“Agreed. So where do we go? Florida?”
“No!” They were surprised to hear Maddy’s voice. Jayden looked over at her. She was staring at the unrolled manuscript.
“Why not?”
Maddy looked up from the old writing. “I know where we should go! Head due south.”
Chapter 28
“You sure this is the right way?” Jayden shot a nervous glance at the fuel gauge from his seat in the back. Hunt’s reply was swift.
“Pretty sure.”
“Pretty sure? Are—” Jayden looked like he was about to jump up out of the aircraft before it dropped from the sky.
“Kidding, relax. We’re on track. We may have to do a water landing, but it should be within sight of land.”
“Should be, great,” Jayden intoned sarcastically. Looking down, he saw only the deep blue of open ocean, topped with whitecaps. He looked over to Maddy, who had been looking out the window but quickly buried her nose once again in the mysterious manuscript.
“And how do you know, again, that Cuba is the right place to go?” Jayden inquired.
Maddy answered without looking up from the musty old paper. “My God…”
Jayden stared at her but she did not elaborate. “My God, what?”
“I…I do believe I hold in my hands the lost pages of Plato’s Critias.”
“I’ve heard of Plato,” Jayden said with a shrug. Maddy looked up at him, eyes wide with wonder.
“The two documents that contain everything we know about Plato’s Atlantis story — the Timaeus and the Critias!”
“Of course, how could I have forgotten,” Jayden replied.
Maddy frowned at him and yelled to Hunt in the front seat. “Do you know what we’ve got here, Carter?”
“Yeah, about an eighth of a tank of fuel left.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean that we are now in possession of what will surely be one of the most sought-after documents in the world once it’s authenticated.”
“Great,” Jayden droned from the co-pilot’s seat, “another reason for Treasure, Inc. to come after us.”
She stared at him open-mouthed. “You don’t understand.” She shook her hands ever so slightly, emphasizing the paper. “This paper is about 2,000 years old — containing words written by Plato—that I believe lead to an actual location of Atlantis.”
“Now would be a good time for that actual location,” Hunt called from the pilot’s seat. “Because I see land.”
Jayden and Maddy both looked out their respective windows. A dark mountainous mass loomed in the distance, part of it obscured by clouds.
“Is that Cuba?” Maddy asked, voice tinged with tension.
Jayden made like he was sniffing the air. “I can smell the cigars from here.”
“Cuba’s a huge island — need to know which part of it we should focus on,” Hunt said.
Maddy squinted down at the ancient manuscript again, burying her nose in it for almost a minute before replying. “Northwest corner. Sorry, that’s as specific as I can be right now.”
“It’ll have to be a boots-on-the-ground thing from there, is that it?” Jayden asked.
Hunt answered. “That’s literally it, because our boots are going to be on the ground all right, when this bird runs out of gas.” Hunt consulted his gauges, GPS and compass before making a course correction, then eased back a little in the seat. “I set us on a course that should take us to Bahia Honda, a circular natural cove that’s about fifty miles west of Havana.”
Maddy looked up from the document again. “Did you say circular?”
Hunt called back from the cockpit. “It’s roughly circular, yes. Small inlet leading to a big circular bay surrounded by mangrove forest, probably, but we’ll see. Hopefully, anyway,” he finished, tapping the fuel gauge with his pointer finger.
“Oh, my…” Maddy went back to the manuscript while Jayden rolled his eyes.
“This is turning out to be one heckuva working vacation, I gotta say.”
“It’s all coming together now. In the Critias, a speaker is addressing a crowd, in an amphitheater, which is of course, a circular arrangement. But then again, the entire city layout of Atlantis was supposedly circular, with canals connecting the concentric rings…”
“But there must be thousands of circular bays around the Caribbean, or south of the Bahamas, anyway. What’s so special about Bahia Honda?”
“According to the lost pages of the Critias—" Maddy began, but she broke off at the sound of an alarm emanating from the plane’s dashboard.
“I hope that means the beverage cart service is ready,” Jayden said, “because I’m thirsty.”
Hunt turned around to answer. “Unfortunately, the plane’s thirsty, too. For fuel. That’s the low fuel alarm signifying that we’re on our last reserves.”
Jayden looked out the window ahead of them, where Cuba still looked like an indistinct land mass far away. “Reminds me of that time over the Persian Gulf, with that radio operator guy — remember him?”
“Rather forget him,” Hunt called back. “But it worked out okay.”
“Yeah, well let’s hope this works out okay, too. How close do you think we’ll get before we need to make a water landing?”
“The closer the better, that’s all I know. Get ready to bail out. Have all the important stuff ready to take with you.” Hunt turned back around and dedicated himself fully to flying the plane.
Jayden turned around to look at Maddy. “That means you, too, and that magic scroll of yours.”
She looked up from the missing Critias pages and started to roll them back up. “Right. I think reading it was taking my mind off the stress of being shot at and now possibly running out of gas.”
Suddenly the plane’s motor’s began to cough and sputter. “Not possibly,” Hunt shouted. “Definitely. We’re out of gas.”
Jayden looked out his window. “Hey Carter, I see a little barrier island we might be able to make.”
Hunt stared out of his window from the cockpit, eyeing the flat strip of sandy land dotted with a green band. Then he gauged the distance from the island to the Cuban mainland, and shook his head.
“That’ll have to do. I’m going to set her down.” Hunt put the plane into a controlled dive in preparation for a water landing. Just as the plane levelled out over the water’s surface, the engine sputtered once more and then died, casting a pall of silence over the group as they hurtled through the salty air in a non-functional aircraft. The air was not still, and frequent gusts required Hunt to react swiftly with the plane’s rudder to keep it level, lest they turn over and land upside-down in the ocean.
“I’ll try to land us as near the island as I can, but no guarantees,” Hunt shouted. As Jayden gazed out the window, with no other craft in sight, no populated land of any sort in sight, it dawned on him that they had gone out of the frying pan and into the fire, from one dangerous situation to another — stranded on a Cuban barrier island — and that’s if they managed to stick the landing.
Jayden sat back in his seat and put the seatbelt on, encouraging Maddy to do the same. He knew from experience that even a good seaplane landing could be quite bumpy, and given their lack of engine power, this was not going to be a good one. Maddy stowed the scroll and braced for a hard landing.
In the pilot’s seat, Hunt’s eyes scanned the gauges, his brow furrowed in concentration, sweat beading on his forehead. He white-knuckled the steering wheel, pulling back on the stick to bring the nose up a little as the beleaguered aircraft approached the sea surface.
“Brace, brace!” he shouted as the small seaplane bashed nose-first into the ocean. Water washed over the windshield and Hunt was shocked to see a school of fish dart away from the plane in surprise, before it floated back to the surface and rays of sunlight greeted his wide-open eyes. The aircraft rocked back and forth, nose to tail, before settling down into a sloshy floating pattern.