The Lost Island (12 page)

T
HE MORNING DAWNED
dirty and rough, with a howling wind and dark clouds scudding low across the sky. They had taken refuge in Bahía Hondita, a huge, shallow lagoon with dozens of islands and coves and patches of mangrove swamp—an ideal place to hide. With the jet drive propulsion their draft was only three feet, and with no need to worry about fouling a propeller they’d been able to get the boat up a watercourse and deep into the recesses of a mangrove swamp, where the larger
Horizonte
could not follow, even if they knew where they were.

Gideon spent the morning cleaning up the mess in the galley and mopping up the blood on the cockpit deck. Amy opened the hatches and examined the engine and boat systems, doing a damage assessment where rounds had struck the boat.

They convened in the galley over espresso one hour before it was time to make a scheduled call to EES. Amy looked gray.

“How’s your injury?” Gideon asked.

“Fine,” said Amy. “Listen, we’ve got some damage. A 50-caliber round fragmented and went everywhere inside the engine compartment.”

“The boat seems to be working all right.”

“For now. We have some damaged hoses, fuel and oil lines, which I can patch or replace. Some shrapnel in the battery compartment, as well, but no leaks there. One bad circuit board. It’ll take most of the day. We’ll head out to Cayo Jeyupsi tonight.”

“You sure the boat’s okay?”

“My only real worry is the ricocheting of all those bits and pieces of shrapnel. It’s impossible to trace it all or know what might be wrong—until something fails.”

“What about the other rounds that hit the boat?”

“They went high, through the pilothouse. One in the forward hull above the waterline. I put a temporary patch on it.”

“Oh, dear, we might lose our damage deposit.”

Amy managed a wan smile. “That’s Glinn’s problem, not ours.”

“Speaking of Glinn, we’ve got to give him a sit-rep in an hour. We should talk now about how we’re going to present this to him. I also need to write up what happened in the electronic log.”

A hesitation. “Gideon, let’s not…alarm him.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Look, we don’t want him to abort our mission. We’re too far into this.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not suggesting we
lie
, exactly. We just have to give it the proper spin. An unfortunate encounter. A bump in the road.”

“An ‘unfortunate encounter’? Amy, a man’s dead.”

“We don’t know that.” A beat. She gazed at him intently with her dark eyes. “You want to give this up?”

Gideon hesitated. “No.”

“Then pitch your log entry accordingly, and in the video meeting think carefully about how you present things.”

“Is that an order, Captain?”

A long silence. “I won’t make that an order. Because I know you’re with me on this one.”

Gideon nodded. She was right.

The meeting with Glinn was short. They made their report, Gideon presenting it as a brief, unfortunate encounter with a pair of crazy treasure hunters, over and done with. It was, in the end, a good thing, as it produced an essential piece of information: the Devil’s vomit cay marked on the map. Glinn listened, asked few questions, did not offer any advice, and signed off quickly.

Amy spent the rest of the day below, fixing the engine. She emerged at sunset covered with grease. She took a shower and then sat down at the computer. The wind had picked up further, the mangroves clacking and shaking around them. The tropical depression that had been building beyond the Cape Verde Islands had turned into a tropical storm and was now heading toward the Windwards and northwestward to Haiti. While they were considerably south of its path, it was a large system and, one way or another, they were going to be affected.

Amy seemed pleased. “The worse the weather, the less chance there is of the
Horizonte
surprising us at the cay tonight.”

“I doubt they’re going to be at the cay.”

“I
know
they will. They’re treasure hunters. The word
obsession
doesn’t even begin to describe them.”

“How do you know so much about treasure hunters, anyway?” Gideon asked.

“That question falls into the personal information category. Sorry.”

She went back to the laptop in the work area while Gideon prepared an elaborate dinner of seared duck breasts, wild rice, and toasted goat cheese salad. From time to time, he glanced over at what she was working on so assiduously. It appeared she was comparing the Phorkys Map to other old maps—and a bunch of texts in ancient Greek.

“What’s all that?”

“Idle speculation.”

“Dinner’s ready.”

She abandoned the computer and sat down at the dining room table. Gideon laid the plates on with ceremony. He poured himself some wine, giving her the glass of water, no ice, that she asked for.

She tucked in and began the usual unceremonious shoveling.

“Whoa, hold on,” aid Gideon, laying a hand on her fork hand, staying the scarfing process. “There’s no hurry. Can we please have a civilized meal? I worked hard preparing it—you should slow down and enjoy it.”

“You eat your way, I’ll eat mine,” she said, forking a quarter of the breast into her mouth and chewing, her cheeks bulging like a chipmunk, making vulgar eating noises.

Gideon shook his head. “Jesus, didn’t your parents teach you table manners?”

This was met with a sudden, freezing silence. Gideon thought to himself,
More personal information I won’t be privy to.

She finished, pushing her plate away and standing up. “At midnight, we’ll start for Jeyupsi. It’s thirty nautical miles. I doubt we can make more than twelve knots in this sea, so we’ll arrive around two thirty in the morning. We’re going to make a large circle of the cay at extreme radar distance, just to see if they’re around. Their boat is bigger than ours, makes a larger radar target, so we’ll see them before they see us. If all looks good, we go in, try to figure out what was meant by the phrase
Follow the Devil’s vomit
. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“So why don’t you go below, get some sleep? I’ll take care of the dishes.”

“No objections to that.”

As he stood up, preparing to head for his stateroom, she laid a hand on his arm. “Gideon.”

“Yes?”

“You handled those treasure hunters really well back there—all that talk about a billion dollars in gold. You got them to lose their heads—and that saved our lives.”

“Social engineering is my specialty. But your contribution was pretty damn crucial, too.”

“And that business with the launch—they fell for it just long enough for us to give them the slip.”

“It was your radar reflectors that did the trick.”

There was a slightly awkward silence. Gideon sensed that any praise from Amy was praise indeed, so he just smiled and said, “Thanks.”

She nodded wordlessly.

And as he turned to leave the galley, he saw her go back to the computer and continue working on the Greek texts and the map.

G
ARZA LOOKED ON
as Weaver, the head DNA tech, leaned over a microscope, peering intently into the eyepiece as he moved the stage this way and that with fussy, tiny movements. Two other techs hovered nearby, watching, various tools at the ready. To Garza, the procedure had all the feel of a surgical operation.

Glinn had vanished after the call from Gideon—in his usual way, without taking leave, saying where he was going, or mentioning when he’d be back. Glinn had always been secretive, but it was getting worse. He used to keep Garza in the loop. He was supposed to be Glinn’s right-hand man, second in command at EES. But now he was beginning to feel like an errand boy.

“Okay,” Weaver murmured, eyes glued to the microscope. “I’ve got the binding edge of the page in view and it looks like there might be some intact follicles.”

All work on the vellum was done at a painstaking, glacial pace; it had taken them most of a day just to prepare for this procedure. A silence settled over the lab as Weaver continued peering into the scope, every now and then adjusting its stage. The minutes ticked by. Garza resisted the urge to glance at his watch.

“Got one that looks good,” said Weaver. “Two, actually. Hand me a probe, a sterile number three forceps, and a strip of PCR tubes.”

The technicians came forward with the requested articles. Garza watched as—with the utmost care—Weaver extracted first one microscopic hair, then a second.

“Both follicles are intact,” he said as he straightened up from the microscope.

“How quickly can you get results?” Garza asked.

“Sterile microsurgery will be required to access the uncontaminated interior of the follicles—with something like this, DNA contamination can be a huge problem. After that, we have to do a PCR on it, and then sequence it. It’s time consuming—and a lot depends on whether there’s still contamination in the samples that has to be teased out.” He seemed to hesitate.

“What is it?” Garza asked.

“I didn’t want to say anything before,” Weaver said. “But now that I’ve actually seen these hair follicles and viewed the pattern of pores under the scope, I’m almost certain.”

“Certain about what?”

“About what kind of, ah, animal this vellum is from.”

“Well?” Garza said. Why was he being so coy?

Weaver licked his lips. “Human.”

For a moment, the lab went silent.

Brock laid down his pen. “You can’t be serious.”

Weaver said nothing.

“I’m sorry, but there must be some mistake,” Brock continued. “There are simply no examples of human skin being used for vellum.”

Garza glanced over at him. “Are you sure?”

“Quite. For monks to flay a human and use his skin for vellum is unthinkable. No Christian of the time would have done that, even to a pagan enemy. That sort of cruelty wasn’t invented until the twentieth century.”

“What about Viking raiders?” Garza asked. “Or other pagan tribes of the time, perhaps? Maybe they made their own vellum from the skin of Christian monks.” He cast a smirk at Brock.

“Absolutely not. The Vikings didn’t read books—they
burned
books. But more to the point, the desecration of the human body after death was not part of Viking or pagan culture, either. They might rape your wife and burn you alive in your house, but they would never mutilate a corpse.” Brock paused. “If you want my considered opinion, gentlemen, you are grievously in error.”

Weaver looked down at the tiny box of clear plastic that held the two follicles. “Say what you will. I think it’s human.”

“Get those tests started right away,” Garza said.

A
MY AWOKE GIDEON
at eleven thirty. The wind was still blowing, and the weather report indicated worse was on the way. He went through the usual first-mate chores of raising the anchor, arranging the paper charts in their proper order, and checking the electronics to make sure they were working properly. He was pleased at how quickly he had mastered these numerous but relatively simple chores.

At midnight, they eased out of the mangrove swamp into the choppy waters of the bay. It was a dirty night, sand blowing across the water in stinging clouds, neither moon nor stars. It took another half an hour to reach the inlet, which was boiling from the storm surge—and then they were in the open sea.

The swells were suddenly terrifying, great rolling beasts coming one after the other, the crests foaming white, spray and spume blown forward by the wind.

“This is perfect,” said Amy, at the helm. She was adjusting the gain on the radar, back and forth.

“Perfect? You’re joking, right?” Gideon was already feeling queasy. During the encounter with the
Horizonte
, he’d been too busy—and too scared—to feel seasick. That wasn’t the case at present. This was not going to be a good night.

“The radar’s practically green with sea return, and the waves are almost as high as our boat. They’re going to have a hell of a time seeing us on their radar.”

“If you say so.”

The boat plowed through the water at ten knots. Beyond the pilothouse windows, hammered with rain, there was nothing—no horizon, no stars, no sense of orientation, just a thundering blackness. The swell was coming from behind, and each foaming crest shoved the bow down and pushed their stern sideways in a sickening corkscrew motion, Amy fighting the wheel to stay the course. The chartplotter showed them as a tiny black arrow on a sea of white, moving away from shore until their lonely speck was the only thing on the screen. Gideon tried to adjust the gain on the radar as Amy had previously showed him, but there was only so much he could do in a sea like this.

About one o’clock, a strange sound came from below: a kind of stuttering vibration that shivered the hull.

“Damn,” said Amy, looking at the dials. The boat started to slew sideways and she fought with the wheel, throttling one engine down and the other up.

More stuttering, and the boat slewed again. Amy worked the controls, muttering under her breath, and then the shuddering stopped.

“Port engine’s out,” she said. “I’ve got to go below. Take the wheel.”

“Me? I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“Listen to me:
don’t let the boat go broadside
. Every wave will try to push your stern around—you’ve got to turn the wheel the opposite way—push it back. But don’t overcorrect, either.”

She pointed to the dual throttles. “You only have one engine—starboard, the right throttle. Try to maintain twenty-one hundred rpm. You might need to throttle up or down depending on whether you’re climbing and descending a wave. Got it?”

“Not really—”

She went below. Gideon grasped the wheel, peering into the darkness. He couldn’t even see the waves in front of the bow. But there was a growling sound behind him, and the stern began to rise with the hiss of breaking water. His hands felt frozen on the wheel. The bow was pushed down, down, the nose burying itself in the water. And then the stern was shoved sideways—violently.

“Fuck!” He turned the wheel against the movement, goosing the throttle; the boat began to straighten out, and then abruptly swung the other way, the bow rearing up as the stern sank into the trough. Fighting the wheel to true it up, he could hear things crashing in the galley. He turned the other way, fighting his own overcorrection, easing off the throttle.

That was only the first wave. Now the terrifying process began again.

Even worse, he was about to be sick. Fumbling with the side window latch, he managed to get it open with one hand, the rain lashing in, trying to keep his other hand firm on the wheel. He stuck his head out the window and retched unhappily. He was hardly done heaving when the next crest shoved the boat sideways again, the water sweeping over the stern and jamming the bow down. He pulled the wheel around; the boat skidded, too much yet again, and he quickly swung it back the other way, the boat weaving drunkenly through the combers.

He heard a muffled yell from Amy, below.

The next wave he handled a little better, pausing to puke again between the swells. On the chartplotter he could now make out their destination, ten nautical miles distant, creeping toward them. This was crazy. They should have stayed in the bay, waited for the storm to blow over.

And now something else was happening. He could hear a hesitation in the rumble of the remaining engine—a kind of stuttering sound. The needle of its rpm gauge began to chatter and drop. He throttled up but that only made it worse, the engine faltering. He quickly throttled back down and it seemed to stabilize. But the rpms had subsided to fifteen hundred—and he could feel the power of the sea taking over as the boat’s forward motion faltered.

The next wave came harder, bashing the stern around and tilting the boat viciously. He threw the wheel to the left, and the boat came around—sluggishly. The next wave hammered them again, pushing the vessel farther around, almost broadside.

The engine coughed, rumbled, coughed again.

“Amy!” he cried. “What’s going on!” But the roar of the wind and sea snatched the words away.

And then the engine quit totally. There was a sudden loss of vibration, a vanishing of the low-frequency throb—leaving only the roar of the sea and wind.

The boat was abruptly shoved broadside, in a nauseating rotating movement, totally in the grip of the sea. Gideon hung on to the wheel for dear life. It was all he could do to stay on his feet. The lights flickered.

Amy’s voice came over the intercom, supernaturally calm. “Go forward to the chain locker, deploy the drogue.”

“Drogue—?”

“The sea anchor. It looks like a big canvas parachute. Throw it overboard, run the line out a hundred feet, and cleat it off. Then come back and help me.”

He abandoned the wheel and exited the pilothouse. Outside, the full force of the storm slammed into him, staggering him, the rain lashing his face, the deck heaving. Beyond, he could dimly see the ridges and foaming peaks of a mountainous sea rising above his head in all directions.

Gripping the rail, he crawled forward to the chain locker set in the bow. The boat was wallowing, each swell tilting it up and throwing it down sideways, almost like a bucking horse, the hull shuddering. Water erupted over the rubrail and surged along the deck. Each time it did, he had to grip the rail with both hands to keep from being washed overboard.

He made it to the bow, undogged the chain locker. With no light, he reached in and felt his way around blindly. There it was: something bulky made of thick canvas, to the left.

A swell burst over him, knocking his body sideways and sliding him over the deck until his legs dangled over the side. With all his strength, he pulled himself back by gripping the rail. As soon as the swell had passed, he hauled the canvas thing out of the locker. It was all folded up and there was no way to be sure of what it was, but it was attached to a rope and he threw it overboard.
Here goes nothing
. It hit the water, the rope running out fast. It burned his hands as he arrested its headlong rush. He managed to tie it off to the mooring post, his fingers feeling fat and stupid.

It was almost like magic. The line went taut; there was a groaning sound; and then the
Turquesa
began to swing around, bow pointing into the wind and sea. In a moment the boat was riding better—much better.

Gideon crawled back into the pilothouse, soaked to the skin, hit by a series of dry heaves. Head pounding from the effort, anxiety, and nausea, he went below to where Amy was working on the engine. The compartment panels were off and she was on her back, her head and torso deep in the mass of machinery.

“What now?”

“Shut down those fuel lines, there.”

Gideon turned the levers perpendicular to the lines.

Amy continued issuing orders as she worked. The boat was riding much better, the big combers hissing past on either side. It was terrifying enough, but at least they weren’t broadside and spinning out of control.

“Okay,” Amy said at last. “See if you can start the starboard engine.”

Gideon went up, set the throttle and shift, and pressed the button. A few coughs and the engine roared to life. He felt a rush of relief.

A moment later Amy appeared—covered in oil, her hair matted. She took the helm. “Raise the drogue. Wrap the line around the anchor windlass and I’ll winch it in. Leave it cleated in case we need to re-deploy.”

Gideon did as instructed and a moment later the motorized windlass was hauling in the drogue. He manhandled it back into the locker.

The boat swung around, a wave slamming over him as he crawled back toward the pilothouse.

“We’d better get back to Bahía Hondita,” he said, coughing and shedding water. “Ride it out there.”

“We’re two miles from Jeyupsi,” said Amy, quietly. “Let’s finish what we started.” She reached down and flipped a batch of circuit breakers, plunging the boat into darkness. The only light came from the dim glow of the electronics.

Gideon stared at the isolated cay on the chartplotter, an irregular shape in the middle of nowhere.

“We’re going to circle it at a mile, looking for our friends. If they’re not there, we go in and turn on the outside floodlight so we can verify it’s the right landmark. You’ll document it with photographs and video. And identify whatever might be meant by clue seven, the Devil’s vomit.”

“And if they’re there?”

“We turn and run.”

“We only have one engine.”

“We’ll see them before they see us. We’ll lose them in this sea. The crests of these waves are higher than our boat.”

“Thanks, I hadn’t noticed.”

The boat rumbled on, thrown back and sideways again and again. They circled the cay, seeing nothing on radar that might be a lurking boat.

“Okay,” Amy said. “We’re going in.”

She brought the boat closer to the cay. As they approached, Gideon could hear the roar of surf, like a continuous barrage of artillery, growing increasingly in volume. And then, dimly emerging from the darkness, a patch of ever-shifting, ever-boiling white.

She slowed, circling until they were in the lee of the cay. The outline on radar sharpened, beginning to take on the approximate shape of the image on the map. Amy slowed still further, keeping the engine going just enough to keep the boat oriented.

“Get ready with the floodlights,” she said. “Aim them at the rock. We’ll want to do this quickly.”

Gideon grabbed the handles of the floodlights in the roof of the pilothouse and maneuvered them toward the vague outline, white with surf. The surf was so violent, the thunder of it shook the very air.

“Now.”

He threw the switches, and the bank of lights blazed into the darkness, brilliantly illuminating the cay. It was stupendous—a huge arch of black rock rising out of the water, lashed by surf, streaming white water. A long rocky shore extended along one side, about a quarter of a mile, raging with surf.

But it was the arch itself that transfixed Gideon. With each wave, the sea rushed through the hole in the arch, cramming in and boiling into a violent maelstrom—and then
vomiting
out the other side, leaving a long trail of white spume on the surface of the sea that trailed off in a straight line into the darkness.

Gideon grabbed the camera and began taking photos as the boat moved past, then switched it into video mode.

“That trail of sea foam,” said Amy. “It follows the current. And we’re supposed to follow it. I’m taking a bearing now—that’ll be our new heading.” She gunned the engine, the boat swinging around to slip past the cay…

Just as—suddenly, out of the darkness from behind the cay, churning at high speed—there came the
Horizonte
, its 50-caliber deck gun pointed directly at them.