Spartan Gold

The question was, were they seeing what they wanted to see, the victims of self-suggestion, or was there really something there? One look at Remi’s face told him she was wondering the same thing.

“One way to find out,” he said.

The break in the reef was narrow, less than eight feet wide, and with high tide and churn, the top of the coral was submerged just enough to be invisible at a distance but close enough to the surface to rip the dinghy’s rubber skin to shreds should Sam stray.

Remi sat in the bow, arms braced on the side walls as she leaned forward and peered into the water.

“Left . . . left . . . left,” she called. “Okay, straighten out. Steady on . . .”

On either side of the dinghy, through the froth Sam could see dagger-edged coral just beneath the turquoise surface. He jinked the throttle and rudder, searching for that delicate balance between steerageway and power; not enough of the former and he couldn’t avoid being pushed onto the coral; too much of the latter and he couldn’t respond to Remi’s signals.

“Good . . . hard right!”

Sam pushed the rudder over and the dinghy veered just as a wave broke on the reef and knocked the stern around. “Hold on!” He powered up and compensated.

“Left . . . a little more . . . more . . .”

“How far to go?”

“Ten more feet and we’re through.”

Sam looked over his shoulder. A swell was rising twenty feet behind them, building up on the reef ’s outer edge.

“Go

“Almost there . . . veer right, straight now . . . good. Give it all you’ve got!”

Sam cranked the throttle to its stops just as the wave broke under the dinghy’s stern. Sam felt his belly lurch into his throat. For a brief second the prop lifted free of the water with a sputtering whine, then the dinghy was slapped back onto a calm lagoon.

Remi rolled onto her back, leaned against the bow, and let out a sigh. “I’ll say it again, Sam Fargo, you sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

“I do what I can. Welcome to Goat’s Head Lagoon.”

CHAPTER 16

Paradise, dead ahead,” Sam said, straightening the dinghy’s nose.

After spending the past eight hours first roasting in the hot sun and then navigating a shark’s mouth of a reef break, the shaded lagoon felt like paradise. Roughly one hundred feet in diameter, it was sheltered to the north and south by curved thumbs of land choked with scrub pine and palms. The cliff, which rose thirty vertical feet from the water, was blanketed in vines, foliage, and overhanging banyan trees—the two most prominent ones forming the goat’s horns. To the left of the cliff lay a crescent of white sand roughly the size of a standard house deck. With the sun on its downward arc toward nightfall, the lagoon was cast in deep shade. The water was glass calm. In the canopy came a symphony of squawks and buzzes.

“Not a bad place to spend the night,” Remi agreed. “Not the Four Seasons, but it does have a certain charm. The question is, are we in the right place?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, but one thing’s for certain: We’ve got a cave.” Sam pointed, then turned the rudder and steered toward the cliff face, throttling down as he drew alongside it.

The water here, moving in a barely perceptible clockwise rotation, gave off a faint iridescent shimmer, which generally indicated an outflow of fresh water. Sam dug out his dive goggles from the duffel bag at his feet, pressed them to his eyes, and dipped his face into the water, which, despite being warmed by the sun all day, felt cool on his skin. Dozens of fish darted this way and that, squabbling over invisible bits of nutrients being stirred up by the freshwater current.

Sam lifted his head out. He dipped his fingertip into the water and brought it to his lips. It tasted only about a third as salty as true seawater.

“Underground river?” Remi asked.

“Has to be,” Sam replied, shaking the water from his hair.

Though it was an uncommon phenomenon, sea caves in this area did on occasion link up with both solutional and fracture-guided caves, which in turn joined underground inland streams.

“I’ll have to look at a map. I think we’re only a couple miles from Lake George. I wouldn’t be surprised if this system dumps out there. Or even down to Salt Lake.”

“Neither would I, but if you don’t mind I’d prefer we put that adventure on our ‘someday’ list.”

“Deal.” Sam checked his watch. High tide was thirty minutes away. If they were going to explore the cave, they’d have to do it within the next hour lest they find themselves fighting the full force of the outflow. Ideally, they would enter at the end of the inflow, use the forty-five- to sixty-minute window of relatively calm current to explore the cave, then ride the outflow back out. The problem was, this was not a typical closed sea cave. The source of the underground river inside would create volatile currents that could either trap them inside or suck them into fracture tu

He put the question to Remi, who replied, “I’d rather we wait, but I know that look in your eye: You want to go in.”

“Better we find out now if we’re on the right track. We’ve got seventy-five feet of rope. We tie one end to a banyan root out here, the other end to my weight belt. If I get into trouble, I can haul myself out.”

“And if you bonk your head and are out cold?”

“Every sixty seconds I’ll give the line three tugs. I miss one of those and you haul me out using the dinghy.”

“Time limit?”

“Ten minutes, not a second more.”

Remi considered this for a few moments, narrowed her eyes at him, then sighed. “Okay, Jacques Cousteau. Remember what I said, though: If you die, I’ll never forgive you.”

Sam smiled and gave her a wink. “Deal.”

Ten minutes later he was suited up and sitting in the bow. Remi glided the dinghy to a stop against the cliff. Sam, moving carefully, stood up and tied a bowline knot around a protruding root, then sat down and secured the other end to the D-ring on his weight belt. Remi reversed the dinghy and stopped ten feet from the face, using minute throttle adjustments to keep them stationary.

Sam spit in his mask, rubbed the saliva around the inside, then dipped the mask into the water and slipped it on his head, the lower edge resting just above his eyebrows. Next he slipped on his fins, punched the regulator to test the airflow, then nodded to Remi.

“Luck,” she said.

“I’ll be back.”

He settled the mask over his eyes and rolled backward into the water.

He let himself hang motionless for a moment, enjoying the sudden immersion and the striking clarity of the water that filled his vision. He waited for the bubbles and froth to fully clear, then tipped himself upright and did a pike dive for the bottom, already feeling the tug of the current. He let it take him, rolling onto his side so he could watch the sun-dappled surface for a few fleeting seconds before the lip of the cliff appeared and he slipped into darkness. He clicked on his dive light and cast it around.

The cave’s entrance was a rough half circle, an arch ten to twelve feet wide and twenty feet tall. At low tide, its peak probably rose only a few inches above the lagoon’s surface—that, combined with the foliage blanketing the rock face, rendered it all but invisible. If not for the Goat’s Head clue, they would have never found it.