Havana Storm (Dirk Pitt Adventure) Read online

  “Ozomahtli,” Madero said.

  “Exactly. He found what he thinks could be a link to a vessel called the Oso Malo, or Bad Bear.”

  Madero smiled. “They do sound similar. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think the Aztecs misinterpreted the Spanish sailors’ name of their ship. That may be an inspired correlation by your historian.”

  “He’s been known to work miracles for the right motivation.”

  “But identifying the ship won’t produce the stone,” Madero said.

  “It might in this case,” Summer said, “as the fate of the Oso Malo is rather compelling. She made only one voyage to Veracruz, in 1525. On her return trip to Cádiz, she sailed into a hurricane and had to make for Jamaica. She nearly made it, before foundering on the north shore.”

  “Was the wreck salvaged?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Dirk said, “but we intend to find out. Summer and I are flying to Jamaica tonight. We’re scheduled to return to work aboard a NUMA research ship in three days but will use the intervening time to locate and explore the wreck site.”

  “We hope any historic salvors would have been interested only in precious metals or jewels and would have tossed aside a broken old stone.” Summer pointed to the photo. “At least we know what we’re looking for.”

  Madero looked at the twins and shook his head. “The link to the ship is tenuous at best. I think you are chasing a fantasy. Please, let it rest. Once the first stone is recovered, the academic community will learn of its existence and we shall receive all kinds of leads to the second fragment. It is no doubt in a museum somewhere.”

  “Perhaps,” Summer said, “but there is no harm in looking. Besides, I’m not going to Jamaica just so my brother can lie on the beach and drink rum for three days.”

  “Spoilsport,” Dirk muttered.

  “You two be careful,” Madero said quietly.

  “We will, Eduardo.” Summer shook his hand. “We’ll let you know exactly what we find.”

  Madero stood motionless as they departed the lab, then turned stiffly toward his office. Out of its shadows, Juan Díaz emerged, holding a gun. A younger man behind him crossed the lab and locked the door to the hallway.

  “A very enlightening conversation,” Díaz said. “I’m so glad we happened to be here. Your friends are quite helpful. Perhaps they will be as helpful in locating the second stone as they were in discovering the first.”

  Madero stood quietly, fury seething in his eyes. Only moments before Dirk and Summer arrived, Díaz had appeared in his office with the gun to demand the codex. The realization that the Cuban had murdered Torres struck him with a bolt of anger. “The link to the shipwreck in Jamaica is pure speculation,” Madero said. “You’d be wasting your time going there.”

  “I admire your attempt at dissuasion, but we both know it’s an entirely reasonable hypothesis.”

  He stepped close to Madero and eyed him. “You neglected to tell your friends the true value behind the stone. Why is that? Are you going to plunder your friends’ riches?”

  Madero clenched his teeth. “I was just trying to protect them from harm.” He looked at Díaz, a rugged-framed man whose black eyes gyrated like a hungry hawk’s. “How do you know what the stone says?”

  Díaz smiled. “I happened to make my own find, which brought me to Dr. Torres. A stroke of good fortune, really, that you happened to share your discovery of the codex. Now, where exactly is that fine document?” The Cuban raised his pistol at Madero.

  Madero cautiously slipped a hand into his pocket and produced a key ring, then unlocked a steel cabinet. The Aztec codex, tucked in its felt lining, lay inside a small plastic bin. Díaz gave a slight nod to his companion, then snatched the container.

  His attention focused on the codex, Madero didn’t detect the other man lift a stone Olmec statue off the lab bench. With a wide swing, the man brought the statue down across the back of Madero’s head. Madero melted to the ground.

  Díaz stepped over the prone body and turned to his partner. “Wipe your prints off that statue. If we are lucky, the police will think his American friends killed him and stole the codex.”

  With a look of smug satisfaction, he tucked the container under his arm and strolled out of the building.

  25

  The moss-colored water washed over the Starfish, snuffing out the bright Caribbean sunshine. Pitt monitored the ballast tank from the pilot’s seat, while alongside him, Giordino checked the power and life support systems.

  “Estimated bottom depth is twelve hundred feet,” Pitt said.

  Giordino yawned. “Nearly enough time to slip in a nap before we get there.”

  The deepwater submersible descended by gravity alone, making for a lethargic ride to the seafloor. The descent seemed even slower for Giordino, who was deprived of a nap as Pitt needled him about his latest girlfriend, a well-known Washington attorney.

  “At least I’m not married to a politician,” Giordino countered.

  Pitt halted their descent as the sea bottom came into view. Giordino let out a low whistle. “Looks like somebody was building a freeway down here.”

  They had dropped onto one of the shadowy linear images they’d seen on the sonar. In person, the lines were much more defined and clearly not a natural geographic feature. They could only be mechanically made tracks.

  Pitt guided the submersible to a wide set of parallel marks and hovered over them. “Someone’s been down here with some heavy equipment, all right.”

  “The indentations are over ten feet across,” Giordino said. “I don’t know of many vehicles large enough to make that kind of a track.”

  Pitt shook his head. “It’s not from an oil or gas well operation. Somebody was conducting a large-scale mining operation.”

  “You think someone was down here scooping up manganese nodules?”

  “A good bet. Probably high in gold content.”

  Pitt thrust the submersible across the scarred seabed, where two different track marks crisscrossed a wide area. “Do those second tracks look familiar?”

  “Now that you mention it, they look an awful lot like the tracks around the Alta’s diving bell.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  As Pitt circled away from the tracks, he noticed the water depth decrease slightly. The depression they’d seen in the sonar image was evident out the viewport in the form of a bowl-shaped indention that dropped sharply at its center. The tracks were most prevalent around this center point.

  “Do you think they blasted here?” Giordino asked.

  “Kind of looks that way.”

  “Whoa, ease off the gas a second. The water temperature just spiked about fifty degrees.”

  Pitt eased off the thrusters, nudging the submersible toward the center of the depression.

  “Temperature’s still rising,” Giordino said. “Up to one hundred and forty degrees, one-fifty, one-sixty . . . now dropping.” He tracked it for another minute. “It peaked at about one hundred and sixty-five degrees.”

  “It’s a thermal vent,” Pitt said, “right in the heart of their mining grid.”

  “Makes sense. Deepwater vents are known for their rich surrounding minerals.”

  “I bet this one comes with a high dose of mercury.”

  “That must be the source,” Giordino said. “Odd that we’ve never run across high levels of mercury in other hydrothermal vents we’ve examined.”

  “Might have something to do with the explosives. There could be a pent-up base of mercury beneath the vents that’s dispersed by a blast.”

  “Makes sense. If it’s a natural deposit that was disturbed, that would explain why we didn’t find any overt evidence at the other two sites.”

  “If we look closer,” Pitt said, “I bet we’ll find the same telltale tracks and man-made depressions.”

  �
�Now we know what to look for. Let’s get back to the ship. I’d like another look at the last two sites’ sonar records.”

  “Sure,” Pitt said, “but first one quick detour.”

  Circling the depression, he scanned the depths before goosing the submersible toward a slender brown object jutting from the sand. Hovering above it, they could see it was neither a ship nor a sailboat. It was a large log.

  “So much for my sunken boat,” Giordino said. “It’s just a big log that rolled off a cargo ship.”

  “Not so fast,” Pitt said. He circled to the other side, where they could see it was actually a dugout canoe.

  “Will you look at the size of that?” Giordino said as he reached up and activated an external video camera. “It must be over thirty feet long.”

  “That’s a major league dugout canoe,” Pitt said. “It must have been used for interisland travel.”

  The canoe was half buried and facing away from the depression, but its interior was free of sand and debris. Pitt eased the Starfish along its length, allowing the video camera to capture a thorough record of the vessel.

  “I count ten benches,” Giordino said, “wide enough to seat two oarsmen each, with plenty of cargo room to spare.”

  “Probably used by the local Taíno Indians for trading goods.” Pitt pointed to the hull. “Looks like they knew how to modify a canoe for the open seas.”

  Carved planks had been pegged to the topsides of the canoe, creating a freeboard that extended an additional ten inches. Both stem and stern featured raised angular end pieces that had been attached to the base log.

  “I don’t know what they were carrying,” Giordino said, “but it’s a cinch it wasn’t mercury.”

  Pitt nodded. As he swung around the end of the canoe, the submersible’s thrusters blew away a patch of loose sand, exposing a small rectangular stone.

  Giordino caught sight of the object. “Something on the bottom there.”

  “I see it. Why don’t you try to bring it home?”

  Giordino was already activating the controls of the manipulator, extending its silver claw as Pitt brought the Starfish over the object. He easily grasped the stone and pulled it from the sand. As he held it to the viewport, he and Pitt could see it was a carving of a native warrior. The image had squat legs, a large nose, and wore a breechcloth.

  Pitt glanced at the carving before purging the ballast tanks to surface. “Possibly of ancient vintage,” he said.

  “He kind of reminds me of our high school wrestling coach, Herbert Mudd,” Giordino said.

  Pitt grinned. “I’ll wager young Herbert there would have an interesting story to tell, if he could talk.”

  The carved warrior remained clutched in the manipulator’s claw, peering into the cockpit as the submersible rose to the surface. Although Herbert would leave the talking to others, the little stone statue would ultimately have a lot to declare.

  26

  The pinging melody from a sidewalk steel drum band greeted Dirk and Summer as they exited Montego Bay’s Donald Sangster International Airport. Summer listened a moment, then dropped a five-dollar bill into the band’s Rastafarian-knit collection hat, eliciting a nod from the trio. She hustled to catch up to Dirk, who was shrugging off an aggressive taxi driver before making his way to the rental car kiosk.

  “Space B-9,” he said to Summer, dangling a set of car keys.

  Stepping toward their assigned parking spot, they found a Volkswagen Beetle convertible. “A Beetle?” Dirk asked with a pained expression.

  “Best the office could reserve on short notice.” Summer grabbed the keys away from her brother. “I think they’re cute.”

  “Cute and functional don’t always go hand in hand.” He stuffed their suitcases into the small trunk. It was too minuscule to hold their dive gear, so Dirk wedged their equipment bags into the backseat floor.

  He shook his head. “We’ve still got to pick up our magnetometer and some dive tanks.”

  “We can just stack things up,” Summer said, lowering the top.

  She slid behind the wheel on the car’s right side and passed her brother a road map. “I’ll drive and you can navigate our way to the dive shop.”

  As Dirk climbed in the passenger seat, he grunted something about needing rum. Summer drove the car around to the air cargo office, where they picked up a small crate. She then headed south toward Montego Bay. Summer melted into the late-afternoon traffic. Steering down the road’s left lane, a vestige from Jamaica’s British colonial past, she drove with a focused vigilance.

  They motored another five minutes before Summer pulled off the road, her knuckles white. In that short span, they’d been nearly sideswiped by a moving van and rear-ended by a bread truck. “They drive like crazy here!” she blurted.

  “Too many potholes,” Dirk said, “or maybe just too much pot.” He hopped out and stepped to the driver’s door. “I’ll take it from here, if you like.”

  “Gladly,” Summer said, sliding to the passenger seat.

  Dirk took off, a grin forming as he joined the aggressive drivers. Where Summer felt intimidated, Dirk felt a challenge, one he fulfilled at home by racing a 1980s-era Porsche in local sports car club events.

  They found the dive shop near one of the luxury hotels on Doctor’s Beach and rented four air tanks, which they piled on top of their other gear in the VW’s backseat. Reversing course, they passed by the airport, leaving the outskirts of Montego Bay behind them as they followed a narrow coastal road along the north shore.

  They passed a conglomeration of resorts and scenic plantation houses, a reminder of Jamaica’s slave-produced sugar industry that prospered in the eighteenth century. The traffic and development withered as the road skirted the jungle-kissed waters of the blue Caribbean.

  Summer checked the road map. “White Bay should be coming up.”

  The road wound through a dense patch of jungle before opening above a shallow cove ringed with white sand. Dirk turned onto a narrow dirt road, escaping a tailgating taxi that had been pestering him since they left the dive shop.

  The dirt road curved past a lane of ramshackle houses to a band of beachfront cottages that lined the cove. Mostly foreign-owned vacation retreats, the cottages appeared sparsely occupied.

  “The rental agent said the third house on the left.” Summer pointed to one of the bungalows. “The yellow one there, I think, with the white trim.”

  Dirk nodded and pulled into the bungalow’s open carport. A gentle surf rocked the beach just a few dozen yards in front of them. “Accommodations right off the wreck site,” he said, gazing at the waterfront. “Can’t get more convenient than that.”

  “The keys are supposed to be under the mat and the house already stocked with groceries, so we can stay put and work until the Sargasso Sea makes port.”

  “And a workboat?”

  “A Boston Whaler with extra fuel tanks is supposed to be waiting at a pier around the cove.”

  They unloaded their belongings into the modest two-bedroom bungalow, opening all the doors and windows to catch the afternoon breeze. After hauling the dive tanks down to the beach, they walked to the nearby pier.

  They found the workboat tied to the pier, appearing as though it had been sitting there for years. Its fiberglass finish was dulled by the sun and its brightwork was consumed by rust. “Looks like it was built during the Civil War,” Dirk said.

  “Same goes for the dock.”

  They stepped single file onto the rickety pier, which was little more than a handful of narrow planks atop some rock pilings. Dirk placed their dive tanks in the boat and pulled the starter on the outboard motor. The engine fired on the second pull. “Not the Queen Elizabeth, but it’ll do.”

  “The cove is smaller than I expected,” Summer said as they walked back to the cottage under a setting sun. “It looks less than a mile acro
ss.”

  “With luck, we ought to get it surveyed in a day.” Dirk stopped and stared into the waves. Like his father, he was drawn by an almost primeval need to explore the sea. The remains of the Oso Malo were calling just off shore.

  They rose at dawn and shoved off from the dock under a cool breeze. Dirk opened the crate they had picked up from the airport and unpacked a towed magnetometer unit. Once they were under way, a fish-shaped sensor was towed behind the boat. The cable was attached to a small processing station with an audio monitor, which would signal the presence of ferrous metal objects with a high-pitched buzz.

  Using a handheld GPS unit to mark their path, Dirk drove the boat in narrow survey lanes across the cove while Summer monitored the magnetometer, adjusting the length of the towed cable to keep the sensor from grounding on the bottom. On their third lane, the monitor shrieked—it was a large target. Dirk cut the motor and Summer jumped over the side with mask and fins for a quick investigation. She surfaced a minute later and climbed into the boat with a frown.

  “Somebody lost a nice anchor, but it’s much too new to be from a Spanish galleon.”

  “We can fish it out later.” Dirk restarted the motor.

  They surveyed until midday, stopping only for a quick lunch at the cottage. Returning to the dock, Summer motioned offshore. “Looks like we have some competition.”

  A faded green skiff with a lone man aboard was bobbing off the cove. Clad only in a pair of cutoffs, the man waved at Summer, then slipped on a mask and jumped over the side, clutching a speargun. A minute later, his head popped above the surface for a quick breath of air, then he disappeared again.

  Dirk sailed the Boston Whaler to their last position in the middle of the cove and motioned to Summer. She lowered the magnetometer and they resumed surveying as a bank of low clouds rolled in, offering respite from the hot sun. The magnetometer buzzed with small targets here and there but found nothing of consequence. After two more hours, they drew near the other boat. The Jamaican diver pulled himself onto his boat with a long string of silver fish tied to his waist and guzzled a drink of water from a plastic jug. He smiled broadly at the Boston Whaler. “What you looking for, mon?”