Atlantis Gold

Chapter 28

“You sure this is the right way?” Jayden shot a nervous glance at the fuel gauge from his seat in the back. Hunt’s reply was swift.

“Pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure? Are—” Jayden looked like he was about to jump up out of the aircraft before it dropped from the sky.

“Kidding, relax. We’re on track. We may have to do a water landing, but it should be within sight of land.”

“Should be, great,” Jayden intoned sarcastically. Looking down, he saw only the deep blue of open ocean, topped with whitecaps. He looked over to Maddy, who had been looking out the window but quickly buried her nose once again in the mysterious manuscript.

“And how do you know, again, that Cuba is the right place to go?” Jayden inquired.

Maddy answered without looking up from the musty old paper. “My God…”

Jayden stared at her but she did not elaborate. “My God, what?”

“I…I do believe I hold in my hands the lost pages of Plato’s Critias.”

“I’ve heard of Plato,” Jayden said with a shrug. Maddy looked up at him, eyes wide with wonder.

“The two documents that contain everything we know about Plato’s Atlantis story — the Timaeus and the Critias!”

“Of course, how could I have forgotten,” Jayden replied.

Maddy frowned at him and yelled to Hunt in the front seat. “Do you know what we’ve got here, Carter?”

“Yeah, about an eighth of a tank of fuel left.”

“That’s not what I meant. I mean that we are now in possession of what will surely be one of the most sought-after documents in the world once it’s authenticated.”

“Great,” Jayden droned from the co-pilot’s seat, “another reason for Treasure, Inc. to come after us.”

She stared at him open-mouthed. “You don’t understand.” She shook her hands ever so slightly, emphasizing the paper. “This paper is about 2,000 years old — containing words written by Plato—that I believe lead to an actual location of Atlantis.”

“Now would be a good time for that actual location,” Hunt called from the pilot’s seat. “Because I see land.”

Jayden and Maddy both looked out their respective windows. A dark mountainous mass loomed in the distance, part of it obscured by clouds.

“Is that Cuba?” Maddy asked, voice tinged with tension.

Jayden made like he was sniffing the air. “I can smell the cigars from here.”

“Cuba’s a huge island — need to know which part of it we should focus on,” Hunt said.

Maddy squinted down at the ancient manuscript again, burying her nose in it for almost a minute before replying. “Northwest corner. Sorry, that’s as specific as I can be right now.”

“It’ll have to be a boots-on-the-ground thing from there, is that it?” Jayden asked.

Hunt answered. “That’s literally it, because our boots are going to be on the ground all right, when this bird runs out of gas.” Hunt consulted his gauges, GPS and compass before making a course correction, then eased back a little in the seat. “I set us on a course that should take us to Bahia Honda, a circular natural cove that’s about fifty miles west of Havana.”

Maddy looked up from the document again. “Did you say circular?”

Hunt called back from the cockpit. “It’s roughly circular, yes. Small inlet leading to a big circular bay surrounded by mangrove forest, probably, but we’ll see. Hopefully, anyway,” he finished, tapping the fuel gauge with his pointer finger.

“Oh, my…” Maddy went back to the manuscript while Jayden rolled his eyes.

“This is turning out to be one heckuva working vacation, I gotta say.”

“It’s all coming together now. In the Critias, a speaker is addressing a crowd, in an amphitheater, which is of course, a circular arrangement. But then again, the entire city layout of Atlantis was supposedly circular, with canals connecting the concentric rings…”

“But there must be thousands of circular bays around the Caribbean, or south of the Bahamas, anyway. What’s so special about Bahia Honda?”

“According to the lost pages of the Critias—" Maddy began, but she broke off at the sound of an alarm emanating from the plane’s dashboard.

“I hope that means the beverage cart service is ready,” Jayden said, “because I’m thirsty.”

Hunt turned around to answer. “Unfortunately, the plane’s thirsty, too. For fuel. That’s the low fuel alarm signifying that we’re on our last reserves.”

Jayden looked out the window ahead of them, where Cuba still looked like an indistinct land mass far away. “Reminds me of that time over the Persian Gulf, with that radio operator guy — remember him?”

“Rather forget him,” Hunt called back. “But it worked out okay.”

“Yeah, well let’s hope this works out okay, too. How close do you think we’ll get before we need to make a water landing?”

“The closer the better, that’s all I know. Get ready to bail out. Have all the important stuff ready to take with you.” Hunt turned back around and dedicated himself fully to flying the plane.

Jayden turned around to look at Maddy. “That means you, too, and that magic scroll of yours.”

She looked up from the missing Critias pages and started to roll them back up. “Right. I think reading it was taking my mind off the stress of being shot at and now possibly running out of gas.”

Suddenly the plane’s motor’s began to cough and sputter. “Not possibly,” Hunt shouted. “Definitely. We’re out of gas.”

Jayden looked out his window. “Hey Carter, I see a little barrier island we might be able to make.”

Hunt stared out of his window from the cockpit, eyeing the flat strip of sandy land dotted with a green band. Then he gauged the distance from the island to the Cuban mainland, and shook his head.

“That’ll have to do. I’m going to set her down.” Hunt put the plane into a controlled dive in preparation for a water landing. Just as the plane levelled out over the water’s surface, the engine sputtered once more and then died, casting a pall of silence over the group as they hurtled through the salty air in a non-functional aircraft. The air was not still, and frequent gusts required Hunt to react swiftly with the plane’s rudder to keep it level, lest they turn over and land upside-down in the ocean.

“I’ll try to land us as near the island as I can, but no guarantees,” Hunt shouted. As Jayden gazed out the window, with no other craft in sight, no populated land of any sort in sight, it dawned on him that they had gone out of the frying pan and into the fire, from one dangerous situation to another — stranded on a Cuban barrier island — and that’s if they managed to stick the landing.

Jayden sat back in his seat and put the seatbelt on, encouraging Maddy to do the same. He knew from experience that even a good seaplane landing could be quite bumpy, and given their lack of engine power, this was not going to be a good one. Maddy stowed the scroll and braced for a hard landing.

In the pilot’s seat, Hunt’s eyes scanned the gauges, his brow furrowed in concentration, sweat beading on his forehead. He white-knuckled the steering wheel, pulling back on the stick to bring the nose up a little as the beleaguered aircraft approached the sea surface.

“Brace, brace!” he shouted as the small seaplane bashed nose-first into the ocean. Water washed over the windshield and Hunt was shocked to see a school of fish dart away from the plane in surprise, before it floated back to the surface and rays of sunlight greeted his wide-open eyes. The aircraft rocked back and forth, nose to tail, before settling down into a sloshy floating pattern.

“Everybody okay?” Hunt shouted.

He was glad to hear Maddy’s voice first. “I’m fine.”

“The expression is, ‘Any landing you can walk away from, Carter, not swim away from. But we all seem to be in one piece, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one.”

“Thanks.” Hunt cranked the plane’s controls, turning it to the left toward the barrier island, wishing to coax every ounce of remaining momentum from the plane’s landing to their advantage. After a couple of minutes it was clear that, while it wasn’t sinking, the plane was no longer drifting toward the island. In fact, it was being carried slowly away from it, back out to the open waters of the Florida Straits which they had just crossed over.

Hunt let go of the controls. “We’re going to have to get wet, people. Grab the essentials and let’s go.” He opened his cockpit door and lamented the fact that he no longer had the anchor he’d used in Bimini, thanks to Daedalus’ vandals and their hasty departure. The plane would drift away once they left it. But as he glanced over at the island — a swimmable distance away — he was grateful that at least they would be alive.

Hunt ducked back inside the plane and loaded his backpack with the plane’s remaining useful safety equipment — a small tool kit, a first aid kit. “Time to go.” He glanced back at Jayden, who had moved into the back with Maddy to prepare their bags. Jayden opened the rear door.

Hunt stepped outside onto the plane’s pontoon, staring down into the sea and trying to gauge the water depth. He guessed it was about seven or eight feet, mostly sandy bottom. Too deep to stand, but he knew it would get shallower as they approached the island, which he judged to be maybe an eighth of a mile away. He could tell by the drift of the airplane that a current was running through the area, though, taking them away from the island, so they’d have to work against that.

Hunt opted to slip quietly into the water from the pontoon rather than make a big splash that might attract sharks. He encouraged Jayden and Maddy to do the same. He treaded water while Jayden and then Maddy slipped into the sea alongside him. They began to swim toward the low-lying land, kicking hard against a current that felt like a freight train coming in the opposite direction. They kept at it, though, with some choice curses from Jayden and some encouraging words from Hunt, and some time later Hunt stopped swimming and put his feet straight down.

He was rewarded with the feel of soft sand beneath his wetsuit boots, the water about shoulder high on his six-foot frame. A large shadow materialized from the sand below and Hunt raised his arms in a defensive posture, but he quickly saw that it was only a large stingray, wings flapping furiously as it moved to escape the intruder who had disturbed it as it lay beneath the sand. He watched it disappear into the distance and then turned around, waving to Jayden and Maddy.

“I can stand. We’re almost there.” He waited for Maddy to get close and then reached out and pulled her to him, holding her while she got her footing on the sandy bottom. Jayden caught up with them next, appearing not the least bit winded from the strenuous swim. He nodded to the low-lying isle that was now not so far away.

“Looks a lot like the one we came up on in the Bahamas.”

Hunt nodded as he took in the scrubby vegetation atop a low-lying sand hillock. “Let’s check it out. Shuffle your feet so you don’t step on a stingray.”

“I call it the ‘stingray shuffle’, kind of like a moonwalk.” Jayden broke out into song as he slid his feet across the sand bottom. “Do the stingray shuffle, every day, the stingray shuffle, look out for those rays!”

“I think I’d rather be stung by a ray than be subjected to your singing,” Hunt mocked.

The waterlogged trio shuffled across the sandy bottom that sloped gradually up toward the flat island. The tropical sun warmed them, but also burned their faces as it reflected off the water’s surface. Hunt was grateful for the aviator sunglasses he still wore. As they neared the island’s fringing beach, the water became shallower; they were waist-high, able to walk faster, and then trudging through only calf deep water until they reached the beach and flopped down on the dry sand, exhausted.

“So this is Cuba,” Jayden said at length, after they had rested.

“Where’s your cigars?” Maddy wondered.

“We need to figure out how to get to the Cuban mainland,” Hunt said, rising to his feet. He turned around 360 degrees and stopped when facing the Cuban mainland. “It’s got to be two, maybe three miles away,” he estimated, the dejection evident in his voice.

“I can’t swim that far,” Maddy said bluntly.

“We’ll figure something out,” Hunt said. But what? As he continued to look around, he saw no signs of human activity whatsoever — no boats, planes, no noise from the mainland — nothing. Jayden got to his feet and went to explore what little there was to see of the rest of the islet, while Maddy took out the Critias scroll.

“I hate to expose it to the elements here,” she said, unrolling the ancient parchment, “but something’s been nagging at me.”

Hunt watched her while she buried her nose in the lost manuscript once again. “Tell me more about what led you to think Cuba is a possible location for Atlantis? I’ve heard unfounded reports of an underwater city somewhere along Cuba’s coast, but it wasn’t connected to Atlantis as far as I know.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Maddy said cryptically, still staring at the pages. She reached into her pack and took from it her digital camera. “I snapped a couple of pics right before we began our descent, while we were still high up.” She turned the device on. She nodded on seeing the screen fill with an aerial image. “Yeah, you can see the Cuban mainland coast as well as the barrier islands…including this one.” She held up the camera so that Hunt could see the photo.

He stared at it for a minute before nodding slowly. “Okay, it shows the surrounding area, the islands. The bird’s eye view could help us plan our way out of here, is that the point?”

Maddy shook her head. “No. Try to imagine the scene without any water, as if it was one of those topographic maps showing valleys and mountains.”

Hunt eyeballed the photo while mentally picturing it as she suggested. The Cuban mainland formed one side of a ring, while the barrier islands, including the one they were currently stranded on, formed the opposite side of the ring. In between were smaller, isolated islands and islets. Hunt had seen imagery with the oceans’ water removed to show the bottom contours and seamounts, and knew that many islands were really just the tips of huge undersea mountains.

“Okay, I can picture it. But I still don’t get your point. How does it help us?”

“What if, tens of thousands of years ago — say eleven thousand — the sea level wasn’t as high as it was now?”

Hunt shrugged. “I suppose there would have been more land back then, which today is submerged under the ocean.”

Maddy beamed. “Right. But look at the shape that land — this land,” she said, waving an arm at the sea beyond their little sand islet—“would have taken.” She pointed back to the image on the camera’s display, tracing the contours of the islands with a finger. “Imagine just a little more land on each of these islands — picture these islets in the middle here as the tips of large mountains, with some water still at the bottom….what shapes would it take on?”

Hunt felt the realization wash over him like the waves lapping at the beach a few feet away. He gazed at the tiny screen in amazement, staring at it until it made sense to his eyes like one of those blurry posters that slowly materialized into a recognizable shape after squinting at it long enough.

“I see it now,” he said, his voice low and even. “It would form a series of concentric rings, wouldn’t it?”