He got to a standing position and then kicked off of the rock, launching himself toward the target stone. Maddy and Jayden followed, swimming a few feet above the smooth stones. Hunt found it a bit strange that there was no sea life of any kind near the road. No schools of fish, not even crabs scuttling along the bottom. He supposed there could be myriad creatures buried in the sand, but for such a sunny, shallow spot, with rocks, he would have thought there would be more life. Only a thin patina of green algae grew on the stones; their natural pale color was still plainly visible.
Jayden pointed excitedly as he spotted the distinctive hook shape of the target stone. He didn’t bring the gold piece with him, for fear of losing it, but he was confident they’d be able to identify the stone in question without it.
And here it was.
Hunt, Jayden and Maddy settled onto the stones surrounding the target stone. The road was either two or three stones wide in most places, and three wide here, with the target stone in the middle position. Visually, it appeared the same material, color and texture as the rest of them, with only the slight irregularity of its shape to differentiate it.
Hunt removed a dive knife from a sheath on his calf and dug the point into the rock on which he knelt, to test its consistency. Normal limestone, it chipped with sufficient force, but he found nothing unusual about it. Jayden tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the target rock, indicating he wanted to move onto it. Hunt nodded, and all three of them hopped over to the stone in question. Approximately eight feet long by four wide, it accommodated the three divers, who knelt on its surface, Maddy and Hunt at one end, with Jayden in the middle.
Together, they carefully eyeballed its surface, looking for any telltale sign that it concealed an artifact, or was in some way unusual. But they saw nothing. It looked exactly like all of the other Bimini Road stones. Hunt held up a gloved hand and made a show of running it down along the side of the stone where it disappeared into the sand. He pushed his fingers into the sand as far as they would go and ran them along the side of the stone. The others started doing the same. After a few minutes they had gone all the way around the perimeter of the strange stone and still had detected nothing out of the ordinary.
Hunt checked his air pressure, urging the others to do the same. They all still had plenty left, but it served to give them a little breather and to remind them that time was limited. They needed to try something else. Maddy photographed the stone with her camera in a plastic housing, taking some closeups of its top face. But inwardly, Hunt was disappointed. Nothing seemed significant about this stone, compared to all the others. They had come a long way for nothing. Maybe the shape of the gold piece from the Anubis statuette was simply a coincidence?
Jayden and Maddy grew bored and swam off over the neighboring stones, leaving Hunt to stare at the mystery stone by himself. He again turned to his dive knife, this time using it as a tool to stick as far down as he could along the edges of the stone. He wanted to figure out how thick the stone was. Were they thin, paving-stone like entities, or several feet deep? He soon had his answer when the knife plowed through the resistance of the sand into…into what? Hunt used the hand not holding the knife to fan away the sand particles in his way. Into…open water?
Digging some more with the knife, he found that he could scrape along the underside of the stone. It wasn’t more than a few inches thick. Was it just one thin section, or the same thickness all the way around? He tried the same thing with the knife on a couple of different points along the stone’s edge. It was the same thing each place he tried. He could picture the stone as a thin cap, lying on the bottom.
But then he got to thinking, if they’re so thin, why hadn’t some of them been taken? Thousands of people had dived the main Bimini Road, and all of those stones were still there. Even this outlying section of road had probably seen hundreds of underwater visitors over the decades. He found it hard to believe that none of them had been chipped away at or taken altogether if they were so thin…and therefore so movable.
He looked up from his work to glance over at Jayden and Maddy, who swam lazily over a section of road some distance away. Hunt moved one stone over. He took his knife and set to work in the same manner, attempting to determine the thickness of the stone. This time, however, the tip of his blade was met only with more stone as he thrust it as deep as he could into the sand along the limestone’s edge.
He smiled inside his dive mask. The target stone was different! Thinner than the rest. He thought about it while breathing slowly through his regulator and watching his bubbles float lazily toward the sunlit surface. One stone different than the rest….we were led to it by a miniature model found in a statuette of Anubis — also a miniature — which was in turn found in the Azores…Hunt ruminated on the facts, but after a couple of minutes he was still no closer than before to figuring out what the thin stone could mean. He decided to get hands on again.
Moving back to an edge of the stone, he inserted his knife blade against the flat rock until he felt it pass beneath the bottom edge. Then he pried upward with the knife. Nothing happened, so he ran the blade sideways along the length of the stone, loosening the sand and sediment that was holding it in place with the suction created by it laying there for untold decades or centuries.
Then Hunt had an idea. He rapped the butt of his dive knife on his metal scuba tank, creating a piercing ring that immediately caught the attention of Jayden and Maddy. He waved them over. When they reached him, Hunt held up his knife and pointed to the one Jayden carried on his leg. Jayden looked confused, so Hunt demonstrated what he had been doing with the stone, trying to pry it up. After watching that, Jayden gave him the okay sign and set to work alongside Hunt. Hunt wasn’t sure if Maddy carried a knife, but he was glad to see her hold one up and join them on the side of the limestone.
Together, the three of them wedged their metal implements beneath the stone slab and pried with all their strength. Just as Hunt thought he was going to snap the blade, he felt the limestone move. He signaled his friends to reposition and try again. Once more they repeated the process, and once again the slab moved, this time a little higher off the seabed.
He heard a muffled grunt and looked over to his right to see Jayden with his arm wedged beneath the slab up to his elbow, eyes bulging with physical effort. Immediately, Jayden curled the fingers of his left hand beneath the slab and began to lift. As it separated from the bottom, his knife blade snapped with an audible crack. He dropped the ruined knife and replaced it with his right hand. Redoubling his efforts, he planted his fin-clad feet against the sand bottom next to the stone slab and put his leg muscles into the lift. Looking to his right to gauge the progress, wondering if he should drop the slab and rush to Jayden’s aid, he saw the Asian-American ex-Navy man still bearing down on the lifting and smiled.
We can do this.
Maddy was also not giving up. She dropped her own knife and also gripped the stone with both hands, putting all her strength into it. A thick curtain of air bubbles floated up above them with their heavy exertions. In the back of his mind, Hunt made a mental note to check their air remaining when the lifting was done, since they were breathing very heavily with the hard labor. But right now, there was no stopping. The curiosity factor was too strong. What lay beneath this stone slab? The fact that the stone was even movable at all was exciting enough.