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  “By selling them to the bad guys?”

  “Exactly. So, on the off chance I don’t make it back, can you get this to a friend of mine at Fort Bragg? His name is Patch. We served together. He’ll know what to do with it.”

  “Patch? Of course,” she said. “But you’ll make it back just fine.” She looked at the phone number scribbled on the box and nodded.

  “A deal’s a deal. Go to the bookstore or download it on your iPad, but find a copy of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. Read it and you’ll figure out what I’m doing. Just remember I’ll be somewhere in the Galaxy.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Okay,” she said, drawing out the last syllable. “That narrows it down for me.”

  “Actually, it does. Quite a bit.”

  They were quickly back in the Defender and she was dropping him off at the airfield. He kissed her on the cheek as if he were just another commuter heading to work.

  Which, in a way, he was.

  Locklear decided to skip the rest of the party. She walked into her small living room and sat on her sofa as she tugged at her laptop. She flipped up the screen, powered on, and waited as the MacBook came to life and connected with her Wi-Fi. She went straight to Google and typed in the book Mahegan had mentioned, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea.

  Of course any treasure hunter worth her weight in unfound gold knew about Tommy Thompson and his amazing discovery. But what did that have to do with what Samuel Nix was doing with the Adger gold, she wondered?

  On instinct, she went to the history section for her browser and tracked the last websites her computer had visited.

  As she suspected, she didn’t recall the last three.

  The first was the Virginia Beach Municipal Court website that showed a recent PDF download. She went to her download folder and found a document filed earlier that day by Copperhead, Inc. to establish a one-square-mile box around a latitude and longitude referenced as being 140 miles east of Cape Hatteras.

  What the hell?

  The second website was the Wikipedia link to the SS Central America, a gold-carrying partner of the James Adger that sank in the same hurricane back in September, 1857. Treasure hunter Tommy Thompson and his Columbus Ohio Discovery Group had located the shipwreck and retrieved nearly a billion dollars’ worth of gold from the ocean floor. Beneath that link was a Google link that searched the term, “Galaxy.”

  The last link was an open records search of the government contract the Navy had with Copperhead, Inc. and all associated purchases, to include a C-12 airplane with sonar search capability, the landing craft, assorted buildings constructed on Dare County Bombing Range, a 180-foot side trawler called the Ocean Ranger, and multiple vehicles.

  Locklear snapped the top of her MacBook shut and stared at the wall clock. She thought she heard the hum of the de Havilland buzzing low over her bungalow as it made its way toward a spot 140 miles offshore.

  How Mahegan had figured it out, she didn’t know, but she was certain now he would lead her to the gold.

  Chapter 23

  The assembly line was in motion.

  Actually it was in continuous motion. Samuel Nix stared at the blinking dot on the map. While he was still reeling from the destruction that Mahegan had wreaked on his operation, he thought it was all still salvageable.

  Nix’s thermal and radar-imaging plane had found the Adger gold by pure chance. Six months ago, the pilot had flown a north-to-south track over the bombing range and imaged the gold sitting in twenty feet of water in a cove riddled with water moccasins and alligators. No wonder no one had found it. He sent Falco on a dive mission, and he confirmed they were indeed bricks of gold nestled deep in the silt. He and Falco had studied, schemed, and developed their plan before beginning a sophisticated series of logistics.

  One hundred and forty miles offshore was a shipwreck site that explorer Tommy Thompson had called “Galaxy,” in 1987, wrongly believing the location to be one of the top three most likely locations of the SS Central America. While the gold Nix had discovered had nothing to do with Thompson’s gold find, the legal precedent of “finders keepers” had everything to do with Nix’s strategy to keep the gold.

  Nix knew that Thompson had briefly inspected the shipwreck two miles below sea level using his underwater robot. He had found mounds of anthracite coal used to push a side-wheel steamer, but no gold. Nor had he been able to identify the ship. The location, in Nix’s mind, was the perfect solution to the “problem” of their gold discovery inside US territory.

  Nix, a Navy man, knew about the twelve-mile coastal boundaries of nations and the “finders keepers” law that Thompson’s eventual discovery had begot. Before the law, over eighty insurance companies had crawled out of the woodwork, laying claim to the one billion dollars in gold Thompson had found. After much legal wrangling, a judge in Virginia Beach, however, issued a verdict that Thompson and the Columbus Discovery Group of investors that had funded Thompson’s operation were entitled to keep 92.7 percent of the gold, or roughly $927 million.

  Of course, no one had seen Tommy Thompson or the gold since then, but Nix knew all he needed to do was use the same methodology Thompson had.

  He continued to look at the map. He could see the triangular point of Cape Hatteras where it reached outward into the Atlantic. The Labrador Current pushing down from Nova Scotia met with the Gulf Stream flowing northward to create this series of arrowhead-shaped sand spits.

  He had a world map on his Vizio high-definition plasma display, which he had billed to the government, of course. On this map were a series of lighted indicators. He could scale the map in or out using a remote control. The United States and other countries were a tan neutral color with the oceans indicated in deep blue, almost black. In his command post on the Dare County bombing range, Nix looked at the digital map with the green blinking light indicating a position one hundred and forty miles to the east of Cape Hatteras. That light indicated the side trawler, Ocean Ranger, was operational.

  Another green blinking light indicated that the Lucky Lindy was moored next to the Ocean Ranger.

  A third green blinking light, moving from south to north and heading directly toward the side trawler, appeared to be right on schedule. His plan was coming together. The Lindy should have already delivered the last pallet of gold and munitions. He had made an executive decision to leave a few gold remnants in the Long Shoal Creek. He had even rationalized that if anyone argued he had taken it, he could simply “discover” the gold and point at the remaining gold bricks as the entire find.

  He pressed the remote twice and a series of blue lights appeared on his map, beginning in Karachi, Pakistan. The south-to-north green blinking light was a ship that had been at sea for two weeks, having departed Karachi and made port in Dar es Salaam, Capetown, Grenada, and Great Inagua, Bahamas, before closing in on its designated latitude and longitude. All of these stops appeared as blue lights, which indicated no problem.

  All good, Nix thought. He smiled. Mahegan had disrupted their operation, but only one of the product lines. Mahegan was focused on the MVX-90s, which Nix would destroy tomorrow as they did another controlled detonation of several hundred found warheads. Mahegan didn’t have the smoking gun he thought he had. Selling the MVX-90s was just a product line that had run its course, and Nix didn’t need it enough to risk getting caught with the warehouse full of weapons. But the gold, that was another line that would pay off hugely. Project Rainbow. It was all about sustainable business practices and diversification.

  He punched the remote again and was now watching the radar from the Ocean Ranger.

  As the radar scanned, a small airplane appeared off the bow of the north-facing ship. It was flying slowly at 10,000 feet.

  Unusual but no threat, Nix thought, and then shut down the monitor as he began to think through everything he had going on.

  Vinny Falco came into the room and said, “Just got word that Mahegan hooked up with Dakota at the cast party for The Lost Colony.�
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  “The pilot?”

  “Yep.”

  “When?”

  “About two hours ago.”

  “Long enough to fly a hundred and fifty miles,” Nix said more to himself than to Falco.

  Chapter 24

  Mahegan checked the GPS and said to Dakota, “See anything?”

  Dakota was flying by instruments, but had a PVS-14 night-vision monocle that he’d strapped onto his head. They were nearly 140 miles east of Cape Hatteras over the Atlantic Ocean.

  “I’m going to tilt the nose about forty-five degrees to the horizon. We’re at ten thousand feet so should be no worries. This goggle should tell me if anything with lights is on the horizon.”

  Mahegan felt the airplane tip noticeably forward as Dakota punched the autopilot button. The wind buffeted them a bit, but they held in a steady dive as Dakota searched the black expanse nearly two miles beneath them. The GPS put them approximately six miles to the north of the lat-long Mahegan had found on the Loran navigation device, the location that also corresponded with Wikipedia’s lat-long for Tommy Thompson’s original Galaxy site. To Mahegan, Dakota’s night-vision goggle reminded him of so many combat missions he had led. That thought put him at ease.

  Just another mission.

  After about thirty seconds, Dakota said, “Not seeing anything, man.”

  “Let me see the fourteens,” Mahegan said, referring to the night-vision goggle.

  Dakota leveled the Twin Otter and reset his autopilot before reaching up and removing the head harness. Mahegan placed it on his head, refocused the lens, and said, “Okay, give me another tilt.”

  “We’re at eight thousand feet. If whatever we’re trying to find has any radar, or worse, then we could be screwed.”

  “Then climb and point it back down,” Mahegan said with little patience. He removed the goggle from the harness and placed it to his eye like a pirate searching for land from the bridge of a ship. As he felt the nose tilt over again, he saw a small wink of light from his two o’clock.

  “There,” he said. “Two o’clock. That’s got to be it.”

  “Can’t see it with the naked eye, man, but if you say so. I’m about to hit my halfway point on fuel.”

  Mahegan stepped out of the co-pilot seat and into the cargo bay of the Twin Otter. He pulled the parachute onto his back, fastening the leg straps and then tightening them. He secured his rucksack with two snap-hooks to the D-ring that would normally hold the reserve parachute. Once again, he held the night-vision goggle to his eye, catching a bead on the winking light, and then secured the goggle in his ruck.

  He looked at Dakota, who said, “Sorry about not having a reserve parachute for you. Jumping with no reserve? Huge balls, man.”

  Mahegan focused. “What are the winds?”

  Dakota looked at the anemometer and said, “Thirty knots south by southwest up here. Probably less at sea level. I’m doing one hundred knots. So your net is about seventy.”

  “Thanks for the lift, chief.”

  Mahegan heard Dakota say, “Now get out of here—”

  And then he was gone, floating through the warm night 150 miles off the tip of Cape Hatteras, arms spread, stabilizing his flight for the first few seconds, then diving and plunging through the air like a comic book hero.

  Not only was this stupidly dangerous with no reserve parachute, he had no altimeter either, which was reckless. But it was all the equipment Dakota had on hand without a two-hour diversion to his equipment shed in some other county. Mahegan kept his eye on the light and calculated that once the facility got big enough to recognize, he would deploy his parachute. Good plan, he told himself sardonically.

  That moment came sooner rather than later. It had taken him less than a minute to careen nearly two miles through the sky. With simple gravity pulling him down, the trip should have taken three minutes. Yet he had angled his body to accelerate his speed and to fly toward the light marking what he hoped was the ship he believed to be over the Galaxy site, cutting by a full third his air time. He tugged at his parachute cord and felt the risers release from the pack tray. The ripstop nylon parachute caught air, slowing his descent to the point that the leg straps made it questionable whether he might ever produce children of his own.

  As he grasped the toggles, he steadied his descent and began to fly toward the light. He held his path into the wind to maintain altitude. Using one hand to steer his square parachute, he used the other to retrieve the goggle and assess his positioning relative to his target.

  Which was moving.

  He quickly determined he had deployed his parachute at about two thousand feet above sea level, which was high. Though, better high than low. In the green-lit world of the night-vision goggle, he saw a ship moving from south to north. By Mahegan’s estimation it was no more than one hundred feet long, looked cargo in nature, and was moving slowly . . . as if it was looking for something.

  He switched the goggle to his other hand, steered his parachute toward the north to follow the ship, and lined up behind the stern of the vessel. He was now some one thousand feet above sea level. The equivalent of three football fields was between him and the Atlantic Ocean.

  He could smell the salt water and feel the thrum of the ship churning to the north. Seconds before he was to plunge into the ice-cold water, he grimaced. He was jumping into a lat-long coordinate that was on a thief’s global positioning system. The boat beneath him could be chugging steadily to Bangor, Maine, for all he knew, and the coordinates could have been a decoy or old waypoint. His calculation was that Nix and Copperhead, Inc. were spiriting the found Adger gold to this little-known shipwreck location where they were conducting a “reverse find.”

  What he had put together was the Lucky Lindy was moving a pallet at a time out to sea as if the boat were doing Mahi deep-sea fishing runs daily. The Lindy, he guessed, was offloading the gold onto the government purchased side trawler where some Copperhead, Inc. employees would then use the winch to lower it into the shipwreck on the ocean floor. They probably let it sit there for a few days to accumulate some of the local detritus in its engravings so that the experts who would surely examine the gold would declare it found in the deep blue sea as opposed to originating from the silt of the Long Shoal River.

  Doing some quick calculations, Mahegan figured his best shot was to steer toward the steaming ship and perhaps find a landing spot there instead of the ocean. He toggled hard with the wind and quartered a bit to the west so that he could ride against the southwest wind into the moving ship. It was a bit like landing on an aircraft carrier, he presumed, without knowing his own speed, the speed of the ship or, with any certainty, the wind direction and speed at landing altitude.

  Other than that, he had it figured out.

  As he accelerated and descended simultaneously, Mahegan saw that the lights were searchlights off the nose of the ship. The lights were scanning the water for something, moving back and forth as if in an auto lot with fantastic savings to be had. With the focus of the crew to the bow, Mahegan aimed to the aft end of the ship. Knowing that there was bound to be some superstructure and that he was coming in at great speed, probably twenty knots, if not more, he needed to circle wide and land into the wind. To do so would possibly force him into the path of the searchlights or, at a minimum, into the field of vision of the forward facing crew.

  He took a chance and whipped past the rear of the ship doing about thirty knots now at about two hundred feet above sea level. What he saw was not promising. The ship was a merchant cargo rig with a cabin and command center all the way in the rear. The deck was relatively clear, save a few containers. The gunwale appeared to be forty feet above sea level. Ideally, he could swing out to the bow and land on top of the containers, which were probably solid. To do so, though, would put him in the crosshairs of the searchlights and whatever else might be onboard, so he excluded it as an option.

  Options: suicide run up the middle of the searchlights; land on the head of a pin
atop the bridge, laden with all its antennae and satellite dishes; land in the water as close as possible to the ship and find a ladder.

  He had about five seconds to make up his mind as he turned back into the wind about one hundred feet away from the ship. If the bow of the vessel was twelve o’clock, Mahegan put himself at about two o’clock, just outside the arc of the searchlights. He adjusted his flight path to become as perpendicular to the ship as possible to avoid lateral movement that was easier for those on the ship to notice. He was quartering in against the starboard side and still hadn’t decided what he was going to do, though he had, by default, ruled out the suicide run up the middle.

  As the ship grew in clarity, he saw a third option. Between the bridge and the gunwale was an alley of sorts. If he could slide into the gap, he might be able to find safe harbor.

  The vessel was upon him quickly. He was a bit low, but caught an updraft that lifted him over the gunwale. He pulled hard on his left toggle as his body slammed into the side of the bridge. Thankfully, he had the sense to come into the wind and slow his descent to maybe ten knots. But it still hurt as he slid alongside the steel wall, rivets tearing at his wetsuit.

  The air left his canopy with a suddenness that dropped him into the alley. He tumbled head over heels once and then stood up perfectly as if he were doing a gymnastics move. He unlatched both canopy release assemblies and quickly withdrew his pistol while stuffing the parachute into a crevice.

  He went to one knee, slid his rucksack onto his back, and held his pistol in a military shooter’s grip aimed toward the bow.

  His first thought was, A ten from the Russian judge.

  Then he heard shouting from the bridge and the bow.