Treasure of the Deep (5 page)

Chapter Ten

We traveled through the waterway in what amounted to primitive gondolas.

Gliding as a four-gondola procession in the dark, Aafreen led the way. Kintu followed him, and the last surviving young man, named Dinesh, steered the gondola in front of ours. Apparently they figured Ishi could steer the one in the vulnerable rear of this gondola train just fine.

Despite the terrible grief involved, Norema, Aafreen, Kintu and the others kept their pained weeping as low as humanly possible. Still, we almost lost others to certain death when only a stray flashlight beam kept two of the gondolas from going over the edge of the waterway, where it sounded like a massive underground waterfall flowed just below us. Ishi eyed me worriedly several times as he steered and I paddled madly with my hands and forearms to move the boat away from the edge. Both of us scarcely believed such a place existed in the Maldives.

My heart thudded in my chest when the current almost pulled us back down into the deep abyss after we thought we had escaped the danger. The crashing waterfall became a near-deafening roar just before I suggested with sign language for him and I to dive into the dark water away from the menacing chasm, ignoring the likelihood of a powerful undertow in the unknown depths beneath our boat. Could be worse and even deadlier. Not to mention the water stunk of dead fish.

“
Keep up with us!” Shouted Aafreen above the din, as Ishi fought to steer the gondola back on course in our attempt to catch up with the rest of the group. “The stream is more manageable up ahead. We will be back on foot soon!”

I prayed the kid was right about that, but didn’t believe his words until the current’s pull from behind us eased and we were on the verge of catching the boat in front of us. Until then, I was still paddling with my hands, and almost lost my sari in the water.

“The next place we visit needs to definitely be one where there’s a lot less excitement and not far from a fully stocked bar,” I said softly to Ishi. I noticed that my hands really stunk. Stunk to high-heaven, as if I’d been wrestling with an aquarium filled with rancid creatures in a perpetual state of decay.

“
And a beach full of beautiful women,” said Ishi.

“
Shh!” Aafreen hushed us. “We are ready to take the back way to our beach, behind Badri’s quarters. If we are quiet, I can get all of you to a much bigger boat, and then you can leave the island.”

Say what? Did this kid just speak to my heart’s desire and biggest fantasy? Hot damn!

“If it turns out half as easy as it sounds, we might just have something worth celebrating soon,” I whispered to Ishi. He nodded eagerly. He must have needed a drink worse than me.

Or not.

Norema had wept throughout our gondola trip, and surely her tears were a mixture of sadness and joy for those she’d lost and the reunion with her boy. As I watched her up ahead, she turned to look at me...and I almost wish she hadn’t done so. Her eyes spoke for her, telling me that despite her joy in finding her son we had made a grave mistake coming here, and where we were heading next might prove to be even worse for all of us in the end. The painful regret in her eyes said so, and it matched the growing dread in my gut.

I’d already figured the easy way wouldn’t be our destined path—it almost never is. It had definitely not been that way for Ishi or me since we encountered Marie Da Vinci. Our hurried flight halfway across the world might’ve been more fortuitous if an engine had blown and we plunged into the Pacific, or even into the Bay of Bengal before we reached Bangalore. I regretted more than ever not listening to my own gut instinct about taking the fateful flight to this island, and worse yet, ignoring Ishi’s dream premonition warning us to wait a few days—that I’d told him to shut the hell up about it at the small Indian coastal airport.

“Something will make sense in a few days, if we wait here first.” That was what he’d told me as we loaded our gear onto the puddle-jumper that was hardly suitable for the trip to the southern most reaches of the Maldivian chain.

My response had been rude and curt. Basically, typical Nick Caine. Now I regretted not listening. Damn my stubbornness.

But, in my defense, it had sounded like a bullshit reason to wait. I wanted to get here, scope out some supposedly long, lost treasure, then enjoy some downtime with Marie before heading off to Egypt to fulfill an old promise to my buddy Mario. A promise I made to him while he lay dying in my arms from a bullet fired by Marie’s wicked uncle so long ago. My haste fueled a series of foolhardy actions, and now, obviously, it was too damned late to turn back and start over.

I shook my head again at my own folly and looked over my shoulder into the darkness. The waterfall sounded louder for some reason, even though we were steadily moving farther away.

“We are here!” Aafreen called to us, lowering his voice but projecting well enough for Ishi and me to hear him. “We’ll help you tie the boats and then we’ll need to move quickly to reach the tunnel behind Badri’s compound. It will be our last one to go through, and then we’ll be back in daylight...”

His voice trailed off, and he whipped his head in the direction he had pointed to a moment before. At first, I heard nothing above the din of the water crashing less than a hundred yards behind me. I still didn’t hear anything to worry about, until I saw the first halogen beam moving toward us from the area ahead of Aafreen.

I immediately grabbed Ishi’s arm, to get him to help me turn the gondola around. No, it wasn’t cowardice or a vain instinct to save only my own skin and his. I had hoped that everyone else would follow our lead, and we could avoid our pursuers who had obviously figured out where we were headed and had cut us off. But, before we turned our boat around to head into the dangerous darkness, I heard three clicks in succession. These were followed by more halogens that suddenly appeared next to us across the waterway. Two more clicks and we now had at least five bright beams pointed at us. I couldn’t make out a damned thing behind them...including the assholes holding the flashlights.

“
I believe this belongs to you, Nicholas Alexander Caine,” said a deep male voice. The English carried a rich Indian accent, and the tone revealed amusement.

“
What belongs to me? And how the hell does everyone know my middle name?”

A large hand bearing jeweled rings on every finger shoved a small, thin piece of warped plastic toward me. My California driver’s license. I had buried it in the sand near our campsite for safekeeping. An old habit after years of coming back to a campsite to find my tent raided. That’s why I rarely bring anything of real value on a trip like this, but a license and passport are easy enough to conceal in almost any environment. I hoped my passport remained hidden near the roots of a thick palm nearest to our tent.

“Er, thanks,” I said, hiding my surprise while taking my license from whomever it was chuckling sardonically in the darkness behind the blinding lights.

By then, the dirty turban guys had already invaded the area and surrounded everyone with rifles pointed at each head. We were badly outnumbered.

“It was a very bad idea for you to come, Mr. Caine,” said the man with the rich deep voice. His hand disappeared into the shadows, and I made out the top of a jeweled turban in the dimness. The turban would make anyone seem taller. But this man would be immense with or without his head cover. “It is even worse, however, that you have come to steal from me. It is a crime
all
of you will soon regret.”

Chapter Eleven

In less than five minutes, we went from the prospect of sunshine and finding a way off of the island to wondering if we’d still be alive at sundown.

I assumed we’d all be rope-bound before the real pirates on the island escorted us to some old-time schooner, and then force us to walk the plank when far enough out to sea. But instead, they brought us to Badri’s cave encampment. The word
encampment
may seem like a strange description for the place, and maybe
commune
would be more fitting. But, in my mind, if one considered the several small adjacent cave rooms filled with enough weapons and explosive materials to blow the entire island sky-high, a descriptor like
encampment
seemed most appropriate. Not to mention, rows of tents lined the floor of the enormous cavern we were herded into, and sort of looked like a Union campsite during the American Civil War.

The deep-throated guy who had made trespassing threats to me turned out to be the master and venerated lord of this underground hideout. Badri, as in badass, bad-tempered king of his band of anti-hygiene miscreants. I know...it’s not like Ishi and I get a chance to bathe routinely. But this cavern’s prevalent stench reminded me of when I once was forced to share a zoo shelter for a night back in graduate school with four camels and a dozen emus.

Long story...

Badri was dressed in clean attire, like the kids he must’ve sent to kill us upon our arrival in the treasure room. Instead of the Abercrombie & Fitch look the youngsters were wearing, he was dressed in a white, multi-layered robe and gold-rimmed turban that had a brilliant blue sapphire in its center—like some wannabe sultan from eons past. I will say the dude was handsome, with sleek facial features most women of any nationality would find alluring. But the eyes gave away his soulless condition and pointed to a violent disposition.

I had no doubt he intended to kill us, and in the fashion Norema described the men of her village being lined up and shot, slaughtered as an afterthought. He must’ve picked up on Ishi’s and my deep disdain for the noxious smell—an odor that surely bothered him, as well. His spiced cologne was near overpowering as he strolled past us all. He glared at my Tawankan buddy and me the most while ignoring Norema, the kids, and ladies as we stood in a line near the entrance to his little tent kingdom.

“
We haven’t had anyone foolish enough to pay us a visit in quite some time,” he said, sizing me up again. “Especially not someone who prefers women’s fashion. Do you know what we do to such individuals in the village I come from?”

“
Let them go with a pocketful of gold and a slap on the back?”

He stared at me blankly. So did the others. Ishi shook his head and grinned. Badri laughed heartily, then sniffed the air around me...sniffing it as if
I
was the source of what had stunk the joint up, instead of his filthy brood of pirates. “Don’t tell me you’ve been swimming in our sewer? What a strange man you are!”

His dumbass comment elicited only a contemptuous grin from me. However, before I could voice something just as stupid to hasten our pending execution, he reached under my sari and grabbed my wrists, bringing them close to his face until he grimaced. I was grimacing, too, my arms and hands stunk worse than earlier. I now detected foulness beyond the dead fish aroma I originally noticed. Something beyond dead...something that brought back memories of rancid port-a-potties at Fourth of July picnics as a kid.

Shit! Literally!

His laughter turned boisterous at the look of horror on Ishi’s face and certainly mine, too, and continued until his eyes began to tear up. Even though he was a few inches taller than me, I felt extremely tempted to reach out and pull him close, and then twist his neck until it snapped. But that’s another no-no from Nick Cain’s Looting 101, as it only works in adventure fantasies. Fantasy adventures, I might add, where two dozen pirates didn’t have assault rifles trained on the semi-good guys’ heads and midsections. We’d be dead before Aladdin here hit the ground.

“Yes! You’ve been playing in our piss and shit, Mr. Nicholas Alexander Caine!” he crowed in amusement. The rest of the bastards laughed along with him, although I’d bet my relic collection back in Honduras that most of them understood little, if any, English. “There are other ingredients beyond what the sea brings in, too, like what’s left of the last poor bastards who trespassed, along with the uncooperative slaves we’ve discarded over the years.”

And, just like that he grew serious again.

A joyless, soulless, waste of a human being. He seemed to gain something new from my expression, and studied me more intently.

“
Oh? You don’t think you’d like to be a slave?” he said, moving over to Ishi next. “This one is about the right height...like a boy who never grew up. Would you like to be my slave, little boy?”

Ishi had stopped grinning. For his dimunitive size, Ishi was not someone I wanted to mess with. The little Tawankan was like a cornered jungle cat when pushed. Ishi said simply, “I would prefer to watch you die.”

I grimaced. Truer words had never been spoken, but I suspected they might have just hastened our own demise. Still, I admired the little guy’s spunk.

“
You’ve got fire, boy,” he said. “You would make a fine pirate.”

“
I would rather slit your throat.”

Badri chuckled and moved down the rest of the line, staring angrily at Aafreen, Kintu, and Dinesh. All three trembled, which suggested that they’d been beaten or worse—or forced to witness such heinous acts. Dinesh looked longingly toward an area above my head and to my right. I followed his gaze and my eyes widened in surprise.

It must have been the squalor of tents and foulness in the air that prevented Ishi and me from noticing the small, gleaming marble palace rising up to the cave’s ceiling. Not quite a mini Taj Mahal, but this structure of probably less than fifteen hundred square feet came as a surprise nonetheless. White marble columns in classic white Corinthian style—likely imported—supported the building that looked as if it were partially carved into the cave itself. The sucker surely cost a king’s ransom to create. No doubt, the materials were procured by funds taken from the vast resources we had recently seen.

A pair of lads a few years younger than Aafreen and his pals guarded the palace’s entryway. Wearing solemn expressions on their faces, I got the feeling these kids were extremely worried about the fate of the three youths facing Badri.

The bizarreness of this island continued to thoroughly amaze me. Beyond strange, my heart told me things were about to get even crazier, if not worse.

Badri approached Ishi again, demanding him to hold out his right hand. This came right after the island’s supposed despot had regarded Norema menacingly and whispered a threat in the dialect she had used when addressing her Maldivian companions. She cried out immediately, sobbing in anguish while unsuccessfully trying to grab his robe’s sleeve.

Ishi was less than willing to extend his hand. But when one of Badri’s cohorts threatened to use his saber to sever his arm from his body, Ishi sighed and extended his hand and dropped its contents into the bastard’s open palm.

A gold medallion from the treasure room glistened in Badri’s hand. It figures my little buddy couldn’t resist taking a souvenir when given the chance. A deadly mistake, as I feared Ishi would be dispatched first to the afterlife. Yet, instead, our unpredictable host smiled, revealing the first full set of teeth I had seen among this collection of thugs. Perfect veneers.

“Yes, a true pirate at heart.”

“
What can I say?” said Ishi in his heavily-accented English. “I love gold.”

“
Don’t we all, my little friend. Except, of course, this isn’t gold.”

Que?
Yeah, I sure as hell thought it was real. Obviously Ishi assumed it was, too, or he wouldn’t have taken the damned thing in the first place. Badri laughed heartily again.

“
Do you really believe that you could just walk in here and find a room filled with piles of gold and jewels? Especially one unguarded? Hmm? Why, that sort of thing only happens in movies, like your Indiana Jones!” He threw his head back and laughed even harder, although I didn’t find it very funny. Gold was nothing to mess with, especially to a looter. Badri went on, “Those are great movies with great props and lots of fake gold coins. But we have no need for a golden ark, since a few crates of cheap gold leaf paint can do wonders!”

He produced a dagger from inside his robe and raised it above his head. I thought he might bring it down upon Ishi’s hand or wrist, but instead he slammed it into the coin, which broke into several pieces. The inside of the damned thing looked like mortar, which might give enough weight to fool someone not paying attention to anything other than the outer coating’s golden glow.

A fake, it wasn’t even a good one. Although, for a moment I was stuck on the fallacy of his claim that walking into an unattended room filled with piles of gold and jewels only happens in fictional books and film. Ishi and I had experienced that very thing less than a week ago in a remote Honduran jungle...

“
So, everything in there is fake?” I asked.

“
Yes...well, maybe not
everything
, Mr. Caine. I can’t give away
all
my secrets, now can I?” He laughed. “But it would take a real expert to know the difference between the frauds and genuine articles.”

Whether or not we had been duped into falling for fool’s gold, or not, I instinctively knew our playtime was almost up. Despite Badri’s laughter, the anger that went into smashing the fake medallion confirmed as much. I allowed my careful gaze to wander systematically around us, looking for some avenue of escape despite the likelihood of not living long enough to utilize one if I found it.

Nothing. Not a damned exit close to us, beyond shallow cave rooms filled with boxes of guns, and older barrels of what looked like...gunpowder? It was a fluke as to how I determined this, and the only clue came from a break near the base of one of the barrels. A small pile had leaked out onto the cave floor surrounding it.

I noticed this without hearing most of what Badri had said next, although almost all of his words were directed at me. Something about our time was up, and that I could have my passport to hang onto for sentimental reasons while his men gunned us all down, as our execution was about to commence.

“Sure,” I said, almost absently. He eyed me curiously as I took my passport from him. Meanwhile, the wheels were turning furiously in my head. If I could obtain a flame—even if it came from a gun flare, or just a spark, I might have a slim chance of getting us out of this mess yet. “Thanks,” I added.

He motioned for thirteen of his henchmen to take their places in front of everyone but me, and they aimed their weapons at chest level. As for me, Badri positioned his knife as if ready to fillet my midsection. He obviously wanted to bring about prolonged suffering in my case. Regardless, in the next few moments we’d all be dead...

I happened to notice two of the gunmen were smoking cigarettes, and a third—the creep I had traded gunfire with in the treasure room’s exit to the sewer tunnel—was chewing on the butt of another. With no more time to work things out thoroughly, I rolled with the moment.

“
You know, Badri...back in the day, prisoners in places like Alcatraz were given a final cigarette...a last smoke before being executed,” I said, determined to sound as calm as possible. “It was considered a courtesy of the victorious over the vanquished. I could sure use a smoke...and the damned broad who stranded us here left me without a single cigarette. What do you say...one last smoke for a dying man who’s got not much else to look forward to?”

Honestly, the way he looked at me made me think he might grab one of the assault rifles and riddle my body with bullets himself. But, after a long moment, he smiled again and chuckled, somewhat warmly this time. Perhaps he pictured the older classic movies known throughout the world...the ones featuring famous actors like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen as cons waiting to die behind bars...with one last cigarette to look forward to.

“You make a good point,” he said, finally, still chuckling. “We will allow you a fag, and then you will die a happy man, Mr. Caine? I think not, but it will allow me one more moment of amusement at your expense...Singh, come here and give Mr. Caine your fag.”

The greasy pirate approached me. He made a show of chewing on the end of the cigarette. Nice. Then, he pulled the mess out of his mouth and gave it to me, grinning wide enough to reveal those nasty gold teeth framed in decay. Only this time, I got a whiff of his horrible breath, as well. He motioned for me to put the slobbery butt between my lips before he’d light it. Yes, I expected to hurl my meager breakfast—especially when the taste was worse than the odor of the man before me. But, admirably, I kept my composure—enough to where I managed a glance at Ishi that, after years of familiarity, I hoped he understood the subtle message I sent to him.

He did.

Singh lit the cigarette, and I offered a silent prayer of thanksgiving that I only had to exhale twice to get the tip’s flame fiery hot. Then, the greatest acting feat I’ve ever attempted commenced. Pretending I had incorrectly inhaled, I doubled over, coughing. But before I grabbed at my midsection as if in a spasm, I flicked the butt through the air toward the gunpowder keg.