‘So what is it? Another magnetic hot spot?’
‘No, that’s the thing,’ Nash said, enjoying telling the story. ‘Ship instruments work fine there. In fact, unlike the one in Bermuda, planes can cross through it fine. It’s the boats that come to harm.’
‘What happens?’ Tyler asked.
‘They sink. Disappear without a trace. It’s a graveyard down there. Wreckage everywhere that has been reclaimed by the waters. Or at least, that’s what the stories say.’
‘How, though? There must be a reason for it,’ Tyler asked.
‘Nobody knows,’ Liam said, ‘although there is a story about the place which I’m sure my father is about to get to.’
‘It’s a true story. Only thing is nobody believes it, my son included,’ Nash snapped.
Tyler waited, reluctant to get involved with the tension between father and son. Both of them sipped their drinks, then Nash went on. ‘Back when I was in the Army, we were on a training exercise out there. Our route took us straight through the Devil’s Triangle. Of course, back then, I was young and brash. Didn’t care for or believe in the stories. We were near the middle of the Triangle when it happened. Explosion from below deck. The boat started to list straight away. Most of us were sleeping, and so by the time we got up, we were already ankle-deep in water.’ Nash’s good remaining eye took on a vacant glare as he recalled the events. ‘We went in the water, forty of us. Some crew went down with the ship. We could see the hole in the hull as it capsized. Something had hit the boat from underneath.’
‘What was it?’ Tyler asked, drink forgotten.
Nash didn’t answer; he stared off into space. ‘There was something in the water. Started to take us, those that were left. We didn’t know if anyone had sent out a distress call, and there were no landmasses we could get to. All we could do was cling to the wreckage and wait for help that we didn’t know was even coming, which was all well and good until we started to die.’
‘Sharks?’ Tyler asked.
‘Just one. A big one. Big enough to sink the boat anyway.’
‘Great whites can grow up to twenty feet in these waters. Even so, that’s not big enough to sink a boat of that size. You said you had forty men on board.’
‘Fifty. Forty went into the water, the rest I’m guessing went down with the ship or couldn’t get out.’
‘Fifty men, so you’d be talking about a boat that was what, a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet long? No shark could do that.’
‘You don’t need to give me the history lesson. I’ve lived here all my life. I’ve dived with the whites and I know how big they can get. This thing, though… It was no great white. This thing was seventy feet, maybe even eighty.’
Tyler smirked and was about to laugh it off when he saw Nash was deadly serious. ‘That’s impossible. Something that big would have been found.’
‘Depends on how you consider big,’ Nash said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘To you or me, a seventy-foot shark is big. Scaled up to the size of the ocean, seventy feet is nothing. Hell, some blue whales reach almost a hundred feet in length, and manage to go about their business. The only reason we see those is when they surface to breathe. Sharks, of course, don’t need to do that.’
‘But people would have seen one.’
‘I’ve seen one,’ Nash snapped. ‘You ever hear of Megalodon?’
Tyler shook his head.
‘It was a shark, identical in almost every way to the modern great white but much bigger. They grew up to seventy feet in length. The official story goes that the last ice age caused them to die out, the cooling of the waters making survival for them impossible. As their prey died, they starved as they were too big and slow to capture the smaller creatures that it would have been forced to feed on, but, we know that story is just not true. Fossilised teeth have been found that date to after the ice age. The Megalodon as a species survived that period.’
‘Even so, there wouldn’t have been enough food to support something so big. You said so yourself. All the bigger prey died. ‘
‘That’s not true either. There was an abundance of whales and other large sea creatures which they could feed on in deeper waters. If you accept the possibility that the colder waters slowed their metabolism so that they didn’t have to feed so often, then you have a scenario where these things can exist. True, they primarily hunted in warmer waters, but let’s just say the ice age forced them to adapt to colder oceans and live deeper where the whales and sufficient prey lived. It’s more than possible.’
‘Let’s say you’re right. You don’t have any proof.’
Nash leaned on the bar, the lights casting his face into an ugly shadow-filled wasteland. ‘This is my evidence. It did this to me. I saw it up close, so yes, I have my evidence.’
Tyler was confused. The conversation seemed to have gone off track and he had no idea where it was going. ‘I don’t understand what this has to do with gold,’ he said.
Nash did his best attempt at a grin and leaned back out of the harsh light. ‘There is a story about a boat, a drug-smuggling vessel that was transporting a shipment of gold to a courier ready to be taken to a foundry and melted down by a local cartel. By all accounts, there was around thirty million dollars’ worth of it on board. The story goes that the boat never arrived at the pickup and disappeared without a trace. Some say the people driving the boat were ambushed and the cargo stolen. Others say the guys doing the drop off kept the haul, sold it on the black market and lived as rich men. Some say the cartel took it, killed the crew and claimed it never arrived.’
‘Let me guess,’ Tyler said. ‘Another version of the story is that the boat was sunk by your shark in the Devil’s Triangle and took the gold down there with it.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But nobody can get to it because of this…’
‘Megalodon,’ Nash said, finishing the sentence and taking a sip of his drink.
‘Yeah, this Megalodon,’ Tyler repeated.
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘No offence, but it seems a little far-fetched.’
Nash turned to Liam. ‘Show him.’
‘We don’t know this guy, are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. We need another pair of hands to do this. Show him.’
Liam flashed another mistrustful look at Tyler then took an object wrapped in cloth from the bag at his feet. ‘You’ll have to come over to see it. I can’t put this on the bar.’
Tyler was too intrigued not to go look. He slid off his bar stool and stood between the two men staring at the wrapped package in Liam’s lap.
‘Last week, Liam and I were out doing some spotting on the edge of the Triangle.’
‘Spotting?’ Tyler repeated.
‘For the Megalodon.’
‘Oh.’
‘Anyway, we see something floating in the water so we go and retrieve it. Turns out to be a flotation balloon just drifting along the surface along with a few pieces of debris from a boat.’
‘We don’t know that, Dad,’ Liam cut in.
‘Either way, we came across this and pulled it out of the water. There was one object in the netting under the balloon.’ Nash nodded to Liam who unwrapped the cloth.
Tyler drew a breath. The gold bar shimmered under the low-level lighting of the bar, appearing like liquid gold. Part of the bar was damaged and worn and exactly how Tyler would expect it to look if it had been submerged underwater for years. Tyler looked at the two men then at the gold.
‘Where did this come from?’ Tyler asked, finally remembering to breathe.
‘Where do you think?’ Nash said. ‘Local reports say a boat went missing last week. Two brothers, locals. They went out and didn’t come back. The floating wreckage we saw was consistent with the same type of boat they had. My guess is they were looking for the gold and found it.’