Kensies treasures, p.18
Kensie's Treasures, page 18
Kensie could feel the tension in her jaw as she gritted her teeth with frustration, digging up one unremarkable artifact after another. As she’d expected, the field was littered with buttons, pocket watch chains, eyeglass rims, and a few rings. She even found a tiny lump of gold that confused her until she realized it was probably a filling for a tooth, which creeped her out a great deal.
But these were all small items, suggesting that an item as substantial as the Couronne was not among them. Had it broken apart in the sinking? Kensie had not really considered that possibility, but it fit the scenario. Would bringing a piece of it back to the states be enough? It would, but she would be lying if she tried to convince herself that it would be the same as finding it intact.
Forty-five minutes and 37 very uninspiring artifacts later, Kensie headed to the surface, wondering if her third or fourth dives of the day would be any more successful than this morning had been.
***
Burke could feel Kensie’s frustration as she stared at the deck, absent-mindedly chomping on one of the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches that she’d picked up before leaving Grenada. His was cold and soggy, and he suspected that she wasn’t even tasting hers. In all honesty, he was at just as much of a loss as she was. They had to be looking at something the wrong way, considering something incorrectly.
Kensie was thinking along those lines too. “This isn’t making any sense. I’m doing something wrong, missing some data.” She was half taking to herself, but then she raised her head and stared pointedly at Burke. “Are you sure the currents are always west-to-east here?”
“Yeah, pretty much. The tidal flow is so strong over the shoal that any back-currents would be minimal, especially over the time frame we’re talking about.”
Kensie affirmed his statement with a clenched-lip expression that would have been a curse had she decided to enunciate. Her eyes moved back and forth; she was considering what she knew about the situation, but every few seconds she shook her head as she dismissed another idea.
“OK, we’re stuck,” Burke said. “Maybe you’re too close to this whole thing. Why don’t you just give me a brain dump about the situation and I’ll try to provide some distance analysis. Start with him taking the Couronne.”
Kensie nodded and recited the story as she knew it, clarifying what was historically accurate and what was conjecture. After the theft, he’d made two stops, one in the Azores and one at the eastern tip of Puerto Rico, staying only long enough in each port to get some supplies. Those were the last places to which he could be definitively traced. After that, only the artifacts they’d recovered lent credence to her theory that they were searching in the right place.
Burke frowned. There was nothing in Kensie’s tale that might explain why the Couronne might not be here. “Tell me about Buckwell’s crew,” he said.
“Not too much is known about them,” Kensie said glumly, thinking this was a dead-end, but she persisted. “We know he had a very small core of senior crew members that he seemed to trust with his life, but his writings only ever mentioned two of them – one named Daniel and one named Erasmus. They were the ones he trusted to keep the ship on course and keep the crew in line when he was sleeping or doing something else. There were probably others, but he never wrote anything about them.”
A thought started forming in his head. “OK, so they were his trusted lieutenants and probably got the biggest share of whatever he stole.”
“Most likely, yes.”
“So how would the rest of the crew get paid?”
“Normally, the entire crew got an equal share, but it wasn’t at all unheard for very liberal forms of accounting to go on. A crew member might be the first one to find something, and he might come back to the captain saying he found 30 gold coins when he really found 40. But if they got caught, they’d be lucky to be stranded somewhere. A lot of them got keelhauled.” Burke grimaced; he could not imagine anything worse than being dragged under a boat as punishment.
“Buckwell was reputed to take a little more than his fair share because he was so damn good at stealing, and because he was becoming a legend before he died. A few letters mentioned how he, along with Daniel and Erasmus, would split half of everything among themselves and divide the other half up to the crew. Because he was so successful, the idea is that his crew accepted this because they still did better than on other ships. That, and because Buckwell was not a man to be fucked with.”
“So how would they have planned to divvy-up a single thing, like this headdress?”
“No one is certain. This kind of unique treasure would be more complicated. If he cut it up, it would be worth far less than the whole but easier to sell. He probably would have kept it in one piece, but that meant he would need to find someone who could afford such a thing, and that wouldn’t have been easy. One guess is that he promised his crew a much higher percentage on later journeys and planned to split the proceeds from the Couronne among his senior men. But that would mean holding onto it for possibly a very long time, and he’d know that Admiralty ships were out looking for him.”
Burke felt a vague notion forming in his head. It’s about keeping the treasure safe until he could sell it. “And would that delayed payment maybe have made some of the crew angry?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Kensie said as she tilted her head to consider what appeared to be new information. “Buckwell was reputed to have, shall we say, liberal morals. If that was the deal, they might have thought Buckwell would sell it and disappear, and then where would those men get their fortune from? A higher percentage of zero is still zero.”
“So maybe one or some of them, or the whole crew even, might have wanted to take it. And that means that he had to protect it from them, right?” Burke asked. The wheels were spinning, but the idea wasn’t quite taking shape just yet. “And he only had a few other men he would trust?”
“Yeah.” Kensie appeared enthused by his line of questioning; she thought something was there too.
“How many crew on a ship like Buckwell’s?”
“Probably at least 60. Maybe more. Aberaeron Fortune was a brigantine, and they normally had about a 100 crew.”
“So not too many guys to hold out against 60 to 100 pissed-off crew?” Just as he finished the sentence, the answer they were looking for slapped him across the face. “Does that sound like a good plan to you?”
“No, not even a little bit.” She squinted at him, probably alerted by the way he felt his face change.
He took her left wrist in his hand. “That’s a nice watch, Kensie. Citizen. Good, solid dive watch. What did it cost you?”
“About $200,” she answered, her face a question. “Why?”
“Is that the only watch you brought on the cruise?”
“No. I brought a Tag Heuer for dinners and going out and things.”
“Pretty fancy. What’s that one worth?” he asked. He was enjoying drawing this out, even if Kensie appeared to be growing impatient.
“Like $2,500 or so. What does that matter?”
“You’re not wearing it. Where is it now?”
She gave him a cross look, like he was wasting her time with such silly questions. “Of course I’m not wearing it. It’s valuable and it’s not for diving. It’s in my cabin, in the…” The irritation disappeared and her entire face went slack. “Holy shit. It’s in the cabin safe.”
“That’s where I’d have it, just like where I’d keep a super-treasure on my ship when I’m surrounded by men I don’t completely trust. It’d be in the strongest safe I could afford, bolted down to the deck, and only me and my trusted cronies would have the combination.”
“Yeah, of course. And a safe would fall straight to the bottom when the ship sank. It sure wouldn’t drift – not in under a 100 feet of water.” She licked her lips as her brain went into overdrive. “Where’s my GPS?” Burke was already handing it to her.
Kensie powered it up and scrolled until she reached the opposite end of the field. “OK, this mark is for the candlestick I brought up,” she said, turning so Burke could see the screen and stabbing her finger at the furthest mark. “And that was the heaviest and densest thing I found. So it’s a good bet that any safe is west of this point.”
“That fits,” Burke agreed. “How deep was the candlestick?”
“Um… 36 feet. Why?”
“Think of the shoal as an underwater island that just dropped down below the surface. The top of the mound would be where the island would have poked out of the water, and a sailing ship like that would have only drawn seven or eight feet, I’m guessing, so it wouldn’t have hit the island until it was pretty shallow. So it’s probably up near the top of the slope.”
“Yup. Up this way,” she ran her fingers over the GPS screen, indicating the shallower part of the shoal.
“So, if I were you, I’d follow the exact same strategy as you did this morning, just in the opposite direction. Find the border of the debris field this way. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that the safe is at the exact point where the Aberaeron Fortune hit the island.” He grew strangely excited at his deduction; while still nothing more than conjecture, Burke felt like it was the right track. It was like a hunt, and he was the hunter that had just figured out how to corner his prey.
He noticed that Kensie was getting even more excited, but that wouldn’t do, not right now. He could afford it – he wasn’t going to dive – but she would be, and excited people used their air far too quickly. Kensie needed to spend every second she could in the water.
“You look a little flushed, Kensie. You need to calm down.”
“I am calm!” she snapped in a voice that was anything but.
“I’m excited too. But if you use up all your air or – worse – hyperventilate down there, you’re not going to be able to do 15 minutes’ worth of work, so settle yourself. There’ll be time for freaking out later. Right now, you need to be a professor, not a fan-girl.”
Kensie scrunched her nose at him in mostly-feigned irritation, but nodded. “Yeah, I know. Give me a second, but then I’m going in. And I’ll find it.” Burke wondered where this attractive, almost delicate-looking woman hid the steel of resolve that now flashed in her eyes.
***
Kensie gave Burke a quick thumbs-up before setting out in the opposite direction of the day’s earlier dives. The white sand, with little spots of coral sticking out here and there, beckoned to her. The sunlight filtering through the water looked like a spotlight to her, guiding her inexorably to her moment of destiny.
You’re being a little dramatic, aren’t you? She admonished herself for losing focus. Burke had been right; this was like being a surgeon operating on the President of the United States. No matter who your patient was, you stayed calm and did your job. And she would do her job the same way, no matter what she thought she was about to find.
Passing over the western-most mark on her GPS, she started sweeping the floor, much as she had this morning. The detector squawked loudly with the heavier marks it picked up, and did so with great regularity. In fact, the number of returns were worrisome. That was a lot of things to dig up, and she simply didn’t have the time. Kensie knew that she had more than enough evidence by now to justify a new expedition – hell, she could make them call it “The Kensie Prescott Expedition” at this point – but she wanted to bring the Couronne to the surface herself so badly it almost hurt. She wanted to show it to Dean Talbot, to have him force another meeting of the NAS, and to walk in with the headdress raised over her head like she was skating around the rink having just won the Stanley Cup. Being ignored and ridiculed by a bunch of septegenarians still stung, and there was only one thing that would act as the appropriate salve.
These thoughts rumbled about Kensie’s brain as she continued over the buried debris field. The screen on her GPS was coated with so many marks it looked like a solid color, just like the eastern field had on the earlier dives. She was going to have to pick one of them, dig it up, and use that information as a baseline to pick the most attractive target. This was still going to be damn hard.
Then the returns completely stopped.
At 21 feet, the detector went instantly silent like the batteries had failed, but the screen remained lit. Slightly confused, she turned back to the last mark, and heard the dutiful wail of the device as the electromagnetic field proved it was still working. “Burke?”
“Yeah, Kensie?”
“I was getting a ton of returns, and then they just stopped dead. It’s like I crossed a border or something. What d’ya think?”
She got no response, and in a few seconds Kensie wondered if she’d transmitted at all. “Did you copy my last?”
“Yeah. Hang on.” He must have been considering this new evidence, so while she waited Kensie took the opportunity to scan forward a little further. Still nothing.
“Kensie, I think you should keep scanning the dead area for a while.”
“And ignore all the juicy hits I just got? Isn’t that a waste of time?”
“No, it’s not. You said he sunk in a storm, so that means even heavy stuff would move with the current, but a safe is still going to go straight down. So just search higher up the slope.”
“OK.” She headed up towards the apex of the shoal, making quick, broad sweeps. If she heard anything at all she planned to stop, but nary a peep came from the device. She reached the peak of the underwater hill, pivoted, and started back down the same side but on another path, ensuring that she did not overlap any part of the sand twice. The silence was frustrating.
This is stupid! I’m out of the hot zone! I’m not going to find dick all the way up – ”
BEEEEEEEEEEP!!!
The return hurt her ears, so much so she had to pull the device away to prevent blowing out her eardrum. She lowered the sensitivity and ran it over the same place. Another hit. Although not as loud, it was intense enough to indicate a very big return.
I’m getting a Very Big Return. Oh my god.
She didn’t bother to mark the GPS even as she realized that ignoring that step was reckless. Dropping the detector to let it hang from her belt, she pulled out her shovel and plunged it into the sand. She dug in a controlled frenzy, going too fast and obscuring the visibility, but she expected to feel the target before she saw it.
Kensie dug deeper, getting into more tightly-packed sediment. It didn’t stop her, but it was a little harder to pull each scoop out, and it slowed her down. She grew tired, so she took a quick break, which would also allow the cloudy water to clear.
When it did, Kensie was surprised by how deep she’d dug. She should have found something by now. Grabbing the detector, she waved it over the area and was rewarded with the same response that told her she was in the right place, but just not deep enough. So keep going.
She returned to her task, trying to quell her building enthusiasm. She was breathing so hard she was starting to worry about CO2 poisoning. Kensie started repeating a simple phrase, almost like a mantra: keep calm, keep calm, keep calm…
Clank.
Kensie froze in place, allowing the particulate to settle, and when she cleared the last vestiges of sediment, she saw the unmistakable straight, almost-black edge of something that could only be man-made. She touched it, finding it cool against her fingers in the warm tropical water, like metal would be. Her mouth was suddenly bone-dry.
“Buh- Burke?”
“Yeah.”
“I, uh, I think I have something here.”
The edge on his voice was unmistakable. “Something what?”
“Big. Metal. With a straight edge.” She tried to move the exposed portion, but it didn’t even think about budging. “And heavy.” Kensie didn’t dare say what she thought it was, like that would jinx it.
Burke had no such concerns. “Sounds like a safe to me. Try to dig around the edges to get a feel for the dimensions.”
Kensie moved to obey, scraping away the mud until she had a rectangle, about two feet by three, with a mound of sand on the center. She brushed it away until two features became easily visible; a handle and a dial. “Oh yeah, it’s a safe all right.”
“How big?”
“Maybe six square feet. Not sure how deep.”
“Damn it. That’s pretty big. Can you dig under it?”
Kensie stuck her shovel into the sand as far as she could, but the metal ran down further than she could reach. “I don’t think so, not without a lot of effort and half a day.”
“Hang on.” The mike went silent for a minute, and Kensie cleared more sand off the front. There appeared to be remnants of a couple of words there, but she could not read them. She started digging a little deeper around it, but made only miniscule progress. They would need several dives – at least – to clear the sand and silt from it.
Burke’s voice entered her ears once again. “I’m coming down.”
“What? Why? I thought you said it was too dangerous with those guys maybe around somewhere.”
“We’ve only got one fresh tank left, Kensie. You want to leave this thing sitting there so any idiot can see it? Hell, I think I can see it from here.” And he was at least 30 yards away and on the surface.
That was a good point. It would take no great exploratory skill to see a big black rectangle in the nearly-white sand and clear water, and someone with the right equipment or the right number of people would have this out of the sea before Burke and Kensie could run back to Grenada, get more air, and get back here.
“I don’t know if it’ll matter whether you come down or not. This thing seems pretty big. I don’t think even you and I can dig it out, let alone lift it up to the boat.”
“I have a lift I can mount on the stern, and plenty of heavy chain. But we can’t attach a line to it unless we can dig out under it, and yeah – that’s gonna take time.” It would take far too long, and Burke sounded like he’d figured that out as well.
