Discovery (9780545628112)

by Korman, Gordon

  A gasp escaped Reardon, which Marina extinguished with a stern look.

  Cutter spoke up carefully. “I’m telling you this now, because I know how embarrassed you were when word got around the institute about that German plane. Guys, you just found the anchor of the Queen Anne’s Revenge.”

  Adriana gawked at him. “Blackbeard’s ship?”

  “Don’t you remember the movie? Harrison Ford played the diver who spotted the anchor buried in the mud.”

  “You’re not saying — ” Star’s eyes narrowed. “Another film prop?”

  Cutter nodded. “It took the location people three weeks to plant it deep enough on the bottom.”

  “That anchor wasn’t in mud,” Kaz pointed out. “It was in coral.”

  “Coral grows fast,” put in Marina. “Especially on something hard like an anchor. How old is that movie — seven or eight years?”

  “But the Queen Anne’s Revenge didn’t sink in the Caribbean,” Adriana pointed out. “It went aground off the Carolinas. Why shoot the film here?”

  Cutter shrugged. “On-screen, water is water. You can’t tell the latitude by looking at it. Hollywood people like to work where the sea’s nice and warm and crystal clear. It’s easier and cheaper.”

  Dante regarded his anchor chip with chagrin. “Worthless.” As he reared back to pitch the black disk into the sea, Reardon bulled forward and snatched it out of his hand. “Mind if I hang on to this?” he asked. “I’m a big Harrison Ford fan.”

  Star looked disgusted. “Is there anything else we should know about before we make total idiots out of ourselves? Did Steven Spielberg re-create the lost continent of Atlantis over by the oil rigs?”

  Marina laughed. “Don’t be embarrassed. You kids are doing beautifully, and you’re turning into top-notch divers. Don’t let yourselves get obsessed with sunken anchors or crazy discoveries. You’ll just end up disappointed.”

  “Right,” agreed Cutter. “Anything of value in these waters has been salvaged decades ago. There’s nothing left to find down there.”

  Throughout the conversation, Chris Reardon did not take his eyes off the small black disk.

  11 August 1665

  The Griffin’s store of fruit had long since gone rotten, and was maggot infested besides.

  “Eat it, young Samuel,” ordered York, the ship’s barber. “The maggots too. They’ll keep the teeth in your head.”

  Samuel closed his eyes and took a tiny bite of the moldy apple. He could feel the wormy insects moving on his tongue, and quickly swallowed, choking back his nausea.

  As barber, York was in charge of much more than cutting hair. He was the Griffin’s sole medical man, apothecary, and dentist.

  “Scurvy takes the teeth first,” he lectured. “Then the mind. Then your life.”

  It was true. At the start of the crossing, each crewman aboard the ship had been allotted a small quantity of fruit. Those who had not jealously hoarded their shares were now suffering deeply from the disease. Toothless, their bodies bent from pain, they stumbled around the barque, struggling to perform their duties. Many more had given up trying, and hung in their berths, eyes wide with vacant stares. Of two and eighty seamen and four and thirty Viscount survivors, only sixty men — barely half — remained. Now, nearly four months out of England, the rest had succumbed to scurvy, fever, and the relentless assault of the Atlantic. The gut-wrenching stink of death joined the mix of overpowering smells that made up the reek of the ship.

  The funerals were becoming commonplace — two or three a day now. Normally, a body would be wrapped in a shroud for burial at sea. But sewing the shrouds was the office of the sail maker, and Evans was long gone. Samuel was struggling to take over the old man’s duties, but it was all he could do to keep the Griffin’s patchwork canvas aloft. So the dead were dispatched naked to their final resting places.

  “It makes no difference to the sharks,” was Captain Blade’s opinion. “A meal’s a meal, wrapped or no.”

  The cruel seaman never missed a flogging, yet never attended a single funeral. “A captain has more important things on his plate than feeding fish,” he told Samuel.

  An hour did not pass in which Samuel neglected to curse himself for saving his master’s life on the ratlines. His hatred of the captain grew stronger, not weaker, as the barque approached the New World.

  But even as resentment swelled inside Samuel, James Blade had begun to warm to the cabin boy who had stopped his fall that fateful day.

  On the surface, there was no difference. The captain continued to treat him as a slave who was unworthy of even the slightest consideration. But it was Blade who had ordered the barber to keep an eye out for the young seaman the crew now called Lucky.

  Never mind that the men of the Griffin avoided York like an evil spirit. He was most often seen covered in gore, sawing an unfortunate sailor’s leg off. His newfound “friendship” with Samuel only served to make the boy feel like even more of an outcast. And he had James Blade to thank for it.

  Samuel’s feelings for the captain were not helped by the information he acquired on bailing duty in the ship’s bilge. As he battled the pumps and the stench, he overheard some sailors chortling over the day when the hold would be piled high with gold and silver. Soon, they said, the Griffin would wallow low in the water from a cargo of plundered Spanish treasure, and all aboard her would be rich.

  Samuel pounded back to the captain’s quarters as soon as his shift was over, ignoring fatigue and the cramping of his muscles. He found Blade at the small desk, examining his rutter — the secret diary of a ship’s pilot who had sailed this route before. No map, no chart, no instrument was as vital to a safe voyage as a good rutter.

  “Sir!” he cried. Distraught, he related what he had heard from the pumpers in the hold. “It can’t be so, can it, Captain? Tell me we’re not — common pirates!”

  “Pirates?!” The bone handle of the snake whip came down on Samuel’s head with devastating, murderous force. The last thing he saw before the captain’s cabin went dark was James Blade, his cheeks suffused with purple rage.

  Samuel awoke to a stinging pain so great it seared his very soul. He was in the barber’s surgery. York was pouring seawater over a bloody gash on the boy’s crown.

  “A friendly piece of advice, young Samuel,” the man said, a trace of humor in his voice. “Never say ‘pirate’ to Captain Blade. A right good thing it is that he’s taken a liking to you.”

  Samuel tried to sit up, but the torment was too much. “We are pirates,” he mumbled bitterly. “Thieves. Murderers too, probably.”

  “Listen to me, boy,” York ordered. “We’re patriots, with the full backing of the king of England. There are papers on board signed by the Merry Monarch himself in proper London. They give us the right — no, the responsibility — to attack and disrupt enemy shipping in the Indies.”

  Samuel frowned. “How does it help England if we steal their treasure?”

  “Gold buys ships, boy. And trains soldiers, and equips them with muskets and cannon,” the barber explained. “We’re at war, Lucky, and wealth is power. The Royal Navy can’t waste a ship on every stinking fever-hole in the New World. That’s our lot — the patriots, the privateers! We’re legal as a magistrate, flush with letters of marque to raid the scurvy Dutch.”

  “But — ” Samuel was confused. “But they were talking about Spanish treasure, not Dutch.”

  “True that is,” York agreed. “And a beastly nuisance to us that His Majesty, God bless him, called a truce with the cursed Spaniard. But the ocean is large, and the courtly affairs of Europe far distant. Mistakes are made, you see my point? A Spanish ship looks much like a Dutch ship in the heat of battle, and treasure is treasure, no matter whose dead hand you pry it from.”

  He put an arm around the cabin boy’s shoulders, and Samuel winced from the stench of decay on his blood-spattered smock. The barber’s pockmarked face was barely an inch from his own, his breath as foul as the rest of him. “An
d in this part of the world, Lucky, no treasure shines as bright as Spanish gold.”

  Kaz stumbled through the darkness of 4:45 A.M. along the boardwalk that connected the Poseidon compound to the small marina. There was little moon. Only a handful of stars flickered through the overcast to light his way.

  A dull clunk — his dive bag, falling to the dock. As he bent down, groping through the gloom, his knife slipped from its scabbard and planted itself with a boing tip first in the weathered planking. It could just as easily have been in Kaz’s foot.

  With a groan that was overwhelmed by a yawn, he gathered up his gear. Hockey players lugged a lot of equipment too. Why was he so discombobulated this morning?

  “Kaz! That you?”

  Dante beckoned from the harbor lights. Kaz gathered up his things and hurried over. “Where’s the boat?”

  “Gone,” the boy told him.

  “You’re kidding!” Squinting, he took inventory of the various research vessels and launches that bobbed by the dock. There was no Ponce de León.

  “Maybe it’s in for service,” suggested Dante. “Like, change the oil — ”

  “Rotate the tires,” Kaz added sarcastically.

  “You know what I mean. Boat stuff.”

  “What boat stuff?” Star came into the light, her dive bag draped over her shoulder.

  Adriana was right behind her. She did a quick scan of the harbor. “Not again. I thought all this was behind us.”

  “It could be a maintenance problem,” put in Dante.

  “Yeah, well, I want to hear that from Cutter.” Star dumped her gear on the dock and marched back up the boardwalk toward the institute. Her limp added an ill-fitting wobble to her almost military gait, but the others followed without comment. All too well they recognized the look of determination on the slight girl’s face.

  Only Kaz ventured a discouraging word. “You know, if the boat’s being serviced, Cutter’s probably grabbing some extra sleep.”

  “I don’t care if he’s in a coma.” Star strode purposefully up to the small cabin and rapped on the door.

  The team leader wasn’t home, so they tried the main lab area, where Cutter, Marina, and Reardon shared a small office.

  “Tad?” The door was slightly ajar. Star pushed it open and turned on the light.

  The room was deserted, the desk hidden under piles of maps and data printouts. The only other object on it was a drinking glass filled with what appeared to be water. In the bottom sat a small metal disk.

  “Blackbeard’s anchor,” said Dante sarcastically. “Coming soon to a theater near you.” But when he took a step toward it, he noticed a sharp chemical smell coming from the clear liquid. And when he peered into the glass itself, he saw that his artifact had changed.

  The strong solution had eaten away the black coating. Now the piece gleamed shiny silver. Even more amazing, the thing was stamped with a design — a worn pattern, perhaps a coat of arms.

  Dante was thunderstruck. This wasn’t part of the anchor at all. It was a coin!

  He turned to the others. “Guys — is that what I think it is?”

  Kaz peered into the glass. “Silver, right?”

  “Definitely,” said Star. “It’s pretty crude, but I guarantee that’s some kind of money.”

  Adriana stepped forward, eyes alight. “Not just money. That’s a piece of eight!”

  Dante stared at her. “A piece of what?”

  “Spanish money,” she explained excitedly. “From hundreds of years ago! They have lots of it at the British Museum. In the seventeenth century, this silver piece was the most common coin in the world. Eight reals — a piece of eight.”

  Dante perked up. “Is it worth anything?”

  “What do you think?” Star asked sarcastically. “It’s a three-hundred-year-old coin.”

  “It’s living history,” Adriana amended. “This coin was made from silver pulled out of the mines of South America by descendants of the Incas. You can’t put a price on that.”

  “Fifty bucks?” prompted Dante. “A hundred? More? Man, I almost chucked it overboard!”

  Kaz’s eyes narrowed. “But Reardon wouldn’t let you. He practically leaped across the boat to get it off you.”

  “He knew,” Star agreed bitterly. “And so did Cutter. That anchor wasn’t any movie prop. We found something, and they’re trying to steal it from us.”

  “We’ll steal it back!” Dante decided.

  “Brilliant,” approved Kaz. “And what about the anchor down there? You can’t just hide that in your underwear drawer. We have to get it on official record that this find is ours. Let’s go to Gallagher.”

  * * *

  When Dr. Geoffrey Gallagher arrived at his office promptly at eight that morning, he found the four teenage interns fast asleep on his doorstep.

  “Good morning,” he said loudly enough to startle them awake. He noticed with some annoyance that his cameraman was filming the four as they scrambled to their feet.

  Kaz found his voice first. “Dr. Gallagher, we have a problem. We found this coin — ”

  “A Spanish piece of eight — ” Adriana put in.

  “An anchor too,” added Dante. “I spotted it first. I thought it broke off the anchor, but it turned out to be a coin — ”

  Star cut him off. “But Chris Reardon stole it — ”

  “Well, we gave it away,” Kaz took up the narrative, “but we didn’t know it was a coin then. We thought it was part of a movie prop — ”

  It was the truth, but it was coming out in a scattered jumble of half sentences and interruptions as the groggy four struggled to give voice to their disorganized thoughts.

  Gallagher grimaced in perplexity. At least, he noted, the cameraman had stopped filming these babbling youngsters. It was obvious that they had nothing to add to a scientific documentary.

  He pulled himself up to his full six feet. “What you young interns don’t seem to understand is that this institute is actually dozens of independent projects, headed by dozens of different scientists. I make it possible for these projects to function, but I have no authority within the projects themselves.”

  They looked blank, so he simplified his language. “Your boss is Mr. Cutter, not me. If you have anything to report, you report it to him.”

  “But that’s the whole problem — ” Kaz began.

  At that moment, Dr. Gallagher noticed that the camera’s red light was on again. He gave his most public smile. “You young people are the future of the oceanographic community. You are an asset to Poseidon.”

  And he and his cameraman entered the office, shutting the door in their faces.

  Angrily, Kaz reached for the handle.

  “Forget it,” grumbled Star. “The guy’s a dolt. All he cares about is looking good on video.”

  Discouraged, they straggled back to the dock to retrieve their diving gear.

  Dante sat down on a weathered piling. “Some summer this turned out to be,” he growled. “I feel like getting on the next catamaran to Martinique and the first flight home. I should tell them to stick their internship. It’s not like I’m pumping out thousands of great pictures.”

  “I’d leave too,” Adriana said quietly, “but there’s nowhere to go. My parents are in Saint- Tropez or Corfu or wherever the in place is to go this year.”

  Star folded her arms in front of her. “I’m not a quitter.”

  “None of us are quitters,” Kaz retorted. “We’re just talking, okay? Don’t tell me you’re not disappointed with how this internship’s been going.”

  “I should be the most disappointed of anybody,” grumbled Dante. “Technically, that’s my coin they ripped off. I’m the one who found the anchor.”

  Star looked at him curiously. “There’s another thing I’ve been wondering about. How did you see that? And you spotted the plane too. How come you see things other people don’t?”

  Dante looked away. “Maybe I have better eyesight than the rest of you guys.”


  “You’ve got terrible eyesight,” Adriana put in. “You think the ocean is purple.”

  “No, I don’t,” the photographer defended himself. “That was a darkroom error.”

  “Or those scuba tanks,” Kaz persisted. “You thought a red sticker was a green sticker.”

  “I got confused — ” Dante managed weakly.

  “Between red and green?”

  When it finally came out, it cascaded from him in an avalanche. “Don’t you get it? To me, red is green, and green is red, and they’re both gray! I’m color-blind! The great photographic prodigy is living inside a black-and-white movie!”

  The others were stunned.

  Kaz was first to find his voice. “How does that help you pick out an anchor buried in coral?”

  “You guys look at a reef and see a billion different colors. But to me, it’s all a super-detailed charcoal sketch. I focus on shading and texture, rough and smooth, raised and flat. To you, that anchor was invisible. But to me, the shape under the coral was as obvious as a person under a blanket. I couldn’t see it directly, but I knew it was there.”

  Adriana spoke up. “But why would you take color pictures if you can’t see color? How could you ever hope to get it right?”

  Dante shrugged unhappily. “I don’t know. I guess I figured I could learn to fake it or something — connect certain shading to certain colors. But it’s no use. Some handicap for a photographer, huh?”

  “That’s not a handicap,” Star said sharply. “That’s a gift. You see what other people can’t. Poor you.”

  As they sat on the dock, feeling sorry for themselves, the sound of an approaching engine caught their attention. It was the Hernando Cortés, with Captain Vanover at the wheel. He tooted the horn twice and waved at them.

  Adriana raised an eyebrow. “You know,” she began thoughtfully, “Gallagher won’t listen to us, but what about the captain? He always takes us seriously. Maybe we should tell him about the coin.”