Douglas Preston - Riptide

RIPTIDE

D OUGLAS PRESTON

AND

LINCOLN CHILD

WARNER BOOKS

A Time Warner Company This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Visit our Web site at http://warnerbooks.com A Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America First Printing: July 1998 10 987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preston, Douglas J.

Riptide / Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.p. cm.

ISBN 0-446-52336-4 I. Child, Lincoln. IL Title. PS3566.R3982R57 1998 813'.52—dc21

Book design by Giorgetta Bell McRee 97-23907 CIP

Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter, Veronica

Douglas Preston dedicates this book to his brother, Richard Preston

Acknowledgments

We owe a great debt to one of Maine's finest doctors, David Preston, for invaluable help with the medical aspects of Riptide. We also wish to thank our agents, Eric Simonoff and Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit; Matthew Snyder of Creative Artists Agency; our superb editor, Betsy Mitchell, and Maureen Egen, publisher, of Warner Books.

Lincoln Child would like to thank Denis Kelly, Bruce Swan-son, Lee Suckno, M.D., Bry Benjamin, M.D., Bonnie Mauer, Cherif Keita, the Reverend Robert M. Diachek, and Jim Cush. In particular, I wish to thank my wife, Luchie, for her support, and for her stringent (and sometimes astringent) criticism, over the past five years, of four novels-in-progress. I want to thank my parents for instilling in me, from the beginning, a profound love for sailing and salt water that continues to this day. I also wish to acknowledge the shadowy company of centuries-dead buccaneers, pirates, codemakers and codebreakers, dilettantes, and Elizabethan intelligence agents, for providing some of the more colorful archetypes and source material in Riptide's arsenal. And, lastly, I want to give a long-overdue thank-you to Tom McCormack, ex-boss and mentor, who with enthusiasm and perspicacity taught me so much about the art of writing and the craft of editing. Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.

Douglas Preston would like to express his appreciation to John P. Wiley, Jr., senior editor of Smithsonian magazine, and to Don Moser, editor. I would like to thank my wife, Christine, for her support, and my daughter Selene, for reading the manuscript and offering excellent suggestions. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my mother, Dorothy McCann Preston, and to my father, Jerome Preston, Jr., for keeping and preserving Green Pastures Farm so that my children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy the real place that figures as one of the fictional backdrops to Riptide.

We offer our apologies to Maine purists for reconfiguring the coastline and moving islands and channels about with brazen abandon. Needless to say, Stormhaven and its inhabitants, and Thalassa and its employees, are fictitious and exist only in our imaginations. Similarly, though there may be several Ragged Islands found along the Eastern seaboard, the Ragged Island described in Riptide —along with the Hatch family that owns it—is a completely fictitious object.

RIPTIDE

Such a day, rum all out:—Our company somewhat sober:—A damned confusion amongst us!—Rogues a-plotting:—Great talk of separation—so I looked sharp for a prize:—Such a day took one, with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again.

— from the logbook of Edward Teach, aka Black beard, ca. 1718

Applying twentieth-century solutions to seventeenth-century problems affords either absolute success or absolute chaos; there is no middle ground.

—Orville Horn, Ph.D.

Prologue

On an afternoon in June 1790, a Maine cod fisherman named Simon Rutter became caught in a storm and a strong riptide. His dory overloaded with fish, he went badly off course and was forced to put in at fogbound Ragged Island, six miles off the coast. While waiting for the heavy weather to pass, the fisherman decided to explore the deserted spot. Inland from the rocky bluffs that gave the islet its name, he found a massive old oak tree with an ancient block and tackle dangling from one low-slung limb. Directly underneath it the ground had subsided into a depression. Although the island was known to be uninhabited, Rutter found clear evidence that someone had visited many years before.

His curiosity aroused, Rutter enlisted the aid of a brother and returned one Sunday several weeks later with picks and shovels. Locating the depression in the ground, the men began to dig. After five feet they hit a platform of oak logs. They pulled up the logs and, with increasing excitement, kept digging. By the end of the day, they had dug almost twenty feet, passing through layers of charcoal and clay to another oak platform. The brothers went home, intending to renew their digging after the annual mackerel run. But a week later, Rutter's brother was drowned when his dory capsized in a freak accident. The pit was temporarily abandoned.

Two years later, Rutter and a group of local merchants decided to pool their resources and return to the mysterious spot on Ragged Island. Resuming the dig, they soon reached a number of heavy vertical oak beams and cross-joists, which appeared to be the ancient cribbing of a backfilled shaft. Precisely how deep the group dug has been lost to history — most estimates assume close to one hundred feet. At this point they struck a flat rock with an inscription carved into it:

First will ye Lie

Curst shall ye Crye

Worst must ye Die

The rock was dislodged and hoisted to the surface. It has been theorized that the removal of the rock broke a seal, because moments later, without warning, a flood of seawater burst into the pit. All the diggers escaped — except Simon Rutter. The Water Pit, as the flooded shaft became known, had claimed its first victim.

Many legends grew up about the Water Pit. But the most plausible held that around 1695, the notorious English pirate Edward Ockham buried his vast hoard somewhere along the Maine coast shortly before his mysterious death. The shaft at Ragged Island seemed a likely candidate. Shortly after Rutter's death, rumors began to circulate that the treasure was cursed, and that anyone attempting to plunder it would suffer the fate threatened on the stone.

Numerous unsuccessful efforts were made to drain the Water Pit. In 1800, two of Rutter's former partners formed a new company and raised money to finance the digging of a second tunnel, twelve feet to the south of the original pit. All went well for the first hundred feet of digging, at which point they attempted to dig a horizontal passage beneath the original Water Pit. Their scheme was to tunnel up from underneath the treasure, but as soon as they angled in toward the original pit, the passage rapidly began filling with water. The men barely escaped with their lives.

For thirty years, the pit lay fallow. Then, in 1831, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company was formed by a downstate mining engineer named Richard Parkhurst. A friend of one of the original merchants, Parkhurst was able to gain valuable information about the earlier workings. Parkhurst decked over the mouth of the Water Pit and set up a large steam-driven pump. He found it impossible to drain the seawater. Undaunted, he brought in a primitive coal-drilling rig, which he positioned directly over the Pit. The drill went well beyond the original depth of the Pit, striking planking as deep as 170 feet, until the drill was stopped by something impenetrable. When the drilling pipe was removed, bits of iron and scales of rust were found jammed in the torn bit. The pod also brought up putty, cement, and large quantities of fiber. This fiber was analyzed and found to be "manilla grass" or coconut fiber. This plant, which grows only in the tropics, was commonly used as dunnage in ships to keep cargo from shifting. Shortly after this discovery, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company went bankrupt and Parkhurst was forced to leave the island.