They’d spent the better part of a week preparing for their dive on the Acosta Star, shuttling back and forth between Hollaback Cay and Nassau gathering equipment, including the bright yellow Inspiration Closed Circuit Rebreathers packed into the cargo area behind them. They’d gone to the library and museum on Shirley Street and studied the archives files of the Nassau Guardian, researching the Acosta Star and the details of her sinking almost fifty years before. They also spent a great deal of time with Tucker Noe, taking notes about the area immediately surrounding the dive site and consulting Lyman Mills’s personal chart library. According to the old bonefish guide the ship wouldn’t be hard to find if they knew what to look for; he’d taken accurate bearings from the old lighthouse, and while the sunken hull was hidden in the lee of the reef for twenty-three hours a day, there were several identifying markers on the reef itself that, seen from the air, would enable them to pinpoint the location to within a few hundred yards. It was Noe’s estimation that a dive of only forty feet or so would put them on the main deck of the ship.
Over the years Lyman Mills had collected an impressive collection of Acosta Star memorabilia, including old cruise brochures, schedules, and passenger lists, engineering drawings of the ship’s construction, and half a dozen photo albums from passengers who’d cruised on the ship at various times during her career. One of the most useful of these had been a detailed set of scrapbooks that once belonged to Paulus Boegarts, or Paul Bogart, as he liked to be called, a half Dutch, half American who’d been professionally associated with the ship through almost all of her incarnations. Using all of this information Finn, Hilts, Lyman Mills, and Tucker Noe spent several days and nights developing a strategy for the underwater penetration of the vessel.
The M.V. Acosta Star was by far the largest vessel ever to have sunk in the Caribbean. At 758 feet overall and 37,000 gross tons, she was 150 feet longer and 1,800 tons heavier than her nearest rival, the Bianca C., which had gone down just off the coast of Grenada. By wreck diving standards the Acosta Star was a monster, and like any monster it would have to be treated with caution, care, and a great deal of respect. A ship a hundred feet wide and the length of two and a half football fields would have been confusing in broad daylight with a deck plan; after fifty years and a hundred feet down in the deep-seas gloom, the interior of the vessel was going to be a very dark, dangerous, sharp-edged and coral-encrusted labyrinth.
In theory the dive didn’t pose any insoluble problems. The bottom depth was a hundred feet in clear water, an easy depth even for simple scuba. With rebreathers they would have almost triple the time they’d have with ordinary tanks-better than three hours-and with their constant mix of oxygen and nitrogen, the rebreathers gave them even more time by removing the need to decompress on the way up. They’d be wearing full face masks with Ocean Technology Buddy Phones to let them communicate underwater and have the best tank-mounted and handheld lighting units available. They even had a GEM systems portable magnetometer that would ping for the wreck, find it, and instantly provide its exact location via the Global Positioning System.
According to the passenger lists, Bishop Principe had taken the Gelderland Deluxe Suite on the Upper Promenade Deck. Pierre DeVaux, alias Peter Devereaux, had occupied cabin A-305, one level below the Main Deck on the port, or left, side of the ship, about one hundred and fifty feet from the bow of the ship and two decks below Bishop Principe. Given the way the ship had reportedly gone down, this would put Devereaux’s cabin on the “outer,” ocean side of the reef. Martin Kerzner, the supposed Israeli Intelligence agent traveling on the false Canadian passport, had been on the deck below Devereaux in cabin B-616 on the inner, or reef side of the ship. To go from one cabin to the other would involve entering the ship through one of the main hull hatches leading into the Acosta Star’s central lobby, located on either side of the ship. From there they would follow the wide lobby stairs up to Bishop Principe’s suite on the Upper Promenade Deck, then down to Devereaux’s cabin on A Deck. If necessary they could then use the lobby stairs again to descend to B Deck.
If the stairs were blocked by debris, they had two alternate routes: one down the purser’s companionway, the other using one of the two elevator shafts on the port and starboard sides of the lobby. Theoretically it was a walk in the park.
“You realize that realistically this whole thing is insane, don’t you?” Hilts said. “You’ve never done any wreck diving at all.”
“I used to free dive into cenotes in the jungles of Quintana Roo. Two hundred feet,” Finn countered. “How long can you hold your breath, Hilts?”
“That’s not the point,” the pilot answered.
“That’s exactly the point. I’ve used scuba and rebreathers, my dive limit is around two hundred and fifty feet, and on top of that I’ve done cave diving, which is at least as complicated as wreck diving, and you know it.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“For a woman? Is that what you’re saying?” Finn queried hotly.
“No, of course not, but…”
“No buts.”
“I’ll need someone on the surface.”
“You’ll need someone below. It’s the prime directive, you know that too: never dive alone.”
“This isn’t some safety-groomed resort wreck, Finn. It’s not going to have all the dangerous spots neatly defanged. Remember, Tucker said there were sharks as well. Tigers. Bulls, mean ones.”
“Which is why we brought along shark repellent and a pair of Mares air guns. Relax, Hilts. I can handle myself. In the Roo I had to deal with snakes as thick as your arm and spiders the size of dinner plates. That doesn’t include the fire ants and the really gross scorpions. Relax, you’ll live longer,” she repeated.
“All right,” he muttered, but he didn’t seem to relax at all. Finn stared out through the side window of the airplane. More than once she’d found herself wondering why they were making the dive at all; the chance that they’d find anything on board after almost fifty years was minimal. When you got right down to it, what could you find? DeVaux, or Devereaux, had apparently discovered something that he thought was evidence that Luciferus Africanus had somehow traveled from the deserts of Libya to the central United States, perhaps bringing the Lucifer Gospel with him on his journey.
Unless the mysterious monk had brought a physical artifact to prove his claim, or explicit directions to where such artifacts could be found, they would be no further ahead. Rolf Adamson and his people had set them up for the violent killing of Vergadora, both to hide the knowledge of Pedrazzi’s murder in the desert and to compromise anything they might discover about Devereaux’s find. Without the Gospel, or at the very least a clue to its whereabouts, they would have no evidence of Adamson’s motive for killing Vergadora and attacking them.
The only other option left to them if the dive came up empty would be to go to Lawrence, Kansas, and see if there was any trace of Devereaux’s discovery there. It was possible that he’d left some kind of clue at the Wilcox Classical Museum at the university, but once again, a lot of time had passed. The chances were very slim.
“Check the GPS,” said Hilts, peering out through the windscreen. “We should almost be there.”
Finn checked the readout on the little box mounted on her side of the cockpit: 22°25’N, 77°40’W.” She relayed the numbers to Hilts.
“Then we are there,” Hilts said. “Look for the lighthouse.”
And suddenly it was there, less than a mile away, a solid white line against the sky poking up from the rough scrub of a coral cay no more than a hundred yards long, the lee end trailing off into a line of breakers and foam that marked the low breaking edge of a reef. The reef itself stretched away, slightly curving, the breakers marking its course for three-quarters of a mile, pointing almost due west toward the coast of Cuba. Hilts knew that with another five hundred feet of altitude he would be able to see the coast no more than ten or twelve miles away. It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought, even with the Bahamian markings and the idiotic cartoon duck painted in full color on the nose. Daffy wasn’t going to impress a Cuban Flogger-B MiG armed with Kedge-class laser-guided air-to-surface missiles. He had a vague memory of the payload. About seven hundred pounds of high explosive. Each.