Benchley, Peter (12 page)

They were at the mouth of the cave.

The light reflected off the white sand and rock walls. Sanders saw the rock marker they had placed in the cave. Treece’s hand moved it and set it in the sand next to the infrared light. A finger pointed to the depression in the sand where the rock had been, telling Sanders to train the light

there. The finger withdrew, and a hand appeared, holding the Ping-Pong paddle. Treece moved the paddle over the sand in short, swift motions. The sand rose in billows: in seconds, the cave was filled with a cloud. Sanders put his face down beside the light. The hole in the sand grew. It was several inches deep, more than a foot in diameter. Treece brought his face down beside Sanders’, and the two heads clustered about the light as the paddle waved the sand away.

Treece stopped fanning. At first, Sanders thought he had given up. Then he saw two

fingers reach into the sand hole and withdraw, clutching what looked to Sanders like a brown leaf. There was a faint impression on the leaf, traces of writing or printing. The fanning resumed, and Sanders saw a glint in the sand. The fingers probed again, as delicately as if they were extracting a splinter from a child’s foot. An ampule was pulled from the sand.

Soon more leaf appeared-rotten wood, Sanders now assumed, from the cigar boxes that held the ampules; and then another ampule. Then two ampules together.

Then, as the hole deepened, the corner of a box, faded and flaking. Sanders backed off a few inches, for most of the box seemed to lie outside the cave.

Treece fanned until he had uncovered the box.

It lay upside down, a brown square about six inches by eight. He set the paddle down and gently lifted the box bottom, which came away in one mushy piece. Inside, protected by a honeycomb of cardboard partitions, lay forty-eight ampules, all intact.

Treece didn’t touch them. He picked up the paddle and began to fan again, moving away from the mouth of the

cave. The sand that swirled around the cave was already sifting between the ampules, covering them.

Treece fanned until he found the edge of another box, then stopped. He held his left wrist up to the light and rolled back his wet-suit cuff.

Sanders saw the dial of his wrist watch: they had been down for thirty-two minutes. Treece’s thumb pointed up, and his hand reached to take the light from Sanders.

Sanders rose slowly in the black water, watching the beam of light below him. It would move a few feet, then stop, then move again. Sanders swam without using his arms, kicking smoothly, making as little commotion as possible, for he suddenly felt lonely and vulnerable in the blackness. His senses were useless, and he did not want to attract the attention of anything equipped to prey upon the weak or solitary.

His head broke the surface. He looked around and saw that he had misjudged his ascent; he had risen away from the boat, not toward it. It rested at anchor, a black sculpture in the moonlight, about fifty yards away. He did not want to swim on the surface, where he would make sounds and vibrations that an animal below might determine were being emitted by a wounded fish. So he ducked underwater and kicked in the general direction of the boat. Twice he poked his head out of water, twice discovered that he had strayed way wide of the boat.

Since he could see nothing on the bottom against which to measure his progress, he could not maintain a steady course.

He was breathing too fast, too deeply, his lungs gasping for more air than the regulator would give them. Stop it!

he told himself. Stop it, or you’ll run out of air. He stopped swimming and lay motionless in the water, forcing himself to breathe more slowly. Gradually, the ache in his lungs subsided. He raised his face from the water, saw the boat, and, with a smooth, deliberate breast stroke, swam toward it.

Sanders reached the boat and held onto the diving platform at the stern that made it possible for divers to board the boat without assistance. He unsnapped his shoulder harness and heaved his tank onto the platform.

Then he hauled himself up and sat, breathing heavily, letting his flippered feet dangle in the water.

He heard a distant whining from the direction of the bow.

Treece’s head popped up beside the platform. He spat out his mouthpiece and said, “Where’s Charlotte?”

“Forward. Sounds like she’s having a nightmare.”

“Not bloody likely.” Treece pulled

himself, tank and all, onto the platform. With one motion, he shed his tank and stepped over the transom onto the deck. “She doesn’t sleep on the boat. She waits for me, so she can lick the salt off my face.” He started forward, and Sanders followed.

As they neared the bow, the whining grew louder, more frantic. Sanders saw the outline of Treece ahead of him, a wide, towering figure that moved with certainty and grace even in the dark. He saw Treece stop, then heard him cry, “Bastards!”

“What is it?” As he drew even with Treece, Sanders saw the dog.

She had thrust herself against the port gunwale, where she thrashed in a contorted ball, wildly biting at her flanks.

Something shiny protruded from her rear end, just above the tail, where the dog couldn’t reach with her teeth. She had tried to get at whatever it was, and in gnashing at her flanks had torn tufts of hair and flesh from her haunches. Exhausted, whining, she continued to snap at herself.

Treece squatted down and put out a hand to soothe the dog. The dog curled her lip and growled. “It’s all right,” Treece said softly. “It’s all right.” He grabbed the dog’s neck and forced her head to the deck. With his other hand, he reached around and yanked a piece of steel from the dog’s back.

Freed from pain, the dog moaned and licked herself.

“What happened?”

Treece strode aft, swung down into the cockpit, and snapped on an overhead light. In his hand was a two-inch-long dart shaped like a feather.

“What the Christ do they think they’re doing?”

Sanders looked at the dart and said, “Cloche.”

“What?”

“Cloche wears a feather exactly like that, only smaller. It must be his calling card. He’s already worked on Gail and me. Now he probably wants to force you to deal with him.”

“Idiot,” Treece said. “Just because he hired some toady to row out here and shoot my dog? That’s supposed to make me fall to my knees?” He spat on the deck. “All that does is piss me off.”

He looked up and saw the dog hobbling along the gunwale. “Get me the first-aid kit,” he said, pointing to a locker on the starboard side. “Got to patch up the old lady.”

He lifted the dog off the gunwale and set her on the deck. Gently, he forced her to lie on her good side.

Treece clipped the matted hairs from around the ragged wound, cleaned it with an antiseptic, and poured sulfa powder onto it. As he worked, he cooed lovingly to the dog, soothing, reassuring, treating her, it seemed to Sanders, with paternal tenderness and affection.

The dog responded: she made no sound and did not move.

When he had finished, Treece scratched the dog’s ears and said, “I suppose I better bandage you.”

He reached for a gauze pad and adhesive tape.

“Knowing you, you’ve already got a taste for yourself, and you’ll eat yourself right up to the bloody neck.” He helped the dog to her feet, and, tail wagging feebly, she tottered to a corner and lay down.

“What do you think they’ll do now?” Sanders asked.

“Cloche? No telling. T covered up those ampules, so he’ll not be dead sure we found anything. But that just buys us a day or two.”

Treece shook his head. “Lord, but there’s a Christ

load of stuff down there.”

“More than we saw?”

“Aye. That box was just the tip. It looks to me like the number three hold hit the rocks and spilled a little bit. Then maybe she slid backward and busted her guts.” Treece made an upside-down V

with his hands. “What we saw was up at the top here.

The farther down away from the cave I looked, the wider the pattern was, with some of those explosives mixed in.”

“Can we get it all up?”

“Not with a Ping-Pong paddle. We’ll need the air lift.”

He pointed to the aluminum tube lashed to the gunwale. “And we’ll have to dive with Desco gear, not air tanks. Can’t be coming up every hour for new tanks. That means firing up the compressor, and that

means noise. It’s going to be bad.”

“Why?”

“The deep stuff must be all mixed in with the artillery shells.”

“They’re not armed, are they?”

“Doesn’t matter. Brass corrodes.

Primers may be weak. And the cordite in those shells is still good as new. Bang “em together, or drop one on a rock-let alone use a

torch comand we’ll be playing harp duets for Saint Peter.”

“Can we get the government to help?”

“The Bermuda Government?” Treece laughed.

“Aye. They’ll have the royal scroll-maker draw up a fancy scroll commissioning me to get rid of the nuisance. If it weren’t for one thing, I’d be tempted to put a charge down there and blow the whole mess to dust.”

Treece fished inside his wet-suit jacket, found what he was looking for, and handed it to Sanders. It was a coin, irregular-shaped and green with tarnish.

It looked as if the design on the coin had been impressed off-center, for only about three quarters of the surface of the metal carried any marks at all. Around the rim of the coin Sanders could make out the letters “El,” then a period, then the letter “G,”

another period and the numerals “170.” Closer to the center of the coin was an “M,” and in the center was an intricate crest that included two castles, a lion, and a number of bars.

“So?” Sanders said. “You said yourself that one coin doesn’t make a treasure.”

“True. But

coin might.”

“Why?”

“After I sent you up, I went along the reef a way and fanned a few pockets around the rocks.

I found that coin about six inches under the sand. It was lying up against a piece of iron, which is why it survived and wasn’t all oxidized like the one you found.”

“Why is it green?”

“That’s nothing, it cleans right off. The iron it was lying up against looked to me like the hasp of a padlock. It didn’t come loose right away, and I didn’t want to spend the time wrestling with it.”

“You mean there’s a chest down there?”

“Not the way you’d imagine. The wood would have rotted away long since. The coins’d be all clotted together, and a lot of them would be no damn good. There’s a clump of them down there, under a rock. I tried to pry one loose, but it wouldn’t come. I figure it’s stuck to some others.”

“There could be more, then. Gold, I mean.”

“It’s beginning to look like it.” Treece held the coin to the light. “Here. The ‘More” means it was minted in Mexico City. What does that tell you?”

“That the ship was going east, back to Spain.”

“Aye. It was leaving the New World. About a third of the ships that wrecked were on their way to

the New World, and they didn’t carry treasure.

They were burdened with wine and cheese and clothing and mining equipment. The numbers are the first three numbers of the

date the coin was minted-sometime in the first ten years of the eighteenth century. That jibes with the crest. It’s Philip the Fifth’s. He took the throne in 1700.”

“What do the letters mean?”

was “By the grace of God,”” Treece said.

“They’re the end of the legend on the obverse of all the coins:

Philippus V,

then

Dei G.,

for

gratia.”

Treece turned the coin over. “That’s a Jerusalem cross. I can’t read the letters, except for that “M” there, and the “R,” but it said

Hispaniarwn et Indiarum Rex—

King of Spain and the Indies.”

“So?”

“In 1715 a big fleet, one of Philip’s biggest, went down on the way home.”

“I’ve heard of that fleet. But somebody found it, didn’t they?”

“Aye, a diver named Kip Wagner. Ten ships went down, carrying God knows how much in gold and silver, and in the early 1960’s Wagner found what he figured was eight of them. He pulled up something like eight million dollars’ worth of gold.”

Sanders felt excitement surge through his stomach.

“And this stuff is from one of the other two ships?”

Treece smiled and shook his head. “Not a chance.

Something’s

down there, for sure, but it can’t be one of Philip’s ten. They all went down off Florida, every one of them. It’s been documented over and over again-survivors, eyewitness reports, logs, salvors’ records, everything-and no ship’s going to move a thousand miles on the bottom of the ocean.

No, what we know’s no problem; it’s what we don’t know that’s bothersome.”

“Like?”

“It’s a healthy bet that if there is a ship beneath Goliath,

it sank between 1710 and 1720. If it was later than that, the coins we’ve found would have later dates.

New World coins didn’t stay long in the New World. The Spaniards needed every one of them to keep their country afloat. But there’s no record of a Spanish ship sinking on this end of Bermuda between 1710 and 1720.”

“It doesn’t have to be a Spanish ship, does it, just because it carried Spanish coins?”

“No. Pieces of eight were international currency.

Everybody used them. But there’s no record of any

ship sinking off this stretch of beach in the early 1700’s.”

Sanders said, “That could be good, couldn’t it? It means the ship was never salvaged.”

“Good and bad. It means we have to start from scratch.

Odds are, she went down at night. If there were survivors comand I doubt there were-they’d have no misty notion of where they pranged up. They’d be too concerned with saving their own pelts. So whatever cargo went down with her is probably still there.”

“And that could be-was

“No telling. According to the records, between 1520 and 1800 the Spaniards hauled about twelve billion dollars’ worth of goodies out of the New World-that’s twelve billion dollars’ worth in those

days. About five per cent of that was lost, and about half of what was lost was recovered, which leaves roughly three hundred million dollars on the bottom. Figure a couple of hundred years’