“Everybody okay?” Hunt shouted.
He was glad to hear Maddy’s voice first. “I’m fine.”
“The expression is, ‘Any landing you can walk away from, Carter, not swim away from. But we all seem to be in one piece, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on this one.”
“Thanks.” Hunt cranked the plane’s controls, turning it to the left toward the barrier island, wishing to coax every ounce of remaining momentum from the plane’s landing to their advantage. After a couple of minutes it was clear that, while it wasn’t sinking, the plane was no longer drifting toward the island. In fact, it was being carried slowly away from it, back out to the open waters of the Florida Straits which they had just crossed over.
Hunt let go of the controls. “We’re going to have to get wet, people. Grab the essentials and let’s go.” He opened his cockpit door and lamented the fact that he no longer had the anchor he’d used in Bimini, thanks to Daedalus’ vandals and their hasty departure. The plane would drift away once they left it. But as he glanced over at the island — a swimmable distance away — he was grateful that at least they would be alive.
Hunt ducked back inside the plane and loaded his backpack with the plane’s remaining useful safety equipment — a small tool kit, a first aid kit. “Time to go.” He glanced back at Jayden, who had moved into the back with Maddy to prepare their bags. Jayden opened the rear door.
Hunt stepped outside onto the plane’s pontoon, staring down into the sea and trying to gauge the water depth. He guessed it was about seven or eight feet, mostly sandy bottom. Too deep to stand, but he knew it would get shallower as they approached the island, which he judged to be maybe an eighth of a mile away. He could tell by the drift of the airplane that a current was running through the area, though, taking them away from the island, so they’d have to work against that.
Hunt opted to slip quietly into the water from the pontoon rather than make a big splash that might attract sharks. He encouraged Jayden and Maddy to do the same. He treaded water while Jayden and then Maddy slipped into the sea alongside him. They began to swim toward the low-lying land, kicking hard against a current that felt like a freight train coming in the opposite direction. They kept at it, though, with some choice curses from Jayden and some encouraging words from Hunt, and some time later Hunt stopped swimming and put his feet straight down.
He was rewarded with the feel of soft sand beneath his wetsuit boots, the water about shoulder high on his six-foot frame. A large shadow materialized from the sand below and Hunt raised his arms in a defensive posture, but he quickly saw that it was only a large stingray, wings flapping furiously as it moved to escape the intruder who had disturbed it as it lay beneath the sand. He watched it disappear into the distance and then turned around, waving to Jayden and Maddy.
“I can stand. We’re almost there.” He waited for Maddy to get close and then reached out and pulled her to him, holding her while she got her footing on the sandy bottom. Jayden caught up with them next, appearing not the least bit winded from the strenuous swim. He nodded to the low-lying isle that was now not so far away.
“Looks a lot like the one we came up on in the Bahamas.”
Hunt nodded as he took in the scrubby vegetation atop a low-lying sand hillock. “Let’s check it out. Shuffle your feet so you don’t step on a stingray.”
“I call it the ‘stingray shuffle’, kind of like a moonwalk.” Jayden broke out into song as he slid his feet across the sand bottom. “Do the stingray shuffle, every day, the stingray shuffle, look out for those rays!”
“I think I’d rather be stung by a ray than be subjected to your singing,” Hunt mocked.
The waterlogged trio shuffled across the sandy bottom that sloped gradually up toward the flat island. The tropical sun warmed them, but also burned their faces as it reflected off the water’s surface. Hunt was grateful for the aviator sunglasses he still wore. As they neared the island’s fringing beach, the water became shallower; they were waist-high, able to walk faster, and then trudging through only calf deep water until they reached the beach and flopped down on the dry sand, exhausted.
“So this is Cuba,” Jayden said at length, after they had rested.
“Where’s your cigars?” Maddy wondered.
“We need to figure out how to get to the Cuban mainland,” Hunt said, rising to his feet. He turned around 360 degrees and stopped when facing the Cuban mainland. “It’s got to be two, maybe three miles away,” he estimated, the dejection evident in his voice.
“I can’t swim that far,” Maddy said bluntly.
“We’ll figure something out,” Hunt said. But what? As he continued to look around, he saw no signs of human activity whatsoever — no boats, planes, no noise from the mainland — nothing. Jayden got to his feet and went to explore what little there was to see of the rest of the islet, while Maddy took out the Critias scroll.
“I hate to expose it to the elements here,” she said, unrolling the ancient parchment, “but something’s been nagging at me.”
Hunt watched her while she buried her nose in the lost manuscript once again. “Tell me more about what led you to think Cuba is a possible location for Atlantis? I’ve heard unfounded reports of an underwater city somewhere along Cuba’s coast, but it wasn’t connected to Atlantis as far as I know.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Maddy said cryptically, still staring at the pages. She reached into her pack and took from it her digital camera. “I snapped a couple of pics right before we began our descent, while we were still high up.” She turned the device on. She nodded on seeing the screen fill with an aerial image. “Yeah, you can see the Cuban mainland coast as well as the barrier islands…including this one.” She held up the camera so that Hunt could see the photo.
He stared at it for a minute before nodding slowly. “Okay, it shows the surrounding area, the islands. The bird’s eye view could help us plan our way out of here, is that the point?”
Maddy shook her head. “No. Try to imagine the scene without any water, as if it was one of those topographic maps showing valleys and mountains.”
Hunt eyeballed the photo while mentally picturing it as she suggested. The Cuban mainland formed one side of a ring, while the barrier islands, including the one they were currently stranded on, formed the opposite side of the ring. In between were smaller, isolated islands and islets. Hunt had seen imagery with the oceans’ water removed to show the bottom contours and seamounts, and knew that many islands were really just the tips of huge undersea mountains.
“Okay, I can picture it. But I still don’t get your point. How does it help us?”
“What if, tens of thousands of years ago — say eleven thousand — the sea level wasn’t as high as it was now?”
Hunt shrugged. “I suppose there would have been more land back then, which today is submerged under the ocean.”
Maddy beamed. “Right. But look at the shape that land — this land,” she said, waving an arm at the sea beyond their little sand islet—“would have taken.” She pointed back to the image on the camera’s display, tracing the contours of the islands with a finger. “Imagine just a little more land on each of these islands — picture these islets in the middle here as the tips of large mountains, with some water still at the bottom….what shapes would it take on?”