Lost Empire (Fargo Adventures 2)

“Nicely done.”

“Don’t get too excited. We still have to raise it.”

Sam smiled. “Have no fear, Remi. Physics is our friend.”

BEFORE THEY COULD APPLY Sam’s idea, however, they had to exercise some brute force. With Sam’s newly damaged pinkie wrapped in duct tape, he stood in the stern taking up slack in the anchor line while Remi reversed the Andreyale’s engine and followed his hand signals until they were almost directly above the bell. He uncoiled the line from the cleats, took up the remainder of the slack, then looped and locked down again.

Sam called, “All ahead slow. Nice and easy.”

“You got it.”

Remi eased the throttle forward a quarter inch at a time. Sam, leaning over the stern, his face mask in the water, watched the bell’s progress as it bulldozed through the sand. When it was twenty feet from the edge of the precipice, he called: “All stop.” Remi throttled down.

Sam settled the mask over his face and dove down to examine their prize. He resurfaced a minute later. “Looks good. Not much barnacle growth, which means it’s probably been embedded in that bank for quite a while.”

Remi extended her hand and helped Sam aboard. She asked, “Damage?”

“None that I could see. It’s thick, Remi—probably closer to eighty pounds.”

She whistled softly. “Big boy. Okay, by standard measure that’d make the ship . . . what, a thousand tons displacement?”

“

Between that and twelve hundred. Much bigger than the Speaker. The proximity of the Adelise coin and the bell is pure coincidence.”

WITH THE BELL no longer in danger of dropping into the channel, they disconnected and steered the Andreyale north a hundred yards, then eased their way through the inlet at the island’s ankle and emerged in the stiletto lagoon.

Only a half mile wide and long, the lagoon was actually a mangrove swamp. Jutting from the water were a couple dozen “floating islands”: mushroom caps of earth sitting atop buttresses of exposed, gnarled mangrove roots. Ranging in size from standing-room-only to a double garage, all were covered in thick weeds, and most supported miniature forests of scrub trees and bushes. At the southern end of the swamp was a narrow beach, and beyond that a copse of coconut palms. It was eerily quiet, the air dead still.

“Now, this isn’t something you see every day,” Remi murmured.

“Any sign of the Mad Hatter or Alice?”

“No, knock wood.”

“Let’s get moving. Daylight’s burning.”

The made their way through the floating islands, dropped anchor just off the beach, and waded ashore.

“How many are we going to need?” Remi asked. With one hand she deftly curled her auburn hair off her neck and snapped a rubber band around it, making a neat topknot.

Sam smiled. “It’s like magic, how you do that.”

“We are a wondrous species,” Remi agreed with a smile and wrung the water from her shirttails. “So, how many?”

“Six. No, five.”

“And you’re sure we couldn’t get what we need in Stone Town and sneak back here?”

“You want to risk it? Something tells me that gunboat captain would be only too happy to arrest us. If he thinks we were lying to him . . .”

“True. Okay, Gilligan, let’s make your raft.”

THEY HAD NO TROUBLE finding plenty of downed trees but a harder time finding ones of a manageable size. Sam identified five candidates, all roughly eight feet long and about as big around as a telephone pole. He and Remi dragged each log down to the beach, where they arranged them in a row.

SAM WENT TO WORK. The construction was simple enough, Sam explained. He grabbed a nearby piece of driftwood and inscribed the plan in the sand:

“Not exactly the Queen Mary,” Remi observed with a smile.