He looked around at the interior of the ancient ship, but there was little to be seen. Random bumps and bulges beneath the surface of the silt indicated that a few items might remain inside the hold. If this was the Dourado, he did not expect to find much inside the ship, given that items had apparently been salvaged from it at the time of its sinking. Still, he wished he could find something, anything to confirm the ship’s identity.
Bones waved to him. Dane looked over, and saw his friend gesturing for him to exit the wreck. He trusted his partner enough not to question his judgment. Dane carefully turned and swam out through the hole in the deck. When he reached the outside, he turned about and peered back into the hold.
Bones was looking at something covered in silt. Occasionally he would look up toward Dane, as if fixing his location, then look back down at the spot on the ocean floor. Finally, he began digging in the fine dirt. A massive cloud of silt erupted, spreading as if in slow motion to fill the hold. Dane caught a glimpse of Bones scooping something up before the other diver vanished from sight. He held his position, keeping an eye out for his friend. Moments later, he made his appearance, bursting forth from the cloud that poured out of the ship, his fine mesh dive bag clutched in his hand. He held up the bag for Dane to see. Coins! Dane gave his friend the thumbs up, and they headed for the surface.
Breaking the surface, Dane swam to the side of the Queen’s Ransom, where Willis offered him a helping hand. The muscular, ebony-skinned man lifted him from the water with ease. Bones clambered aboard with help from Kaylin, who wore the expression of an expectant parent.
“Well?” she asked.
“Let’s clean those up first,” Dane nodded toward Bones’ bag of coins. “They ought to tell us a great deal.” He tried to suppress his excitement. He had learned a long time ago not to get his hopes up, but right now he had a good feeling.
Retiring to the cabin, Dane and Bones set to cleaning the coins. Patiently they scoured away two hundred years of tarnish and grime. Glints of gold began to peek out from the black circles. Soon, thereafter, details appeared: writing, numbers and images. Forty minutes later, a small pile of gold coins lay gleaming dully in a bowl of preservative solution. Dane fished one out gingerly, held it up to the light and inspected it carefully, turning it around in his fingers.
“Portuguese,” he announced. He could feel the grin spreading across his face.
“And the date?” Bones asked, leaning forward, his pearl-white teeth glowing in the sun.
“Hmm…” Dane stalled, letting the tension build. “It’s hard to say, but I’m pretty sure…”
“Oh, just tell us, Maddock!” Kaylin scolded.
“Fine,” he said, chuckling. “The year of our Lord, 1824.”
The room erupted in shouts of joy. Kaylin threw her arms around Dane’s neck and gave him a squeeze. Willis, still standing guard on the deck, pumped his fist and smiled.
Bones scooped another coin out of the bowl and examined it. His smile widened. “Portugal, 1821.” He raised his clenched fist in triumph.
They repeated the ritual, taking turns examining the coins, until they had inspected every one. The final tally was eleven coins: seven Portuguese, three Spanish and one French. All were dated four years or more prior to the sinking of the Dourado.
“Gentlemen,” Dane began, “and lady,” he added, “I believe we have found our ship.”
CHAPTER 9
The Dourado had definitely been salvaged, though they went through the motions of excavating the wreck. By the end of the day, they had found only a few more coins, a statuette, and a few pieces of china. The statuette, in Kaylin's opinion, was further proof that this was the Dourado.
“It's definitely Middle-Eastern,” she said. “It's very likely something that would have been found in Rienzi's collection.”
The following morning, they mapped out their plan to search for the remaining artifacts. Utilizing the same program with which he had predicted the location of the Dourado, Jimmy had provided them with a chart that plotted the probable location of the remaining artifacts from the Dourado’s cargo. The search area was a crescent-shaped swath that swept down in an east-southeast arc from the initial wreck site to the spot where the ship had come to rest.
Dane inspected the chart and shook his head. It was a large area to cover, with artifacts possibly spread thin across the sea floor. He was beginning to feel discouraged, but knew that a negative attitude would kill morale.
“We'll make our way to the wreck site keeping to the center of the target zone.” His finger traced a path through the middle of the shaded area, up to Pedra Branca. “We'll run both the side scan sonar and the wave spectrometer, which ought to give us a unique signature for the different objects on the bottom. Once we get to Pedra Branca, we'll take stock of the readings we took along the way, and start our grid in the most promising place.”
“Let's do it,” Corey said enthusiastically. He was still excited over their success the previous day in locating the wreck.
The others nodded their heads, but Dane could read the skepticism in their faces: skepticism that he shared.
Dane looked out at the rocks of Pedra Branca, so named because of the massive quantities of seagull guano that had colored them permanently white. These very same rocks had claimed the Dourado. Somewhere between this spot and the ship's watery grave, he hoped, lay the sword of Goliath.
The readouts they had taken along the way had not painted a hopeful picture. Admittedly, it was only a narrow strip in a wide swath of search area, but the lack of positive hits was worrisome. His cell phone buzzed against his thigh, and he answered it with an annoyed voice.
“Yeah?” he snapped.
“Dane, how's the fishing?” Jimmy asked.
“Haven't caught a thing.”
“Want to know why?” the hacker’s voice had an odd ring to it, almost as if Jimmy were taunting.
Dane closed his eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled and forced himself to relax. Jimmy could be annoying. A byproduct, Dane supposed, of spending too much time at a computer terminal. “Jim, I'm tired and more than a bit hacked off right now.”
“Fine, I'll start making sense. When you asked me to do some checking on the Dourado, I spread out the parameters of the search a bit. You remember how the captain claimed that there was half a million dollars on board?”
“Yes,” Dane said.
“Well, I checked on the colonial governor who reported the finding of the Dourado off the shore of Bintan. Seems that not long after the salvage efforts came up short, he found himself one quarter of a million dollars richer, and living high on the hog back in England.”
Dane perked up. This was starting to get interesting.
“Next, I followed up on the captain, a Francisco Covilha. He retired to America, a rich man. Settled in New York, and became a benefactor to several museums. Guess what he donated?”
“Artifacts from the Holy Land,” Dane groaned. “The son of a gun was in on it with the governor. They hoodwinked Rienzi and made off with everything.”
“That's the bad news. The good news is, I can't find any record of a Middle-Eastern sword turning up on the collections of any of the museums he supported.”
“So either he held on to it,” Dane mused, “or it's still somewhere on the bottom of the ocean.”
“Want to hear the weirdest part of all?”
“Not really.” Dane didn't think he could take any more of Jimmy's weird news.
“Just for a lark, I ran his name through Nexus, and I got a hit.”