Spartan Gold - Cussler Clive - Страница 22

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.