“Must be a lost city!” Maddy suggested.
“Let’s check it out,” Hunt veered the aircraft to the right and then leveled out in preparation for a water landing. First he flew low over the formation, following a course of what appeared to be dark colored stones — large ones — laid out in a line.
“That’s the Bimini Road, all right,” Maddy declared, craning her neck to look out the window.
“And the stones look like giant versions of the gold one from Anubis,” Jayden said.
“Let’s see what the overall pattern is,” Hunt said, veering the plane slightly to the left as he followed the underwater path of stones.
“I see the end up ahead,” Maddy said. “The whole thing is sort of a “J” pattern. Mostly a straight line, but then curving at one end of it.”
They flew on for another minute, until they reached the hook-shaped formation and Hunt began banking the craft into a lazy 180-degree turn.
“Wait a minute, if this is the Bimini Road, then what’s that over there?” Jayden pointed out of his left side window. Hunt took a look in that direction.
“Looks like a parallel track of stones, but much shorter. It’s probably a mile away from the main road.”
“Maybe we should dive that instead?” Jayden suggested.
“Maybe we should fly over it, see what it looks like closer up,” Hunt said. They all agreed and he took the sea plane out of the banking turn and onto a straight course toward the outlying section of the Bimini Road.
“An altitude of fifty feet should let us get a good, close look at the structure,” Hunt said, hands manipulating the plane’s controls. “I’ll slow us down some, too. Here we go…”
All three of them looked down out the windows as Hunt flew just to the right of a linear path of oblong stones, a mile from the main underwater track. Looking down at the stones, it was easy to see their individual shapes and how they fit neatly together, interlocking to form a paved road beneath the waves.
Maddy took photographs as they passed over the structure. They had almost reached the end, with Hunt preparing to bank the plane into a turn, when Jayden called out.
“Wait a minute, can you go back? I see something.”
“What is it?” Hunt asked.
“One of the stones we just passed over. Hold on…where’s the gold piece we got from Anubis? Can I see it?”
Maddy reached into her backpack and then passed him the oblong piece of shiny, gold metal.
“Go back around over the same spot at the same altitude, would you?” Jayden asked Hunt.
“Will do.” Past the end of the structure, out over a featureless plain of white sand, Hunt put the plane into a tight arc and headed back to the end of the parallel, second road. This time, as they passed over, Jayden held the Anubis gold piece up to the window as he looked down on the mysterious stones. “Should be right about on it,” Hunt said, also looking down.
“There it is! Maddy, get a picture!” She clicked off snapshots as Jayden alternated his gaze between the gold piece in his hand and one of the Bimini Road stones below.
“It’s a match! One of the stones down there is the exact same shape as the piece of gold we got from Anubis! What are the odds? I mean, it has that same little hook shape in it and everything!”
Maddy brought up one of the photographs she had just taken of the stone in question and enlarged it on her digital camera’s screen. She reached her hand back over the seat. “Let me see the piece, please?” Jayden handed it to her and then went back to looking down from the window, checking to see if any other stones had the same shape.
“I don’t see any other ones with that same exact shape,” he declared.
“And it is the same shape,” Maddy concluded, looking up from the camera while holding up the gold artifact. “I’d say they’re perfect replicas of each other, except for the scale, of course. Hard to say which came first, though, without some carbon dating on each piece.”
Hunt banked into a turn yet again. “You two up for a dive to check it out more closely?”
They both agreed and Hunt coaxed the plane into a landing pattern, giving himself a wide enough approach that they would end up near the site at the end of their water taxiing. He slowed the plane as he decreased altitude, the tops of the turquoise waves looking closer beneath them with each passing second. Then the plane’s floats bounced off the water’s surface, skipping like stones a few times until they stayed on the water, coasting like a boat. Hunt decreased speed until the plane coasted to a stop under its own momentum. He stuck his head out the rolled-down window, craning his neck to see where they were in relation to the target stone. He saw some blurry stones, fifteen or twenty feet below them, some distance out in front of the seaplane. He pushed on the throttle a little, taxiing the aircraft on the water like a sluggish, ungainly boat until they were right over the stones.
“A little more that way.” Maddy pointed toward the end of the subsea roadway, and Hunt directed the plane accordingly.
“That’s it, we’re right over it,” Jayden called out after a few minutes of sloshing over the waves.
“Should have brought some seasickness pills,” Maddy said. “I’m starting to feel a little queasy already.”
Hunt shut off the plane’s engines and a quiet calm settled over them. “You’ll feel better once you hit the water. Let’s dive!”
They opened the doors to let fresh air inside and began gearing up. Jayden handed Maddy her set of gear first, while Hunt helped her put it on. Then he passed Hunt’s to him, and he and Hunt donned their equipment. Each of them would enter the water from their respective open doors, then they would drop down to the seafloor as a group.
When they were ready, Hunt initiated a countdown. “On three, two, one…splashdown!”
The three divers rolled backwards into the waters of the Bermuda Triangle, the Bimini Road beckoning below.
Chapter 18
The phrase “gin clear water” was an expression that was almost cliché among scuba divers, but Hunt couldn’t deny how apt it was here. Looking down after splashing out of the plane, he recoiled, it looked like the bottom was so close he could reach out and touch it. But in actuality it was twenty feet deep.
After a quick check of their equipment, the three divers vented the air from their buoyancy compensator vests and began their short descent to the bottom. To the Bimini Road, or at least the strange parallel track they had found next to the main road. Hunt had heard of it before — knew it existed and had been photographed and dived before, but it got nowhere near the traffic that the main road did.
When they reached the bottom, they landed on one of the smooth, flat stones, to avoid stirring the sand up on the bottom, which would cloud the water and reduce their visibility. The stone of interest, the one matching the shape of the Anubis gold piece, lay only five or six stones to their left. After checking their depth gauges (twenty-one feet), and their air pressure (nearly full tanks) to confirm all was working properly, the three of them were ready to begin work.
First, Hunt traced his fingers along the stone they had landed on, figuring that they may as well get a feel for what the normal ones were like before examining the target stone. To Hunt, it felt like smooth limestone, weathered over the centuries by wave action. He was aware that many geologists and oceanographers dismissed the Atlantis related stories about the stones as fiction, claiming that wave action and coastal erosion patterns were sufficient to explain the shape of the stones. Also, their mineral composition, they maintained, was consistent with that of the nearby shoreline. Others were not so convinced. But to Hunt, he would take neither side’s word for it. That’s why they were here today, to find out for themselves.