Hell Ship (18 page)

He had entertained a desperate hope that the diving equipment might be recoverable; with it, he could take his time salvaging the wreck, but the locker where it had been stored had been completely obliterated.

Further along the deck, he spied the cradle that contained a cylindrical container, about the size of a beer keg. The explosion had ripped apart one end of the canister, peeling the aluminum shroud back like the skin off a banana. The uninflated four-person life raft contained within was peppered with splinters of debris and black scorch marks.

H
e was starting feel a desperate urge to breathe. It was time to go.

He twisted the release handle of the life raft canister. There was an eruption of bubbles as the contents of a pressurized gas cylinder flooded into the cells of the raft, and then promptly rushed out through the gaping holes caused by the explosion.
Not all of the cells were compromised however; half of the raft plumped up like a frankfurter on a grill, and started rising for the surface, boosted by the cloud of free gas rushing out of the damaged sections. Dane knew the raft also contained an array of survival equipment and emergency rations.

H
e swung around to
Baby’s
winch spool and disengaged the manual clutch, allowing it to turn freely. The weight of the cable and the friction of the winch axle kept it from shooting straight to the surface, but it nevertheless started rising. With one hand gripping the body of the ROV, he gave the cable winch a spin, rapidly unspooling several hundred feet of cable for the ROV, and was about to kick for the surface when something caught his eye.

Dane
felt a surge of excitement at this discovery, but the demand for fresh air would not be put off any longer. He pushed off from the deck and kicked furiously for the surface, letting out the stale breath in a stream as he went.

The ascent was agony.
The need to breathe was an animal in his chest, trying to tear its way out. He could see daylight, magnified by water refraction to appear deceptively close. He kept kicking, clawing for the surface with one hand. The ROV in his other didn’t seem to be aiding his climb appreciably, but it wasn’t weighing him down either. The animal told him to let it go, but he refused to part with his prize.

The end was almost anticlimactic.
There was a moment of disorientation as his momentum suddenly changed, his kicking legs no longer propelling him upward, after which it occurred to him to check his watch—the sweep hand was just passing the ten o’clock mark, which meant he was fifty seconds through whatever minute this was, probably the fourth, which meant if he could hold for just ten seconds more he’d set a new personal record.

BREATHE!

He took a greedy gasp. Fresh air filled his lungs, lifting him up higher in the water. He realized only now that the ROV had actually helped him stay buoyant when he’d exhaled everything else.

The orange life raft floated nearby, looking like a collapsed parachute on the water’s sur
face. It was moving, caught in the slow drift current that ran parallel to the island. He imagined Trevor Hancock and Archie Bailey, fifty years earlier, clinging to each other for hours, perhaps days, brought to this island by that current, and then having to swim like crazy to avoid being just as quickly drawn away by it.

Dane knew the tethered ROV would keep him from drifting too far away, but if he didn’t secure the raft, it would be lost forever.
He dog-paddled toward it and snared a handful of amorphous rubber. After shifting the ROV inside the collapsed body of the raft and wrapping it up into a crude bundle so the two would not become separated, he pulled his upper body onto the floating mass.

He ached for
a rest break, but every idle second took him further from his goal—the beach—and would require that much more effort later on, so he immediately began kicking, propelling himself and the floating bundle back toward the surf. He quickly got into an automatic rhythm that allowed him to compartmentalize his weariness and just drive on without thinking about how exhausted he was, or how much further he had to go. Finally, after long minutes of mind-numbing exertion, he was caught by the incoming waves and thrown toward shore. He allowed himself to be swept in. Bones and Alex were waiting in the tide, and helped him drag his burden up onto dry sand.

While Dane lay supine on the beach, Bones began unpacking the bundle and taking stock of the emergency equipment cache in the raft.
“There’s a leak repair kit,” he announced, “but this thing is shredded. We might be able to use the coaxil from the ROV to lash some of the driftwood together, make a raft, but I wouldn’t give great odds for it holding together in open water.”

The canister life raft had been Dane’s Plan A.
Cobbling together a driftwood raft had been Plan B, and a desperate one at that. Fortunately, his last discovery before leaving the
Jacinta
trumped both of those ideas.

“I’m going back,” he announced.
“To get the Zodiac. It’s still intact…mostly, anyway. Tied up right where…”
Right where Gabby had left it
, he almost said. “To the dive platform.”

Bones stroked his chin thoughtfully.
“Drop the outboard and you’ll probably be able to float it back to the surface. Be a shame to lose it, though.”

“Maybe we don’t have to.”
Dane would have preferred to rest a few minutes—or more accurately, days—longer, but he knew there was no time for delay. “You’ve got your Leatherman, right?”

Bones took
the multi-tool from his pocket and held it up for inspection.

Dane outlined his plan, and assigned tasks for each of them.
Bones went to work cutting away the damaged sections of the raft, and then he and Alex worked together to deflate the boat and ensure that its undamaged cells would remain air tight. Dane meanwhile removed the compressed air cylinder that was part of
Baby’s
ballast regulator, and switched out the spent cylinder that had initially inflated the lifeboat. To re-inflate the partial raft, he would need only twist the manual valve on the air cylinder.

Bones inspected the finished contraption with hands on hips.
“MacGyver would be proud. But will it work?”

“I guess I’ll go find out.”

“It’s going to be dark soon,” observed Alex. “Sure you don’t want to put this off until morning?”

“We’re going to be a hundred miles away from here by morning,” Dane told her, confidently.
He tucked the orange bundle of the deflated raft under one arm and headed out across the beach. “You guys keep working on the rain shroud. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

The outgoing tide shortened the distance he had to swim and made the paddle out considerably less of an ordeal, which was a good thing since he was still bone-tired and carrying thirty pounds of equipment.

The fuel slick was mostly gone, but
Baby’s
coaxial cable tether led him straight to his destination, and before long he was once again preparing himself for a final free-dive to the
Jacinta
.

This time, there was no uncertainty about what he would find or what he would do when he reached the wreck.
He sped down the length of the cable and when he reached the deck, the first thing he did was to pull out what remained of the cable and detach it altogether from the winch spool. That took up the first minute of his dive.

He quickly swam over the side of the boat and down to the sunken Zodiac.
He immediately noted that it had not escaped the explosion completely unscathed. At least one of its cells had been damaged, and only its rigid fiberglass hull kept it from folding in half like a taco. That didn’t worry Dane overmuch; they could probably repair the damage once the little boat was back on the surface. It was the condition of the outboard motor that worried him most; after a few hours of total immersion, he wasn’t sure they’d be able to get it started again, and if they couldn’t all of his preparations would be for nothing.

No time to worry about that now.

He tied the loose end of the cable around the tapered base of the motor. The wire cable was stiffer than rope, but he managed a decent approximation of a bowline. He then hooked the repurposed life raft to the line and allowed it to unfurl a moment before opening the valve on the pressurized air cylinder.

The raft instantly puffed up and leaped out of his h
ands, lifting the Zodiac and the heavy engine as if they were feather light. The mooring rope went taut, too taut for him to even attempt untying the knot. Instead, he slashed it with the knife blade of Bones’ Leatherman. The Zodiac floated free back to the surface, and Dane was right behind it.

As soon as the Zodiac reached the surface, Bones started hauling in the cable from the beach.
With hundreds of gallons of water filling its bilges, the Zodiac was like a floating anchor, but Bones won the tug of war and got the craft up on the beach faster than Dane could swim. Nevertheless, the sky was a deepening purple, shot through with orange clouds, by the time Dane crawled up on the sand next to the still swamped inflatable.

They bailed out as much of the water as they could, and then tipped the boat up on its side to drain the rest.
Dane and Alex transferred their survival equipment to Zodiac, while Bones tinkered with the outboard.

“
The good news,” Bones announced, “is that I don’t think the fuel supply was contaminated. I can’t tell if the electrical system was compromised, but we should be able to get her started.”

“And the bad news?” asked
Alex.

“That fuel supply I told you about?
There’s not a whole lot of it. About a quarter of a tank. Not sure how far that will get us.”

“Far enough,” said Dane, trying to inject a confidence into the discussion that he did not necessarily feel.
He’d known all along that, even if the Zodiac’s outboard could be made functional, it would only be of limited use. If they were to reach civilization, it would require another means of motive force. “We’ll take another look at it in the morning. For now, we paddle.”

Alex
slumped against the boat. “What, tonight?”

“I told you.
I want to be a hundred miles away by sunrise.”

“I thought you were joking.”

“Him?” interjected Bones. “You’ve been around him long enough to know, he doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

“Very funny.”
Dane handed Bones an oar. “But true.”

Manila, Philippines

John Lee Ray
was almost painfully aware of the gold triangle in his breast pocket, but he resisted the urge to take it out—to touch it, look at it—until he was safely ensconced within the lavishly appointed confines of his Gulfstream III jet, which sat idle at a private airstrip outside Manila, awaiting a destination. With only Scalpel and four other senior lieutenants present—all of them members of his inner circle and true believers in his cause—he took out the thick leather portfolio which contained the sum total of the knowledge he had acquired about the history the Templar conspiracy. He flipped through the file folders within until he found a sheaf of photographs which he removed and spread out on a table-top.

One photo showed a wide-angle shot of the ceiling of the secret chapel at the Hancock manor.
The other pictures, dozens of them, showed the individual sigils, and marked on the back of each print was the corresponding geographical location. Many of them were known Templar fortresses and houses dating back to the Crusades. He knew many of these places well; he had thoroughly researched each of them, hoping in vain to find a shortcut to the secret Templar treasury. Several of the other symbols indicated prominent cities throughout Europe and the Middle East where there was no well established presence for the monastic order. Those were more problematic since there was no way to narrow the focus of the search.

Until now.

He shuffled through the photographs like playing cards, removing all those that did not contain a triangle in the sigil. To his dismay, that measure did not greatly reduce the number of possibilities; triangles figured prominently into most of them. He recalled an old riddle he’d come across in his investigations:
Where is the Templar treasure? It's under a triangle so large only God can see.

Of course
, Ray thought.
The triangle is a Masonic symbol, with links to the Illuminati. It all makes sense
.

The connection between the Freemasons and the Templar Knights had long been posited by scholars of the Templar conspiracy, but the Masonic influence was so ubiquitous that instead of shedding light on the mystery, this knowledge only obscured the truth.

He studied the medallion again, noting that none of its sides were even. Therein lay its secret. Like a puzzle piece, it might appear to fit in many different places, but would only match one.

If he couldn’t make a match with the photos, he would have to
go back to Hancock’s estate.

He’d obtained the ph
otographs three years earlier, learning about the secret chapel only after months of quiet inquiry and investigation. At first, he had hoped to join the secret fraternity; after all, who was a sacred warrior monk in the tradition of the Templars, if not he? He had discreetly approached some whom he knew to be among their number, and while none would confirm what he had discovered, their oblique refusals told him that he was being considered for membership. More importantly, they helped him identify other key figures in the ranks, including a rather shabby English lord with a run-down estate north of London. His surveillance of Edward Lord Hancock had paid off handsomely when, one summer evening, several of the men he suspected were Templars paid Hancock a visit, and took a walk in the nearby woods. When the meeting was concluded, Ray stole into the underground chapel and photographed everything. Soon, he had the whole story, but like the Templars themselves, had no way to decode the map and find the treasure vault.