Fallen Mangrove (Jesse McDermitt Series Book 5) (5 page)

Looking at the others, I thought it over. Many years ago, me and Deuce’s dad found a little treasure up in Fort Pierce. Last year, Deuce’s dad was killed looking for another treasure, when he found part of it. Earlier this year, me, Deuce, and Rusty went up there and found the rest. It was enough that Deuce and Julie’s kids wouldn’t have to worry about college, Rusty could do some renovations on the bar and his house, and I was able to spread a little around the tiny community that had grown up on my island.

Besides myself, I had a caretaker who had his own little house and looked after things for me. We’d started a fledgling business growing vegetables and crawfish in an aquaculture system. The sale of the crawfish was becoming pretty lucrative for him, his wife, and their two small children.

At any given time, there might be a few others living in two small bunkhouses, and the vegetable garden had quickly become a part-time hobby for many of them during their downtime. These were members of Deuce’s team and they ranged from a former female Olympic swimmer turned Miami cop to a number of SpecOps
-
type guys from the SEALs, Marine Recon, Army Rangers, CIA, and the Coast Guard’s elite Maritime Enforcement.

“You guys in a hurry to get home?” I asked. “We can head up to the island and see what Chyrel can do right now.”

“I have to work in the morning,” Nikki said. “You go ahead, Bob. Call me when you get there.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Deuce said. “We’ll come up in the morning. We have a lot of things to do on the boat this evening.”

Doc and I walked out to the docks behind the bar, where he kissed his wife goodbye and we shoved off after I promised her I’d have him home before she got off work. Pescador took his usual spot on the casting deck. We’d just cleared the jetty when we heard Doc’s motorcycle start up and I brought my little skiff up on plane.

We turned toward the Seven Mile Bridge and skimmed across the skinny water between East Sister Rock and Boot Key. Rounding the tip of Boot Key and turning north, I pushed the throttle a little more. Crossing under the bridge, we heard a horn behind us. We both looked back and saw Nikki waving as she headed up the long span on Doc’s motorcycle. We waved back.

I turned more westerly and wound my way through the small islands of Cocoanut, Teakettle, and Sandfly Keys. Looking over at Doc, I could tell he was happy to be back on the water. Being cooped up sixty miles inland doesn’t sit well with a waterman.

It was only twenty miles in the skiff, and it took only thirty minutes to get to my island. I’d bought it and the
Revenge
a month after I retired from the Corps in ’99, pretty much on a whim. I did some work on it off and on for a couple of years and camped out there when the weather was cool, until I met a woman named Alex. We became friends, but after a little more than a year, she’d had to go back to Oregon to take care of a sick brother. I really went to work on it then. In less than a year, I’d built my little house on stilts, mostly from scrap lumber I’d picked up at the Miami shipping docks and fallen hardwood trees that I’d cut up and had milled in Homestead. The pilings were concrete and went down into the limestone and coral base quite a few feet. All in all, it was a simple, sturdy little house. The first I’d ever owned.

When Alex had returned to the Keys a year ago, we’d both realized our friendship had changed to a lot more than that while she’d been gone. She loved the little house and we’d both realized we wanted to live out our lives there. In a week, we were married. She was murdered the next day.

That was when I fell in with Deuce and his team on a more permanent basis. Together we’d found those responsible and dealt with them in our own way. Not really vigilantism, as Deuce’s team had the full backing of the federal government, but none of those guys will ever hurt anyone again.

Since then, I’d added the two bunkhouses, the aquaculture system, a battery shack, a generator system, and a water maker. With the addition of my caretaker Carl Trent’s little house, we had five permanent structures. Together, they didn’t add up to the square footage of a decent-sized house on the mainland, but it was home for us.

I keep my boats under the house to avoid prying eyes. When I’d first built the house, the channel I’d dug by hand was barely deep enough for the skiff and the underside of the house was open. After Alex died, I redoubled my efforts and dredged the channel eight feet deep and twenty wide, building a pier on top of the spoils and enclosing the area under the house, adding large doors to the south side.

Using the fob on my keychain, I released the latch and the east door slowly began to swing open on its spring-loaded hinges as a light came on inside. The main house was still completely on its own solar and wind system that charged a bank of deep-cycle marine batteries. All of the electric in the house was twelve volt. The doors had an electric motor that pulled them closed.

When I’d originally built the place, I’d had it in mind to dock the
Revenge
under there, so I’d built it with the floor beams fourteen feet above the high tide. There are two bays, with a narrow dock all the way around three sides and another narrow dock in the center, and large hanging closets for gear at the front of each of the three docks.

The
Revenge
was tied up on the far western side. Over the last year, I’d acquired a few other boats. As a wedding gift, Deuce and Julie had given us Russ’s twenty-foot Grady-White. It now belonged to the Trents. I’d given it to them so Carl’s wife, Charlie, could get back and forth to go shopping on Big Pine Key and take their kids to school. It was tied off against the far eastern dock, along with my late wife’s red Maverick Mirage skiff. Tied up to the center pier on the east side was a thirty-two-foot Winter center console named
El Cazador
, the Hunter. It fell into our possession last winter, having been confiscated during a drug bust. On the opposite side of the center dock was a Cigarette 42x, one of the fastest boats on the water. It came to us from the terrorist smuggler who was ultimately responsible for my wife’s death. The previous owner didn’t have any more use for it now that he was vacationing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a guest of the federal government.

I turned the skiff around in front of the house and backed it in between
Cazador
and the Grady, tying off sideways to the rear pier behind
Cazador
. I was surprised there wasn’t a welcoming committee. Usually the Trents’ two kids were always at the dock when any boat came in.

“We weren’t up there long,” Doc said, “but it’s sure great to be back down here.”

As we stepped up onto the pier, I said, “I was worried Nikki might con you into accepting the Judge’s house.”

He handed the chest up to me before climbing out. “I kind of got the impression she was reluctant to give it up, but in the end she loves it down here as much as I do.”

Walking around the back of the docks and along the western pier to the door, I clicked the fob again to close the doors and said, “I wonder where everyone is.”

The door opened just as I reached it. “Hey, Jesse,” Carl said, standing in the doorway. “Welcome back, Doc.”

“Thanks, Carl,” Doc said. “It’s good to be back.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“I heard you coming. Tony’s down by the fire pit telling a story to the kids, Chyrel, and Charlie.”

“The man can spin a tale,” Doc said with a chuckle.

Pescador looked up at me, his ears up and tail wagging. “Go ahead,” I said, and he bolted up the steps.

Carl grinned and asked, “What’s in the treasure chest?”

“We’re hoping Chyrel can tell us. It’s a coconut with some kind of riddle carved into it.”

“A riddle? Don’t mention that to Charlie.”

“Don’t mention what to me?” Trent’s wife asked from the top of the steps leading up to the deck surrounding three sides of my little stilt house.

“Oh?” Doc said, glancing at Carl. Then looking up at Charlie he asked, “You good at riddles, are you?”

“Can’t resist trying to figure one out,” she replied, smiling. “Welcome home, Doc.”

We crossed the deck together and I told the others to go ahead while I put away some things. I went inside and switched on the single lamp in the main room. My house really only has two rooms, three if you count the head. The main room is a combination galley and living room, with a small propane stove and sink in one corner. By the door is a small propane-fired refrigerator and across the room is a tiny table and two chairs, next to a small pantry. The living room part has a pair of recliners, with a small table between them. The rest of the room is cluttered with work benches, outboard motor parts and a wood-burning potbellied stove.

Beyond the living room are two doors. The one on the left is the head and the one on the right goes to my bedroom. It’s equally Spartan, with nothing more than a queen-sized bed and a chest of drawers. It has two windows, one looking out over the deck to the large clearing in the middle of the island and the other looking east, over the treetops to the multicolored waters of the flats and the Gulf beyond. I usually slept aboard the
Revenge
, as I’d sort of grown fond of air conditioning, and allowed any couples visiting to use the house. Although it’d been a year since my wife was killed and I’d enjoyed the company of a couple of women in the last few months, I wasn’t ready to share that bedroom on a permanent basis yet.

I opened the pantry door and put my go bag inside, took my Sig Sauer P-226 and holster from the small of my back and placed it on a shelf above the bag. I never go anywhere unarmed, but here on the island I felt safe. Only one person had ever made it to the shore undetected, but trying to get through the thick tangle of vegetation around the clearing was a different story. Pescador’s sharp ears had alerted us, and the intruder ended up with a huge knot on his head from a heavy lignum vitae tree branch, swung by Deuce.

I took a six pack of Red Stripe from the refrigerator and went back down to the docks. I stepped aboard the
Revenge
and went across the wide cockpit and up the steps into the salon, turning on the cockpit light and overhead lights in the salon and galley. Putting the beer in the fridge, I heard the generator start up. It was controlled by a voltage regulator and came on automatically whenever the onboard house batteries, which were separate from the engine’s batteries, got too low.

I went back upstairs to the deck and looked out over the north rail as the last rays of the sun painted the few clouds to the west a dark red and purple. I couldn’t help but think,
Red sky at night
, as I looked out over the island. Doc, Carl, and Charlie were standing around the fire pit on the northeast side of the clearing, with Tony, Chyrel, and the Trents’ two kids
.

Directly across from my house stood the two tiny bunkhouses I’d built and Carl had remodeled. Originally, each had had six sets of bunk beds and a small desk at one end. I’d failed to take into account that lodging for women and an office might be needed, so Carl had converted the bunkhouse on the west side. He put up a wall separating two sets of bunks from the others, then turned the two in the smaller part of the bunkhouse so they were against the new wall, leaving more space for all of Chyrel’s electronic gizmos.

Just in front of the two bunkhouses were two identical heavy wooden picnic tables, a flagpole at one end and a huge stone fireplace and grill at the other. Originally, that’s where most of the cooking was done. When Carl built his house on the west side, overlooking the small beach and sandbar, I’d bought a top-of-the-line-oven for it. A big, commercial type oven and six-burner stove. Charlie cooked for everyone and a few times that had been more than twenty people.

I heard a small splash to my right and glanced over. There was a widening circle in the first tank of the aquaculture system we’d built. Carl was in the process of enlarging it, but for now there were only three tanks, each twenty feet by eight feet. He’d added the third just a few weeks earlier. The first tank was deeper than the other two, which were up on a platform so the tops were slightly higher than the first one. In the first were crawfish, separated into several sections with different-size mesh so the bigger ones couldn’t eat the littler ones. The second tank held a system of racks that grew several kinds of vegetables. The third one was to grow even more vegetables, and the one Trent was now building would grow tilapia, a farm-raised freshwater food fish that tastes like snapper.

Water was pumped from the bottom of the crawfish tank up to the first vegetable tank, where it flowed through to the second one before being gravity fed back to the crawfish. The nitrates in the water from the crawfish tank fed the plants, and the oxygenated water from the plants was returned to the crawfish tank. It was all Greek to me, but Trent had a friend in South America doing it and learned all there was to it. Apparently, it was working, because we always had fresh tomatoes, broccoli, and lettuce. He wanted to try to grow corn in the third tank, and the shoots were just starting to come up.

It was two hours later, after the Trents had gone to put the kids to bed, that Chyrel came out of her little office, the coconut in one hand and a file folder in the other.

“I used the laser scanner to capture the markings digitally,” she said. “I had to do a few passes and jigsaw them together.” She lost me at the word laser. She handed the nut back to Doc, who put it back in the chest. “Then I upped the contrast, fiddled with the levels, and cleaned up the image some.” I nodded as Chyrel went into an in-depth explanation of pixels, resolution, and a histogram she’d edited to “punch up latent markings.” I knew if I asked about whatever that meant we’d lose thirty minutes. She was the guru, so I let her do her job. “My guess is that those worn places were caused by decades of wind blowing the tree it was hidden in and moving the coconut around inside the box.”

“So, after all your techno magic, what does it say?” Doc asked.

She opened the file and handed the three of us sheets of paper, then turned so that the light from a gas lantern fell across her shoulder. “It says, ‘
Después de la niebla, la tempestad recato atravesó el istmo y nos rodearon y ahora la mujer inquieta ahora descansa. Su envío suprimido fuera el pilar prodigioso ochenta contundentes avances ausente del comercio. 23 de septiembre, 1566
.’ That’s one really old coconut.”

“Jimmy said he recognized a few words,” I said. “Mist, woman, suppressed, and trade. But, he said it was what he called ‘old Spanish,’ not like the Cuban that’s spoken around here.”

“I spent a year in Rota,” Tony said. “Gimme some light.” Tony Jacobs was one of Deuce’s first recruits, along with another member of his SEAL team, Art Newman. Tony’s a wiry, very dark-skinned, easy going black guy. His dedication to service was evident by his just being here. Last winter, he was captured by a terrorist cell operating out of Cuba and tortured. They’d cut off the tips of his right forefinger and middle finger, at the first knuckle. His only response, once we got him out, was that he was glad the SEALs had taught him how to shoot with either hand.

“Yeah, this is a riddle, all right,” Tony said. “And Jimmy was right—this is Castilian Spanish, but written in sort of a medieval way, maybe. I think it says, ‘After the mist, the diffident tempest traversed the isthmus and surrounded us and now the restless woman now sleeps. Her consignment suppressed outside the prodigious mainstay eighty forceful advances absent from trade. September twenty-third, 1566.’”

“No,” Chyrel said. “The computer says
descansa
means rests, not sleeps.”

“You sure?” Tony asked. “Not really much difference.”

“In a riddle,” Charlie said as she came across the clearing, “a subtle difference in wording is huge. Rests means to cease being active, but sleep is the suspension of consciousness. Mind if I have a look?”

“I’m lousy at riddles,” I said and handed Charlie the translation.

“Hmmm,” she muttered. “Did you notice that the two words near the end of the first sentence in the Spanish text start with uppercase letters, while the rest of it is normal?”

“Huh,” Tony and Chyrel said in unison.

“Is that important?” Tony asked.

“It does if it’s intentional. The writer of a riddle usually does everything intentionally. Makes me think that the M and I might be initials, or Mujer Inquieta is a title, or maybe a name, not just an adjective and noun.”

“Chyrel,” Doc said. “Do you think you can find—”

Chyrel interrupted him, saying, “A list of possible Spanish shipwreck locations in September, 1566?”

Doc grinned. “You don’t think they kept really accurate GPS records back then? No, I was thinking a list of names of ships that never arrived in Spain? Maybe one about this time with the initials M I?”

“No,” she replied, smiling. “No GPS back then. But they kept very accurate lists of ship departures and arrivals. Most Spanish ships going up through the Windward Passage, which we now call the Gulf Stream, were treasure ships headed to Spain. Coming from Spain they used the equatorial route following the trade winds and carried commercial goods to their outposts in the Caribbean.”

“Trade?” I asked. “Absent from trade?”

“Hah!” Charlie exclaimed. “He used synonyms. Absent could be away from. As in the opposite way of the trade winds.”

I gave that a thought. “The trade winds for the northern route to Spain obviously blow toward the east, so he meant west?”

“How long would it take a Spanish treasure galleon to sail from Havana to wherever the coconut was found?” Chyrel asked.

“It was found on Elbow Cay, in the Abacos,” Doc said.

“Ships in those days followed landmarks as much as they could, staying close to shore,” I said. “They’d stay in deeper water once out of sight of land, and they probably didn’t travel more than a hundred miles a day. Chyrel, calculate the distance from Havana to Key West, then along the Keys and east coast up to the northern Bahamas. That could give us a departure date.”

She headed back inside to her computer. “Okay,” I said. “What’s that give us?”

Charlie pondered the translation. “After the mist, the diffident tempest traversed the isthmus and surrounded us.” She thought it over then said, “Mist could be fog. A diffident tempest, maybe a backward storm?”

“A backward storm?” I asked. “No storm in the northern hemisphere circulates backward.”

“No,” Doc said, getting excited. “But sometimes a hurricane will move east instead of west. Usually in September hurricanes form in the eastern Atlantic, but now and then one will form in the Gulf of Mexico and cross Florida into the Atlantic.”

“Traversed the isthmus!” Charlie said. “Crossed Florida.”

“Okay,” I said. “So, after a fog, a hurricane crossed Florida and passed them. Probably to the north, which caused them to sail south to get away from it. That would make sense as to why they wrecked in the Bahamas. If it circled them, it could have caught them in open water and driven them onto Elbow Cay.”

“Then the rest,” Charlie said, “and now a ship, maybe named after someone with the initials I M, finally rests. Her consignment, meaning cargo, suppressed outside the prodigious mainstay, I’m guessing that’s some nautical term, eighty forceful advances to the west.”

“On land,” Doc said, “distances are sometimes measured in paces. Advances?”

“Okay, eighty forceful paces then,” Charlie said. “If it is paces, then forceful paces must mean long paces. But what’s a prodigious mainstay? ‘Prodigious’ means amazing or impressive.”

“Eighty long paces?” I thought out loud. “A regular pace is about thirty inches, a long pace could be anywhere from thirty-six to forty-eight inches. That’d be two hundred and forty to three hundred and twenty feet. Probably less, depending on the terrain. What was the word for ‘mainstay’ in Spanish again?” I asked.

“Pilar,” Tony said. “Pillar? Like a big rock or spire?”

“The restless woman finally rests,” I thought out loud again. “Her cargo suppressed. Buried?”

“Of course!” Doc shouted. “What else do pirates do with treasure?”

“Outside the giant rock or spire, eighty long paces west?” Tony asked. “Outside would have to mean away from the water, or inland, right?”

“After the fog the hurricane crossed Florida and circled around us and now the restless woman finally rests,” Charlie began, really getting excited. “Her cargo buried inland from the giant rock two to three hundred feet west. It would have to be a giant rock. They couldn’t mean anything that might not be there in a few years. Maybe they knew they were going to die and wanted to leave a clue for another Spanish ship.”

“Now all we need is a ship’s name, and to find the giant rock,” Doc said.

“Do you know exactly where on Elbow Cay the chest was found?” I asked.

“The Judge said his fifth great-grandfather found it while walking on the northern beaches of the island. He was waiting for the tide to rise to refloat their ship, which was stuck on a sandbar.”

“Satellite view!” Tony and I said together. We all jumped up and headed toward the western bunkhouse and Chyrel’s little office.

Chyrel was just coming out when we got there. “Not a galleon at all,” she said as she turned and went back inside, the rest of us crowding around her desk. “There was a fleet of four galleons, five caravels, and one carrack that left Havana in early September. I didn’t even have to calculate the distance. They were the only ships that didn’t make it to Spain in the summer and fall of 1566. A carrack is much larger than a caravel or galleon. This particular carrack was the
Nuestra Señora de Magdalena
y las Angustias, or Our Lady of Magdalena and Anxieties. The Restless Woman.”

“Can you pull up a satellite view of the northern part of Elbow Cay?” I said.

“Satellite time is expensive,” Chyrel replied.

“Doesn’t have to be live,” I said. “Even an aerial picture might do the trick. We’re looking for a large rock on the eastern shore of the northern part of the island.”

A moment later, she zoomed in on the beaches of Elbow Cay, north of Hope Town.

“There,” I said, pointing at a place that jutted out into the water. “Zoom in on that.”

“It’s a big rock, all right,” Doc said. “But look at the scale. The island’s only a little more than a hundred feet from beach to bay.”

“Zoom back out,” Tony said.

Chyrel zoomed back out and scrolled the screen down, showing the beach further north.

“What’s that?” I asked

“Looks like a house,” Chyrel said.

“Yeah, but the way that piece of land juts out, it’s got to be built on a huge boulder,” I said. “Zoom back out,”

“The island’s a lot wider there,” Tony said. “Almost a quarter mile or so.”

“You think that’s it?” Doc asked.

“No way to know for sure,” I replied. “Hell, the rock we’re looking for might even be underwater now.”

“It probably is,” Chyrel said. “I’ll check into it some more tomorrow. Erosion data for most coastal areas has been collected for several decades. I might be able to extrapolate that data and create a computer model that could simulate what the coastline of the island looked like four hundred and forty years ago.”

“You can do that?” Doc asked.

Tony laughed and said, “Doc, when it comes to computers, there’s not much beyond her capability.”

“Thanks, Tony. Now all of you scram. I’m going to bed,” Chyrel said. As we left the little office, Charlie said she was also going to bed and headed off to their little house.

“You guys really think there’s a treasure?” Tony asked.

“Maybe Chyrel can find out more about the fleet tomorrow,” I said. “I know the Spaniards had a full manifest of every ship’s cargo and most of the time, there was more aboard than what the manifest said. I just put some beer in the fridge on the boat—you guys wanna join me?”

We sat in the salon and Tony pulled the sheet of paper out of his pocket along with a printout of the satellite view. “Let’s suppose for a minute that this ship,
Magdalena
, was the ship that Doc’s chest came from. Do you think they all wrecked there?”

“September’s still hurricane season,” I said. “And the clues point toward their being sunk during a storm. That’s what most likely happened, since none of the eight ships made it to Spain. The history books are full of entire fleets being wiped out by hurricanes.”

“Okay,” Tony said. “So what happened to the other treasure ships? I’m just guessing here, but wouldn’t they all have been carrying treasure?”

“Probably,” Doc said. “Chyrel said the carrack was much larger than the caravels and galleons, which were very heavily armed. Being larger, you’d assume they were much sturdier and slower. Maybe the other ships broke apart in the storm and never made it to land, or maybe they made it further south, trying to run from the storm.”

Tony shuddered. “Nasty way to go.”

I grabbed a pencil from a drawer and handed it to Tony. “Let’s write down everything we have questions about. The manifest, for one. The size difference between a carrack and a galleon, for another. Also, if they were driven onto the island by a hurricane, the storm didn’t stop there. We think it crossed Florida, looped around to the south, then west, and it probably made landfall again on the mainland somewhere else. Maybe she can look through early American archives for hurricanes that made landfall in September of 1566.”

“What would that tell us?” Doc asked.

“I’m wondering if it was this one ship, or the whole fleet, that strayed so far out of the shipping lanes,” I replied. “They should have been well to the north of the Abacos and if they were caught in a storm, they would have been sunk at sea, or driven onto the mainland. If we knew the storm’s track, we might even have a starting point for where the rest of the fleet went down.”

“Chyrel said it was bigger than the others,” Tony said. “Maybe during the fog, they steered away from the smaller ships to avoid a collision.”

“That makes perfect sense,” Doc replied. “If we know the location of one ship and the track of the storm, we might be able to predict where the others sank also.”

“You want to find the whole fleet?” I asked.

“Finding a deep-water wreck would probably be beyond what we can do,” he replied. “But narrowing the location would be something, wouldn’t it?”