| |
Like fratboys at spring break, eager to hit the beach, Bones and Willis scrambled for suits and tanks. Maddock said, “Matt, you may as well get your own gear organized. We’ll go second jump.”
Lyn ran out the anchor. A bump and rattle of chain, then the howl of rope passing over the davit. She snubbed it off and let Lark swing before the southeast breeze. Corey ran up and checked their GPS readings. “We’re just about over it,” he called down.
Maddock stayed glued to the LIDAR screen. Something just looked strange. Sally had returned their drone to the deck. “You look like a big yellow tabby watching a mousehole.”
“I think we’re missing part of the picture here. Can you run another scan just to the north?”
“Aye aye, Skipper. We’ve got enough juice for another flyover.” She launched the drone and circled it once, then started a rectangular pattern just off Lark’s bow.
Willis and Bones returned to the deck in neoprene suits, carrying tanks and buoyancy compensators. Unlike their free dive earlier, they each wore full-face masks with integral radio communication equipment. Matt helped them with the gear.
Maddock toggled the talk switch on their communication unit. “Coms working?” When both men nodded, he continued, “We’ve got a hundred and ten feet of water under us. Watch your dive computers and save enough air for a safety stop on the way up. I’d say you’ve got no more than twelve minutes on the bottom, so be careful. If you get the bends, you’ll just have to tough it out. Matt and I will go next.”
Maddock knew he didn’t have to tell them, it just made him feel better. He heard a gush of air on the com-set and both men disappeared over the side. For the next three minutes there was nothing but breathing, then Bones said, “Come to papa.”
Maddock and Lyn sat at the com-set. Matt watched over the side. “The water is so clear, I can see them down there.”
At that moment, Willis’ voice came over the set. “We got us a good one. Seventeenth century for sure. I see ballast stones, ribs and a row of cannon.”
The com-set whooshed and hissed with the men’s breathing. Maddock heard Bones say, “Stern broke off, it’s back here.”
The breathing became heavier; rapid puffs and grunts. Maddock thought he heard Bones say, “Help me with this,” then, “stand by, we’re coming up.”
Matt turned and said, “It looks like they’re both headed back to the boat.”
Sally landed the drone and left Corey to deal with it. She rushed to Matt’s side and said, “Are they okay?”
A surge of bubbles boiled to the surface. Bones’ voice came through much clearer. “We’re on a five-minute safety stop. Ask Sally if she has lunch ready.”
“Why don’t you tell him... ooh, just wait ‘til he gets up here, I’ll tell him myself.”
Lyn said, “Spam and cheese subs for everyone, coming right up.”
Two heads bobbed to the surface, ducked under, then reappeared. Sally said, “They’re struggling with something. We need to help them.”
Maddock toggled the talk button. “You guys okay?”
“Thought we could handle bringing this up on our own,” Willis said. “It’s heavy.”
Maddock leaned over the side and grabbed the rough gray brick they handed up. Between them, he and Matt hauled the two divers on deck.
Sally pushed between them and helped Bones with his mask. “That was awful deep,” she said, “and you were down a long time. How do you feel?”
Willis looked at Maddock and raised his eyebrows. Maddock shrugged back.
Bones had slipped out of his buoyancy compensator and tank. “We do this all the time.” He knelt on the deck and hefted the lime encrusted brick. “The wreck is too deep for much coral growth, but it’s been down there a long time. The worms and bugs have had a field day.”
“So, what’s that rock you dragged up?” Sally asked.
Maddock grinned. “My friend is just stringing us along. Show her, Bones.”
At that moment, Lyn poked her head out the cabin door and said, “Lunch break.”
Bones tucked the brick under his arm and said, “We should all see this.”
Corey joined them in the cabin. Bones set the crusty wet lump on the dinette and drew out his dive knife. “Lyn,” he said, “you should see this too.”
With the others looking on, Bones rapped the brick with the butt of his knife, then inserted the blade in a crack and twisted. A large flake broke off, revealing a glistening surface of yellow gold. Maddock knew what to expect, yet he too gasped at the find.
“Gold, my friends,” Bones said. “Bars of gold down there, maybe silver too. Sally, you are truly a genius. I bow in awe of your noodle network.”
Corey said, “That’s not all. While you were diving, we scanned a little further north.” He set the LIDAR processor unit next to Bones’ gold bar. “Look at this.”
Not a hundred yards off their bow, a similar wreck lay at about the same depth. Three more like it were scattered nearby. Maddock said, “A fleet. An entire treasure fleet lies just beneath our keel.”
Lyn finally spoke. “Manila galleons. They brought gold and silver from New Spain and traded for Chinese porcelain and Indonesian spices. This one must have been on the westward leg. I can’t believe it! We actually found something.”
“Well we just brought up our gas money,” Bones said. “That should earn us lunch.”
Willis and Bones had slid out of their neoprene suits, still they both perspired from their recent exertion. Bones wiped his face and said, “I wish we had a boarding ladder.”
“For a bunch of smart guys, you sure can find the hard way to do things.” Lyn said. “Why don’t you just lower the bow-ramp and dive from there?”
Matt blinked at her. “You mean, like a ramp, in the water? Just walk on, and walk off?”
“I was going to suggest that,” Bones said, between bites. “I was just about to say ‘We should lower the bow-ramp,’ I really was.”
“Well I’m thinking of our next jump,” Maddock said. “Matt and I will take crowbars and bags. We’ll need a line to get whatever we find back to the surface.”
This time, it was Bones’ turn to deliver the stern lecture. He focused on Matt, “When Maddock says time’s up, it’s up. Got it?”
The two had each clipped an orange, mesh-bottomed bag to his belt, marched down the bow-ramp, and sat on its lip to don their fins. Now, swimming along the bottom, they listened while Willis guided them over the com-set to the galleon’s stern. Maddock trailed a length of half-inch line behind him. He kept an eye on Matt, swimming at his side. The ex-Army Ranger was no novice, but there remained a world of SEAL dive training that he never had.
“Here, I see it,” Maddock said.
A scatter of unidentifiable debris lay around them, but a compact pile of fist-sized lumps looked different from the ballast stones and other remains. Matt signed okay with his thumb and forefinger, then said, “Yeah, roger that.”
Maddock pried loose a few lumps. Matt struggled with a large cluster, then managed to break it in half. Between the two of them, they filled one bag, then the other. “A hundred and fifty pounds per bag,” Maddock said. “Time’s up. We’ve got to go.”
He clipped the bags to the line at his waist and told Bones to haul away. Above, he knew that his friend had fed the line through Lark’s anchor davit and looped it over the windless. The heavy bags began to drag along the sand. Matt fended them away from the mounds of ballast stone and coral debris until the rope went vertical and their haul cleared the bottom.
Maddock followed the bags up until they neared the surface and then hung at depth for a five-minute safety stop. Above, their bubbles trailed away to the silvery water’s surface. Something swam by. He caught it out of the corner of his eye before it vanished behind him. Then two more shadows passed, not three feet away.
“Did you see that?” Matt said.
“Squid. Big ones, longer than my arm.”
Lyn came over the com-set. “What are you seeing, guys?”
“They look like Humboldt squid,” Maddock said. “Three, four feet long... here come some more.”
Matt swung his head around. “Holy crap, there’s hundreds of them. No, thousands...”
Maddock felt something on his leg, tentacles covered his mask, and suddenly he felt their beaks tearing his suit and ripping into his flesh. Matt started to scream. Maddock tore the obstruction from his face, only to see his friend nearly enveloped in a writhing mass of eyes and tentacles. They had shredded his buoyancy vest. Head down, Matt spiraled back into the depths.
Maddock dumped his own air and kicked downward in pursuit. When he caught up with Matt, he was doubled over, wrenching the squirming bodies from his legs and streaming blood from a dozen wounds. Maddock grabbed his friend by the vest and dumped his ballast. He flipped the weight belt buckle and watched it disappear below.
Ignoring the searing pain as scores of sharp beaks tore into his own arms and legs, he held fast to Matt’s vest. Maddock ditched his own weights and kicked for the surface.
“We’ve got trouble, guys. I’m going to need some help here.”
His com-set remained silent, and he heard a loud rasping on his dive mask. Matt kicked and thrashed before finally straightening and swimming toward the surface on his own. A mass of gray suckers affixed themselves to Maddock’s mask. Just in front of his eyes, a black parrot’s beak began to attack the plastic itself.
Another squid clung to his neck. Within seconds it had chewed through one of the straps holding his mask in place. Water began filling beneath his chin and he tasted a stream of salt coming through his regulator. A mass of wriggling tentacles pushed their way beneath the neoprene seal and crawled like an army of worms across his face. Maddock tried to inhale, but drew only salt water.
Something gripped him about the ankles and wrapped his legs, drawing him down. He kicked and twisted, his lungs burning. His buoyancy vest wrenched and tugged as if it were being torn from his back. One last regret passed quickly through Maddock’s fleeting consciousness. Matt! He hadn’t saved his friend.