by Rachel Lee
“Where’s Tam?” she asked, but he was too far away and she couldn’t read his lips. She went back to the stern and found a dry patch of bench to sit on. “Where’s Tam?” she asked again.
“Probably still following his search pattern.”
“Why’d you stop?”
He perched on the other seat and grinned at her while he toweled his hair dry, but he didn’t say anything.
Hope began to grow in her, and with it came unbearable anticipation. “Dugan? Don’t tease me.”
He shrugged, tossed the towel aside and reached down for his belt. Hanging from it was a large black pouch. He disconnected it from the belt and handed it to her.
“You might want to take that below before you open it.”
“Why?”
“Less chance of an accident.”
Rising, she hurried forward and down the ladder to the galley. Dugan was right behind her, and he switched on as many lights as he could while she struggled to open the pouch. Her fingers were too eager, making a hash of it, and finally Dugan took it from her.
“Here, let me,” he said, his grin growing even wider. He pulled the pouch open, then upended it on the table.
Veronica stopped breathing as she looked at the pile of disks, some of them green or gray with oxidation, some crusted with calciferous deposits. Coins, she thought, her heart slamming.
Then she saw the gold. It glinted still, undamaged by its sojourn at sea. With a trembling hand she reached out and lifted it, turning it so the light would highlight the pattern on it.
“Oh my God,” she said, lifting her eyes slowly to Dugan’s. “This is a royal. A Spanish eight-escudo. My God, do you know how rare these are? One of these would fetch more than a hundred thousand dollars on the open market.”
Dugan sat with a thud. “You’re kidding. That little thing?”
“That little thing.”
They sat staring at it for a few moments. “God,” sad Dugan. “It’s hard to believe.”
She didn’t really hear him, because she wasn’t looking at him, but she picked up on the sense of what he said. She was more interested in searching for some indication of the coin’s age.
But then she flipped it over and gasped. “Sixteen ninety-two,” she said, lifting her gaze to his face. “It’s old enough.”
Dugan’s grin split his face. “Maybe you aren’t so crazy after all, lady. What about the rest of them?”
She set the gold coin down and touched the others with her fingertip, sorting them. “Copper and silver, it looks like. Valuable, but not as valuable. I’ll need to wash them in an acid bath to clean them.”
“We can’t do that here, can we?”
“I didn’t bring the stuff. I didn’t want to disturb the site too much.”
“You mean you don’t want to start digging stuff up?”
She shook her head. “We’ve got to do this right. That means surveying the whole area around this find before we do any more. Then, when we get ready to start excavating, we’ll need to be able to document what we do, mark our finds, handle discoveries appropriately so they don’t deteriorate . . .”
His eyebrows lifted. “We’re not just on a pillaging expedition for one item then?”
“God, no! This is a major archaeological find. I may want to get my hands on that mask, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to destroy the rest of it looking. We have to do this responsibly.”
Something in his face softened a little, and he nodded. “Sounds good to me. But a word of advice?”
“What’s that?”
“I’d put that royal someplace very safe. And I wouldn’t mention it to Tam.”
Her heart skipped. “You don’t trust him?”
“I trust him plenty. But that’s a hell of a lot of temptation in one tiny little package.”
She nodded slowly; she could understand his point. “Where should I hide it?”
“Stuff it in with your panties or your bras.” He winked, making her blush. “I don’t know. Just find a good place in your cabin. He won’t be looking for it if we don’t tell him about it, so it’ll be safe anywhere.”
Taking his advice, she tucked the royal in her breast pocket. “The rest of this stuff is pretty valuable, too. There might be silver reals in there . . . they can be worth thousands.”
“Maybe it would just be best if we didn’t discuss the potential value of these coins.”
“Okay. That makes sense.”
“The less anyone knows about it, the safer we are.”
Her breath caught again, and her gaze drifted down to the pile of tarnished coins. Her father had warned her about this possibility, but she’d dismissed it. After all, she’d been on plenty of digs where no one tried to steal their discoveries.
But the reality of the value of the gold coin in her pocket, and the fact that Dugan evidently felt there might be some risk in this, made the possibility seem a whole lot more real.
“Better yet,” said Dugan. “Hide all but a couple of these coins. We’ll tell Tam I found one or two copper ones. The less anyone knows about this, the better until we can get a crowd of people working on it with us.”
“But why keep it a secret if we’re only going to tell a bunch of people anyway?”
His gaze seemed to bore into her. “Safety in numbers. Until you’re ready to bring numbers out here, we keep mum. That’s it.”
Another chill ran down her spine, and she found herself thinking of her mother. “You don’t think someone would kill over this?”
He shrugged. “Probably not. But they sure might horn in. Unless you want to see a dozen boats out here getting in your way, the less we say the better. And that includes Tam.”
Just then, there was a thud from the deck of the boat.
“Must be Tam,” Dugan said. “Put the coins away, except for a couple. I’ll go see if he found anything.”
Veronica went to do as he’d suggested, leaving only a couple of green-tarnished copper coins on the table. The thought flitted across her mind that Dugan was being paranoid, and that they were hardly going to be able to keep the secret from Tam for long.
Then she wondered why in the world she should trust Dugan any more than Tam.
Just as she was mounting the ladder to the deck, Dugan stuck his head through the hatch.
“Tam thinks he found a cannon.”
Chapter 13
“I’m going back with him to check it out.”
Veronica forgot all about the coins, forgot about Dugan’s paranoia and what might happen if word got out. Excitement filled her and she rushed up the rest of the ladder and onto the deck. Dugan was pulling on his fins again, and his air tank. Tam mounted a fresh tank into his harness, then pulled it on. He grinned at Veronica and said something.
“What?” God, how she hated this.
Dugan turned to her. “He says it won’t be long. We’re going right to it.”
“Okay.” She managed a smile for Tam, who winked and gave her an “okay” sign with his thumb and forefinger. And Veronica found herself thinking that there might be some advantage to learning sign language. She’d been avoiding it, wanting to appear as normal as possible, and besides, the counselor who’d worked with her had advised her that learning sign was extremely difficult for adults.
But a beard or moustache wouldn’t prevent her from reading sign the way Tam’s moustache kept her from reading his lips. On the other hand, Tam didn’t know Ameslan anyway. There was no way, she thought with sudden glumness, no way she would ever be able to talk to some people.
But before she could sink too far into self-pity, Dugan and Tam moved to the diving platform and jumped into the water. A cannon. Maybe they’d found a cannon.
Hope suddenly filled her, so strong that she could hardly stand it. She found herself crossing her fingers like a child, and she finally gave in and crossed her arms, too.
The soft swells were growing a little bigger, she noticed, and a glance upward showed her that the little fluf
fs of popcorn had turned into large, puffy cumulus clouds. Rain? She hoped not. She wanted to stay right there and survey the entire area around them, because in her heart of hearts she was convinced they’d found the Alcantara.
Somewhere below them lay the rotting timbers and precious cargo of a ship that had vanished three hundred years ago. A ship that had borne her ancestors.
Possibly, she thought with an unexpected catch in her throat, the bones of the priestess lay beneath her. She might only be thirty feet from her final resting place. It amazed her how strongly that affected her.
But this whole exploration had made her emotional, she realized. It wasn’t like any other archaeological expedition she’d ever gone on. This one meant something to her in terms of her own family history.
It was almost as if a circle were closing at last, a circle made up of the female line stretching from an ancient priestess to her, spanning the centuries. And it was, she realized for the first time, so incredibly appropriate that she was using her inheritance to fund this exploration. The fortune, after all, had been passed down through generations of the Bernal and Escobar families until it had come to rest in the hands of their sole descendant, Renata Coleridge. In the hands of her only child, Veronica.
It was as if some cosmic plan were coming to fruition.
Then she cautioned herself not to be so fanciful and mystical about this. For heaven’s sake, she didn’t even know if they’d actually found the Alcantara.
Twenty minutes passed while she watched the cumulus pile higher and the day grow hazier. Finally, she went to check the barometer, but it was still holding steady from this morning. For now there was no problem. Whatever was happening overhead was probably localized.
Finally, when she was just about ready to jump in the water to ease her impatience, Tam and Dugan bobbed to the surface a few feet from the boat. Dugan grabbed the ladder, spat his regulator out of his mouth, pulled his mask back and called to her, “It’s a cannon. It’s a by-God cannon.”
Tam yanked out his own regulator and let out a wahoo. The rest of what he crowed was lost on Veronica.
Dugan pulled himself up the ladder to the platform, then stepped onto the deck. Tam wasn’t far behind. The two of them shed their gear, then Tam began doing a little jig. Dugan laughed at him, then did a strange thing.
He turned to Veronica and held out his arms.
Heedless of the water still dripping from his wet suit, she practically launched herself at him. He caught her and swung her around in circles, both of them laughing. She knew that moment, that very instant, was going to be etched in crystalline clarity in her memory forever. The clouds above, the aquamarine of the water, the way the sun prickled on her skin. And the way Dugan’s arms felt around her.
Tam started clapping his hands, then broke into something that resembled an end zone victory dance. Dugan set her on her feet and gave her a high five. She returned it willingly, feeling a smile that was stretching her face from ear to ear.
“We did it,” Dugan told her, catching her hand with his. “We did it. And I gotta tell you, Veronica, I never thought we’d find a thing.”
“I was beginning to doubt it myself.”
His eyes were dancing. “I guess it’s pretty clear now. There has to be a ship down there somewhere.”
“What did the cannon look like?”
Tam said something.
Dugan turned back to Veronica. “He’s going to go back and take some pictures a little later. Right now we’ve got the mud all stirred up from digging around. Let’s go below, and I’ll draw you a picture of what we saw, okay?”
She nodded, then waited as he stripped his wet suit. Beneath it he was wearing swim trunks, and at that moment in time, with all the joy she was feeling, she thought he was as beautiful as any Roman god. Then he pulled on an oversize T-shirt and the image was lost.
He stowed his equipment, then signaled her to follow him below. Tam remained behind, still wearing his wet suit, busy switching his regulator to another bottle of air.
The lounge seemed dim after the brightness outside. Dugan pulled back some of the short white curtains to let more light in through the portholes, then grabbed Veronica’s legal pad and her gold Cross pencil and sat at the table.
She sat across from him, waiting impatiently while he flipped to a blank sheet of paper and began to sketch.
“I’m not the world’s best artist,” he said, catching her eye. “But this I think I can do.”
She couldn’t repress a smile. “Hurry. Just hurry.”
He obliged, drawing a long cylindrical object, larger on one end than the other, that was mostly buried in sand. He added a few details, suggesting a wide ridge around the mouth of the cylinder and belling. At the other end, the carabel was unmistakable.
“It’s a cannon,” she said, her heart leaping.
He nodded and looked at her, making sure she was watching his lips. “No doubt of it.”
“What kind of shape is it in?”
“It looks pretty rusty and I didn’t want to scrape any of it away to see what was underneath.”
“No, oh no! I’m glad you didn’t do that. There are special treatments for getting the rust off without damaging the cannon. Besides, not knowing how badly rusted it is . . . well, you could tap on it and watch it disintegrate.”
“I don’t think so. Not this one. It was buried in more than a foot of sand, so I imagine Tam must have dinged it a few times while digging it out. So what now, boss? Do we raise it? Not that I think we can without some additional equipment. Those old cannons weigh between two and four tons, don’t they?”
“No, let it stay. I don’t want to disturb anything yet. First we continue our survey of the area, until we have a pretty good map of how the wreck scattered, and where we need to look. Then we’ll go over it with metal detectors and see if we pick up anything else.”
“And then?”
“I want to check any metallic finds for evidence that this is the Alcantara. If it is, I’ll set up an excavation.”
“You mean hire more people and all that?”
She nodded. “And probably a bigger boat with some serious salvage equipment. Depending on what else we find out here, anyway.”
“Okay.”
“You look disappointed.”
He shrugged, then said, “Maybe I am a little.”
“Why?”
“Because . . . well, because today was just so damn much fun.” He flashed her a wry smile. “A real adventure. I don’t know why, but it won’t seem as exciting with a dozen divers and a big boat. Maybe because it’ll seem more like a commercial enterprise.”
It was the child in him speaking, and she knew it. But the child in her identified with what he was saying. It would have been nice if they could have kept the crew limited to the three of them, and kept their secret. But she didn’t see how that was possible, not if she was going to do a serious excavation with an eye to the archaeological value of the site. If she were just treasure hunting, that would be different, but . . .
“You know the state insists this be done right. We can’t just go around digging things up and keeping only what we want. We have to consider the archaeological value of the site.”
“I know that. But it sure is fun this way.”
She almost agreed, but then had to laugh. “Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been bored to death for weeks now.”
“That changed radically, didn’t it?”
She didn’t answer, but pulled his sketch of the cannon closer to her. “You’re sure it’s iron?”
“Yes.”
She looked down at it, studying what he had drawn. “Then it had to have been a cargo ship.”
He said something that sounded inquisitive, so she assumed he was asking why.
“Spanish warships carried bronze guns almost exclusively. Anyway, iron guns would fit with what I know about the Alcantara. Apparently she had picked up a shipment of goods from Manila that had been delivered ’round the
Cape and transferred to her at Veracruz. While there, she also traded ballast for gold bars out of Peru.”
“Wouldn’t she have been with a fleet, carrying that much gold?”
“That’s the interesting part. She wasn’t. There were two other cargo ships sailing with her, but the word was all that they carried were textiles and spices. Apparently this shipment of gold was something unusual. And from what Bernal recorded in his letter, it was hush-hush. Nobody knew it was on board until the captain wouldn’t let them dump ballast to lighten the Alcantara when the seas became rough.”
“Geez.” He rubbed his chin and considered the image. “Wouldn’t you like to know why they made a secret of the gold? Maybe somebody was stealing it.”
“I’ve wondered about that. Considering how it was being shipped, it certainly might have been contraband. But we’ll know that if we find any of it.”
“How so?”
“Contraband wasn’t usually marked with all the stamps of the legitimate bars.”
He shook his head slowly. “It must have been such a temptation back then. All that gold being plundered from every corner of the Americas. Why wouldn’t a conquistador or an administrator figure he could siphon off a little for himself with nobody the wiser?”
“But then he had to get it back home where it would do some good for him. Imagine how many people he’d have to pay off to get it there. Unless he carried it personally.”
His eyes took on a gleam. “I wonder if we’ll find out what your conquistador was carrying apart from a mask, a wife, and a child.”
She often wondered the same thing. “We probably won’t be able to tell.”
“I know, but I’m still going to wonder. It’s more fun that way.”
Tam took the pictures with the underwater camera. By then it was late afternoon, but they decided to continue with the survey. All of them were high on the excitement of the discovery.
But that evening, after they’d towed the magnetometer probe for another three hours without finding anything, Veronica sat alone in her cabin, thinking about the coins they’d found.
