Atlantis Gold

Chapter 18

The phrase “gin clear water” was an expression that was almost cliché among scuba divers, but Hunt couldn’t deny how apt it was here. Looking down after splashing out of the plane, he recoiled, it looked like the bottom was so close he could reach out and touch it. But in actuality it was twenty feet deep.

After a quick check of their equipment, the three divers vented the air from their buoyancy compensator vests and began their short descent to the bottom. To the Bimini Road, or at least the strange parallel track they had found next to the main road. Hunt had heard of it before — knew it existed and had been photographed and dived before, but it got nowhere near the traffic that the main road did.

When they reached the bottom, they landed on one of the smooth, flat stones, to avoid stirring the sand up on the bottom, which would cloud the water and reduce their visibility. The stone of interest, the one matching the shape of the Anubis gold piece, lay only five or six stones to their left. After checking their depth gauges (twenty-one feet), and their air pressure (nearly full tanks) to confirm all was working properly, the three of them were ready to begin work.

First, Hunt traced his fingers along the stone they had landed on, figuring that they may as well get a feel for what the normal ones were like before examining the target stone. To Hunt, it felt like smooth limestone, weathered over the centuries by wave action. He was aware that many geologists and oceanographers dismissed the Atlantis related stories about the stones as fiction, claiming that wave action and coastal erosion patterns were sufficient to explain the shape of the stones. Also, their mineral composition, they maintained, was consistent with that of the nearby shoreline. Others were not so convinced. But to Hunt, he would take neither side’s word for it. That’s why they were here today, to find out for themselves.

He got to a standing position and then kicked off of the rock, launching himself toward the target stone. Maddy and Jayden followed, swimming a few feet above the smooth stones. Hunt found it a bit strange that there was no sea life of any kind near the road. No schools of fish, not even crabs scuttling along the bottom. He supposed there could be myriad creatures buried in the sand, but for such a sunny, shallow spot, with rocks, he would have thought there would be more life. Only a thin patina of green algae grew on the stones; their natural pale color was still plainly visible.

Jayden pointed excitedly as he spotted the distinctive hook shape of the target stone. He didn’t bring the gold piece with him, for fear of losing it, but he was confident they’d be able to identify the stone in question without it.

And here it was.

Hunt, Jayden and Maddy settled onto the stones surrounding the target stone. The road was either two or three stones wide in most places, and three wide here, with the target stone in the middle position. Visually, it appeared the same material, color and texture as the rest of them, with only the slight irregularity of its shape to differentiate it.

Hunt removed a dive knife from a sheath on his calf and dug the point into the rock on which he knelt, to test its consistency. Normal limestone, it chipped with sufficient force, but he found nothing unusual about it. Jayden tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the target rock, indicating he wanted to move onto it. Hunt nodded, and all three of them hopped over to the stone in question. Approximately eight feet long by four wide, it accommodated the three divers, who knelt on its surface, Maddy and Hunt at one end, with Jayden in the middle.

Together, they carefully eyeballed its surface, looking for any telltale sign that it concealed an artifact, or was in some way unusual. But they saw nothing. It looked exactly like all of the other Bimini Road stones. Hunt held up a gloved hand and made a show of running it down along the side of the stone where it disappeared into the sand. He pushed his fingers into the sand as far as they would go and ran them along the side of the stone. The others started doing the same. After a few minutes they had gone all the way around the perimeter of the strange stone and still had detected nothing out of the ordinary.

Hunt checked his air pressure, urging the others to do the same. They all still had plenty left, but it served to give them a little breather and to remind them that time was limited. They needed to try something else. Maddy photographed the stone with her camera in a plastic housing, taking some closeups of its top face. But inwardly, Hunt was disappointed. Nothing seemed significant about this stone, compared to all the others. They had come a long way for nothing. Maybe the shape of the gold piece from the Anubis statuette was simply a coincidence?

Jayden and Maddy grew bored and swam off over the neighboring stones, leaving Hunt to stare at the mystery stone by himself. He again turned to his dive knife, this time using it as a tool to stick as far down as he could along the edges of the stone. He wanted to figure out how thick the stone was. Were they thin, paving-stone like entities, or several feet deep? He soon had his answer when the knife plowed through the resistance of the sand into…into what? Hunt used the hand not holding the knife to fan away the sand particles in his way. Into…open water?

Digging some more with the knife, he found that he could scrape along the underside of the stone. It wasn’t more than a few inches thick. Was it just one thin section, or the same thickness all the way around? He tried the same thing with the knife on a couple of different points along the stone’s edge. It was the same thing each place he tried. He could picture the stone as a thin cap, lying on the bottom.

But then he got to thinking, if they’re so thin, why hadn’t some of them been taken? Thousands of people had dived the main Bimini Road, and all of those stones were still there. Even this outlying section of road had probably seen hundreds of underwater visitors over the decades. He found it hard to believe that none of them had been chipped away at or taken altogether if they were so thin…and therefore so movable.

He looked up from his work to glance over at Jayden and Maddy, who swam lazily over a section of road some distance away. Hunt moved one stone over. He took his knife and set to work in the same manner, attempting to determine the thickness of the stone. This time, however, the tip of his blade was met only with more stone as he thrust it as deep as he could into the sand along the limestone’s edge.

He smiled inside his dive mask. The target stone was different! Thinner than the rest. He thought about it while breathing slowly through his regulator and watching his bubbles float lazily toward the sunlit surface. One stone different than the rest….we were led to it by a miniature model found in a statuette of Anubis — also a miniature — which was in turn found in the Azores…Hunt ruminated on the facts, but after a couple of minutes he was still no closer than before to figuring out what the thin stone could mean. He decided to get hands on again.

Moving back to an edge of the stone, he inserted his knife blade against the flat rock until he felt it pass beneath the bottom edge. Then he pried upward with the knife. Nothing happened, so he ran the blade sideways along the length of the stone, loosening the sand and sediment that was holding it in place with the suction created by it laying there for untold decades or centuries.

Then Hunt had an idea. He rapped the butt of his dive knife on his metal scuba tank, creating a piercing ring that immediately caught the attention of Jayden and Maddy. He waved them over. When they reached him, Hunt held up his knife and pointed to the one Jayden carried on his leg. Jayden looked confused, so Hunt demonstrated what he had been doing with the stone, trying to pry it up. After watching that, Jayden gave him the okay sign and set to work alongside Hunt. Hunt wasn’t sure if Maddy carried a knife, but he was glad to see her hold one up and join them on the side of the limestone.

Together, the three of them wedged their metal implements beneath the stone slab and pried with all their strength. Just as Hunt thought he was going to snap the blade, he felt the limestone move. He signaled his friends to reposition and try again. Once more they repeated the process, and once again the slab moved, this time a little higher off the seabed.

He heard a muffled grunt and looked over to his right to see Jayden with his arm wedged beneath the slab up to his elbow, eyes bulging with physical effort. Immediately, Jayden curled the fingers of his left hand beneath the slab and began to lift. As it separated from the bottom, his knife blade snapped with an audible crack. He dropped the ruined knife and replaced it with his right hand. Redoubling his efforts, he planted his fin-clad feet against the sand bottom next to the stone slab and put his leg muscles into the lift. Looking to his right to gauge the progress, wondering if he should drop the slab and rush to Jayden’s aid, he saw the Asian-American ex-Navy man still bearing down on the lifting and smiled.

We can do this.

Maddy was also not giving up. She dropped her own knife and also gripped the stone with both hands, putting all her strength into it. A thick curtain of air bubbles floated up above them with their heavy exertions. In the back of his mind, Hunt made a mental note to check their air remaining when the lifting was done, since they were breathing very heavily with the hard labor. But right now, there was no stopping. The curiosity factor was too strong. What lay beneath this stone slab? The fact that the stone was even movable at all was exciting enough.

So they kept at it, coordinating their bursts of lifting power, pushing with their legs while their gloved hands raised the lip of the slab. After five grueling minutes, they had the slab three feet off the sea bottom. Hunt began to push forward instead of up, looking to his right while yelling, “Hey, look!” into his regulator. The words themselves were not really distinguishable, but the noise itself got his friends’ attention. They saw what he was doing and followed suit.

With the three divers straining, shoving and pushing, they were able to pivot the stone slab off of its resting place until it was clearly in a different position. They dropped it halfway on top of its neighboring stone and then sat in place, waiting for the swirling sand particles to dissipate so that they could see.

During this waiting period, Hunt checked his air gauge: he was down to about one-third of his supply remaining. Not yet critical, but definitely something to keep an eye on; it was easy to become distracted by exciting finds underwater and forget about things like how much air you had left. Knowing this, he tapped Maddy on the shoulder and pointed to her air gauge. How much left? She glanced at the gauge before handing it to him. Also one-third left. Hunt smiled behind his mask. They say that women have better air consumption than men, and it must be true in Maddy’s case, since she was much less an experienced diver than Hunt. But it was good news right now, and he was glad for it. He knew Jayden was experienced enough to keep track of his air supply, and that he would be about the same as him, so he didn’t bother asking him. The visibility was clearing now, and it was time to see what they had uncovered.

Hunt peered down at the space the block had uncovered, which was equal to about half of its length and width. Enough to see what it had been concealing, if anything. Hunt wished now that he had brought an underwater metal detector with him, to pass it over the sand the stone had been covering. But as he peered down at the uncovered area, his breath caught in surprise.

There was only water there.

How is that possible? His mind screamed, and yet, he was looking down into deep water. Particles of sand and detritus swirled around ten, twenty, thirty feet below him, removing all doubt. Hunt leaned down, sticking his head into the hole that had been revealed by uncapping the stone slab. As he suspected, the opening was the exact dimensions of the thin stone. He could see the undersides of the other road stones jutting down below around the opening.

Hunt could not see the bottom of the uncapped zone. He imagined it to be like a cenote, a natural geological formation that was essentially a deep hole in the Earth, on land, filled with fresh water. In the ocean, a hole in the seafloor was known as a “blue hole.” Hunt himself had dove one before, in the coral reefs of Belize in Central America. They were well known features of the Caribbean, and even in the Bahamas. But he had never heard of one in connection with the Bimini Road.

Jayden and Maddy swam over beside him and also peered down into the newly revealed passage. Hunt knew that he and Jayden, at least — probably Maddy, too, out of professional curiosity — were dying to go in there. But he didn’t want to literally die by going in there. Glancing at his air gauge, he knew it was time to return to the surface. They had an extra set of fresh scuba tanks in the plane. They could switch them out for the dry ones and return to explore the new area.

That would have been the prudent thing to do, he knew. But staring down into the that unknown void, it beckoned, pulled at him with a siren song all its own. It was a lure he had heard before from shipwreck divers exploring passages of famous wrecks like the Andrea Doria or a newly discovered German U-Boat from World War II. The allure was so hard to resist that it became dangerous.

Hunt just wanted one look at what it was like down there right now. Just a little taste, to see what they were getting into. Maybe see how deep it was. A couple of minutes’ look-see, at the most. Then he’d swim right back up out of there and they’d get back to the plane, swap the tanks and come back properly equipped. Proper dive lights would be good too, since it looked dark down there, but he had a small back up light clipped to his vest. It would have to do for now.

He signaled for Jayden to wait at the opening with Maddy while he checked it out, tapping his dive watch and holding up two fingers. Two minutes — be right back.

Then Hunt positioned his body and swam head first into the hole.

He swam down into the inky void, making sure he dove below the protruding road stones before moving laterally. There he floated, dangling in the open void, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim light after the dazzling, sunlit shallow bottom of white sand.

Geez, it’s deep, he thought. He could not see the bottom. He knew that some blue holes were several hundred, even a thousand feet deep. He really had no idea what to expect here, but he was only a little ways below the opening, so he swam down some more. When his depth gauge read one hundred feet, he stopped and floated in the water column. One hundred feet meant that he was eighty feet down into the hole, since the seabed where the stones lay was already at twenty feet deep.

He glanced at his air pressure gauge, now in the red. It was reckless to remain any longer. He was about to press the button to add air into his buoyancy vest to aid his ascent, when he caught something in his vision, far below.

The bottom! But wait, he realized, it wasn’t the bottom, because it only occupied a narrow part of the hole, in the center. More like a pinnacle. Some kind of rock formation, stalagmites, perhaps. He unclipped is tiny backup flashlight from his vest and turned it on.

Just a little further. Hunt dropped down deeper into the hole, feet first now, since he didn’t want to hit his head on anything now that he knew something was down there. Down he went, ten, twenty, thirty more feet. That’s it, absolutely no more, he told himself, knowing that nitrogen narcosis, a narcotic effect from nitrogen caused by breathing compressed air at depth, would be setting in any second now if it hadn’t already. It affected a diver’s judgment, much like having too many alcoholic drinks.

Let’s see what it looks like now…He aimed his puny flashlight beam down toward the pinnacle he’d seen…

And felt a numbing chill envelope his entire body.