The Silent Sea

Table of Contents

 

DIRK PITT® ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER

Arctic Drift
(WITH DIRK CUSSLER)

 

Treasure of Khan
(WITH DIRK CUSSLER)

 

Black Wind
(WITH DIRK CUSSLER)

 

 

 

 

FARGO ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
WITH GRANT BLACK WOOD
Spartan Gold

 

 

 

ISAAC BELL NOVELS BY CLIVE CUSSLER

 

The Wrecker
(WITH JUSTIN SCOTT)

KURT AUSTIN ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
WITH PAUL KEMPRECOS

 

 

 

 

OREGON
FILES ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER
WITH JACK DU BRUL

 

 

WITH CRAIG DIRGO

 

 

 

 

NONFICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND CRAIG DIRGO

 

 

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Copyright © 2010 by Sandecker, RLLLP

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cussler, Clive.

The silent sea / Clive Cussler ; with Jack Du Brul.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18597-1

1. Cabrillo, Juan (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Intelligence service—Fiction. 3. Ship captains—Fiction. 4. Mercenary troops—Fiction. 5. Argentina—Fiction. 6. Antarctica—Fiction. I. Du Brul, Jack B. II. Title.

PS3553.U75S

813’.54—dc22

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

—
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

 

 

 

 

A
GOLDEN BLUR LEAPT OVER THE SMALL BOAT’S GUNWALE just as the bows met the rocky beach. It hit the water with a splash and plowed through the surf, its tail raised like a triumphant pennant. When the retriever reached land, it shook itself so that drops flew like diamond chips in the crisp air, and then it looked back at the skiff. The dog barked at a pair of gulls farther down the beach that took startled flight. Feeling its companions were coming much too slowly, the purebred tore off into a copse of nearby trees, her bark diminishing until it was swallowed by the forest that covered most of the mile-square island just an hour’s row off the mainland.

“Amelia,” cried Jimmy Ronish, the youngest of the five brothers in the boat.

“She’ll be fine,” Nick said, shipping his oars and taking the boat’s painter line in his hand. He was the eldest of the Ronish boys.

He timed his leap perfectly, landing on the pebbled shore as a wave receded. Three long strides later he was above the tidal mark of flotsam and drying kelp, looping the rope around a sun- and salt-bleached limb of driftwood that was a crosshatch of carved initials. He hauled back on the line to firmly ground the fourteen-foot craft and tied it off.

“Shake a leg,” Nick Ronish admonished his younger siblings. “Low tide’s in five hours, and we’ve got a lot to do.”

While the air was reasonably comfortable this late in the year, the north Pacific was icy cold, forcing them to unload their gear between the lapping waves. One of the heaviest pieces of equipment was a three-hundred-foot coil of hemp line that Ron and Don, the twins, had to shoulder together to get it up the beach. Jimmy was given charge of the rucksack containing their lunch, and as he was nine years old it was a burden to his slender frame.

The four older boys—Nick at nineteen, Ron and Don a year younger, and Kevin just eleven months their junior—could have passed for quintuplets, with their towheads of floppy blond hair and their pale blue eyes. They retained the buoyant energy of youth wrapped in bodies that were rapidly becoming those of men. On the other hand, Jimmy was small for his age, with darker hair and brown eyes. His brothers teased that he looked a lot like Mr. Green-field, the town’s grocer, and while Jimmy wasn’t exactly sure what that implied, he knew he didn’t like it. He idolized his older brothers and hated anything that distinguished him from them.

Their family owned the small island off the coast and had for as far back as their grandfather could remember, and it was a place every generation of boys—for the Ronishes hadn’t produced a girl since 1862—spent adventurous summers exploring. Not only was it easy to pretend they were all Huck Finns marooned on the Mississippi or Tom Sawyers exploring the island’s intricate cave systems, but Pine Island had an inherent sense of intrigue because of the pit.

Mothers had been forbidding their boys from playing near the pit since Abe Ronish, great-uncle of the current Ronish brood, had fallen to his death in 1887. The directive was as inevitably ignored as it was given.

The real lure of the place was that local legend told that a certain Pierre Devereaux, one of the most successful privateers to ever harass the Spanish Main, had buried part of his treasure on this far northern island to lighten his ship during the dogged pursuit by a squadron of frigates that had chased him around Cape Horn and up the length of the Americas. The legend was bolstered by the discovery of a small pyramid of cannon balls in one of the island’s caves, and the fact that the top forty feet of the square pit was braced with rough-hewn log balks.

The cannonballs had long since been lost and were now considered a myth, but there was no denying the reality of the timberworks ringing the mysterious hole in the rocky earth.

“My shoes got wet,” Jimmy complained.

Nick swiftly rounded on his youngest brother and said, “Damn it, Jimmy, I told you already if I heard one complaint outta you I’d make you stay with the boat.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” the boy said, trying to keep from sniveling. “I was just saying is all.” He shook a few drops from his wet foot to show it wasn’t a problem. Nick shot him a stern look, his blue eyes glacial, and turned his attention back to the job at hand.