1 Red Right Return

by John H. Cunningham

  Table of Contents

  Fair Winds and Past Sins

  Dark Skies and Dead Guys

  Crossings

  Adrift, Alone, Alive

  Stay Off the Ropes

  Redline to Ruin

  RED

  RIGHT

  RETURN

  A Buck Reilly Adventure

  John H. Cunningham

  The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Certain real locations and public figures are mentioned, but have been used fictitiously, and all other characters and events in the book have been invented.

  Copyright © 2009 by John H. Cunningham

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

  Electronic Edition

  Published by Greene Street, LLC

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-615-49169-1

  www.jhcunningham.com

  This book is dedicated to my parents,

  Cortlandt and Betty Cunningham

  I miss you

  Fair Winds

  and

  Past Sins

  1

  FORT JEFFERSON WAS VISIBLE in the distance, seventy miles from Key West, another outcast in the Florida straits. The Civil War fortress beckoned me, but I turned back to this morning’s surprise, a beautiful, unscheduled one-way charter customer whose replies to my inquiries were met with hundred-dollar bills but no name.

  My name’s Buck Reilly, but don’t bother to Google me. You won’t find a thing. I used to go by my full name, it ended with “the third.” Going broke forces you to change things, sometimes even your identity. Skills, however, can be recycled. Being a pilot taught me to travel light, a necessary talent in my new circumstances…

  As we flew over the shimmering azure waters that morning, images of the past played out in my mind. Landing on a grass strip in the Andes, flying down narrow tributaries of the Rio Negro, a rough take off from a rock field outside Katmandu. And then there was the time I flew blind in a sand storm over Egypt, or taxiing over the flats near Porto Bello. I let out a long breath. I missed the adventure and excitement from my e-Antiquity days, but not much else.

  Our destination appeared as a white spot on the horizon, and we closed the distance fast. We circled the boat once before landing in the light chop. A handful of men stared back from the transom, distorted by a thin mist of exhaust rising off the occasional boil from the captain’s attempts to keep the craft straight in the press of the Gulf Stream. We taxied with the vent windows open, the sound of Betty’s twin engines loud inside the cabin.

  “Show me on the map where we are?”

  I slowly unfolded the chart, pointed to the fort, then dragged my finger due west to our approximate location. Her eyes lingered on the eastern side.

  “What’s all that?” Numerous grid squares were cross-hatched with pencil, pen, and magic marker. “Some kind of treasure map?”

  I placed it back under my leg. “The company is Last Resort Charter and Salvage. You’re a charter, that’s salvage.”

  Calling Last Resort a company was a stretch. I take the occasional charter, if it interests me, but the salvage work is more diverse. Lost items to lost souls. When my first company, e-Antiquity, crashed I lost everything. Funny thing, it wasn’t the money that mattered. Wealth only fueled the lust to acquire crap: cars, houses, toys, even relationships. The false Gods of Mercedes, Palm Beach, Wall Street, Gulfstream and Stock Portfolio had been a spiritual pursuit, but when the money was gone I needed a new place of worship. None of the stuff was left, but it was the flight of friends that hurt most. Success attracts, and failure repels. Especially in relationships.

  We closed the distance, and my concern for the transfer was resolved when a lone man operating a rubber inflatable boat, Zodiac, or something similar was launched. With a tug on the throttles, Betty’s propellers slowed immediately, and the green float under her port wing settled into the water.

  “You have a welcoming committee,” I said.

  She flashed her white teeth. Part Latin, or maybe African-American and white—whatever her heritage, I found her exotic pale almond eyes hypnotic. Only the slight tang of perspiration belied her air of confidence.

  Most pilots wouldn’t accept an anonymous customer who paid in cash. It wasn’t that I lacked ethics or good sense, or that I’d knowingly do something illegal, but times were tough and work was hard to come by. Besides, risk never bothered me, especially when my survival depended on it.

  The Zodiac bounced towards us without altering its course to avoid the swells. The girl’s sphinx-like smile returned as she watched the boat approach. I lifted the side hatch to a gust of thick salt air.

  “This is it, Miss…”

  Her eyes lit toward the hovering Zodiac. At the helm was a large black kid in a bright blue polo shirt. He gave my Grumman Widgeon flying boat a quick once-over and shook his head.

  “You’re crazy, girl!”

  She slid from the edge of the hatch onto the boat’s rubber bow and into the seat next to him. He looked more like he belonged on a football field than here in the gulf. Her “Thank you” blew like a kiss—my final reward.

  I tucked her five hundred in my breast pocket and ducked back into the cockpit. The Zodiac retreated slowly to the mother ship, where the other men watched, unsmiling. Not the greeting you’d expect for a pretty woman. The boat was a good size, maybe fifty-five feet, with the lines of an old Bertram and a smart-looking red stripe along its side. As the girl pulled herself aboard, the name Carnival was legible above the water. She’d never said where she got my number, but now that she was safely delivered, my job was done. The bonus was that her drop point left me near the next open grid on the chart.

  2

  WHILE I MAY NOT miss the money, much, I still crave the hunt for treasure. My remaining assets from e-Antiquity were a handful of commandeered ancient maps, letters and clues for the location of lost artifacts, which if nothing more, provided me with a mental diversion from my own past. The idea of actually finding something, however, terrified me, as I would be faced with a concept I had sworn off—success.

  I slid my finger over the squares already marked with X’s. After eighteen months of searching, the only result had been the occasional gratification of crossing off another section. With something like two hundred wrecks littering the waters of the Dry Tortugas, finding an uncharted one required incredible luck, cutting edge technology, and blind faith. With only the latter, the outcome was no surprise. Treasure map, indeed.

  My brother, Ben, once characterized any search for treasure as a fool’s errand. That’s what he said when I started e-Antiquity, too. Until it made him rich. He was always the conservative son, while I was out scouring the world. It’s no wonder he thinks I’m irresponsible.

  Mel Fisher of Treasure Salvors always said, “Today’s the day,” but it took him thirteen years to find the half-billion-dollar wreck of the La Nuestra Señora de Atocha. Aside from the fact that I lacked his patience and resources, sneaking around national park waters forced discretion. Otherwise I could be towing the improvised metal detector behind Betty instead of searching at a tenth the speed in my over-laden kayak.

  The information from the 1933 letter from Ernest Hemingway to his editor describing a six-foot section of solid gold chain found wrapped around their anchor while fishing these waters was the hook, and to my knowledge, nobody else had ever taken the bait. Maybe—

  The gray noise of emptiness that clattered in my headphones suddenly changed pitch. Most likely another false alarm, but the digital read-out pinged higher than most of the junk I’d found. Much higher. I paddled in a circle, methodically working to define the size
of the anomaly. It was roughly twenty feet square.

  The sky was clouded over, so I couldn’t see into the water, but my anchor rope indicated the depth was nearly thirty feet. I secured the loose gear, donned mask, fins and the 19 p.s.i. pony tank that would give me twenty minutes of air at this depth, based on normal breathing. A last glance at the darkening sky made me hurry my pace.

  I slid into the water and the whoosh of bubbles from my regulator brushed past my ears as I began to descend. A bulky coral head materialized in the gloom, surrounded by turtle grass, brain coral and a field of dead staghorn coral. How many times had I dove on similar formations, only to find garbage, old lobster pots or worthless wreckage? Isn’t the definition of insanity the repeated attempts at a futile task with the same results? Or is that persistence?

  The current increased with the depth and I swam against it to the far end of the mass so I could drift over the largest section. Once in position I let the flow carry me back. A quick shimmer caught my eye, right at the base of the up-current edge of the formation. The color was…I spun and kicked hard into the current, peering over the rocky edge until I saw it again. My heart thudded.

  The water carried me back over the mass, but my mind was fixated on the three inch-square image I saw near the bottom. The color, brilliant and radiant, unaltered after how many years underwater? Or centuries?

  3

  WHETHER WISHFUL THINKING, OR the result of having read the patchwork history so many times, the recently discovered connections cut a familiar groove in my mind. It was in 1621 when Governor Gíron of Cartagena had sent a surprise wedding gift aboard the Esmeralda, a small, nondescript galleon, to King Philip IV and Queen Elisabeth of Spain. Since it was a non-official transport and thereby undocumented in Seville, no record of its journey was ever noted in the royal archives. And since it never arrived, the king and queen were oblivious to its existence.

  The governor died shortly after the Esmeralda sailed, so the lack of recognition of his generosity never upset his renowned sensitivities. The existence of the Esmeralda remained unknown for 350 years, until a Colombian biographer on behalf of the University of Cartagena chronicled Gíron’s reign, making note of the gift referred to in the former governor’s private diary.

  I smiled. Thank God for the Spanish historians who challenged the work, which splashed the news of the Esmeralda’s existence onto headlines world wide. According to the limited information they cobbled together, the ship had a crew and passengers of ninety people, and even though it didn’t carry near the treasure of the storied Atocha, the governor’s journal entry summarized two dozen crates of gold bars, fifty crates of silver bars, eight crates of emeralds, an unspecified number of jewels, and a vast number of silver pieces of four and eight, not to mention gold doubloons. A chill ran down my spine at the most recent estimates that valued the treasure in excess of twenty million dollars.

  The fate of the Esmeralda may have remained a mystery, if it weren’t for two eyewitness accounts from half-mad castaways found on an uninhabited island somewhere between Havana and Miami. They claimed to have been aboard a ship sanctioned by Gíron destined for Spain that was lost in a storm in 1621. How many times had I studied Spanish shipping routes of the time, the documented paths of galleons, the accounts of storms for the era, and cross-referenced them with the date the ship sailed from Havana, all of which led me to the area between the Marquesas to what today is Sugarloaf Key?

  Until I found the obscure reference in a letter from Ernest Hemingway to his editor about the gold chain pulled up from the sea bottom on his anchor that led me to the Dry Tortugas.

  And maybe, just maybe to the Esmeralda?

  4

  I FOUGHT BACK AGAINST the press of water, and even in the sunless depths, the shimmer of gold sparkled briefly. I avoided a wall of black sea urchins that threatened to perforate my palms and grabbed the rough edge of a small coral fissure. I pulled myself toward the glistening object, which was embedded in eons of sea growth. Using my dive knife, I scraped at the coral, but the current was too strong to hold on with one hand.

  With the knife under my armpit and both hands on the lip of the crevice, I drew myself closer. I tried to wedge my knee into the coral hole, but a sudden sharp pain tore at my shin—I lost my grip. As the water carried me back, a fat green moray eel darted halfway out of the hole and glared back at me.

  There was no blood, so at least its sharp teeth hadn’t punctured my skin. I again swam up and drifted past the mound and wondered whether I could have found the Esmeralda.

  My pursuit of treasure used to be based on greed, a lust for recognition, anticipation of more headlines and of e-Antiquity’s stock skyrocketing yet again. I sensed the familiar tingle in my hands, a numbness caused by excitement and adrenalin. Those desires were foreign now, and the last thing I wanted.

  I was alone, floating above a lump of ocean bottom that promised or threatened to reinstate my world to a life of material comfort and excess—

  My rapid breathing came to a sudden halt—

  The air gauge read zero!

  I kicked hard toward the top, a growing fire aflame in my lungs. The distance seemed like a thousand feet until I burst through the surface.

  I gasped for air and felt as if sweat was bursting from my head—not sweat, but rain, pounding rain. The storm that had been thrashing the southern straits most of the day was upon me. The kayak was anchored thirty yards away, into the current. Already exhausted, the effort it took to get there left my legs cramped. Thunder clapped as I climbed aboard and commenced to paddle into a black curtain of driving rain. Fort Jefferson was invisible in the reduced visibility, but my GPS showed that it was over half-mile away to—I stopped suddenly—the coral head! How would I find it again? I hit the ‘mark’ button on the GPS, then placed a quick ‘x’ on the soggy grid square where I thought the mound had been.

  Hunched over in the six-foot sit-on-top kayak, I flogged the oars so hard my stomach muscles cramped like seized pistons. I ran ashore in front of the perfect hexagon of Fort Jefferson before I saw its brick walls, still cloaked in mist. Seeking shelter on-island would be smart, but the plane’s anchorage would never hold under the force of this storm.

  Whitecaps erupted in the shallows.

  Green mangrove branches sagged under the driving rain, and their clotted mass of roots smelled of excrement. Cormorants and an egret hunched in the web of leaves as I sliced past. A flash of lightning lit the sky, followed closely by a roar of thunder that reverberated in my gut. The edge of the island was ahead, and a stiff headwind blew around the corner.

  Betty was there, her bow-mounted anchor line pulled taut, her fuselage white against the black horizon. With no time for an orderly transfer of equipment I jumped into the waist-deep water, pushed in my gear, then the kayak and dove in. I scrambled into the left seat, stuffed the cross-hatched chart into the waterproof pouch that bulged with several others, then jammed the packet into the makeshift slot under my seat.

  Fool’s errand?

  Success, by most people’s standards, had nothing to do with it. I’ve been driven to do what people tell me can’t be done my entire life. Whether compulsion, or curse, I had a knack for the hunt. The pursuit of discovery sucked me in, even if my goals were different now. I was hooked on experience, excitement and challenge. Money was just a sideline—a necessary evil. If that lump back there was the Esmeralda, though, we’ll see how those platitudes hold up.

  The scene through the windshield cut short my reverie. I had to get out of here, and fast. I’d never completed my instrument rating and now I’d be taking on the storm with no pre-flight preparation whatsoever.

  The sky and horizon had grown seamless, liquid, and were closing in fast. I pulled anchor, fumbled with the fuel mixtures, primed the fuel pumps, and fired up the twin Lycoming engines. Jockeying the rudder with slippery toes, I maneuvered Betty toward the black wall of water and shoved the throttles halfway forward.

  A loud cough sputtere
d from the port engine.

  “Not now, Betty!”

  Guilt pierced my heart for doubting the old girl, but she’d been built in 1946, and I couldn’t help questioning her ability to muster the oomph to pull us out of the mess my failure to anticipate the storm had us in. It was like counting on your grandmother to carry you from a burning building.

  The port engine caught and the hull jolted on course. Waves crashed over the windshield while I fought to hold Betty straight. Water detonated in all directions as we gained speed. I grappled with the controls to keep the nose high. Seconds passed at an excruciating pace. I stole a glance at the airspeed indicator and when I looked up, a waterspout was telescoping down from a leaden cloud directly ahead. Without fifteen more knots to escape the ocean’s grasp, a collision with the liquid tornado would—

  A sudden shout filled my headset. Words cascaded in, what, Spanish? The voice’s urgency felt like a reprimand from God himself, but only one word registered: “Mayday!”

  Something else sounded in the background—was it screaming?

  We bounced onto a large wave and shot into the air. I nearly pushed the ceiling- mounted throttle through the roof, simultaneously stomping the left rudder to the floor, which spun Betty into a turn that almost forced her wing back into the same wave that had set us free. The waterspout reached out for Betty’s starboard wing tip but we blew past and up into the black clouds.

  The Mayday proved I wasn’t the only idiot the storm had caught by surprise, but since the voice was in Spanish, finding their location would be hopeless. Any missed salvage opportunity irked me, but the hesitation in Betty’s port engine threatened to turn us into one.

  After acknowledging my approach into Key West airport, Donny, the air traffic controller, uncharacteristically broke the code of the airwaves.