the runabout sped across the calm wide sea toward Demar, the fiberglass hull slapping across the low waves. Nate kept an eye on his phone, the marine GPS app guiding him to the island. He looked up when he saw the volcano rising up out of the blue, north and east of him.
Nate slowed the boat, the stiff wind tousling his hair, white Henley Aapping, Sam’s ring around his neck. The black, smoking mountain loomed closer, a towering hump of rock footed by jungle and small, stony beaches. High, rocky cliffs marked the west and north approaches. There was a good- sized cargo ship anchored south of the island, at Golden Cove, and Nate kept far enough out to avoid being seen without a scope.
He filled his lungs with the warm salt air. Here he was, speeding through foreign waters, ducking bad guys to get to the gold… and he was the only person alive who knew where the treasure was. That feeling, knowing, was incredible, it filled him up in a way he couldn’t describe.
Nate guided the boat along the west coast, slowing down once he couldn’t see Braddock’s ship anymore, and started looking for the break in the cliffs.
* * *
Braddock had felt a full minute of hope when one of the workers dug up an old board, but there was nothing around it, only dirt and rock and stinking sand. Braddock scowled, watching the men come up empty. They’d have to move farther in… but how far? Gold was heavy and the jungle was dense, how far would the “explorers” have dragged it to keep it safe?
Hugo waved her over. He’d taken over Scotty’s watch, out on the sand. Braddock slogged through the ragged mess they’d made, heaps of dirt and chopped plants dumped on the beach, saw the big man looking west with the binoculars.
“Still nothing,” she said, because they’d all been hoping. “What do you got?”
He handed her the binoculars, and she followed his line of sight.
There. Even with the binoculars, the boat was small. Looked like a tourist’s skiff. Pretty far out, headed north.
Braddock watched the speck disappear from sight, behind the towering western cliffs. Demar wasn’t central to anything, but they were in an island country; there were boats everywhere. On the other hand, she’d started to have serious fucking doubts about Golden Cove. Chloe Frazer had been certain; but then, Frazer was a feckless moron. Might be wise to make a little run north, just to see if anyone was around.
“Field trip,” she said. “Get Scotty. Alvaro, too. Have him pick a team and tell them to come loaded.”
Hugo nodded and strode away. Braddock headed for one of the equipment boxes, considering what to take along. It was probably just some fisherman, but if Sully was still sucking air, he’d try for the gold… and maybe he knew something she didn’t.
* * *
Chloe went out of her way to keep out of Braddock’s view, circling Demar and coming down the east side before striking out for the islands, a narrow chain that curved toward West Papua. She didn’t like losing the time—Nate would be hot on her heels and she’d had to buy a few supplies before setting out, but she’d had more than enough of Jo Braddock. Chloe would find the gold, fill her small cruiser with as much as it would carry, and head for land. She was tempted to just take the boat to Australia—she had friends in Queensland— but she wasn’t a fan of life on the water; safer to ship the gold where she wanted and hop a Aight. Contrary to popular opinion, she wasn’t suicidal.
Chloe watched the GPS, slowing the skiff as the coordinates Nate had figured out edged closer. Her boat slid between bare spires of rock. A minute later she could see the tiny, unnamed beach at Nate’s coordinates from her position, sand perhaps a dozen meters across and twice as deep, scattered with boulders and backed by a small patch of vivid green.
She rode in as close as she dared, dropped the cruiser’s small anchor, and gathered up her supplies: a pick, a shovel, the gold crosses, a canteen, a Aashlight. She hoped Elcano had marked the site somehow, but she might just have to start digging.
Fine by me. She was fed, well-rested, and more than ready to add to her reputation as a top procurer. Not to mention never having to think about money again, for the rest of her life.
Chloe jumped into the warm, shallow water, crystal blue and teeming with small, colorful fish, and waded to shore.
* * *
The coordinates were inland, through a break in the uneven limestone cliffs that made up much of Demar’s west coast. Nate turned the boat and buzzed through the strait, shadowed by rugged stone walls to either side. The air was cooler in the shade, the sound of the runabout’s motor suddenly loud as it echoed off the towering rock. The passage was nearly claustrophobic after the open sea, but it was at least eighty feet across, plenty wide enough to admit a carrack—the type of ship Magellan had sailed with. One of the five had been a caravel, Nate remembered, but those were smaller, under a hundred tons. All had been three-masted sailing ships, built up aft and stern with artillery to fend off pirates…
Nate imagined the exhausted Spanish sailors looking up at the same looming stone walls, wondering if they’d run aground as they searched for somewhere to put their stolen loot. Thanks to Google Earth, Nate knew the passage led to a small, deep cove, but Elcano’s crew might have been sailing in with their fingers crossed. He could practically hear the creak of the rigging, the whispered prayers.
The passage opened into a rocky cove, lined with more cliffs—except there were a number of tall, gaping sea caves ahead, topped with jungle, the tiny cove overshadowed by tropical Aora on all sides. Deep water slopped at the rock, an igneous base thickly layered with limestone. Nate checked the coordinates and eased the boat toward one of the larger openings, maybe sixty feet high at its tallest and forty across.
The low-slung boat slid into the watery shadows of the cave, the motor echoing in warbles. The sun only reAected in for the first few seconds. Nate turned on the boat’s fog light, squinting as the wide yellow beam came on. The cave continued on past where he could see, narrowing slightly. Nate could only make out the dank, rough walls, the shimmer of water. Had Elcano dared to come in this far? Maybe it was just a few sailors now, paddling a heavily laden, leaky boat away from the safety of their ship and into the dark, holding up lanterns as they went.
And no one’s been here since. Truly, the cave felt ancient… Although, of course, the island’s volcano may have done some rearranging since Magellan’s day. It had erupted a dozen times just in the last century. The gold could well be buried under tons of rock.
The glowing GPS put the location dead ahead, he had to be nearly on top of it.
The cave dipped ahead of him, the ceiling dropping abruptly almost to the water’s surface—and then dipping into it. There were openings where the rock touched the sea, low, rough arches spanning the width of the dead end. The stone was volcanic, and rough.
Like doorways? Tunnels? The tide was high, he could wait a few hours… The water might go down enough for him to maneuver the narrow boat through.
Nate looked at the coordinates on his phone. The exact location Elcano had marked was a few hundred feet away, straight in front of him and two degrees right.
Fuck it. Nate put his phone in his pocket, dropped anchor, and turned off the fog light. He’d bought a waterproof Aashlight at the bait shop, and was about to turn it on when he noticed the bluish glow staining the water. It seemed to be coming from beneath the rocky arches.
Phosphorescence? Daylight ahead? Both?
Maybe an unknown species of highly poisonous eel. Or some kind of anemone that hangs out in dead-end underwater tunnels, feeding off dumb guys who won’t wait for the tide to go down.
Nate turned on the light, took a deep breath, and dove in before he could think anything else.
He ducked under the rock overhang and kicked himself forward, expecting to come up on the other side of a wall—but the wall was thick. In fact it was more like a tunnel, and ran a good thirty, forty feet before opening up ahead.
Nate put his head down and swam. There was some kind of glowworm responsible for the blue light he’d seen, fat rubbery caterpillar-looking things stuck in clumps to the pitted rocks, and what if there was no other side? What if Demar’s volcano had rebuilt these caves a hundred years back, filled them in? Well, then I’d be pretty fucked, Nate thought and kicked harder. There was definitely daylight somewhere ahead, he could see the greenish murk of the water now, getting brighter, but his lungs were starting to cry out for air, too late to turn back…
Nate pushed himself, a powerful, desperate crawl toward the light—
—and the rock opened up over his head.
Nate came up gasping into open air. There was a Aat jut of slimy rock to his left and he grabbed for it, hanging on while he got his breath back—but the sight in front of him took it away again
Oh my god.
He’d surfaced in a cavernous chamber, a grotto lit from above by a giant, mature cenote, sunlight filtered by jungle spilling down into the shadowy room, painting everything a soft green. A hundred feet in front of him—and a little to the right—was a small incline of pale sand, where two full Spanish carracks had been drawn up from the water.
Nate pulled himself onto the jut of rock and stood on numb legs, gazing in awe at the massive ships. They’d been drydocked, strung up with moss- dripping ropes and chains by some unimaginable winch system, bellies resting on the sand well out of the water. The bows faced him, long bowsprits reAecting off the gently rippling pool, sails put away in mossy bundles all along the yardarms of the three towering masts on each ship. The ships’ figureheads —an eagle on the left, a majestic lion on the right—were carved with incredible skill, each as big as a full-grown man. Bigger. Carracks hadn’t been as giant as galleons, most well under a hundred feet tip to tail, but they’d been deep, built to carry a shit-ton of cargo in addition to keeping thirty-plus men alive for years at a time.
Heavy vines hung over the sides of the cenote above, a few plants sprouting on the mizzenmast of the slightly larger ship, on the right. Considering the exposure, centuries of tides and storms, and the acidic trickle of dissolving limestone—behind and around Nate were massive stalactites, spears of rock hanging down from the high ceiling—the ships were both in astoundingly good condition. Some of the rigging had rotted away on the larger boat, but the masts themselves still stood tall, lashed with mossy rope. The sails were probably in tatters but were still tightly rolled.
According to history, only the Victoria had made it back to Spain from the circumnavigation. One ship had turned back early on, the rest had been lost, burned or wrecked… Except the book about the real voyage had claimed that those stories were lies, that at least two others had survived.
Concepción and Trinidad. The Trinidad was the bigger of the two, Nate remembered. Was that really what he’d found?
One way to find out.
Nate dove into the pool and swam to the underground beach, boots finding the shallow shore after just a few strokes. He waded out of the rippling water, dripping onto the pale strip of rocky sand between the ships. Stunned at the size of them, he walked between the two, scanning the moss-covered sides, each a wall of curved boards going up and up. They were huge, the lowest part of either deck ten feet over his head. Fore and aft were double that. Wood braces hung along the sides, ladders off the sterns.
Nate saw letters carved into the side of the ship on his left, high up, and grinned, scanning the other ship’s hull. He could just make out the letters through a film of damp lichen. The Trinidad was bigger, slightly more weathered, but both ships seemed to be otherwise perfectly preserved.
Nate touched one of the heavy beams that ran the Concepción’s length—a framing board, the aged wood slippery but solid beneath his fingers. He gripped Sam’s ring with his other hand, closed his eyes. He could hear the call of birds high overhead, smell the ancient pitch in the weathered, mossy wood. The mist of centuries cleared at a touch.
“We did it,” Nate said, and had to swallow against the lump of feeling in his throat. It was such a fucking victory, that a couple of orphans had made it this far. Sam had been guiding his hand all along.
Nate looked up at the deck, then at a pile of sandy rocks close to the hull about midship. The framing boards stuck out a bit, closer together near the top…
Let’s do this, he told Sam, and backed up for a run. Time to go aboard and see what there was to see.