The Deep

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The old ship’s bell, after more than three centuries at the bottom of the Caribbean, now sat in a glass tub, soaking in a mild acidic solution. On the other side of the lab area, in PUSH’s entry lock, Adriana pounded the keyboard in search of clues to the identity of the mysterious galleon.

The lists and numbers that passed across the screen astonished her. The web site was maintained by the Spanish government. It contained a complete archive of every ship that had ever sailed to and from Spain, including its cargo. There were passenger manifests and bills of lading all the way back to the fifteenth century.

If that wreck is what we think it is, it has to be in here somewhere, Adriana reasoned.

Outside the viewing port by her shoulder, a lobster hunt was in progress. English was leading Star, Kaz, and Dante on a search for a dinner that was worthy of their last night on PUSH. Seafood was on the menu; peanut butter most definitely was not.

She got up from the chair and knelt down in front of the bell. Using a long-handled soft brush, she dabbed gently at the coating of rust on the brass. A cloud of reddish-brown particles flaked off into the surrounding liquid.

She squinted at the mottled surface. Was it getting cleaner, or was that just wishful thinking? She could make out faint lines of engraving, but nothing was clear enough to read.

She glanced up. Outside the porthole, Dante had cornered one of the clawless Caribbean lobsters in a rock crevice, and was trying to coax it out.

“Stay in there, kiddo,” she advised the creature. “He wants to cook you.” With a self-conscious laugh, she realized she had spoken aloud.

Dante lay on the rocks, his head almost completely inserted in the opening. As he reached out to grab, a huge dark shadow fell over him.

Adriana gaped. An enormous manta ray came flapping down to take a look at the diver with his head in a hole. Frantic, she banged on the window with both fists, hoping the concussion of her knocking would carry through the water. Perhaps it did, because Dante emerged with his captured lobster to find the twenty-foot wingspan of the devilfish looming over him.

Adriana couldn’t hear anything, but it was plain that Dante was screaming his head off. He spat out his regulator, and howled a cloud of bubbles that seemed to have no end. Star and Kaz tried to come to his aid, but Dante was out of control.

English finned onto the scene, with bubbles pouring from him as well. Adriana felt a stab of fear. The guide was afraid of nothing. Just how dangerous was this big beast that hovered like an alien spacecraft?

Then she realized that English was not in the grip of terror. He was laughing.

Somehow they managed to get Dante calmed down. He was inconsolable, though — in the excitement, his lobster had made its escape. With sign language, English instructed the others to watch. Then, astoundingly, he climbed right onto the manta’s expansive back.

Adriana stared through the viewing port. The monster just hung there and allowed itself to be mounted, great wings undulating slightly. Then, with a nudge from its rider, it took off, sailing gracefully over the reef, bearing English like some begoggled jockey. It was out of Adriana’s view almost immediately, but she could see the others watching with undisguised awe.

She returned her attention to the bell, and brushed a little more. The solution was now growing cloudy with rust particles, and the engraving was definitely beginning to appear.

1! But no — there was a crosspiece on top! T, then! She dabbed the brush gently but firmly, holding herself back from scrubbing. If she ruined this artifact, she would never forgive herself.

T-O-L-L — no, the second L was an E!

Outside the habitat, the manta flashed by, this time with Star on its back. What was this — a carnival? Manta rides: fifty cents?

Concentrate! You’re so close to cracking this!

She kept on working the soft bristles, and more engraving began to appear.

Another O. No, wait! It was a D! T-O-L-E-D — it could only be one word: Toledo!

Of course! All the great metalworks in Spain were in Toledo! This bell was made there!

The exhilaration of discovery had her dancing around the tiny room. But she quickly returned to the bell. There had to be a date there, and she was going to find it.

Star, Kaz, and Dante clattered onto the wet porch, whooping and exchanging high fives.

“That was awesome!” Star crowed ecstatically. “Like riding a pterodactyl underwater!”

“It was so tame!” marveled Dante. “Who knew something that big and ugly could be so friendly?”

“Is that any way to talk about our dive guide?” Kaz grinned.

“You know what I mean!”

All at once, Adriana appeared at the pressure lock, smiling from ear to ear. She said, “Nuestra Señora de la Luz.”

The three stared at her.

“What are you babbling about?” asked Star.

“That’s our galleon! It means ‘Our Lady of the Light.’ It sailed from Cádiz in 1648, and was lost at sea in 1665 on its fifth Atlantic crossing!”

“It says all that on the bell?” asked Dante incredulously.

Star was disgusted. “Sometimes you ask the dumbest questions! How could it say when they sank? You think they were engraving it while they were going down?”

“There are two inscriptions,” Adriana explained breathlessly. “One says ‘Toledo,’ which means the bell was made at the metalworks there. And the other is ‘1648,’ the year it was cast. I checked the old Spanish records. Seven new galleons were launched between 1648 and 1650. One of them burned in the harbor, and took the dock and half the town with it. One’s on display at the Maritime Museum in Barcelona. Two disappeared looking for the Philippines, which puts them ten thousand miles from here. Two were sunk in naval battles off the coast of Europe. That leaves just Nuestra Señora de la Luz.” She quivered with excitement. “It was part of the 1665 treasure fleet — the only ship that never made it home. According to the rest of the fleet, it disappeared in a hurricane in the French West Indies — right around here!”

“Then that’s the only ship it can be!” Kaz exclaimed.

“And Cutter’s taken it from us,” added Star bitterly.

“Hold on a second,” Dante interrupted. He turned to Adriana. “Did you say treasure fleet?”

“You won’t believe it!” she crowed, eyes shining. “The web site showed the bills of lading. Nuestra Señora was a floating Fort Knox. You know that piece of eight we found? There were seven hundred thousand of them, freshly minted from South American silver! There were tons — tons — of gold! Chests piled high with pearls and precious stones! The total estimated value of that cargo today is one-point-two billion dollars!”

The whoop of celebration that escaped Dante was barely human.

“What are you so excited about?” asked Star. “A billion bucks, and we’ve found nothing but a bunch of spoons and plates!”

“I think I know where the real thing might be!” Dante babbled excitedly. “If you go past the wreck site, the seafloor falls away to deeper ocean. The bell came from the top of that slope. But when I looked, I could see stuff scattered way, way down there, almost out of sight. The treasure’s there! I know it!”

Adriana looked thoughtful. “It’s possible, you know. Nuestra Señora went down in a hurricane. Heavy seas could have separated the cargo and dragged it off the shoal.”

“We have to get to it before Cutter figures that out!” Kaz exclaimed urgently.

“I see,” came a cold voice behind them.

They wheeled. English stood at the pressure hatch to the wet porch, scowling at them. Every inch of his six-foot-five frame radiated deep disapproval. He tossed a dive bag crawling with live lobsters onto the stainless steel counter.

“So. Monsieur Cutter, he is the treasure hunter. And you are not? You cry for the destruction of the reef, and then you drool over gold like common bank robbers! You do not fool me!”

Star was genuinely distressed. “That’s not how it is!”

But English was carved from stone. “I have ears, me. I am not stupide!” With lightning speed, he reached out a hand and nudged an escaping lobster back into the bag. “Pack your gear. After dinner, we go into decompression. Then our association is at an end. Once we are topside, I do not know you.”

The lobster was delicious, but the four interns very nearly choked on it. The click and scrape of cutlery on their plates resounded in the steel-trimmed galley. There was no conversation. Every time English cracked a shell, his expression plainly said he would have preferred to be snapping one of their necks.

It was painful, but not nearly as torturous as the endless stay in the decompression chamber. The only reading material was a small library of scientific journals. Every time one of the teens spoke, the dive guide would soon extinguish the conversation with a look that would have melted the polar ice cap. Kaz made an attempt to start a word game, but the other three were too intimidated to join in. Sleep was reduced to a handful of claustrophobic catnaps. The metal floor of the chamber was painful, but not half as much as the burning of the twin laser beams of English’s eyes.

Over seventeen agonizing hours, the device brought them back to surface pressure, giving their bodies a chance to expel the excess nitrogen they had absorbed during their time at sixty-five feet.

At long last, they wordlessly gathered together their tiny pieces of luggage, their bags of artifacts, and the Nuestra Señora bell, and started up the habitat’s umbilical to the PUSH life-support buoy. Sunlight had never seemed so overpoweringly brilliant. There, waiting for them, was the Hernando Cortés. Captain Vanover was on the dive platform to haul them aboard.

“Hey, you guys, how was it? Iggy said you were having a blast!”

Star kicked off her flippers. “Yeah, well, Iggy left,” she said pointedly.

Vanover frowned. “Huh?”

English surfaced behind them, deliberately swam away from the platform, reached up to the forward gunwale, and hoisted himself aboard. He peeled back his hood, stepped out of his fins, and stormed below, without a word to anyone.