Gold in the Keys Page 4

  I searched the bottom, hoping to spot something shiny and hoping that we were the only ones in the water. There had been no signs of the cartel having divers from the surface; no dive flags or tanks on the boats or with the men on the shore. I kept swimming along the bottom, and then something caught my eye just ahead of me. There was a deep pool just beneath where the waterfall crashed into the lake. I pointed it out to Scott, then swam for it, fighting against the swirling currents that raged in all directions around me. The waterfall was booming now, a constant roar that thundered overhead. When I reached the pool, I saw that it was much deeper than I’d originally suspected. I adjusted my position and swam straight down, where the water was much calmer, then turned on the flashlight that was strapped to my wrist. The pool narrowed and appeared to end about fifty feet down. It looked like a dead end.

  We swam down to the bottom of the pool to survey the lake floor. As we scanned our flashlights along the rocks, we illuminated what looked like the narrow opening of a cave. I glanced at Scott and knew that he too was smiling behind his mouthpiece. We pointed our flashlights into the opening but couldn’t see where it led. I pointed at myself, then at the opening, and motioned for Scott to follow me. He gave the “okay” signal, placing his index finger and thumb together, and I finned into the cave.

  The cave was dark and lined with jagged rocks. It dropped down and had a few turns before leading up. Gradually, the cave opened wider, and I could see what looked like the surface up ahead. I unholstered my Sig and held it in one hand and my flashlight in the other as I slowly broke through the surface and scanned the area around me. The cave was about twenty feet tall and thirty feet wide, with large stalactites jutting down from above. I pushed my mask down to rest around my neck and took a better look at the cave as Scott surfaced beside me.

  Removing his mouthpiece, he said, “Any sign of cartel?”

  I shook my head, then swam for the edge of the water. The rocks were slippery, but after removing our fins, we were able to climb up a crevice and walk onto a flat surface large enough for us to change out of our gear. Scott, though focused and alert, couldn’t stop smiling.

  “We found it,” he said. “An underwater cave. Just as the legend said.”

  I couldn’t stop smiling myself. My heart raced within my chest at the prospect of finding such a treasure. I’d been in dangerous situations time and time again and had learned how to stay calm under pressure. But there’s something about searching for a treasure that can make a grown man feel like a kid again. I bet even the most hardened men can’t stop the excitement within them.

  We slid out of our rebreather gear and stowed it behind a large rock, then slipped our wet suits off and got dressed, our clothes still dry as a bone. Leaving everything behind except for our guns, flashlights and the satellite phone, we moved deeper into the cave. But we hadn’t made it five paces in before we both froze in our tracks.

  “We’re not alone in here,” I said as I shined my flashlight on three full sets of scuba gear on the ground ahead of us, complete with BCDs, tanks, regulators, fins and masks. Scott and I stood still for a moment, listening intently to the silence around us before looking at each other than stepping closer.

  “All three are still wet,” Scott said, examining the gear. We searched them for clues but found only the standard scuba gear, with nothing but weights in the pockets.

  While Scott searched the area around the gear, I did a full scan of the cave ahead of us, then moved a few steps deeper inside.

  “Over here,” I said, pointing my flashlight at a passageway about fifty feet ahead of me. The limestone rocks split, revealing a space just wide enough for us to fit through.

  “It looks man-made,” Scott said. “And look over here.” He pointed to markings on the stone, distinct shapes from a language used centuries ago.

  We kept moving through the opening, which soon grew larger, revealing a massive open space. It was completely dark, with no light breaking through from above. It looked to be about forty feet high, and there were openings along the sides, probably leading to other caves. It was a giant web, a series of caves sprouting out from this main one. The light from our flashlights scanned the space, and a few small, shiny specks of light reflected back at us. Scott and I looked at each other and moved in closer, both of us wondering what it could be.

  We neared the unknown object, then paused upon realizing what it was. Silver reflected light back at us, and we saw the distinct shape of a Morion—an old-style helmet worn primarily by the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was round, with a perpendicular rim around the edges and a fin that stuck out from front to back like a Mohawk. Resting beside the helmet was a stone that had been sculpted to look like a cross. It sat flat on the ground and had words engraved on it.

  We searched the rest of the cave, making sure we were alone. Then Scott turned to me and said, “How’s your Spanish?”

  Most of my jobs had brought me to South America over the years, which had resulted in me being able to speak the language almost fluently.

  I knelt down beside the cross and examined the old carved words. “May we be blessed on our voyage to the motherland,” I said, reading them as best as I could, “as our beloved captain is blessed on his journey to Heaven.” The top of the cross had a name carved into it. “Francisco de Cavallos,” I read aloud. Then, looking down at the Morion and examining the stone cross, I turned to Scott and said, “It’s a grave site.”

  I searched the area around the cross but found nothing else. While exploring the rest of the cave, I turned to Scott and said, “Looks like we’re a few hundred years too late.”

  Scott was on the other side of the cave, and when I shined my flashlight his direction, I saw that there were indentations in one of the walls, strange grooves that twisted the light from my flashlight.

  “Hey, look at this,” Scott said as I moved closer.

  My jaw dropped as I realized what the indentations were. The entire rock face was covered with human skulls stacked on top of each other.

  “Montezuma’s warriors,” I said.

  “Must be. You find anything else out about the grave site?”

  I told him that I hadn’t and repeated that it appeared that we were too late, not knowing if he’d heard me the first time.

  Scott shined his flashlight down the nearest passageway, which extended away from the cavern we were standing in. “Only one way to find out.”

  We advanced through the passageway, watching our step and keeping a lookout for any movement or foreign features. Hundreds more skulls lined the walls beside us as we kept moving through the narrow cave. Up ahead, we saw that it opened up again, this time revealing an even larger cavern. It was massive, easily a hundred feet to the top and more than double that in length. We moved in, hopeful that we might find something, but the cavern appeared to be empty.

  After taking a few minutes to search the cave, I looked at Scott and shrugged. “The treasure isn’t here, Coop.”

  He was on the other side of the cavern, examining something on the ground. But before he could reply, a loud explosion echoed through the cave and shook the rocks and ground around us violently.

  We both took cover in an instant, dropping to the ground as rocks tumbled all around us. A large rock broke free, falling towards me as I rolled out of the way, narrowly escaping being squashed to death. When the blast and the shaking subsided, I shined my flashlight towards Scott but was unable to see him through the fine layer of dust in the air. I weaved in and out of a few boulders and saw that he’d taken cover near where we’d entered the cave.

  “Are you all right?”

  He rose to his feet and took a look around. “Yeah. You?” I nodded and he continued, “They must be trying to blow their way out of here.”

  He was right, and I knew that soon they would succeed and that the cave would be swarming with the cartel.

  “Alright, let’s get the hell out of here before this whole place caves
in on us.”

  I moved past Scott towards the passageway we had come in from, but he held up his hand to stop me.

  “It’s too late for that,” he said, his eyes wide. He shined his flashlight into the cave, and I saw that it was blocked off with large rocks. Searching every corner, I realized that there was no way we’d be able to fit through.

  I sighed. “We better hope they blow a way out of here. Otherwise, we may become permanent residents of this cave.”

  I’d been caving before and knew firsthand how easy it was to get turned around or delirious, or fall and break something. Although following a marked path is well and good, venturing out into unknown portions of a cave is one of the most dangerous things you can do. I’d read many stories of adventurers getting lost in caves, their flashlights dying on them and their bodies being found weeks later.

  We moved to the other side of the cavern and into another passageway, heading in the direction the explosion had come from. The cave was silent again, the only sounds being the occasional drip of water from the stalactites above and the soft echo of our boots shuffling against the rocks below with every step. After five minutes of trekking through the darkness, taking notes with every turn to remember our way back, I saw a faint glow up ahead. We both froze upon seeing the light and watched as it shifted, indicating that someone was moving in our direction with a flashlight in their hands.

  Scott turned to me, holding his right hand in the air. “Do you hear that?”

  “Yeah. There’s at least two of them.”

  The distinct sounds of boots stomping on the rocky surface grew louder and louder, and we both knew that they would reach us soon. We took a quick look at the walls around us, then switched off our flashlights. To our right, I saw that about ten feet overhead, the rocks turned sharply, jutting out to form a small plateau.

  “I’m climbing up,” I whispered as I wrapped my hands around a massive stalactite, gripping it with my fingertips as I heaved myself up. I stretched my leg up and over the plateau, then leveraged the rest of my body, sliding between the damp and slippery grooves in the rocks. Looking down at the bottom of the cave, I saw that Scott had vanished into the shadows. We’d fought side by side so many times that we usually knew what the other person was thinking without saying a word.

  Lying completely still, I waited in the darkness as the men approached our position. Streaks of light appeared from down the cave, and I peeked over a rock and saw that there were two men moving towards me. The first wore a cutoff shirt and had a brown bandanna tied around his head. Tattoos covered his arms, shoulders and neck up to his shaved head. The second man had long hair, wore a black tee shirt and looked like he weighed at least two hundred pounds. Both men were muscular and carried themselves like they’d been in the military before.

  As they moved closer, I could hear most of what they said to each other. I’d hoped to get an idea of who they were and who they were working for, but their conversation revolved around the previous night’s trip to a nearby strip club.

  They both walked right past me, unable to see me as I pressed my body against the cold rock. They took a few steps past me, then froze as Scott appeared from the black in an instant and lunged for the first guy. He wrapped his arm around Tattoo’s back and held him from behind, his right arm flexing around the guy’s throat. He gagged and struggled, but in one quick motion, Scott knocked him out and his body fell limp to the cave floor.

  This was my cue. The guy with the long hair reached for the pistol on his hip just as I jumped from my position high above and, using all of my bodyweight, lodged my elbow into the back of his head. The guy collapsed as I fell on top of him, his body going limp as he lost consciousness. I grabbed the pistol from his holster and searched his pockets, but aside from a radio, a pair of brass knuckles and a switchblade, they were all empty. He didn’t even have a wallet or any kind of identification. I checked all of his pockets again, just to be sure, but there was nothing else.

  I glanced over at Scott, who was crouching beside the other guy, and said, “You find anything?”

  “Nothing,” he replied, standing and walking over towards me.

  I stood and slid the magazine out of the guy’s pistol. Just as I was about to throw it aside, I noticed something strange on the handle. I held it up to the light of my flashlight to get a better look and saw that the handle had a custom symbol etched into its side. It was the image of two black snakes slithering around a circle. I looked at the man on the ground, then dropped down beside him and grabbed his left hand. Examining it, I saw the same two snakes slithering around his left wrist.

  “What is it?” Scott said. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “Holy shit. These guys are Black Venom.”

  Scott knelt down beside me, and I handed him the pistol. He examined it briefly, then threw it to the ground. Black Venom is one of the most powerful and deadly drug cartels in the world. They work primarily out of Mexico, but over the last few years, they’ve expanded immensely and I’d even encountered some of them while working in Colombia. They’re notorious for hiring and training only the best fighters, which means that an encounter with them is never an easy one.

  “Looks like we were right about them being cartel,” Scott said.

  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I said. “These guys both had radios, and when they don’t reply to any communications, you can bet that this cave will be crawling with more of them.”

  Scott shined his light forward, then down at the two unconscious men at our feet.

  “There’s no time to hide them,” I added. “We’re just gonna have to risk the third guy stumbling in here. We need to get out of this cave.”

  Scott reached for the Inmarsat waterproof satellite phone in his cargo pants pocket and pressed a few buttons on the home screen.

  “Damn,” he said. “Even this can’t get a signal in here.”

  Stowing it back inside his pocket, he motioned ahead of us, and we continued quickly down the narrow passageway, still heading in the direction the explosion had come from. We figured it was our best chance, if we had one, at getting out. Our only other option would have been to find a way back to the water, working our way down alternate passageways in an intricate and elaborate maze of tunnels. We could have been wandering for hours, perhaps days, in a cave that size, and eventually our lights would have gone out. Stories of people getting trapped in caves like that are common around the world, and we didn’t want to be added to the list.

  “Looks like it opens up ahead,” Scott said.

  We both stopped, turned off our flashlights and listened. It was quiet, and after a few breaths, we gave ourselves the all clear and moved in. With our flashlights off, we saw that there was light coming from what we realized was another large cavern. Rocks and boulders littered the ground, and on the other side of the cavern, a wide beam of sunlight streamed down from above.

  We looked at each other, then scanned the space as best as we could before slowly moving in. I held my pistol at shoulder height, ready to take aim and pull the trigger at a moment’s notice. Being there with Scott by my side felt like old times, like the hundreds of situations just like this one that we’d found ourselves in before.

  “Do you hear that?” Scott said as we reached the middle of the cavern.

  I nodded. It sounded like the clattering of a diesel engine, and it was coming from just outside the cave. The opening was right over our heads, and the good news was that it was plenty large enough to fit through. The bad news was there was no way for us to get out. From the burn marks on the ground, it looked like whoever was trying to blow out of there had accidentally caused the ceiling of the cave to collapse into itself, leaving a massive opening with no means of escape.

  Looking up at the top, we saw the edge about thirty feet above us, with grass and vines hanging over the side. We kept an eye out for cartel but saw no movement above us or inside the cave.

  “Where the hell is e
veryone?” I asked, looking around.

  Scott shrugged. “Who knows? You think you could give me a boost up to that vine, though?” He motioned toward the vine that dropped down farthest into the cave.

  I examined it and saw that it was a liana vine, a common plant in South America, characterized by its thick, woody stems and astonishing lengths, sometimes in excess of three thousand feet. Aside from the broken end that hung freely roughly ten feet overhead, the vine appeared to be intact and secure in its position.

  I slid my Sig into my leg holster, moved just below the vine and patted Scott on his shoulder.

  “Let me do it,” I said. “We don’t know how secure this is, and Susan would kill me if you broke your neck.” I wanted to add that I was in better shape than he was as well, but as good as Scott was at swallowing his pride, I knew he’d never back down if a fellow SEAL questioned his physical prowess.

  He relented, though not happy about it, and I climbed onto his shoulders and grabbed hold of the vine. I gave it a couple of hard tugs, just to test it out before giving it all of my bodyweight. The vine tensed but felt strong, not making any creaking sounds or loosening at all. Hand over hand I climbed, trying to be as quiet as possible and keeping my senses constantly on the alert for any movement above. I soon reached a patch of overhanging green vegetation, and just as I did, I heard the sound of another diesel engine, this one quickly approaching our position. By the loud rumble and vibration of the earth, I knew it had to be a large truck.

  Hanging in the open with no cover, I had to move. As fast as I could, I climbed the remaining length of vine, hoisted my body over the rim of the opening and crawled under a patch of Caquib plants with large green leaves that provided ample cover. I turned around and watched as an army-green Ford F-150 off-road Raptor approached and stopped just on the other side of the cave opening, less than a hundred feet away from me. It looked new, but its wheels were covered in mud, and the rest of it was covered in dirt. Surveying the area around me, I saw that we were in the middle of the dense tropical jungle with no roads in sight.