Stolen (4 page)

My hand hits something sharp. I have a moment of wild hope. But it is only the broken end of the black wood that Annabel had crouched beside.

“She's over here,” I yell and move a foot and a half to my right. Bill's and my hands keep hitting each other, we're working so close together. I can hear him gasping for breath as he digs feverishly. I realize I am breathless too. My lungs hurt almost as much as my arms do.

My hand gets entangled in some buried seaweed or grass. I yank it angrily. It comes up clutching a bunch of red hair. It takes me a moment to recognize what I have.

“I've found her.” I scream it, even though Bill is right beside me. The hair's all over the place. Bill reaches Annabel's forehead. We scoop sand away.

She must have looked up when the wall above her collapsed. We soon have her face clear. I almost faint with relief when she gags weakly and spits out a mouthful of sand.

“Here's the shovels.” I look up and see Kelly standing on the edge. Two shovels slide down and bump to rest beside us.

“Thank you,” Bill shouts. “Do you have any water?”

A one-liter plastic bottle bounces down. I rip the lid off and pour the water over Annabel's sandy face. I laugh out loud when she complains, “Hey.”

“Are you okay?” I ask. I know it's a stupid question, but I'm not thinking clearly.

“Do I…look okay?” Annabel replies, gasping for breath.

“Have you broken anything?” Bill's question is much more sensible than mine.

“I don't…think so.” Annabel's taking shallow, short gasps for breath. “Tight…around my…chest…and my leg's…sore…but okay. No need to… tear my hair out.”

“Sorry,” I gasp.

“Hang in there,” Bill says. “We'll have you out in no time.”

Bill and I start digging around Annabel. A lot of sand came down, and Bill keeps looking nervously at the bank above us. Once we've got dug down a bit, Annabel manages to free her right arm and help. When her chest is free, her breathing becomes easier.

“I'm going to try and haul you out,” Bill says. We've dug almost to Annabel's waist. The sand keeps sliding back into the hole as we dig, and it's only going to get worse the deeper we go.

“Okay,” Annabel says.

Bill crouches down and grasps Annabel under her armpits. He pauses for second, takes a deep breath and hauls. Nothing happens. I start scraping sand away with my shovel.

“Careful with that,” Annabel says. “I don't want to survive being buried alive just to have you hack me to bits with a shovel.” She sounds cheerful enough, but I saw her grimace in pain when Bill pulled.

“See how far you can get reciting Pi before we get you out,” I suggest.

“The way you guys are going, I'll break the world record,” she says, but she begins, “3.141592653589793…”

We dig a bit more and then Bill tries again. This time Annabel moves. I work as hard as I can to scrape sand away. Bill pulls a third time. With a scream, Annabel comes free, and we all fall back against the far wall. Sand cascades around us.

“Come on,” Bill says. “Let's get out of here.”

Half carrying Annabel between us, we head toward the parking lot, where the gully is shallower. Eventually, we climb out and pull Annabel up after us. We sit gasping beside one of the trucks.

“You didn't get very far with Pi,” I say.

“You guys are too good for me,” Annabel says with a wry smile. Sucking air through her teeth, she flexes her right leg.

“Is it broken?” Bill asks.

“I don't think so,” Annabel replies. “It was bent under me with my weight and all that sand on top of it. I think it's just bruised or strained.”

“That was a stupid thing to do,” Bill says, but his voice has no anger in it.

“I know,” Annabel says with a smile, “but look what I found.” She holds out her left hand. Nestled in the palm is a plain, softball-sized clay pot. “This is what I saw beside the black timber. It looked different, so I went down to get it.”

She hands the pot to Bill, who turns it over and examines it thoughtfully. “It's old. No doubt about that.” The pot is cracked but looks as if it's held together by some kind of rust and there's sand encrusted over much of it. I peer into the mouth, but it's only more rust and sand.

“Do you think it's from the Mahogany Ship?” I ask.

“Could be,” Bill says.

“You okay?” We look up to see Kelly heading toward us.

“Yeah, we're fine,” Bill replies, slipping the pot into his pocket.

“What was it she went tearing down there to find?” Kelly asks.

“That's the last thing on my mind right now,” Bill replies.

“Anyway, you got out just in time. The walls are collapsing fast. It'll be awhile before we see the Mahogany Ship again. At least we've proved it's here.”

“Maybe,” Bill says, standing up. “But it's more important to get Annabel to the hospital.”

I lean on my left hand to stand up and collapse with a cry of pain. My middle fingernail is gone, and the end of the finger is raw and bloody. And there's a gash on the ball of my thumb where the broken end of the wood has cut me. It doesn't appear to be bleeding, but that's probably only because the wound is packed with sand.

“Looks like you need to get to the hospital as well,” Bill says. He helps me up and the three of us stumble toward the truck. “I'm going to call Heritage Victoria and tell them about the find,” Bill shouts back to Kelly. “Don't do anything dumb while I'm gone.”

Kelly doesn't reply. Bill loads our bikes into the back of the truck, and we climb into the cab. As we head out of the parking lot, I see Percy and his master in the distance, heading along the path toward town. They must really love walking—it's a good two or three miles back to the edge of town.

As Bill drives, Annabel leans against my shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispers. I'm filthy, I ache all over, and my hand is torn and bleeding, but I'm happier than I've been in months.

Chapter Seven

“You are extremely lucky. Sand is basically moving rock, and it's just as heavy. Every year, kids die because they dig tunnels in sand and it collapses on them. If it wasn't for the quick response of your friends, we wouldn't be having this conversation.” The doctor is looking at Annabel, who is propped up in a bed in the emergency department of the Warrnambool hospital. She's been cleaned up, examined, x-rayed and declared fit. She'll have a limp for a few days from the bruising to her leg and sore ribs from breathing against the weight of sand, but nothing is broken.

While Annabel was being tested and prodded, another doctor cleaned and stitched the cut on my hand and bandaged my finger where the nail used to be. Bill went off to make phone calls.

“Just take some Ibuprofen for the pain and you'll be good in a day or two. And don't do anything that dumb again.” The doctor smiles, flips the curtain back and leaves.

“Thank you,” Annabel calls after the doctor. “And thank you.” She turns to me with a smile that makes my knees go weak. “You saved my life.”

“What was I going to do?” I ask. “Let your skeleton become part of the Mahogany Ship? That would just mess with archaeologists a hundred years from now. Besides, I haven't heard how far you can go with this Pi thing.”

Annabel's lopsided grin broadens. “3.1415…”

“Enough!” I say with a laugh. I'm still amazed at how easy it is to talk and joke with Annabel. Normally, I'm tongue-tied and awkward, especially around beautiful girls. It takes me a long time to get comfortable in anyone's company, but I feel as if I've known Annabel all my life.

“Do you feel up to going and grabbing a Coke?” I ask.

“Sure,” Annabel replies. “Bill is probably down in the cafeteria making his phone calls.”

I help Annabel limp downstairs and get us a Coke and a donut each. We see Bill outside on his cell, pacing back and forth. He throws me a quick wave.

As I carry our snacks to the table, I think back to the beach. “Bill said that Kelly is Pete's father,” I say. “What was he doing down on the beach this morning?”

“Jim Kelly's the local shipwreck nut,” Annabel says. “He's got more stuff in his house than we have in the museum.”

“Aren't shipwrecks protected?”

“Only those we know about. Kelly runs a diving business, taking tourists out to well-known wrecks, but who's to say where he dives in his spare time.”

“So Kelly just helps himself when he finds something and stores it in his house?”

“There's maybe more to Kelly's work than that. Selling artifacts to rich collectors is a profitable business. It's a thriving trade in Egypt, for example, and it's not just some local goat herder stumbling on a burial urn and selling it to a tourist. It's well organized and linked to the big crime syndicates. Say you collect ancient Babylonian statues, and there's one you really want. You go to a crooked art dealer, who goes to his crime connection, who goes to the local lads, who steal the statue from a museum.

“The looting of the national museum in Baghdad in 2003 was organized. Thousands of pieces were stolen, and many of the most valuable pieces were targeted. The thieves ignored the replicas on display and used keys to get into vaults where the originals were stored. They knew what they were doing, and someone had probably arranged the sale of the best pieces in advance. In fact, several hundred pieces were found in FedEx boxes in New York, on their way to an American art dealer.”

Annabel falls silent and looks sheepish. “Sorry. I tend to get carried away. I didn't mean to lecture you.”

“That's okay,” I say. “I've learned a lot in the last two days. I'll never be able to look at March 14 the same again.”

“Well,” Annabel says with a laugh, “I'm glad you're remembering the important stuff.”

“Do you think Kelly and Pete are involved in smuggling?”

“Probably only in a small way. Kelly's probably not above selling something if the opportunity arises, but I doubt he's involved with international crime. Besides, apart from the
Loch
Ard
peacock, there's not much here to interest a big collector.”

“And the peacock would be hard to smuggle out under your jacket.”

“It would,” Annabel agrees. “Kelly's style is more about finding items no one else has. That's why he's so into the Mahogany Ship, and why he headed out early this morning to see if the storm had uncovered anything.”

“Why? The Mahogany Ship might be interesting, but surely any treasure would be gone by now.”

“I think it's fame he's after.”

“Fame?”

“The person who discovers a wreck that proves someone got to Australia way before Janszoon would be famous. There'd be
TV
appearances, articles in magazines, a book, maybe even a movie—fame.”

“And Kelly thinks the Mahogany Ship will prove someone beat Janszoon here?”

“Probably a Portuguese explorer. They were in Indonesia, not too far away, in the 1500s. There are Portuguese maps that, if you use some imagination, look like bits of the Australian coast. Also, there are mentions of voyages with no official records, either because they were kept secret or because the records were lost.”

“You don't sound convinced.”

“I'm not. It's like all conspiracy theories. If you believe that multiple assassins shot Kennedy or that 9/11 was an inside job, you'll fill the gaps in the record with whatever crackpot idea you want. How easy is it to do that with something that happened five hundred years ago?”

“I suppose you're right,” I say, disappointed by Annabel's rationality. I want the Mahogany Ship to be a real-life mystery. Then I remember something else. “Kelly also said something about a Chinese ship?”

“Most people think the Mahogany Ship's a Portuguese caravel. Kelly imagines he can see the outline of a wreck on the aerial photos and that it's something almost seventy meters long. The largest caravels were only half that size. So he thinks it's a Chinese junk that sailed here a hundred years before even the phantom Portuguese.”

“A Chinese junk?” I repeat. “They couldn't sail this far.”

“That's not the problem. Between 1405 and 1433, a Chinese admiral called Zheng He made seven voyages with huge fleets of junks. They sailed all around the Indian Ocean and down the African coast. There is evidence that some of the junks got into the Atlantic Ocean and maybe even all the way across the Pacific. Some people think the Chinese got to both coasts of Canada. Some of Zheng He's junks were over a hundred meters long, and they were loaded with treasure to trade with the people he met.”

“So the Mahogany Ship could be one of these junks loaded with treasure?” My interest is rekindled.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Annabel says with a smile, “but probably not. The Chinese kept good records, and there's no mention of an expedition in this area.”

“What about the old pot you almost died finding? That's old, isn't it?”

“Sure it's old. It might even be Chinese.”

My eyes widen at that, but Annabel soon crushes my romantic dreams of treasure ships.

“By old I mean a hundred and fifty years or so, not six hundred. What I found was almost certainly dropped by someone pottering around the old wreck in the nineteenth century, looking for treasure. It might have been a Chinese laborer. There were a lot of them working in the goldfields from the 1850s on.”

Annabel laughs at my disappointed expression. “One thing I've learned working for Bill is that archaeology is nothing like Indiana Jones. It's spending days struggling to make an old piece of wood or leather, a pot or a coin tell you a tiny fragment of a story. It's not romantic. For example, Bill will give the pot I found to Rose, who will take it to her lab and spend hours cleaning, scraping and dissolving to find out what's inside. Then, maybe, she'll be able to say that it was dropped by someone around 1850. Then we can put it in a small corner of our display on the Mahogany Ship. Sorry.”