The Deep

Treece clipped the matted hairs from around the ragged wound, cleaned it with an antiseptic, and poured sulfa powder onto it. As he worked, he cooed lovingly to the dog, soothing, reassuring, treating her, it seemed to Sanders, with paternal tenderness and affection.

The dog responded: she made no sound and did not move.

When he had finished, Treece scratched the dog’s ears and said, “I suppose I better bandage you.”

He reached for a gauze pad and adhesive tape.

“Knowing you, you’ve already got a taste for yourself, and you’ll eat yourself right up to the bloody neck.” He helped the dog to her feet, and, tail wagging feebly, she tottered to a corner and lay down.

“What do you think they’ll do now?” Sanders asked.

“Cloche? No telling. T covered up those ampules, so he’ll not be dead sure we found anything. But that just buys us a day or two.”

Treece shook his head. “Lord, but there’s a Christ load of stuff down there.”

“More than we saw?”

“Aye. That box was just the tip. It looks to me like the number three hold hit the rocks and spilled a little bit. Then maybe she slid backward and busted her guts.” Treece made an upside-down V with his hands. “What we saw was up at the top here. The farther down away from the cave I looked, the wider the pattern was, with some of those explosives mixed in.”

“Can we get it all up?”

“Not with a Ping-Pong paddle. We’ll need the air lift.”

He pointed to the aluminum tube lashed to the gunwale. “And we’ll have to dive with Desco gear, not air tanks. Can’t be coming up every hour for new tanks. That means firing up the compressor, and that means noise. It’s going to be bad.”

“Why?”

“The deep stuff must be all mixed in with the artillery shells.”

“They’re not armed, are they?”

“Doesn’t matter. Brass corrodes. Primers may be weak. And the cordite in those shells is still good as new. Bang ’em together, or drop one on a rock-let alone use a torch comand we’ll be playing harp duets for Saint Peter.”

“Can we get the government to help?”

“The Bermuda Government?” Treece laughed.

“Aye. They’ll have the royal scroll-maker draw up a fancy scroll commissioning me to get rid of the nuisance. If it weren’t for one thing, I’d be tempted to put a charge down there and blow the whole mess to dust.”

Treece fished inside his wet-suit jacket, found what he was looking for, and handed it to Sanders. It was a coin, irregular-shaped and green with tarnish.

It looked as if the design on the coin had been impressed off-center, for only about three quarters of the surface of the metal carried any marks at all. Around the rim of the coin Sanders could make out the letters “El,” then a period, then the letter “G,” another period and the numerals “170.” Closer to the center of the coin was an “M,” and in the center was an intricate crest that included two castles, a lion, and a number of bars.

“So?” Sanders said. “You said yourself that one coin doesn’t make a treasure.”

“True. But coin might.”

“Why?”

“After I sent you up, I went along the reef a way and fanned a few pockets around the rocks.

I found that coin about six inches under the sand. It was lying up against a piece of iron, which is why it survived and wasn’t all oxidized like the one you found.”

“Why is it green?”

“That’s nothing, it cleans right off. The iron it was lying up against looked to me like the hasp of a padlock. It didn’t come loose right away, and I didn’t want to spend the time wrestling with it.”

“You mean there’s a chest down there?”

“Not the way you’d imagine. The wood would have rotted away long since. The coins’d be all clotted together, and a lot of them would be no damn good. There’s a clump of them down there, under a rock. I tried to pry one loose, but it wouldn’t come. I figure it’s stuck to some others.”

“There could be more, then. Gold, I mean.”

“It’s beginning to look like it.” Treece held the coin to the light. “Here. The ‘More” means it was minted in Mexico City. What does that tell you?”

“That the ship was going east, back to Spain.”

“Aye. It was leaving the New World. About a third of the ships that wrecked were on their way to the New World, and they didn’t carry treasure.

They were burdened with wine and cheese and clothing and mining equipment. The numbers are the first three numbers of the date the coin was minted-sometime in the first ten years of the eighteenth century. That jibes with the crest. It’s Philip the Fifth’s. He took the throne in 1700.”

“What do the letters mean?”

“By the grace of God,” Treece said.

“They’re the end of the legend on the obverse of all the coins: Philippus V, then Dei G., for gratia.”

Treece turned the coin over. “That’s a Jerusalem cross. I can’t read the letters, except for that “M” there, and the “R,” but it said Hispaniarwn et Indiarum Rex—King of Spain and the Indies.”

“So?”

“In 1715 a big fleet, one of Philip’s biggest, went down on the way home.”

“I’ve heard of that fleet. But somebody found it, didn’t they?”