Clive Cussler - Lost Empire

“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 ?”

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.