Clive Cussler - Lost Empire

Rivera stopped suddenly and held up a closed fist, the soldier’s universal hand signal for “Halt!” His partner stopped in his tracks, and in unison they slowly dropped to one knee. The flashlights were doused. Each man’s head began rotating, looking, listening. The flashlights popped back on again and began skimming over the trees, pausing occasionally here and there. Rivera looked over his shoulder and gestured something to his partner. Together they stood up, turned, and began picking their way into the trees, heading directly for Sam and Remi’s hiding spot.Sam felt Remi’s hand on his shoulder. He reached up, gave it a reassuring squeeze.

Rivera and his partner kept coming. They were thirty feet away.

Now twenty feet. Ten feet.

They stopped, looked left and right, and flashlight beams probed the gaps between the logs around Sam and Remi. Twigs cracked. Rivera whispered something to his partner. Sam and Remi felt the log over their heads sink a couple inches. The tips of a pair of boots appeared at the edge of the log, and a flashlight beam swept over the depression.Five long seconds passed.

The flashlight clicked off. The boots pulled back, followed by a double thump as Rivera dismounted the log. Slowly the footfalls faded.

Sam counted to one hundred, then slowly lifted his head until he could see through the gap. Silhouetted by the glow of their flashlights, Rivera and his partner were back at the tree line and moving south toward the sandbar. Sam watched them for another minute and turned his head so his mouth was closer to Remi’s ear.

“They’re moving off. We’ll stay put in case they double back.” For the next twenty minutes they remained still, wedged as tightly as possible in their bolt-hole, until finally they heard in the distance the Rinker’s engines growling back to life.Sam whispered, “Just a little longer.” He gave it another five minutes, then rolled out from under the log. “I’m going to have a look around.”

He crawled out of the depression and disappeared. He returned ten minutes later. “They’re gone.” He helped Remi out from her hiding spot.

She exhaled heavily. “That bell better be worth it.”

“Another few hours and we’re home free.” ED MITCHELL WAS as good as his word, if not a little better. Just as the sun was peeking through the forest to the east they heard the thump of helicopter rotors. As a precaution Sam and Remi scrambled back into their bolt-holes, occasionally peeking out as the rotors grew louder. To the west they saw a yellow-and-white Bell helicopter sweep in over the beach and turn inland, following the course of the river. When the helicopter reached the sandbar, the pilot’s door opened. A moment later, blue smoke began drifting over the ground.Sam and Remi rolled out together and stood up. Sam asked, “Ready for home?” Remi shook her head, and he chuckled. “Right. Sorry. Hot shower and breakfast.”

AN HOUR LATER, with the crate strapped safely to the Bell’s deck, they touched down at the Ras Kutani airstrip. While Mitchell trotted off to collect his vehicle for the ride back to Dar es Salaam, Sam and Remi used the sat phone to place a long-overdue call to Selma.“Where have you been?” their chief researcher said over the speaker. “I’ve been sitting by the phone.”

“Is that your way of saying you were worried about us?” Remi asked.

“Yes, it is. Now, explain yourselves.”

Sam briefly recounted the last few days, ending with their recovery of the bell. Selma sighed. “I wish I could say positively you haven’t wasted your time.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

“We got the first shipment from Morton’s museum yesterday. In with the miscellanea we found what looks like a journal of sorts-Blaylock’s journal, to be exact.”

“That’s good news,” Remi said, then added tentatively, “Right?”

“It would be,” Selma replied, “if not for the fact that I’m pretty sure Winston Lloyd Blaylock, the Mbogo of Bagamoyo, was certifiably insane.”

GOLDFISH POINT,

LA JOLLA , CALIFORNIA

EXHAUSTED AND WANTING TO HIT THE GROUND RUNNING WHEN they got home, Sam and Remi spent the majority of the flights home sleeping and eating and generally trying to keep their minds off Selma’s proclamation regarding Winston Blaylock. Their chief researcher wasn’t prone to hyperbole, so they took seriously her suspicion which, if true, cast a pall on their efforts to recover the Shenandoah’s bell. Of course, while the bell was of significant historical value regardless, the cryptic inscription on the bell’s inner surface and Blaylock’s obsession with the ship (either under the guise of the Ophelia, the Shenandoah, or the El Majidi) had suggested to them a deeper mystery-one that had apparently prompted Itzli Rivera and perhaps someone in the Mexican government to murder nine tourists.AS PROMISED, PETE JEFFCOAT and Wendy Corden were waiting for them in the baggage claim area. Pete took their carry-ons. “You look tired.”

“You should have seen us eighteen hours and a couple dozen time zones ago,” Sam replied.

“What happened to you?” Wendy asked, gesturing to Sam’s swollen cheekbone and his taped finger. While the latter was now properly bandaged with medical tape, the cut on his cheekbone was crusty with Super Glue-a remedy Ed Mitchell swore was better than stitches.“I burned a casserole, and Remi got mad,” Sam said. He got a light punch on the arm from his wife in return.

Remi said to Wendy, “Boys being boys, that’s what happened.”

“We’re glad you’re home,” Pete said. “Selma’s been pulling her hair out. Don’t tell her I told you.”

The baggage carousel started turning, and Pete wandered off to collect Sam and Remi’s luggage.

Sam asked Wendy, “Any word on the bell?”

“It’s en route. Should be halfway across the Atlantic by now. With luck, we’ll have it the day after tomorrow.”

“Care to give us a hint why Selma thinks Blaylock is a fruitcake?”

Wendy shook her head. “She’s been up for almost three days straight trying to piece this together. I’m going to let her explain.”

SAM AND REMI’S HOME and base of operations was a four-story, twelve-thousand-square-foot Spanish-style home with an open floor plan, vaulted maple-beamed ceilings, and windows and skylights enough that they bought their Windex in ten-gallon buckets.

The upper floor held Sam and Remi’s master suite, and below this, one flight down, were four guest suites, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen/great room that jutted over the cliff. On the second floor was a gymnasium containing both aerobic and circuit training exercise equipment, a steam room, a HydroWorx endless lap pool, a climbing wall, and a thousand square feet of hardwood floor space for Remi to practice her fencing and Sam his judo.

The ground floor sported two thousand square feet of office space for Sam and Remi and an adjoining workspace for Selma, complete with three Mac Pro workstations coupled with thirty-inch cinema displays, and a pair of wall-mounted thirty-two-inch LCD televisions. On the east wall was Selma’s pride and joy, a fourteen-foot, five-hundred-gallon saltwater aquarium filled with a rainbow-hued assortment of fish whose scientific names she knew by heart.

Selma’s other love, tea, she approached with equal passion; an entire cabinet of the workroom was devoted to her stock, which included a rare Phoobsering-Osmanthus Darjeeling hybrid that Sam and Remi suspected was the source of her seemingly boundless energy.

In appearance, Selma Wondrash was eclectic in the extreme: She wore a modified 1960s bob, horn-rimmed glasses, complete with a neck chain, and a default uniform of khaki pants, sneakers, and a tie-dyed T-shirt.As far as Sam and Remi were concerned, Selma could be as strange as she wished. There was no one better at logistics, research, and resource scrounging.