Hunt threw his hands up and looked around the little island. “If this was Atlantis, then we already succeeded. We found Atlantis!” He grinned at Maddy and Jayden, hoping to cheer them up. Jayden especially appeared less than convinced.
“Yeah but the treasure’s not here. Nothing is here, except for some old animal bones. Which are cool — don’t get me wrong. I love old animal bones. But they’re not really part of Atlantis.”
Maddy pointed emphatically to the lost Critias pages. “Actually, it says in here that ‘strange beasts from another time were kept inside the city’s gold walls’. That could mean mammoths, I don’t know. But what it does say that’s important is that the beasts, whatever they are exactly, were moved to the ‘mirror island.’”
“Is that like an island covered with mirrors, like a funhouse or something?” Jayden asked, only half joking.
Maddy frowned at him. “No. It means it’s a lookalike island, but a mirror image, like left and right hands.”
“So an island that looks like Cuba. But it’s not Cuba?” Jayden clarified.
“Now you’re getting it. If you were to look at it on a map, it would have the same basic shape, but somehow inverted so that similar features like coves and peninsulas would match up if swapped back to the original position. For example, the Greek island of Crete would fit the bill. Crete is a lot smaller than Cuba, though, but if they were fleeing they might have lost a lot of people and things and had to scale down.”
“When we get back to civilization, we’ll have a look at some maps and try to figure it out. But right now, the way I see it, our best ticket out of here is floating away as we speak.” Hunt pointed to their seaplane, still floating nearby, but definitely farther away from where they had left it.
“You didn’t anchor it this time?” Maddy asked.
Hunt shrugged. “My first priority was getting us safely to land, not the plane. Also, since it’s out of gas, it doesn’t do us much good. But it’s still basically a boat at this point, and with the current heading toward the Cuban main island, it means we can sit in it to get there.”
“Cuban cigars, here we come!” Jayden ran across the beach toward the water. Hunt helped Maddy to secure her things in her backpack, then donned his own small pack and met Jayden down at the waterline.
“At least it’s warm,” Jayden said, wading out into deeper water.
“We’re going with the current this time,” Hunt pointed out.
“But so is the plane,” Jayden said. As if to emphasize this point, a gust of wind picked up and sped the drifting boat-plane along even faster.
“Jayden, if you can get to it first, see if you can fashion a sea-anchor out of something to slow it down,” Hunt said, recognizing that Jayden, already out front and the only one of the three with no pack to weigh him down, was likely to reach the plane first. In fact, he thought but did not say, he was beginning to doubt whether any of them would be able to reach it before it drifted hopelessly far away. He silently cursed himself for not taking the time to anchor it, but at the same time knew he had no time to waste. He kept pace with Maddy, not wanting to leave her too far behind lest she get into trouble and then he’d have to swim against the river of a current, something he didn’t think was possible.
So he swam steadily, counting on Jayden to reach that plane and slow it down.
Phillipo stood on the fantail and watched the massive wake ejecting plumes of whitewater behind them. Now en route back to Nassau, the Bahamian capital, where the ship would refuel before being readied for its next destination, he considered his options. As usual, his brother was clueless when it came to the actual day-to-day operations of Treasure, Inc. Surely all the employees could see that it was he who truly ran the show?
Find out where Atlantis is before Carter Hunt does…That’s all, is it? Just find a city lost for millennia, those are my orders? Meanwhile, we’ve already found a gold pyramid under the Bimini Road. But that’s not enough.
If he knew where Atlantis, or its fabled treasure was, he’d be there already, why couldn’t his brother see that? But if getting there before Hunt was important, then that meant slowing Hunt down was important, too. And Phillipo knew of one way to do that, given his possible location in Cuba. He might not have gone that far south — it would have been a risky flight, pushing the boundaries of his fuel range — but Hunt had thus far proven unpredictable. Besides, Phillipo thought, removing a satellite phone from his pocket. It was but the matter of a simple phone call.
He used the ship’s internet connection to look up a phone number, and then placed a call to the Cuban government.
Jayden reached the drifting seaplane and put a hand up on the slick pontoon. He felt a chill as the wind buffeted his back while pulling himself up out of the water. He flung open the rear door of the plane and glanced back before stepping inside. Hunt and Maddy still swam toward him, but they were losing ground as the wind blew the fuel-empty plane toward the Cuban mainland.
Jayden ducked inside the craft and began looking around for something to use as a sea anchor. The actual anchor had been cut by Daedalus’ henchmen and left behind in the Bahamas, but another way to do it involved tying something bulky to the plane and letting it sit in the water to slow down the drift. But what?
Jayden rooted around the back of the plane but found nothing that would work. Then he moved up front to the cockpit and checked under the pilot seat. He felt a bag under the seat and pulled it out. He recognized it immediately from his Navy days as a parachute. Perfect, he thought. He hastily unpacked the ‘chute while nervously eyeballing the rapidly approaching Cuban mainland through the windshield. Then he looked back to Maddy and Hunt and saw that they were falling even further behind.
Got to turn this ‘chute into a sea anchor…a drogue, I think they’re formally called, Jayden thought, recalling an old seafaring lecture. He bunched up the ‘chute and took it out onto the plane’s pontoon. He first unraveled the cord until he located the end, and then tied that to one of the metal struts that fastened the pontoon to the plane’s fuselage. Then he heaved the parachute up and out, hoping to get it to unfurl some of it before it hit the water. It did, and then it spread open more while slowly sinking into the ocean.
Jayden smiled as the plane’s drifting began to slow. The added drag of the submerged parachute swerved to slow the plane’s drifting considerably. He turned back to Hunt and Maddy, who still swam toward the plane. But now at least they were making progress, Jayden could see. After a few more minutes, the pair caught up to the plane and Jayden helped first Maddy aboard, and then Hunt.
“Nice drogue,” Hunt said with a smile.
“Yeah, that instructor we had for that class was hot, you remember her?” Jayden said with a smile.
Hunt nodded but When Maddy said, “Oh really?” he declined to comment further. “I’ll pull in the sea anchor,” he said, eager for an excuse to change the subject. While Jayden and Maddy got inside the plane to warm up after the swim, Hunt walked out along the pontoon and untied the paracord from the plane. He didn’t exactly feel like hauling the heavy ‘chute in, but decided to do it anyway since it was possible they might need it again. He also hated the thought of polluting the marine environment, and leaving something in the ocean to entangle sea life. So he hauled in the ‘chute and pulled it aboard and bunched it up until it would fit in the backseat. That done, he climbed inside the cockpit, sitting in the pilot’s seat even though the aircraft was now only an unpowered raft.