Текст книги "Lost Empire"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Clive Cussler
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

CHAPTER 2

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

QUAUHTLI GARZA, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED MEXICAN States and the leader of the Mexica (pronounced in the traditional way, Meh-SHEE-kah) Tenochca Party, gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows and down into the Plaza de la Constitucion, where the Great Temple had once stood. Now it was nothing more than beautified ruins, a tourist attraction for those who wanted to gawk at the sad remains of the magnificent Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and the great twelve-foot-diameter, twenty-ton Calendar Stone.“A mockery,” Quauhtli Garza mumbled, watching the milling crowds.

A mockery he’d so far been able to correct with only marginal success. True, the Mexican people had since his election gained a better understanding of their lineage-had come to understand the true history of their country that had been all but obliterated by Spanish imperialism. Even the name, the Aztec Party, which so many news reporters used to describe Mexica Tenochca, was an insult, a nod to falsity. Hernan Cortes and his bloodthirsty Spanish conquistadors had named the Mexica peoples Aztecs, bastardized from the name of the legendary home of the Mexica-Aztlan. It was a necessary artifice, however. For now, Aztec was a term the Mexican people both understood and could take to their collective hearts. In time, Garza would educate them.

It was, in fact, a ground surge of pre-conquest nationalism that had swept Garza and the Mexica Tenochca into power, but Garza’s hopes for Mexico’s widespread and immediate embracement of its history were starting to fade. He’d come to realize they’d won the election partly because of the previous administration’s incompetence and corruption and partly because of Mexica Tenochca’s “Aztecan showmanship,” as one political pundit had termed it.Showmanship indeed! It was absurd.

Hadn’t Garza years ago renounced his Spanish Christian name, Fernando, for a Nahuatl one? Hadn’t his entire cabinet done the same? Hadn’t Garza renamed his own children in the Nahuatl tongue? And more: Literature and images of Spain’s conquest of Mexico were slowly being weeded from school curricula; street and plaza names had been changed in favor of Nahuatl words; schools now taught courses in Nahuatl and the true history of the Mexica people; religious holidays and traditional Mexica festivals were celebrated several times a year. But still, all the polling showed that the Mexican people saw all of it as novelties-excuses to miss work or drink or misbehave in the streets. Even so, that same polling suggested real change could be instituted if they had enough time. Garza and the Mexica Tenochca needed another term, and to get that Garza needed to have the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation more firmly under his thumb. As it stood, the presidency was restricted to a single term of six years. Not long enough to accomplish what Garza had planned, not long enough to accomplish what Mexico needed: a fully realized history of its own, free of the lies of conquest and slaughter.

Garza stepped away from the window, strode to his desk, and pressed a button on the remote. Shades descended from the ceiling, muting the noonday sun; in the ceiling, recessed lighting glowed to life, illuminating the burgundy carpet and heavy wooden furniture. Like the rest of Garza’s life, his office reflected his Mexica heritage. Tapestries and paintings depicting Aztec history lined the walls. Here, a twelve-foot-long, hand-painted codex detailing the founding of Tenochtitlan on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco; over there, a painting of the Aztec goddess of the moon, Coyolxauhqui; across the room above the fireplace, a floor-to-ceiling tapestry showing Huitzilopochtli, the “Hummingbird Wizard,” and Tezcatlipoca, the “Smoking Mirror,” in union, watching over their people. On the wall above his desk was an oil painting of Chicomoztoc-“the Place of Seven Caves”-the legendary source of all Nahuatl-speaking peoples.

None of these, however, kept him awake at night. That honor belonged to the artifact standing in the corner of the room. Perched atop a crystal pedestal in a cube of half-inch-thick glass was Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs. Of course, depictions of Quetzalcoatl were commonplace-on pottery and tapestries and in a multitude of codices-but this representation was unique. A statuette. The only one of its kind. At four inches tall and seven inches long, it was a masterwork carved by unknown hands a millennium ago from a chunk of nearly translucent jade.

Garza walked around his desk and sat in the chair before the pedestal. Quetzalcoatl’s surface, lit from above by an inset halogen bulb, seemed to swirl, forming mesmerizing shapes and pools of color that were at once there and not there. Garza’s eyes drifted back along Quetzalcoatl’s plumes and scales until coming to rest on the tail-or where the tail should have been, he corrected himself. Instead of tapering to a traditional serpent’s tail, the statuette widened for a few inches before ending abruptly in a jagged vertical line, as though it had been cleaved from a larger artifact. This was, in fact, the theory Garza’s scientists had put forth. And a theory he had worked hard to suppress.

This Quetzalcoatl statuette, this symbol of the Mexica Tenochca, was incomplete. Garza knew what was missing-or, more accurately, he knew the missing piece would not resemble anything in the Aztec pantheon. It was this thought that kept him awake at night. As the symbol of the Mexica Tenochca movement since the day Garza had founded it, this statuette had become a rallying cry for the wave of nationalism that had swept him into office. Should its credibility be called into doubt . . . It was a question Garza didn’t dare entertain. The thought that a lost nineteenth-century warship could destroy everything that he’d built was unacceptable. All of it gone because of a trinket or artifact found by a random snorkeler, who in turn shows it to someone with a passing interest in history, who then asks an expert. A falling domino that destroys a nation’s restored pride.THE BUZZ OF THE INTERCOM on Garza’s desk shook him from his reverie. He turned off the case’s halogen light and returned to his desk.

“Yes?” he said.

“He is here, Mr. President.”

“Send him in,” Garza said, then turned and sat down behind his desk.

The double doors opened a moment later and in strode Itzli Rivera. At six feet tall and one hundred fifty pounds, Itzli Rivera appeared unsubstantial from a distance-gaunt in the extreme, his narrow face of angles and planes dominated by a hawk nose-but as he came closer Garza reminded himself how deceptive Rivera’s appearance was. It showed in the hard set of his eyes and mouth, in his steady, purposeful gait, and in the taut muscles and the tendons of his bare forearms. Even without knowing the man, an astute observer could easily see Itzli Rivera was no stranger to hardship. Of course, Garza knew this to be true. His chief operative had indeed visited hardship upon many poor souls, so far most of them political opponents who didn’t share Garza’s vision for Mexico. Luckily, it was easier to find a virgin in a brothel than it was to find an incorrupt member of the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies, and Rivera had a knack for finding a man’s weakness, then shoving the dagger home. Rivera was himself a true believer, having rejected his Spanish name, Hector, in favor of Itzli, which in Nahuatl meant “obsidian.” A fitting name, Garza thought.

A former major in the Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales, or Special Forces Airmobile Group, GAFE, and former Secretariat of National Defence’s S-2 Intelligence Second Section, Rivera had left the army to become Garza’s personal bodyguard, but Garza had quickly seen Rivera’s wider potential and had put him to work as his own private intelligence and operations director.“Good morning, Mr. President,” Rivera said stiffly.

“And to you. Sit down, sit down. Can I get you something?” Rivera shook his head, and

Garza asked, “To what do I owe this visit?”

“We’ve come across something you may want to see-a video. I asked your secretary to cue it up.”

Rivera picked up the remote from his desk, aimed it at the fifty-inch LCD television on the wall, and hit Power. Garza sat down. After a few seconds of silence, a man and woman in their mid-thirties appeared, sitting together before an ocean backdrop. Off camera, a reporter was asking questions. Though Garza’s English was fluent, Rivera’s technical people had added Spanish subtitles.The interview was short, no longer than three minutes. When it was done, Garza looked to Rivera. “And the significance is?”

“Those are the Fargos-Sam and Remi Fargo.”

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Do you remember last year, the story about Napoleon’s Lost Cellar . . . the lost Spartans?”

Garza was nodding his head. “Yes, yes . . .”

“The Fargos were behind that. They’re very good at what they do.”

This got Garza’s attention. He leaned forward in his chair. “Where was this interview taped?”

“Zanzibar. By a BBC correspondent. Of course, the timing could be a coincidence.”

Garza waved his hand dismissively. “I don’t believe in coincidences. And neither do you, my friend, or else you wouldn’t have brought this to me.”

For the first time since entering the office, Rivera showed a trace of emotion-a thin shark’s smile that never reached his eyes. “True.”

“How did you come across this?”

“After the . . . revelation . . . I had my technical team create a special program. It monitors the Internet for certain key words. In this case, ‘Zanzibar,’ ‘Tanzania,’ ‘Chumbe,’ ‘Shipwrecks,’ and ‘Treasure.’ The last two, of course, are the Fargos’ specialties. In the interview they were adamant that the trip was simply a diving vacation, but . . .”“This close to the last incident . . . the British woman . . .” “Sylvie Radford.”

Radford, Garza thought. Luckily, the idiot woman had had no inkling of the significance of what she’d found, treating it as nothing more than a trinket, showing it off around Zanzibar and Bagamoyo, asking locals what it might be. The necessity of her death had been unfortunate, but Rivera had handled it with his usual care-a street robbery turned murder, the police had concluded.

What Ms. Radford actually found had been the thinnest of threads, one that would’ve required careful and expert teasing lest it snap. But the Fargos . . . They knew all about following random threads, he suspected. The Fargos knew how to uncover something from nothing.

“Could she have told someone what she found?” Garza asked. “The Fargos have their own intelligence network of sorts, I would imagine. Could they have gotten a whiff of something?” Garza narrowed his eyes and stared hard at Rivera. “Tell me, Itzli, did you miss something?”The gaze that had withered many a cabinet secretary and political opponent left Rivera unfazed; the man merely shrugged.

“I doubt it, but it is possible,” he said calmly.

Garza nodded. Though the possibility of Ms. Radford having shared her find with someone was disconcerting, Garza was pleased Rivera had no trouble admitting he may have made a mistake. As president, Garza was surrounded daily by sycophants and yes-men. He trusted Rivera to give him the unvarnished truth and to fix the unfix-able, and he’d never failed in either respect.“Find out,” Garza ordered. “Go to Zanzibar and find out what the Fargos are up to.”

“And if this isn’t a coincidence? They wouldn’t be as easy to handle as the British woman.”

“I’m sure you’ll work it out,” Garza said. “If history has shown us anything, it’s that Zanzibar can be a dangerous place.”

CHAPTER 3

ZANZIBAR

AFTER TALKING WITH SELMA, SAM AND REMI TOOK A CATNAP, then showered, changed clothes, and took their scooters down the coast road to Stone Town, to their favorite Tanzanian cuisine restaurant, the Ekundu Kifaru-Swahili for “Red Rhino.” Overlooking the waterfront, the Red Rhino was nestled between the Old Customs House and the Big Tree, a giant old fig that served as a daily hangout for small boat builders and charter captains offering day sails to Prison Island or Bawe Island.

For Sam and Remi, Zanzibar (or Unguja in Swahili) personified Old World Africa. The island had over the centuries been ruled by warlords and sultans, slave traders and pirates; it had been the head-quarters for trading companies and the staging area for thousands of European missionaries, explorers, and big game hunters. Sir Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke had used Zanzibar as the base for their search for the source of the Nile; Henry Morton Stanley had begun his famous hunt for the wayward David Livingstone in the labyrinthine alleys of Stone Town; Captain William Kidd had reputedly sailed the waters around Zanzibar as both pirate and pirate hunter.Here, Sam and Remi found every street and courtyard had a story and every structure a secret history. They never left Zanzibar without dozens of fond memories.

By the time they pulled into the parking lot the sun was dropping quickly toward the horizon, casting the sea in shades of gold and red. The scent of oysters on the grill drifted in the air.“Welcome back, Mr. and Mrs. Fargo,” the valet called, then signaled for a pair of white-coated attendants, who trotted over and pushed the scooters away.

“Evening, Abasi,” Sam replied, shaking the valet’s hand. Remi received a warm hug. They’d met Abasi Sibale on their first visit to Zanzibar six years earlier and had become fast friends, usually having dinner with him and his family at least once during their yearly visits. Abasi was never without a smile.“How’re Faraja and the kids?” Sam asked.

“Happy and healthy, thank you. You will come to supper while you are here?”

Remi smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

“I believe they are ready for you inside,” Abasi said.

Just inside the door the maitre d’, Elimu, was waiting. He, too, had known the Fargos for years. “Good to see you, good to see you. Your favorite table overlooking the harbor is ready.”

“Thank you,” Sam said.

Elimu led them to a corner table lit by a red hurricane lantern and surrounded on two sides by open windows overlooking the waterfront. Below, Stone Town’s streetlights were flickering to life.“Wine, yes?” Elimu asked. “You would like the list?”

“Do you still have that Pinot Noir-the Chamonix?”

“Yes, we have a ’98 or a 2000.”

Sam looked to Remi, who said, “I still remember the ’98.”

“As the lady wishes, Elimu.”

“Very good, sir.”

Elimu disappeared.

“It’s beautiful,” Remi murmured, staring out over the ocean.

“I couldn’t agree more.”

She turned her head away from the window, gave him a smile, and squeezed his hand. “You got a little sun,” she remarked. For some inexplicable reason, Sam Fargo burned oddly-today, only the bridge of his nose and the tips of his ears were pink. Tomorrow they would be bronze. “You’re going to be itchy later.”“I’m itchy now.”

“So, any guesses?” Remi asked, holding up the diamond coin.

It had spent the afternoon first sitting in a bowl of ten percent nitric acid, followed by Sam’s secret formula of white vinegar, salt, and distilled water, followed by a scrubbing with a soft-bristle toothbrush. While many spots remained obscured, they could make out a woman’s face in profile and two words: “Marie” and “Reunion.” These details they’d relayed to Selma before leaving the bungalow.“Not a one,” Sam said. “An odd shape for a coin, though.”

“Private minting, perhaps?” “Could be. If so, it’s well done. Nice clean edges, good tooling, solid weight . . .”

Elimu returned with the wine, decanted, poured for both of them, waited for their nods of approval, then filled their glasses. This particular Pinot Noir was South African, a rich red with hints of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and something Sam couldn’t quite place.Remi took a second sip and said, “Chicory.”

Sam’s phone rang. He looked at the screen, mouthed, Selma , then answered. “Evening, Selma.” Remi leaned forward to listen in.

“Morning for me. Pete and Wendy just got here. They’re starting on the Tanzanian law angle.”

“Perfect.”

“Let me guess: You’re sitting at the the Ekundu Kifaru, staring at the sunset.”

“Creatures of habit,” Remi said.

“You have news?” Sam asked.

“About your coin. You have yourself another mystery.”

Sam saw the waiter approaching and said, “Hold a minute.” They ordered a Samakai wa kusonga and wali-fish croquet and native rice with chapati bread-and for dessert, N’dizi no kastad-Zanzibar-style banana custard. The waiter left, and Sam un-muted Selma.“Go ahead, Selma. We’re all ears,” Sam said.

“The coin was minted sometime in the early 1690s. Only fifty were made, and they never saw official circulation. In fact, they were a token of affection, for lack of a better term. The ‘Marie’ on the coin’s face is part of ‘Sainte Marie,’ the name of a French commune situated on the north coast of Reunion Island.”“Never heard of it,” Remi said.

“Not surprising. It’s a little lump of an island about four hundred miles east of Madagascar.”

“Who’s the woman?” Sam asked. “Adelise Molyneux. The wife of Demont Molyneux, the administrator of Sainte Marie from 1685 to 1701. According to the stories, for their tenth anniversary Demont had his private stock of gold melted down and minted into these Adelise coins.”“Quite a gesture,” Remi said.

“The coins were supposed to represent the number of years Demont hoped they would spend together before dying. They came close. They both died within a year of each other, just shy of their fortieth anniversary.”“So how did this one get all the way to Zanzibar?” Sam asked.

“Here’s where truth gets mixed up with legend,” Selma replied. “You’ve heard of George Booth, I assume?”

“English pirate,” Sam said.

“Right. Spent most of his time in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Started as a gunner aboard the Pelican around 1696, then aboard the Dolphin. Around 1699 the Dolphin was cornered by a British fleet near Reunion Island. Some of the crew surrendered; some, including Booth, escaped to Madagascar, where Booth and a another pirate captain, John Bowen, combined forces and hijacked the Speaker, a four-hundred-fifty-ton, fifty-gun slave ship. Booth was elected captain, and then around 1700 he took the Speaker to Zanzibar. When they went ashore for supplies, the landing party was attacked by Arab troops. Booth was killed and Bowen survived. From there, Bowen took the Speaker back to the waters around Madagascar, before dying a few years later on Mauritius.”

“You said the Dolphin was cornered near Reunion Island,” Sam repeated. “How close to the Sainte Marie commune?”“A few miles offshore,” Selma replied. “Legend says Booth and his crew had just finished raiding the commune.”

“Having made off with the Adelise coins,” Remi finished.

“So says the legend. And so said Demont Molyneux in an official letter of complaint to

Louis XIV, the king of France.”

“So let’s play this out,” Sam said. “Booth and the other escapees from the Dolphin take with them the Adelise coins, then meet up with Bowen. They then hijack the Speaker and head for Zanzibar, where they . . . what? Bury their booty on Chumbe Island? Dump it in shallow water for later recovery?”

“Or maybe the Speaker never got away,” Remi added. “Maybe the stories are wrong. Maybe she was sunk in the channel.”“Half a dozen of one, six of the other,” Selma replied. “Either way, the coin you found is from the Adelise lot.”

“The question is,” Sam said, “does our bell belong to the Speaker ?”

CHAPTER 4

ZANZIBAR

THE STORM THAT HAD CLOSED OVER THE ISLAND IN THE EARLY-MORNING hours had moved on by dawn, leaving the air crisp and the foliage around their bungalow glistening with dew. Sam and Remi sat on the rear porch overlooking the beach and shared a meal of fruit, bread, cheese, and strong black coffee. In the trees around them, hidden birds squawked.Suddenly a pinkie-sized gecko scaled the leg of Remi’s chair and skittered across her lap and onto the table, where it navigated the dishes before retreating down Sam’s chair.

“Wrong turn, I guess,” Sam remarked.

“I have a way with reptiles,” Remi said.

They shared one more cup of coffee, then cleaned up, packed their backpacks, and walked down to the beach, where they’d grounded the cabin cruiser. Sam tossed their backpacks over the railing, then gave Remi a boost.“Anchor?” she called.

“Coming.”

Sam squatted beside the auger-shaped beach anchor, wriggled it free, then handed it up to Remi. She disappeared, and he could hear her feet padding along the deck, and then a few seconds later the engines growled to life and settled into a sputtering idle.“Slow back,” Sam called.

“Slow back, aye,” Remi replied.

When Sam heard the propeller begin to churn, he leaned hard against the hull, dug his feet into the wet sand, coiled his legs, and shoved. The boat eased back a foot, then another, then floated free. He reached up, snagged the lowermost railing with his hands, then swung his legs up, hooked his heel on the gunwale, and climbed aboard.“Chumbe Island?” Remi called through the open pilothouse window.

“Chumbe Island,” Sam confirmed. “Got a mystery to solve.”

THEY WERE A FEW MILES northwest of Prison Island when Sam’s satellite phone trilled. Sitting on the afterdeck, sorting through their gear, Sam picked up the phone and pressed Talk. It was Selma. “Good news, not so good news,” she said.“Good news first,” Sam said.

“According to Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources regulations, the spot where you found the bell is outside sanctuary boundaries. There’s no reef there, so no protection necessary.”“And the not so good news?”

“Tanzanian maritime salvage law still applies-‘No extraordinary excavation methods.’ It’s a gray area, but it sounds like you’re going to need more than Ping-Pong paddles to free that bell. I’ve got both Pete and Wendy looking into the permit process-discreetly, of course.”

Boyfriend and girlfriend Pete Jeffcoat and Wendy Corden-tan and fit blond Californians with degrees in archaeology and social sciences, respectively-worked as Selma’s apprentices.“Good,” Sam said. “Keep us posted.”

AFTER A BRIEF STOP at the Stone Town docks to refuel and gather the days’ provisions, it took another leisurely ninety minutes’ cruising down the coast and picking their way through the channels of Zanzibar’s outer islands before they reached the bell’s GPS coordinates. Sam went forward and dropped anchor. The air was dead calm and the sky a cloudless blue. As Zanzibar sat just below the equator, July was during winter rather than summer, so the temperature wouldn’t climb above the low eighties. A good day for diving. He hoisted the white-stripe-on-red diver-down flag on the halyard, then joined Remi on the afterdeck.“Tanks or snorkel?” she asked.

“Let’s start with snorkel.” The bell was sitting in ten feet of water. “Let’s get a good look at what we’re up against, then regroup.”

AS IT HAD BEEN the day before and was ninety percent of the time in Zanzibar, the water was stunningly clear, ranging in shade from turquoise to indigo. Sam rolled backward over the gunwale, followed a few seconds later by Remi. Together they hung motionless on the surface for a few seconds, letting the cloud of bubbles and froth dissipate, then flipped over and dove. Once they reached the white sand bottom they turned right and soon reached the lip of the bank, where they performed another pike dive and followed the vertical face to the bottom. They stopped, knelt in the sand, and jammed their dive knives into the bottom to use as handholds.

Ahead they could see the edge of the Good-bye Zone. The previous night’s storm had not only ramped up the current in the main channel but had also churned up a lot of debris, so thick it looked like a solid gray-brown wall of sand. This at least would keep the sharks away from the shallows. The downside was they could feel the draw of the current from where they hovered.Sam tapped his snorkel and jerked his thumb upward. Remi nodded.

They finned for the surface and broke into the air.

“You feel that?” Sam asked.

Remi nodded. “Felt like an invisible hand was trying to grab us.”

“Stick close to the bank.”

“Got it.”

They dove again. On the bottom, Sam checked the readout on his GPS unit, oriented himself, then pointed south down the bank and signed to Remi: 30 feet . Resurfacing, they swam that way in single file, Sam in the lead, one eye on the GPS, one eye on his position. He stopped again and pointed an index finger down.

Where the bell had jutted from the bank there was now nothing but a barrel-shaped crater. Anxiously they scanned left and right. Remi saw it first, a curved indentation in the bottom, ten feet to their right, connected to another indentation by a curved line like a sidewinder’s trail. The pattern repeated. They followed it with their eyes until, twenty feet away, they saw a dark lump jutting from the sand. It was the bell.

It took little imagination to piece together what had happened: Throughout the night the storm-driven waves had scoured the bank, slowly but steadily eroding the sand around the bell until it tumbled from its resting place. From there the surge had rolled the bell along its mouth, physics, erosion, and time doing their work until the storm passed.

Sam and Remi turned to each other and nodded excitedly. Where Tanzanian law had forbidden them to use “extraordinary excavation methods,” Mother Nature had come to the rescue.

They swam toward the bell but had only covered half the distance when Sam reached out a halting hand to Remi’s arm. She had already stopped and was staring ahead. She’d seen what he’d seen.The bell had come to a stop at the lip of the precipice, with the waist, shoulder, and crown embedded in the sand and the sound ring and mouth jutting into empty space.

BACK ON THE SURFACE, they got their breath. Remi said, “It’s too big.”

“Too big for what? To move?”

“No, to belong to the Speaker .”

Sam considered this. “You’re right. I didn’t notice.”

The Speaker’s displacement was listed as four hundred fifty tons. According to standard measures for the era in question, her bell wouldn’t have weighed more than sixty pounds. Their bell was bigger than that.“Curiouser and curiouser,” Sam said. “Back to the boat. We need a plan.”

THEY WERE TEN FEET from the boat when they heard the rumble of diesel engines approaching from behind. They reached the ladder and turned around to see a Tanzanian coast guard gunboat a hundred yards away. Sam and Remi climbed onto the Andreyale’s afterdeck and shed their gear.“Smile and wave,” Sam murmured.

“Are we in trouble?” Remi whispered through her smile.

“Don’t know. We’ll soon find out.” Sam continued waving.

“I’ve heard Tanzanian jails are unpleasant.”

“Every jail is unpleasant. It’s all relative.”

Thirty feet away, the gunboat came about and drew parallel to them, bow to stern. Sam now saw it was an upgraded 1960s-era Chinese Yulin-class patrol boat. They saw Yulins several times on each of their trips, and Sam, ever interested, had done his homework: forty feet long, ten tons; three-shaft, two six-hundred-horsepower diesel engines; and a pair of twin 12.7mm deck guns fore and aft.

Two sailors in jungle fatigues stood on the afterdeck and two more on the forecastle. All bore shoulder-slung AK-47s. A tall black man in crisp whites, clearly the captain, stepped from the cabin and walked to the railing.“Ahoy,” he called. Unlike Sam and Remi’s previous encounters with the coast guard, this captain was grim-faced. No welcoming smile or pleasantries.

“Ahoy,” Sam replied.

“Routine safety check. We will board you now.”

“Be our guest.”

The gunboat’s engines gurgled, and the Yulin angled closer until its bow was ten feet away. The engines went back to idle, and the Yulin glided to a stop beside them. The sailors on the afterdeck tossed tire bumpers over the side, then reached down, grabbed the Andreyale’s railing, and pulled the boats together. The captain vaulted over the railing and landed catlike on the Andreyale’s afterdeck beside Sam and Remi.“You are flying the diver flag, I see,” he said.

“Doing a little snorkeling,” Sam replied.

“This boat is yours?” “No, a rental.”

“Your papers.”

“For the boat?”

“And diving certificates.”

Remi said, “I’ll get them,” then trotted down the steps into the cabin.

The captain asked Sam, “What is your purpose here?”

“On Zanzibar or here specifically?”

“Both, sir.”

“Just on vacation. This seemed like a nice spot. We were here yesterday.”

Remi returned with the documents and handed them to the captain, who first examined the rental agreement, then their diving certificates. He looked up and studied their faces. “You are Sam and Remi Fargo.”Sam nodded.

“The treasure hunters.”

Remi said, “For lack of a better term.”

“Are you hunting treasure on Zanzibar?”

Sam smiled. “That’s not why we came, but we try to keep our eyes open.” Over the captain’s shoulder, behind the tinted windows of the Yulin’s cabin, Sam saw a shadowed figure. It appeared to be staring at them.“Have your eyes seen anything on this visit?”

“A coin.”

“You are aware of Tanzanian law regarding these matters?”

Remi nodded. “We are.” From the Yulin, a knuckle rapped once on the window.

The captain looked over his shoulder, said to Sam and Remi, “Wait here,” then climbed back over the railing and stepped into the Yulin’s cabin. He reappeared a minute later and jumped back down.“The coin you have found-describe it.”

Without hesitation, Remi said, “Round, copper, about the size of a fifty-shilling piece. It’s badly pitted. We haven’t been able to make anything of it.”

“Do you have it with you?”

“No,” said Sam.

“And you say you are not hunting for any shipwrecks or specific treasure?”

“That’s correct.”

“Where are you staying on Zanzibar?”

Sam saw no point in lying. They would double-check the answer. “A bungalow on Kendwa Beach.”

The captain handed back their papers, then tipped his cap to them. “Good day.”

And then he was back over the rail and inside the Yulin’s cabin. The gunboat’s engines rumbled, the sailors pushed off, and the gunboat came about and steered west toward the channel. Sam took two long strides, ducked into the cabin, and reemerged with a pair of binoculars. He lifted them to his eyes and trained them on the Yulin. After twenty seconds, he lowered the binoculars.“What?” Remi asked.