by Alex Archer
“All the more reason to press on as soon as we can,” Annja told her. “Marcos is doing well. I’m sure he’ll be able to travel in the morning. How far are we from our destination?”
“Half a day’s hike, maybe a little more.”
“Then we should have some answers by midday tomorrow. Hang in there, Claire. We’ll know soon enough. I’m sure he’s all right.”
But she wasn’t sure, not really, and as she walked away she wondered just what they had gotten themselves into. The treasure was worth millions and that kind of wealth attracted more than its fair share of unscrupulous people who would stop at nothing to possess it for themselves.
Given the events of that morning, Annja thought the chances of finding Dr. Knowles alive and well were swiftly dwindling. Marcos’s captors had clearly intended for him to perish at the hands of the jaguar they’d lured to his side with the fresh blood from that wild pig, and it wasn’t such a stretch to think that they would have been equally ruthless in dealing with Knowles.
She hoped there was a simple explanation for why Knowles had lost contact with his wife, she really did, but after today, she wasn’t going to put money on it.
* * *
THANKFULLY, THE NIGHT PASSED without incident and by midmorning Marcos announced that he felt fit enough to travel. They quickly broke camp, packed their gear and then pulled out the map in order to check their position relative to that of their destination.
When asked about the details of their destination, Claire pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to Annja. The paper was an email, sent by Dr. Knowles, noting the discovery of an “iron-banded sea chest” inside a “narrow cave that showed signs of previous excavation.” The email gave GPS coordinates for the specific location and noted that the team was planning to begin excavating the rear of the cave the morning after the email was sent.
Annja memorized the coordinates and was about to hand the email back to Claire when the header caught her attention. She let her gaze flick over it and saw that the email had not been sent to Claire, but rather to a Matt Davis at the Science Channel. For a moment she was confused—Who is Matt Davis? Why wasn’t the email sent to Claire?—but then realized that the Science Channel, a cable television channel about twice the size of her own, had probably financed Knowles’s expedition. Knowles’s email was probably just one of the many progress updates required by such an agreement. Heaven knew she’d made enough of them herself over the years.
She made note of the name.
If someone had leaked information about Knowles’s expedition, then Davis was as much a possible source for that as anyone else at this point. There was nothing she could do about it right now, but she had every intention of tracking down that leak when all was said and done.
Satisfied that they were literally on the right track, Annja led the way into the jungle once more. Gone was the casual atmosphere that had governed their first day of travel. Now all of them were constantly checking the jungle around them, knowing their enemies were out there, somewhere, and not wanting to be surprised a second time.
Annja concentrated on getting the group where they needed to go with a minimum of delay.
Their course took them out of the lowland jungle and into an area of slightly higher elevation away from the coast as they began to make their way into the foothills leading to Mount Yglesias on the far side of the island.
Several times during the morning’s journey they came to places where the trail split off in different directions and each time Annja found Knowles’s trademark K carved into a nearby tree or scratched on a rock. Annja knew their enemies might have noticed the markings and might have gone so far as to alter them in an attempt to throw them off the trail, so she made a point of checking each one against the GPS signal to ensure that they were always accurate.
Better safe than sorry.
They took a short break to replenish the fluids they were losing in the high humidity and then pushed on. The sooner they reached their destination, the sooner their questions would be answered.
Or so they thought.
Reality, however, had another surprise in store for them.
Knowles and his team had made camp just south of a long, winding ridgeline of dark rock that rose out of the jungle like the blade of a knife, neatly bisecting the island in two. They had cut a clearing out of the undergrowth and erected their tents in three orderly rows with wide footpaths between and a communal mess tent at the far end.
Annja was surprised. Most expedition camps were disorderly affairs, with tents erected hither and yon for no particular reason at all. It was almost as if, in reaction to the necessary order and precision of their daily work, the archaeologists needed an outlet for the chaotic side of their souls and a haphazard camp was one way of allowing for that.
But not this camp. No, this one was laid out with almost military precision.
It was also completely deserted. They searched the camp, top to bottom, and didn’t find a single soul. There was an empty feeling in the air, like a circus after it closed for the night and all the marks had gone home and the lights had gone dark. It was beyond empty, if that made any kind of sense, and Annja knew that her fears had been right—something bad had happened here.
“How many people did you say your husband had with him?” she asked as they walked between the rows of silent tents, peering into their interiors and wondering what had happened to them all.
“Fifteen,” Claire replied. “Nine scientists and grad students plus six porters to help carry the gear and anything they recovered from the dig.”
Fifteen people.
Vanished.
22
Cave of the Unknown
Isla del Coco
They had reached their destination and were no closer to finding the answers they needed than they’d been days before back in Puntarenas. Annja found that totally unacceptable.
“All right, let’s spread out and find the dig site. Perhaps we’ll get some answers there,” she said, and the four of them got to work.
It didn’t take long.
The cave mentioned in the email, the one where Knowles had discovered the seaman’s chest, turned out to be less than a hundred yards away at the foot of the ridge. The entrance was low to the ground and very narrow, more a fissure in the rock than an actual tunnel opening. If they had come this way several days ago, they probably would have walked right past; it wasn’t immediately obvious that the opening led anywhere. But given the amount of effort Knowles and his crew had spent pulling back the vegetation surrounding the entrance, it was clear that there was something worth exploring here.
Annja slipped off her pack and dug around inside until she found her headlamp. She slipped it on, tightening the Velcro strap to keep it from sliding around on her forehead, and then triggered the LED light to test it. Satisfied, she crouched down and peered inside the opening.
The entrance was narrow, yes, but it grew into a slightly wider tunnel about three feet past the entrance, and she could see the mouth of what she took to be a small cavern roughly six feet after that.
It would be a tight squeeze at first, but then she should be free and clear.
Not any worse than some of the other things you’ve done on a dig in the past.
She turned to Claire and the others and said, “I’m going in to have a quick look around. If there’s anything worth seeing, I’ll whistle and that will be your signal to come in after me.”
“All of us?”
Annja nodded. “Safety in numbers and all that.”
The truth of the matter was that one guard wasn’t going to do all that much good against the kind of thing that could make an entire camp full of people disappear, so why leave someone alone and vulnerable? Better to have the entire team together in the same place to make a concerted effort to deal wi
th any threats that might arise.
“When it comes to this kind of stuff, you’re the boss,” Claire said.
Annja gave her a grin and then turned, took a deep breath and slid into the cave mouth on her belly. Her headlamp illuminated the way ahead in a wide arc that made it easy to see where she was headed. For the first few moments she was very aware of the nearness of the rock around her, pressing against her stomach and back, but she did what she could to put it out of her mind and continue forward, one foot at a time.
After the first few feet, the tunnel opened up enough to allow her to get up off her belly and move along in a crouch, but it wasn’t until she reached the main cavern ahead of her that she could actually stand upright.
Her light spilled out ahead of her, illuminating the cavern. It was bigger than she’d expected and longer than it was wide. If she had to guess she’d put it in the neighborhood of fifty by seventy-five feet, with the ceiling at least twenty feet above her head.
The rear wall of the cavern had partially collapsed at some point in the past, and it was around and amid the rockfall from that collapse that Dr. Knowles had focused his excavation. The area in front of the wall had been sectioned off into a grid with ropes and stakes, allowing the archaeologists to properly record the original location and position of any artifacts that they pulled from the earth.
To the left of the grid and running parallel to the side wall of the cavern stood several wood-framed sifters, used to sift for smaller artifacts through the earth brought up during the excavation. Several temporary tables, made from semirigid pieces of plastic unfurled across packing crates and bolted down at the corners, stood beside the shifters and held half a dozen artifact boxes.
Inside the cavern, the heavy, cloying scent of the jungle gave way to the dusty smell of rock and dirt. It was quiet, too; all that rock blocked the very present noise of the jungle, reinforcing the sense that she’d just stepped inside a long-sealed tomb. Annja hoped it wasn’t a literal tomb and also that she wouldn’t find the bodies of the missing archaeologists stacked in the corner somewhere by persons unknown.
She stood in the cavern entrance for another moment or two and then decided that nothing was going to come charging out of the cave at her. Satisfied, she crossed the floor of the cave to reach the excavation proper.
It seemed as if they’d been working hard for some time, given the amount of activity happening. More than half of the grid squares had been excavated, some to a depth of eight feet or more. A glance at the artifact boxes on the table showed a small but growing collection of items unearthed from the dig—from musket balls to brass hinges and even a few gold coins. A partially reassembled sea chest stood on a table off to the side, and Annja wondered if that was the one Knowles had emailed about.
A cool breeze slipped across her face in a gentle caress, catching her attention. She turned, looking for the source. She was too far from the entrance she’d come through for that to be the cause....
The tunnel mouth was to the side of the rockfall, behind a freestanding shelf that blocked a direct view of it. It was wider than the one she’d entered through; she would have no trouble standing upright in it.
It extended past the reach of her light.
Curiosity beckoned.
She hesitated, considered giving the signal and having the others join her, but she was caught up in the thrill of discovery and decided that making certain the passageway was secure before bringing in the others was the more prudent thing to do.
A closer look showed her that the original tunnel had been blocked by the same rockfall that Knowles’s team had been excavating; the current opening was considerably smaller than the width of the passage just beyond it. Marks in the earth around the opening showed where the others had widened it, creating a hole wide enough for a person to slip through, and that was precisely what Annja did at that point.
Once on the other side, she adjusted her headlamp, then called her sword to hand.
She made her way along the tunnel, cautious of the uneven floor beneath her feet, knowing help was a long way off if she unexpectedly injured herself. She kept one hand on the wall to her left and held her sword out before her with the other, ready to take on anything that came out of the dark at her. She trusted her instincts, and the blade, to get her out of trouble if things got too hairy.
The passage ran straight ahead at first and then turned into a series of switchbacks that had Annja cautiously peering around each corner before continuing forward, convinced each time that some danger lurked just beyond. Just as she was starting to relax, she rounded another turn and found herself outside the tunnel complex, staring at the jungle no more than three feet in front of her.
The tunnel had apparently taken her completely beneath the ridgeline and out the opposite side!
She glanced around, curious if any of Knowles’s people had come this way, when she saw something through the trees. It looked man-made, but she couldn’t be certain without getting a better view, so that was what she decided to do.
She pushed through the waist-high undergrowth and ducked beneath a few branches before emerging into a small clearing.
In the middle of the clearing was a graveyard.
Annja stood and stared, her mind having trouble reconciling the mounds of earth with their wooden and stone crosses with the knowledge that she was hundreds of miles from any known civilization.
Then it hit her.
Had she found the missing archaeologists?
23
Annja moved forward, each step seeming to take forever as her gaze roamed over the graves before her and she mentally cataloged the details as they jumped out at her.
The crosses made from weathered planks.
The lichen-covered stones that carefully surrounded each mound.
The overgrowth of jungle grasses over each grave.
These are not recent, not by a long shot.
She stood over the nearest grave marker and stared down at it, then bent and ran her fingers along the faint grooves in the wood where something had once been written. It was faded by long exposure to the harsh tropical climate, but the word seemed to be Ellis.
An Englishman, then, she thought.
She quickly counted and discovered that there were nine graves in all. Each of them was in the same basic state of disrepair due to age and weather. Annja had the gut feeling that whoever had buried these men had done so at the same time; the graves were the result of a tragedy, rather than natural causes, then. She certainly couldn’t prove it, but it felt right to her.
Feels right? Very scientific, Annja.
She was intrigued by the puzzle and wanted to stay to see what else she could learn, but she knew she’d been gone long enough. The others were no doubt growing concerned and she acknowledged it was time to let them know what she’d found.
Annja retraced her steps through the tunnel and back into the main cavern. It only took a few minutes for the others to join her after she gave the signal. She’d been right; they’d been getting antsy and were debating whether or not to come in after her when she’d returned.
She led them into the cavern and waited while they examined the same things she had, then brought them down the passageway and out to the clearing beyond. Annja warned Claire ahead of time, not wanting her to have a similar reaction as the one she’d experienced. The four of them stood before the graves, staring at them in fascination.
“Who do you think they were?” Marcos asked at last.
“Hard to say. We’re certainly not the first to explore the island,” Annja said, “but I don’t remember hearing about any of the earlier expeditions losing this many people.”
“Maybe they were pirates,” Claire suggested, “and their leader killed them to keep the location of the treasure they’d just buried a secret from everyone else.”
Before Claire could answer, he said, “Besides, why would they go through the trouble of digging nine extra graves if they’d just dug a hole big enough to bury the treasure in? Seems it would be easier to just bury it all together at that point.”
Ever the archaeologist, Annja wondered what they would find if they excavated one of the graves. Contrary to the old saying, in the hands of a competent archaeologist, dead men did tell tales and often rather intricate ones at that.
“Maybe they’re from that boat.”
Hugo’s voice startled her out of her own internal speculations.
Boat?
Annja looked in the direction in which he was pointing but all she saw was jungle.
What boat? What is he talking about?
She stared, trying to see through the tangled mass of jungle greenery, looking for what he was referring to, but she still wasn’t getting it. Beside her Claire gasped...and then Annja saw it.
A woman’s face, gazing out at her from the foliage.
Her hair was thick and piled atop her head in an elegant coiffure, while her eyes were open wide and gazing outward toward the horizon. A large crack split her brow just above her left ear, giving her a strange, lopsided appearance.
The moment Annja recognized it for what it was—the figurehead on the front of a sailing ship—she saw the rest of the boat looming there amid the trees as easily as if someone had just lit up the entire structure with blinking neon lights. The bowsprit, covered with vines, jutting out over the figurehead as if pointing back in their direction.
The round curvature of the bow.
The dark, gaping holes of the gun ports.
A sailing ship was the last thing she’d expected to see in the middle of the jungle, so her gaze had glanced right over it previously without seeing it for what it was. Now that she knew it was there, it was impossible to ignore.
