Spartan Gold - Clive Cussler

“Don’t mean to intrude,” Sam said.

“Nonsense. Wanderers are always welcome, and you two certainly look the part. Have a seat.”

Sam and Remi dropped their gear in the sand and found seats on a log. Sam introduced themselves to their host, who simply said, “Happy to have you. In fact, I’m going to turn the estate over to you. Time to move on.”

“Don’t go on our account,” Remi said.

“Nothing of the sort, dear lady. I’ve got a previous engagement in Port Henry. Won’t be back for a couple days.”

With that the man disappeared into the trees and emerged a few seconds later pushing a Vespa scooter. “There’s a fishing pole, lures, pots, pans, and all that inside,” he said. “Make yourselves at home. There’s a trapdoor wine cellar. You’re welcome to try a bottle.”

Sam, strangely certain he could trust this stranger, said, “You haven’t heard any legends about a secret base around here, have you?”

“A Nazi submarine base, yes?”

“That’s the one.”

The man put the scooter up onto its kickstand. He went inside the hut and came back out carrying what looked like a tray-sized square of sheet metal. He handed it to Sam.

“To carry our dinner?” Sam asked.

“That’s a hydroplane, son. From a pretty small sub, too, by the looks of it.”

“Where did you find this?”

“Liberty Rock, on the north side near Port Boyd.”

“Sounds like the place to start looking.”

“I found that in a lagoon. My guess is it washed out of an underground river. Here on the east side of the island they all flow south to north. Problem is, they’re not strong enough to push anything heavier than that plane.”

“No offense,” Remi said, “but if you knew what this belonged to, why haven’t you looked for it yourself?”

The man smiled. “I’ve done my fair share of exploring. I figured sooner or later someone would come along asking the right questions. And here you are.” The man walked toward his scooter, then stopped and turned back. “You know, if I’d been a German sailor back then looking for a place to hide out, I would’ve loved to have stumbled across a sea cave.”

“Me, too,” Sam said.

“As luck would have it, Rum Cay is full of them. Dozens along this shore alone, most unexplored—most connected to underground rivers.”

“Thanks. By the way, ever heard of anything called the Goat’s Head?”

The man scratched his chin. “Can’t say I have. Well, I’m off. Good hunting.”

The man puttered off on the scooter and disappeared.

Sam and Remi were silent for a few moments, then Sam said, “I’ll be damned.”

“What?”

“We didn’t even think to get his name.”

“I don’t think we need it,” Remi said, pointing at the hut.

Beside the door was a wooden plaque. In hand-painted red letters it said, CASA DE CUSSLER.

CHAPTER 15

I could get used to this,” Sam said, staring into the fire.

“I’ll second that,” Remi replied.

They’d decided to accept their host’s invitation to spend the night at the hut. As the sun dipped toward the horizon Sam strolled the beach and gathered burnable driftwood while Remi used their host’s collapsible bamboo fishing rod to snag a trio of snapper from the surf. By the time night fell they were lying against a log before a crackling campfire, their stomachs full of braised and sea-salted fish. The night was clear and black, with diamond-speck stars filling the sky. Aside from the swoosh-hiss of the surf and the occasional rustling of palm fronds, all was quiet.

Their host hadn’t been joking about the wine cellar, which, though barely larger than a closet, sported two dozen bottles. They’d chosen a Jordan Chardonnay to complement Remi’s catch.

They sat and sipped and watched the stars until finally Remi said, “You think they’ll find us?”

“Who, Arkhipov and Kholkov? Not likely.”

For the airline tickets, the hotel, and the rental car they’d used a credit card attached to a twice-removed Fargo Foundation expense account. While Sam had no doubt Bondaruk’s hatchet men had the resources to eventually unravel the financial trail, it wouldn’t happen, he hoped, before they were gone.

“Unless,” he added, “they already have a lead that points them here.”

“There’s a cheery notion. Sam, I’ve been thinking about Ted. That Russian—Arkhipov—he was going to kill him, wasn’t he?”

“I suspect so.”

“Over wine. What kind of man would do that? If Rube’s right, Bondaruk’s filthy rich. What he’d gain from selling the Lost Cellar would be pocket change. Why is he willing to kill for it?”

“Remi, for him murder comes naturally. It’s not a last resort; it’s a ready option.”

“I suppose.”

“But you’re not convinced.”

“It just doesn’t add up. Is Bondaruk a wine collector? A Napo leonophile, maybe?”

“I don’t know. We’ll check.”

She shook her head, frustrated. After a few moments of silence, she asked, “So where do we start?”

“We have to make some assumptions,” Sam replied. “First, that Selma’s right about the Goat’s Head being a landmark; and second, that Boehm and his team would have chosen the most uninhabited part of the island to set up shop. This coastline certainly fits the bill. At first light, we pile our gear into the dinghy—”

“Not the plane?”

“Don’t think so. Boehm’s vantage point would have been from the surface. From the air a goat’s head could look like a duck’s foot, or a donkey’s ear, or nothing at all.”

“Good point. Erosion’s going to be a problem. Sixty years of weather could change a lot.”

“True.”

The Bahamian Archipelago was a spelunking and cave-diving paradise, Sam knew, and there were four general types of cave systems: blue holes, which came in both the open ocean and inshore variety and were essentially great tubes plunging hundreds of feet into the ocean or an island’s rock strata; fracture-guided caves, which followed the natural fissures in the bedrock; solutional caves, which formed over time by rainwater mixing with minerals in the soil to dissolve the underlying limestone or calcium carbonate bedrock; and finally, garden-variety sea caves, formed along cliffs by thousands of years of pounding surf. While these systems rarely went any deeper than a hundred feet, they were also usually spacious and offered sheltered underwater entrances—precisely what one might look for when scouting for a spot to hide a mini submarine.

“You missed one,” Remi said. “An assumption, I mean.”

“Which is?”

“That all this isn’t just a goose chase—or to be exact, a wild Molch hunt.”

They woke at dawn, had a breakfast of wild grape, fig, and pigeon plums, all of which they found growing wild within a hundred yards of the hut, then piled their gear into the inflatable dinghy and set out. The trolling motor wasn’t going to help them set any speed records, but it was fuel efficient and powerful enough to get through the reef line and to navigate the inshore tides. By the time the sun had lifted free of the horizon, they were tooling north along the coast, parallel to the reef line. The water was a crystalline turquoise, so clear they could see rainbow-hued fish skimming along the white sand bottom twenty feet below.

As Sam steered, staying as close to the shore as possible, which ranged from fifty to one hundred yards, Remi sat in the bow, alternately scanning the cliffs through her binoculars and taking shots with her digital SLR camera. Occasionally she would call for Sam to come about and make a repeat pass of a rock formation as she tilted her head and squinted her eyes and took more pictures before eventually shaking her head and giving him the okay to proceed.

The hours and the coastline slipped by until around noon they found themselves nearing the island’s headland and Junkanoo Rock; beyond that, on the northern shoreline, lay Port Boyd and the island’s more populous western areas. Sam turned the dinghy around and they headed south.

“We’ve probably already passed dozens of sea caves,” Remi said.

This was true. Many of the cliff faces they’d surveyed were shrouded in climbing vines and scrub foliage that jutted from every nook and cranny. From this distance they could be seeing a cave entrance and never know it. They had little choice, however. Slipping inside each reef break and checking every foot of every cliff would take years. More frustrating still was that most of their search had so far occurred during low tide, which should have given them the best chance to spot an opening.

Suddenly Remi sat up straighter and cocked her head, a posture Sam knew only too well: His wife had had a eureka moment.

“What?” he asked.

“I think we’re going about this the wrong way. We’re assuming Boehm used this Goat’s Head as a navigation aid while test-driving the Molch before the mission, correct? They’d want to test out any refit work they’d done, wouldn’t they?”

“I’d hope so.”

“And close to shore, they wouldn’t have risked grounding the sub by diving, which meant the Molch probably didn’t roam too far. . . .”

The Molch’s mothership, the Lothringen, would have been equipped with an advanced open-ocean navigation system, but not so the mini submarine, which would have relied on speed-distance dead reckoning and, quite likely, visual aids.

“Right again.”

“So what if the only time Boehm would have to rely on a landmark was when he was coming back in—from a test dive.”

“From offshore,” Sam finished. “Inshore, a goat’s head might not look like a goat’s head, but from a mile or two out to sea . . .”

Remi was smiling and nodding.

Sam brought the dinghy about and pointed the nose toward open ocean.

Once they were about a mile out, they repeated their tour of the coastline, heading back the way they’d come, past their landing beach toward the southeastern tip of the island, Signal Point, and Port Nelson, where they turned around and headed north again.

By three thirty, tired, thirsty, and slightly sunburned despite their hats and repeated coatings of BullFrog sunscreen, they were a mile from the northern headland when Remi, who was studying the coast through her binoculars, held up a closed fist. Sam throttled down to an idle and waited. Remi turned in her seat and leaned back to hand Sam the binoculars.

“Take a look at that cliff.” She pointed. “Bearing about two-eight-zero relative.”

Sam aimed the binoculars and panned along the rock face.

“See the two banyan trees sitting next to one another?” Remi said.

“Hold on . . . okay, I see them.”

“Imagine them sixty years ago, about a third their size with less branches. Add a little dimension to the rock . . .”

Sam made the illusive adjustment and looked again, but after ten seconds shook his head. “Sorry.”

“Squint,” Remi offered.

He did and suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, he saw it. Six decades of erosion had in fact softened the bump in the cliff, but there was no doubt: Combined, the outcropping and the twin banyans formed the vague profile of a goat’s face topped by a pair of overgrown and tangled horns.

The question was, were they seeing what they wanted to see, the victims of self-suggestion, or was there really something there? One look at Remi’s face told him she was wondering the same thing.

“One way to find out,” he said.

The break in the reef was narrow, less than eight feet wide, and with high tide and churn, the top of the coral was submerged just enough to be invisible at a distance but close enough to the surface to rip the dinghy’s rubber skin to shreds should Sam stray.

Remi sat in the bow, arms braced on the side walls as she leaned forward and peered into the water.

“Left . . . left . . . left,” she called. “Okay, straighten out. Steady on . . .”

On either side of the dinghy, through the froth Sam could see dagger-edged coral just beneath the turquoise surface. He jinked the throttle and rudder, searching for that delicate balance between steerageway and power; not enough of the former and he couldn’t avoid being pushed onto the coral; too much of the latter and he couldn’t respond to Remi’s signals.

“Good . . . hard right!”

Sam pushed the rudder over and the dinghy veered just as a wave broke on the reef and knocked the stern around. “Hold on!” He powered up and compensated.

“Left . . . a little more . . . more . . .”

“How far to go?”

“Ten more feet and we’re through.”

Sam looked over his shoulder. A swell was rising twenty feet behind them, building up on the reef ’s outer edge.

“Gonna get hit,” Sam called. “Brace yourself!”

“Almost there . . . veer right, straight now . . . good. Give it all you’ve got!”

Sam cranked the throttle to its stops just as the wave broke under the dinghy’s stern. Sam felt his belly lurch into his throat. For a brief second the prop lifted free of the water with a sputtering whine, then the dinghy was slapped back onto a calm lagoon.

Remi rolled onto her back, leaned against the bow, and let out a sigh. “I’ll say it again, Sam Fargo, you sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

“I do what I can. Welcome to Goat’s Head Lagoon.”

CHAPTER 16

Paradise, dead ahead,” Sam said, straightening the dinghy’s nose.

After spending the past eight hours first roasting in the hot sun and then navigating a shark’s mouth of a reef break, the shaded lagoon felt like paradise. Roughly one hundred feet in diameter, it was sheltered to the north and south by curved thumbs of land choked with scrub pine and palms. The cliff, which rose thirty vertical feet from the water, was blanketed in vines, foliage, and overhanging banyan trees—the two most prominent ones forming the goat’s horns. To the left of the cliff lay a crescent of white sand roughly the size of a standard house deck. With the sun on its downward arc toward nightfall, the lagoon was cast in deep shade. The water was glass calm. In the canopy came a symphony of squawks and buzzes.

“Not a bad place to spend the night,” Remi agreed. “Not the Four Seasons, but it does have a certain charm. The question is, are we in the right place?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, but one thing’s for certain: We’ve got a cave.” Sam pointed, then turned the rudder and steered toward the cliff face, throttling down as he drew alongside it.

The water here, moving in a barely perceptible clockwise rotation, gave off a faint iridescent shimmer, which generally indicated an outflow of fresh water. Sam dug out his dive goggles from the duffel bag at his feet, pressed them to his eyes, and dipped his face into the water, which, despite being warmed by the sun all day, felt cool on his skin. Dozens of fish darted this way and that, squabbling over invisible bits of nutrients being stirred up by the freshwater current.