Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile Page 14

  “Yes, they could,” I said. “If their life depended on it and they’d spent their entire lives living on the ocean.”

  I was remembering how quickly Beck and I had swum across that lake after the hippo dunked us.

  “But,” said Beck, “your theory probably explains why for over five hundred years, no one else has found the treasure that we’re about to bring up from the bottom of the sea. Everyone just figured it was too far away.”

  Tommy brought the boat to a dead stop.

  “Drop anchor, Bick,” he cried. “Beck, suit up.”

  Dumaka looked around at the rippling blue water. “This is it?”

  “Yep,” said Storm, tapping her map. “X marks the spot.”

  CHAPTER 83

  It was great being underwater on purpose again.

  Suited up in our rented scuba gear, Tommy, Beck, and I descended into the murky waters. The only sound was my own regulated breathing. The only light came from the three beacons shining out of our headlamps. Beck and I followed Tommy’s trail of bubbles as we dived into the deep waters encircling Nubende Rock.

  We were at seventy meters when Tommy put out his flat hand with the palm facing down and moved it back and forth slowly. It was the command to level off. We were as deep as we needed to be.

  As we spread out and Tommy’s bubble cloud quit blocking my view, I could finally see the ocean bottom.

  And lying there was the shadowy outline of what looked like a toppled, barnacle-covered skyscraper lying sideways in the sand.

  It was definitely a Chinese treasure ship!

  The claims about its length were true. Below us, I saw the humped carcass of a four-hundred-and-fifty-foot wooden whale.

  I could see only four shattered masts jutting through the water. The other five were buried beneath centuries of muck and sand and sea debris.

  Now Tommy hand-signaled for us to follow him through a square porthole at the stern of the massive ship that would, hopefully, lead to a lower deck. Carefully, we swam into the Chinese treasure vessel.

  With all the cargo compartments, it was like navigating through an underwater maze.

  The first small room was filled with casks and barrels and lumpy sacks, which I figured had to have been for holding spices and coffee.

  The next room we swam into was extremely tall. We had found the giraffe (I’m sorry, unicorn) cabin.

  This ship was like a sunken shopping mall, with multiple compartments crammed with merchandise. It would take months to salvage all the treasure on board the jumbo junk. Fortunately, we needed only one piece of pottery.

  The Ming vase that would set our mother free!

  CHAPTER 84

  After swimming through maybe a dozen interconnected rooms, Tommy gave us the “watch me” hand signal. He pulled out his knife and started prying open the nearest wooden crate.

  Beck and I followed Tommy’s lead. We pulled out our dive knives and set to work ripping open the rotted wooden crates, everyone searching for one thing.

  I found spice jars, ivory tusks, and strands of pearls, but no Ming vases.

  Tommy scored some broken teapots.

  Beck was the first to find what we were looking for: a whole box filled with imperial ceramics glazed in fourteenth-century China, with the markings to prove it.

  She held up a cobalt-blue porcelain piece that looked exactly like one Storm had shown us when we Googled Ming vases on the hotel’s business center computer.

  The Ming vase on the Internet had sold at an auction in Hong Kong for $21.6 million.

  Then Beck reached back into the box and pulled out another!

  Tommy gave us a big thumbs-up.

  When you’re scuba diving, a thumbs-up doesn’t mean “Woo-hoo! Great job, sis!” It meant it was time for us to head back to the surface.

  And we definitely had to hurry.

  Because while we’d been busy ripping the lids off cargo crates, a giant great white shark had quietly followed us into the belly of the treasure boat.

  CHAPTER 85

  Panicking, Beck backpedaled as fast as she could.

  The giant shark lunged for her flippers.

  Beck yanked her legs away from its monstrous jaws a split second before they slammed shut and sent up a massive underwater wake that spun her into a spiral and made her lose her grip on both of the Ming vases.

  Our treasures drifted down, twirling slowly, headed for the hard wooden decking below.

  Tommy signaled for Beck and me to hightail it out of that cargo compartment as he dived down to recover Beck’s fumble. The shark twisted its torso and thrashed after Tommy, who snagged one vase with his left hand, the other with his right—a half second before $40 million worth of antique Chinese art hit the floor and shattered.

  But because of his underwater acrobatics, Tommy was cornered. The shark was circling him, lining up its next attack.

  I glanced back into the crates I’d been searching through.

  I saw corked jars of… something. I wasn’t sure what, but I hoped it was dye. Indigo, maybe. I remembered Mom had taught us about indigo’s being a major African export in the days of the spice trade on the high seas.

  I grabbed a jar and smashed it against the ship’s hull.

  Whatever was in the jar wasn’t blue, so it couldn’t be indigo. It was something better: red and murky. Maybe I had cracked open an antique spice container that had managed to keep its contents safe until I came along. It was red, so it could’ve been cinnamon? Maybe paprika? Cayenne pepper?

  I didn’t really care. Whatever it was, it worked.

  The shark sensed the swirling cloud of murky redness, and its shark brain bolted to “blood in the water!” faster than a dog’s brain leaping to “squirrel!”

  Tommy was able to swim out of the suddenly cramped compartment through a side door. Beck had already made it out the way we came in.

  That left just me and Bruce and my billowy red cloud of spicy soup.

  Yeah, I had already named the monster Bruce after the shark in Jaws.

  Hey, I figured if a great white wanted to take me out for dinner, I should at least know his name!

  CHAPTER 86

  Remember how fast I swam across that hippo-infested lake?

  Well, I swam even faster through the sharkinfested treasure ship. I flew from cargo compartment to cargo compartment like a mouse running through a maze in a mad dash to find a six-pound wheel of cheese.

  Bruce stayed with me through every twist and turn.

  In that high-ceilinged giraffe cabin, he nipped at my flippers and tasted rubber.

  Fortunately, I kept all my toes. But the chewed-up flipper meant I couldn’t maintain my optimum speed as I swam into the adjoining chamber—I think it was the rhinoceros room, because there was a pair of petrified rhino skeletons on the floor near a crumbling feeding trough just waiting for me and my puny bones to join them.

  I looked up at the rhino room’s ceiling, searching for my next exit.

  And saw Beck and Tommy waving at me from a cramped passageway.

  They were signaling for me to swim up and join them.

  So I kicked hard.

  Bruce the shark was maybe six feet behind me. His jaws were wide open. From the look of his sharp and jagged teeth, there might not be any bones left for the rhino room’s fossil collection after he finished grinding his way through my wet suit.

  I found my last extra ounce of oomph and shot through the tiny opening.

  I was with Tommy and Beck in a cramped side room. Behind them, I saw a rusty cannon aimed through a porthole. Beck had the two Ming vases in net dive bags securely strapped to her right wrist. Tommy was cradling a cannonball.

  Of course, I didn’t have much time to enjoy our underwater family reunion on the gun deck of Zheng He’s treasure vessel, because the great white shark shot into the hatchway maybe three seconds after I came out of it.

  But Bruce was too enormous to squeeze all the way through the tight opening. Only his toothy snout a
nd icy black eyeballs made it into the gun deck. His thick, gilled neck—not to mention his dorsal and pectoral fins—kept him trapped inside that narrow frame like he was a pit bull wearing a wooden choke collar.

  Furious, Bruce thrashed and gnashed his mammoth jaws.

  That’s when Tommy underhanded his cannonball across the room like he was lobbing up a free throw from the foul line. In his fury, Bruce clamped down hard on the lead, probably thinking it was my head.

  We didn’t stick around to see what happened next. We were too busy flying to the surface like Polaris missiles, but I had a feeling Bruce would probably need to see the shark dentist soon. There’s no way he didn’t shatter a whole bunch of teeth when he bit into Tommy’s rust-flavored jawbreaker.

  As we neared the surface, I was feeling pretty good. Make that really good. We really needed only one Ming vase to set Mom free, and now we were bringing up two!

  I figured we could sell the spare vase at a Hong Kong auction house and score $20 million to throw Mom the biggest welcome home party ever!

  Unfortunately, all my party plans had to be tossed overboard the instant we reached the surface.

  CHAPTER 87

  Ours wasn’t the only boat bobbing on the water surrounding the jagged rock outcropping.

  Three very sleek military vessels had dropped anchor beside our humble fishing boat. I was pretty sure two were from the People’s Republic of China Navy, based on the insignia on their hulls. The other one was probably a CIA ship.

  How could I be sure?

  Uncle Timothy was standing on the deck. He was surrounded by an entourage of Chinese men with shiny black hair wearing even shinier black suits.

  The two Chinese Navy boats were filled with heavily armed men decked out in blue-and-white-striped sailor shirts. They wore brimless admiral hats with bold red stars where the double anchors usually go. Golden Chinese letters were embroidered around the hatbands.

  “Well done, Kidds!” Uncle Timothy called to us from the deck of his ship. Then he turned to Dumaka, who was standing next to Storm on the bridge of the rented fishing boat. “And congratulations to you, too, Turkey Trot Two.”

  I don’t have Storm’s photographic memory, but I did remember hearing that phrase before: Turkey Trot Two was the person Uncle Timothy had been yammering at in his earpiece when he “miraculously” showed up with trench foot medicine in the jungle.

  Dumaka was still a CIA contract worker. Only now, apparently, he was working for Uncle Timothy instead of our dad. No wonder he’d been so eager to travel with us when he learned we had another treasure map besides the phony one for King Solomon’s Mines.

  Beck ripped her scuba regulator out of her mouth and swam closer so she could whisper to me. “Dumaka knew we were searching for the sunken Chinese treasure ship.”

  “Because Tommy told him after the Somali pirates stole our truck.”

  Beck shook her head. “He knew before that.”

  “What? When?”

  “When Storm translated Mom’s code on the helicopter flight out of Congo.”

  “No way. Storm did that on the headsets. Dumaka was busy flying the helicopter.”

  “And wearing a headset! Remember?”

  Yeah. Now I did. Duh. Pilots always wore headsets.

  I also remembered the Chinese man who had tailed us in New York City, right after we slipped out of Chumley Prep. And Uncle Timothy’s Chinese helicopter pilot, Major Lin—not to mention Uncle T.’s newfound familiarity with Mandarin, one of the many Chinese dialects.

  “This smells worse than stinky tofu sold on the streets of Changsha in the Hunan Province!” I whispered.

  “What’re we going to do, Tommy?” asked Beck.

  “We’re gonna go along to get along,” he said. “And make sure at least one of these Ming vases ends up in Cyprus so it can rescue Mom.”

  CHAPTER 88

  “You have done our nation a great service,” Uncle Timothy said as he inspected our treasure haul on the deck of his CIA spy boat.

  “Then what’s with the Chinese Navy surrounding us?” snapped Beck.

  “These Ming vases and the sunken treasure ship down below belong to the people of China, Rebecca. They are of great cultural significance. The Chinese wanted to have proof of Zheng He’s voyages to these waters as a matter of national pride. By helping them achieve that goal, we have also helped solidify relationships between two global powers.”

  “How long have you been searching for the shipwreck?” I asked.

  Uncle Timothy grinned. “Ever since your father told me last year that he had a hunch about where one of Zheng He’s giant treasure ships might have sunken off the coast of Kenya.”

  “But you couldn’t locate the treasure ship without Dad’s treasure map,” said Storm.

  “It was certainly helpful, wouldn’t you children agree?”

  “Chyah,” said Tommy. “Totally.”

  “This is why you wanted us in that boarding school!” said Beck. “You had to take us off the game board so you’d have first dibs at finding Dad’s map.”

  “And why you were so relieved when you thought we were actually searching for King Solomon’s Mines,” I added.

  “I admit you kids had me fooled,” said Uncle Timothy.

  “It was pretty easy,” said Storm.

  “Speak for yourself,” I mumbled, remembering my trench foot and the hippo attack and the giant snake and the mosquitoes and literally everything that happened on our horrible hike through the jungles of Africa.

  “Was Merck working for you, too?” Beck demanded. “Did you have him ‘eliminate’ Bela Kilgore so she wouldn’t tell us anything about Mom?”

  “Merck is an independent contractor,” scoffed Uncle Timothy. “A loose cannon. I have absolutely no control over his actions.”

  Was Uncle Timothy telling us the truth about that or anything else? With those mirrored sunglasses, it’s extremely hard to tell, because you can never read the guy’s eyes. Either way, the whole thing was devious and disgusting.

  But, to tell you the truth, at that moment I didn’t really care.

  “No matter what,” I declared, “we need to send one Ming vase to Cyprus! To free Mom!”

  “We’ll talk to some high-ranking Chinese officials I’m friendly with,” said Uncle Timothy. “I’ll plead our case. Perhaps they will be willing to let one piece go.”

  “They better,” said Tommy. “Because winning Mom’s freedom is the whole reason we did everything we did.”

  When Tommy put it that way, I felt better about my trench foot.

  CHAPTER 89

  So is Uncle Timothy a good guy or a bad guy?

  We couldn’t decide, and really we still can’t.

  The next day, we were heading to Beijing, China. Uncle Timothy had agreed to take us along on his trip to present the first of the recovered treasure to highly placed government officials on the Chinese State Council to try to negotiate a deal—one Ming vase in exchange for having done all the work to locate their sunken treasure ship.

  Call me an unrealistic, foolhardy, and idiotic optimist (Beck already has), but I was pretty sure everything would work out the way we wanted it to.

  Beck wasn’t so positive.

  But one thing was certain about our trip to China: It was bound to be an adventure!

  (Is that really how you want to end this story, Beck? Seriously? Sheesh. How lame is this?)

  CHAPTER 90

  I am happy to report that, since nobody was going to win that particular argument, Beck and I reached a compromise. I can tell you about one more action-packed adventure: the Awesome Boar Attack that occurred when we had to change that flat tire!

  I promise you this—the boars were not boring! (Whatever, Beck—puns are awesome.)

  CHAPTER 91

  As I’m sure you remember, we were driving from Nairobi to the Kenyan coast in our souped-up expedition vehicle when, right in the middle of the Ngai Ndethya National Reserve, we had a flat tire.

>   Tommy and I went out to fix it while Beck and Storm stayed in the truck to continue enjoying the air-conditioning.

  Suddenly we heard snorting.

  It was a deadly African wild boar.

  (Fine, Beck says it was actually a giant warthog. Whatever. It was a huge pig with tusks. Enough said.)

  The thing had to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds, and it wasn’t cute like Pumbaa in The Lion King, either. This beast was ferocious and ridiculously ugly, with all sorts of warty bumps on its head. And the smell? The warthog is a living, breathing, thick-skinned fart.

  And it knows how to use those tusks. Fights between males can be pretty violent and extremely bloody. If a warthog senses danger—like maybe it sees a guy holding a tire iron in his hand, about the size and shape of one Bick Kidd—it will attack people. In fact, Tommy told me warthogs will rip off your arms and legs and carry them away to eat, just like a take-home bucket of drumsticks.

  There was no time for us to run back into the truck.

  The warthog lowered its head and charged.

  I did my best to defend us. But I knew Tommy and I were dead meat.

  CHAPTER 92

  And then things got worse.

  Four more snorting warthogs came charging across the savanna. They’d been hiding in the tall grass and behind the scattered, scruffy trees—just waiting for the word from the head warthog to attack!

  It was a full-on, tusk-up charge of the pig brigade.

  I fluttered out that yellow rain slicker like a matador’s cape, hoping I could trick the pigs into aiming for it instead of us.