From here I could see the Hispaniola, about fifty metres away. I pointed to my right, but Sal had seen it too, because she’d altered course. I’m not sure if ‘course’ was the right word, because it seemed to me that we were completely at the mercy of the sea, trough then peak, trough then peak, the same terrifying pattern.
Even though I knew from my trip to Italy that Salacia, Goddess of the Sea, was pretty handy with an inflatable boat, I didn’t realise how handy.
In a word, she was incredible.
In two words: really incredible.
How she negotiated through that chaos, I’ll never know.
Just when it seemed we were going to get swamped by a toppling wave, she found a way up.
Just when it seemed we were going to get catapulted off a crest, she found a way down.
If ever there was a Zodiac event in the Olympics, she was a cert for the gold medal.
Slowly, ever so slowly, we were getting closer.
But then I saw another problem: how could the Hispaniola and the Zodiac, both of them tossed around like crazy, ever get to the same level so that I could attempt to scramble aboard?
They were like two high-speed lifts going in different directions.
Through a series of hand signals Sal indicated that she wanted me to board while she stayed on the Zodiac.
Should I tie the Zodiac to the Hispaniola? I signalled.
No, she signalled.
As we came closer I couldn’t see a soul on board the Hispaniola. In fact, it had the air of a ghost ship. A very battered ghost ship, because one of its satellite dishes had come loose and there were various ropes dragging in the water.
Sal held off, waiting for the right moment.
Personally, all I could see was a whole lot of wrong moments.
But she twisted the throttle, the propeller bit, and we surged forward, the Zodiac quickly gathering momentum.
The Hispaniola, which had been metres above us, was dropping down, dropping down.
We met, more or less at the same level.
I didn’t have time to think how she’d done it: I threw myself from the bow of the Zodiac and catapulted over the rail and crashed onto the deck of the Hispaniola.
I felt pain, but not of the broken-bone variety.
Now that I was aboard, I actually wasn’t sure what to do next.
A real pirate would’ve burst into the wheelhouse, cutlass swinging, all yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! But that wasn’t really my style, especially since I seemed to be somewhat deficient in the cutlass department.
The usual way into the wheelhouse was by the back door, the one that led out onto the deck I was on. The stairs that went to the downstairs cabin were right next to this.
Depending on who was in the wheelhouse, and how alert they were, it would be possible to enter it and get down those stairs without them knowing.
Difficult, but possible.
So that, now, was my plan.
I made my way along the deck – not as easy as it sounds. It was a deck awash with water, water that sometimes surged around my waist and was continually tilting this way and that.
Handhold by handhold, eventually I was at the door.
I pushed the handle. The door was locked from the inside. That was the end of that plan.
Just for a second I allowed myself to despair – why was it always so difficult? Why couldn’t it be easy sometimes?
But immediately another plan was forming, pushing the despair right out of the frame.
As far as plans went, it was pretty crazy, so crazy it made pirates look like actuaries.
But I knew I had to go with this plan – there weren’t a lot of options left.
Back along the deck I went, until I came to the porthole with the sheet.
Conveniently, there was a rope tangled around the guardrail. I quickly untangled it and tied one end securely around a nearby bollard. The other end I tied around my waist.
I’d already had one swim in the open ocean; I wasn’t keen on another.
I waited for the right moment and hit the deck. Literally. And then I shuffled forward on my stomach. From this angle, the up-and-down motion of the boat was even more dramatic. Think of the most sick-inducing ride you have ever been on, multiply it by plenty, and you will get some idea of what I mean.
Tower of Terror? Piece of cake.
Superman Escape? Too easy.
It was like my guts were sloshing around inside my body.
Eventually my eyes were at the level of the porthole.
But of course the boat picked that very moment to roll violently, and I went under the water, just managing to grab a lungful of air before I did.
Deeper and deeper it went, less and less air was in my lungs, and just when it seemed as if it was going to roll all the way around, it started coming back the other way.
Just a little more, I kept telling myself, my lungs burning.
Just a little bit more.
We broke the surface.
Gratefully, I sucked in air and opened my eyes.
And there, at the porthole, loomed a white misshapen face.
Hell!
A dead person!
The dead person wiped the mist off the glass with her dead-person hand, and it was Zoe.
Well, a version of Zoe, because this Zoe, unlike the usual one, did not have any colour at all in her face.
‘Dom,’ she mouthed.
Very perceptive of you, Zoe.
I mouthed something of my own: ‘Otto?’
She disappeared for a second and when she reappeared it was with Otto.
Otto was green, so green he made Kermit the Frog look anaemic.
I pointed at them, and then at the deck, then made a motion with my hand as if I was twisting a throttle.
As far as charades went it was pretty crap; as far as communicating went it worked a treat because they both nodded enthusiastically. We’ll meet you on the deck.
I shuffled back the way I had come; all I could do now was wait.
There was no use signalling Sal until I was certain that they were coming back with us.
I didn’t have to wait long, however. The back door opened and the two of them appeared, holding on to each other.
That was pretty easy, I thought, but not for long because I had to signal Sal.
I waited until she was right up high on the crest of a wave, and then frantically waved at her. She responded with a less frantic wave of her own.
Goddess of the Sea?
Probably.
We were on.
I took Zoe’s hand, she took Otto’s hand, and we daisy-chained our way across the deck, through the churning water, to the stern.
Sal waited and she waited and she waited.
‘Come on,’ I mouthed, anxiously looking around me, half-expecting Bones to come flying through the door.
And a real pirate like him would have a cutlass, or its modern-day equivalent: an Uzi or an AK-47.
But again Sal chose the perfect moment, and the Zodiac and the Hispaniola met on the same horizontal plane.
Zoe scrambled onboard first, and then Otto, and then it was my turn.
By this time the two boats had separated; there was perhaps a metre between them. In normal circumstances a metre jump is nothing, but, as you may have gathered, there was nothing normal about this. I hesitated – not a great idea, because it was now a metre and a half.
‘Go!’ yelled Sal.
I sprung up and out.
My knees hit the side of the Zodiac, and I bounced backwards, towards the boiling sea.
But a gangly figure reached out, grabbed a handful of my shirt and jerked me into the Zodiac.
My nose hit the bottom of the boat hard, and blood began gushing from it.
The pain was that sort of pain that makes you instantly angry.
You want to punch whoever did this.
Still, nice catch, Otto.
Sal again performed her miracle act, negotiating the sucking trou
ghs and the towering peaks to get us back to the Argo.
Our absence had not gone unnoticed, and there were several yellow-suited figures on the deck waiting for us.
Sal came up behind the stern of the Argo and waited until a swell rolled beneath us.
She gunned it, and we rode that swell up and onto the stern, but when it subsided we were sitting on the guardrails, perfectly positioned.
I didn’t need any prompting: I clipped the karabiner.
The yellow-suited figures were already securing the Zodiac, dragging us out of it. We were told to get out of our wet clothes, given dry ones to change into. Then there was basic first aid: somebody I had not seen before had a look at my nose.
‘You’ve banged it up pretty good,’ he said. ‘But it’s not broken.’
And then it was repercussion time.
The four of us were in a room and E Lee Marx and Art Tabori were sitting down in front of us.
‘That was a pretty goddamn crazy stunt you kids pulled,’ said E Lee Marx, but already from the tone of his voice I knew it wasn’t going to be that bad.
And it wasn’t.
It went on like this for a while, him telling us how goddamn crazy it was, how we could’ve all been goddamn killed.
But then he said we could goddamn go.
The four of us went to get up, but Art Tabori, who had been strangely quiet, said, ‘A word to our two guests, if I could.’
‘I’d like to stay with them,’ I said.
‘You won’t be needed, Dom,’ he said, and I knew there was no use arguing; when old Mr Smooth As Snot says you’re not needed, you’re really not needed.
And to tell the truth, I wasn’t too fussed – those two were big enough and feral enough to look after themselves.
And besides, I was overcome, and ‘overcome’ is the right word, by the need for rest.
I went back to my cabin, and closed the blind, and crawled into bed and entered into a very, very deep sleep.
Monday
Geometric Dilution Of Precision
I woke to a world that seemed way too still.
I pulled up the blind to reveal a sea as flat as our pool at home. Though perhaps not quite as chlorinated.
It didn’t seem possible that something so tempestuous had become so not.
I stumbled out of bed and there was breakfast sitting on the table.
There was muesli and fresh fruit and toast and I ate the whole lot of it, even scraping the last of the jam out of the blister packets.
And then I went to find somebody.
It didn’t take me long – the nerd centre was buzzing with activity.
E Lee Marx and Felipe were in their usual positions and Dr Muldoon was looking at a photo that had obviously been lifted from the Cerberus output, the bars strewn across the ocean floor like pickup sticks.
‘Morning,’ said E Lee Marx. ‘How’d you sleep?’
‘Like a pirate,’ I said, which didn’t really make sense, because pirates aren’t exactly renowned for their sleeping ability.
E Lee Marx seemed to get it, though, because he said, ‘That’s my Long John Silver.’
‘What happened to the cyclone?’
‘Apparently it went off to terrorise some poor little Pacific island somewhere.’
‘And the Hispaniola?’ I said, my eyes drawn to the radar.
‘Out of range,’ said Felipe, which was a pretty ambiguous statement.
Out of range because they’d drifted away from us? Or – an infinitely more terrible thought – out of range because they’d sunk?
I didn’t know whether to feel guilty – why hadn’t I saved everybody? Or triumphant – I’d managed to snatch Otto and Zoe from Davy Jones’s locker.
‘Radar’s only got a forty-kay range, so they’re probably just hanging off us for a while,’ said Felipe.
‘And Otto and Zoe?’ I said. ‘Have you seen them around?’
E Lee Marx and Felipe exchanged glances. ‘They’re in good hands.’
Again, I wasn’t too fussed. It was probably better that the troublesome twosome were safely locked away somewhere.
‘So what happens now?’ I said, envisaging hour after boring hour of towing the dreaded towfish, mapping the bottom, all that archaeological drudgery.
‘We go for goddamn gold,’ said the world’s greatest treasure hunter.
‘Now?’
‘As soon as we find the mother lode again.’
‘We dive on it?’ I said, my imagination scampering ahead of me.
‘Well, Castor and Pollux do.’
Can you really be jealous of a machine? Yes, you can. Bloody Castor. Damn Pollux.
I thought finding the mother lode would be a pretty straightforward procedure; the GPS position was actually printed on the photo that Dr Muldoon was perusing.
But, of course, marine positioning isn’t as easy as that; I soon learnt that there is something called atmospheric error and something called signal arrival time error and something called multipath error and even something called geometric dilution of precision.
Phew!
Eventually, we – okay, they – managed to overcome all these and we – okay, they – got the Argo back into roughly the right position.
Now it was up to the sensors.
The sidescan sonar was working fine, but the output from the adapted Cerberus was intermittent: those compatibility issues had still not been resolved.
But the sidescan sonar was not coming up with anything of interest.
‘I just don’t get it,’ said Felipe. ‘All that metal should be sending the sonar crazy.’
I had a terrible thought: somebody had got there before us and taken the bars. How this was possible, I wasn’t sure, but how else to explain what was happening?
‘Why don’t you get the other sensor working properly?’ I said.
Felipe gave me a look: Kid, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
‘Hardware guys have been at it twenty-four seven,’ said E Lee Marx, ‘but they just can’t crack it.’
‘Compatibility issues?’ I said.
‘You got it.’
Ten minutes later, however, and those compatibility issues must’ve been resolved, temporarily anyway, because the screen flickered to life again.
And again the quality of the image was breathtaking.
E Lee Marx was spewing words into the microphone, about lines and tangents and algorithms.
I looked at the screen and I said, ‘He needs to turn right.’
‘To the starboard?’ said E Lee Marx. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve just got this hunch,’ I said.
‘Great, a hunch,’ said Felipe.
But E Lee Marx wasn’t so dismissive. ‘In the old days, hunches were sometimes all we had. Very occasionally they paid off. Mostly they didn’t.’
‘Of course not,’ said Felipe.
It was a fair bet he didn’t believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, either.
Actually, neither did I, but, eyes on the screen, I said, ‘Now.’
E Lee Marx hesitated, but then he said, ‘Swing ninety degrees to starboard.’
Felipe shook his head as if to say, So it’s kids running the show now.
Two minutes later and we were back over Yamashita’s Gold – on the screen was that breathtaking image, of the gold bars strewn across the ocean’s floor.
‘I just had a hunch about the kid’s hunch,’ said E Lee Marx, slapping Felipe on the back.
Monday
Pollux and Castor
Lying on my bed, swimming laps of the pool, even sitting on the toilet, I’d recovered Yamashita’s Gold hundreds, maybe even thousands, of times in my mind.
The details may have varied, but the plotline was basically the same: me donning scuba gear and entering the water; cut to me descending, fins moving rhythmically; cut to me and the treasure, and I have to admit, the treasure I’d imagined was more your yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottl
e-of-rum treasure: a chest overflowing with pieces of eight, and diamonds and rubies and … Cut to me ascending, my arms laden with treasure, bursting out of the water and into a world that was now bigger and brighter and much, much more interesting.
Sitting in a nerd centre, on a comfy chair, watching two machines wasn’t anything like this.
Don’t get me wrong, it was exciting, as exciting as all get-out, but it just wasn’t what I’d imagined.
I’m not sure what Pollux and Castor reminded me of – giant aquatic cockroaches, perhaps. Something insectoid, anyway.
Down they went, deeper and deeper, the camera on Pollux filming Castor, the camera on Castor filming Pollux.
As they did, their movements became jerkier, more erratic.
‘The currents down there are hell,’ said E Lee Marx.
And then they reached silt.
It was such an anticlimax, the whole room emitted a collective groan. Including me. Even though we all knew that the image from the adapted Cerberus wasn’t ‘real’, that it had taken out the silt the same way an X-ray takes out the flesh.
‘Blower time,’ said Dr Muldoon.
E Lee Marx was already talking into his microphone. ‘Let’s engage the blower.’
I’d read about using a blower; a technique developed by another famous treasure hunter, Mel Fisher, when he was working on a wreck that was covered in silt.
Basically, it was just a downward blast of water.
I’d even utilised a version of it myself by using my fin.
‘We’re onto it,’ said the voice at the other end.
A minute or so later the voice said, ‘Engaging blower!’
The blower blew, the silt disappeared, and underneath was Yamashita’s Gold, those magnificent bars of bullion.
Now there was a collective intake of breath.
Followed by cheers and high-fives and back slaps.
If not the best moment in my life, it was definitely in the top ten.
I looked across at Art Tabori, and he responded with a nod. If he was The Debt, and I didn’t see how he couldn’t be, then I’d just repaid the fifth instalment.
E Lee Marx was back on the microphone.
‘What are you waiting for, guys? Get in there and tidy up that mess.’
More cheers. More high-fives. More back slaps.
I’d read that the ROV’s two clawed arms were controlled by different people and Felipe confirmed that this was, indeed, the case. You’d think the result would be chaos but the absolute opposite was true. It was amazing how dexterous they were, and I had to admit there was no way divers could pick up so much gold so quickly.
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