Rogue Angel 46: Treasure of Lima (15 page)

25

Captain’s
cabin

HMS
Reliant

Annja stepped into the cabin and was followed by the
others. Her gaze swept across the space, taking it in. It was far more luxurious
than even the officers’ cabins they’d examined below. A large poster bed stood
to one side. Next to that was a hand-carved wooden wardrobe, its slightly open
doors revealing several of the captain’s uniforms hanging inside. A table with
two chairs stood in the far corner, for use when the captain wished to dine
alone or with a single guest in the privacy of his quarters. Two large windows,
one of which had been broken at some point in the past, allowed a fair bit of
light into the room.

But it was the presence of a writing desk and the item atop the
desk that caught Annja’s attention.

She crossed the room and looked down at the leather-bound
journal resting there, knowing instinctively that it was the ship’s logbook. The
page to which it was open had been damaged by weather, most likely that coming
in from the broken window nearby, but a quick check showed that other pages were
still intact and legible.

Here, in this book, might be the answers they were seeking,
Annja realized.

She looked up at the others. “The ship’s log might give us some
clue as to where to go next, but it’ll take some time to look through it.”

Marcos scoffed. “Do you really think a book that’s been sitting
on that table rotting for the past two hundred years is going to help us find
Dr. Knowles?”

Annja nodded. “I do.”

“Clearly the heat’s been getting to you, then,” Marcos
retorted.

“I don’t know, Marcos,” Claire said, stepping in. “Maybe
Annja’s right. It appears that some of the crew survived. Maybe there was
something they saw or experienced that might have some bearing on what happened
to Dr. Knowles and his team.”

She looked at Annja. “See what you can find. Since we don’t
know where we’re headed after this, we might as well camp here for the night and
come up with a working plan for tomorrow.”

Claire faced the group. “Tents first and then we’ll see about
dressing that pig,” she told them, then hustled them out of the cabin.

Thankful that Claire had seen things her way, Annja settled
into a nearby chair and began to read.

She started with the earlier pages in the journal, which were
largely intact. Captain Jeffries had a fine, spidery script that made it easy to
read, as well.

The journal told the whole sorry tale.

Captain Jeffries had sighted the
Mary
Dear
off the coast of Panama and had given chase, eventually engaging
in a running gun battle that ended only when Jeffries utilized the marines he
had at his disposal to board the other vessel and take her by force. The charges
against Thompson had been simple, straightforward and beyond much doubt. A trial
presided over by Jeffries found Thompson and his crew guilty of murder and
piracy. The crew members were hung from the mizzenmast in sets of three, until
only Thompson and his first mate were left.

Thompson pleaded for Jeffries to spare his life, one captain to
another, and the British commander had agreed to do so, provided Thompson led
them to the location where he’d buried the treasure.

With little choice before him, Thompson agreed.

Annja had assumed all of that; the story as outlined by Captain
Jeffries was the same as that which had come down through history.

She flipped ahead, seeking something more relevant. She found
it several pages later.

October 2

I am astounded that I am alive to write this, for the events of
the past forty-eight hours have been a nightmare unlike any I have ever
experienced. Only by the Lord’s grace and blessing did we make it through at
all, though the cost has been considerable.

The morning of September 30 dawned calm and clear. Having
retrieved the treasure from Cocos Island the night before, we rendezvoused with
the
Mary Dear
off the leeward side of the island and
spent most of the morning transferring half of the treasure to her holds. I told
Lieutenant Johann that it was to protect the Crown’s investment should one of
our ships run into difficulty on the return voyage; at the time I had no idea
just how prophetic I was being.

When the loading was finished, a full complement of crew
members, along with dispatches I’d prepared for the admiralty, were sent over to
the other ship with orders for Johann to make for Bristol at the best possible
speed. His was the lighter, faster ship and I expected him to arrive at least
three days before I would.

We saw them off with a six-gun salute and then returned to
work repairing the last of the damage
Reliant
had
sustained during her confrontation with the
Mary
Dear
when she was under Captain Thompson’s command.

The storm began about midway through the afternoon watch and
grew worse by the hour. The nearness of the island began to make me nervous, and
as the swells increased in size, so, too, did my anxiety. As the first dogwatch
dawned, I had the men haul anchor and pointed the
Reliant
toward the open ocean.

Better to ride out the storm in deep water than get battered
about on the reef, I thought.

No sooner had we turned for open water than I heard the
lookout in the main-mast crow’s nest give a shout. He was hard to see in the
rain, but after a moment I realized that he was pointing frantically toward the
horizon. I dug out my spyglass and stared hard into the night, searching for
whatever it was that had gotten him so worked up. Lightning flashed and what I
saw in its light has been carved indelibly onto the inside of my eyelids for all
time.

The largest wave I have ever seen filled the horizon and was
looming down upon us.

We had one chance and I took it. There was no time to turn
about for we’d be caught halfway through the maneuver and swamped by the force
of the wave. Same held true for trying to outrun it. The
Reliant
was a 2100-ton vessel without the treasure aboard her. She
could lumber about like a behemoth but that was about it. No way did she have
the guts to outrun it.

Our only chance was to climb straight up it.

There was no time to furl the sails, so I gave the order to
have them cut away. We had more in the hold, so replacing them wouldn’t be
difficult. The crew jumped to carry out the order without hesitation—they were
good men and had been trained well—but even so, by the time the last rope had
been severed, the wave had gained on us considerably.

The helmsmen and his crew had just enough time to carry out my
orders to bring the boat about, aiming the bow right for the heart of the
oncoming wave, before the wave reached our location.

It towered above us, a veritable wall of water that had to be
at least a thousand feet high. Up, up, up the face of the wave we went until we
were all but vertical on the face of it. At that moment the lowest part of the
wave struck the reefs surrounding Cocos and the wave crested, smashing down upon
us and sending us flipping away from it like a cork from a bottle lost on the
high seas.

Somewhere in the midst of all the bouncing and battering I
lost consciousness.

I awoke to the silence of the dead.

The rogue wave carried us several miles inland before
depositing us like so much rejected flotsam in the middle of a stretch of
decimated jungle. We are sitting more or less upright, the hull wedged between
what is left of a dozen trees. A ten-foot hole on the aft section of the
port-side hull will need to be repaired before we can even think about being
seaworthy again, but I am not in a rush to assign a detail to repair it. It
seems futile; there is no way to get the ship back to the coast even if we could
fix the damage to the hull.

The loss of life in the storm was significant. Of all the
souls that were aboard the
Reliant
when we bid
goodbye to the
Mary Dear,
only forty-five remain. Of
those forty-five, only eleven, counting myself, are actually fit for duty. The
damage to our company is staggering and the men wander about like punch-drunk
fighters, waiting for the next blow to fall....

That’s one question answered,
Annja
thought. They had all been wondering how the
Reliant
had ended up in the middle of the jungle and now they knew. The tsunami that had
brought the ship here certainly must have been an impressive sight, if Captain
Jeffries’s guess regarding its size was correct. It might not be the largest on
record—that belonged to a 1,720 foot wave in Lituya Bay, Alaska—but it was
astounding just the same. Annja had been through a tsunami herself, albeit a
much smaller one, and knew the devastation it could bring. She had no trouble
believing that the crew of the
Reliant
had
encountered something so big that their only choice had been to buckle down the
hatches and ride it out.

She started reading ahead in the journal, only to discover a
few pages later that it hadn’t taken long for that “next blow,” as Jeffries had
called it, to fall on the crew of the
Reliant.
The
beginning of the entry was washed out, but she was still able to understand the
gist of it.

The natives returned during the night and this time they were not
content to just observe. The men of the watch were slain instantly with arrows
through the eyes. The brigands then scaled the hull of the ship and entered the
lower gun deck through the open sally ports. Four additional men died before the
noise woke the others. The general melee that followed was swift and bloody.

In the end, we were able to repulse the attackers with the
judicious use of the ship’s firearms but it was close just the same. If they
come back with a larger party, we are going to be in trouble. I needed all hands
on deck. I informed Mr. Thompson that, given our present circumstances, I was
granting him a temporary pardon and releasing him from confinement, provided
that I had his word as an officer and gentleman that he would not seek to act
against myself or my crew in any fashion.

Thompson agreed.

Additional guards were posted and several of the cannons were
moved into the sally ports and primed for use. If the natives returned, it was
my intention to blow them out of the jungle before they could attempt to storm
the ship a second time.

I needn’t have worried. The natives weren’t coming back. They
had already beaten us; we just didn’t know it yet.

Eighteen men had sustained serious injury in the attack, so we
converted one side of the lower gun deck to an infirmary to allow the ship’s
doctor to treat them all in one location. Thankfully, the need for amputations
and other major surgical procedures was limited as the natives didn’t have
firearms or cannons to cause injuries deserving of such treatment.

Three hours after the doctor had finished treating all of
their wounds, the first of the injured men grew sick. By dawn the next day, all
of the injured men had come down with the same illness. Concerned, I had the
lower gun deck declared off-limits to the rest of the crew and restricted access
to the doctor and his staff only. It didn’t do any good.

Less than forty-eight hours later, the first of the uninjured
men became sick.

After that, it was just a matter of time.

There were several
pages after that point that were illegible due to weather damage, the
pages having stuck together and, on those that weren’t, the ink so faded and
overgrown with mold that Annja couldn’t even tell where one sentence began and
another ended.

Then, on October 18, an entry with just a single sentence.

Thompson has fled.

The last entry
in the
log was written on the very next day, October 19, and within its stark phrases
Annja found the answer she was seeking. She knew what had happened to Dr.
Knowles and, more importantly, what to do to get him back.

She closed the journal and, taking it with her, went to find
the others.

26

The day had grown late while Annja read and reread the
captain’s journal. By the time she stepped out of the wardroom and onto the
upper gun deck, she discovered that the sun had all but set.

The smell of cooked meat wafted up over the side of the ship,
causing Annja’s stomach to grumble; her body had already grown tired of
rehydrated rations, it seemed. She walked to the edge and found her three
companions sitting around a large fire, the carcass of the boar they’d killed
earlier roasting within the flames. Their voices drifted up to her, but she
couldn’t make sense of what they were talking about from the few isolated words
that reached her.

She turned and made her way back down through the ship to exit
exactly as they had entered.

Marcos saw her first.

“Well? Did you find all of the answers we need?”

Annja kept her face even but inside she was frowning. Marcos
seemed to be getting more belligerent the farther away from civilization they
got. She needed to watch him a bit more carefully, she decided.

To the others, she said, “As a matter of fact, yes. I think I
know what happened to Dr. Knowles and his team.”

“Really?” Claire said, her voice full of surprise and
excitement.

Annja accepted a plate of food from Hugo and sat down at the
fire with the rest of them. She tore off a piece of meat and began to eat while
telling her story.

“According to the logbook, Thompson revealed the location of
the treasure to Captain Jeffries of the
Reliant
in
exchange for his life. Jeffries promptly ordered the treasure dug up again and
put half aboard the
Mary Dear
and half aboard the
Reliant.
The
Mary
Dear
left for England while the
Reliant
remained to finish up a few repairs.”

She paused to gulp down a few more bites; the food was
terrific.

“Before the
Reliant
could leave the
area, however, she was caught in a massive storm. In the midst of the storm, the
Reliant
was struck by a tsunami of incredible
size that carried the ship halfway across the island to where you see it
now.

“Here’s where it gets interesting. Most of the crew was lost in
the storm, but Captain Jeffries managed to get the others organized and working
as a team. They buried their dead—” Annja pointed over her shoulder at the
graveyard several yards behind her “—and buried the treasure in the cave.”

“Wait a minute,” Marcos said. “If they were all marooned here,
how did word of the treasure’s location get out? How did Dr. Knowles know to
look along the ridge instead of down by the coast, where it would have made
sense for the pirates to bury it?”

Claire beat her to the answer. “Thompson escaped.”

Annja nodded. “Jeffries refused to keep him locked up, said
they needed every spare hand they could get. Thompson bided his time and then
hightailed it out of camp one night when Jeffries wasn’t paying attention.
Somehow, someway, he made it off the island.”

“So Keating wasn’t lying—the directions he’d been given to the
treasure had actually come from Thompson, just as he claimed!” Claire
exclaimed.

“Your husband must have recognized the truth, as they brought
him to this place, as well.”

“So what?” Marcos said, his irritation plain. “All that ancient
history doesn’t do a thing to tell us what happened to Knowles. Or the
treasure.”

Annja didn’t agree. “On the contrary, I think it does. Listen
to this.”

She opened up the logbook and, with the help of the light from
the fire, read out loud Jeffries’s comments about the attack by the natives.

“Like I said before. So what?”

Annja ignored Marcos, focusing her attention on Claire, for it
would be up to Claire where the team went next.

“No one knew there were natives on the island in 1821. In fact,
this logbook is the only mention of them that I’ve ever come across. More than
two dozen expeditions have been to this place, looking for the gold, and not a
single one of them have encountered them?”

“Because they’re all dead! It was hundreds of years ago.”

Annja’s gaze never left Claire’s face. “We know at least one of
them who is not. And where there is one, there are probably a lot more.”

“Do you believe that?” Claire asked. “That it was an actual
native and not someone trying to horn in on the treasure? Perhaps even one of
Richard’s men?”

“I do. Listen to this.... ‘The morning brings with it a
shocking revelation,’” Annja quoted, reading the final entry from the logbook
aloud. “‘The last of my crew disappeared in the night. Eighteen healthy men
vanished without a trace.’

“‘At first I thought they had decided en masse to reject my
leadership. That they had headed for the coast despite my fears that the island
would be struck by a secondary wave. But when I checked on the men in the
infirmary, I discovered that they had, to a man, been murdered in their beds.
Standing in the midst of their lifeless bodies was another of those monkey-faced
idols we’d discovered before.’

“‘The natives had returned and, for whatever reason, had slain
the sick and taken the healthy men of my crew with them when they’d left.’”

Annja glanced up from the logbook and knew from the expression
on Claire’s face that she’d put two and two together.

But Annja wasn’t finished reading. Not yet.

She went on. “‘Knowing I couldn’t live with myself if I left my
crew at the mercy of the natives,’” she read, “‘I’ve decided to go after them. I
have several days of food and plenty of water, so when I am done writing this, I
will set out in pursuit. I will leave the logbook behind so that there will be a
record if I fail in my task. I will also mark the trail in my wake in the rare
case that someone finds this logbook and attempts to come after me.’

“‘Written this twenty-third day of October, in the year of our
Lord Eighteen Twenty-One.’

“‘Captain Martin Jeffries.’”

Even Marcos understood the similarities now. Two hundred years,
give or take a decade or two, separated them from Captain Jeffries and his crew,
but what they had experienced was almost identical to that of the British
commander.

“Are you suggesting that not only Dr. Knowles and his team but
also the crew of the
Sea Dancer
were taken captive
by these so-called natives?” Claire asked.

Annja nodded, her gaze locked with that of Claire. “I am.”

“And what are you proposing we do about it?”

“I would think that would be obvious,” Annja said with a smile.
“Go after them, of course.”

From the look on Marcos’s face, he agreed with her for a
change.

It wasn’t long before they decided to investigate the area
around the ship for the marker Captain Jeffries claimed to have left. If they
found it, they would continue in that direction. If they did not, they would
discuss the issue a bit further and, hopefully, come to some consensus as to the
direction they should take.

With their plan made, the group finished their meal and then
settled in for the night, with each of them taking a turn at watch.

Sunrise could not come soon enough for Annja.

* * *

A
NNJA
WAS
CLIMBING
high in the
rigging of a sailing ship, the rain lashing against her face as she moved
upward with every step. She kept her attention on the ropes in front of her,
knowing one slip would mean a long fall either onto the deck or into the
sea, neither of which would be good for her.

She could hear the captain shouting out
orders below, but she had a hard time understanding them over the crack of
the thunder overhead and the howl of the wind in her ears. It didn’t matter,
really; she knew the orders weren’t for her. She had a job already—cutting
down the sail on the main mast—and that took precedence over everything else
for one simple reason. If the sail stayed up, they were all dead,
anyway.

She planted her feet, gripped the shrouds
tightly and turned her head to look out toward the vast ocean. A flash of
lightning lit the sky, and for a second, she saw it silhouetted there
against the darkness.

The wave that was coming to consume them
alive.

Fear raced down her spine and for a moment
she was frozen there, knife between her teeth, fingers clenched around the
shroud lines like a corpse trapped in rigor, and it was only the realization
that she would become exactly that
—
a
corpse
—
if she didn’t get moving that sent her
clambering upward again.

Reaching her destination, she wrapped her
hand tightly about the lines, then used the other to take the knife from her
mouth and begin sawing through the thick ropes that held the sail to the
crossbeam of the mast. The cold rain wasn’t making it easy; her fingers were
having a hard time holding on to the knife.

A frantic glance over her
shoulder.

The wave was not only closer, but larger,
as well.

She began to saw faster....

The scene shifted. The wave was left
behind and she found herself in the dimness of the lower gun deck, cutlass
in hand as she fought in the half-light against an unknown
assailant.

It was the cutlass that clued her in that
she was dreaming. There was only one sword she would willingly choose to
fight with, and a cutlass certainly wasn’t it. She tried to get herself to
wake up, but either her subconscious wasn’t listening or there was something
it wanted her to see, for it completely ignored her commands and the dream
continued around her, unabated. Unable to stop it, Annja simply went with
the flow.

The lanterns had been extinguished
earlier, and without them it was hard to see exactly who they were fighting
against. What little moonlight there was showed Annja glimpses of men in
tunics, carrying shields and spears. They shouted in an unfamiliar language
as they charged the line of half-awake sailors....

Another scene shift and this time she
found herself standing outside the hull of the
Reliant
in a light tropical rain, gazing back at the wreckage with a
mixture of sorrow and determination. She had the sense she wouldn’t see the
old girl again and that saddened her; the
Reliant
had been her command for the past several years and the two of them had
taken care of each other for all that time. She was a sturdy ship and it
wasn’t fair that she should end her days marooned in the middle of the
jungle on an ignored island like this one, but there was little that could
be done about it.

Filled with the sense of abandoning an old
friend, she stared out into the jungle, wondering if they were out there,
watching, even now. She suspected that they were. Believed, in fact, that
they’d been under continuous observation ever since the storm had dumped
them in this place.

So be it.

She cast about looking for the ideal spot
to affix her mark. Several rocks jutted out of the jungle floor nearby and
from this perspective they reminded her of a giant python. She stepped over
to the first stone, the head of the snake, so to speak, and, taking out her
knife, carved an arrow pointing north onto the surface of the stone. Beneath
it she carved the date—1/25.

Satisfied that she’d done what she could
to direct anyone who might come after her, she set off into the
jungle.

From the bushes, several pairs of eyes
watched her go....

* * *

A
NNJA
AWOKE
WITH
A
START
.
Her heart was racing and her body was covered with
a sheen of sweat, as if she’d just run a mile through the rain.

It was early morning, the sunlight just beginning to filter
through the trees. Mists of steam rose from the jungle floor as the heat began
to bake away the moisture from the night before. A glance showed Claire and Hugo
still in their sleeping bags. For a moment she couldn’t find Marcos, but then
spotted him sitting against the hull of the
Reliant,
looking outward into the trees around him; he’d had the night’s final watch. He
nodded in her direction but didn’t make any move to get up, for which Annja was
grateful. She didn’t want to make small talk and take the chance of forgetting
some of the details from her dream. She had this crazy idea...

Annja slipped out of her sleeping bag, pulled on her boots and
walked around to the other side of the
Reliant.
In
her dream she’d been standing with the wreckage of the ship to her left and
slightly behind her, so she put herself in a similar position and then began
searching for the snakelike rock formation.

It took a few minutes. The rocks had sunk deeper into the earth
and were hidden in part by an overgrown patch of ferns, but after some searching
she found them. Once she’d located them, she moved to the stone that served as
the snake’s head and began examining its surface, looking for the mark. The fact
that the stones themselves were here at all had buoyed her confidence that she
wasn’t totally crazy for thinking there was even a speck of truth to her dream.
Now all she had to do was find the arrow....

But it wasn’t there. She searched the top of the rock, even
scraping away the lichen that had grown there, looking for it to no avail.

You imagined it,
her inner voice
told her.
You saw the rock from the deck of the ship and
your subconscious just added it to your dream. There’s no mark.There never
was.