Dangerous Depths (6 page)

“I suspected sabotage from the first. I heard a bang that almost sounded like a small bomb before I lost control. Do you think Westerfield is capable of doing something like that? What would be the point?”

“Sam Westerfield is capable of anything.” Ron tossed a peanut shell into the water, then cocked his head like a bird. “He particularly likes to humiliate me. If he finds the wreck before we do, he’d get his papers filed first to arrest the shipwreck, and we’d be out in the cold. If he had an inkling of how advanced this new equipment is, he’d do anything to remove it from our arsenal of search options.”

“What makes you think he knows about the new seafloor scanner we developed?” Bane wanted to know.

“Nothing I do ever goes unnoticed by him for long. I’ve never figured out how he finds out my business, but he always does. I suppose one of my men is on his payroll.” Ron sighed heavily.

The crane lifted the aircraft fully out of the water, and the runoff rained a small waterfall back into the ocean. “Is there a history with the two of you or just professional rivalry?” Bane asked. He didn’t know much about his boss yet. Ron was good at what he did, and his reputation in the business was impeccable. The only rumbling Bane had heard before he took the job was that Ron never forgot a grievance.

“We were partners once,” Ron admitted. “I headed up the business, but Sam was never one to take orders. He started his own company, which was fine. What wasn’t so fine was that he stabbed me in the back and lied to a major client, who took his business to Westerfield. I would never trust him again.” He drummed his fingers on the railing. “What do you think of the equipment? Is it all we hoped it would be?”

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to really test it fully, but the preliminary stuff I got back looked like it might be everything we’d dreamed of. We got some awesome imagery before the plane went down—3-D quality stuff, like looking at a top-notch video game.”

Ron frowned. “And now it’s waterlogged. Can we salvage any of it?”

“Maybe. Most of it was in waterproof housing. I’ll have to test it out. We might not need it for this job, though. Tony mentioned an old man who lives out on the peninsula who claims the treasure is buried there. He also says he knows where the boat sank.”

“Sir, about the images on sonar,” the technician put in again.

“All right, Logan, we’re coming,” Ron said.

The men followed Logan to the deck room that housed the scientific equipment. Ajax padded close behind. The room reeked of electronics and new plastic from the meteorological and oceanographic equipment that crowded the space. Banks of computerized equipment lined the room—from bathymetric equipment like shallow- and deepwater echo sounders to multiple computer stations used to collate the data. The men stepped to the swath bathymetric sonar system. The system was capable of hydrographic charting and seafloor acoustic backscatter imaging in water depths of 50 to 20,000 meters. It was Bane’s own design, and he grew fonder of the device on every mission. There was something sexy about a machine that performed perfectly and had great graphics.

“Look here.” Logan jabbed a finger at the image on the computer screen. “There’s something under where we found the plane. Could be a rock formation, but it’s too symmetrical. I think it’s a sunken ship.”

Bane sat at the computer and transferred the data so it showed up as an oblique view of colored bathymetry, a 3-D image that allowed him to assess the area, though not with the detail of the equipment he’d been testing. “Looks promising,” he said.

Reeking of peanuts, Ron leaned over his shoulder and pointed. “That looks like it could be a fallen mast.”

In the old days, the only way to find a sunken ship was to stumble onto it in a dive, which was about as likely as a New Yorker stumbling across a mermaid. Now sophisticated sonar could pinpoint likely spots in living color. The truth of the matter still required visual confirmation, and Bane’s adrenaline surged at the thought. “It might be just a rock formation, but there’s only one way to find out. We’ll have to go down and take a look.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ve got another couple of hours of day-light. Let’s get suited up.”

“You were down twice today, bailed from a plane crash, and lost a friend,” Ron observed. “We’ve only got a little daylight left. Are you sure you’re up to it?”

Bane glanced at his watch. Nearly five. Was it only early this morning he’d arrived on Moloka’i? The day’s events had piled onto each other. “I’m fine.” Ron’s reminder brought the aches and pains in his back and legs into focus. Bane felt like an old man, but he was intrigued by what he saw on the screen. And his mind kept going back to Candace’s fearful confessions about the future. He owed it to Tony to do what he could for his widow.

“I’ll go with you.” Ron followed him to the deck, and they both pulled on wet suits. Ajax nosed Bane’s gear and barked. “You want to go, boy?” The dog barked again, and Bane opened his bag and grabbed the dog’s snuba gear: a specially made harness with hose and enclosed bubble around his head.

Ron’s mouth gaped. “You’re kidding me, right? He doesn’t really dive.”

“He loves it. He can go down around twelve feet or so.” Bane finished fastening Ajax’s vest. “Watch.” The dog took
a flying leap off the end of the boat and into the water. He disappeared from view moments later.

“And I thought I’d seen everything.” Ron shook his head. A boatswain helped them into their air tanks, and they jumped into the water.

Bane was too tired to enjoy the colorful show this time. He finned his way down, using a portable GPS device to pinpoint the exact location of the image on his equipment. Ajax joined him, paddling his big paws and looking around with a doggy smile. Bane’s fatigue lifted just watching the dog, and he refocused on the job at hand. Bane paused when he realized the site was the same one he and Leia had explored while looking for Tony’s weight belt. Coral often grew on a shipwreck, creating a seemingly natural reef that was hard to detect as artificial. This particular bed spread out over the area, stopping at a blue hole that dropped off into the abyss.

He left Ajax exploring a school of wrasses. Diving deeper than the dog could go, he snapped pictures of the banks of bright coral and the outline of the seabed. It extended back to the cave he had wanted to explore. Down here, it was difficult to see the full scope of the site. They’d have to do some excavation. Maybe the cave would be the place to start so they didn’t disturb the coral unless they had to. Bane was adamant about preserving and reviving the ocean’s coral reefs, and he wasn’t willing to toss that away for a sunken ship of dubious value.

He motioned toward the cave, and Ron swam with him to the opening. Bane’s powerful halogen light probed the recesses. Good, the sharks were gone now. They were only reef tips and not really dangerous normally, but invading their lair might rile them enough to attack. He entered the cave. The sides were about forty feet apart, and the ceiling zoomed over them about twenty feet up. Lichen and shrimp clung to the cave’s surfaces. His small shovel clanked against the side of the cave as they entered. Bane checked his dive computer. He still had another forty-five minutes, long enough to dig a little. His beam swept the sides and ceiling of the cave. He fumbled with his shovel and finally got it in hand, then began to dig at a long symmetrical line on the seafloor. Digging underwater was never his favorite pastime.

Ron joined him. Bane kept checking his computer as the minutes slipped away. They went down through silt until his shovel brought up something he recognized. He touched Ron’s arm, then hefted the palm-sized cannonball in his hand. Bingo. They’d struck pay dirt. Ron’s grin was wide. He took the cannonball and rolled it around in his hands. Jabbing his thumb up, he swam toward the cave opening with the artifact still in his hand. Bane glanced around, reluctant to leave. He had another ten minutes of bottom time. Ron paused at the mouth of the cave and motioned him energetically. Bane shrugged and swam to join him. Further exploration would have to wait for another day.

He wished Tony were alive. This ship was old—old enough to have seventeenth-century cannonballs. It just might be Tony’s Spanish galleon.

A
mass of red-and-white ginger flanked the front door of the Kahale home. The embrace of its sweet scent eased the tension in Leia’s shoulders. Candace’s grief had sapped her energy like cold water drained her body temperature. A movement to her right caught Leia’s attention, and she turned to see her mother, Ingrid, and her cousin, Malia.

“You’re just in time to help,” Malia called. She wore her long, dark hair swooped to one side and draped over her left shoulder. A white orchid nestled behind her right ear because she was unmarried, and a mass of orchids, plumeria, and ginger lay around her where she sat on the grass making leis. Malia was tiny and petite, a classic Hawaiian beauty, and Leia towered over her.

Leia detoured from the path to join them under the shade of a giant monkeypod tree. Eva lay on her back on the grass and watched Hina stalk a gecko. Leia picked up a finished ginger lei and draped it over her neck, inhaling the heady fragrance, before drop-ping to the soft grass next to Malia. “You look almost done. Are these for the hula festival in O’ahu?” Malia’s leis were renowned in the islands and commanded a premium price. Her shell leis rivaled those sold on Ni’ihau and sold for hundreds of dollars.

Malia nodded, her gaze lingering on Leia’s face. “What’s wrong?”

“I take it you didn’t hear the news? Tony Romero died on a dive today.”

“Aloha no!” Malia said. She put down her lei.

Ingrid patted Leia’s arm. “Eva told me. Are you doing okay? Tony’s been your friend a long time.”

Leia had been damming up how she felt, but at the touch of her mother’s hand, she wanted to burrow into Ingrid’s lap and inhale her familiar plumeria scent. She knew better than to give in. Her mother didn’t hold with obvious shows of weakness, which would have surprised most of Ingrid’s patients. As chief of staff at the tiny Moloka’i hospital, Ingrid was warm and understanding, but as a mother, she kept herself aloof.

Leia shrugged, and her mother’s hand fell away. “Candace is a mess, of course. Maybe the autopsy will show what happened. The funny thing is that his weight belt is missing. It should have been on the seafloor, but it’s nowhere to be found.”

“What does that mean?” Her mother picked up the twelve-inch-long lei needle and began to slide orchid blossoms onto it.

Leia took a spare needle and began to thread it through a blossom. “I’m not sure. It seems odd, that’s all.”

Malia’s gaze sharpened. “Odd as in strange or odd as in suspicious? Are you thinking it might not have been an accident?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that. Everyone liked Tony. I can’t imagine someone wanting to hurt—” She stopped, remembering the threats from Hans.

“What?” Malia demanded.

“Do you know Aberg Hans?”

Malia nodded. “Vaguely. He owns the other dive shop.”

“He came into Tony’s shop just before we went out. He was mad that Tony was taking all the island’s clients. He claimed Tony was using his treasure-hunting spiel to run him out of business.”

“Was he?” Ingrid asked in a quiet voice.

Her mother always did that to her. She was the voice of reason when Leia wanted to jump to conclusions. Ingrid’s medical training, unlike her own, made Leia analyze everything. “Maybe. Tony had a way of making people believe in his dream.”

“Did you see
Tûtû
?” Malia asked.

Leia nodded. “She’s doing well.” She kept her eye on her mother’s forehead. When a slight frown creased the fair Scandinavian skin, Leia held her breath.

“I suppose you pushed more of your herbal preparations on her?”

“The scars are fading.” Leia squared her shoulders and met her mother’s gaze.

“You’re wasting your medical training, Leia. Why can’t you see it? Two more years of residency, and you’d have been a full-fledged doctor.”

“Why can’t you see I’m not cut out for filling out insurance forms and seeing patients in ten-minute segments like cattle?” Leia fired back. “I tried it your way for months, Mama. I felt like I was turning into someone I didn’t know or like. And I couldn’t stand the smells of antiseptic and drugs. That’s not how God wanted us to live.”

“You didn’t give it a fair try. I know San Francisco wasn’t what you were used to, but I pulled every imaginable string to get you that opportunity, and you threw it away. It was one of the most sought-after residency programs in the country.”

“I’m not like you,” Leia said. “I have Dad’s Hawaiian blood in me too. I just want to be who I am inside. I want to learn the old ways before it’s all gone.”

“Making paper cloth. What good is that? You can do better, Leia.”

Leia’s gaze shot to her cousin, but Malia didn’t seem to take offense at Ingrid’s denigration of Hawaiian arts. Maybe because she was actually making a living
at her leis while Leia scraped by on what little she could sell her cloth for and the tiny payments she got from the patients at Kalaupapa. If not for the chance to live in a house her father owned, she’d never make it.

Her mother’s gaze touched the scar on Leia’s lip, and Leia had to resist an impulse to cover it with her hand. Her mother wanted only what was best for her—she knew that. She’d known it when she was six years old, when Ingrid had taken her to the hospital for yet another operation for her cleft lip. No tears had leaked from Leia’s eyes since that day, and she vowed never to cry again. She was strong enough to be her own person.

She watched her mother stand and go to the house. Nearly six feet tall and still blonde and graceful, she had always seemed to Leia to be a throwback to some Valkyrie, maybe Brunhild herself. All her life Leia had tried to live up to her mother’s expectations. Leia often thought of the verse in Revelation of being lukewarm. That’s how she felt—lukewarm. Neither Hawaiian nor Swedish but something in the middle. Neither a success nor a failure but always a dis-appointment. Since the medical school fiasco, she had become all the more determined to prove to her mother that she was capable of choosing her own path.