Rogue Angel 46: Treasure of Lima (14 page)

23

Annja moved forward, each step seeming to take forever as her gaze roamed over the graves before her and she mentally cataloged the details as they jumped out at her.

The crosses made from weathered planks.

The lichen-covered stones that carefully surrounded each mound.

The overgrowth of jungle grasses over each grave.

These are not recent, not by a long shot.

She stood over the nearest grave marker and stared down at it, then bent and ran her fingers along the faint grooves in the wood where something had once been written. It was faded by long exposure to the harsh tropical climate, but the word seemed to be
Ellis.

An Englishman, then, she thought.

She quickly counted and discovered that there were nine graves in all. Each of them was in the same basic state of disrepair due to age and weather. Annja had the gut feeling that whoever had buried these men had done so at the same time; the graves were the result of a tragedy, rather than natural causes, then. She certainly couldn’t prove it, but it felt right to her.

Feels right? Very scientific, Annja.

She was intrigued by the puzzle and wanted to stay to see what else she could learn, but she knew she’d been gone long enough. The others were no doubt growing concerned and she acknowledged it was time to let them know what she’d found.

Annja retraced her steps through the tunnel and back into the main cavern. It only took a few minutes for the others to join her after she gave the signal. She’d been right; they’d been getting antsy and were debating whether or not to come in after her when she’d returned.

She led them into the cavern and waited while they examined the same things she had, then brought them down the passageway and out to the clearing beyond. Annja warned Claire ahead of time, not wanting her to have a similar reaction as the one she’d experienced. The four of them stood before the graves, staring at them in fascination.

“Who do you think they were?” Marcos asked at last.

“Hard to say. We’re certainly not the first to explore the island,” Annja said, “but I don’t remember hearing about any of the earlier expeditions losing this many people.”

“Maybe they were pirates,” Claire suggested, “and their leader killed them to keep the location of the treasure they’d just buried a secret from everyone else.”

Marcos frowned, then shook his head. “Burying them so close to the treasure is a bit of a—excuse the expression—dead giveaway, don’t you think?”

Before Claire could answer, he said, “Besides, why would they go through the trouble of digging nine extra graves if they’d just dug a hole big enough to bury the treasure in? Seems it would be easier to just bury it all together at that point.”

Ever the archaeologist, Annja wondered what they would find if they excavated one of the graves. Contrary to the old saying, in the hands of a competent archaeologist, dead men did tell tales and often rather intricate ones at that.

“Maybe they’re from that boat.”

Hugo’s voice startled her out of her own internal speculations.

Boat?

Annja looked in the direction in which he was pointing but all she saw was jungle.

What boat? What is he talking about?

She stared, trying to see through the tangled mass of jungle greenery, looking for what he was referring to, but she still wasn’t getting it. Beside her Claire gasped...and then Annja saw it.

A woman’s face, gazing out at her from the foliage.

Her hair was thick and piled atop her head in an elegant coiffure, while her eyes were open wide and gazing outward toward the horizon. A large crack split her brow just above her left ear, giving her a strange, lopsided appearance.

The moment Annja recognized it for what it was—the figurehead on the front of a sailing ship—she saw the rest of the boat looming there amid the trees as easily as if someone had just lit up the entire structure with blinking neon lights. The bowsprit, covered with vines, jutting out over the figurehead as if pointing back in their direction.

The round curvature of the bow.

The dark, gaping holes of the gun ports.

A sailing ship was the last thing she’d expected to see in the middle of the jungle, so her gaze had glanced right over it previously without seeing it for what it was. Now that she knew it was there, it was impossible to ignore.

What was a sailing ship doing in the middle of the jungle, miles from shore?

And how had it gotten here in the first place?

It was too big a mystery to resist.

Annja strode forward, intent on taking a closer look at the ship and getting some answers to the hundreds of questions now whirling about inside her head. She barely noticed the others following her.

She walked right up to the ship and put out a hand to touch it, subconsciously assuring herself that it was real, that there was indeed a sailing ship resting upright between several palm trees as though cradled in their grasp.

This close, the wreck resolved itself into a truly massive vessel. At least three, possibly four, decks high, it rose nearly fifty feet above her head and was probably close to two hundred feet in length. The jungle had wrapped it in its embrace, and vegetation now grew over it in a riot of green leaves and colored flowers, but even so it was easily recognizable for what it was.

A British man-of-war.

Annja felt a wave of excitement sweep over her as she stared up at the surprisingly well-preserved vessel. Pieces of information were starting to click together in the back of her mind, and one suspicion in particular just wouldn’t let her go. To see if she was right, she grabbed Hugo and dragged him around to the stern of the ship. She pulled out the machete she carried in her pack and had Hugo help her up into the branches of a nearby tree. From there she climbed higher until she reached the windows looking into the captain’s wardroom at the rear of the ship. Just above the windows was a flat stretch of hull on which the ship’s name was usually fashioned. Right now, that area was more than half-covered with leaves and other green debris.

Annja began to cut and chop away at the vegetation covering the nameplate, until it didn’t take long to reveal the name that was painted across the stern in foot-high letters that were still surprisingly readable after all this time.

HMS
Reliant.

All Annja could do was stand there and stare, for she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

Her Majesty’s
Reliant
was the British man-of-war that had defeated the
Mary Dear
and taken her captain and crew into custody.
Reliant
’s captain, Russell Jeffries, hung the entire crew of the
Mary Dear
for murder and piracy on the high seas, sparing only the lives of Captain Thompson and his first mate. Some said that Jeffries did so only in exchange for the location of the Treasure of Lima, but that was all conjecture because the
Reliant
had vanished from history shortly after that.

It seemed she was back for an encore.

A shout broke into her thoughts. “Over here! I’ve found a way in!”

Annja followed the sound of Marcos’s voice to find him standing near a large hole in the hull on the starboard side of the wreckage. Seeing the damage it was immediately clear that the ship would never be seaworthy again without spending several months in dry dock, but that hadn’t stopped someone from trying to seal off the entrance by nailing loose planks over the opening. To Annja it seemed more as if they were trying to keep out the local wildlife than make any real attempt at repair, but either way, it still gave them an important piece of information.

At least one person had lived through the wreck.

Lived and cared enough to try to keep themselves and anyone who was with them safe afterward.

As Annja and the others looked on, Marcos stepped forward and kicked with a booted foot at one of the lower planks. With a squeal of nails and the sound of splintering wood, the plank came free.

Marcos looked back, grinned and set upon the barrier with a vengeance. Less than five minutes later the way into the wreckage was clear.

The darkness beyond seemed to beckon to them.

Annja reached up and activated her headlamp, checked to be certain the others were doing the same and then led the way inside the ship.

24

HMS
Reliant

Cocos Island

Annja had once been a guest aboard a full-scale working replica of Admiral Nelson’s flagship, the
Temeraire,
and had been given a rather extensive tour by a good-looking British sailor who was determined to show her every nook and cranny of the place. As she stepped inside the
Reliant,
she was suddenly grateful she’d agreed to take the man’s tour.

Her light cut the darkness ahead of her and she could see that they’d entered the hold. Rotting piles of cloth, mostly likely spare sails, were stacked next to a dozen or more sealed barrels. The barrels were roped together and tied to the bulkhead to keep them from moving in heavy weather. Next to those were piles of spare rigging and hawser ropes, equally secured. A jumbled mass of additional supplies rested against the rear wall of the hold. To Annja it looked as if someone had made an attempt to clean up what would have been a terrible mess after the ship arrived here and, finally seeing the uselessness of it all, had simply shoved it to one side to be picked over at leisure
.

“Over there,” Claire said, pointing to a ladder extending down into the hold from the deck above.

They were halfway across the hold when something screamed and came charging at them from the darkness on the far side of the room.

Marcos was closest to whatever it was and it charged right at him. Annja had a glimpse of something heavy and low to the ground racing forward toward him and then Marcos’s gun spoke, the sound echoing in the confined space. The thing staggered, then slowed, giving Marcos time to fire again before it crashed into him, driving him to the ground beneath its weight.

Annja didn’t want to draw her sword in front of so many witnesses, so she drew her knife instead and leaped to his side, ready to give whatever help was needed. Peripherally she was aware of Hugo and Claire doing the same.

Their lights fell upon the carcass of the wild pig that was stretched out atop Marcos’s frame, pinning his gun arm to the floor, and then on his disgusted expression as his own lamp illuminated the pig’s snout just inches from his face.

“Get this hairy thing off me!” he hollered, pushing at it with his free hand.

Laughing, Hugo said, “That hairy thing is dinner, amigo, so stop insulting it,” but bent to help him just the same.

Once Marcos was back on his feet, it was quickly decided that the pig’s carcass was going to attract other animals and therefore couldn’t be left inside the hold. The solution was for the two men to drag it outside and then hang it in a tree. Only when they were finished did they resume their search of the
Reliant.

The room above the hold was small and contained a fair bit of lumber, now warped and molded from years in the humid weather, suggesting that it was probably the carpenter’s storeroom. They passed quickly through it into several other storerooms, all in the same dilapidated state, before finding a stairwell leading upward.

Their eventual goal was the captain’s wardroom, which, if Annja recalled her tour of the
Temeraire
properly, would be on the upper gun deck toward the stern of the ship. To get there they would have to climb up several decks and then head aft. The next set of stairs took them up to what Annja recognized as the lower gun deck, the light coming in from the gun ports throughout the room making it easier to see. The cannons, of course, were a dead giveaway. She counted twelve cannons still in their respective gun ports, the wheels of their support cradles chocked in place to keep them from moving unexpectedly. Several more cannons were lying haphazardly about the deck; thankfully, the ship was fairly level and the heavy iron wouldn’t be rolling anywhere soon.

Hammocks had been strung across the port side of the deck between the beams of the ship. As Annja’s light swept across the hammocks, she thought she saw something glinting from within the folds of the one closest to her.

She moved closer.

“Annja?”

Claire’s voice.

Annja held up a hand in a “hang on a sec” gesture. Closer now, she could see that the canvas of the hammock was weighted down by something inside it.

“Did you find something?”

Annja reached the hammock and looked inside.

The yellowed skeleton of one of the
Reliant
’s crew members lay nestled in the fabric, its empty eyes staring and its mouth locked forever open in a silent scream.

Annja must have started in surprise, for Claire gave a yell and the others came rushing over.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Annja said. “Just wasn’t expecting to find we had company.”

She bent over to take a closer look. She saw that the skeleton still wore the tattered remains of a sailor’s shirt and breeches, but what was more interesting was the fact that he had been secured in the hammock with leather straps and buckles. They were loose now, of course, but given how his arms were lying parallel to the rest of his skeleton, it was safe to assume that the straps had been used to immobilize him. Whether he’d been alive or not at the time was another issue entirely.

“Here’s another one,” Marcos called from a hammock a few feet away.

“And another,” Claire echoed.

In the end, they found ten men in all. Each and every one of them had been strapped into their hammocks, and that, more than anything else, made Annja uneasy. Clearly they hadn’t done that to themselves; if they had, they would have left their hands free. No, these men had been bound by a third party.

“Maybe they mutinied over the treasure,” Claire said.

Annja didn’t think so. Mutineers were usually dealt with quickly. If they weren’t hanged, they were usually locked in leg irons and left on deck.

These men had been held down with belts.

Not the most secure material out there.

“Maybe they were seasick,” said Hugo.

Everyone laughed but Annja.

Maybe they were sick....

Annja’s mind was racing as she saw Marcos reaching out to take the ring off the finger of one of the skeletons.

Fear seized her throat, threatened to swallow her words when she needed them the most.

“Don’t touch them!” she forced out around the lump forming there, and breathed a sigh of relief as Marcos snatched his hand back.

“Come on, woman!” Marcos exclaimed. “Don’t scare me like that!” But he stepped away from the hammock just the same.

“Annja might be right. They were probably sick and the ship’s doctor strapped them in to keep them from infecting everyone else.”

The others began to back away from the hammocks.

“If they were sick, I doubt any pathogens would have lasted this long, but better safe than sorry. I think we should move on, anyway.”

No one argued with her.

In fact, they all decided that it was time to see who could get up the stairs the fastest.

With a final glance at the mystery she was leaving behind, Annja followed.

The next set of stairs took them up another deck, emerging into a passageway outside several cabins. Annja knew that none of them were the captain’s—that would be up at least one more deck—but that didn’t stop the others from investigating.

Inside each cabin was a small table and chair, a dresser with several drawers and a hanging cot that resembled a box with bedding in it.

“Funny-looking bed,” Marcos said, giving the first one they came to a little push to set it swinging back and forth. “Looks like a coffin.”

“That’s because it is one,” Annja told him. “The officer would be buried in it if he died at sea.”

Marcos didn’t touch any more hanging cots after that.

Marcos, Claire and Hugo went through several of the officers’ cabins but emerged each time disappointed. To their eyes, there wasn’t much of value to be found—a few personal items made of gold or silver that might fetch a few dollars if presented to the right buyer—but Annja knew better. The ship had vanished into history and had been presumed lost with all hands on board. Even a crew member’s simple shirt would fetch a fair price at auction as a result, and there were several to be had among the cabins, including what looked to be a full-dress uniform for a royal marine.

Annja didn’t say anything, however. The material here belonged in a museum and not in some private collection somewhere. She’d inform the British government of the ship’s location when they got back.

After they discovered what happened to Dr. Knowles.

It seemed strange to Annja that Claire hadn’t mentioned her husband’s disappearance since arriving at the camp, but then again Annja hadn’t been dealing with the stress for weeks the way Claire had. Perhaps just being near the archaeologists’ camp had settled her down and then the subsequent discovery of the
Reliant
had simply kept her occupied.

But still...

She was about to say something to Claire when Hugo opened the door ahead of them and found the stairs they’d been looking for, the ones leading to the deck above. He gestured for Annja to go first and she took advantage of doing so, climbing the steps to the doorway at the top.

Opening the door, Annja found herself on the upper gun deck, the middle portion of which, where she now stood, was open to the sky above. She found the sunlight exceptionally bright after the darkened interior they’d just passed through.

Annja glanced along the length of the ship, forward toward the bow. It seemed Mother Nature didn’t like her territory being invaded. The upper deck was practically drowning beneath a sea of vines and creepers, making it appear like a carpet of green had taken over the vessel. Here and there objects thrust skyward out of the covering—the truncated shaft of a mast, the blunt end of a cannon, even the vent from the Brodie stove down in the galley below.

Looking aft, Annja could see the rounded shape of the ship’s wheel and then, past that, the door to the captain’s wardroom tucked away beneath the poop deck.

Like a missile following a homing beacon, Annja headed directly for that door, knowing that the room she was actually looking for, the captain’s personal cabin, lay to one side or the other of the wardroom.

All it took was a few steps into the wardroom for Annja to know that she’d just entered senior-officer country. Light streamed in from the row of windows at the back of the room, which was also the stern of the boat itself; Annja’s and Hugo’s efforts to clear the nameplate had also cleared some of the vegetation growing over the windows. The room was large and its space was dominated by a rectangular table carved of dark teakwood, surrounded by eight chairs of the same. Table settings in both silver and porcelain stood in glass cases along one wall. A chart case occupied another.

For all the splendor, Annja barely noticed. Her attention was drawn almost immediately to the doors on either side of the room. One of the doors on the starboard side seemed to be situated a bit off to the side from the others, so she crossed the room and tried that one first.

The door was locked.

Annja smiled. Every other door they’d encountered on this ship so far had been unlocked, with the exception of this one. Her confidence that she had chosen the right one went up a notch.

She glanced behind her, saw that the others still hadn’t joined her and decided to take a chance. She called her sword to hand and inserted the blade between the door and the jamb, parallel to the keyhole. When she was satisfied with its position, she gave the blade a good shove, putting considerable pressure on the lock in the process.

The door popped open with a snap.

“Annja?”

A thought sent the sword back easily into the otherwhere, and she turned just as Claire stepped into the doorway of the wardroom.

“Here,” Annja called, drawing the other woman’s attention. Of course, if worse came to worst, she could claim to have picked up the weapon from the wardroom table. This was a British warship, after all, and swords were fairly common shipboard weapons.

“Find anything interesting?” Claire asked as their other two companions came up behind her.

Annja gestured at the now-open door in front of her. “Captain’s cabin. Perhaps now we’ll get some answers.”