The Aztec Heresy (11 page)

He lifted the glasses again and looked out at the Zodiac. Finn, his lordship, and the Dutchman were all in the water; the little inflatable was empty. It was safe enough though; there were two buoys bobbing in the water on either side of the rubber boat, each flying the distinctive red and white ‘‘Diver Down’’ pennant.

He moved the glasses over the water. It was uniformly shallow, sunlight reflecting easily back from the sandy bottom, the terrain mottled with darker areas showing a few deepwater trenches and one or two of the circular formations called blue holes, which were relatively common in the Bahamas Banks.

The holes had been formed before the last ice age when the entire Bahamas Plateau had been above sea level, the limestone formations creating sinkholes as the rock weathered naturally over time. Because of the poor circulation of water in most Blue Holes, the water was anoxic—sometimes completely devoid of any free oxygen at all and utterly devoid of any marine life. According to the side-scanning sonar, the wreck Finn and the others were investigating was only a few yards from one of the formations. A little bit to one side and the ship would have slid into the hole and vanished, never to be found again.

Hanson refocused the binoculars and looked a little farther out. According to the information Finn and Lord Billy had been given by the antiquarian book dealer in Paris, the
San Anton
had gone down on a line between the shoals on the upper end of North Bimini Island, now called the Bluff, and a limestone formation three hundred yards out and only visible at low tide called North Rock.

According to the detailed charts, the water varied from twenty to thirty feet over most of the area, sloping upward to shoals at the island end and dropping off abruptly into water hundreds of feet deep on the Florida Strait side.

The captain’s log of the
San Anton
said the ship had been blown into the shallows during the hurricane, foundered on the shoals, and sank just offshore. Also according to the log, the
San Anton
had been carrying a small cargo of spices, mostly pepper, and had not been worth attempting any kind of salvage operation. On the other hand, as Lord Billy had pointed out, if the ship had no cargo worth salvaging, why had the captain made such a detailed report of exactly where she had gone down?

Hanson put down the glasses and lit another cigarette. The whole thing was beyond him; he was still getting used to a regular paycheck and a tropical home base, not to mention the joys of not having to deal with cargoes of banana chips, raw rubber, and once, a nightmarish load of liquid guano. He lifted the glasses and made another careful sweep of the surface.

There was nothing to see except the sun glinting brilliantly off the small turquoise waves stretching to the horizon. He closed his eyes and let his senses hold the moment. He smiled to himself, feeling the warmth of the tropical sun on his tanned, handsome face. This was what he needed, clear sailing and nothing looming on the horizon.

Finn floated above the wreck while Billy and Guido did a photographic survey, Billy using one of the big Nikonos digital cameras and Guido holding a two-meter graded survey stick for scale. Before giving up his job as a corporate lawyer in Amsterdam, the muscular Dutchman’s idea of adventure had been thrice-weekly visits to the gym. He hadn’t even known how to swim.

Like everything else he did, however, Guido never took on a challenge by halves. Eighteen months later and he swam better than Finn and was an expert diver to boot. On top of that he was reading anthropology and archaeology texts by the bushel, and was getting Briney Hanson to teach him celestial navigation.

Finn stared down at the shape in the sand beneath her. There was no doubt in her mind that it was the
San Anton,
lost here in July of 1521 under the command of Captain Gonzalo Rodriguez, the man who had kept the log shown to them by Pierre Jumaire in Paris. The ship was no more than eighty feet long and would have fit easily in the space between home plate and first base on a regulation baseball diamond.

The
nau,
which simply meant ‘‘ship’’ in Spanish, were the last of a long line of watercraft that went back centuries, the front and rear of the vessel literally built as forts from which archers and spearmen could engage other ships. In the case of the
San Anton,
the ‘‘fort’’ that made up the fo’c’sle, or forecastle, of the ship was eight or ten feet above the sand. The rear quarterdeck was not quite as clearly defined.

The main deck of the wreck was completely covered by sand and the only evidence that there was even a center portion was the stump of the mainmast poking up darkly from the tongue of sand, which lay like an unmoving river that pointed toward the lip of the blue hole less than a hundred feet away. It was clear that the ship was leaning steeply to one side, and Finn knew they’d had the luck of the Irish on their side. Another hurricane and the ship might well have been pulled inexorably into the depths of the vertical limestone cave and probably torn to pieces in the process.

Finn let herself drift down toward the ship as Billy finished up the photo survey. She swam the length of the wreck, looking for some way into the hull. If Jumaire was right, Captain Rodriguez knew that he was carrying something extremely valuable back to his masters in Spain, and he’d most probably kept it close.

If the copy of the Cortéz Codex really was on board, it would probably still be in the captain’s cabin, located under the quarterdeck. At first glance Finn couldn’t see an opening, which meant they’d have to break out the big vacuum pumps and hoses to flush the excess sand out of the way. If they went deep enough they’d probably find a hole in the bottom of the ship created when she’d foundered on the nearby shoals during the hurricane, but coming in from the bottom in a shifting sandbar would be dangerous. Finding a way in from the deck would be far safer.

She paused, turning herself slightly in the water. She heard something in the distance, a faint vibration like a faraway drumbeat of thunder. A boat. She looked up automatically, searching for and finding the shadow of the Zodiac on the surface and the thin anchor line that led down toward the wreck. They’d been careful to put out Diver Down buoys, so she wasn’t really worried. It was probably just a local coming out to take a look at the
Hispaniola.
She turned back to her examination of the wreck.

Hanson heard the boat before he saw it; a heavy sound of big diesels somewhere to the east and the churning slap and heavy whisper of a bow wave. Even without seeing it, Briney knew the boat was large; there was no outboard whine or harsh slapping sound of a planing fiberglass hull smacking down into the water. A workboat of some kind. He turned the glasses toward the channel between North Rock and the Bluff, waiting apprehensively. With the buoys out and the Zodiac clearly visible, he wasn’t too worried, but any kind of large vessel in the area was potentially a problem, and accidents happened, even in perfect weather like this.

Suddenly the ship appeared. She was a shallow-draft trawler, half the size of the
Hispaniola
and old. The hull had once been painted smuggler’s gray but was now streaked with rust the color of old dried blood. She had a single funnel pumping black smoke in a stream behind her as her bow broke heavily in the pale water, throwing up an arc of foam. Both of her swinging booms were out and she was going full speed, her course clearly taking her directly toward the Zodiac.

Run-Run McSeveney had felt the vibration of her passage down in the engine room and had burst out onto the deck below Hanson’s position. Both men saw the danger immediately.

‘‘The bluidy bampot! What in the name of God is he thinkin’?’’

The trawler was a long liner, running two sets of lines from the masts. Each line was connected to a pair of steadying otter boards beneath the water to keep her depth constant. The lines were separated into sublines, or ‘‘snoods,’’ each of the snoods carrying hundreds of baited hooks. Running two lines like this one, the trawler could be dragging literally thousands of deadly hooks through the water at an unknown depth. A diver snagged on the lines could be torn to shreds in seconds or just as easily dragged for miles and drowned.

Hanson hurled himself down the companionway ladder to the bridge and lunged toward the large red button on the main console beside the throttles. He hammered his palm down on the button again and again, sounding the big Kahlenberg S2 air horns, sending out a deep-throated wail that could have come from a speeding freight train bearing down on the fishing boat.

‘‘Why doesn’t the pikslikker change course?!’’ Hanson bellowed, swearing in Danish.

Run-Run appeared on the bridge, chest heaving.

‘‘The geggie hoer-slet isn’t going to stop!’’

‘‘Weigh anchor!’’ Hanson yelled. Run-Run jumped to the console and hit the main winch controls and the anchor chain began to wind up forward with agonizing slowness. Hanson knew they didn’t have much time. As soon as he felt the slight shudder of the big Danforth fluke anchor pulling from the sandy bottom, Hanson pulled the twin throttles down, taking the powerful diesels from idle to all ahead full in a split second. As soon as the big converted tug gained a fractional headway Hanson spun the big wheel hard to port in a desperate attempt to cut the trawler off. It was going to be very close.

Finn was swimming down the exposed side of the wreck when she caught a hint of movement at the edge of her vision and heard a heavy clanking sound. Looking up, she spotted Guido banging the back of his air tank with the handle of his dive knife and waving his right arm up and down: the signal for danger. Spotting her looking, he turned and pointed to the east. Finn stared.

There was a huge shadow above them coming in at a high rate of speed, and in the shadow’s wake glinted a thousand points of light deep in the water. It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing. The shadow was a trawler heading toward the Zodiac and the twinkling flares in the water were bright steel fishhooks catching the light of the morning sun. The hooks were spread out in a line at least five hundred feet across and coming closer by the second.

Billy appeared on her left, the camera hooked to his dive belt. He grabbed her by the arm and pushed her down toward the sandy bottom. She nodded and kept pace, finding a shallow niche under the curving side of the wreck. An instant later Guido joined them.

The thundering of the trawler’s engine was pounding in Finn’s ears now. Guido signaled, three fingers of one hand hooked into a claw. He pointed up and Finn nodded, realizing what he was trying to tell her and Billy: if there were enough hooks in the array of connecting lines trailing behind the trawler, they could easily have enough power to hook the wreck and pull it over on them, crushing the three divers underneath the hull. There was no chance of reaching the surface without being impaled. There was no place to go unless they tried to make it to the lip of the blue hole a hundred feet away.

Then Billy spotted another avenue of escape. He squeezed Finn’s shoulder and turned her around, pointing. At her feet she could see a faint dark and jagged line where the hull met the sand. Twisting, all three divers turned themselves downward in the water and began to dig frantically at the sand with their bare hands. The pounding of the trawler’s engines was even louder now. On the bottom the ragged hole in the hull of the
San Anton
grew fractionally larger and Finn saw what it was: the remains of an old gun port in the stern section, now half buried. A way into the ship.

Running at a full twelve knots, the anchor winch howling and the diesels thundering, the
Hispaniola
headed directly at the trawler. The tug was almost twice the size of the trawler, and even a glancing blow from the
Hispaniola
would capsize her. The trawler never faltered; a few moments later the Zodiac and the Diver Down buoys disappeared under her foaming bow. Hanson altered course fractionally. It was too late to ram the trawler but there was still a chance.

‘‘There’s na name on the blaigeard’s bow!’’ Run-Run yelled over the sound of the engines. ‘‘The fannybawz is a gedgie pirate!’’

Hanson risked a quick look. The engineer was right; the trawler’s name, along with her license registration, had been obscured with heavy grease or paint. If she escaped out into the Florida Straits she’d disappear in a few short hours into fleets of fishing boats that plied these waters.

‘‘How close are we?’’

‘‘Hundred yards,’’ answered Run-Run with an experienced eye. ‘‘We might take her in the stern but it’ll be a near thing with the anchor dragging at us like it is.’’

‘‘How much chain is still out?’’

Run-Run looked down at the winch gauge. ‘‘Twenty feet,’’ he called out.

‘‘That should do it,’’ Hanson said with a tight, angry grimace on his face. ‘‘Hang on, old man!’’

Hispaniola
seemed to rise to the occasion, her bow leaping upward as the anchor chain shortened and the drag on her forward momentum changed. The big tug shouldered through the water, the sea churning up a broad wake behind her as she raced forward, coming within a few short yards of clipping the stern of the other vessel.

‘‘Nowt on transom neither, the cladaire bastrid! ’’ Run-Run yelled out as they passed. Out of the corner of his eye Hanson saw that the engineer was right; the name and home port on the stern had been obscured as well.

There was a staggering lurch as the Danforth anchor and its heavy chain connected with the twin cables stretched out from the trawler’s outriggers, tearing through them and snapping the heavy mahogany booms into broken, splintered stumps on the smaller ship’s deck.

The cables tore away, wrapping around the anchor chain as the
Hispaniola
dragged the long lines and the multiple hook snoods away from the dive sight. Still moving at full speed, the fouled anchor came banging up out of the water to rest against the hull, trailing the cables like dragging lengths of seaweed.

Hanson put the
Hispaniola
into a broad turn, taking them around the jagged mass of North Rock, then slowed and finally stopped. Now on the starboard side, the trawler was pounding off into the distance. There was no question of going after her; the propeller would eventually foul in the dragging lines, and it was more important to see to the safety of Finn and the others. Hanson lifted the binoculars, aiming them at the position where the Zodiac had been. There were only a few pieces of floating wreckage to mark the spot.