Riptide Read online

  Riptide

  Douglas Preston

  Lincoln Child

  RIPTIDE

  D OUGLAS PRESTON

  AND

  LINCOLN CHILD

  WARNER BOOKS

  A Time Warner Company This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1998 by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc., 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 Visit our Web site at http://warnerbooks.com A Time Warner Company Printed in the United States of America First Printing: July 1998 10 987654321

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Preston, Douglas J.

  Riptide / Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.p. cm.

  ISBN 0-446-52336-4 I. Child, Lincoln. IL Title. PS3566.R3982R57 1998 813'.52—dc21

  Book design by Giorgetta Bell McRee 97-23907 CIP

  Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter, Veronica

  Douglas Preston dedicates this book to his brother, Richard Preston

  Acknowledgments

  We owe a great debt to one of Maine's finest doctors, David Preston, for invaluable help with the medical aspects of Riptide. We also wish to thank our agents, Eric Simonoff and Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit; Matthew Snyder of Creative Artists Agency; our superb editor, Betsy Mitchell, and Maureen Egen, publisher, of Warner Books.

  Lincoln Child would like to thank Denis Kelly, Bruce Swan-son, Lee Suckno, M.D., Bry Benjamin, M.D., Bonnie Mauer, Cherif Keita, the Reverend Robert M. Diachek, and Jim Cush. In particular, I wish to thank my wife, Luchie, for her support, and for her stringent (and sometimes astringent) criticism, over the past five years, of four novels-in-progress. I want to thank my parents for instilling in me, from the beginning, a profound love for sailing and salt water that continues to this day. I also wish to acknowledge the shadowy company of centuries-dead buccaneers, pirates, codemakers and codebreakers, dilettantes, and Elizabethan intelligence agents, for providing some of the more colorful archetypes and source material in Riptide's arsenal. And, lastly, I want to give a long-overdue thank-you to Tom McCormack, ex-boss and mentor, who with enthusiasm and perspicacity taught me so much about the art of writing and the craft of editing. Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.

  Douglas Preston would like to express his appreciation to John P. Wiley, Jr., senior editor of Smithsonian magazine, and to Don Moser, editor. I would like to thank my wife, Christine, for her support, and my daughter Selene, for reading the manuscript and offering excellent suggestions. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my mother, Dorothy McCann Preston, and to my father, Jerome Preston, Jr., for keeping and preserving Green Pastures Farm so that my children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy the real place that figures as one of the fictional backdrops to Riptide.

  We offer our apologies to Maine purists for reconfiguring the coastline and moving islands and channels about with brazen abandon. Needless to say, Stormhaven and its inhabitants, and Thalassa and its employees, are fictitious and exist only in our imaginations. Similarly, though there may be several Ragged Islands found along the Eastern seaboard, the Ragged Island described in Riptide—along with the Hatch family that owns it—is a completely fictitious object.

  RIPTIDE

  Such a day, rum all out:—Our company somewhat sober:—A damned confusion amongst us!—Rogues a-plotting:—Great talk of separation—so I looked sharp for a prize:—Such a day took one, with a great deal of liquor on board, so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again.

  —from the logbook of Edward Teach, aka Black beard, ca. 1718

  Applying twentieth-century solutions to seventeenth-century problems affords either absolute success or absolute chaos; there is no middle ground.

  —Orville Horn, Ph.D.

  Prologue

  On an afternoon in June 1790, a Maine cod fisherman named Simon Rutter became caught in a storm and a strong riptide. His dory overloaded with fish, he went badly off course and was forced to put in at fogbound Ragged Island, six miles off the coast. While waiting for the heavy weather to pass, the fisherman decided to explore the deserted spot. Inland from the rocky bluffs that gave the islet its name, he found a massive old oak tree with an ancient block and tackle dangling from one low-slung limb. Directly underneath it the ground had subsided into a depression. Although the island was known to be uninhabited, Rutter found clear evidence that someone had visited many years before.

  His curiosity aroused, Rutter enlisted the aid of a brother and returned one Sunday several weeks later with picks and shovels. Locating the depression in the ground, the men began to dig. After five feet they hit a platform of oak logs. They pulled up the logs and, with increasing excitement, kept digging. By the end of the day, they had dug almost twenty feet, passing through layers of charcoal and clay to another oak platform. The brothers went home, intending to renew their digging after the annual mackerel run. But a week later, Rutter's brother was drowned when his dory capsized in a freak accident. The pit was temporarily abandoned.

  Two years later, Rutter and a group of local merchants decided to pool their resources and return to the mysterious spot on Ragged Island. Resuming the dig, they soon reached a number of heavy vertical oak beams and cross-joists, which appeared to be the ancient cribbing of a backfilled shaft. Precisely how deep the group dug has been lost to history—most estimates assume close to one hundred feet. At this point they struck a flat rock with an inscription carved into it:

  First will ye Lie

  Curst shall ye Crye

  Worst must ye Die

  The rock was dislodged and hoisted to the surface. It has been theorized that the removal of the rock broke a seal, because moments later, without warning, a flood of seawater burst into the pit. All the diggers escaped—except Simon Rutter. The Water Pit, as the flooded shaft became known, had claimed its first victim.

  Many legends grew up about the Water Pit. But the most plausible held that around 1695, the notorious English pirate Edward Ockham buried his vast hoard somewhere along the Maine coast shortly before his mysterious death. The shaft at Ragged Island seemed a likely candidate. Shortly after Rutter's death, rumors began to circulate that the treasure was cursed, and that anyone attempting to plunder it would suffer the fate threatened on the stone.

  Numerous unsuccessful efforts were made to drain the Water Pit. In 1800, two of Rutter's former partners formed a new company and raised money to finance the digging of a second tunnel, twelve feet to the south of the original pit. All went well for the first hundred feet of digging, at which point they attempted to dig a horizontal passage beneath the original Water Pit. Their scheme was to tunnel up from underneath the treasure, but as soon as they angled in toward the original pit, the passage rapidly began filling with water. The men barely escaped with their lives.

  For thirty years, the pit lay fallow. Then, in 1831, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company was formed by a downstate mining engineer named Richard Parkhurst. A friend of one of the original merchants, Parkhurst was able to gain valuable information about the earlier workings. Parkhurst decked over the mouth of the Water Pit and set up a large steam-driven pump. He found it impossible to drain the seawater. Undaunted, he brought in a primitive coal-drilling rig, which he positioned directly over the Pit. The drill went well beyond the original depth of the Pit, striking planking as deep as 170 feet, until the drill was stopped by something impenetrable. When the drilling pipe was removed, bits of iron and scales of rust were found jammed in the torn bit. The pod also brought up putty, cement
, and large quantities of fiber. This fiber was analyzed and found to be "manilla grass" or coconut fiber. This plant, which grows only in the tropics, was commonly used as dunnage in ships to keep cargo from shifting. Shortly after this discovery, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company went bankrupt and Parkhurst was forced to leave the island.

  In 1840, the Boston Salvage Company was formed and began digging a third shaft in the vicinity of the Water Pit. After only sixty-six feet, they unexpectedly struck an ancient side tunnel that appeared to lead from the original Pit. Their own shaft filled instantly with water, then collapsed.

  Undaunted, the entrepreneurs dug yet another, very large shaft thirty yards away, which became known as the Boston Shaft. Unlike earlier tunnels, the Boston Shaft was not a vertical pit, but was instead cut on a slope. Striking a spur of bedrock at seventy feet, they angled downward for another fifty feet at enormous expense, using augers and gunpowder. Then they drove a horizontal passage beneath the presumed bottom of the original Water Pit, where they found cribbing and the continuation of the original backfilled shaft. Excited, they dug downward, clearing the old shaft. At 130 feet they struck another platform, which they left in place while debating whether to pull it up. But that night, the camp was awakened by a loud rumble. The diggers rushed out to find that the bottom of the Water Pit had fallen into the new tunnel with such force that mud and water had been ejected thirty feet beyond the mouth of the Boston Shaft. Among this mud, a crude metal bolt was discovered, similar to what might be found on a banded sea chest.

  Over the next twenty years, a dozen more shafts were dug in an attempt to reach the treasure chamber, all of which flooded or collapsed. Four more treasure companies went bankrupt. In several cases, diggers emerged swearing that the flooding was no accident, and that the original builders of the Water Pit had designed a diabolical mechanism to flood any side shafts that might be dug.

  The Civil War brought a brief respite to the diggings. Then, in 1869, a new treasure-hunting company secured the rights to dig on the island. The dig foreman, F. X. Wrenche, noticed that water rose and fell in the Pit in accordance with the tides, and theorized that the Pit and its water traps must all be connected to the sea by an artificial flood tunnel. If the tunnel could be found and sealed, the Pit could be drained and the treasure removed safely. In all, Wrenche dug more than a dozen exploratory shafts of varying depths in the vicinity of the Water Pit. Many of these shafts encountered horizontal tunnels and rock "pipes," which were dynamited in an attempt to stop the water. However, no flood tunnel to the sea was ever found and the Water Pit remained flooded. The company ran out of money and, like those before, left its machinery behind to rust quietly in the salt air.

  In the early 1880s, Gold Seekers Ltd. was formed by a consortium of industrialists from Canada and England. Powerful pumps and a new kind of drill were floated out to the island, along with boilers to power them. The company tried boring several holes into the Water Pit, finally hitting pay dirt on August 23, 1883. The drill came up against the plate of iron that had defeated Parkhurst's drill fifty years before. A new diamond bit was fitted and the boilers were stoked to a full head of steam. This time the drill bored through the iron and into a solid block of a softer metal. When the corer was extracted, a long, heavy curl of pure gold was found inside its grooves, along with a rotten piece of parchment with two broken phrases: "silks, canary wine, ivory" and "John Hyde rotting on the Deptford gibbet."

  Half an hour after the discovery was made, one of the massive boilers exploded, killing an Irish stoker and leveling many of the company's structures. Thirteen were injured and one of the principals, Ezekiel Harris, was left blinded. Gold Seekers Ltd. followed its predecessors into bankruptcy.

  The years immediately before and after 1900 saw three more companies try their luck at the Water Pit. Unsuccessful in duplicating the discovery of Gold Seekers Ltd., these companies used newly designed pumps in concert with randomly placed underwater charges in an attempt to seal and drain the waterlogged island. Working at their utmost capacity, the pumps were able to lower the water level in several of the central shafts by about twenty feet at low tide. Excavators sent down to examine the condition of the pits complained of noxious gases; several fainted and had to be hauled to the surface. While the last of the three companies was at work in early September 1907, a man lost one arm and both legs when an explosive charge went off prematurely. Two days later, a vicious Nor'easter howled up the coast and wrecked the primary pump. Work was abandoned.

  Although no more companies came forward, individual diggers and enthusiasts still occasionally dared to try their hands at exploratory tunnels. By this time, the original location of the Water Pit had been lost among the countless flooded side shafts, holes, and tunnels that riddled the heart of the island. At last the island was abandoned to the ospreys and the chokecherry bushes, its very surface unstable and dangerous, shunned by the mainland townspeople. It was in 1940 that Alfred Westgate Hatch, Sr., a young, wealthy New York financier, brought his family to Maine for the summer. He learned of the island and, growing intrigued, researched its history. Documentation was spotty: none of the previous companies had bothered to keep careful records. Six years later, Hatch purchased the island from a land speculator and moved his family to Stormhaven.

  As had so many others before him, A. W. Hatch, Sr., became obsessed with the Water Pit and was ruined by it. Within two years the family s finances had been drained and Hatch was forced to declare personal bankruptcy; he turned to drink and died soon after, leaving A. W. Hatch, Jr., at nineteen, the sole support for his family.

  Chapter 1

  July 1971

  Malin Hatch was bored with summer. He and Johnny had spent the early part of the morning throwing rocks at the hornet's nest in the old well-house. That had been fun. But now there was nothing else to do. It was just past eleven, but he'd already eaten the two peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches his mother had made him for lunch. Now he sat crosslegged on the floating dock in front of their house, looking out to sea, hoping to spot a battleship steaming over the horizon. Even a big oil tanker would do. Maybe it would head for one of the outer islands, run aground, and blow up. Now that would be something.

  His brother came out of the house and rattled down the wooden ramp leading to the dock. He was holding a piece of ice on his neck.

  "Got you good," Malin said, secretly satisfied that he had escaped stinging and that his older, supposedly wiser, brother had not.

  "You just didn't get close enough," Johnny said through his last mouthful of sandwich. "Chicken."

  "I got as close as you."

  "Yeah, sure. All those bees could see was your skinny butt running away." He snorted and winged the piece of ice into the water.

  "No, sir. I was right there."

  Johnny plopped down beside him on the dock, dropping his satchel next to him. "We fixed those bees pretty good though, huh, Mal?" he said, testing the fiery patch on his neck with one forefinger.

  "Sure did."

  They fell silent. Malin looked out across the little cove toward the islands in the bay: Hermit Island, Wreck Island, Old Hump, Killick Stone. And far beyond, the blue outline of Ragged Island, appearing and disappearing in the stubborn mist that refused to lift even on this beautiful midsummer day. Beyond the islands, the open ocean was, as his father often said, as calm as a millpond.

  Languidly, he tossed a rock into the water and watched the spreading ripples without interest. He almost regretted not going into town with his parents. At least it would be something to do. He wished he could be anywhere else in the world—Boston, New York—anywhere but Maine.

  "Ever been to New York, Johnny?" he asked.

  Johnny nodded solemnly. "Once. Before you were born."

  What a lie, Malin thought. As if Johnny would remember anything that had happened when he was less than two years old. But saying so out loud would be to risk a swift punch in the arm.

  Malin's eye fell on the small outboard
tied at the end of the dock. And he suddenly had an idea. A really good idea.

  "Let's take it out," he said, lowering his voice and nodding at the skiff.

  "You're crazy," Johnny said. "Dad would whip us good."

  "Come on," Malin said. "They're having lunch at the Hastings after they finish shopping. They won't be back until three, maybe four. Who's gonna know?"

  "Just the whole town, that's all, seeing us going out there."

  "Nobody's gonna be watching," said Malin. Then, recklessly, he added, "Who's chicken now?"

  But Johnny did not seem to notice this liberty. His eyes were on the boat. "So where do you want to go that's so great, anyway?" he asked.

  Despite their solitude, Malin lowered his voice further. "Ragged Island."

  Johnny turned toward him. "Dad'll kill us," he whispered.

  "He won't kill us if we find the treasure."

  "There's no treasure," Johnny said scornfully, but without much conviction. "Anyway, it's dangerous out there, with all those pits."

  Malin knew enough about his brother to recognize the tone in his voice. Johnny was interested. Malin kept quiet, letting the monotonous morning solitude do his persuading for him.

  Abruptly, Johnny stood up and strode to the end of the dock. Malin waited, an anticipatory thrill coursing through him. When his brother returned, he was holding a life preserver in each hand.

  "When we land, we don't go farther than the rocks along the shore." Johnny's voice was deliberately gruff, as if to remind Malin that simply having one good idea didn't alter their balance of power. "Understand?"