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“Don’t be makin’ this harder than it needs to be,” the bigger of the three said.
“Knives or hands or both?” Jotun asked.
“Whot?”
“No matter. It’s your choice. Come on, then, let’s get on with it.”
Jotun took his hands from his pockets.
The big one rushed in. Jotun saw the knife coming up from the man’s waist, a well-timed slash designed to open up a femoral artery in the leg or tear open the lower belly. Jotun not only had two inches of height on the man but at least four inches of arm’s reach, and he used it, lashing out with his own uppercut blow. At the last second he let the palmed cosh swing forward. The leather-wrapped lead bulb caught the big man squarely under the chin. His head flipped up, and he stumbled backward into his partners, then dropped hard on his butt. The knife clattered across the cobblestones. Jotun took one long stride forward, cocked his knee up to waist height, and slammed the heel of his boot down onto the big man’s ankle, shattering the bone. The man started screaming.
The other two hesitated then but only for a moment. Often in these circumstances a wolf pack like this disperses once the big dog is put down, but these were men accustomed to easy fights.
The one on the right sidestepped his fallen partner, dropped his shoulder, and charged forward like a bull. The charge was a ruse, of course. There was a blade hidden in one of those hands; the moment Jotun grabbed ahold of the man, the knife would come up. Jotun took a quick step back on his left leg, coiled it, then sprung forward, simultaneously swinging his right foot forward. The kick caught the charging man fully in the face. Jotun heard the wet crunch of bone. The man dropped to his knees, teetered for a moment, then collapsed face-first onto the street.
The last man was against hesitating, and now Jotun saw what he was looking for: that watershed moment when a man realizes he’s going to die if he doesn’t make the right decision.
“They’re alive,” Jotun said. “If you don’t turn around and run, I’m going to kill you.”
The man stood rooted, knife before him.
“Come on, son, did they really pay you enough for this?”
The man lowered his knife. He swallowed hard, shook his head once, then turned and ran.
SO DID JOTUN. Ran for all he was worth, down the street, right onto Dock Road, then through a line of hedges and across St. Andrews. A short alley took him to a pair of warehouses. He sprinted between them, vaulted over a fence, landed hard, then rolled to his feet and kept going until he heard the pounding of wood beneath his boots. The docks. He looked left, then right, but saw only fog.
Which way?
He turned around, read the building number above his head, then turned on his heel and sprinted south for fifty yards. To his right he heard the sound of water lapping. He veered that way. A dark shape loomed before him. He skidded to a stop, bumped into the stack of crates, stumbled sideways, then found his feet. He hopped up onto the smallest crate, then boosted himself up one more level. Twenty feet below, he could just make out the surface of the water. He looked upriver, saw nothing, then turned to look downriver.
Twenty yards away he saw the faint glow of yellow light behind a mullioned window; above this, past the deck rail, a ship’s wheelhouse.
“Damn it!” Jotun barked. “Damn it to hell!”
The ship faded into the fog and disappeared.
CHAPTER 1
CHUMBE ISLAND, ZANZIBAR,
TANZANIA
THE SHARKS DARTED AT THE EDGES OF THEIR VISION, SLEEK GRAY shapes that offered Sam and Remi Fargo only glimpses of knife-edged fins and flicking tails before disappearing into the curtain of swirling sand. As usual, Remi had refused to pass up the photo opportunity, and as usual she’d asked Sam to serve as scale as she focused her highspeed underwater camera past him and at the feeding frenzy. For his part, Sam was less worried about the sharks than he was the precipice at his back—a hundred-fifty-foot drop off the sandbank into the dark deep of the Zanzibar Channel.
Remi pulled her face up from the camera, smiled with her eyes behind the mask, and gave him an OK sign. Sam thankfully finned forward to join her. Together they knelt in the sand and watched the show. It was July off the coast of Tanzania, which meant monsoon season, which in turn meant the warm East African Coastal Current (EACC) was surging from the southeast until it met the southern tip of Zanzibar, where it split into inshore and offshore currents. For sharks this created a “foo
d funnel” in the eighteen-mile gap between Zanzibar and the mainland as prey fish were driven northward. An irresistible moving buffet, Remi called it.
Sam and Remi took care to stay within what they’d dubbed the Safe Zone, that fifty-yard, crystal-clear water strip off Chumbe Island. Past that was the drop into the channel. The demarcation was hard to miss: The current, moving at six knots or more, threw up a roiling curtain of sand as it scraped along the island’s sandbar. This Sam and Remi had dubbed the Good-bye Zone; step into this rip current without a safety line and you were in for a one-way trip up the coast.
Despite the danger—or perhaps because of it—this yearly trip to Zanzibar was one of their favorites. Along with sharks, prey fish, rip currents, and underwater sandstorms that lasted for months, the EACC offered up treasure—albeit usually bits and pieces worth nothing more than their curiosity factor, but this was enough for Sam and Remi. Over the centuries, ships had been plying Africa’s east coast from Mombasa to Dar es Salaam, many of them laden with gold and gems and ivory bound for colonial empire cities. Countless ships had sunk in and around the Zanzibar Channel, the contents of their holds spilled along the bottom, just waiting for the right current to uncover or move them within reach of curious divers such as the Fargos. Over the years they’d recovered gold and silver coins from the Roman Empire to Spain, Chinese ceramics, Sri Lankan jade, silverware . . . From the fascinating to the mundane, they’d uncovered it. So far on this trip, they’d found only one item of note: a diamond-shaped gold coin so barnacle-encrusted they could make out no details.
Sam and Remi watched the sharks feed for a few more minutes and then, by mutual nod, turned and began finning south along the bottom, each stopping occasionally to use a Ping-Pong paddle to waft at the sand, hoping the lump that had caught the eye might be a hidden bit of history.
Chumbe Island, roughly six miles long and two miles wide, is shaped like a woman’s boot, with the shin, ankle, and forefoot facing the channel, and the back of the calf, the stiletto heel, and sole facing Zanzibar proper. Just above the ankle there was a break in the sandbar, an inlet that led to the lagoon created by the stiletto heel.
After fifteen minutes of trolling along the sand, Sam and Remi reached this stiletto break, then turned west until they were ten yards off the beach, then swung north again to resume their search. Now they became more watchful. It was along this stretch of the sandbar that the main channel pushed dangerously close to the beach, a bubble-shaped salient that narrowed their Safe Zone to a mere forty feet. Remi swam inshore and ahead of Sam by a few feet, each of them frequently checking to make sure the other hadn’t drifted toward the precipice.