Hell Ship

CHAPTER 13

“We finished clearing the ship yesterday, and started sweeping the surrounding seafloor.” Bones motioned to a pile of encrusted debris on the deck. “So far, all we’ve found is a whole lot of nothing.”

“If you don’t include the remains of over four hundred Allied soldiers,” remarked Alex, gesturing to the array of dog tags laid out on a table. There were a half-dozen different styles representing the same number of nationalities. The metal tags were badly corroded and would have to be meticulously restored if an identification was to be made, but some, such as the distinctive red disk and green octagon pair issued by the Royal Army which were made of vulcanized asbestos fiber, were perfectly legible.

Dane didn’t think that she had meant it to sound like an accusation, but he could tell from the way Bones stiffened that it had come out that way. They were all tired and irritable. Bones and his crew had been working long, tedious and ultimately unfruitful hours sifting through the wreck of the Nagata Maru, while Dane, Alex and Professor had been traveling non-stop for too many days to count, first hopping their way across Europe and Asia to reach the Philippines, followed by a long journey aboard the Sea Sprite, a cramped — and not altogether sea-worthy — cabin cruiser, to rendezvous with Jacinta shortly before sunrise. The travel expenses alone had put quite a dent in their reserve — which consisted of several thousand dollars in Dane’s money belt — and every day they spent at sea was just adding to the final tally.

Dane quickly tried to smooth things over. “I appreciate all the work you’ve done. I wish there was a shortcut, but unfortunately this isn’t an exact science. More of a process of elimination, really.”

Bones stared suspiciously at Alex a few seconds longer then turned his attention back to Dane. “Well, like the lady said, we did bring up a whole mess of dog tags. The grandkids of these missing soldiers will probably think that’s worth a hell of a lot more than some fairy tale treasure.”

“Ordinarily, I would feel the same way, but unfortunately this is one fairy tale that people are willing to kill for.”

“People kill for less than that all the time,” intoned Alex. “That doesn’t make any of it real.” She turned to Bones and stuck out her hand. “I’m sorry if I offended you. Truce?”

Bones grimaced, but there was a playful twinkle in his eye. “My people have learned to be very suspicious when the white man asks for a truce.”

“I know this will tax your powers of observation,” Alex countered in the same tone, “but I am not exactly lily-white, and I’m certainly not a man.”

Bones looked her up and down with an exaggerated lascivious grin. “Well, there’s no arguing that.”

Behind them, Gabby cleared her throat. “When you two are finished, maybe you’d like to tell me what to do next.”

Bones transferred his smile to Gabby for a moment then became serious. “As I see it, we have two choices. We can keep searching the sea floor surrounding the wreck, or we can try to go back into the interior.”

He walked over and laid a hand on the monitor screen which displayed the alien-looking sub-surface environment in dull hues of green and brown. “We found some remains in the area around the wreck. I’m no forensic expert, but judging by the way the bones were shattered, I’d guess they were shot, probably trying to escape. So, there’s a chance we’ll find our guy out there, but the further out we go, the less we’re finding. On the upside, it’s going quickly because we can sweep with the metal detector.”

“Okay, what are the pros and cons of going back to the wreck?” Dane asked.

Gabby fielded this question. “The metal detector is useless in there, so we have to do everything visually. We think that most of the prisoners were being kept in the ship’s ballroom — that’s the big enclosure you first explored. We were also able to access the bridge and a few other compartments on the main deck, but there are probably dozens of places below decks that we haven’t checked out yet. The engine room, galleys, crew quarters, staterooms. That will be slow going since a lot of those spaces will have collapsed or been silted in.”

“I doubt we’ll find our missing POW there anyway,” Dane said.

Bones inclined his head in agreement. “It’s your call. Gabby’s working by the hour, so she probably doesn’t care if we spend the next six months out here. The rest of us…” He shrugged.

Dane thought he understood Bones’ subtext. There was no reason for them to still be out here. In finding the ship, they had accomplished the mission objective, or more precisely nullified that objective. Either way, the logical thing for them to do was to return to base, send their findings up the chain of command, and await further orders. SEALs were given a lot of latitude in how they accomplished their missions, but there were limits to their autonomy. Even if he didn’t trust the SECNAV, he knew he should, at the very least, turn the whole thing over to Maxie.

He had been operating under the belief that, once he had all the facts, the way forward would become clearer, but every new discovery only took them deeper into a labyrinth of uncertainty. If they could find Trevor Hancock, find the medallion that was supposedly affixed to his skull, they would have a piece of concrete evidence, but Dane was beginning to wonder if even that discovery would shed light on the mystery, or further muddy the waters.

Hancock and the Gatekeepers were still out there, and there was no telling how deep the Templar influence extended, or to what lengths they would go to preserve their secret. There had already been one attempt to harm them; how long before the next one came? As much as Dane wanted to know the truth, he couldn’t justify putting the rest of the team in danger.

He watched Gabby drive the ROV for several minutes, during which time the scene on the monitor remained mostly unchanged and the metal detector remained quiescent, and came to a conclusion.

“All right, here’s what’s going to happen. Bones, Professor and Willis are going to head home and report what we’ve found.” Dane realized that he was dangerously close to blowing their cover. As far as Alex and Gabby were concerned, they were fortune hunters, beholden to no one, and he wasn’t ready to reveal the truth to them just yet, so he hastily added. “Go public with it. Tell the newspapers that we found a missing ship from World War II. And of course, you should tell our friend Maxie about it. He might have some ideas.”

Bones nodded slowly. “And while we’re doing that, you’re going to do…what?”

“I’ll stay here with Gabby and Alex and keep looking.”

“Ah, you want to send us away, so you can party with the hot chicks, is that right? Is that your idea of taking one for the team?” Bones tone was humorous, but Dane didn’t miss the subtle familiar criticism.

You don’t want to be part of the team.

“I have to do this,” he insisted. “You guys don’t. I won’t drag you down with me.”

Bones looked at Professor and then at Willis. “You guys feeling drug down?”

Willis gave a succinct, “Hell, no!”

Professor was more eloquent. “All for one and one for all, boss.”

Dane shook his head. “I appreciate the offer guys, but our best chance of surviving this is by getting the word out. Sending you back is the right call.”

Bones heaved an overly dramatic sigh. “Fine. Willis and the Prof will go back. I’m staying.”

Dane would have preferred to keep Professor with him, but got the sense that Bones had no intention of budging on the issue. He wondered if Bones first comment about the women hadn’t been a joke after all. Was he involved with Gabby?

Well, so what if he is? At least he’s sober. “Okay, if we’re done with that minor mutiny…Gabby, reel in the ROV.”

Bones craggy eyebrows drew together questioningly.

“We found this ship by throwing out what we thought we knew,” Dane explained. “Thinking outside the box; thinking like the people who were there, living it. So let’s put ourselves in Hancock’s shoes. We know he didn’t go down with the ship, and it’s looking like he didn’t get machine gunned by the guards. If either was the case, we’d have found him already.”

“Not necessarily,” countered Professor. “It’s a big ocean. The odds of finding one person—”

“Don’t you have somewhere you need to be?” growled Bones. Professor promptly fell silent. “Okay, C-3PO here makes a good point, but go on.”

“Like I said, put yourself in his shoes. Your ship was just sunk. You’re alone in the middle of the sea. What do you do?”

Glances were exchanged but no one had an answer.

“You swim.”

“Sure,” joked Bones. “The nearest land is only…what, three hundred miles away?”

“Hancock wouldn’t have known that. He’d been shut up in that ship for days. He would have been swimming just to stay alive. Hell, he was probably just trying to stay afloat. And you’re wrong about the nearest land, Bones. Gabby, you want to tell him?”

The ROV operator looked surprised to have been singled out, and considered the question for a moment. “Oh, duh. The Spratlys. Technically, we’re on the northern edge of them right now.”

“He wouldn’t have known about those either,” Dane continued, “but when you’re adrift in the ocean, you go where the current takes you. Gabby, I’m guessing you know a thing or two about the currents here?”

“Umm, yeah. What time of year was the ship sunk?”

“April,” said Alex. “April 21, 1944, if that makes a difference.”

“Hmm. It might, but the month is the important thing. The currents change with the onset of the monsoon season. And of course they’re always changing from one year to the next. But I can put you in the ballpark.”

Dane felt the same rush of excitement he’d experienced when they had first discovered the wreck. His instincts — his gut, as Bones would say — told him he was on the right track.

With Gabby’s best-guess plot of the currents to guide them, the crew of the Jacinta, minus Professor and Sanders who were en route to Manila aboard Sea Sprite, headed southwest. The current was only about three knots, an estimate that had been more or less verified by throwing a life ring overboard and clocking the time it took to drift away.

Dane knew this was a shot in the dark. Ocean currents, driven by differences in water temperature and salinity, were predictable only at a very large scale. Perhaps with accurate historical data, crunched by a dedicated supercomputer, they would be able to narrow their focus, but without knowing exactly where — or if — Hancock had gone into the water, success or failure would probably be more dependent on luck than anything else.

Still, luck had gotten them this far.

About two hours after leaving the wreck site, the sea floor rose to within five fathoms — less than thirty feet of water separated the keel of the Jacinta from the bottom.

“It’s a seamount,” Gabby explained. “An undersea mountain that didn’t quite make it to the surface to become an island. There are a lot of them out here. Seamounts, shallow reefs, islands that are submerged except at low tide.”

The landforms, she went on, would shunt the currents aside, creating stronger and faster movement of water, that would stay parallel to shallows. Dane cut the engines and allowed the boat to drift, while watching the horizon in every direction for any sign of land. Soon, he spied the froth of waves breaking on a reef, but a closer inspection revealed a patch of ground about the size of a baseball infield — and just as flat and featureless, too — poking above the waves.

If Trevor Hancock had washed up on that beach fifty years earlier, he would just as surely have been washed away with the next tide. They kept looking.

Twenty minutes later, Bones’ voice boomed like thunder across the decks. “Land, ho!”

Dane trained his binoculars in the direction Bones was pointing and saw another reef, this one only slightly larger and more pronounced than the first one they had seen, but nevertheless worth investigating.

When the Jacinta was safely anchored outside the surf zone, they all boarded the Zodiac that Scalpel’s team had left behind. Bones skillfully navigated through the crashing breakers and into a small lagoon on the islet where Dane hopped out to drag the craft up above the tide line.

Alex clambered over the side to stand with him in the ankle deep surf. “Doesn’t look like much.”

“Maybe not to us,” Dane agreed, “but try looking at it from the eyes of man who’s been floating in the sea for two days, menaced by sharks. Probably looked like paradise.”

Bones cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted, “Yo, Ginger! Mary Ann! Pina Coladas, right here!”

Paradise, Dane had to admit, was a bit of an overstatement. The island was little more than an hourglass shaped sandbar that had accumulated around a pair of craggy rocks, the tallest of which was shorter than Alex. There was hardly any shade, absolutely no vegetation and no evident sources of fresh water. Dane understood now why the Spratly Islands were mostly uninhabited. This was not the idyllic paradise of Gilligan’s Island or Swiss Family Robinson; this was the last rest area on the way to Hell.

“Let’s spread out. Look for anything that looks…well, interesting.”

“That won’t take long,” muttered Bones, but no sooner had he spoken the last word when his voice changed. “Wait a sec. I think that qualifies.”

He was pointing to one of the tall rocks, or more specifically to what looked at a distance like a nub of rock extending out on the sheltered side of the crag. As they got closer, Dane saw that it wasn’t rock at all, but a waist-high heap of driftwood pieces, ranging in size from tree boughs four feet long to chunks no bigger than Dane’s thumb, all of them worn smooth by persistent wave action.

“How did those get there?” Gabby wondered aloud.

The rock was too far from the beach and the pile too neat to be the work of nature. The answer was obvious.

“Someone put them there.” Dane raced over for a closer look, confirming that inescapable conclusion. The driftwood was not merely heaped up, but placed carefully to minimize gaps and prevent shifting. It reminded him of something….

“It’s a cairn,” said Alex. “Like a burial mound.”

If Dane had any doubts about that, they were cleared away when he spied something carved into a large chunk of wood at the base of the mound; a word, made up of straight lines that had been scratched repeatedly in the dense surface.

ARCHIE

“It’s not him,” said Alex, dejectedly.

“It’s someone.” Dane inspected the marker more carefully and saw that something had been wedged into a crack in the wood. It was a circular red identification tag, stamped with letters and numbers. “‘Bailey, A.’ This is a Royal Army dog tag. The kind they used throughout World War II. Archie Bailey may have been a survivor from the Nagata Maru.”

“But not the one we were looking for.”

Bones chuckled. “You don’t think he buried himself, do you?”

“There was another survivor here.” Alex stepped away from the pile. “Look for another cairn.”

“Alex, there wouldn’t be anyone left to bury the last man.” Dane stared at the driftwood marker. “This took a lot of time and effort. Days maybe.”

“What are you saying?”

“Our castaway found a way to survive. At least long enough to bury one of his mates.” Dane took Alex’s hand and drew her along as he explored the second crag, situated at the far end of the hourglass. There was another arrangement of driftwood there, but this time instead of a large mound, the pieces were all about the same size, laid out one the ground, side by side, like a deck.

“Is it a raft?”

Dane shook his head. “No. Or if it was meant to be, he never finished it. There’s nothing to hold the logs together.”

He knelt down and lifted one of the logs, revealing a shallow depression underneath. “It’s a roof! He built a shelter.”

He pulled more of the logs aside, revealing a space easily large enough for a man to lie, protected from the elements. There was other evidence of habitation — brittle fragments of what could only be fabric, and a small heap of seashells.

The others joined them a moment later and Bones gave a low whistle of appreciation. “That’s a pretty nice lodge. I’ll bet he had Indian blood.”

Dane probed at the debris and uncovered a small red tag, just like the one on the grave marker. He rubbed the dust away and read the letters stamped there. “Hancock, T. I think that’s a negative on the Indian blood.”

“He was here,” Alex gasped. “But where did he go?”

She turned in a circle, looking for some other subtle indication of a human presence on the island.

“Maybe he swam away again,” ventured Bones. “I would.”

“You’re a real ray of sunshine,” said Dane.

“Just keeping it real.” Bones turned to Gabby. “Let’s head back to Jacinta and get Baby’s metal detector. If our guy is here somewhere, then that plate in his skull is probably the only thing made of metal anywhere on the island.”

Dane, surprised at Bones’ quick thinking, nodded his approval. As the oddly-matched pair marched back to the Zodiac, Dane tried once more to think like the castaway.

“Okay, let’s be logical. You’re stuck here. You’ve got nothing. Even the clothes you’re wearing are rags. What do you do?”

Alex pointed to the driftwood deck. “Basic needs. Shelter. And of course, food and water.”

Dane snapped his fingers. “Yes. Where do you find food and water in a place like this?”

“Fish?”

“Maybe. He doesn’t have any tools, but maybe he can fashion something out of driftwood. A club, maybe even a spear. And there are dozens of tide pools around here. He could collect mollusks, maybe even fish that get trapped when the tide goes out. That takes care of food, but water’s the real problem.”

“It’s the tropics. Rain?”

“He would have to store it somehow; a catch basin or a cistern.” Dane felt like the answer had to be right in front of him; he just needed a new perspective. He scrambled onto the tall rock next the shelter. It was a change of only about four feet, but now he could see dozens of depressions pockmarking the island, any one of which might have served to catch rainwater.

Then he saw something else.

Bones kept his gaze on the Jacinta, nudging the tiller to stay on course as the little inflatable boat charged headlong into the surf. He eased off the throttle, allowing the craft to coast — or more accurately to drift backward, caught in the rush of a wave that had already broken — and then twisted the outboard engine’s throttle wide open. The burst of speed caught Gabby unprepared and she tumbled off her seat and landed half on his lap. Bones didn’t let the mishap distract him from the task at hand; with the engine at full power, he drove the boat directly at the rising face of an incoming breaker. The bow end tilted up as the craft started climbing the hill made of water, and then just when it seemed the wave would curl over, capsize the boat and slam them down into the sea once more, they broke through the crest and were rocketing down the backside of the wave.

“Nicely done,” said Gabby, laughing as she used Bones’ thigh for leverage to pull herself upright.

“Just call me the Big Kahuna,” Bones said with a grin.

She took her seat again, this time facing him, but said nothing more until they were past the incoming surf. The subsequent waves hadn’t yet begun to crest and crossing them was considerably less dramatic, but even a momentary lapse in focus might result in them taking a dunk. Only when Bones had eased off the throttle a little, cruising through considerably smoother water toward the waiting Jacinta, did she speak again.

“Your boss seems like a smart guy.”

“Maddock?” He grinned to hide a twinge of jealousy. “Well, he’s what you’d call ‘book smart.’ But yeah, he’s definitely the brains of the outfit.”

“Do you think he can find this medallion you’re looking for?”

Bones shrugged. “If it can be found, Maddock will find it. He seems to have a sixth sense when it comes to stuff like this.”

She nodded as if that was sufficient reassurance and swung her gaze around to watch the final approach to the larger craft. When the inflatable bumped against the dive platform, she nimbly hopped over and secured a mooring line to a cleat. She waited for Bones to join her, then ascended the stairs to the deck where Baby was stored, along with the cable spool that connected it to the operating console on the bridge.

The little yellow submersible looked like the offspring of a spacesuit helmet and an air compressor, to which someone had added a robot claw hand and something that resembled the circular base of a floor lamp. The latter item was the business end of a Fisher underwater metal detector. Bones used his Leatherman multi-tool to cut the plastic zip-ties that secured the device to the ROV while Gabby went to work unscrewing the water-tight cable connector that joined the metal detector to the remote’s cable hub. Both finished their respective tasks in less than a minute. Bones casually propped the treasure finder over one shoulder as if carrying a rifle in a parade and started for the boat.

Gabby called after him. “Hey, I’m gonna pay a visit to the head before we go back.”

“Good thought. The island isn’t exactly equipped with modern facilities.”

Gabby waited until Bones was on the stairs to the dive platform before ducking inside, but she did not go immediately to the lavatory. Instead, she entered the crew’s quarters and with the same economy of motion she’d employed to disconnect the metal detector, opened her duffel bag and took out an Iridium satellite phone identical to the one she’d seen Bones using two days earlier. She moved swiftly to the bridge, from which vantage she could see Bones, lashing the metal detector to the boat with bungee cords.

Without looking away, she extended the phone’s antenna and punched in a number. There was an electronic click as the connection was made, followed by a brief lag as the signal traveled from its source, to a satellite orbiting in space, and back down to her handset.

“Report.”

“Be ready,” she said. “He’s very close to finding it.”

The wait was interminable. She saw Bones glance impatiently up the stairs and drew back, away from the bridge window, even though there was no way he could see inside. The seconds seemed to stretch out into minutes. This is taking too long, she thought, and was about to sever the connection when she heard the voice again.

“We’re on our way. Here’s what you need to do….”

From even a short distance away, it was impossible to see the outline of a human skeleton. Fifty years of tropical rain and scorching sun had leached away minerals, partially dissolving the bones so that, from more than a few steps away, they looked like part of the landscape. Further obscuring the picture was the fact that the skeleton had no head. Where the skull should have been, there was a small pool, about two feet across, filled with water.

Dane knelt beside the skeleton, trying to imagine how this man’s life had ended. He dipped a finger in the pool and tasted it. “Brackish. This was his catch basin, but it got contaminated. Or maybe he was waiting for it to rain, but it never did.”

“So where’s his head?”

“I think there are still headhunters in this part of the world. Maybe one of them visited and took a souvenir.”

Alex shuddered.

“Kidding.”

Dane dragged a hand through the sediment at the bottom of the pool. He felt something hard, closed his fingers around it, drew his hand out. The sand fell away to reveal a piece of crab shell. He went in again, raking the sand until he found something hard and crusty, held in place by the weight of sand and the suction of the muck beneath. He bent over the pool and stuck his other hand in as well, working his fingers underneath it until he felt water flooding into the space underneath. With an audible, sucking noise it came free and he lifted his prize out of the pool.

A slurry of wet sand dripped away to reveal a spherical object, half-encrusted with barnacles, but nevertheless easily recognizable as a completely intact human skull. Dane dunked it in the water to clear away the rest of the sediment, and when he took it out again, something flashed in the sunlight. Affixed to the parietal bone, just above and behind where the man’s right ear would have been, was a triangle of yellow metal, slightly larger than the identification disks the man had carried as a soldier. Dane noticed that it wasn’t perfectly symmetrical, but was an obtuse scalene triangle, with one angle slightly wider than ninety degrees.

Dane immediately noticed two things about the medallion. “There’s no oxidation or corrosion. I think this thing is gold. It’s too hard to be twenty-four karat, but definitely a gold alloy.”

“There’s something on it.”

That was the second thing Dane had noticed. Adorning the triangle was a simple but unique symbol: a Templar Cross.

The cross was centered in the triangle, its vertical axis bisecting the medallion through the wide angle. A tiny nail had been driven through the intersection of the cross-arms to secure it in place, but this popped out with the slightest pressure from Dane’s thumbnail. The medallion itself took a little more effort, as if, even in death, Trevor Hancock was reluctant to part with the item that had been entrusted to him as a boy.

Dane gently pried it loose and then set the skull next to the rest of the skeleton. “I’ll take it from here, Lord Hancock. Rest in peace.”

Alex crossed herself, and then stuck out an eager hand. “Let me see.”

She flipped it over, inspected the obverse, then rotated it in her fingers. “I think this was made to fit into one of the sigils on the map in the Templar chapel at Lord Hancock’s estate. Each of those sigils marks a Templar fortress. Whichever one it fits is where they hid the treasure.”

“I don’t suppose you remember where this one goes.”

She closed her eyes, as if trying to visualize the map, but then shook her head. “I wish I had that kind of memory.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to pay him another visit. Think he’ll be happy to see us?”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“Yeah,” he went on. “I don’t think so either.”

“Do you think it could really be that easy? Just find the right slot, put the triangle in and…Presto! Dig here for treasure.”

“If I had that access to that map and knew that there was a treasure in one of those places, I wouldn’t waste time waiting to see if this thing turned up. I’d go to every single location on the map and tear them apart until I found it.”

She grinned at him. “Something tells me you’d be able to narrow it down and find the right place on the first try.”

“Why, thank you.”

She held the medallion close to her eyes, searching for some hidden inscription. “Maybe there’s more to it than just knowing where to go. Maybe once you get to the right place, you have to use the key again.”

Dane held his hand out, palm up. “Doesn’t matter. This triangle is what everyone wants. It’s our leverage.”

“Leverage?” She handed him the medallion. “What kind of treasure hunter are you?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure that out.” He looked out to where Jacinta was anchored, and then saw Bones and Gabby aboard the Zodiac surfing the breakers on their return trip. “Come on. Let’s go tell Bones he wasted a trip.”

As the wave started to pick them up, Bones gripped the side of the Zodiac and shouted: “Now!”

Gabby, seated at the stern, twisted the throttle and the inflatable craft started forward. For a moment, it seemed that they would lose the race; the wave was relentless, inexorable, while the puny outboard was struggling to overcome the Zodiac’s inertia. The nose tilted down, the boat sliding up the face of the wave…but then, just when it seemed they would lose the wave altogether, gravity gave them an assist. The Zodiac dropped down the face of the breaker like it was a roller coaster.

“Cut it!”

Gabby let go of the throttle, allowing the engine to idle, but even though the screw was no longer turning, they were picking up speed. She angled the tiller so that the boat veered to the right, shooting along the base of the wave as it curled and broke right behind them.

“You’re surfing!” cheered Bones.

Gabby shrieked with delight. “Let’s do it again!”

“Business before pleasure. Besides, first we’d have to get past the incoming breakers to get back out, and as you’ve seen, that’s the hard part.”

“I want to try. Show me how.”

“Let’s drop off our package first.”

She stuck out her lip in a pout. “I thought Maddock was the stick-in-the-mud.”

“Hey, I let you drive, didn’t I? Some gratitude would be nice.” He turned his attention to the beach where Maddock and Alex stood waiting. Even from fifty yards out, Bones could see the look of triumph on his team leader’s face. “Uh, oh. Either Maddock got lucky, or he found what he was looking for.”

As the wave collapsed to white froth beneath them, Gabby engaged the screw once more and turned the Zodiac toward the place where the others waited. Bones sat near the prow, poised to leap out as soon as the fiberglass hull scraped against the sand.

The engine noise cut out as Gabby abruptly let off the throttle again. Bones turned to admonish her, but before he could say anything, she had twisted the throttle in the opposite direction, reversing the screw.

“Not yet—” Bones started to say, but then he was thrown off balance by the sudden deceleration. He saw Gabby reach out to him, but instead of trying to catch hold of him, she gave him a hard shove, toppling him forward over the prow.

The water was hip deep, but he went in face first and it took him a few seconds to right himself. He came up, sputtering, not really angry but ready to meet her unprovoked horseplay with equal and appropriate mischief. The Zodiac however was already thirty yards away, skimming the incoming whitewater and headed for the breakers. He shouted her name, but she didn’t look back.

Maddock splashed out to meet him. “What did you say to her?”

Bones shook his head. “Women. Who can figure ‘em?” Then he realized Alex was there and added. “I mean, she’s just a kid.”

“Well, tell her to quite goofing off,” said Maddock. “We found it.”

Bones wheeled around. “Seriously. I mean, I knew you could do it, but…seriously? You found it?”

Maddock held up a piece of shiny yellow metal.

Bones shook his head in amazement. “A needle in a haystack, and you found it. You’re buying me a lotto ticket when we get back, because you must be the luckiest bastard on earth.”

Maddock nodded to the Zodiac which was fighting its way through the incoming surf. “One of us has to be. What’s she doing?”

“Trying to hot dog, I guess. If she’s not careful…” He didn’t finish the thought aloud. He had been about to say that if Gabby wasn’t careful, she’d be going for a swim, but the awful truth was if she failed, there was a good chance the Zodiac would be wrecked, and then they’d all have a rough swim to get back to the Jacinta.

He held his breath as she made her charge, a couple seconds too soon for his liking, but the wave was smaller than the one he’d charged and she actually made it look easy. The inflatable slid down the shallow back of the wave, momentarily disappearing from view, but when the wave flattened out, he was surprised to see the Zodiac heading for the anchored vessel. Gabby pulled the inflatable up to the diving platform, tied it off, and ascended the stairs.

“Ah, Bones?” There was an anxious incredulity in Maddock’s voice, a sentiment that Bones felt as well, and with each passing second, his dread increased. Something was very wrong.

Any doubts to that effect were swept away when they heard the distant but unmistakable sound of helicopters in the sky.