Lost Empire (13 page)

“Oh, boy . . .” Remi said. She pressed her hands against the dashboard and her head against the rest.

The berm loomed before them. The Land Cruiser tipped backward. Sky filled the windshield, then they were tipping forward again, soaring through the air, the engine roaring as the tires spun freely. The Cruiser crashed to the earth. Sand peppered the windshield. Sam jammed the accelerator to the floorboard, and after a momentary groan of protest the engine responded and they were again moving forward, albeit at half speed as the tires struggled to find purchase in the dry sand.

Ahead, the running figure had nearly reached the quay. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the Land Cruiser, and stumbled. It was Yaotl.

“Guess he didn’t like our hospitality,” Sam called.

“Can’t imagine why,” replied Remi.

Yaotl was back on his feet. He charged up the quay’s steps, taking them two at a time, then dashed toward the waiting Rinker, where Rivera and Nochtli were waving their arms, urging him on.

Sam kept going, jostling the wheel and trying to feel his way to firmer ground. The quay was fifty yards away. Yaotl reached the Rinker and jumped aboard. Thirty yards to go. Nochtli moved to the driver’s seat and settled behind the wheel. Smoke burst from the exhaust manifold.

Quite casually, Rivera stepped past the panting Yaotl, gave him a clap on the shoulder, then stepped to the transom. He stared at the approaching Land Cruiser for a moment, then raised his hand as if to wave.

Sam muttered, “Son of a—”

Remi said, “He’s got something.”

“What?”

“In his hand! He’s holding something!”

Sam slammed on the brakes. The Land Cruiser slewed sideways and shuddered to a halt. Sam shifted the transmission into reverse, his foot ready to move from the brake to the accelerator.

His eyes never leaving theirs, Rivera smiled grimly, then reached up, pulled the pin on the grenade, turned, and tossed it into the Andreyale. Ahead of a rooster tail of water, the Rinker shot away from the quay and headed for the
Njiwa
.

With a dull crump, the grenade exploded. A geyser of water and wood splinters shot upward and rained down on the quay. The Andreyale settled lower in the water, then slowly disappeared beneath the surface in a cloud of bubbles.

 

 

AFTER BACKING THE SUV over the sand and dunes to the road, they watched Rivera and his men tool out to the
Njiwa
. Within minutes the anchor was weighed, and the yacht got under way, heading south down the coast.

“I’d started to grow attached to that bell,” Sam muttered.

“And you don’t like losing,” Remi said. When Sam shook his head, she added, “Me neither.”

Sam leaned sideways across Remi’s lap and retrieved the H&K P30 from the glove box, then said, “I’ll be right back.” He climbed out, walked down the road to the villa, then slipped inside. He emerged two minutes later and gave Remi the OK sign. She scooted into the driver’s seat and pulled the Toyota into the driveway.

“Did they toss the house?” she asked, climbing out.

Sam shook his head. “But I know how they found us.”

He led her through the villa to the guest room where they’d been keeping Yaotl. Sam walked to the headboard and pointed to the loop that had been secured around their guest’s left wrist. It was stained a dark reddish brown. The remaining three loops had been untied.

“That’s blood,” Remi said. “He worked his way free.”

“Then called Rivera,” Sam added. “I’ll give him this much: He’s got a high tolerance for pain. His wrist must be raw down to the bone.”

“Why didn’t they ambush us?”

“Hard to say. Rivera’s no dummy. He knows we’ve got Yaotl’s gun and didn’t want to risk attracting the police.”

“I think we’re a secondary concern. They got what they came for. Without that, all we’ve got is an interesting story. Sam, what in the world can be so important about that bell?”

 

 

ERRING ON THE SIDE of caution, they agreed the villa was no longer safe. They packed what few belongings were left inside, got back into the Toyota, and drove eight miles south to Chwaka, a small town whose only claim to fame seemed to be that it was home to the mysteriously named Zanzibar Institute of Financial Administration. They found a beachfront restaurant with air-conditioning and went inside. They asked to be seated in a quiet area near an aquarium.

Remi pointed out the window. “Is that . . . ?”

Sam looked. Two miles offshore they could see the
Njiwa
, still steaming south at a leisurely pace. Sam grumbled a curse under his breath and took a sip of ice water.

“Well, what do you want to do about it?” Remi prodded.

Sam shrugged. “I can’t decide if my ego is just bruised because they stole something we worked so hard to get. That’s not much of a reason to put ourselves back in their gunsights.”

“It’s more than that. We know how badly they don’t want people to know about the bell or the ship it was attached to. They probably murdered for it. They’re going to either destroy it or dump it in the deepest part of the ocean, where it’ll never be found again. It’s a piece of history, and they’re going to treat it like garbage.”

Sam’s phone rang. He said, “Selma,” to Remi, then answered and tapped the Speakerphone button. As was her way, Selma jumped in without preamble: “That bell you’ve got is an interesting find.”

“Had,” Sam replied. “We don’t have it anymore.” He explained.

Remi said, “Tell us anyway, Selma.”

“Do you want the fascinating news or the astounding news first?”

“Fascinating.”

“Wendy used her Photoshop wizardry skills and ran the pictures through some filters or something. Most of what she said was Greek to me. Under all that marine growth there’s engraved writing.”

“What kind?” asked Sam.

“We don’t know for sure. There are bits of symbology, some words in Swahili, a smattering of German, pictographs, but not enough of any one of them to make sense. From the looks of it, most of the bell’s interior is covered with it.”

“Okay, now astound us,” Remi said.

“Wendy was also able to pull a few more letters from the name beneath the
Ophelia
engraving. In addition to the first two—
S
and
H
, and the last one,
H
, she was able to pull two letters from the middle: a pair of
N
s separated by a space.”

As Selma had been talking, Remi had grabbed a napkin from the holder, and she and Sam were working the anagram.

Selma continued: “We fed the letters and arrangement into an anagram program and cross-matched the results against our shipwreck databases and came up with—”

“Shenandoah,”
Sam and Remi said in unison.

 

 

THE CONFEDERATE STATES SHIP
SHENANDOAH
HAD LONG FASCINATED Sam and Remi, but they’d never had the time to explore the mysteries behind the saga. Now it appeared fate had handed them a bronze invitation in the form of a ship’s bell.

A 1,160-ton steam cruiser,
Shenandoah
was launched at the Alexander Stephen & Sons shipyard in River Clyde, Scotland, in August of 1863 under the name
Sea King
. Iron-framed, teak-planked, and black-hulled,
Sea King
was fully rigged for both sail and auxiliary steam power, designed as cargo transport for the East Asia tea trade routes. Tea hauling did not lie in her future, however.

A year after her commissioning, in September 1864,
Sea King
was covertly purchased by agents of the Confederate Secret Service, and on October eighth she sailed with a full complement of merchant sailors, ostensibly headed for Bombay on her maiden trading voyage. Nine days later
Sea King
rendezvoused near the island of Madeira, off the African coast, with the steamship
Laurel
, which had been lying in wait. Aboard
Laurel
were the officers and the nucleus of the
Sea King
’s new crew, all loyal and experienced sailors, either Southerners or sympathetic British citizens. Their captain was Lieutenant James Iredell Waddell, a forty-one-year-old North Carolinian and graduate of the United States Naval Academy.

The
Laurel
’s cargo of naval guns, ammunition, and general stores were quickly transferred aboard
Sea King
, whose dumbfounded and angry crew were given the option of joining this new expedition at higher wages or being transferred to the
Laurel
and subsequently deposited on Tenerife, an island in the Canary Archipelago off the coast of Morocco. In the end, however, Waddell was only able to enlist enough of
Laurel
’s seamen to bring the newly commissioned commerce raider
Shenandoah
to half her normal sailing complement. Despite this,
Shenandoah
left the Madeira Islands on October twenty-first and set about her task of destroying or capturing Union ships wherever she found them.

Through the fall of 1864 and into the winter of 1865
Shenandoah
sailed through the South Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and into the Indian Ocean and across to Australia, destroying and capturing Union-flagged merchant vessels before setting her sights on the Union’s Pacific whaling grounds, sailing north from New Guinea into the Sea of Okhotsk and the Bering Sea.

In the nine months
Shenandoah
sailed under the Confederate flag as a warship, she accounted for the destruction of some three dozen enemy ships. On August 2, 1865, some four months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox,
Shenandoah
learned of the war’s end by the passing British barque
Barracouta
. Captain Waddell ordered
Shenandoah
disarmed, then set a course for Liverpool, England, where he and
Shenandoah
’s crew surrendered in November 1865. The following March she was sold through intermediaries to Sayyid Majid bin Said al-Busaid, the first Sultan of Zanzibar, who renamed her
El Majidi
, after himself.

For Sam and Remi it had always been this part of the
Shenandoah
’s history that they found so intriguing. There were three accounts of
El Majidi
’s final disposition. One had her being scuttled in the Zanzibar Channel shortly after being damaged in the 1872 hurricane; the next, her sinking six months later while being towed to Bombay for repairs; the last, her going down in November of 1879 after striking a reef near the island of Socotra on the way home from Bombay.

“This raises more questions than it gives answers,” Sam said. “For starters, was it Blaylock or someone else who renamed her
Ophelia
?”

“And why was she renamed?” Remi added. “And why is there no record of her anywhere?”

“And the biggest question: Why did we find the bell at all?”

“What do you mean?” asked Remi.

“After Waddell surrendered the
Shenandoah
, wouldn’t she and everything aboard her have been the property of the Union?”

“Including the bell.”

“Including the bell,” Sam echoed.

“Maybe the Union sold her to the Sultan of Zanzibar, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Could be. But that was in 1866. The
El Majidi
didn’t sink for another six or thirteen years, depending on which account you go with. Hell, the Sultan named the ship after himself. Does he sound like someone who would hang on to a bell with another ship’s name on it?”

“No, he doesn’t. Maybe whoever refitted her just tossed the bell overboard. For the sake of expediency.”

Remi was the devil’s advocate of the couple. She often did her best to poke holes in their thinking; if after going through the “Remi Gauntlet” the theory remained afloat, they then knew they were on to something.

Sam considered this. “Possible, but I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of the Sultan’s shipfitter. He’s probably not the wealthiest of guys—overworked and underpaid. Unsurprisingly, the Sultan demands the ship meet his royal standards, including a shiny new bell. What would this shipfitter do with a ninety-pound, solid bronze bell?”

“Sell it,” Selma chimed in.

“Let’s put a pin in that,” Remi said. “It seems safe to assume Blaylock himself came across the bell at some point. If it was still attached to the vessel, he either bought it or stole the ship, then changed the name to
Ophelia
. If the bell had been discarded by the Sultan, it means Blaylock salvaged the bell, blotted out the
Shenandoah
name, and engraved it with
Ophelia
.”

“And did what with it? Stared at it?”

“The charcoal sketch at the museum suggests he saw that ship as the
Ophelia
.”

Sam snapped his fingers. “We’re overthinking this. Remi, boot up your laptop. Selma, e-mail us pictures of the
Shenandoah
and the
El Majidi
.”

As they were waiting, Sam plugged his camera into Remi’s laptop, and she called up the photo they’d taken of the
Ophelia
sketch. “No Wi-Fi signal,” Remi said.

Sam stood up and walked around, checking beneath nearby tables. “There are Ethernet plug-ins,” he said, then walked toward the hostess. He returned two minutes later with an Ethernet cable, which he first plugged into Remi’s laptop, then into the closest plug. “It’s dial-up Internet, but it should do,” Sam said.

Over the phone, Selma said, “Images on the way.”

It took four minutes for the JPEG images to load. Remi arranged the pictures on her screen, and they spent a few minutes rotating and zooming and playing with colors until they were certain. “Same ship,” Remi said.

“I agree,” Sam agreed. “Blaylock’s
Ophelia
is also the
Shenandoah
and the
El Majidi
. The question is, at what point in the time line did Blaylock appear and why are there no records of any of this?”