Skeleton Coast (Oregon Files 4)

He squatted down next to his fire pit, his back to Tony and Sloane. The bones of his spine looked like a string of black pearls. He blew the coals into life, feeding scraps of driftwood into the embers until he had produced a small flame. “There are many difficult places to fish these waters,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice for such a small frame. He hadn’t turned. “I have fished them all and dare any man to follow where Papa Heinrick goes. I have lost enough fishing line to stretch from here to Cape Cross Bay.” That was more than eighty miles north. “And back,” he added as if challenging them to deny his boast. “I have lost enough net to cover all the Namib Desert. I have battled seas that make other men wail and turn their bowels to water. And I have caught fish bigger than the biggest ship and I have seen things that would drive other men mad.”

He turned finally. In the wavering light of his fire his eyes had taken on a demonic cast. He smiled, revealing three teeth that meshed together like gears. His smile turned into a chuckle, then a barking laugh that was cut short by a coughing fit. When he’d recovered he spat into the fire again. “Papa Heinrick does not reveal his secrets. I know things you wish to know, but you will never know them because I wish you not to know them.”

“Why would you wish that?” Sloane said after she analyzed his grammar in her head to make sure she’d heard right. She squatted next to him.

“Papa Heinrick is the greatest fisherman that has ever lived. Why would I tell you and make you my rival?”

“I do not want to fish these waters. I am looking for a ship that sank a long time ago. My friend and I”—she waved at Tony, who’d stepped back after getting a whiff of Papa Heinrick’s body—“want to find this ship because…” Sloane paused and made up a story. “Because we were hired to recover something from it belonging to a rich man who lost it when it sank. We think that you can help us.”

“Does this rich man pay?” Heinrick asked slyly.

“A little, yes.”

The fisherman waved a hand like a bat fluttering through the night. “Papa Heinrick has no use for money.”

“What would it take for you to help us?” Tony asked suddenly. Sloane had a bad feeling about what the old man might want and shot him a scathing look.

“I will not help you,” Heinrick said to Tony and looked at Sloane. “You I will help. You are a woman and do not fish so you will never be my rival.”

Sloane wasn’t about to tell him that she’d grown up in Fort Lauderdale and had spent her summers crewing her father’s charter fishing boat and then took it out herself when he was struck by Alzheimer’s at age fifty. “Thank you, Papa Heinrick.” Sloane pulled a large map from her pack and spread it next to the fire. Tony edged in and added illumination with his flashlight. The map was of Namibia’s coastline. There were dozens of stars penciled in just off shore. Most were clustered around Walvis Bay but others were scattered up and down the coast.

“We have spoken to many other fishermen, asking them where they lose lines and nets. We think one of these places might be a sunken ship. Can you look at this and tell me if there are any they missed?”

Heinrick studied the chart intently, his eyes darting from one spot to the next, his fingers tracing the outline of the coast. He finally looked up at Sloane. She could see there was a kernel of madness behind them, as if his reality wasn’t quite her own. “I do not know this place.”

Confused Sloane placed her finger on Walvis Bay and said its name. Then she drew it southward and said, “Here we are at Sandwich Bay. She tapped her finger toward the top of the map. “And here’s Cape Cross.”

“I do not understand. Cape Cross is there.” Heinrick pointed emphatically northward. “It can not be here.” He touched the spot on the map.

Sloane realized that despite a lifetime at sea, Papa Heinrick had never seen a nautical chart. She groaned inwardly.

For the next two hours Sloane laboriously talked the old fisherman through the places where he had lost nets or had lines tangled. Because the desert continued under the ocean for hundreds of miles from the coast, anything that tore lines or ripped nets was either a rock outcropping or a shipwreck. Papa Heinrick would tell her that two days sailing southwest from Sandwich Bay was such a place, or five days northwest was another. Each one he described corresponded with

the map she’d made over the past days talking to the commercial fishermen and day excursion captains at Walvis.

But there was one spot that only Papa Heinrick mentioned. It was nearly seventy miles out by Sloane’s estimation, well away from any other. In fact, none of the other captains had even mentioned fishing in the area. Papa Heinrick said that there was little out there to attract marine life and he’d only been there himself because a freak wind had pushed him off course.

Sloane circled the spot on her chart, noting the water depth was over a hundred and fifty feet, at the limit of her scuba abilities but still doable. However, it was too deep for even the clearest water to reveal the outline of a ship against the sandy bottom—even from the helicopter they planned to rent to investigate the other sites.

“You must not go there,” Papa Heinrick warned when he saw the far-off look in Sloane’s eyes.

His comment refocused her attention. “Why not?”

“The seas are alive with great metal snakes. It is bad magic, I think.”

“Metal snakes?” Tony scoffed.

The old man lunged to his feet, his expression fierce. “You doubt Papa Heinrick?” he thundered, spraying Reardon with clots of saliva. “There are dozens of them, a hundred feet long or more, twisting and thrashing on the water. One nearly sank my boat when it tried to eat me. Only I could have escaped its evil mouth, for I am the greatest sailor who has ever lived. You would have pissed yourself in fear and died crying like an infant.” He looked back at Sloane, the edge of madness in his eyes a bit more keen. “Papa Heinrick has warned you. Go there and you will surely be eaten alive. Now leave me.” He settled back at his little smoke fire, rocking on his heels and muttering in a language Sloane didn’t know.

She thanked him for his help but he didn’t acknowledge her. She and Tony returned to their inflatable and slowly paddled out of Papa Heinrick’s isolated camp. When they emerged from the secret cleft in the reeds Tony exhaled a long breath. “That man’s utterly daft. Metal snakes? Pleeease.”

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.’ ”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s a line from Hamlet that means that the world is stranger than we can possibly imagine.”

“You don’t believe him, do you?”