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Originally known as Mamana by the local Lucayan Indians, the island was renamed Santa Maria de la Concepción by Christopher Columbus, finally gaining its modern name when Spanish explorers found a lone cask of rum washed up on one of its white sand beaches.
The island’s only village of note, Port Nelson, lay on the island’s northwest coast surrounded by groves of coconut trees. With a population that, according to the 1990 census, was somewhere between fifty and seventy souls—most of whom lived in Port Nelson—Rum Cay’s primary, if anemic, industry was tourism, followed by pineapple, salt, and sisal, all of which have waxed and waned over the decades. Other settlements, long since deserted and overgrown, bore exotic monikers like Black Rock and Gin Hill. Formidable reefs, coral canyons, and plunging seabeds encircle the island, making it a favored destination for pirates of old—or so said the brochure Remi had picked up in Nassau.
“There’s even a famous wreck,” she said as Sam banked the Bonanza to the right, following the contour of the island.
However unlikely they were to spot their target from the air, both thought it prudent to at least circumnavigate the island to get a better feel for what lay ahead.
“Blackbeard?” Sam asked. “Captain Kidd?”
“Neither. The HMS Conqueror, Britain’s first propeller-driven warship. Sank in 1861 in about thirty feet of water in a staghorn gully near Sumner Point Reef.”
“Sounds like it may be worth a return trip here.”
Rum Cay offered a few luxury resorts and even more beach cottage rentals. Judging by the azure waters, lush rolling hills, and relative seclusion, it struck Sam as the perfect get-away-from-it-all spot.
“There’s the airstrip,” Remi said, pointing out the window.
The 4,500-foot paved runway sat a couple miles from Port Nelson, a truncated white T amid a patch of forest that seemed determined to reclaim it. Sam could see antlike workers at the tarmac’s edge, hacking at the foliage with machetes. Just east of the runway they could see Salt Lake, and a few miles north of that, Lake George.
Though Sam had no fear of using the airstrip, they had asked Selma to ensure whatever aircraft they rented was equipped with pontoons. Exploring the island by car would have taken weeks at least and required miles of cross-country bushwhacking. With the pontoons, they could hop around the island’s shoreline, exploring interesting spots as they came across them.
Sam descended to two thousand feet, contacted Port Nelson Control, which verified their flight plan and permission, then banked around the northeast headland and turned south along the coast. As the least-inhabited part of the island, he and Remi thought it the best place to start their search. As the western half of the island was well explored and well populated—at least by Rum Cay standards—any discovery of the secret base would have been noted by now. Selma hadn’t come across any such reports, so Sam and Remi took this as a good sign. Providing the secret base wasn’t simply the concoction of some senile German Kriegsmarine.
“That looks like it’d make a good base of operations,” Sam said, nodding through the windshield at a three-quarter moon cove with sugar-white beaches. The nearest structure, what looked like an abandoned plantation house, sat six miles inland.
Sam banked again, bleeding off speed and altitude as he went until they were two hundred feet off the waves, then lined up the Bonanza’s nose on the beach. He did a quick visual check to make sure he hadn’t missed seeing a reef, then eased the craft down, flaring at the last moment and letting the pontoons kiss the surface. He throttled back to idle, letting the plane’s momentum carry them forward. The pontoons hissed as they contacted the shoal sand and they came to a gentle stop six feet onto dry land.
“Beautiful landing, Mr. Lindbergh,” Remi said, unbuckling her seat belt.
“I like to think all my landings are beautiful.”
“Of course they are, dear. Except for that time in Peru . . .”
“Never mind.”
Remi climbed out onto the beach and Sam handed down their backpacks and the duffel bags containing their camping gear. Sam’s satellite phone trilled and he answered.
“Mr. Fargo, it’s Selma.”
“Good timing. We just touched down. Hold on.” Sam called Remi over and put the phone on speaker. “First things first: You’re buttoned up?”
After learning the pedigrees of Bondaruk, Arkhipov, and Kholkov from Rube, Sam had ordered Selma, Pete, and Wendy to move into the Goldfish Point house and set the alarm system, which Sam had long ago tweaked to satisfy h
is engineer’s mind; the system, he knew, would give a CIA black-bag team a run for its money. And, as luck would have it, the San Diego Commissioner of Police and Sam’s thrice-weekly judo partner lived a half mile from them. Squad cars were on quick-response alert for their neighborhood.
“Safe and sound,” Selma replied.
“How goes the battle?”
“We’re getting there. Should have some interesting reading for you when you get home. First, some good news: I figured out what the bug is on the bottom of the bottle. It’s from Napoleon’s family coat of arms. On the right side of the coat is what looks like a bee. Though there’s some debate about this among historians, most believe it isn’t a bee at all, but a golden cicada—or at least that’s what it was in the beginning. The symbol was first discovered in 1653 in the tomb of Childeric I, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty. It represents immortality and resurrection.”
“Immortality and resurrection,” Remi repeated. “A tad conceited—but then again we are talking about Napoleon.”
“Let me get this straight,” Sam said. “Napoleon’s signature icon is a grasshopper?”
“Close, but not exactly,” Selma said. “Different branch of the family tree. The cicada is more closely related to leafhoppers and spittlebugs.”
Sam laughed. “Ah, yes, the royal spittlebug.”