The Aztec Heresy by Paul Christopher

tweaked the dials on the image. It looked like the print of an old hobnail boot, slightly wider in the center and narrower at one end.
    ‘‘Three masts. High at bow and stern. A nau, a carrack. About eighty or ninety feet long,’’ said the Dutchman. ‘‘Thirty feet down on a sandy bottom.’’
    ‘‘Aye,’’ commented Run-Run McSeveney from where he was perched on a counter by the door and sipping from an old enamel cup. ‘‘Or it could verra well be naught but a blodgy bit o’ coral where it oughtn’t ought to be.’’ His face screwed up. ‘‘Why hasn’t anyone seen it before if it was that easy?’’
    ‘‘It’s right there on the charts,’’ said Eli Santoro. ‘‘Shifting sandbars. It’s an undersea sand river. There’s been a lot of hurricane activity the last few years. Al Gore weather. It was probably buried before.’’
    ‘‘And it still could be a blodgy bit o’ coral.’’
    ‘‘You really are a sour old bugger, aren’t you?’’ Billy laughed.
    ‘‘I’m a Scot. We’re sour by nature. It’s the bluidy winters in Auld Reekie,’’ answered the skinny little man with a gold-capped grimace. ‘‘But I’m philosophical about it, which is the Chinee in me.’’
    ‘‘You’re all crazy,’’ said Finn. ‘‘Now, who wants to dive?’’
    She moved through the water smoothly, arms at her sides. The big Dacor fins pumped in a smooth slow rhythm, propelling her through the warm clear depths, the tanks on her back a comforting weight as she swam down the wreck site. The position on the side scan had been five hundred yards or so from where the Hispaniola was anchored, and they were using the twelve-foot Zodiac 420 they kept as a tender on the chart room roof for a dive boat.
    Being in the water was a relief after the long jet trip from Heathrow and the journey across England and half of Europe that had gone before. Sometimes it seemed to Finn that she’d spent half her young life in some kind of academic surroundings, like universities and archives like the one in Spain, and while she enjoyed the challenge of research, sometimes she craved the adventure of being on-site. Her father and mother had been the same way: when they were annotating finds back in Columbus they were yearning for the jungle, and vice versa. Archaeology was like that: half the time spent looking and the other half spent studying what you found.
    She smiled to herself around the silicone mouthpiece she had gripped between her teeth. Study was over, the hunt had begun, and the first scent of the quarry was right below her in the glowing sand at the bottom of the Florida Straits.
    Briney Hanson stood at the rail on the flying bridge of the Hispaniola smoking one of his clove cigarettes and occasionally peering through the pair of binoculars that hung around his neck, a vintage Zeiss instrument he had owned for years and his last link with the old Batavia Queen. He smiled, squinting in the sunlight as he looked out to the Zodiac bobbing in the small waves a quarter of a mile away.
    He’d come a long way from the little Danish coastal town of Thorsminde. He was the son of a herring fisherman by way of the South China Sea, and had spent his adult life piloting old rust buckets like the Queen on their tramping routes from one fly-blown island port to another, going nowhere slowly and calling no place home.
    And now here he was, riding the tide off Miami Beach and master of a ship outfitted with everything except a hot tub. His home port was an island paradise, and except for occasional groups of Colombians in superfast cigarette boats trying to outdo Miami Vice, it was all relatively peaceful. It was almost enough to make him feel guilty.
    He took a last puff on the Djarum cigarette and snuffed it out in the makeshift ashtray he’d duct-taped to the bridge rail—a coffee tin filled with beach sand, another holdover from his days on the Batavia Queen. Finn was forever giving him lectures about his nicotine