Treasure Hunters Read online

  Col nodded. ‘Pretty well.’

  ‘Let’s cheat.’ Matt reached into the wheelhouse and took the wheel from Pat’s hands. He turned the Tub back to the fishhook marker.

  Col waved the marked chart then sighed. ‘Oh, okay,’ he said. The Tub circled the marker until the bow aimed at the distant peak and the other markers formed a straggled line off the stern.

  ‘Just hold us on the peak.’ Matt gave the wheel back to Pat.

  ‘It’s getting deeper.’ Col said.

  The papers moved slowly, catching rocks on the seabed and boulders below. The papers scratched in soft urgency, even the engine was beating an impatient rhythm in its slow march ’

  Diego leans tiredly on the tiller after working at the pumps. Juan and the old carpenter are talking by the steps.

  ‘The leaks are getting worse,’ the carpenter says. ‘We’re going to have to do something.’

  ‘Was thinking about that.’ Juan points ahead. ‘There’s an island up there. Maybe we can beach it and fix it prop–’

  Diego feels a scraping in the hull and heaves the tiller with his eyes wide.

  ‘North, north!’ Juan screams, but too late.

  The Flor has been moving slowly across the calm water with the sails almost hanging from the yards, but its keel has crunched into another unseen reef. The ship lurches and stops.

  Again! Diego thinks in despair.

  Water pours from the patched hole.

  ‘Got one right now.’ Col said.

  The needle hardly quivered, the sonar paper showed nothing, but the profiler showed an odd angle under the seabed. Matt dutifully threw another marker over the side. This was the fifth marker since Pat had aimed the Tub at the peak.

  ‘Hey ’’ Col stepped back in alarm.

  The pens of the sonar and the profiler had been muttering to each other for more than two hours as their paper rollers slowly moved – but suddenly they were almost screaming in panic. The pens shivered the width of the paper, leaving black smears.

  ‘That’s all we need,’ Matt said. ‘Your machines are breaking down.’

  Col looked over his shoulder. ‘I don’t think so. Sonar and profile are agreeing with each other. It looks like a cliff.’

  Matt snatched the chart from Col. ‘No sign of it here.’

  ‘So the oceanographers didn’t know. It happens.’

  ‘They’ve stopped,’ Pat said.

  Suddenly the black smears had finished in a scribbled line. The pens returned to sketching the rocks and boulders.

  ‘It’s a cleft. A chasm on the seabed.’ Col looked at Matt.

  Matt shook his head. ‘Ah, no, forget it. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  But in the last glow of the day the ticking machines found nothing else on the other side of the chasm. Not a fisherman’s anchor, not a rusty screw.

  Col took the Tub to the reef at sunset and Matt dropped the anchor. They stared from the bow at the markers, a line weaving like a water snake towards the smoking mountain. Towards the chasm.

  ‘It could be there,’ said Matt flatly.

  19 / the sinking

  Next morning Col was at the drums in the bow watching the smoking mountain when Pat and Matt staggered up from the cabin. As if he had remained there overnight.

  ‘Waiting for us?’ Matt said.

  ‘Just look at the island now.’

  Now there were four heavy plumes of smoke rising from the lower slopes, mingling to become a single column in the clear morning air above the island. But Pat wasn’t looking at the fires; he had caught sight of the sun blazing on the leaping tiger on the peak.

  ‘Taketigra,’ he said.

  Col looked at him blankly.

  ‘You know, what the old fisherman said.’

  ‘Oh, the boat from the village. Well, there’s no fires around the village, that’s something. Bloody army.’

  ‘Hey, let’s think about the job,’ Matt said. ‘Breakfast and work.’

  ‘Maybe we ought to take the Tub into the harbour. Show the flag.’

  Matt was startled for a moment. Then he sucked in a breath before he slowly spoke. ‘Like Sorrento?’

  Pat watched Col’s face crumple, as if he had been hit.

  There was a long silence between the two men.

  Pat couldn’t stand the tension. ‘Anyone want coffee?’

  Col closed his eyes. ‘Yes, coffee.’

  ‘Breakfast!’ Matt rubbed his hands.

  Col looked again at the burning island and turned away. ‘Yes, it wouldn’t work.’

  After breakfast Pat followed Col down to the reef, still wondering what had happened at Sorrento. He watched two small, red fish playing in Col’s bubbles and thought: What do you know? It’s a beach place in Victoria and in Italy. But it could be the name of a bull, or a plane, anything at all. And it’s an adult thing. With Robbie you can ask straight out: ‘What’s this about?’ And he would tell you. But Col is a wrinkled-man and you are a kid and Col would say: ‘Never mind.’ Forget about Sorrento, you’ll never know.

  Col took Pat to the base of the reef where he and Matt had been working with their trowels the day before. Col pointed ahead until Pat saw the remnants of a chain etched on a rock. He floated down to the rock and found a single fragment of black wood anchored by a shell. He shifted his eyes from it and suddenly he saw cannon snouts thrusting through some coral.

  At least he could work this one out ’

  Diego grips the tiller numbly, listening to water pouring into the hull and the shouting of frightened men.

  ‘Get planks, canvas! Cover that hole!’ bellows Juan.

  ‘Pump, pump!’ shouts the carpenter.

  ‘The tide is coming in,’ pants Juan. ‘We can get her off!’

  ‘Throw things over the side!’

  ‘Cheap things,’ shouts Juan.

  Diego joins wheezing men in hurling wooden boxes, seamen’s chests, the stove’s firewood, the stove, barrels of water, bags of rice, cannons ’ The soldiers hesitate with the cannons. Diego knows what the soldiers are thinking, that if pirates attacked them they would be helpless without the cannons. But without the ship the cannons are useless. Juan shouts at them until they heave all the cannons and the stone cannonballs overboard.

  And suddenly the Flor slides from the reef.

  The men lean on the rail and pant.

  But Juan is screaming. ‘Don’t stop now! The water is rushing in where the reef made a hole. We’re sinking!’

  Pat kicked away from the cannon snouts and followed Col through the swaying seaweed towards the second marker. The dark shoeprint of the Tub’s hull trailed after them.

  Col reached the marker first and swept the seabed with the disc of the metal detector, but Pat found the ragged skeleton of rust jutting out of a cluster of rocks. Not a fishhook for whales, but the remains of a ship’s anchor.

  Pat waved at Col.

  Col cruised over, moving the marker to the anchor. He shook his head sadly and swam to the third marker.

  Diego tightens the ropes to the tiller so that the Flor will sail straight at the island without him. He is moving to help the men when he bangs into the glaring lion. He looks at its eyes and they seem to be gloating at him.

  ‘You can leave!’ Diego grabs its head and rolls it on the edge of its base towards the open deck. Juan sees what he’s doing and they wrestle it to the rail until it topples into the water.

  Diego staggers back and looks around. Juan has given up trying to block the rushing water. The sails are now almost limp in the still air, but the seamen are thrusting the long sweep oars from the hull in an effort to drag the ship across the sea. He joins them. Now the Flor do Mar, the proud caravel that sailed halfway around the world, is nothing more than a Roman galley with hardly enough oarsmen to shift her.

  The soldiers are still pumping desperately as others heave barrels of salted meat and the last of the drinking water overboard. Juan chops the rope from one of the two anchors with an axe. The anchor splashes
in the sea.

  Nobody looks at the island. It is a long way and they cannot swim ’

  Near the third marker Pat found some fragments of chain and a bronze hinge. Maybe it had been a very large box, locked carefully, but there was no sign of what it contained now. He cocked his head at Col. What’s this then?

  Col opened a hand. Sorry, no idea at all.

  They swirled over a hanging cliff ledge and reached the fourth marker. They found a curved piece of metal in a network of orange coral. The metal was thickly covered with shells and weed, but Pat thought he could see the shape of a man’s chest. For a second he was seeing a man’s body.

  Col tapped his chest and shook his hand as if it was hurting. You know this. They wore them on the chest…

  Pat nodded his head. A breastplate, a soldier’s armour.

  Diego is brushed by Juan while he is carrying his dented armour to the rail.

  Juan hesitates for a moment.

  ‘Go on soldier,’ wheezes the carpenter. ‘You won’t be fighting now. Next you’ll be swimming.’

  Juan throws his armour into the water, but the soldiers on the pumps sag to a stop.

  The carpenter shakes his head. ‘It’s no good. Too much water.’

  Diego lets go of his sweep and sees the dark water high in the hold, then looks at the long distance to the island. Far too much water.

  Col turned away from the breastplate and started to swim to the last marker. Then he turned back with his eyes widening. He stared at the armour, seeing something more than the rusted fragments, then clenched his fist before him.

  Pat opened his hand. What?

  Col jerked his thumb up and immediately kicked towards the surface.

  20 / chasm

  Matt leaned on the rail and looked down. ‘Bit early for you.’

  Col tilted his face mask and grinned. ‘They didn’t die here.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Matt, his voice flat.

  Pat looked at Matt. He sounded unhappy. Why?

  Col shook his head. ‘Hey, I didn’t say the ship didn’t die here.’

  Oh right, he’s worried about the ship getting away.

  Col heaved himself up. ‘The ship is probably down there – somewhere. But the crew aren’t. Wait, wait.’ He shrugged off his tank, kicked his fins away and jogged to the wheelhouse.

  Pat slowly began to smile. It doesn’t matter if Matt doesn’t like it. Suddenly the guys on the Florhad a chance.

  Col came out, flipping through a battered Portuguese-English dictionary. ‘Before, Pat was saying Taketigra. And that’s what the grandfather said. So I got myself thinking about that word and Indonesian languages, using the beginning of the word – Tak – as a peg. But I wasn’t thinking properly.

  He jabbed a finger at a page and looked up. ‘I don’t speak Indonesian, Portuguese, Spanish but I grope from one word to another and after a while you know a few words. Even those in the old, old books. Thing is that words change all the time. Especially over five hundred years. If you just drop “T” from Taketigra then you have Aketigra – Atiquetikre - Atique Tikre. That is “leaping tiger” in Portuguese.’

  ‘They made it to the island,’ said Pat softly.

  ‘I better have a look after lunch,’ said Matt.

  Diego lowers the ship’s boat. The heavy yard had smashed it at the first reef, but the old carpenter had been working on it since the ship’s sails were raised, just in case. Now is the time.

  Once the boat is sitting in the water the old carpenter nervously studies his caulked seams for leaks. There are a couple of slow trickles but they won’t worry anyone, so he motions Diego to climb down and rig up the boat’s mast. The men swing clumsily down the side of the ship, some of them carrying a statuette, a bar of gold, a few silver coins, snatched from the treasure hold.

  Juan holds a fat bag as he squeezes past Diego. Diego wants to go back into the ship but the lower deck is awash. The old carpenter is the only person left on the Flor. He starts to climb down but he falters and steps back.

  ‘Wait,’ he says, and disappears back into the ship.

  Matt reached past Pat to touch a bronze lock. He looked with a shrug at the fragments of ancient wood, rusted metal and an axe head. The last marker was giving away nothing. He jerked the weight’s line to duck the marker under the surface so that Col would know they were moving on. He pointed towards the chasm and swam ahead.

  Pat slid over the lock and guessed that it might have come off a chest ’

  The carpenter drags his tool chest and balances it over the rail.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Juan snorts. ‘That is worthless!’

  ‘On that island we need tools more than gold. Help me.’

  Juan stands in the boat and reaches for the chest.

  ‘I have it.’

  Juan slides the chest over the rail but Juan is not ready for the weight and staggers. Another soldier leaps up to help him, but they tilt the boat and fall across Diego. The chest thumps onto the bow of the boat and splashes into the water between the boat and the ship.

  The carpenter stares at the long eruption of bubbles then Flor lurches as black water wells over the deck from the open hatch. He slithers down to the boat and Diego pushes away from the ship. The seamen row the boat to the open water and stop, leaning on the oars in exhaustion.

  They watch the Flor as the sails catch a brief, light air, pushing a weak bow wave. For a moment she seems to be trying to reach the island by herself. But the bow kisses the surface of the sea. Green water curls over the lower deck, eddies around the abandoned pumps and begins to climb the mainmast. A large mahogany horse rears from the flooded hold and rushes into the shadowy tunnel of Diego’s tiller. The water laps over the quarterdeck and the sails dip slowly into the swirling sea as the hull gives a massive belch. The top of the mainmast wobbles for a second, then the Flor do Mar disappears.

  The boat’s tattered sail is hauled up the mast and Diego steers towards the island’s mountain.

  He looks at the men in the boat, six seamen, five soldiers, that’s all. Very tired, sick, hurt, frightened and beyond the edge of the world. He lifts his head to the glinting mountain peak and sees an angry quartz tiger leaping at him.

  He rubs his thumb against his lucky token and closes his eyes. Stay with us, he pleads. Look after us.

  Matt and Pat kicked from the seabed and slid towards the chasm. Suddenly they had stopped nosing for signs among the coral and had begun to race, as if they knew the ship was just over that waiting edge. A speckled, fat, red fish drifted in front of Pat, and gobbled at him before shooting away in fright. He saw a long shark cruising in the shadows fifty metres away, but it was not interested.

  The Tub moved ahead of them, Col dropping the anchor on a clutter of rocks at the edge of the chasm. Pat kicked past the rusty chain, slipped over the lip and immediately went cold.

  There was nothing below him.

  There was a tumbling cliff behind him with bizarre coral growths, like brains, reaching out towards him. Swollen purple brains, as immense as pumpkins, sat on outcrops next to delicate staghorns and orange fans. He saw coral filigrees so fine that no current or tide seemed to have passed there. Silver, gold, crimson fish blurred around the coral. Across from Pat there was the other cliff, dim in the distance.

  But between the two cliffs there was an abyss. A black hole. A sunbeam passed him, flicked past a deep white fish and petered out in the dark of the emerald green.

  Pat felt as if he was falling from a tall precipice and he could not do anything. He knew that he was not falling; he was drifting across a mass of deep still water. He could not fall! But his body would not believe that.

  Matt nudged him and passed the metal detector.

  Pat frowned. What do I do with it?

  Matt unclipped a long torch from his belt.

  Pat winced. He hadn’t really noticed that Matt was carrying the torch until now.

  Matt clicked it on and shone the beam straight down.

  It d
idn’t help. The beam was concentrated; almost a pole of light, catching an edge of a large, grey fish, a flicker of a yellow school, then it was lost in the dark.

  Matt tapped his chest and pointed down but he held up his hand in front of Pat. Stay here kid and wait. He twisted and followed the beam.

  Pat hovered in the bright water and watched Matt slowly shrink towards the waiting black. He became a seal with his tail washing behind him, a small fish, a shadow in the diminishing beam, then he was gone. The beam became a lonely spark for a while but eventually even that went.

  Pat closed his eyes, rolled his body and saw the footprint of the Tub above him and felt a little better. He wasn’t all that alone. He rolled again and stared into the black chasm for a long while but he could not see anything. A large rainbow fish wandered close to his mask and twitched its mouth at him.

  He wobbled a couple of fingers. Go away, before I eat you.

  He looked at his watch. It’s getting a bit long, isn’t it? He reached back for the tank gauge. Okay for a while.

  But what if he gets in trouble? How do you know? You can’t see anything. And what do you do anyway? Swim after him? The water pressure down there is a killer. It would flatten a tennis ball. If it kills him, for sure it would kill you.

  But ’

  There was a glimmer down there.

  He’s coming up. About bloody time.

  Pat saw that his hand was trembling and he shook his head.

  But the light wasn’t moving. It was as though the torch had been dropped onto a rock.

  Don’t be stupid. You know he can’t come pedalling up; the nitrogen in his blood would kill him for certain. Every metre he goes down, the water pressure builds on his body, forcing nitrogen to be released in the blood. If he comes up fast it makes the nitrogen bubble; it’s like boiling the blood. He’ll have the bends, doubling him up in agony in the middle of nowhere.