Atlantis Gold

Chapter 21

Daedalus stood on the expansive bow deck of the Historica and looked down into the water, where a row of stones lay across the bone white sand. The expression on his face wasn’t what one would call happiness, yet might be called smug satisfaction. He checked his Rolex and then turned to his brother, Phillipo, who stood next him at the yacht’s rail.

“An hour from now and they will have succumbed. It is great to have finally gotten rid of that thorn in my side, Carter Hunt.”

Phillipo nodded. “Later today I will send down a dive team to locate their bodies, so that we know for sure.”

Daedalus nodded. “Leave them down there, though. We don’t need any bodies recovered. Weight their corpses so that they sink to the bottom of the hole.”

Phillipo said he would. With tensions running high between him and his brother regarding the running of the company, whenever he did find a simple task he had no issues with, he made sure to comply with enthusiasm and without delay.

“In the meantime,” Daedalus went on, “we can speculate on what’s down there. How do you think they found it — how did they know where to look?”

Phillipo shook his head. “No idea. This site, while not as common as the main Bimini road, has nonetheless been dived on by hundreds of people. It was as if…” He trailed off as though suddenly lost in thought.

“As if what, brother?”

“As if they were somehow led right to it.”

“We’ve been following them, surveilling them. They don’t seem to have been in close contact with anyone.”

Phillipo nodded. “They won’t be in close contact with anyone ever again after another few minutes.” He looked at his own watch and then excused himself to go supervise the dive team getting ready on the aft deck.

Hunt pounded his fists on the underside of the limestone slab. Seconds later, Maddy and Jayden joined him. Hunt switched to using the butt of his dive knife to bang on the rock, because it would be louder. Jayden followed suit. He was pretty sure that if people were on the other side of the stone — which they had to have been in order to move it back into position — that they could hear the noise. But alas, the stone did not move.

All three of them tried to push up against it in various ways — Jayden even removed his fins and planted both feet against the underside, pushing with all of his leg strength — but the limestone cap would not budge.

Trapped.

The word echoed about in Hunt’s head like a menacing ghost. He descended a few feet down and switched off his light to see if he could see sunlight leaking through anywhere. He saw only complete darkness. The capstone was the only way in or out.

He felt Maddy’s hand grip his arm tightly. She showed him her pressure gauge. It was low, about how it should be at the end of a normal dive. He had a little bit more, and he knew Jayden would, too, but if there were no other exits…

He blocked out the panic from his mind and tried to visualize their situation as if he were someone watching it on TV, to reduce the fear and think more rationally. Three divers in a capped off limestone blue hole. Low on air. It’s completely dark, meaning no light is coming in from topside, so there must not be any other places to get in or out…He pictured an illustration of a blue hole, the kind geologists would make, that depicted the ocean surface and then the blue hole formation and the various rock deposit layers that made it up, as well as the surrounding seabed. In his mind, the diagram, typical of those he’d seen both in geology lectures and by scuba divemaster briefings when he’d dove blue holes and Mexican cenotes, featured tunnels and passageways formed by water flowing eons ago when the entire reef was above sea level. One or two of these passages opening out into a cave on the bottom of the reef or sand shelf some distance away, connected beneath the seafloor.

That’s our only chance, Hunt told himself. The only way out is down!

He waved his dive light back and forth to gain his friends’ attention. Then he pointed down. He could see Jayden nod grimly. He understood what the goal was, but no doubt also the low odds of success. But Maddy had no idea why they would go down. Hunt took a precious couple of seconds to write on his slate: MAYBE TUNNELS UP TO REEF DOWN BELOW.

Maddy nodded slowly, her face ashen.

Then, after one last unsuccessful attempt to move the stone cap, the trio began their descent. Hunt did his best to block out the white hot anger he felt toward Daedalus and Treasure, Inc. as they fell through the blackness that most likely would be their eternal tomb. How could I have been so stupid, so naïve? he lamented. Of course Daedalus had been shadowing them in country after being duped about the Anubis figurine.

Hunt’s flashlight blinked off just as the top of the pyramid came into view, leaving them with only two tiny specks of light held by Maddy and Jayden. He hit it against the palm of his hand and it came back on, but he knew what it likely meant. The seal was no longer water tight, and seawater was affecting the electrical connections inside. Hunt twisted the head of the light until it was screwed as tight as he could get it. The last thing they needed to do was to make a near impossible task any more difficult by not being able to see.

Hunt put the beam back on the top of the pyramid because it was nice to have a reference point while descending instead of only a black void. As they sank past the pyramidal structure, Hunt lamented that they would likely never be able to unlock its secrets. All three of them were doomed to perish down here in this blue hole, this black hole, really. Feelings of rage and helplessness again welled up within Hunt, and this time he had trouble beating them back. He and his friends were going to drown! They would never find a blue hole tunnel that led to the reef. Even if they found an opening in the side of the hole, it would likely just be a dead end. Literally.

Hunt watched the golden pyramid slip by until they reached its base, which also meant that they had reached the bottom of the blue hole. He checked his depth gauge: 200 feet. His minutes, his very breaths were numbered at this great depth. Maddy especially, being the least experienced of the three, she was more prone to panic and would consume air more rapidly in this situation. To have any chance of finding a tunnel, they needed to swim out to the side of the hole now and start poking around.

The three of them touched down on the bottom, which, as Hunt expected, was limestone with a thin covering of sand that trickled down from above. Hunt didn’t bother asking everyone what their air situation was; he knew it wasn’t good and that there wasn’t anything they could do about it, anyway. It would only be a time-waster at this point, so he simply pointed along the base of the pyramid toward the side of the blue hole and began to swim.

Jayden and Maddy followed him as they finned along next to the pyramidal edifice. It occurred to Hunt that this was one of the sides they hadn’t seen yet, and so he played his beam along it as they moved past it. Same gold tiles. Same smooth, uninterrupted surface, just like the—Wait, what’s that? Hunt stopped swimming. Was he seeing things? But Jayden and Maddy were tapping on his arm and pointing at it, too.

It appeared to be an entrance of some sort. A doorway leading inside the structure. The vertically oriented rectangular opening was set perhaps ten feet up from the base. From down on the bottom it appeared only as a dark hole. Hunt kicked off the bottom and rose to the level of the doorway, unable to contain his overwhelming curiosity even in the face of death. He stared into the opening. A narrow passageway that was also constructed of gold tiles. It extended some distance inside, perhaps fifty feet back, where his light beam landed on a wall of some sort.

Then the light blinked out again, plunging the internal pyramid into blackness. Hunt banged on the light a couple of times but it wouldn’t come back on. On the fifth try, as Jayden and Maddy reached him, it illuminated once again.

Hunt shrugged while looking at Maddy and Jayden, pointing into the pyramid. Both of them nodded. Let’s check it out.

The three divers, perilously low on air, swam into the golden pyramid.