Spartan Gold (15 page)

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.”

P
aradise, 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.

Sam lifted his head out. He dipped his fingertip into the water and brought it to his lips. It tasted only about a third as salty as true seawater.

“Underground river?” Remi asked.

“Has to be,” Sam replied, shaking the water from his hair.

Though it was an uncommon phenomenon, sea caves in this area did on occasion link up with both solutional and fracture-guided caves, which in turn joined underground inland streams.

“I’ll have to look at a map. I think we’re only a couple miles from Lake George. I wouldn’t be surprised if this system dumps out there. Or even down to Salt Lake.”

“Neither would I, but if you don’t mind I’d prefer we put that adventure on our ‘someday’ list.”

“Deal.” Sam checked his watch. High tide was thirty minutes away. If they were going to explore the cave, they’d have to do it within the next hour lest they find themselves fighting the full force of the outflow. Ideally, they would enter at the end of the inflow, use the forty-five- to sixty-minute window of relatively calm current to explore the cave, then ride the outflow back out. The problem was, this was not a typical closed sea cave. The source of the underground river inside would create volatile currents that could either trap them inside or suck them into fracture tunnels that led into the bowels of the island. Neither option appealed to Sam.

He put the question to Remi, who replied, “I’d rather we wait, but I know that look in your eye: You want to go in.”

“Better we find out now if we’re on the right track. We’ve got seventy-five feet of rope. We tie one end to a banyan root out here, the other end to my weight belt. If I get into trouble, I can haul myself out.”

“And if you bonk your head and are out cold?”

“Every sixty seconds I’ll give the line three tugs. I miss one of those and you haul me out using the dinghy.”

“Time limit?”

“Ten minutes, not a second more.”

Remi considered this for a few moments, narrowed her eyes at him, then sighed. “Okay, Jacques Cousteau. Remember what I said, though: If you die, I’ll never forgive you.”

Sam smiled and gave her a wink. “Deal.”

Ten minutes later he was suited up and sitting in the bow. Remi glided the dinghy to a stop against the cliff. Sam, moving carefully, stood up and tied a bowline knot around a protruding root, then sat down and secured the other end to the D-ring on his weight belt. Remi reversed the dinghy and stopped ten feet from the face, using minute throttle adjustments to keep them stationary.

Sam spit in his mask, rubbed the saliva around the inside, then dipped the mask into the water and slipped it on his head, the lower edge resting just above his eyebrows. Next he slipped on his fins, punched the regulator to test the airflow, then nodded to Remi.