Rembrandt's Ghost (25 page)

“But we do have coffee,” said Winchester, handing her a steaming mug with his free hand. Surprised, Finn took a swallow. It was delicious.

“It tastes just like Starbucks,” she laughed.

“It is Starbucks,” said Winchester. “Sulawesi, from Torajaland. A whole container of it washed up a week or so ago. Some freighter in trouble, no doubt. It happens more often than you’d think. I ground the beans myself, the old-fashioned way—mortar and pestle.”

“Starbucks, bacon and eggs, and Chinese treasure,” said Billy, spooning up his breakfast with the wooden utensil. “Will wonders never cease?”

“Early days yet, my boy. Eat up and we’ll be on our way.”

By the time they finished their meal, the sun was well up and the sky was clear. Before they began their expedition, Winchester gave them both strips of dried and roughly cured goatskin to wrap around their lower legs like his own makeshift puttees. “Keeps the nasties out,” he told them. “And believe you me there’s lots of them about.” Thus prepared, they left the cave.

The pathways along the ridge were dry and the soil was thin. The trees were mostly massive maharanga and mahogany, their trunks huge and straight for a hundred feet, their upper-spreading limbs covered in a rainbow spray of fruit.

“It’s like walking in paradise,” breathed Finn, taking in the rich, rain-forest scents.

“That’s all fine and good,” said Winchester dryly, “until you step on a pit viper. They like this kind of jungle. Bite’s fatal in about ninety seconds.”

“What do they look like?” Finn asked.

“The ground,” said Winchester. “Almost impossible to spot.”

“Full of good news, aren’t you?” Billy said.

“Centipedes, millipedes, black scorpions, even a few dangerous plants. Not a place for the fainthearted, the jungle.”

They kept walking for the better part of an hour, mostly upward and mostly following well-marked paths. According to Winchester they were animal trails, but Finn wasn’t quite so sure; here and there she was fairly certain she could see the recent marks of some kind of blade cutting through the undergrowth.

“What about trying to escape?” Billy asked. “Ever tried it?”

“I thought of it at first,” said the professor. “Building a raft, finding the shipping lanes.”

“And?” said Finn.

“And then I sat down and had a good think about it. I asked myself why there were still people on this island, and why I’ve never seen any evidence of any sort of boat building or rafts anywhere. I finally figured out that the locals had almost certainly tried it themselves, and failed for some reason.”

“What reason?” Finn asked.

“Many years ago there was a movie called
Papillon
,” said Winchester, “about a man trying to escape from Devil’s Island.”

“Steve McQueen playing a Frenchman,” said Billy. “Dustin Hoffman as a counterfeiter who was almost blind,” he added. “Didn’t really work for me.”

“I wasn’t talking about the acting,” said Winchester. “I was talking about the escape.”

“Didn’t he float away on bags of coconuts?”

“Yes,” said Winchester. “In reality of course it never would have worked. Believe me, there’s enough coconuts on this bloody island for everyone here to float away a hundred times. Only they didn’t, you see. They couldn’t. Simply because the currents and the tides would make it entirely impossible.”

They suddenly stepped out of the jungle and found themselves standing on a rocky, windswept promontory. They were at least a thousand feet above the shore where Finn had washed up. Directly in front of them and far below, they could see the heavy line of surf that marked the reef at least a mile distant. Even from where they stood, the sound of the waves was like rolling thunder.

“When I was a young lad at school I excelled in maths. I was one of those rare swots who actually understood trigonometry. I made a transit out of bamboo and actually triangulated the height of those waves down there a year or so ago, just to keep in practice. Even on a calm day they break at close to thirty feet. At low tide the water’s even rougher. No raft could ever get past the reefs even in the calmest weather, and trying to launch a raft on the cliff sides of the island would be suicide.”

“There has to be a break in the reef,” said Billy, holding a shading hand over his eyes and squinting. “There must be. At least if what you’ve been telling us about Zheng He is true. If the treasure junk made it to shore, there must have been a way for it to get through the reef. We got through.”

“In the middle of a typhoon,” said Winchester. “And that’s the rub.”

“What do you mean?” Finn asked, looking down the steep hillside to the beach far below and then out to sea. There was nothing except the distant joining of sea and sky and the delicate curvature of the earth itself. Finn suddenly felt very small and lonely in the face of so much space. To spend years alone in a place like this must have been terrible. She turned to Winchester, about to say something, then noticed the small tear in the corner of his eye as he looked out across the sea. She kept silent.

“Sometimes when I come here at night, I wish I’d been an astronomer instead of a biologist,” said Winchester softly. “You can see every star in the heavens on a clear night, like the sparkles of billions of diamonds on an infinite black velvet sky.”

They stood for a moment longer, looking toward the sea, lost in their own thoughts, and then Winchester turned away. Finn and Billy followed him back into the jungle, following a different path through the undergrowth, heading inland.

“What did you mean about the typhoon being the problem?” Billy asked, panting behind the man in his goatskin outfit as they climbed through the dense forest.

“Not the problem, really,” responded Winchester. “It almost certainly saved your life.” He paused and turned, stopping on the path. “Know much about typhoons?”

“No.”

“They create something called a ‘storm surge,’ an upwelling of water in the eye of the storm that can create a sort of bump or hill in the ocean. Depending on how shallow the approach to land is the results can be devastating.”

“The storm surge from Katrina was twenty-eight feet,” Finn said with a nod.

“Katrina?” Winchester asked. “Did I miss something?”

“A hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. It virtually destroyed New Orleans.”

“That was always a disaster waiting to happen,”Winchester said with a knowing inclination of his head. “Anyone who knows anything at all about hurricanes or typhoons knew that.” The professor shook his head. “Well, twenty-eight feet was about half of the surge that took you. I made it close to fifty feet. A supertyphoon without a doubt.”

“I think I see now,” said Finn, visualizing the storm. “You’re saying the surge raised the water far enough above the reefs to take us through, but when the water receded, the ship was left aground.”

“Something like that,” said Winchester. “This whole island is like a giant lobster pot or fish trap. The topography is like a huge funnel with the island as the center of the trap. Once in, never out. You’ll see it better when we reach the top of Spyglass Hill and you get a look at the Punchbowl.”

Another hour passed, the heat of the day increasing as the sun rose over the arching canopy of the trees. Sweat began to pour and the air was thick with mosquitoes and swirling clouds of tiny flies. The jungle around them was alive with sound, from the faint sighing of a light breeze in the treetops high above their heads to the smaller chirps and rustles of insects, to the sudden, startling cries of a dozen different exotic birds. It was like being in the middle of the noisiest Tarzan movie ever made.

Finally the trees and undergrowth began to thin and Winchester made a warning gesture with his hand.

“Keep low,” he said quietly. He tapped the binoculars hanging on a strap around his neck. “I don’t know for sure if the locals or the Japs have a pair of these, but I’d rather not take the chance of being silhouetted on the top of the hill.”

Winchester crept forward and Finn and Billy followed. They reached a sloping, almost bare patch of ground at the summit of the hill and peered over. The view was unbelievable.

Fifty yards from where they were perched, a waterfall sprang out of a narrow cleft in the rock and soared down a cliff that had to be as high as Half Dome in Yosemite, a sheer wall of some dark, shining stone that reared up out of a lush, immense jungle valley like a weathered ax blade.

The valley was at least twenty miles across. At its base was a bright blue jewel: an invisible lagoon in the interior of the island connected to the sea by a keyhole rift perhaps half a mile wide, its cliffs as sheer as the one that made up the valley-facing side of Spyglass Hill. A giant teacup with a crack in the side.

The lake, several miles across in its own right, seemed to be dotted with dozens of small misshapen islands—a model of the larger sea beyond. The shore of the lake was ringed with wide, brilliant white beaches lined with stands of palms. It was almost perfectly round. Finn commented on the fact.

“It’s a caldera,” explained Winchester. “The remains of an explosive volcano. Like Krakatoa, or Crater Lake in Oregon, Rotorua in New Zealand.”

“How big is this place?” Billy asked, awestruck.

“By my calculations it’s approximately forty-five miles across at its widest point and about sixty miles long.”

“But that’s incredible!” Billy said, stunned. “Surely it must show up on satellite photos and charts!”

“I’m sure it does,” said Winchester mildly. “But so what? Half the time it’s covered in cloud and there’s no obvious sign that it’s inhabited. The island is almost impossible to get to without enormous risk and under just the right conditions, so who’d bother to come?” He made a face. “The madmen who run the governments hereabouts aren’t quite greedy enough to deforest this little place like they have the rest of Malaysia. Not quite yet anyway.”

“This is the place,” said Finn, suddenly understanding. “This is where Willem Van Boegart was shipwrecked back in Rembrandt’s time. This is where his treasure came from. Somehow he found a way off the island and went back to Holland to found his empire.”

“And this is where Pieter Boegart came looking a few hundred years later,” said Billy.

“The Dutchman?” Winchester asked, surprised.

“You knew him?” Billy said.

“I saw him taken,” said Winchester. “The locals got him.”

“When?” Finn asked, surprised at the depth of emotion she felt for a man she’d never met.

“About a month ago.” Winchester shrugged. “Hard to keep track, but I’d say it was about a month.”

“How did he get here?” Billy asked. “I thought you said it was impossible without a storm surge.”

“It is. He got here the only way you could without cracking up on the reefs. He flew.” The goat skinned professor pointed a filthy, bony finger down toward the huge lake. “He landed down there. It was an old Norseman single engine from the war. They have them all over the Pacific. They’ve got a range of about six hundred miles, so he must have island-hopped, looking for the place.”

“What happened?” Finn asked, looking down at the distant circle of blue far below them.

“He circled the island a few times at low altitude. I heard it clearly enough and so did the locals. I made it down to the water in time to see the plane land. By the time he put down, there was a war party waiting. They dragged him out and sank the airplane, all without a by-your-leave.”

“They didn’t kill him?”

“Not that I saw,” said Winchester. “They bundled him out of the plane, threw him into one of their big war canoes, and took him to shore. That’s the last I saw of him.”

“You didn’t try to help him?” Billy asked.

“Help him how?” Winchester said. “I’ve been trying my best to avoid those people for three years. They’re not cannibals but they’re not civilized either and they definitely like to chop off people’s heads and put them onto bamboo poles. I’ve seen it. I have no intention of joining them.”

“How did you know he was Dutch?” Billy asked suspiciously.

“Because the name
Boegart Line
was written across the fuselage in orange letters five feet high,” answered Winchester. “Did I jump to the wrong conclusion?”

“I would have gone after him,” said Billy hotly.

“This is their island. Their customs. They’ve been here for six centuries. I haven’t even been here six years and you haven’t been here so much as six days. You have no idea what you’re up against.” He took off the binoculars and handed them to Finn. “Take a look,” he said. She raised the glasses to her eyes and followed Winchester’s pointing finger.

“My God!” Finn whispered. What she’d thought to have been small islands in the lake were something else altogether.

“What is it?” Billy asked impatiently.

“Ships,” said Finn. “Hundreds of them. It’s a graveyard of ships.” She could still see the names on some. M.V.
Marcalla
, SS
Docteur Angier
, SS
Sebago
, SS
City of Almaco
, SS
Norma C
., USS
Geiger
, MV
Coolsingel
, SS
Morgantown Victory
. They were everywhere, broken islands of long-vanished vessels that time had forgotten. Some of them were military, like the
Geiger
, apparently a troop ship.
City of Almaco
was an enormous and very old-looking oil tanker.

There were even older ships, rotted wooden hulls, something that might once have been an early steamship, its huge mast turned to dark, waterlogged stumps, all the wrecks thrown hither and yon across the lagoon, some packed tightly together, others standing off by themselves. At the far end of the lake, two or three hundred yards offshore, she saw what she took to be the remains of Pieter Boegart’s plane. In front of the half-sunken aircraft was something that looked like a PT boat, the hull smashed in at the bow. She swung the glass around and her passing eye caught a familiar shape. She focused the glasses and stared.

“It’s the
Queen
!” The freighter was close to the neck of the lake at the reef end, beached on the sand and listing a good sixty degrees to one side, her rusted hull below the waterline fully exposed.