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“We’ve probably already passed dozens of sea caves,” Remi said.
This was true. Many of the cliff faces they’d surveyed were shrouded in climbing vines and scrub foliage that jutted from every nook and cranny. From this distance they could be seeing a cave entrance and never know it. They had little choice, however. Slipping inside each reef break and checking every foot of every cliff would take years. More frustrating still was that most of their search had so far occurred during low tide, which should have given them the best chance to spot an opening.
Suddenly Remi sat up straighter and cocked her head, a posture Sam knew only too well: His wife had had a eureka moment.
“What?” he asked.
“I think we’re going about this the wrong way. We’re assuming Boehm used this Goat’s Head as a navigation aid while test-driving the Molch before the mission, correct? They’d want to test out any refit work they’d done, wouldn’t they?”
“I’d hope so.”
“And close to shore, they wouldn’t have risked grounding the sub by diving, which meant the Molch probably didn’t roam too far. . . .”
The Molch’s mothership, the Lothringen, would have been equipped with an advanced open-ocean navigation system, but not so the mini submarine, which would have relied on speed-distance dead reckoning and, quite likely, visual aids.
“Right again.”
“So what if the only time Boehm would have to rely on a landmark was when he was coming back in—from a test dive.”
“From offshore,” Sam finished. “Inshore, a goat’s head might not look like a goat’s head, but from a mile or two out to sea . . .”
Remi was smiling and nodding.
Sam brought the dinghy about and pointed the nose toward open ocean.
Once they were about a mile out, they repeated their tour of the coastline, heading back the way they’d come, past their landing beach toward the southeastern tip of the island, Signal Point, and Port Nelson, where they turned around and headed north again.
By three thirty, tired, thirsty, and slightly sunburned despite their hats and repeated coatings of BullFrog sunscreen, they were a mile from the northern headland when Remi, who was studying the coast through her binoculars, held up a closed fist. Sam throttled down to an idle and waited. Remi turned in her seat and leaned back to hand Sam the binoculars.
“Take a look at that cliff.” She pointed. “Bearing about two-eight-zero relative.”
Sam aimed the binoculars and panned along the rock face.
“See the two banyan trees sitting next to one another?” Remi said.
“Hold on . . . okay, I see them.”
“Imagine them sixty years ago, about a third their size with less branches. Add a little dimension to the rock . . .”
Sam made the illusive adjustment and looked again, but after ten seconds shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Squint,” Remi offered.
He did and suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, he saw it. Six decades of erosion had in fact softened the bump in the cliff, but there was no doubt: Combined, the outcropping and the twin banyans formed the vague profile of a goat’s face topped by a pair of overgrown and tangled horns.
The question was, were they seeing what they wanted to see, the victims of self-suggestion, or was there really something there? One look at Remi’s face told him she was wondering the same thing.
“One way to find out,” he said.
The break in the reef was narrow, less than eight feet wide, and with high tide and churn, the top of the coral was submerged just enough to be invisible at a distance but close enough to the surface to rip the dinghy’s rubber skin to shreds should Sam stray.
Remi sat in the bow, arms braced on the side walls as she leaned forward and peered into the water.
“Left . . . left . . . left,” she called. “Okay, straighten out. Steady on . . .”
On either side of the dinghy, through the froth Sam could see dagger-edged coral just beneath the turquoise surface. He jinked the throttle and rudder, searching for that delicate balance between steerageway and power; not enough of the former and he couldn’t avoid being pushed onto the coral; too much of the latter and he couldn’t respond to Remi’s signals.
“Good . . . hard right!”