Mac travis adventures bo.., p.35
Mac Travis Adventures BoxSet, page 35
part #4 of Mac Travis Series
“All of you. Into the office,” he ordered.
He walked around to the wrapping station in the gift shop and grabbed a packing tape dispenser. One at a time, he bound and gagged them. On his way out, seeing the T-shirt display and realizing he was topless, he grabbed an XL from the shelf before leaving.
He needed a way out. It wouldn’t take long for them to free themselves and call the police. Walking away from the street, he looked for a place to hide. They’d never suspect him of staying on the property.
Near the water, dark netting surrounded a fenced-in area holding huge black water tanks. He opened the gate and entered. The tanks were lit from above, and he could see turtles in most. Too exposed to hide, he left the pen and walked to a small cove on the right. To the end, just hidden behind the tanks, was a twin-engine center-console, hanging above the water from two steel arms. Staying to the shadows, he approached it, found the control box, and lowered the boat into the water. Careful of his side, he slid down into the hull, unhooked the cables, and looked at the helm. The keys were in the ignition, and he took one last look toward the hospital and street to see if anyone had seen him. One at a time, he started the engines. The transmissions clicked when he pushed down the throttles, and the boat started forward. Slowly, to keep the engine noise down, he idled out of the cove and into open water. Once clear of the breakwater, he turned to the west and pushed the throttles down to their limits, steering a course that would take him under the bridge.
21
Around midnight, the wind strengthened, kicking up the seas and making sleep difficult—not that he would have had much luck anyhow. It had still been dark when they had released him from the hold, and now the first rays of light were just breaking the horizon. Usually it was his favorite time of day, but sitting on deck under the watchful eyes of Ironhead, the sunrise was ruined. Alicia was back in the cabin, refining the chart, but they still needed the missing information. Without it, this might be a very long day.
Sometime last night, he had heard the sound of an outboard motor approach and what he thought was a hull scraping against the boat. Now the boat was gone, but Ironhead was back, looking uncomfortable, wearing a Turtle Hospital T-shirt. He wasn’t sure how he had found them, but the reef was less than a mile wide, running parallel to land. There were few boats out at night, and finding a ship the size of Hawk’s trawler would have been easy.
He looked toward land. Marathon was just visible—a thin line on the horizon, the high-rise at Key Colony Beach to the right the lone identifiable landmark. With the right tide, he could swim it, but the ebb tide removed the possibility for now. With the near full moon, he estimated current would be running at almost two knots, moving away from land faster than he could swim. But even with the right tide, he couldn’t leave Alicia. Ironhead sat there glaring at him, a strange look on his face. Hawk called for him to take the wheel, and Mac noticed that he was favoring one side when he moved. There was no apparent injury, but he filed away the observation, a plan for the thick-necked thug forming in his mind.
The engines started and Hawk called for Wallace, who was standing on the bow, to release the line attached to the buoy. He slid the dock line through the eye of the mooring line and signaled that they were clear. Ironhead steered a large circle to escape the other buoys, then headed just south of east. Mac stared down at the water, changing from almost clear to green to blue as the depth increased.
“Get your gear sorted,” Hawk ordered him. “We’ll be on the first numbers in twenty minutes.”
Mac was surprised they would be diving this quickly. “Don’t you tow an array first and make sure something’s down there?”
“If you want a neon billboard that says you’re searching for treasure, that’ll work great, but we’re going to do this the old-fashioned way,” he said.
Mac understood his point, though it would mean a lot of bottom time for him. Pulling a side-scan sonar array was the simplest and most effective method for locating anomalies like shipwrecks underwater, but anyone fishing or diving nearby would quickly notice them. Commercial fishermen would easily pick up the search grid and know they were looking for something. They had a permit for exploration, but it wouldn’t stop everyone else from just “diving” the area.
He went into the cabin. “You having any luck?” he asked Alicia.
“Kind of tweaked the coordinates a bit by adding the projection of the Earth’s surface to the chart,” she said, moving to the side to give him a view of the screen.
The straight lines he had seen yesterday now had slight curves to them, adjusting to the round orb. “That should help a little, but this is still a wild-ass guess.”
Hawk came over. “I’ll need the first pair of coordinates now.”
“You know this is a shot in the dark,” Mac said, trying to take some of the pressure off of her. “You can’t think that we are just going to stumble on a ship that’s been lost for hundreds of years on a handful of dives.”
He looked over to Alicia. “If she’s as good as her reputation, we ought to. If not, I have no use for her.” He turned to him and smiled. “Or you.”
Alicia wrote down the numbers on a piece of paper, and Mac watched as Hawk plotted them on the chart.
“Two hundred and ten feet, Travis. Better put your big boy pants on,” he said. “That’s why no one has found it—too deep.”
Mac knew he was right. One hundred thirty feet was the maximum depth for recreational divers, and until recently, unless you had a submersible vessel, the depth would have discouraged anyone who’d thought to look.
The dangerous shoals and proximity to the Gulf Stream virtually guaranteed that early Keys inhabitants were all in the wrecking business in one way or another: either recovering or brokering the goods that washed up on shore. As technology improved, they were able to dive the shallow wrecks.
But what if the wreck was deep, and valuable? The European settlers and sailors were notorious for being shortsighted and closed-minded. Hundreds had died by their refusal to adopt local diets. Their views toward navigation had leaned toward the scientific, and where the rudimentary instruments and technology had fallen short, they’d filled the gaps with fiction. They would have had no way of recording a deep wreck.
Indigenous tribes had accurately navigated the oceans for a thousand years, relying on more natural methods. They used the stars, of course, but learned the subtle feel only acquired through generations on the water to learn the swells and currents that would push a boat off course. With their instinctive feel for the ocean, they could easily have marked a treasure, hoping a future generation might profit by it.
He’d been thinking last night about the Indians that had inhabited the islands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The indigenous people had been the original wreckers, salvaging long before Europeans had settled in any numbers. They were so skilled at recovering the bounty of the sea that when the Europeans finally realized the financial rewards, they had hired them to do the work. As news spread of the treasures being dumped on the ocean floor, clusters of settlers built Key West, Vaca Key, which was now Marathon, and Indian Key. Was it possible that this was a treasure map leading not to some ancient Mayan ruin, but to a more recent wreck? The relics that he and Wood had found years ago dating from an old Mayan canoe had been inshore. There was no reason for the elaborate tattoos to conceal the location.
“You going to get on with it?” Hawk asked.
Mac snapped back to the present and went out on deck. His gear was still in the mesh bag. Ironhead was gearing up and Mac studied his setup.
“Side-mount?” he asked.
“Bloody back is a problem. You ever try it?” he answered.
When it came to talking diving and equipment, the barrier between the men broke down. Mac had used the harness system, allowing multiple tanks to be carried alongside your body instead of on your back while cave diving. “Yeah. It would be good to have two tanks, especially if we’re going over two hundred feet.”
“Here.” He tossed Mac a harness. “There’s a rebreather setup under that bench.”
Mac had wondered how they were going to get any bottom time at that depth. The maximum depth for nitrox, a standard gas mixture with an increased oxygen content, was much shallower, and he didn’t see any equipment for a helium mix, which negated the risk of oxygen toxicity. He opened the lid and pulled out the backpack-mounted gear. His confusion must have been evident, his experience with the equipment limited.
“Let me give you a rundown,” Ironhead said.
Mac was cautious as the man ran through the system setup and operation. Above the water they were enemies, but forced to work in the conditions below, they would need to count on each other for support. The mixed-gas closed-circuit rebreather would allow them time at depth without the risk of oxygen toxicity. The side-mount tanks would be used for the lengthy decompression stops, and as an alternate air source if the more complicated equipment failed. With just a single regulator attached to each tank, the redundant and simple systems provided a degree of comfort.
The boat slowed, and he grabbed the gunwale as they turned abeam into the waves. This was a day better spent under the water.
“Get ready,” Ironhead said. He turned away and inspected the bandage on his side. Using his teeth to hold the end of the roll, he pulled off several feet of duct tape, wrapping it tightly around the bandage to protect it. Satisfied with his work, he reached into his gear bag, removed a container, and dumped several pills into his hand. Placing them in his mouth, he grabbed a bottle of water and swallowed.
Mac heard the anchor drop and the chain roll through the guides. “You sure you’re okay with that? It looks pretty bad,” Mac said. If they were going to be buddies underwater, he needed to know Ironhead’s mental and physical state—and both looked bad.
“Boss ain’t going to listen to any excuses,” he said, struggling into a heavy wetsuit.
Mac followed his lead and put on the thick suit. The seven-millimeter cold-water suit was bulky, but at the depths they were diving, the water would be considerably colder than the surface. He calculated the extra weight he would need and then subtracted four pounds for the second tank. On his right arm, he strapped the computer matched to the rebreather equipment and scrolled through the screens, familiarizing himself with its operation.
The bow turned into the waves when the anchor grabbed, and a horn chirped.
“That’s it. We go.” Ironhead sat on the gunwale, wincing as he tried to attach the tank to the harness on his wounded side.
“Here,” Mac said, helping him.
Ironhead nodded, pulled the mask he had placed backwards on his head around to the front, and made a few final adjustments before rolling over the side. Mac attached the two tanks to his harness and duplicated the process before dropping into the water.
It took a few minutes to adjust the equipment, but considering the two tanks plus the rebreather, he was balanced and comfortable. Ironhead gave him the okay sign and, without waiting for an answer, started a fast descent. By the time Mac had cleared his ears and made a few tweaks to the harness, they had dropped past one hundred feet. The water was getting darker, and the visibility degraded as they descended, the angle of the early-morning sun not allowing the full spectrum of light into the depths. At a hundred eighty feet, he followed Ironhead’s lead, switched on the LED light attached to a headband, and for the first time saw the bottom.
TJ paced the deck. “Why wait?”
“Goddamn, son,” Trufante said. “Ain’t gonna do us no good, back there during the low tide. This thing draws some serious water.”
TJ nodded. “We can at least head over there.”
“Pama Bama’s still asleep down there. Not a real morning person—if you know what I mean.”
Frustrated, TJ went below and came back with another cup of coffee. “An hour.”
“That’s all I ask,” Trufante said, sipping on his Coke.
“You think we can find her?” TJ asked.
“It’s not the finding part—it’s the her part that worries me.”
They sat in silence, each contemplating their own problems. TJ obviously worried about Alicia, and Trufante about how to handle Cheqea. There were not many people that scared him, but she was one.
They were on the flybridge of TJ’s boat, looking at the area on the chart plotter. “We draw a lot of water to be on the back side,” TJ said, pointing at the shallow water surrounding the area where Trufante expected to find Cheqea.
“I want to get close as I can,” Trufante said. “There’s snakes and shit in that scrub. Big Pine, my ass. There ain’t nothin’ taller than me on that pile of sand.”
“Well, you tell me how we’re going to get in there drawing six feet of water,” TJ said, staring at the chart plotter.
Trufante reached across and panned the chart to the northern side of the island, where he traced a line with the tip of his finger up the Bogie Channel to a point of land across from Porpoise Key. “Can you get ’er in there?” he asked, knowing there was no other option than a hike.
“Yeah, and then what?” TJ asked. “You gonna swim?”
Trufante looked over the windshield and pointed to the white container strapped to the bow. “That’ll work.”
TJ thought for a moment. “Okay. Your hour’s up.” He started the engines.
Several minutes later, with Pamela sunning herself on the back deck, they were underway. Running parallel to the Seven Mile Bridge, they followed the curving shoreline. When they passed the beach at Bahia Honda Key, TJ cut the wheel to starboard. They passed under the new bridge and then, a hundred feet later, through the open section of the old railway bridge, where they entered Bahia Honda Channel. About a mile in, with No Name Key on the port side, he kept the red 22 and 22X markers to starboard and entered Spanish Channel. A quarter mile later, with the mangrove-covered Little Pine Key off to the side, they moved to the west side of the channel and anchored.
Trufante climbed around the cabin and unhooked the straps holding the container to the deck. He dropped the container into the water. On impact, the unit separated and a large raft self-inflated. It was soon bobbing by the transom. TJ opened the transom door, and from the swim platform, he grabbed the floating line. He tied it to a cleat, then took a knife and cut away the tent-like structure. It was designed to protect the occupants from the elements, but the bright orange material would only attract the wrong kind of attention here.
Trufante stood by him, staring at the shore, still a hundred yards away. “How’m I gonna get there?”
TJ pulled two dive tanks out of a rack by the cabin. “Here you go. One for the way there and one for the way back.”
Trufante grinned at him and loaded the tanks. He waved to Pamela and released the line. With one of his long arms, he reached into the water for the valve and cracked it slightly. Nothing happened, and he opened it more. The raft started to slide across the water, emitting a trail of bubbles behind it. It was awkward holding the tank in the water, but if he stayed on his belly, he was able to hold the cylinder over the edge and manipulate it enough to steer.
22
Mac glanced at the dive computer. They were at two hundred twenty feet. Huge schools of ten-pound yellowtails, or flags, as the locals called them, huddled together around the small coral heads rising from the sandy bottom. Otherwise they were finning over a desert, but that was what Mac had expected. The shallower, more famous reefs just inside of their position had probably taken the ship down, and either the tide or a storm had dragged it back to deeper water before it sank. Ironhead swam ahead, with Mac staying about ten feet behind. On his left arm was a dive computer, constantly updating their depth, bottom time, and anticipated decompression schedule. He glanced at it often—vigilance was needed at this depth. They had long ago passed the no-decompression limit that recreational divers were familiar with.
With his right hand, he pulled off the retractable compass clipped to his vest and held it straight out in front. The needle showed them moving in a straight line directly south. Suddenly Ironhead turned to the right, and Mac checked his computer and then his compass. They had been moving south for ten minutes and now were heading due east, which Mac expected they would continue for the same amount of time before turning north and then west—a square search pattern. Every so often, Ironhead kicked out several times with his right fin to counteract the current, but otherwise he held his course. With the LED light synchronized with his head movements, he was able to watch his gauges and search at the same time. The big question was, if Mac did see something that Ironhead missed, should he call attention to it or file it away to check later?
For now, there was no conflict. They were back at the start of the search grid, and Ironhead gave a thumbs-up sign to start the long ascent. They stayed together on the decompression stops, but rarely faced each other, the brotherhood and goodwill Mac had felt with a fellow diver already fading. He expected trouble soon.
Trufante hit a small section of beach, jumped out, and pulled the life raft ashore. He closed the valve on the tank and tested its weight against the other. It was considerably lighter, and he suspected TJ was right; he would need both to return to the boat. He pulled the raft above the high tide line and set the tanks in the bow to secure it, then started walking inland.
Mangroves lined the adjacent shores, but there was a narrow path leading through the massive bushes in front of him. The trail ended after a few hundred feet, with a few boulders marking the end of a road. Like most through Big Pine, the pavement ran straight as an arrow, its end invisible over the immediate horizon. Fighting the morning humidity, he started out along the shoulder, tucking his shirt in and slicking back his hair in the hopes he could hitch a ride from one of the rental cars that cruised these roads looking for Key deer.
