The four interns rushed below to the closed-circuit monitor Dr. Ocasek had set up in the salon. The screen was split in four, one quadrant for each camera.
Dante frowned. “There’s nothing.”
The screen showed swirling water and an occasional sea creature staring in surprise at this bizarre mechanical intruder.
“We’re off the reef,” Dr. Ocasek reminded him. “That’s where the densely packed marine life is.”
“But where’s the bottom?” asked Star.
“I’m not sure,” said Dr. Ocasek.
“Picture a mountain,” came Captain Vanover’s voice through the two-way radio from the wheelhouse. “Our cameras are sort of floating in space beside it. This slope might not bottom out flat for two or three thousand feet.”
Kaz felt his eyelids beginning to droop. Fifteen minutes of staring at nothing was taking its toll on all the interns as the clock ticked on past midnight. This was turning into a big bust. How could anyone find something on the slope if they couldn’t even find the slope itself?
It came up so fast that they barely had a chance to scream. First a large luminescent jellyfish flashed through the top right quadrant. Then a diagonal wall of sand and seaweed was hurtling toward the camera.
Dante reacted first. “Hit the brakes!” he bellowed at the walkie-talkie.
“Slow down!” cried Adriana.
“Veer off!” shouted Star.
When the camera struck the mud, Kaz flinched, expecting an impact. But of course the boat hadn’t struck anything. Only the camera array, 250 feet below the surface, had suffered a collision.
Following Dr. Ocasek’s instructions, Vanover reversed course, and the contraption came free of the muddy incline. Two lenses were sand-encrusted, but soon washed clean.
From that point on, no one felt remotely sleepy or bored. The Cortés traced slow track lines across the water, allowing the cameras a chance to scan the gradient for five hundred yards in each horizontal direction. Then the winch would lower the array another twenty-five feet, Captain Vanover would adjust course, and the thousand-foot trace would begin again.
Around 2 A.M., while they were lowering the array to 325 feet, a gusty wind blew up in their faces, and rain began to pelt down on them.
“How much longer is this going to take?” yelled Vanover from the cockpit. “We’ve got weather coming!”
With the rough wave action tossing its umbilical line, the camera array bounced and spun far below them. The pictures were chaotic. Kaz’s head pounded as he stared at the screen, fearful that something might go by undetected. The motion of the boat was making him queasy, and he swallowed determinedly, his eyes glued to the monitor. Beside him, Dante, never a good sailor, was hugging his knees and moaning.
Dr. Ocasek was the picture of total focus. “If it’s down there, we’ll find it,” he said calmly.
When the time came to lower the winch to 350 feet, it was obvious that conditions outside had deteriorated even further. The tossing of the deck knocked Adriana flat on her back. Even Kaz, who had superb balance from hockey, had to hold on to cabin tops and bulwarks as the sea manhandled the Cortés.
“Get back below!” shouted Vanover from behind the wheel. “I’m turning us around!”
“Not yet!” begged Dante, screaming to be heard over the wind. “I know I saw something!”
“No!” boomed the captain. “In these seas, if you go overboard, you’re done!”
A wave broke over the bow, drenching the winch and the interns who struggled to man it.
“Just one more track line!” howled Star, shaking herself like a wet dog. “If we give up now, we’ll never finish this!”
Vanover hesitated, the driving rain stinging his face. “One more!” he agreed finally. “But then I don’t care if you find the lost continent of Atlantis — we’re going home!”
Star and Dante sloshed down the companionway, and joined the others in front of the monitor for the last pass.
The ship lurched, and a moment later, the camera array swung away from the slope below. And when the pendulum effect brought the apparatus back into position, there it was in the bottom left quadrant:
The long bronze barrel of a cannon.
All four interns began screaming at the same time. Not one word was intelligible.
Even Dr. Ocasek was excited. “Back up, Braden! Back up!”
“Are you crazy?” crackled the sharp voice through the two-way radio. “It’s all I can do to keep us afloat!”
The array bobbed in the current, and for an instant, one of the cameras dipped down to reveal a scattering of ballast stones and other debris half buried on the sandy slope.
Dante was out of his seat, crying, “Did you see that?” until a sudden pitch of the boat sent him sprawling into Dr. Ocasek’s arms.
“It’s more debris from Nuestra Señora!” exclaimed Adriana in amazement. “I wonder how it got all the way over here.”
Star had an idea. “Maybe the galleon broke in two when it sank. And the force of the hurricane blew half of it off the shoal.”
“The half with the money in it!” Dante added breathlessly.
Kaz warmed to the argument. “It would explain why Cutter hasn’t found any treasure.”
“Hey!” came an angry shout from the radio. Then, “If you guys are finished theorizing, do I have your permission to get us out of here?”
“Go!” urged Dr. Ocasek. “We’ll bring up the camera array so it doesn’t get smashed to pieces when we cross the reef.”
“Okay, but be careful! We’re taking ten-foot waves over the bow.”
By the time they got topside, the deck of the Cortés was awash with foam and reeling from the motion of the sea. A stack of safety harnesses came sailing down from the wheelhouse and splashed at their feet.
“Get in them!” boomed Vanover. “And lash yourselves to something permanent!”
The thirty-foot walk to the winch was as tough an obstacle course as Kaz could remember. He clipped himself to the rail and hung on for dear life as Dr. Ocasek started the winch. The cable began to wind up.
Kaz put out a hand as Star stumbled. A second later, his own legs slipped out from under him, and he dangled from his harness, knowing he would have been swept away without it. Star, on the other hand, had kept her feet and was sneering triumphantly down at him.
The winch continued to shudder and groan. Two hundred feet … a hundred and fifty … The underwater lights grew nearer and brighter as they rose. The violent ocean began to glow beneath them. One hundred feet … fifty … twenty-five …
And then the array, still lashed to its weighted platform, broke the surface. Brilliant as a supernova, it turned night into day, showing the occupants of the Hernando Cortés just how much trouble they were in. The heeling of the boat in the troughs and crests of the oncoming seas had turned the dangling array into a hundred-pound projectile. It swung from the tip of the winch’s crane arm like a lethal tetherball, smacking into the side of the wheelhouse and shattering a porthole. Then the craft righted itself, sending the contraption across the full beam of the ship, missing Adriana’s head by inches.
Kaz grabbed a boathook and snagged the umbilical. But the next movement of the ship ripped the pole out of his hands.
“Heads up!” boomed Vanover as the array sailed back over them.
Wham! It connected with the railing, denting it. They watched as one of the cameras, jarred loose by the impact, pitched into the sea.
Kaz picked up the boat hook and swung it at the twisting umbilical. He missed the cable, but the end caught the neck of one of the floodlights and clamped on. The whole array came crashing to the deck.
With a cry like a springing tiger, Dr. Igor Ocasek flung himself on top of his runaway creation, preventing it from sailing off again.
* * *
It was 4:30 A.M. by the time the Hernando Cortés limped back to Côte Saint-Luc harbor.
Waterlogged and weary, the four interns helped Dr. Ocasek car
ry what was left of the array back to the scientist’s cabin. One camera was missing, one was smashed, several floodlights were shattered, and the whole arrangement was covered in mud from numerous collisions with the sloped seabed.
“Sorry about this, Iggy,” Star said sheepishly. “I didn’t think we were going to wreck it.”
Dr. Ocasek was upbeat. “We found what we were looking for. That’s all that matters. The rest was the weather’s fault.”
“You’re not going to get into any trouble for this, are you?” asked Dante nervously.
“Are you kidding?” The scientist grinned. “If I showed up one day and everything wasn’t broken, Geoffrey would have a heart attack!”
They said good night and trudged off to their own quarters. Kaz and Dante let themselves into their cabin and switched on the light.
Dante went straight to the bathroom and began peeling off his wet clothes. “I’ve never been so tired in my life! I’m going to sleep for a hundred years!”
“Join the club,” yawned Kaz. “The minute I hit that pillow — ” He froze.
There in the corner sat the bell of Nuestra Señora de la Luz, cushioned by a bath mat. It was partly off the piece of cloth, which meant it had been moved. And, on the terrazzo floor in front of it, facing it, were two sandy footprints.
Maybe their activities weren’t such a secret from Cutter after all.
It was almost noon before Adriana awoke, the powerful Caribbean sun threading through the gap in the curtains and all but searing a hole in the center of her forehead. She looked to the other bed. Star was still asleep, snoring softly into her pillow. Divers always snored. It was a side effect of time spent at depth and pressure. Even Adriana had woken herself a few times with a loud snort.
She sat up, yawning and stretching, then caught a glimpse of her hands, and gasped aloud. Thick brown mud was caked under all ten fingernails. Her immaculate, stylish mother would faint dead away!
Ballantyne ladies see to their grooming. Adriana had been hearing that since birth. Mother, obviously, had never had to handle a hundred-pound camera array that had scoured the seafloor. To her, the purpose of the ocean was for cruising, and to supply sushi.
She padded barefoot into the small bathroom, and switched on the light. Digging through her toiletry bag, she came up with her manicure set and began to clean her nails.
Yuck! This job is disgusting. You could plant potatoes in the blob I just excavated from under my thumbnail!
And then the blob twinkled.
Huh? Adriana blinked.
It was a tiny particle in the dirt, about half the size of a grain of sand. It was bright yellow, and when it caught the light, it gleamed.
She looked closer. Not yellow, exactly. More like — gold.
Intrigued now, she spread a tissue on the counter, popped the dirt onto it, and used an eyebrow tweezers to separate the shiny fleck from the rest of the material.
It was very shiny — and soft, too. The sharp tweezers could not cut the particle. Strong pressure just left an indentation.
Her breath caught. This didn’t just look like gold; it was gold!
She finished cleaning her nails onto the tissue, and examined the results. Only dirt. Head spinning, she sat down on the edge of the tub, trying to sort out her thoughts. The dirt under her nails came from carrying Iggy’s camera array. That was mud dredged up from the sloping ocean floor near the second debris field from Nuestra Señora. How could it be a coincidence — a tiny piece of gold from the very spot where they suspected a vast treasure lay hidden?
But Spanish gold came in bars, coins, great decorative chains. This was barely larger than a particle of dust.
When the answer came to her, it brought with it so much adrenaline that the feeling was closer to terror than understanding. She leaped to her feet, unable to contain the excitement within one body.
“Star! — Star!!”
* * *
At a quiet corner table in the Poseidon cafeteria, the four interns met with Captain Vanover.
Dante stared at the tiny fleck on Adriana’s fingertip. “That’s not treasure! That’s a molecule!”
“It’s a gold molecule,” Star said in irritation. “And keep your voice down.”
“It is pretty small,” Vanover pointed out. “I can’t explain it, but I guess there’s a chance it occurs naturally.”
“I thought so too,” said Adriana. “But then I remembered something I read on the Spanish government web site. All treasure arriving in Spain from the New World was heavily taxed. But you could never know how much more was smuggled in to avoid the taxes. And the easiest treasure to sneak past the authorities was gold dust.”
“Yeah,” said Kaz dubiously, “but one piece?”
Star took up the explanation. “Think about what happens when a boat sinks. It creates a whirlpool effect, like the Titanic. Something as light as gold dust would get sucked up into the whirlpool, and end up spread out all over the bottom around the wreck.”
“So we tried a little experiment,” Adriana took up the tale. “We pulled all our muddy clothes out of the hamper. And there was another speck on Star’s shirt.” Her eyes shone. “We’re not wrong about this. The debris field we photographed last night has the treasure in it — the real treasure! We can’t get at all that dust, but the rest of it is lying there, just waiting to be claimed!”
Dante choked back a whoop. “I can’t believe it! We found it! It’s ours! Now all we have to do is figure out how to bring it up.”
“Not so fast,” the captain said seriously. “What we saw last night was at three hundred and fifty feet. And that was just the top of the debris field. Who knows how much farther down the slope the treasure could be? There’s no way I can let you kids — even you, Star — dive so deep.”
Star’s jaw stiffened. “That’s not your decision to make! No offense, Captain — you’ve been great to us. But we’re talking about a billion dollars here!”
“It isn’t worth a dime if you get yourself killed going after it.”
Dante was horrified. “You mean we’re just going to leave it there?”
“Calm down,” Vanover soothed. “There are ways to salvage things from deep water. It’s possible, but it’s tricky. And you have to know exactly what you’re doing. Take it easy. We’ve got time. Cutter’s looking in the wrong place; and he doesn’t know that you guys are looking at all.”
Kaz and Dante exchanged a worried look. “That’s not exactly true,” Kaz began slowly. He told the others about finding the footprints on the cabin floor in front of the bell. “We have to assume it’s Cutter,” he finished. “Who else could it be?”
Star looked alarmed. “That’s trouble. If he sees us nosing around the second debris field, we’ll be leading him right to the treasure.”
Captain Vanover looked like a man who had just made up his mind. “All right — here’s what we’re going to do. Poseidon maintains a research sub called Deep Scout. I’m going to requisition it, and we’re all going down there. If we can snag a piece of that treasure and match it to the cargo list on the web site, we can file a claim on the wreck with the International Maritime Commission.” He made eye contact with all four. “Then it won’t matter what Cutter knows. It’ll be our prize, not his.”
If a bubble helicopter married a submarine, their offspring might look very much like the DSV Deep Scout. A gleaming sphere made of clear acrylic sprouted from a titanium hull that was pockmarked with lights, cameras, and other instruments. Six folded manipulator arms gave the submersible an almost insectlike appearance.
“Isn’t she beautiful?” crowed Captain Vanover.
“No,” said Dante with conviction.
“I guess not,” the captain conceded. “But she’ll take us where we need to go. Besides, this boat is usually booked six months in advance. You kids have no idea how many favors I had to call in and people I had to lie to in order to get us on the schedule on such short notice.”
Deep Scout sat on the
launch deck of its support vessel. Scoutmaster was a much larger ship than the Hernando Cortés or the Ponce de León. It had to be to house the crane mechanism required to place the deep-sea vehicle in the water, and to pluck it out again when the mission was done.
Kaz’s head was spinning by the end of the handshakes and introductions. “It takes this many guys to run one little submersible?” he whispered.
“Most of these are Scoutmaster’s crew,” Vanover replied. “But there’s always a tech on board monitoring the sub’s every move. Remember, Deep Scout was built to explore the ocean floor at depths of up to two miles.” Seeing Dante turn gray, he added quickly, “We won’t be going that far down.”
Vanover left them and climbed the metal ladder to the big ship’s towering bridge. It was his job to direct Scoutmaster’s captain to the correct coordinates where Dr. Ocasek’s camera array had spotted the second debris field.
Dante leaned against the rail, observing the beehive of activity. “You think we’re going to have to split the money with all these people?”
Adriana was disgusted. “Is that all this is to you? Money?”
“Yeah, well, maybe those of us who don’t already have one-point-two billion dollars are kind of looking forward to seeing how the other half lives,” Dante shot back.
Her eyes narrowed in anger. “You have no way of knowing how much my family has or doesn’t have.”
“You don’t have to apologize for being rich,” Dante insisted. “But don’t act all superior because you’re in this for pure archaeology. It’s easy to be high-minded when you don’t need the money. I do.”
“I don’t care about the money,” Star put in grimly. “I just want to see the look on Cutter’s face when we show up with that treasure. Us — the losers he picked because we wouldn’t be a threat … the cripple who couldn’t possibly dive….” Her voice trailed off, but her eyes were blazing. “I just want to see that.”
Money. Science. Revenge. Kaz marveled at the different reasons his fellow interns had for coveting this treasure. His mind was on something else entirely — the skull they had unearthed at Cutter’s excavation. More than three hundred years ago, people had perished in this shipwreck.