looked like a tray-sized square of sheet metal. He handed it to Sam.
“To carry our dinner?” Sam asked.
“That’s a hydroplane, son. From a pretty small sub, too, by the looks of it.”
“Where did you find this?”
“Liberty Rock, on the north side near Port Boyd.”
“Sounds like the place to start looking.”
“I found that in a lagoon. My guess is it washed out of an underground river. Here on the east side of the island they all flow south to north. Problem is, they’re not strong enough to push anything heavier than that plane.”
“No offense,” Remi said, “but if you knew what this belonged to, why haven’t you looked for it yourself?”
The man smiled. “I’ve done my fair share of exploring. I figured sooner or later someone would come along asking the right questions. And here you are.” The man walked toward his scooter, then stopped and turned back. “You know, if I’d been a German sailor back then looking for a place to hide out, I would’ve loved to have stumbled across a sea cave.”
“Me, too,” Sam said.
“As luck would have it, Rum Cay is full of them. Dozens along this shore alone, most unexplored—most connected to underground rivers.”
“Thanks. By the way, ever heard of anything called the Goat’s Head?”
The man scratched his chin. “Can’t say I have. Well, I’m off. Good hunting.”
The man puttered off on the scooter and disappeared.
Sam and Remi were silent for a few moments, then Sam said, “I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“We didn’t even think to get his name.”
“I don’t think we need it,” Remi said, pointing at the hut.
Beside the door was a wooden plaque. In hand-painted red letters it said, CASA DE CUSSLER.
CHAPTER 15
I could get used to this,” Sam said, staring into the fire.
“I’ll second that,” Remi replied.
They’d decided to accept their host’s invitation to spend the night at the hut. As the sun dipped toward the horizon Sam strolled the beach and gathered burnable driftwood while Remi used their host’s collapsible bamboo fishing rod to snag a trio of snapper from the surf. By the time night fell they were lying against a log before a crackling campfire, their stomachs full of braised and sea-salted fish. The night was clear and black, with diamond- speck stars filling the sky. Aside from the
Their host hadn’t been joking about the wine cellar, which, though barely larger than a closet, sported two dozen bottles. They’d chosen a Jordan Chardonnay to complement Remi’s catch.
They sat and sipped and watched the stars until finally Remi said, “You think they’ll find us?”
“Who, Arkhipov and Kholkov? Not likely.”
For the airline tickets, the hotel, and the rental car they’d used a credit card attached to a twice-removed Fargo Foundation expense account. While Sam had no doubt Bondaruk’s hatchet men had the resources to eventually unravel the financial trail, it wouldn’t happen, he hoped, before they were gone.
“Unless,” he added, “they already have a lead that points them here.”
“There’s a cheery notion. Sam, I’ve been thinking about Ted. That Russian—Arkhipov—he was going to kill him, wasn’t he?”
“I suspect so.”
“Over wine. What kind of man would do that? If Rube’s right, Bondaruk’s filthy rich. What he’d gain from selling the Lost Cellar would be pocket change. Why is he willing to kill for it?”
“Remi, for him murder comes naturally. It’s not a last resort; it’s a ready option.”
“I suppose.”
“But you’re not convinced.”
“It just doesn’t add up. Is Bondaruk a wine collector? A Napo leonophile, maybe?”
“I don’t know. We’ll check.”
She shook her head, frustrated. After a few moments of silence, she asked, “So where do we start?”
“We have to make some assumptions,” Sam replied. “First, that Selma’s right about the Goat’s Head being a landmark; and second, that Boehm and his team would have chosen the most uninhabited part of the island to set up shop. This coastline certainly fits the bill. At first light, we pile our gear into the dinghy—”
“Not the plane?”
“Don’t think so. Boehm’s vantage point would have been from the surface. From the air a goat’s head could look like a duck’s foot, or a donkey’s ear, or nothing at all.”
“Good point. Erosion’s going to be a problem. Sixty years of weather could change a lot.”
“True.”
The Bahamian Archipelago was a spelunking and cave-diving paradise, Sam knew, and there were four general types of cave systems: blue holes, which came in both the open ocean and inshore variety and were essentially great tubes plunging hundreds of feet into the ocean or an island’s rock strata; fracture-guided caves, which followed the natural fissures in the bedrock; solutional caves, which formed over time by rainwater mixing with minerals in the soil to dissolve the underlying limestone or calcium carbonate bedrock; and finally, garden- variety sea caves, formed along cliffs by thousands of years of pounding surf. While these systems rarely went any deeper than a hundred feet, they were also usually spacious and offered sheltered underwater entrances—precisely what one might look for when scouting for a spot to hide a mini submarine.
“You missed one,” Remi said. “An assumption, I mean.”
“Which is?”
“That all this isn’t just a goose chase—or to be exact, a wild Molch hunt.”
They woke at dawn, had a breakfast of wild grape, fig, and pigeon plums, all of which they found growing wild within a hundred yards of the hut, then piled their gear into the inflatable dinghy and set out. The trolling motor wasn’t going to help them set any speed records, but it was fuel efficient and powerful enough to get through the reef line and to navigate the inshore tides. By the time the sun had lifted free of the horizon, they were tooling north along the coast, parallel to the reef line. The water was a crystalline turquoise, so clear they could see rainbow- hued fish skimming along the white sand bottom twenty feet below.
As Sam steered, staying as close to the shore as possible, which ranged from fifty to one hundred yards, Remi sat in the bow, alternately scanning the cliffs through her binoculars and taking shots with her digital SLR camera. Occasionally she would call for Sam to come about and make a repeat pass of a rock formation as she tilted her head and squinted her eyes and took more pictures before eventually shaking her head and giving him the okay to proceed.
The hours and the coastline slipped by until around noon they found themselves nearing the island’s headland and Junkanoo Rock; beyond that, on the northern shoreline, lay Port Boyd and the island’s more populous western areas. Sam turned the dinghy around and they headed south.
“We’ve probably already passed dozens of sea caves,” Remi said.
This was true. Many of the cliff faces they’d surveyed were shrouded in climbing vines and scrub foliage that jutted from every nook and cranny. From this distance they could be seeing a cave entrance and never know it. They had little choice, however. Slipping inside each reef break and checking every foot of every cliff would take years. More frustrating still was that most of their search had so far occurred during low tide, which should have given them the best chance to spot an opening.
