty harmless, if you didn’t make them mad. But Kaz knew that larger, more aggressive cousins — bulls, hammerheads, makos — also prowled these waters. And somewhere lurked Clarence, the eighteen-foot monster tiger shark with a gullet large enough to swallow a filing cabinet whole.
Suppressing his unease, Kaz started down the ladder. “I’ll go first,” he mumbled, then bit his mouthpiece and let the water swallow him up.
The headlamp in his dive hood created a zone of illumination around him, a funnel-shaped cocoon of light in the great dark sea. He finned away from the station’s bulk, adjusting his buoyancy with the B.C. valve. The reef’s rush hour was over. But he soon realized that the water was just as crowded with different, smaller creatures. The ocean was alive with millions of undulating blue larvae, each one just a few millimeters long. They hung there, absolutely defenseless, as they were attacked by the thousands by tiny, round, tentacled predators —
Polyps! Kaz thought in sudden understanding. At night, coral polyps dislodge from the reef and go hunting! He was witnessing the very bottom of a food chain that extended all the way to Clarence, wherever he was.
Far away, I hope.
The other interns floated around him now, taking in the night scene. Following Star’s lead, they switched off their headlamps. The ocean seemed pitch-black at first, yet as Kaz’s eyes adjusted, he began to see the glow of the moon, penetrating through sixty-five feet of water. Light and color shone all around them from the bodies of fish. It was bioluminescence — the emission of light from living creatures. Like a large moving mushroom, a jellyfish glowed pale pink as it pulsed by. Even the plankton was bioluminescent, causing the water itself to sparkle like glitter makeup.
They switched their headlamps back on, and Star led the way to the wreck site, navigating by the compass on her watch. It gave Kaz a giddy feeling of power to outrace the fish, many of which appeared to be asleep. Some hung motionless in the water; others had attached themselves to kelp and sea fans. There were even a few “sleepwalkers.”
Sleep-swimmers, Kaz corrected himself.
The wreck site was difficult to find. They would have missed it completely if the water hadn’t still been a little cloudy from the use of the airlift hours earlier. With their DPVs set on low, they circled the area, spiraling gradually inward, until at last Dante’s sharp eyes fell on the coral ditch that was Cutter’s excavation.
Adriana emptied her B.C. to lessen her buoyancy. Setting down her scooter, she planted herself on her knees on the bottom and began to sift through the limestone rubble. She worked alone for a few moments while the others hung back, uncertain what to do. Then, noticing their inactivity, she gestured impatiently for them to join her.
Kaz settled himself beside her and began to sort debris. The operation reminded him of the time he was eight when the phone company had busted up the Kaczinski driveway to repair a broken wire. The neighborhood kids had spent days “mining” the blocks of blacktop. It had been a good time, made doubly precious to Kaz by the fact that he was constantly being whisked off to some hockey practice while everybody else had fun.
But here — two thousand miles, sixty-five vertical feet, and two atmospheres of pressure from his home in Toronto — there was an immediacy, a truth to this moment. This was a real shipwreck, pursued by real treasure hunters. And the treasure, if it was there, would be worth real money — millions, probably.
Enough to change our lives forever.
It was theirs for the taking — or losing, if they stood by and let Cutter’s people have their way. He dug faster.
Gold fever. He remembered the term from a social studies unit on the Klondike gold rush. He could feel himself coming down with the disease. The oppressive click and hiss of his own breathing was amplified by the scuba gear. It was accelerating, and so was his heartbeat. The moment when he would push aside a block of coral to reveal gleaming treasure underneath seemed so close he could almost taste it. And the compulsion to keep digging overpowered everything, even fatigue.
He could see it in the urgent actions of his fellow divers as well. It was especially obvious in Dante’s intense, almost crazed eyes, magnified by the prescription lens of his mask.
They worked tirelessly, moving blocks that would have been far too heavy to handle on land. The increased effort ate up their air supplies, and soon it was time to switch to the backup tanks.
Kaz hurriedly snapped the hose back into place. His first breath drew a mouthful of burning salt water into his lungs. Choking, he fumbled with the connection, desperate to restore the flow of air. He finally got it right, but each convulsive hack drew in more water, causing a chain reaction of coughing.
Star grabbed him by the shoulders. “Are you all right?” she shouted into her mouthpiece.
Kaz tried to signal okay with his thumb and forefinger, but he could not get his breathing back under control. With effort, he narrowed his focus to the bowl-shaped debris field below them. The less he thought about the constant tickle in his throat, the less he was likely to cough. But the search was becoming frustrating. There was nothing here but a pile of rocks.
He frowned. This couldn’t be right. The shattered coral was jagged, random. But these rocks were round, and mostly smooth, like quarry stones. What were they doing at the bottom of the Caribbean?
He cast a perplexed look at Adriana. It was hard to read the expression behind her mask, but her eyes were alight with excitement. She pulled her dive slate from the pocket of her vest and wrote: BALLAST.
Of course! She had told them about this. Old wooden ships carried tons of ballast rocks to prevent them from keeling over in rough seas.
This is it! The ship itself, locked in coral for more than three hundred years!
Then, as if his realization had opened the floodgates, the artifacts began to come. First, Star pulled out what looked like a lump on a stick. Upon closer inspection, it was a pewter spoon, its bone handle imprisoned in coral. Next, Dante’s sharp eyes fell on a fragment of a dinner plate. A brass crucifix was Adriana’s first find, followed by a handful of lead musket balls. More cutlery followed — they stuffed dozens of spoons and knives in their mesh dive bags. Dante pulled out another plate, this one intact except for a small wedge-shaped nick in the edging. Star came up with a small glass bottle in perfect condition.
Dante scribbled TREASURE?! on his slate. Adriana shook her head impatiently, digging with both gloved hands. Her face glowed with purpose.
Kaz latched onto a round coral fragment and brought it into the beam of his headlamp. The light flickered, then stabilized, giving him his first good look at the ob
ject before him.
A scream was torn from his throat, dispatching a cloud of bubbles to the surface.
There, partially encased in coral, was a human skull.
The skull slipped from his grip and settled back on the shattered reef. The others gawked in revulsion.
Calm down, Kaz told himself. People die in shipwrecks. You know that. This is no great shock.
But it was a shock. He was here to dive, not to come face-to-face with death.
It happened three hundred years ago! This is no different from the mummy exhibit at the museum!
Star was more concerned about Kaz’s flickering headlamp. Equipment failure could be even more devastating on a night dive. She checked her air supply. The gauge read 1600 psi, but the others were inexperienced divers, and probably had less. It was a good idea to head home.
Their bags full of artifacts, they returned to their scooters for the ride back to PUSH. Unlike the trip over, Kaz barely noticed the nocturnal life of the reef that was all around him. The horror-movie image of the skull hung before him like a totem of doom. How must it have felt to drown in these waters? Especially for a European sailor, so far from anything familiar?
We look at that wreck as an underwater ATM, he thought. But it’s also a mass grave.
He felt the weight of the items in his goody bag tethered to his belt. Stealing from the dead. Well, not exactly. Nobody from that long-lost ship could have any use for this stuff now. But it didn’t feel right.
* * *
Dr. Ocasek was still shut away in the decompression chamber, so it was pretty easy for the interns to smuggle their dive bags into the main lock. Adriana spread a towel over the stainless steel counter, and they placed their dripping artifacts across it.
Kaz stared intently at the coral-encrusted objects as if expecting some hidden discovery to burst upon him like a sunrise. Then he turned to Adriana. “Am I excited about this?”
“Of course,” she replied with a frown. “All this stuff is consistent with the seventeenth century. The cutlery handles are made of bone or wood. And the workmanship looks a lot like things I’ve seen at the museum from the same time period.”