Read Chapter 3: Crew of Ghosts

The dinghy’s outboard coughed twice before catching, and Mack throttled up, steering between the moored trawlers toward the Elizabeth Harbour docks. Rosa’s bottle sat zipped inside his chest pocket, the old parchment crinkling against his ribs like a second skin.

Abigail Lee’s address was a third-floor walkup above a rum shop off Bay Street. He’d found her name in a maritime journal three years ago, attached to a scandal that had ended her career at the University of Miami. Something about fabricating evidence to support a controversial theory about Spanish galleon routes. Mack didn’t care about the scandal. He needed someone who could read two-hundred-year-old cursive without flinching.

The door swung open before he knocked. A woman with sharp cheekbones and gray-streaked hair yanked into a bun stood in a doorway cluttered with stacked books, her sleeves rolled past her elbows. She wore a faded Smithsonian t-shirt and cargo pants that had seen better decades.

“You’re the diver,” she said. Flat statement, not a question.

“Mack Donovan. You Dr. Lee?”

“I’m the woman who rents the apartment above a rum shop and does not receive visitors without an appointment. You have one minute.” She crossed her arms, but her eyes flicked to the map case in his hand, hungry despite the posturing.

Mack unrolled the parchment on the hall table, pinning the corners with a brass compass and a chipped coffee mug. Abigail leaned forward, her expression shifting from irritation to something like recognition.

“Where did you get this?” Her voice dropped half an octave.

“An old woman. Bottle buried in the shallows off Nassau.”

“A message in a bottle.” She didn’t laugh. Her finger traced the ink lines, the faded Latin script bleeding at the edges. “‘Per sanguinem vinculum solvitur.’ Blood releases the lock. Charming.” She looked up. “Do you know what this is?”

“A map to Silas Blackwood’s wreck.”

“You know it’s a map. You probably don’t know it’s one of three.” Abigail pulled a battered notebook from a shelf and flipped it open to a page of dense marginalia. “Blackwood didn’t bury his treasure in one place. He scattered it. Three maps, three wrecks. Two have already been found—both by men who never made it back to shore. One drowned in a harbor. The other—” She shrugged. “Disappeared mid-voyage. Boat found empty. No bodies.”

“So the legends say.”

“Legends exist for a reason.” Abigail studied him for a long moment, then pulled a magnifying loupe from her pocket and examined the lower quadrant of the parchment. “This chart shows the deep trench southeast of the Caicos. Two hundred fathoms at the drop-off. The contour markings are consistent with a ship that sank bow-first into a sediment shelf. If this is accurate—” She traced a coordinate scrawled in the margin. “—your wreck is here. Thirty-two miles off the nearest reef.”

“You’ll come with me.”

Abigail laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “I don’t dive. I’m a historian.”

“I need someone who can read this on-site, in case the wreck’s layout differs from the map. You stay on the boat. Translation services only.”

She studied him again. “What’s your interest?”

“Debt.”

“That’s it? You’re desperate and Blackwood’s coin will pay your bills?”

Mack thought of Rosa’s warning about curses, about the old woman’s hand tightening on his wrist like a manacle. He thought of Reyes counting out his deadline on stained knuckles. He thought of Jake’s dive helmet, still sitting on his boat in photos he couldn’t bring himself to delete.

“That’s it,” he said.

Abigail glanced at the map one more time. Something softened in her face. “I lost my grant funding after the scandal. I need a publication to restore my reputation. If we find Blackwood’s wreck and document it properly, I get the credit. You get the salvage rights. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

She grabbed a waterproof duffel from behind the door and started throwing clothes into it. “We leave within the hour. I know a man in Nassau who rents survey-grade sonar. And you’ll want a proper crew beyond just us.” She paused, looking him over. “Who else is coming?”

“No one. Just the two of us and my engineer.”

“That’s it?”

“Small operation. Less to split.”

She raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue.

---

The *Bottom Feeder* groaned against her mooring lines as Mack loaded the last of the supplies. The boat was a refitted workhorse—forty-two feet of welded steel and stubbornness that had survived three hurricanes and one minor collision with a drug-running cigarette boat. Marcus had named her for his own dubious prospects, but she’d never failed him.

Tomas, his engineer, was already below deck, running a diagnostic on the engine. The kid was twenty-six, scrawny, with a cynical streak that Mack found useful in moments of crisis. When Mack introduced Dr. Lee, Tomas gave her a skeptical once-over but said nothing, returning to his work with a grunt.

Mack cast off the lines and took the helm. The harbor was quiet at midday, the usual tourists sheltering from the heat under striped awnings. He throttled forward, threading between the marker buoys toward the open channel.

Then he saw it.

In the window of an antique shop on the waterfront—one of those cluttered places selling salvaged brass and rusted maritime junk—a gleaming shape caught the low sun. A brass diving helmet, polished to a mirror finish, displayed on a wooden stand beside a coil of rope and a rusted anchor.

Mack’s hands tightened on the wheel.

It wasn’t just any helmet. It was an old Mark V, the vintage model Jake had collected obsessively, the one he’d always said he wanted to dive in “for the experience, Mack, not the practicality.” And Mack recognized the distinctive dent on the crown—the one from a dropped winch weight on a salvage job off Key West, a mistake that had nearly crushed Jake’s foot instead.

Same helmet. Same dent. Same brass fittings.

Jake’s helmet was in an antique shop window.

For a moment, Mack’s vision tunneled. He throttled down, the boat losing way as he stared at the storefront. The proprietor, a heavyset man with a gold tooth, was arranging a display inside. Their eyes met through the glass. The man smiled.

Mack’s hand moved toward the throttles, instincts screaming at him to turn around, to dock, to ask the man where he’d gotten that helmet.

“You drifting us into the channel markers,” Tomas said from behind him.

Mack blinked. Snapped back. The current was pushing the *Bottom Feeder* lazily toward a red buoy, the boat’s bow already angled wrong.

He corrected course, his jaw tight. He didn’t look back at the shop.

“Everything okay?” Abigail’s voice came from the cockpit hatch.

“Fine.” Mack forced his shoulders to relax. “Just a distraction.”

He didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. The deadline was ticking, and Jake’s fate, whatever it was, would still be waiting when he got back. It had been waiting for eight years already.

Behind him, the antique shop shrank to a speck of brass glitter in the morning sun.

---

Night fell fast out in open water, the horizon swallowing the sun like a sinking coin. Mack handed the helm to Tomas at twenty-two hundred hours and went below to review the map with Abigail, the drone of the engines filling the cabin.

“The trench is deep,” Abigail said, tapping the parchment. “Two hundred fathoms puts us well past recreational limits. You’ll need trimix at minimum.”

“I’ve got rebreather gear on board. Mixed gases.”

“And if the wreck is inside an overhang or debris field?”

“That’s why I brought you. You tell me what to expect before I go down.”

Abigail nodded slowly, but her eyes kept drifting to the porthole, where the sky had begun to bruise with clouds. “Storm’s coming.”

“They pass through fast this time of year.”

“Fast and hard.” She folded the map carefully and slid it into a waterproof tube. “I don’t want to be on this boat when it hits.”

Mack was about to reply when the radio crackled. Tomas’s voice came through tinny and urgent. “Cap. You better get up here.”

Mack climbed the ladder in two strides. Tomas was at the helm, his face pale in the green glow of the instruments. The wind had picked up, whipping spray across the bow in erratic bursts.

“Radar’s showing something,” Tomas said.

Mack leaned over the display. A blob of green, half a mile off their port bow, appearing and dissolving on the sweep like a mirage.

“Fishing vessel?”

“No transponder. And it’s not holding a steady shape.” Tomas frowned. “Every other sweep, it’s gone. Then it’s back. Bigger each time.”

Mack squinted at the screen. The image flickered again—a long, narrow form with a distinct bow rise, like the profile of an old sailing ship with its sails furled but towering above the waterline.

“That’s not a modern contact,” Abigail said quietly from behind them. She’d come up without a sound, a rain jacket pulled over her shoulders. Her voice was flat. “That hull shape. Late eighteenth century. Warship or privateer.”

The rain began hammering the deck in sheets. The radar blip bloomed again, then vanished.

“We’re being blown off course,” Tomas said. His knuckles were white on the wheel. “I can’t hold the heading.”

Mack gripped the coaming as the boat pitched hard to port. The storm had come up out of nowhere, angry and sudden, the kind of squall that sank careless fishermen and laughed about it.

“Ride it out,” he said. “Let her turn.”

“If we turn, we lose our route. It’ll take hours to get back on track.”

“We won’t get back on track if we’re at the bottom.” Mack’s eyes stayed fixed on the radar screen. The blip appeared one more time—larger, closer, bow-on to their position, impossibly close for something that had been half a mile away a minute ago.

Then it was gone. The screen showed nothing but their own position, buffeted by wind and waves.

Mack stared at the empty display. Cold crawled up his spine despite the heat of the cabin.

“Did you see that?” Tomas whispered.

Mack didn’t answer. The boat heeled again, a white-capped wave slamming against the hull, and he braced himself against the console.

When the storm finally passed, three hours later, they were forty miles south of their plotted course. The sea had calmed to an eerie stillness, a glassy flatness under a moonlit sky that showed no trace of the fury that had just battered them.

Tomas steered back toward the coordinates. Mack stayed at the bow, watching the water.

*The Santa Catalina,* he thought. Maybe she didn’t need them to find her.

Maybe she was already hunting them.