The Lost Island

26

The morning dawned dirty and rough, with a howling wind and dark clouds scudding low across the sky. They had taken refuge in Bahía Hondita, a huge, shallow lagoon with dozens of islands and coves and patches of mangrove swamp — an ideal place to hide. With the jet drive propulsion their draft was only three feet, and with no need to worry about fouling a propeller they’d been able to get the boat up a watercourse and deep into the recesses of a mangrove swamp, where the larger Horizonte could not follow, even if they knew where they were.

Gideon spent the morning cleaning up the mess in the galley and mopping up the blood on the cockpit deck. Amy opened the hatches and examined the engine and boat systems, doing a damage assessment where rounds had struck the boat.

They convened in the galley over espresso one hour before it was time to make a scheduled call to EES. Amy looked gray.

“How’s your injury?” Gideon asked.

“Fine,” said Amy. “Listen, we’ve got some damage. A 50-caliber round fragmented and went everywhere inside the engine compartment.”

“The boat seems to be working all right.”

“For now. We have some damaged hoses, fuel and oil lines, which I can patch or replace. Some shrapnel in the battery compartment, as well, but no leaks there. One bad circuit board. It’ll take most of the day. We’ll head out to Cayo Jeyupsi tonight.”

“You sure the boat’s okay?”

“My only real worry is the ricocheting of all those bits and pieces of shrapnel. It’s impossible to trace it all or know what might be wrong — until something fails.”

“What about the other rounds that hit the boat?”

“They went high, through the pilothouse. One in the forward hull above the waterline. I put a temporary patch on it.”

“Oh, dear, we might lose our damage deposit.”

Amy managed a wan smile. “That’s Glinn’s problem, not ours.”

“Speaking of Glinn, we’ve got to give him a sit-rep in an hour. We should talk now about how we’re going to present this to him. I also need to write up what happened in the electronic log.”

A hesitation. “Gideon, let’s not…alarm him.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Look, we don’t want him to abort our mission. We’re too far into this.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not suggesting we lie, exactly. We just have to give it the proper spin. An unfortunate encounter. A bump in the road.”

“An ‘unfortunate encounter’? Amy, a man’s dead.”

“We don’t know that.” A beat. She gazed at him intently with her dark eyes. “You want to give this up?”

Gideon hesitated. “No.”

“Then pitch your log entry accordingly, and in the video meeting think carefully about how you present things.”

“Is that an order, Captain?”

A long silence. “I won’t make that an order. Because I know you’re with me on this one.”

Gideon nodded. She was right.

The meeting with Glinn was short. They made their report, Gideon presenting it as a brief, unfortunate encounter with a pair of crazy treasure hunters, over and done with. It was, in the end, a good thing, as it produced an essential piece of information: the Devil’s vomit cay marked on the map. Glinn listened, asked few questions, did not offer any advice, and signed off quickly.

Amy spent the rest of the day below, fixing the engine. She emerged at sunset covered with grease. She took a shower and then sat down at the computer. The wind had picked up further, the mangroves clacking and shaking around them. The tropical depression that had been building beyond the Cape Verde Islands had turned into a tropical storm and was now heading toward the Windwards and northwestward to Haiti. While they were considerably south of its path, it was a large system and, one way or another, they were going to be affected.

Amy seemed pleased. “The worse the weather, the less chance there is of the Horizonte surprising us at the cay tonight.”

“I doubt they’re going to be at the cay.”

“I know they will. They’re treasure hunters. The word obsession doesn’t even begin to describe them.”

“How do you know so much about treasure hunters, anyway?” Gideon asked.

“That question falls into the personal information category. Sorry.”

She went back to the laptop in the work area while Gideon prepared an elaborate dinner of seared duck breasts, wild rice, and toasted goat cheese salad. From time to time, he glanced over at what she was working on so assiduously. It appeared she was comparing the Phorkys Map to other old maps — and a bunch of texts in ancient Greek.

“What’s all that?”

“Idle speculation.”

“Dinner’s ready.”

She abandoned the computer and sat down at the dining room table. Gideon laid the plates on with ceremony. He poured himself some wine, giving her the glass of water, no ice, that she asked for.

She tucked in and began the usual unceremonious shoveling.

“Whoa, hold on,” aid Gideon, laying a hand on her fork hand, staying the scarfing process. “There’s no hurry. Can we please have a civilized meal? I worked hard preparing it — you should slow down and enjoy it.”

“You eat your way, I’ll eat mine,” she said, forking a quarter of the breast into her mouth and chewing, her cheeks bulging like a chipmunk, making vulgar eating noises.

Gideon shook his head. “Jesus, didn’t your parents teach you table manners?”

This was met with a sudden, freezing silence. Gideon thought to himself, More personal information I won’t be privy to.

She finished, pushing her plate away and standing up. “At midnight, we’ll start for Jeyupsi. It’s thirty nautical miles. I doubt we can make more than twelve knots in this sea, so we’ll arrive around two thirty in the morning. We’re going to make a large circle of the cay at extreme radar distance, just to see if they’re around. Their boat is bigger than ours, makes a larger radar target, so we’ll see them before they see us. If all looks good, we go in, try to figure out what was meant by the phrase Follow the Devil’s vomit. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“So why don’t you go below, get some sleep? I’ll take care of the dishes.”

“No objections to that.”

As he stood up, preparing to head for his stateroom, she laid a hand on his arm. “Gideon.”

“Yes?”

“You handled those treasure hunters really well back there — all that talk about a billion dollars in gold. You got them to lose their heads — and that saved our lives.”

“Social engineering is my specialty. But your contribution was pretty damn crucial, too.”

“And that business with the launch — they fell for it just long enough for us to give them the slip.”

“It was your radar reflectors that did the trick.”

There was a slightly awkward silence. Gideon sensed that any praise from Amy was praise indeed, so he just smiled and said, “Thanks.”

She nodded wordlessly.

And as he turned to leave the galley, he saw her go back to the computer and continue working on the Greek texts and the map.