Gingerly, Blade hoisted himself up to regard his cabin boy. “You’re my lucky angel, boy,” he groaned wearily. “Aye, you’re a lucky one, Samuel Higgins.”
CHAPTER NINE
Slowly but surely, Kaz, Adriana, Dante, and Star began to fit into the routine at Poseidon Oceanographic Institute. They continued to dive with Cutter and his crew aboard the Ponce de León, tagging underwater caves and trying to keep a low profile while they snooped.
“We don’t want them to think we’re on to them,” Star advised. “No matter what they’re up to.”
Dante was all for the interns minding their own business. “If it’s top secret or something,” was his reasoning, “then it should stay that way.”
“We’re just curious,” Kaz insisted. “It’s not like we’re spies.”
“And who has a better right to know?” Star added. “They’re messing up our summer program. The least they can do is tell us why.”
So they continued with their busywork and kept an eye on the team from San Diego, although there was little to see. According to Captain Vanover, a magnetometer looked pretty much like a sonar, so the tow fish itself yielded no clue. Cutter spent most of his time belowdecks, his head buried in reams of printouts. Reardon could have been any fishing bum on a Caribbean vacation. He seldom left the stern and his rod and reel. Captain Hamilton ran the boat, period. Marina was the only one who had much interaction with the teen divers.
“If anybody’s innocent on Cutter’s team, it has to be her,” was Adriana’s opinion. “She’s just a friendly, interested mentor.”
“Who looks like a supermodel,” finished Kaz.
“You don’t have to be a photographer to recognize that thing of beauty,” Dante agreed.
Star shook her head. “You guys are such losers.”
It was not the first piece of ribbing Dante had taken on the subject. When he printed his second batch of pictures, more than half of them were of Marina. To make matters worse, the developing was so off that her perfect skin matched the bright orange of the fire coral in the reef shots.
“Stick to purple water, Romeo,” was Adriana’s opinion.
The interns kept their suspicions to themselves, saying nothing to the other institute people for fear of word getting back to Cutter. When they did ask questions, they kept them general, omitting any reference to the team from California.
“Why would a ship tow a side-scan magnetometer?” Adriana asked Captain Vanover in the cafeteria one night.
“Depends who’s on board, and what he’s looking for,” came the reply. “A mag is basically a fancy metal detector. Geologists say most of the world’s mineral ore is under the sea.”
“Mining companies use them?” asked Kaz.
“Sometimes. But the salvage people love them too — anybody who wants to track down something big underwater. How do you think they found the Titanic? The military is also a big user. They’re always going after stuff — equipment and ordnance they lost in the drink.”
Dante shot the others a meaningful glance. Could that be the mysterious assignment — top secret work for the navy, searching for a sunken submarine or even a lost nuke?
“But around here,” Vanover went on, “a lot of the mag scans are done by treasure hunters.”
“Treasure hunters?” repeated Star.
“Sure,” the captain told them. “A few hundred years ago, these waters were the money highway. And they say at least half of it is lying under the seabed somewhere.”
Adriana nodded wisely. “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish shipped billions in treasure from the New World back to Spain.”
“A lot of those ships never made it to Europe,” Vanover explained. “Hurricanes, reefs, pirates. That’s why a mag comes in handy. Gold and silver are metals. If a galleon went down in the area, its cargo would show up on the scan.”
Dante was amazed. “And that works? You just tow it around till you get a hit, and bring up millions?”
The captain laughed. “It’s a little more complicated than that, Dante. First of all, the sea is a big place — three quarters of the earth’s surface, remember? Second, most of those wrecks are under thousands of feet of ocean, far too deep for any diver to reach them. But even if a wreck is located in shallow water, it’s not like there would be a boat full of gold bars just sitting there in the sand. Those old ships were made of wood. Most of that would be gone by now, eaten little by little by microscopic worms in the water. And pretty much all that’s left is buried in coral, which is another problem. It’s against the law to destroy a living reef.”
“In other words, forget about it,” concluded Kaz.
“Most treasure hunters search for decades and never find much,” Vanover agreed. “But there are exceptions. A man named Mel Fisher excavated two galleons off the Florida Keys, and brought up hundreds of millions in gold and gems.”
Dante whistled. “He’s got it made!”
“Not necessarily,” said the captain. “Who owns sunken treasure? Now the government’s suing him, and he’s up to his ears in lawyers.”
“A hundred million bucks can hire a lot of lawyers,” Dante pointed out. “That’s not just rich; it’s rolling.”
Huge money — that was Dante’s secret dream. Not that most people didn’t want to get rich. But for an artist, a big pile of cash had a special meaning — freedom. He could pursue his craft without having to worry about selling pictures or making a living.
A financially secure photographer wouldn’t have to learn color. Which had one definite advantage in Dante’s eyes.
No diving.
Dante was the weakest diver in the group, but even his meager skills were improving. This was true for all of them, if for no other reason than the huge amount of ocean time they were logging.
“You learn to dive by diving,” was Star’s opinion. “Even a baboon would get better if he spent as much time underwater as us.”
When it came to scuba, Star held on to her praise the way a miser holds on to his pennies. To listen to her, the only people who had ever gotten it right were herself, English, and Jacques Cousteau, probably in that order.
It bugged Kaz. She thinks we’re all useless, he reflected resentfully. I probably saved her life in that plane, and she never even said thanks.
In fact, Star was very much aware of Kaz’s development as a diver. His technique was raw, but the Canadian’s natural athletic ability gave him amazing strength, stamina, and body control. He could also hold his breath for a year! One time Adriana got her tether line tangled up in a stand of sea fans. In the process of cutting herself free, she accidentally sliced through her air hose. Now she had to “buddy breathe” to rise to the surface — with her partner, Kaz, sharing his regulator.
It was a tense moment for any diver, but Kaz remained calm, just as he had in the German bomber. Star watched the ascent anxiously, ready to offer help. None had been required. From what she could tell, Kaz barely needed more than a breath or two on the way up. How would some rink rat learn to do that?
The one thing that Kaz could not seem to get used to was sharks. With the water acting as a magnifying glass, even a small reef shark seemed pretty intimidating, with a mouth large enough to bite your hand off. And, of course, there was still an eighteen-foot tiger shark around somewhere — unless that whole Clarence story was a goof cooked up by Vanover to pull everybody’s chain.