'How you feeling?' Jarvis asked her as he swayed unsteadily across the rolling deck and placed a hand on her back.

Lopez peered round at the old man, her face puffy and her eyes narrow.

'You telling me you couldn't have got us out to Bimini any other way?'

'Sorry,' Jarvis shrugged. 'Besides, how the hell was I supposed to know you get seasick?'

Lopez glared across at Ethan. 'He knew.'

Ethan shrugged as Jarvis shot him a dirty look.

'We chased a bail runner out across Lake Michigan a couple of months ago,' he said. 'Lopez got sick I just figured it was nerves as our mark was armed.'

Lopez winced.

'I got sick before the shooting started.'

Bryson vaulted down onto the quarterdeck alongside them, and in one swift move gathered Lopez up in his arms and carried her toward the center of the deck beside the entrance to the wheelhouse. He set her down gently beside the scuba-tank racks, then squatted down in front of her and handed her a bottle of chilled water as he looked at her with one twinkling blue eye.

'Seasickness is just your inner ear playing up because it can't detect the roll and swell of the boat. Sit here, keep yourself hydrated and keep your eye on the horizon. The longer you do it, the quicker your brain will figure out the movement and the quicker the nausea will pass. Got it?'

Lopez managed a weak smile and nodded as she opened the bottle of water. Ethan hurried over.

'How long until we reach the spot?' he asked.

'Twenty minutes or so,' Bryson replied. 'You good to dive?'

Ethan nodded as he glanced at the scuba gear. 'What's the depth?'

'You're lucky,' Bryson informed him. 'The location is just off the Bimini coast on a sandbar near Gun Cay, so you'll be in no more than forty feet with good visibility.'

'I'm coming down too,' Lopez said between sips of water.

'Like hell,' Ethan said. 'You stay up on deck with Long John Silver here until you're back in shape.'

Lopez shook her head.

'It'll give me a break from feeling like crap,' she pointed out. 'Best thing for me right now is to stay busy, right, Scott?'

Bryson shrugged.

'I'd rather have you in sight because I like to look at you, honey,' he murmured. 'But if you want to dive it won't hurt you.'

'Fine,' Ethan said, having decided he'd rather have Lopez where he could see her. 'Let's get suited up. At this supposedly breakneck speed, we'll be there soon.'

Bryson turned to the scuba racks and unhooked the diving suits as he spoke.

'You're quite the comedian, Warner. Guess you must have been the joker in the pack in the Marine Corps. Could have done with a wit like yours in the SEALs, but I guess you were never gonna get that far . . .'

Ethan checked his diving equipment.

'I had my hands full,' he replied. 'I was a platoon officer during Iraqi Freedom and didn't get the chance to join Special Forces. We let the grunts do that.'

'That's what they all say.'

'No, it's not,' Ethan said. 'They all say they got an injury or some crap and were medically discharged from the course. Those that do get through the training develop an inability to stop talking about it, until they no longer need to shoot their enemies. They just bore them the hell to death.'

Bryson burst out laughing, a deep roar from his chest that made Lopez flinch as she was putting on her gear. He settled back down as he checked the oxygen cylinders, looking at Lopez as he worked.

'How'd you end up with this loser?' he asked her.

Lopez zipped up her suit. 'Met him in DC, hasn't left me alone since.'

'Can't blame him.'

Ethan saw that Lopez smiled back, her debilitating sickness apparently now forgotten. He grabbed a set of goggles and tossed them to her before turning to Bryson.

'I take it we're in the Bermuda Triangle here?' he said.

'Just inside it,' Bryson confirmed. 'The generally accepted borders of the Triangle run from Miami to the island of Bermuda and down to San Juan in Puerto Rico.'

'You don't honestly believe in all that crap, do you?' Jarvis asked the captain. 'I've read that this area is one of the busiest shipping and commercial air-traffic lanes in the world.'

'It is,' Bryson replied. 'Statistically there's nothing unusual about the number of aircraft and ships lost in this region. It's considered entirely safe by insurers and suchlike, and most of the supposedly mysterious disappearances over the years were not mysterious at all. Various authors simply omitted facts in order to maintain the legend and sell their books.'

'Such as?' Ethan asked.

'Well, they'd tell of ships that had genuinely been reported missing, but not the fact that they turned up in port later. Or they'd write that a vessel vanished in clear weather when in fact it was caught in a storm. Some ships were reported as having been swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle when in fact they'd accidentally slipped their moorings in harbor and drifted out to sea.'

'There must be more to it than that,' Ethan argued. 'You've been sailing out here for a few years you must have heard or seen things. I can't believe that the whole legend is just a charade.'

Bryson leaned against the bulwarks and squinted out across the ocean.

'You sail around these waters long enough, you see a lot of things you can't explain, but that doesn't mean that what's happening can't be explained. The Gulf Stream runs through here and its currents can quickly remove debris from accidents; the weather is unpredictable, with storms arriving and vanishing so quickly that they don't show up on satellite images, and the islands and ocean floor have both shallows and deep marine trenches that produce strong reef currents and a constant flux of moving water, producing regular navigation hazards to all shipping.' Bryson grinned. 'These waters might look pretty, but they're dangerous and unpredictable. It's no wonder that people go missing out here.'

'But . . . ?' Lopez teased him, and Bryson shrugged.

'Fact is, the Bermuda Triangle is one of only two places on earth where a magnetic compass actually points toward true north. If you don't compensate for this lack of magnetic variation, you can end up going off course. The other place where this happens, a region called the Devil's Triangle in the Pacific, is also a place where vessels and aircraft have gone missing, so there's definitely something odd going on out here, even if it's just navigational error.'

Ethan narrowed his eyes.

'But . . . there's something you're not telling, right?'

The captain sighed as he fiddled with an oxygen cylinder.

'There's weird shit happening out here, okay?' he muttered. 'People say that the Triangle's a recent phenomenon, but Columbus himself recorded problems with magnetic readings in his logs back in 1493. There may not be a statistically large number of vanishings out here, but some of those that do occur are real weird.'

'Do tell,' Lopez said, intrigued, as she sipped her water.

'There's a few,' Bryson said. 'A Tudor IV airplane vanished in 1948 with thirty-one people aboard; the freighter SS Sandra disappeared without trace in 1952; an English York plane vanished with thirty-three people in 1952; the Navy lost a Lockheed Constellation in 1954 and a seaplane in 1956; that's over fifty people vanished without trace, plus several large freighters from various countries.'

'It's odd that both ships and aircraft disappear,' Ethan said thoughtfully.

'And big ones, too,' Bryson noted. 'A DC-3 with twenty-seven passengers in 1948 and a C-124 Globemaster with fifty-three passengers in 1951. No apparent catastrophes, no radio warnings or distress beacons. They just disappear.'

'What about that Flight 19?' Jarvis asked. 'The Navy bombers that went down back in World War Two?'

'They were supposedly lost due to the formation leader's faulty compass and a storm that prevented them from navigating by eye over the islands,' Bryson explained. 'But the thing is, even if the leader's compass did fail, there were a lot of other airplanes in the flight and they all were in radio contact with Fort Lauderdale until they disappeared without trace. So either a whole bunch of military pilots let their leader fly them into oblivion in a faulty airplane, or something else got them all turned around.'

'Well, whatever happened to this airplane it's now a lot closer to Bimini Island than when it must have gone into the water, probably due to the currents,' Ethan said. 'The pilots would have been able to see land from here.' He looked at Lopez. 'Charles Purcell's coordinates must have taken that into account, which means . . .'

'He saw the future,' Jarvis replied. 'He can't have known how far and in what direction it would have moved without having seen it do so. But that still leaves us with the small question of how?'

'Nobody can predict currents in the Straits,' Bryson murmured, 'it's why the search-and-rescue teams never found your missing plane. Who knows how many other ships have disappeared from history out here?'

Ethan looked at Bryson, who was still standing by the bulwarks and staring out to sea.

'Okay, Blackbeard, we must be nearly there by now. Why don't you head up to the wheelhouse and guide us in before the four of us vanish out here, too unless you're reading the waves or using the Force or something.'

Bryson stood up straight and jabbed his thumb over his shoulder.

'It's over there,' he said without looking. 'Less than two nautical miles.'

'Good.' Ethan clapped his hands together. 'Chop-chop, then.'

Bryson shot him a dirty look as he turned away and jogged up into the wheelhouse. Lopez looked at Ethan as she hauled on her oxygen tanks.

'You should take it easy,' she said. 'He's a big guy.'

'The bigger they are . . .' Ethan murmured.

'The harder they hit you.'

The Free Spirit's chattering engines wound down to a soft chugging as Bryson guided them to the exact coordinates that Charles Purcell had left encoded in his diary. Ethan led Lopez across to the boarding platform at the stern of the boat, Jarvis joining them there. Moments later Bryson shut the engines down to idle and leapt to the bow, hurling an anchor that crashed down into the crystalline water.

Bryson made his way to the stern as the Free Spirit turned in the water to face into the current.

'Okay, she's all set. Sonar reads a depth of about six fathoms, and there's definitely something large and metallic down there.'

Lopez gave Bryson a thumbs-up and a wink as she closed her facemask and then rolled over the stern backwards to splash into the water. Ethan cleared his mouthpiece and flipped Bryson a lop-sided salute.

'Keep your eye on things,' he said.

Before Bryson could respond, Ethan flipped himself off the side of the boat and plunged into the waves.

24.

FLORIDA STRAITS, 14 MILES WEST OF SOUTH BIMINI.

The water of the Florida Straits was filled with shimmering beams of sunlight that pierced the rippling surface above to drift across the seabed below. Ethan watched the beams of light dance like golden snakes on the sand far below as he descended.

Lopez swam alongside him as they leveled out ten feet above the seabed. A flight of manta rays glided past nearby through the immense blue wilderness, and a swarm of brightly colored butterfly reef-fish flitted in a rippling kaleidoscopic cloud through a maze of driftwood trapped by the sandbar.

Ethan glanced up at the surface and saw the Free Spirit's hull above them. Her anchor chain was at a steep angle, the swift current of the straits pulling on her. The solution to the disappearance of wrecked ships and airplanes in the Bermuda Triangle was often painfully simple: people were looking in the wrong place. They could hardly hope to find the plane, even if it had moved just a few hundred meters: even in clear waters, the blue eventually concealed anything more than twenty to thirty meters away, and a grid-pattern search of the seabed would take them months.

Ethan was about to curse himself for not organizing an aerial search first when Lopez signaled to him and pointed into the shadowy blue distance to their right.

Ethan squinted through his face mask and saw a feature barely visible through the gloom, a ghostly object made up of sharp angles that did not exist in nature. It had been a common theme of survival training in the US Marines to maintain a lookout for such features in the wilderness as signs of human occupation. Nature did not build in straight lines but instead used curves, coils and sweeping arcs, the elegant freehand strokes of creation.

Ethan turned toward the object and swam over the rugged driftwood debris and the attendant fish that scattered in shimmering shoals as he passed by. He saw the object resolve itself as the vertical tail-fin of an aircraft, the tail code on the damaged metal easy to read: N2764C.

Lopez gave him a thumbs-up as they approached the aircraft and ascended to glide over the wreckage. Ethan could see that the aircraft had hit the water hard, the aluminum nose crumpled like paper. The windscreen had imploded with incredible force, tearing the cockpit apart, and the wings had been sheared off to lie fifty feet either side of the crumpled fuselage. Both the fore and aft exit doors had been ripped away and also lay crumpled nearby on the seabed. Ethan realized that it was sheer chance that what remained of the aircraft had drifted so far from the point of impact and yet had come to lie upright in its watery grave.

Ethan descended until he was level with the exit and then slowly eased his way inside, careful not to hit his oxygen cylinder on the fuselage wall.

A pair of yellow eyes raced into his face and slammed him backwards as giant fangs scraped like scalpels against his mask, searching for his flesh. Ethan shot a panicked swipe at the creature's head and the barracuda snapped past him and raced away into the deep blue distance. Ethan's heart slammed against his chest as he struggled to get his breathing back under control. Idiot. It had been a long time since he'd dived, and he'd forgotten one of the cardinal rules: never, ever panic underwater.

He checked his watch as a diversion. Lopez watched him with concern and then reached out and squeezed his shoulder. Ethan gave her a thumbs-up and turned again toward the exit hatch to ease his way inside.

The fuselage was filled with fragments of floating debris that gently swayed from side to side as the currents outside heaved and churned. Ethan turned, and as he moved forward he saw rows of bodies still strapped into their seats. Mortified mouths gaped open, bare eye sockets stared sightlessly into oblivion, picked clean by countless fish, and clouds of hair rippled upright from scalps as though still alive.

Ethan saw the crushed cockpit ahead, the bodies of the pilots pinned against the bulkheads by the weight of the instrument panel that had smashed inward upon them. Ethan saw a wavy mass of long blonde hair drifting in the current and felt a surge of anger. Aircraft didn't drop out of the sky for no reason, and he felt certain that Purcell was trying to tell them that this crash was no accident. What Ethan could not tell was how the airplane had been brought down.

He turned and headed back out of the fuselage toward the tail, determined now to recover the one thing that could tell the authorities what had brought down the aircraft: the flight-data recorder.

Ethan knew that the device was usually located at the very rear of the aircraft. In this position, the entire front of the aircraft acted as a 'crush zone' to reduce the effects of shock in an impact. Double-wrapped in corrosion-resistant stainless steel or titanium, with high-temperature insulation inside, flight-data recorders were invariably colored bright orange; they were more than capable of withstanding immersion in water at such a depth.

Ethan swam to the rear of the aircraft, alongside the tail section, and looked down.

An open compartment stared back. The flight-data recorder had already been removed. Ethan's conviction that Charles Purcell was an innocent man on a mission for justice and that this aircraft was a major key to the puzzle swelled within him. Whatever else happened, he knew that he needed to get to the surface and inform the National Transport Safety Board of the wreck's location, and then get the Coastguard to prevent any further tampering with the evidence at the crash site.

As he looked at the tail, he noticed a thin cable tied to it. His eyes traced the cable upward toward the surface, where it vanished into the blue, but against the rippling sunlight hitting the surface of the ocean far above he could just make out a small buoy.

Ethan turned to indicate the buoy to Lopez, who was hovering above him in the water. As he did so something zipped past his head at terrific speed, leaving a thin trail of bubbles in the water before burying itself in the aircraft's fuselage, behind where his head had been a moment before.

Ethan whirled in the water as four divers rushed down toward them, each wearing a ducted fan attached to their dive tanks that propelled them effortlessly through the water. Each held a weapon in one hand, and Ethan instantly recognized them as Heckler & Koch P11 underwater firearms. The pistols fired four-inch steel darts from the five barrels that gave the weapon its squat appearance.

Lopez's hand flicked to a knife in a sheath attached to her thigh as she darted away from Ethan, drawing two of the divers and some of the fire with her as she headed toward the front of the aircraft. Ethan turned and grabbed the metal flight-data recorder panel from the seabed before swimming directly at the nearest of their attackers, closing the distance in seconds as the diver plunged down toward him. The diver aimed at Ethan's face and pulled the trigger on his pistol from barely six feet away.

Ethan raised the panel as he saw the steel dart race toward him. The dart hit the panel hard, snapping the metal from Ethan's grip and spinning it away toward the seabed. Ethan caught the spent steel dart and grabbed the diver's pistol arm as he sailed past, yanked along by the power of the fan on his back. Ethan pushed the pistol away and then swung the steel dart over-arm and plunged it into the back of the man's shoulder.

A rush of bubbles exploded from the diver's mask as he writhed in agony, a cloud of thick blood puffing like red smoke to trail behind them through the clear blue water. Ethan ground the dart around inside the man's shoulder as they rolled upside down, the diver squirming desperately to get away as they plunged down toward the seabed. As the diver looked round and exposed his face, Ethan yanked the dart out of his shoulder and smashed it into his facemask.