For Spencer and Harrison Newman
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
About the Author
Other Titles
Copyright
29 August 1665
The sword was the smallest that could be found aboard the Griffin, yet thirteen-year-old Samuel Higgins could barely lift it with both hands.
“But what am I to do with this, sir?” the cabin boy asked in alarm.
York, the ship’s barber and surgeon, regarded him sternly. “We’re going into battle, Lucky. You won’t be picking your teeth with it.”
Samuel was aghast. “Me? I’m to join the fight?”
The word had spread like wildfire through the English privateer fleet that the invasion of Portobelo was at hand. This was what they had crossed the perilous Atlantic for, losing fully a third of their number to scurvy, fever, and the malevolent sea. At the end of this day lay riches beyond their wildest dreams.
In a secluded inlet, forty miles north of the treasure city, the nine remaining privateer ships lay at anchor. Each vessel was manned by a skeleton crew. The majority of the English seamen were loaded onto a flotilla of twenty-four canoes. These had been carried all the way from Liverpool for exactly this purpose — a sneak attack on Portobelo.
Hugging the coast, the canoes were paddled south, rushed along by the fast-moving current. Each narrow craft was about forty feet long and equipped with a small sail. The assault force totaled about five hundred in number. They were led by the captain of the Griffin, the dreaded corsair James Blade.
“Row, you scurvy scum!” the captain roared. “We reach Portobelo before dawn, or your bodies will lie at the bottom of the bay!”
Struggling with a heavy oar, Samuel knew this was not an empty threat. Over the course of their terrible journey, he had seen Blade strike, flog, and even hang his crew. And the cruel captain had murdered Evans, the sail maker, Samuel’s only friend aboard the barque. The memory of that good man’s terrible end still caused the boy to well up with suppressed anger.
By the time they had covered the forty-mile distance, Samuel’s hands were raw and bleeding. He wasn’t sure he would be able to clutch his sword, much less defend himself with it.
Blade indicated a pattern of flickering lights in the moonless blackness ahead. “The torches of Santiago Castle! Muffle the oars! We’ll take those fancy dons by surprise!”
No sooner had the words passed his lips than giant signal fires flared, illuminating the stone fortress before them. There was a flash, followed by a huge explosion. A split second later, a cannonball sizzled over their heads, close enough for Samuel to feel its hot wind. It struck the water behind them, sending up a steaming geyser.
“To the beach!” howled Blade, standing in the bow, a cutlass in one hand and his bone-handled snake whip in the other. “If you want to line your pockets with Spanish gold, first stain your swords with Spanish blood!”
The battle had begun.
Perhaps one diver in a thousand would have noticed the faint glimmer on the ocean floor. Dante Lewis spotted it immediately.
Silver!
Heart racing, he deflated his buoyancy compensator (or B.C.) vest and began to descend toward it, passing towering coral formations and clouds of sea life.
The Hidden Shoals off the Caribbean island of Saint-Luc boasted some of the most spectacular colors on the face of the earth — the brilliant turquoise of a parrot fish, the electric magenta of red algae, the neon yellow of a snapper’s tail, the shimmering violet of a school of Creole wrasses.
Dante perceived none of it.
That wasn’t exactly true. He could see everything — and far sharper than the average person. But only in black and white and shades of gray.
The promising thirteen-year-old photographer was color-blind. That was why he had accepted the diving internship at Poseidon Oceanographic Institute. Not to learn color — his brain wasn’t wired for that. But maybe he could learn to detect it, figure it out from the clues he could see — light, dark, and shading.
He checked the Fathometer on his dive watch to see how deep he’d gone. Forty feet.
So far, the plan was a dismal failure. Descending in full scuba gear, Dante swung around his Nikonos underwater camera to snap a picture of a flamingo tongue — a rare spotted snail, supposedly orange on peach. To Dante, it appeared gray on gray.
Everything is gray on gray, he reminded himself glumly. And it always will be.
Sixty feet. He looked down. The glint of silver was still far below.
Dante felt he was stuck on a backward island in the middle of nowhere for the whole summer. There was nothing to do but dive, an activity that he wasn’t much good at, and liked even less. He had almost gotten himself killed at least once already.
And for what? Gray fish, gray plants, gray coral.
But there was money in these waters. From centuries of sunken ships. Dante and his companions had already found an antique Spanish piece of eight. His brow clouded. The three-hundred-year-old coin had been stolen from them by their supervisor, Tad Cutter. The interns would not make the mistake of trusting the slick Californian again.
Eighty feet. It was deeper than he had ever been, but he barely gave it a second thought. He was completely focused on reaching the source of the glimmer.
And then his flippers made contact with the soft sandy bottom. He peered down at the object that had drawn him to the depths.
A 7UP can.
His disappointment surged like the clouds of bubbles that rose from his breathing apparatus.
Stupid, he berated himself. It was crazy to believe that every glint in the ocean was some kind of lost treasure. But it would have been sweet to snag a pile of silver and rub it in Cutter’s face! The institute man had done a lot more than swipe one little coin. He and his team had taken over the wreck site it had come from.
They’re probably over there right now, digging up our discovery!
It was a huge rip-off, no question about it. Yet the whole business didn’t seem to bother Dante right then. Instead he felt pretty good. A dull, pleasant fatigue, like a runner’s high.
Funny — he was normally pretty nervous on a dive. Underwater seemed like a place that people simply weren’t meant to be. But now he was starting to feel confident. Fearless, even.
A curious lionfish ventured close — a mass of spines and fins and stripes.
It’s an underwater porcupine in designer clothes!
In some remote corner of his mind, it occurred to Dante that he should take a picture. But he made no move for the Nikonos tethered to his arm. Instead, he reached out to touch an elaborately striped fin.
The attack came from above, knocking him backward. His dive partner, fourteen-year-old Star Ling, grabbed him linebacker-style around the waist, driving him away from his quarry. She shook a scolding finger in his face, then whipped out a dive slate and scribbled: POISON!
Dante squinted at the message, his vision darkening at the edges. He could see all the letters, but for the life of him, he couldn’t put them together to read the word. What the young photographer didn’t realize was that he was experiencing nitrogen narcosis — the rapture of the deep. Under deep-water pressure, the nitrogen in air
dissolves in the bloodstream, producing an effect similar to drunkenness. In diving lingo, he was “narced.”
All Dante registered was that he was having a fine time, and here was Star, ruining it. The lionfish had gotten away, leaving Dante sweating from his efforts.
Who needs a rubber suit to dive in boiling water?
Before Star’s horrified eyes, Dante unzipped his lightweight tropical skin suit and began to peel off the thin material. In his narced state, he had forgotten that the wet suit was not for warmth; it was for protection from the sting of coral and other venomous sea life.
She grabbed him and held on. He fought back, the upper half of the wet suit flapping from his waist.
That was when she saw the shark.
It was a bull shark, seven or eight feet long, although it looked even bigger through the lens of the water. It was not Clarence — the teen divers had already had a run-in with the eighteen-foot tiger shark of local legend. But Star was an expert diver, and she knew bulls could be aggressive. Especially if this one mistook their struggling for the thrashing of a wounded fish.
“Calm down!” she barked into her regulator, tasting salt water.
Dante was too impaired to heed the warning. His eyes were barely open, mere slits behind his mask.
The predator was only a few feet away, close enough for Star to see the peculiar remora fish clamped to its underside, attaching itself to feed on scraps of prey.
Star was torn. Should she swim away? But what about her partner? She was there for him, and he for her.
Onto the scene burst a blur of black rubber, a six-foot-five body formed by rigid discipline into the shape of a torpedo. It was Menasce Gérard, a hulking native dive guide with the unlikely nickname English. Propelled by the powerful kicks of his flippers, he swam into the shark’s path. In a single motion, he pulled the dangling camera off Dante’s arm, wheeled around, and brought it down with all his might on the bull’s flat snout.
The shark reared up, shocked. Clearly, a bonk on the nose was the last thing it had expected. It turned abruptly and swam off, roiling the water. Out of the storm appeared a smaller fish — a foot long, with a round suction cup on its back. It was the remora, dislodged from its host during the commotion. It darted back and forth, searching in vain for the bull’s pale underbelly. Finding nothing, it panicked and clamped onto Dante’s bare chest.
That got Dante’s attention. He cried out in shock, blowing a cloud of bubbles into English’s face. He tried to pluck the remora from his skin, but the hold was too strong. Even the guide couldn’t seem to yank the fish free.
English gave the signal to surface, but Dante was focused on his new tenant. “Get off me! Get off me!” He swallowed water, putting himself in a choking frenzy.
The guide took hold of Dante from behind, crossing his arms in an iron grip. Unable to reach his own B.C., he shot air into Dante’s until they both began to rise. Star joined the shaky ascent.
They surfaced about twenty yards from the R/V Hernando Cortés, their dive boat. Symptoms of narcosis disappear as a diver rises, so Dante was no longer dazed. Now he was hysterical. “Pull it off! Pull it off!”
Doubting the boy could even swim in his frantic state, English towed him Red Cross–style to the Cortés. The other two teenage interns, Bobby Kaczinski and Adriana Ballantyne, hauled him onto the dive platform.
Adriana gawked at the fish fastened onto Dante. “What’s that?”
English scrambled up beside them. “Remora!” he exclaimed, trying to work his hands under the creature’s suction cup.
“You’re hurting me!” cried Dante.
Star was last out of the water. She kicked off her flippers and approached Dante. She walked with a limp — the result of a mild case of cerebral palsy — although underwater the condition disappeared. Hefting her dripping air tank, she began smacking the remora with the flat bottom. Dante staggered backward, flopping down on the deck. “What are you trying to do, kill me?” he gasped.
“Silence, you silly child!” ordered English in his French Caribbean accent. This was not his first run-in with the four teens, and he was not in the mood to be understanding. “We do nothing, you complain! We do something, you complain louder!”
“But what if it’s stuck on forever?”
“What’s all the commotion?” Captain Braden Vanover peered down from the flying bridge. Spying the fish attached to Dante’s chest, he exclaimed, “Oh, jeez!” and disappeared below.
He returned a moment later, carrying a bottle of Jamaican rum and a hypodermic syringe. He dipped the needle in the liquor, drew up some dark brown liquid, and injected it into the remora, just behind the gill slits.
The gray fish dropped to the deck, flipping wildly on the olive-painted planks. English expertly kicked it back into the sea.
Then he wheeled his furious attention on Dante. “You were maybe trying out for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, monsieur? Why do you take off the wet suit at eighty feet?”
“He was narced,” supplied Star.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Dante defended himself. “How was I supposed to know that crazy fish was going to stick on? It could happen to anybody.”
“If it was not you, then it would not happen!” the guide seethed. “All of you — you attract the troubles like the giant magnet!” He turned to face Vanover. “I am finished with these American teenagers. I am not MTV, me! The next time they dive with you, you will find another guide!” He peeled off his dripping wet suit and stormed below.
“I’m Canadian,” Kaz called after him. If English had heard, the big man gave no sign.
The four interns exchanged agonized looks. Their internship was a sham — a smokescreen for Tad Cutter’s treasure hunting. Scuba trips with Captain Vanover and English were all that kept this summer from being a total bust. Now they were gone too.
“Well,” the captain said slowly. “You’ve heard the bad news. Anybody ready for the good news?”
“We could sure use some,” said Adriana.
“The office just radioed in. The PUSH team wrapped up their research a few days early. The next project doesn’t start down there for another week. The station is yours if you want it.”
The Poseidon Underwater Self-contained Habitat, or PUSH, was a subsea lab built right onto the Hidden Shoals proper, sixty-five feet beneath the waves. There, scientists called aquanauts could live and work for days at a time, spending almost every waking minute diving.
For Star, it was a dream come true. “The only problem with scuba is it’s over too fast. But on PUSH, when your air runs low, you just swim to the station, switch tanks, and swim back out again. And there’s no decompressing because you don’t have to return to surface pressure. Home is right there on the reef.”
“Home is an underwater sardine can,” Dante said sourly.
“Even when you’re not diving, it’s still awesome,” Star went on. “Because you’re under sixty-five feet of water. Look out the window, and you’re right in the thick of things.”
“We’ll be in the thick of things, all right,” grumbled Dante. “Every time you crook your finger, you’ll be picking somebody else’s nose.”
The four were in the cabin the two girls shared, watching Adriana pack for their undersea sojourn. The girl gazed bleakly from the stacks of color-coordinated designer outfits to the tiny watertight bag about the size of a kindergartner’s knapsack. Anything that wouldn’t fit had to be left on dry land.
“This is impossible,” she complained. “If I take the rust shorts, then I’m stuck with the matching sweatshirt. And it’s so puffy, it fills the whole bag!”
“Rust?” repeated Dante. “Is that supposed to be a color?”
Adriana nodded. “It’s between taupe and burnt sienna.”
“Well, thanks for clearing that up,” Dante said sarcastically. “Just pack any old thing. We’re going to be so sick of looking at one another that you could wear a rabbit suit and nobody would notice.”
“And bring your toothbrush,” added Star. “We’ll be breathing recycled air, but I doubt the CO2 scrubbers can do anything about bad breath.”
It was important not to forget anything. Once they had been at the station for half a day or so, a return to the surface meant seventeen hours in a decompression chamber.
As soon as their bags were packed, the four took advantage of their last chance to e-mail family and friends from Poseidon’s computer lab. PUSH had computers linked by wireless telemetry to the outside world. But the connection was expensive, so there were strict rules against using it for personal correspondence.
Kaz replied to messages from his parents and Steven Allagash, his sports agent. Kaz was a hot prospect to make it as a professional hockey player. They called him the most promising young defenseman to come out of the Toronto area in twenty years.
That was before.
He sent just one more e-mail, to a boy named Drew Christiansen. The two were not friends. In fact, Kaz couldn’t understand why Drew didn’t consider him Public Enemy Number One after what had happened.
The Ontario Minor Hockey Association finals, game six. Kaz could still feel the contact of the body check as he drove Drew away from the net. It was a clean hit — even Drew agreed on that. A freak accident, according to the doctors. Trauma to the spinal column.
In that terrible instant, Drew Christiansen and Bobby Kaczinski were both out of hockey for good.
Drew had no choice in the matter. He would never walk again. And Kaz wanted nothing to do with a sport that could turn him into an instrument of destruction. That was why he had applied for the Poseidon internship. Diving in the Caribbean, it had seemed at the time, was the opposite of hockey in Canada.
He felt more than a little ridiculous e-mailing “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” to this stranger whose life he’d ruined.
But I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen —
“Hey, guys,” called Adriana excitedly from another workstation. “I’ve got an answer from my uncle!”
Adriana’s uncle Alfred Ballantyne was an antiquities expert. She had e-mailed him a photograph of an artifact Star had brought up from the shipwreck site — an elaborately carved whalebone hilt.