Circle of Bones (5 page)

The sword came to rest on his right shoulder. Then the Knight swung it over to his left shoulder.

“I dub thee Thor, Knight of the Order of Skull and Cross Bones.”

CHAPTER FIVE

At sea off Guadeloupe

March 25, 2008

12:35 p.m.

“Are you all right?” Riley called out after she cut the engine. Her boat ghosted to a stop.  

“Yeah. Sure am glad to see you, though. Don’t know how much longer I would have lasted.” 

The man’s face was deeply tanned, and even though his brown hair was slicked back against his skull, she could see the streaks of sun-bleached blond. His legs moved like shadowy blue scissors beneath the sparkling surface, and he was breathing hard from the exertion of swimming.

Riley unsnapped the shackle on the gate at the stern and motioned the man around to the boarding ladder. “You can climb aboard back here. Just duck under the dinghy.” Her inflatable hung in davits above the water.

As he swam to the stern, she scanned the water looking for another boat. All her senses were on high alert. She’d read that incidences of piracy were very rare in these waters, but all her years of training made her suspect everyone and everything. There was not another boat in sight.

He pulled himself onto the swim step aft. He was stark naked except for a gold coin on a chain around his neck. Where the chain crossed his collarbone, two words were tattooed onto the brown skin, written in a script she couldn’t read from this distance. 

It wasn’t as though she had never seen a naked man before; in seven years in the service, the sight of buck naked men had grown too common around whichever Marine House she was calling home. She averted her eyes, more out of courtesy than modesty — but not before noticing he had no tan lines on his stocky, muscular body.

“Wait there,” she said.

She was standing by the boat’s companionway, and she backed her way down the ladder, her eyes flicking right to check for the dive knife she kept in a scabbard lashed to the bulkhead. 

She tossed him a large beach towel. 

“Here.”

“Thanks,” he said, and he flashed her a wide, white-toothed grin. “Sorry I didn’t dress for the occasion.”

He was standing out there drying himself off, in no hurry to cover himself.

“You saved my life, you know. I mean it. Thank you.” 

She didn’t say anything to that. Didn’t know what to say. He was exaggerating. She’d seen those muscular thighs. The boat wasn’t that far off the island. Swimming to shore in flat water like this would be no problem for a man in that kind of shape.  

“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said as she busied herself straightening up the main salon. Not that it needed straightening, but she had a naked man in her cockpit. She reached for her mug on the table and drained the last of her now-cold coffee. She certainly wasn’t feeling sleepy anymore. 

After grabbing a couple of bottles of water out of the fridge, she climbed back into the cockpit. She was glad to see he was wearing the towel wrapped around his waist now. She narrowed her eyes trying to read the tattoo. The curling script spelled
Carpe Diem
.

When she glanced up at his face, his sea-green eyes were alight, daring her to ask about the tattoo.

She handed him the water instead and watched his Adam’s apple bob as he drained half the bottle. What sort of person would get a tattoo of the phrase “Seize the day” in Latin? 

When he tilted his head back to drink from the water bottle a second time, she leaned in and examined the coin he wore. The words on it were French;
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
. 

“So, how’d you wind up out here swimming in your birthday suit?”

He smacked his lips in pleasure, handed her the empty bottle and shook his head. His brown hair curled on his neck well below his ears. “Stupid.”

She waited for him to add more. If he thought he could get away with that short an explanation, he was mistaken. She waited him out. 

“I was in a runabout,” he said at last. “Fishing. Was gonna run down to the Iles des Saintes. I was, you know, enjoying the clothing optional lifestyle when I stepped to the rail to take a leak and –” He shrugged.

“So, what happened to your boat?”

“Beats me. Last I saw her, she was headed that-a-way.” He pointed west. “Rental boat.” Shrugging, he said, “I guess it may wind up in Yucatan.”

She thought she heard something Southern, a little redneck-like in his speech. “And your name?”

He paused for an almost imperceptible beat before answering her. “Robert – Bob Surcouf.” He held out his left hand for her to shake.

“Something wrong with your other hand?”

He cradled it against his body and did not offer to show it to her. With a shrug, he said, “I must’ve cut it on a barnacle climbing aboard.” He smiled at her then, revealing a pair of deep dimples.

She smiled back, but didn’t say anything at first. She had cleaned her boat’s bottom back at Nelson’s Dockyard, Antigua. She knew there wasn’t a single barnacle growing anywhere on the
Bonefish
. Dimples or no, she needed to keep her distance from this guy. There was something about his story that didn’t track.

“Well, welcome aboard, Bob,” she said at last reaching out to shake in one of those back-handed handshakes. “I’m Maggie Riley. Most people just call me Riley.”

He couldn’t sit still. She saw the bloody footprints as he shuffled his feet across the white paint of her cockpit floor.

“Pleased to meet you, Miz Riley. You singlehanding?”

He
was
fishing – wanted to know if there was anyone else aboard. She considered lying but decided against it. She nodded, then reached down, turned the key and started the engine. There was only one of him, and she was confident she could handle him if she needed to. After all, he certainly wasn’t carrying any concealed weapons.

CHAPTER SIX

The Atlantic south of Bermuda

February 12, 1942

Woolsey lay sprawled out on the cold steel deck in utter darkness. The pain in his head and shoulder where he had slammed down onto the deck seemed almost to glow in the black hold. He wasn’t sure if he’d lost consciousness, or for how long, but it was several minutes before he could clear his head enough to think through the pain. The noise of his own breathing was so loud inside his head, it nearly drowned out the throb of the diesel engines. Then he sensed the change in the vibration of the steel plate that pressed against his cheek. No more idling. The screws were turning.
Surcouf
was heading out to sea. He felt the sour taste of panic climbing up his throat.

No. Not him. He would survive. Gohin’s words kept repeating, like a chant inside his head.
À l’enfer avec toi
. No. He wasn’t one of them.

In twenty-three hours, if he didn’t figure a way out of this hole, they’d
all
go to hell. 

Woolsey pushed himself up into a sitting position, and he realized he was sucking in mouthfuls of the foul air. He crawled forward until he found steel, and banging his fists on the bulkhead, he began to shout.

“Hey! Let me out of here! Stop this boat!” He beat on the steel until his throat burned and the bones in his hands ached. He fell back on the steel deck with a sob. It was useless.

He’d hated the goddamn
Surcouf
since the first day he came aboard. She looked like a bloody coffin, and the few times they’d taken her below the surface, he had suffered inexplicable panic attacks, sure he was going to drown. He felt the panic welling up in him now. The cold sweat dampened his armpits, his breathing grew shallow.

Closing his eyes, he attempted to slow his breathing. He had to get himself under control. His fingers explored the rising knot on the side of his head where Gohin had frapped him with the pistol. The hair on the side of his head was matted and sticky with warm blood. Damn scalp wounds bled like mad. The smell of the blood was almost stronger than the stink of the cheese. 

Through the bulkhead he heard the muffled sound of a voice on the speaker. Even if there had been a speaker inside the hold, he would not have understood a word. Stupid bloody French. When the distant voice stopped issuing orders, the hold seemed quiet in spite of the rumbling engines.

The darkness was so complete he felt the vertigo of not knowing which direction was up or where the walls were. At least, he hoped it was just the darkness and not a concussion. Control, man, think! He’d been in bad spots before this – thought he was going to die and hadn’t. He couldn’t just lie down and wait for the boom. 

He’d heard about this compartment but never been inside since he came aboard. It was a cargo hold of sorts, designed originally to hold up to forty prisoners of war.
Surcouf
could sink some good-sized ships with those guns of hers, and she was designed to pick up the survivors afterwards, shut them all in here. They hadn’t been firing any guns this trip – or for years before for that matter. The cook stored some foodstuffs in here, but as far as Woolsey knew, Captain Lamoreaux was the only one who had a key. The Frenchie had always been a bit touchy about it when he’d asked. Woolsey had figured the Captain was using it as a sort of private wine cellar for his better stock – better than the plonk the rest of the crew got out of the tanks. That was a detail he’d once found amusing — only a French sub would have tanks designed to carry wine.

He ran his fingers in an arc across the deck on either side of him. He felt nothing but the fine grit of dirt on the cold steel. He rolled onto his hands and knees and began to crawl forward, reaching out and patting his fingertips against the steel plate ahead of him like a blind man tapping his cane. He inched forward expecting at any moment to come up against something, but he kept moving. He tried to sense where the bulkheads were, but he had no concept of the size of the compartment, nor whether there was anything in it. Odd because his personal radar usually worked better than that. The thought flashed in his head that there were no sides to this darkness, that he had fallen into some infinite black hole. He shuddered, shook his head, and told himself to stop thinking such foolishness. He kept on creeping forward. 

After what seemed like a ridiculously long time, his knuckles brushed against rough wood planks. His fingers crawled over the surface and he found it to be a box, roughly two feet square. Between the slats, he felt the cool smooth surface of glass. And there was another box, and another after that. Wine. Cases of it. The captain’s private reserve.

The wooden cases were stacked one on top of another three high. He came to one spot where a single case was out of alignment, and he tried to slide it back out of his way. The thing would not budge. Heavy buggers. He went around it.

He followed the cases of wine, fairly certain he was moving aft, until, at last, he reached a bulkhead. Steadying himself with one hand on the wall, he stood. Then he slid one foot forward several inches, followed by his other foot. The hold could only have four sides, and of course, there was a door. He would find a way out of here. He had to.

He slid his foot forward again and his shoe came to a stop against something solid. It didn’t have the firmness of the cases of wine. Cheese, he thought. The stink had to be coming from somewhere. It was probably sacks of the stuff, the round ripe cheeses the Frenchies had to have on the table at every meal. He prodded at it with the toe of his shoe, but it did not move. He bent his knees and squatted down into a crouch, swinging his outstretched fingers in the cold dark air, feeling for the object in his path.

There was something about the darkness in front of him. It was denser, somehow. His radar seemed to be clicking back on.  Though he could not see anything, he sensed more than saw there was something large there on the deck. He slid his leg forward and kicked at it, a little harder this time.

“Bugger off.”  

The deep, menacing voice startled him, and when he yanked his leg back, he lost his balance and toppled onto his backside. 

CHAPTER SEVEN

Aboard the Bonefish

March 25, 2008

12:50 p.m.

“Thanks for picking me up. I really wasn’t sure I was gonna make it to shore.” Cole looked back at the island, his left hand at his throat, his thumb caressing the coin.  

He had been almost a mile offshore already and still swimming hard by the time
their
dinghy rounded the point. They had searched the coastline for almost an hour, but they never turned around, looked behind, never figured he’d head out to deep water. 

He turned to face the woman. She looked to be in her early thirties, maybe five foot five, and with a body that showed she worked out often. But there was something different about her, too, like a cool air of competence. 

“Where you headed?” he asked her.

“The capital, Pointe-à-Pitre.” She’d been looking at him with a guarded stare since he’d let out that little laugh, but now she pointed at the small GPS chart plotter affixed above her compass. “It’s a little over thirty miles. I can drop you off in town once I clear customs and immigration.”

“I sure would appreciate that, Miz Maggie.” After all the years he’d spent on the Outer Banks, he could imitate their southern speech and manners. Given that he hadn’t a stitch of clothing, there was little else he could use as a disguise. “And after you clear in, where you headed?”

She engaged the autopilot, set her course, and then climbed back down the companionway. He could see her wariness. She didn’t trust him. Smart woman. 

“The Saintes, probably, for a day or two,” she said. “It’s where most cruising boats go. And please, it’s just Riley.”

He nodded, then looked back at the island. There was no sign of the boat or the men. For now.

“Don’t know many women who go by their last names. Especially when they got such a nice name as Miz Maggie Magee.”