The Bone Hunters (18 page)

There was none. He came close enough to see that there had once been a name but it had been eradicated. He touched the area where the letters had been painted and felt the hard rough texture that suggested a heavy-duty sanding machine. He swam along the port side to the bow to look for the hull identification numbers. They had also been sanded off.

His eyes were drawn to another large object lying on the bottom maybe fifty meters away from the catamaran.

“I see another one, Steef,” he said into the voice communicator. “Big boy . . . motor cruiser.”

“Wait for me,” said Macaulay as he finished taking photographs from every angle of the white-hulled catamaran.

One of the two foot-long rectangular portholes along the starboard side compartment appeared to be slid into the open position. As he watched, a red scarf floated out through it and disappeared in the slow current. He removed the Maglite from his weight belt and swam toward the dark porthole. Putting his face mask through the opening, he shone the Maglite into the compartment.

Macaulay's reaction was instinctive and unthinking as he reeled back away from the porthole. Calming himself for ten seconds, he swam back to the porthole and poked the light inside the stateroom again.

The woman's face was only inches away from his and her jellied eyes were staring straight back at him. Thick black hair floated around her bloated face like a coral fan. The woman's mouth was wide-open, the teeth bulging toward him as if locked in a permanent silent scream.

The gentle current had slowly carried her away from him. It was impossible to tell her age. Parts of her had already been eaten away. The swollen flesh that remained of her body had stretched the blue dress she was wearing to the ripping point.

Beyond her another figure floated into view. It was a man. He was naked and his genitals were missing. At one time, he had probably been strong and well built. Now he looked like a blown-up rubber mannequin. As Macaulay watched, they began what looked like a slow minuet together, their bloated hands touching for a moment and then drifting apart.

Macaulay swam free of the porthole and motioned Carlos to follow him to the second wreck. It was a motor yacht, at least sixty or seventy feet long and beautifully appointed with mahogany decks and an array of the latest electronics mounted above its bridge. Like the catamaran, it looked undamaged and was sitting straight up in the sand as if waiting to resume its journey.

Carlos swam around the stern and headed toward the bow. Like the catamaran's, the boat's name and hull identification numbers had been sanded off. Macaulay began taking pictures of it. As the images registered on the TV monitor aboard
Island Time
, Lexy shuddered involuntarily.

“It looks like they were both deliberately scuttled,” said Steve into the ultrasound communicator as he swam
into the cruiser's open wheelhouse. The compartment doors that led into the main deck were fastened shut.

He wondered if there were more bodies floating inside as Carlos swam toward him pointing at his wrist. Checking his dive watch, Macaulay saw that they had already been at the bottom for twelve minutes. There was no time to explore further.

He suddenly remembered something and headed back to the catamaran. Beginning his ascent to the surface alongside its mast, he paused at the top to examine the little pennant hanging from the halyard. It was red and white and he stretched the pennant to its full length before taking a picture of the tableau.

As they made their carefully timed stops on the path to the surface, he wondered how the sunken boats had gotten there and if there might be more. They were both in superb condition. Together, they were easily worth a million dollars or more. The catamaran could not have been down there long. Small fish had already been feeding on the bodies. It wouldn't take them much longer to finish consuming them.

Macaulay broke the surface of the calm ocean into the warmth of the sun.

28 May

Casa Grande Brugg

Harbour Island

North Eleuthera

Bahamas

The sound of the Muppets singing “Danny Boy” blasted through the sound system mounted on the wall of the mansion's formal dining room as Juwan sat alone at the head of the enormous damask-covered table and helped himself to the second of three roast chickens on the pewter platter.

Varna had placed him on a strict high-protein and raw-food diet and Juwan's weight was holding steady at three hundred ninety pounds. He was now limited to two meals a day, one after exercise in the morning and the second at five in the evening. Varna had told him that his previous late-night food binges were the principal cause of his serious eruption of intestinal gas. He was allowed to supplement the two meals with hand-pressed vegetable juice and raw tree nuts.

He preferred dining alone. It was hard to conceal his anger when a guest at the table would take something from a serving dish that he had been planning to eat. Juwan's mother, Black Mamba, supervised the
preparation of both his meals every day. This morning's fare consisted of three barbecued chickens that had been marinated in rum and Rose's lime juice served with two pounds of broiled shrimp and lobster, followed by a platter of sliced pineapple, grapes, dates, mandarins, and pears. He sorely missed her sweet potato fries.

Emile Bardot, the head of his security guard and deputy to his mother, arrived at precisely ten thirty to deliver his morning update. His white uniform with formal ribbons and decorations was starched and pressed. He removed his gold-braided hat as he approached the table and stood at attention.

“I am pleased to report that all current activities are proceeding according to plan,” he said. “Major Coelho wishes you to know that he sincerely regrets the imposition on your rest caused by his late monkey.”

“Let it be a lesson to him,” said Juwan in his deep, mellifluous voice. “I love all animals, but there are limitations.”

Growing up, he had spent his last five years at St. Paul's Academy in Nassau studying diction under his Oxford-educated English master. When he got to the NBA, one ESPN commentator declared that Juwan was the only player in the league who “could foul like Bill Lambeer with a voice like Darth Vader.”

“I have issued an order about future pets,” said Bardot as the first Muppet song ended and another began.

Bardot was a lightly complexioned Haitian with dueling scars on both his cheeks. He had arrived in the Bahamas after being declared a fugitive from justice by the Haitian government following his indictment for running
a million-dollar business that sold body parts from Haitians while they were still alive. Earlier, he had served as an officer in Jean Claude “Bebe Doc” Duvalier's TonTon Macoute.

The mansion dining room had twenty-foot ceilings and cross-arched oak beams that crowned the thick plaster walls. Juwan's diverse weapons collection was mounted on three of them. It began with ancient hand weapons along the first wall. The second went from swords to blunderbusses, and the third held a modern collection of rifles, shotguns, and assault rifles from virtually every nation in the world, along with movie prop weapons from
Star Wars
and the
Predator
series. The final wall contained many of Juwan's trophies. A gigantic billfish that had lost its last battle to Juwan's endurance and prowess adorned the prize spot over the fireplace.

“What is happening on battleship row?” asked Juwan, referring to the ever-changing array of superyachts anchored in the harbor beyond his compound.

“Typique,”
said Bardot, consulting his clipboard. “A Danish prince and his entourage, two British royals, three Soviet oligarchs and their guests, a Kuwaiti prince, a grotesque-looking Englishman with a fishing party, a minor Kennedy, an American sports team owner—”

“What kind of sport?” interrupted Juwan.

Bardot checked his list. “He owns a professional basketball team.”

Juwan dropped the eviscerated chicken carcass on the plate and wiped his hands on a linen napkin.

“Which one?” he demanded.

“It does not say,” said Bardot, knowing the familiar signs of a volcano about to erupt.

At that moment, Black Mamba came through the swinging door from the kitchen and approached the table. A six-foot version of Juwan with thick braids of black hair coiled above her head, she was wearing a loose-flowing purple muumuu.

“You didn't finish your chickens,” she said. “You must keep up your strength.”

“Find out which team,” demanded Juwan, ignoring her. “What has the man been doing?”

“He hangs out at the bar of the Romora Bay Club after ten o'clock,” said Bardot, checking his clipboard. “According to this report, he has asked a hostess by the name of Giselle to join him on his boat. So far she has refused.”

“Why?” demanded Black Mamba. “I trained that girl since she was fourteen.”

“The man is apparently somewhat unpleasant to look at,” said Bardot. “She told him she would rather mate with a bull shark.”

“Let me take care of it,” said Black Mamba. “I'll have her bring him to Michaud's tonight.”

It was a room over a seafood restaurant with mirrored ceilings and high-end digital video recording equipment. Potential blackmail victims were encouraged to participate in activities they would never want to share on YouTube.

“Finish your chicken,” demanded Black Mamba a second time, and Juwan meekly made short work of it.

When she had removed the platter, Bardot said, “I have made all the security arrangements for the charity
event tomorrow night. We have been informed that the duke of Lancaster and his wife, the duchess, will be attending.”

Each year the annual charity event in support of preserving Eleuthera's increasingly endangered rare bird habitats was hosted at one of the important estates on Harbour Island. For the first time, it would be held at Casa Grande Brugg. Varna had ordered liveried white uniforms for the Academy of Spiritual and Self-Healing students.

“I'm not sure if I will attend,” said Juwan.

It was a tradition that the host and his spouse would inaugurate the festivities by dancing to the first waltz played by the local orchestra. He was imagining the reaction by the royal entourage to himself and Varna when Bardot interrupted his thoughts.

“There is one other piece of interesting news. It came through Sir Henry in New Providence.”

Sir Henry Pindling was Juwan's lawyer and had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth after helping to curtail the investigation into a weekend tryst by Prince Andrew with potentially underage women near the royal compound on Eleuthera.

“What is it?” said Juwan as he thought about Varna doing his calisthenics upstairs wearing his spandex gymnastic tights.

“It is a reward, or you might call it a bounty,” said Bardot, “offered by a Chinese humanitarian society seeking to find several Americans who they wish to honor with a lifetime achievement prize. It seems that they have sent a similar reward notice all over the Caribbean.”

“Who runs this society?” asked Juwan.

“A Chinese industrialist named Zhou Shen Wui.”

Juwan laughed.

“I can imagine the prize the three Americans will receive if he catches up to them,” he said. “How much is the bounty?”

“Five hundred thousand American dollars,” said Bardot.

“They are serious,” said Juwan, leaning back from the table. “Are there descriptions of the so-called prize winners?”

“One of them is a retired American air force general,” said Bardot.

•   •   •

“It might be some kind of underwater graveyard . . . a dumping ground for embarrassments,” said Steve Macaulay to the others sitting around the lounge in Trader's Bluff as they looked at the succession of digital pictures on a television monitor.

“Should we report this to anyone?” asked Chris Kimball.

“If you do,” said Mike McGandy, “it'll probably be reported back to Juwan Brugg or his mother before it ever reaches official channels, and they're probably the ones tending the graveyard.”

“I say we continue our search right away,” said Macaulay. “They're not going anywhere and we can notify the constabulary as soon as we are finished here in the next few days.”

In the magnificent yacht moored near them, he could hear three young girls yipping and screaming as they leaped off the upper deck into the harbor and swam around to the stern to climb up and do it again.

“That makes sense,” agreed Barnaby. “Based on all the readings we have so far, there are five prospective spots that have both the correct depth levels and unusual bottom characteristics from the sonar scanner that suggest a sunken wreck of substantial size.”

“At a depth of one hundred thirty feet, we're going to have to be careful with decompression stages coming back up,” said Macaulay. “To go faster, we'll use two teams. Carlos and Mike can dive the first site and while they're resting, Lexy and I can try the next one.”

“To good fortune,” said Barnaby, raising his mug of Courvoisier-laced coffee.

29 May

Aboard
Island Time

Harbour Island

North Eleuthera

Bahamas

As they left the harbor, Macaulay decided to make a false run in an easterly direction on the lower side of the backbone. The same survival instinct that had served him well in combat and in a number of other dangerous situations was telling him they might be under observation from the island by men with binoculars.

When he had gone about three miles, he turned north and threaded his way across the reef through a cut he had found that morning on a chart in the
Bahamas Yachtsmen's Guide
. Once they were through, he put the boat back on the correct heading to reach the targeted search areas.

Carlos and Mike McGandy brought up the diving gear from the forward hold and began checking the regulators and tanks while Lexy organized the sets of masks, fins, weight belts, and wet suits for them. At one point, Macaulay asked Carlos to take the controls and motioned for Mike McGandy to join him in the cabin.

“You should know that we're not looking for a Russian cargo ship that dumped its cargo during the Cuban
Missile Crisis,” said Macaulay. “I can't tell you what we're really after aside from the fact that it's important.”

“Above my pay grade,” said McGandy with a smile. “I understand.”

“You also need to know it could become very dangerous pretty quickly,” said Macaulay. “I'll understand if it isn't something you want to take on.”

“I grew up on the south side of Los Angeles on a block divided by the Street Saints and the Barrio Evil,” said McGandy. “My father was Irish and my mother black. “I've known some danger.”

Macaulay shook his hand. “We're looking for a freighter sunk by a U-boat at the beginning of the Second World War. Its cargo included a teakwood crate, about five feet square. It was supposedly well constructed.”

“After eighty years, there's no telling if it would have retained its integrity,” said McGandy.

“We can only look and hope,” said Macaulay.

He heard the engine revolutions slow as Carlos cut back on the throttles. Glancing out the port window, Macaulay saw only open ocean. The sea was calm, with a light chop. It was perfect diving weather.

Blinding beams of dazzling sunlight danced across the surface of the water as Macaulay came back on deck. Checking the navigation system, he saw that they were very close to the first target location. He killed the engines and as the boat drifted over it, Carlos hurled the anchor over the side.

After a week on the open water, Steve had tanned to a deep bronze. His hands had been toughened by the hard daily physical work and he was back in the best shape he
had enjoyed since the ill-fated Greenland expedition. He felt ready for whatever challenge awaited them below.

He decided that Mike and Carlos would do the first exploratory dive to see what was down there. If it looked promising, one of them would contact Macaulay through the ultrasound voice equipment to join them below.

Lexy waited for her sixth sense to kick in, that inner rush of exhilaration that might portend if Peking Man was lying below them on the seabed. There was no hint of it as the two divers went over the side.

Mike McGandy followed the anchor line down to the bottom. Carlos stayed close behind him. When they reached the half-buried flukes of the anchor, they began their search using the rough grid Macaulay had written on their underwater slate. He had suggested that the distance they searched in each direction should be determined by the visibility they found at the bottom.

McGandy estimated it to be about fifty meters. Two abreast, they swam north for fifty meters and then turned east for another fifty. The plan was that if they didn't spot anything, they would end up back at the anchor line with two more turns, and then move to the next location in the grid.

They were on the southerly tack when Mike McGandy saw what had to be the abnormality that Barnaby had picked up from the side-scan sonar rig. It was a large mound of coral outcroppings rising maybe twenty feet from the sandy bottom and a hundred feet along it. The cracks and fissures in its walls boasted a panorama of coral fans, sea grass, and exotic ferns.

They spent ten minutes swimming around the coral outcropping, but there was no evidence that it had ever
been disturbed by anything man-made. Returning to the anchor line, they made their way slowly back to the surface, stopping for the required decompression stages along the way.

Bringing them back aboard, Macaulay punched the next set of GPS coordinates into the navigation system and gunned the engines. Twenty minutes later, he and Lexy were preparing for the next dive.

It was Lexy's first since she had arrived in the Bahamas and she was excited, wondering for a few moments if she was confusing this sense of anticipation with her occasionally prescient gift of knowing she was close to an important find.

After she put on her wet suit and slipped into her swim fins, Macaulay lifted the heavy gas tanks onto her back. She clinched the harness around her stomach, fastened her weight belt, then rinsed her mask with spit and put it on.

“Ready,” she said.

Together, they dropped backward off the starboard side.

The water was as clear beneath the boat as a spring-fed stream. As the weight belt carried her down, she gazed back up at the surface. It looked like a sheet of polished silver. A distorted view of Carlos showed him gazing down to make sure she was all right.

Aiming their bodies downward, she and Macaulay peddled their swim fins in a steady rhythm and headed toward the bottom. Above them, the hull got smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared.

Lexy found herself feeling totally at home in the sea, breathing with the controlled easy rhythm she had been
taught at a PADI diving school in Cambridge while she was still at Harvard. As they swam deeper, clouds of colorful fish began darting all around her.

At a depth of one hundred feet, Macaulay looked down and saw the outline of what appeared to be a wreck almost directly beneath them. It was about the size of a small freighter, but the configuration was different, and the man-made aspects of it seemed to be joined or fused to the natural elements. He led her toward the debris field and then over it.

Whatever it had once been, it wasn't the
Prins Willem
. Sections of a massive oak strut were embedded in the coral growth surrounding it. The ship's more ancient origins were confirmed when Lexy pointed out a cylindrical object about eight feet long buried in the coral.

“It's a cannon,” said Macaulay through the ultrasound voice communicator, “maybe eighteenth century.”

He took several digital pictures of it and was about to lead her back to the anchor line when she motioned to him to swim over to her. As he did, he saw that she was holding something in her right glove. Coming closer, he saw that it was standing on the tip of her forefinger.

No more than three inches tall, it was a sea horse, its color a bright Chinese red and exquisitely formed in miniature. He put his own index finger next to hers and it jumped over onto it.

“A good sign, I think,” she said as he gently put it back on the coral outcropping.

•   •   •

They slowly began their ascent, rising with their air bubbles, careful not to get ahead of them as they paused for the required decompression stops along the way. Back aboard the
Island Time
, Mike McGandy was clearly fascinated with their discovery of the wreckage.

“It may not be the one you are looking for,” said Mike, “but the cannon definitely looks Spanish and very old, possibly seventeenth century. It could even be one of those lost Spanish treasure galleons from 1715. Kip Wagner only found eight of the original eleven.”

Macaulay laughed.

“You're welcome to come back and look it over more carefully when we're finished,” he said as they headed for the third target site. “Treasure hunting isn't our line.”

“A different kind of treasure,” added Lexy with an enigmatic grin.

On their next dive, Carlos and Fred weren't on the bottom more than fifteen minutes when they found more sunken wreckage. Lexy and Steve watched the photographs of their find materialize on the television monitor in the wheelhouse.

“A ship all right,” said Carlos. “A big one too.”

“It's about the right size,” said McGandy, looking up at the bridge deck, “but there are huge mounds of coal spilled out all over the bottom. I'd say it was a collier, a coal supply ship . . . maybe World War One vintage . . . definitely not ours.”

As soon as Mike and Carlos had shrugged off their tanks after getting back on board, Carlos began charging the depleted air tanks with the portable compressor. While they headed to the next site, he smoked one cigarette after another and swilled several cups of sugar-laden coffee.

“They be ships all over this part of the sea,” he said to Steve. “Like trying to find Jack in the Haystawk.”

Lexy tried to keep their spirits up by pointing out there were still two good leads left to explore. It was late afternoon by the time they were anchored at the fourth site and Macaulay and Lexy were ready to go down again. In the distance he could see the islet where they had sheltered from the storm off North Eleuthera.

“We don't have a lot of daylight left,” he said. “This will be the last one for today.”

He didn't bother to mention that the amount of nitrogen gas in their bloodstream was accumulating with each dive and they would have much less time on the bottom to find the wreck if it was even there.

As Lexy tightened her tank harness, she suddenly felt a prickle of excitement at the nape of her neck. She didn't say anything to Steve about it as they went over the side and began to descend.

In the waning light, the visibility below fifty feet rapidly diminished. Both of them were carrying powerful Maglites on their weight belts that would hopefully cut through the murky darkness on the seabed floor.

Reaching the end of the anchor line, Macaulay employed the same plan for searching that he had earlier recommended to Mike McGandy. Turning on the Maglites, they swam north into the gloom. Macaulay had gone no more than a hundred feet when something on the bottom glinted up at him in the broad beam of light.

He finned down toward it. The small object was half-buried in the sand. Reaching down with his gloved fingers, he pulled it free and held it under the Maglite. About fourteen inches long, it was made of brass. Triangular shaped, it had a separate brass shaft attached to the top of the triangle, which hung free.

“It's a ship's clinometer,” said Macaulay into the voice communicator.

He felt a quick surge of adrenaline as he read the words engraved on the base of it:
OCTROOICENTRUM NEDE
RLAND
1923.

“It looks like a patent mark and it's Dutch,” he said.

Laying it down on the sand, he swam farther ahead with Lexy beside him. She spotted the next, much larger object. It was a big farm tractor, sitting straight up on the iron rims of its four wheels, its round, concave metal seat awaiting the next rider.

Beyond the tractor, dozens more objects were scattered along the seabed, including freestanding engines, generator housings, a massive hay bailer, and other gasoline-powered farm equipment.

“It's a debris field from the cargo hold of a ship,” said Macaulay, “and from what I remember in the manifest of the
Prins Willem
, she was carrying marine engines and agricultural equipment.”

When he flashed the beam of the Maglite past the long trail of wreckage and debris, he saw the hull of part of a ship looming up out of the gloom. An explosion of some kind had broken its back. The forward section was canted over onto its port side. The stern section appeared to be resting straight up on the bottom.

Lexy swam toward it. The steel plates of the rusty brown hull were covered with a thin coating of moss. When Lexy was only a foot away from the stern section, she used her right glove to rub off the marine growth that covered the ship's nameplate.

Prin
materialized from the murk in dull, grayish-white-painted letters.

“We found her,” said Macaulay, staring at the emerging name beyond her shoulder. “Come on down.”