Gordon Korman: The Danger

“Black is black,” Dante replied gloomily. “In color or black and white.”

In fact, he was probably seeing less than anybody. His glasses were slowly but steadily fogging inside the Rat Hat. He squinted in concentration, focusing on the dim oval his torch projected onto the muddy grade. Another hour passed. It seemed like a week.

As he panned the endless parade of sand and muck, a round object raced through his field of vision. The others might easily have missed it. But in the gray-on-gray world of Dante’s color blindness, shape and texture were everything. He backtracked and picked up the circular form.

It was a metal plate, pewter probably. Definitely very old.

Heart pounding, he shined his light to the left. There was nothing but the underwater moonscape of the seafloor.

Huh? But where’s the —

Beginning to despair, he turned to the right.

The wreck of a seventeenth-century ship winked into ghostly existence in the murky beam.

He tried to call “Guys!” but he began to cough, choking on his own excitement.

“Dante!” cried Kaz. “You okay?”

“I found it!” Dante rasped through hacking and helium. “The shelf! The wreck!”

“Don’t move,” ordered English. “We come to you.”

“Okay.” Dante couldn’t take his eyes off the remains of the old vessel. It was almost as if he expected the site to disappear the instant he looked away. Dishware, bottles, muskets, and helmets littered the angled plateau, along with larger items like anchors and cannon barrels. Ballast stones were everywhere. Half-buried timbers poked out from the bottom silt, all that was left of the spine of the wooden craft.

Now the hard part, he thought to himself. Finding treasure in this mess.

He dropped to his knees, digging an arm experimentally into the soft muck of the shelf. He cleared it away, and aimed his light into the hole. An unmistakable yellow glow shone back at him.

Dante Lewis was staring into a vast pile of gold bars.

It was well after midnight, but the quiet of Côte Saint-Luc harbor was shattered by the rattle and roar of the winch of the R/V Ponce de Léon . The thousand-pound piece of equipment being lowered to the research deck was a sight straight out of Star Wars . It looked like an eight-foot-tall metal-plated robot, with side-mounted thrusters and mechanical claw hands.

It was Tin Man, Poseidon’s one-atmosphere suit, capable of taking a diver to a depth of two thousand feet or more. Tad Cutter had signed it out at exactly 12:01 A.M. Saturday morning.

“I don’t see why this couldn’t wait until we all got some sleep,” yawned Chris Reardon, guiding the huge suit into place for the ride to the wreck site. With a grunt, he added, “This thing weighs a ton.”

“Half a ton,” corrected Marina.

“We’ve only got it for a day, and I’m not taking the chance of coming up empty,” Cutter explained. “The kids are onto us. English is suspicious. It’s time to claim the treasure before somebody beats us to it.” He signaled to Captain Bill Hamilton in the wheelhouse. “Ready to go!”

Thunder rumbled as the Ponce de Léon picked its way out of the harbor, and headed into open water. Distant lightning illuminated the overcast at the horizon.

They had not yet made it to the wreck site when Captain Hamilton cut lights and power, and called his three passengers to the bridge. “There’s a ship ahead,” he informed them. “Looks like an old clunker. The oil company has a few still active.”

“Did they see us?” asked Marina.

“I don’t think so,” replied Hamilton. “I went dark as soon as they came up on radar. They wouldn’t have visual contact yet.”

“You did the right thing,” Cutter approved. “Let’s stay here and play dead until they pass by.”

“They won’t pass by,” Hamilton told him. “They’re anchored. In just about the exact coordinates we’re looking for.”

“No way,” said Reardon in consternation. “There’s no oil on this side of the island.”

“English!” breathed Marina. “The kids must have told him where the treasure is. And he’s put together a team of sat divers to go after it!”

Cutter let fly a string of curses. “Those guys are pros! If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” countered Marina. “If they’re diving sat, they’ve got days of decompression ahead of them. All we have to do is go down in Tin Man and get one piece of treasure. Then the International Maritime Commission declares the wreck is ours. It won’t make any difference if English and his pals pick that ship dry. They’ll just be saving us the trouble.”

Seven hundred feet below, the interns shrieked, sang, and sobbed out their celebration. They had been belittled, ignored, and deceived. Now, finally, they had their reward — gold, not at the end of the rainbow, but at the bottom of the sea.

Gold, gold, and more gold!

“What’s going on down there?” cried Star. “Are you guys all right?”

“You — you won’t believe it—” babbled Dante. “You gotta see it—”

“ Will somebody tell me what’s going on?! ”

Kaz provided the answer. “Dante hit Fort Knox.”

And the party spread to sea level.

For three and a half centuries, the ocean had concealed this prize from armies of treasure hunters, oceanographic experts, and professional divers. Yet four kids on a summer program had managed to unravel the puzzle — with a little help from a West Indian Frenchman named English. And Captain Vanover, of course.

The captain. It was the only melancholy note in this exultant symphony. Braden Vanover should have been here to share this triumph.

Now came the business of recovering the spectacular find. Captain Bourassa repositioned the ship so that the bell and lift basket were directly over the shelf. The divers changed from flippers to weighted boots. Swimming was no longer required. A vast fortune was buried right here. It was simply a matter of digging it up.

After eluding human hands for so long, the treasure of Nuestra Señora de la Luz seemed to give itself up in a single glittering moment. Kaz and Dante pulled hundreds of gold coins and ingots of all shapes and sizes out of the seabed. English yanked on what looked like a chain, only to come up with a rope of gold nine feet long. There turned out to be dozens of these. Beneath them, Adriana uncovered strings of pearls, and necklaces decorated with rubies, emeralds, and sapphires that made her mother’s expensive jewelry seem like dime-store junk.

Gold and gems were easy to spot, but silver was another matter. Silver oxidizes over centuries underwater, so the valuable Spanish pieces of eight were now flat black discs. They littered the bottom like gravel.

“We need a shovel,” panted Kaz. He had lost count of his armloads.

“Or a bulldozer,” Dante added exultantly.

Even English had trouble keeping the smile off his normally sour face. “Monsieur Cutter, he will — how do you say — have the cow.”

“I’m having one myself,” put in Adriana. “And my uncle—”

“I wonder how long it’ll take to get the whole one-point-two billion,” mused Dante.

“Yesterday you refused to dive,” put in Kaz. “Now you want to stay here forever?”

“Dante,” Adriana explained patiently, “the treasure of a Spanish galleon would fill that basket fifty times.”

Star cut in from topside. “I want you guys to come up as soon as you start to feel bushed. Don’t try to be heroes. Remember, it only takes one piece to put a claim on the whole wreck.”