THE FOREVER GENE (THE SCIONS OF EARTH Book 1) (45 page)

The night before he was due to sail, he was disappointed to find that she had taken the evening off.  Stupidly, he hadn't asked her for her phone number, and the bar owner refused to give it to him.  Saddened by not having had a chance to say goodbye, he awoke early the next morning and trudged down to the dock.  He spent an hour and a half readying his old cruiser for launch.  He had thrown his meagre provisions aboard and was untying the forward line, when he looked up to see a pair of slender white legs in denim shorts standing above him on the quay.  Startled, he looked up into Molly's pensive face.

"Is there room for a crewmember on that tub?" she asked.  Before he could reply, she threw him one and then the other of the two duffel bags she was carrying.  He caught them, gaped in astonishment for a few seconds, and then threw them into the cockpit.

"Welcome aboard," he said with a grin and a flourish, and she stepped over the gunwale.  He finished throwing off the lines and started the engine.

"Are you sure?" he asked her.

"I can't face another year here," she said.

"Do you have anything else to collect before we go?"

She shrugged.  "Nothing I need."

And that was it; they had been together for seven years so far.  They had even established a home of sorts, a dusty rented chalet on Saint Kitts which they returned to from time to time.  The rest of the time they spent treasure hunting.  Molly was not obsessed with it, as Patrick was, but she loved diving and was happy to be travelling, constantly visiting new places.

During their first few years in the area they joined sponsored hunts for various wrecks, earning some pocket money and enjoying a measure of success when they found an old passenger steamer off the Florida Keys.  There was no treasure, but they earned a finder's fee and were regarded by some of the professionals as having climbed one rung of the treasure hunters' ladder.

Patrick used the money they had earned to buy a remote controlled submersible, and began his search for the Christina in earnest.  He was able to cover much more ground using the sub; it could search potential sites in a few days rather than the weeks or months it had taken before.  He began searching the deep waters south of Haiti, and then moved on to the Venezuelan coast.  Unfortunately, there were few European settlements on that coast at the time, so there were no written records to consult.

After a fruitless search which took two years, he tried the coasts of Colombia, Central America, the Cayman Islands, Cuba, and Jamaica; anywhere he thought the Christina may have gone in an effort to find riches or to re-join the fleet.  Eventually, he gave up on the Caribbean and tried the Gulf of Mexico, thinking that she may have found what she was looking for and tried to hook up with the fleet at Veracruz.  But there was no sign of his quarry.

It never occurred to him to search Brazilian waters; there was just no reason for her to have gone that way.  Or so he had always assumed.  Perhaps there was a reason that he just didn't know about.  Still, it was a long shot and, for once, he had no great hopes of success.

He and Molly sought the shade of a nearby tree and finished their cones while he told her what he planned to do.  She never greeted any of his schemes with anything less than enthusiasm, but this time she looked quite excited.  She would appreciate a holiday, he realised and, in a rare moment of introspection, he wondered whether his relentless search had been worth it.  Although she never complained, she might be secretly sick of the whole thing.

He should have asked her to marry him by now, he knew, but the time never seemed to be right.  There was always one more clue, one more lead to follow.  Well, perhaps this was the last one and then it was time to let it go.  Maybe they should go back home, buy a pub, and live like normal people for a while.

"I'm sorry I've dragged you along on this wild goose chase," he said.

She looked up at him in surprise.  "That's the first time I've ever heard you call it that.  Are you feeling alright?"

"Fine, just giving myself a reality check.  Let's go back to the boat and have a rest, and then we can plot our next move.  We can have a look at the mainland beaches online and decide which ones we want to visit."

They stood up and tramped arm in arm back to the cruiser.

"Honey, I'm home," said Patrick as they stepped aboard.  Molly always smiled at the well-worn pun.

That evening, he downloaded the satellite data of the tsunami which had rolled right over the low-lying island and crashed into the Brazilian mainland two hundred miles away.  He extrapolated the movement of the wave from its mid-Atlantic origin.  Then he introduced other factors which could have affected its direction; the underwater currents and the topography of the sea-bed around the island.  By midnight he had plotted a narrow, five mile long channel along which the wave was likely to have picked up the cannon.  The channel was only about a mile and a half wide.  That was their search area.  Using the sub, it shouldn't take more than a few days to go over it thoroughly.

The next day was sunny and calm, a perfect day for finding a shipwreck.  They sailed the cruiser around to the windswept eastern side of the island.  He and Molly prepared the sub and their diving equipment, swapping jokes and laughing as if they had never done this before.  People on the shore must have thought they were crazy; tourists didn't usually go diving in the cold, unfriendly waters of the South Atlantic.

When they were about a mile from shore, Patrick launched the sub and used its remote control to pilot it carefully towards the sea-bed.  Together he and Molly sat in the cockpit and watched the monitor as the sub sank slowly into the depths.  It had three cameras built into its hull, two forward and one aft.  Their fields of vision could be independently adjusted to show different angles.  Video feeds from the cameras were transferred to the monitor through the sub's tether cable. 

The water was quite deep already, and murky, which reduced visibility and made the search more difficult.  When the sub reached a depth of sixty feet, the sea-bed became visible.  Molly started the cruiser's engine and began a series of slow zigzags from one side of Patrick's channel to the other.  At first there wasn't much to see.  The sea-bed was essentially a continuation of the low, sandy dunes which made up most of the island.  At about lunchtime they began to see some rocky reefs sticking up through the sand.  They dropped anchor to have lunch, and Patrick used his tablet to plot where they had been on a chart of the search site.  They had already covered nearly half of the target area and he began to feel sure that they were wasting their time.  The weather was changing too, a cold wind had sprung up and the surface of the sea was getting choppy.

"What do you think?" he asked, giving Molly the opportunity to suggest calling the whole thing off.

She picked up the tablet and called up a chart of the sea-bed.  "There are a lot of reefs around here which might be hiding something," she said by way of an answer.  We've come all this way, so let's at least finish sweeping your search site.  If we see anything interesting we can come back tomorrow and explore further.  If not...," she shrugged, "at least we tried."

After polishing off some sandwiches they had brought with them from the mainland, they launched the sub again.  This time Patrick switched on the cruiser's sonar so that they could keep tabs on the reefs they were passing over.  Some of them were quite large and the last thing they wanted was to hole the Honey by running into a sharp spire which wasn't on the charts.

Molly had to slow the cruiser down to give Patrick more time to manoeuvre the sub in and around the reefs.  The smaller ones were clearly not hiding anything and he ignored them.  But the larger ones had ridges and valleys which he had to negotiate carefully.  Visibility was poor, and it became increasingly difficult for him to keep the sub off the rocks.

Eventually, he felt his concentration slipping and retrieved the sub rather than risk damaging it or losing it altogether.  He went up on deck to haul it out of the water and stowed it carefully in its locker.  Then he dropped a small marker buoy, and went back into the cockpit.

"Let's go back to shore," he said, rubbing his tired eyes.  "We can carry on tomorrow."

After they had traversed the four miles back to the island and tied the Honey up at a jetty, they broke out some more food and had an early dinner.  Later they retired to the cruiser's small but comfortable aft cabin for the night.

The next morning was much the same as the one before.  They cast off and within half an hour had located the marker buoy.  Patrick launched the sub and settled down for another long day of squinting at the monitor.  But he was in for a surprise.

Visibility was better than the day before and the first thing he saw was a dark trench running alongside the reef he had been exploring the day before.  Molly stopped the cruiser while he manoeuvred the sub over the edge of the trench and down into its depths.  The spotlights illuminated a narrow channel between two reefs.

Suddenly the sub shot forward, and he realised that it was in the grip of a strong current.  Before he could react, it slammed into a towering object nestled alongside the reef.  One of the forward camera feeds went dark as he toggled the controls desperately, eventually steering the sub upwards out of the trench.

As he did so, he heard a sharp exclamation from Molly.  When he was sure he had the sub back under control, he turned to see what had happened.

"Patrick, look!" was all she said as she replayed the video feed from the other forward camera.  After colliding with the submerged object, the sub had swung around.

The monitor showed, for a brief moment, the outline of a sunken galleon.

PRESENT DAY

(PART TWO)

Patrick reeled in the damaged sub while Molly checked the charts to see if there were any known wrecks in the vicinity.  The nearest one was over thirty miles away, she reported breathlessly.  The wreck underneath their feet was undiscovered.

He hauled the sub aboard and, with Molly peering anxiously over his shoulder, gave it a quick examination to see how badly it was damaged.  Its nose had taken the brunt of the impact.  Part of its outer hull was buckled and the camera housing on the left hand side was smashed.  One of its fins had been bent out of shape.

"Can you fix it?" she asked.

"Not properly.  I could probably seal the nose and camera housing but it is going to need machining to sort out that fin.  If I try to use it like this, it will be very unstable and I won't be able to control it if that current takes it again.  The current is too strong for it anyway."

He looked up at her, his eyes wide with excitement.  "I'll go down myself."

"You can't go down alone, it's too dangerous.  I'll come with you."

"No, we can't both go and leave the boat empty."

He grimaced in frustration.  Ordinarily, they would use the sub to examine the wreck and assess what personnel and equipment they needed to bring in.  Without the sub, their options were limited.  If he went down alone, he would be breaking the cardinal rule of diving.  If he and Molly both went, there would be no one on the boat to help them if they ran into difficulty.

The sensible thing to do would be to mark the site, return to the mainland, and hire a couple of professional divers to help them safely explore the wreck.  But that could cause another set of problems.  The other divers would be entitled to share in the credit for finding the wreck, and in any financial rewards which might follow.  And he would rather work with divers he knew; hiring strangers was risky.  Bill Bennett and Diego Cruz would be his first choice, but that would mean waiting for them to extricate themselves from their existing dive charters in the Caribbean.  At best, they might arrive in a week's time.  He couldn't possibly wait that long, sitting and wondering what was down there.  This could be the find of his life and he couldn't imagine going back to the mainland without at least taking a look.

"Look, it isn't all that far down.  It's about seventy-five feet to the top of the trench.  I'll go down attached to the tether cable.  That way, if I get into trouble, you can winch me up."

Molly wasn't happy with the idea, but she knew that she wouldn't be able to change his mind.  At least it wasn't a completely outrageous plan.  "Okay," she said, "but first, let's do a sonar scan of the area to see exactly what kind of terrain we are dealing with."

He agreed and they both went back into the cabin.  He switched on the sonar and she took the wheel of the boat.  They spent three quarters of an hour criss-crossing the area around the wreck.  The sonar confirmed that the reefs below them were at a depth of about seventy-five feet.  The trench was approximately fifty feet wide.  The floor of the trench was about thirty feet below the level of the reef.  Deep enough to hide a galleon for four hundred years, Patrick couldn't help thinking.  They would never have found it if they hadn't literally run into it.  No wonder it had never been found before.

When the Honey was about five hundred yards south of the wreck, the sonar made contact with a large cylindrical object on the floor of the trench.

"Whale," Patrick said, "big one.  Probably a sperm whale, although they don't usually swim along the sea-bed like that.  I wonder if it's dying."

"You had better watch out for sharks when you go down," said Molly, "they are common in these waters."

When they had finished the scan, he pulled on his diving gear, and then removed two of the spotlights from the hull of the sub, attaching one to each forearm.  The spots had built-in battery backups which would keep them going for about three hours.  He tested the video camera built into the frame of his full-face mask and then clipped himself to the tether cable.  Molly gave him a good luck kiss before he pulled on his mask and slipped into the water.

She darted back into the cockpit to check his sound and video link.  "Can you hear me?"  Her slightly disembodied voice emanated from his earpiece loud and clear.

"Perfectly well, no problems,"

"Listen to me, Patrick; you're just going down for a quick look.  Watch out for that current and don't try to salvage anything by yourself."

"Don't try to be a hero, check."

"Please Patrick, I mean it.  You've been waiting for this for seven years.  Don't go and get yourself killed the day you find something worthwhile."

"Okay, okay, I'll take it easy, I promise."

He ducked under the water, angled himself downwards and began kicking his flippers strongly.  He swam until he could see the grey mass of the reef below.  He took a look at his chronometer to check the depth; sixty feet.  The visibility wasn't bad, but it wasn't particularly good either.  He switched on the spots and swam towards the trench.  It looked much darker and less inviting than it had on the cockpit monitor.

Keeping an eye out for sharks, he eased himself gently over the edge of the reef and shone his spots first one way and then the other.  He couldn't see much in the gloom of the trench.

"Molly, which way is it?" he said into his mask.  He waited while she picked him up on the sonar.

"It's about forty yards north of you."

He swam northwards along the trench, keeping level with the top of the reef so as not to be caught by the current.  After swimming for fifteen minutes, he realised he must have missed the wreck.  Perhaps the trench was a little deeper than he thought.  He turned around and swam back the way he had come, this time about ten yards below the top of the reef.

Almost immediately, appearing wraith-like out of the gloom, the sharp point of a galleon's bow materialised below him.  His breath caught in his throat.  He had found it!  He swam a little closer, feeling the current begin to tug at his feet.  The water in the trench was very murky, throwing a lot of the light from the spots back at him.  It was like driving a car in thick mist.  He activated his video camera, although he couldn't see much yet.

"I'm swimming over the top of the bow," he reported back to Molly.  "Most of the bowsprit has been snapped off.  It probably caught the edge of the reef when the ship sank into the trench."

He was silent for a few seconds, and then continued his running commentary.  "I'm approaching the forecastle now.  It looks intact, but the foremast has broken off about half-way up.  I think this is a three-mast galleon; very common on the Spanish Main.  I have to stay about twenty-five yards above the deck to keep out of the current, so I can't see much detail.  There's the mainmast now.  It's also broken, but only near the top.  The poop deck behind it is much higher than the forecastle, so I can see it a bit more clearly.  It also looks pretty much intact.  I can even see the ship's wheel!  Behind it is the mizzen mast.  Gosh, it doesn't seem to be broken at all."

He paused.  "Boy, this is spooky.  I've never seen such a well-preserved wreck.  She looks like she sank a few years ago.  I doubt that this is the Christina, she would be more than four hundred years old."

"Perhaps she has been sheltered by the reef all this time."

"I don't think so," he said doubtfully.  In that time the current should have pounded her to pieces."

"Is there anything to identify her country of origin?" Molly asked.

"Nothing yet, although she could as easily be Spanish as Portuguese."

He swam a bit further.  "I'm hovering over the stern now.  Are you getting all this on the monitor?"

"Yes, but the picture is pretty hazy.  Wow, look at that!  She has a classic square gallery.  It's beautiful.  Patrick, this is going to cause a sensation, even if it isn't the Christina and there is no treasure aboard."

He could hear the awe in her voice.  He was feeling it too.  "Molly, I think I can find out what ship this is right now."

"What do you mean?"

"Some galleons had their names engraved in the wood below the gallery.  This one is so well preserved; the name might still be visible.  If I drop down over the stern I might be able to make it out.  Then we'll know exactly which ship we have found."

"Don't you dare, you'll be caught in the current!"

"No, it will be alright.  The current flows from north to south.  If I go behind the stern, I will be in its lee."

"I still don't like it, Patrick.  Too much can go wrong.  Let's go back to the island and contact Bill.  I'm sure he will come straightaway when you tell him what you've found.  This wreck has been here for hundreds of years, it can wait a few more days."

"Yes, but I can't," he said, swimming gingerly downwards.  Just before he reached the stern, the current barrelled into him, pushing him about twenty-five yards away.  Then he dropped into the lee of the ship, and it let up.  He could feel it eddying around him, but he was able to swim back to the stern, its ornate gallery appearing ghost-like out of the murk.  He stayed still for a few minutes to capture as much as he could on video.

"Patrick, are you alright?" said Molly anxiously in his ear.

"Yes, I'm fine.  Look at this; it's spectacular, isn't it?"

He panned the video camera across an exquisitely decorated wooden balcony extending from one side of the stern to the other.  It was pock-marked with barnacles and part of its railing had broken away alongside the reef, but it was otherwise intact.  Behind the railing were four square cavities in the hull, where the windows of the stern castle had been.  They gaped at him like skeletal eye sockets.

He ducked below the balcony and swam deeper, keeping close to the stern of the ship.  The water became even murkier with sediment stirred up by the current.  Below the gallery was the vertical wooden keel which he knew extended all the way underneath the vessel.  He began a visual search of the hull to the right of the keel, panning his spots up, down and sideways from about five yards away.  He swam from left to right, then dropped down a few yards and headed back towards the keel.  He continued to search until he realised he had dropped below where the waterline used to be.  The name, if it was there, would be above that.

So he crossed over the keel and began the process again, this time working his way upwards.  Visibility was even worse alongside the reef.  He crawled painstakingly across the face of the stern, his eyes beginning to water from the strain.  Then, about four yards below the gallery, he found a vertical indentation in the wood.  It didn't look much like a letter, except perhaps for an
I
.  He shone one of his spots to the left and there, showing faintly in the dimness was the letter
R
.  His heart quickening, he carried on going left and found an
H
and then a
C
.  Swimming quickly back past the
I
, he found an
S
to its right.  After it came the letters
T
,
I
,
N
and
A
.

CHRISTINA.

Was that it?  Was that the full name of the ship or was there more to it?  Was this the Christina de la Fuego?  Or was Christina perhaps the last part of the name?

His heart hammering in his chest, he searched the area above and below the letters he had found.  There was nothing.  He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he started at the sound of Molly's breathless voice in his ear.

"Patrick, try the other side of the keel."

"I've looked there already," he said.

"Yes, but you didn't know exactly where to look.  You might have missed something."

She was right.  Logically, if there was more to the name, it would be on the other side of the keel, at the same level.  He hauled himself across the keel again and brought his spots to bear.  Right in front of him was the letter
E
, faded but distinct.  To the left of it he found a
D
and then, swimming slowly from left to right, he found the rest of the ship's name.

DE LA FUEGO.

He could hardly believe his eyes.  He had found the four-hundred year old wreck of the Christina de la Fuego.  What was even more amazing was that there was barely a scratch on her.  It was the discovery of a lifetime.

If what he was experiencing was real, he wondered suddenly.  "Molly, you are seeing all this, aren't you?  I'm not suffering from nitrogen narcosis?"

She laughed tinnily.  "Don't worry, if you're hallucinating, then so am I.  Patrick, after all these years, you've found her!  It's incredible!"

He took a few deep breaths, determined to savour his moment alone in the depths with one of the Spanish Main's oldest treasure ships.  He backed away a little so that he could see her outlined against the reef in spectral splendour.  When he looked at his chronometer, he was surprised to see that he had been underwater for nearly two hours.  That was why he was shivering from the cold, he realised.

"Molly, I'm coming up," he said.  He took a lingering look at the ship he had found, and then began rising slowly.  He would have to make at least two decompression stops on the way up to avoid the bends.  He rose up past the gallery, marvelling again at its faded grandeur.  When he got to the top of the stern he braced himself for the onslaught of the current, and prepared to kick strongly to clear it.  But as he was about to launch himself upwards, a sinuous shadow passed over his head.  It came from over the top of the stern castle, heading southwards down the trench.