Deep Shadow by Randy Wayne White Read Free Book Online

treasury, too. In December 1958, four cargo planes loaded with art and gold—mostly gold bars and coins—left Cuba for Tampa. Only three planes landed. The heaviest-loaded plane disappeared. That pilot’s last radio transmission is in Coast Guard records, if you know where to look. The pilot called a few Maydays, then he said, ‘We’re goin’ down. We’re goin’ down in the water’—or something close to that—and that’s the last anyone ever heard.”
    I crossed the room to the chemical cabinet, listening to him talk.
    “For fifty years, the scuba-doo divers and treasure hunters searched for that plane. Some of ’em actual pros, like Mel Fisher’s bunch outta Key West. No one ever found the first trace. Draw a rhumb line ’tween Tampa Bay and Cuba, and men have hunted every yard of that route. In all that time, you’d expect someone to find something, wouldn’t you?”
    I thought about it for a few seconds, before I said, “If the plane actually existed—maybe. Maybe not. Three hundred miles of water is a lot bigger than three hundred miles of land.”
    The man appeared pleased. “Ab-so-lutely by God right, Doc. Most people, they don’t know the difference between water space and land space ’cause they ain’t lived the difference. That’s one reason I’m here talking to you now. We did okay a year ago, with that little salvage company we started.”
    Arlis, Tomlinson and our fishing-guide friend Jeth Nicholes had worked a World War II yacht that lies in seventy feet of water not far from my home on Sanibel Island. Finding the wreck was pure luck. What I’d said about water being more voluminous than land is true.
    Salt water is a shield, occasionally a mirror, but seldom a lens—which is why sea bottom is among the last strongholds of human legend. Dreams are more safely housed in regions not despoiled by light.
    The wreck we had salvaged was real, but so were the long hours we’d put in working below the surface and above. We’d all made a little money, but the profits were tiny in comparison to the time we had invested.
    Arlis asked me, “You got a chart around here? It’d be easier to show you on some kinda map.”
    I said patiently, “It wouldn’t mean anything. Point to a spot on a chart, the width of your finger is thirty miles of Gulf water. There’s nothing to learn from that. I’ve got a business to run—this is the last time I’m going to say it.”
    The old man zipped his jacket as if slamming a door. “Thirty miles in the Gulf of Mexico, huh?”
    “Depends. On a big chart, an inch equals sixty nautical miles. You know that.”
    “You just made the same mistake everyone makes who has ever searched for Batista’s plane.”
    I let my expression communicate irritation. “Am I missing something?”
    “The opportunity of a lifetime, Dr. Ford, that’s what you’re missing—if you don’t start taking me serious. The pilot’s last words were, ‘We’re going down in the water.’ Water, that’s what he said. The man never said nothing about the Gulf of Mexico.”
    I asked, “He ditched in the Atlantic?”
    “I didn’t say that. Didn’t say the Pacific Ocean or the Arctic Ocean, neither. The weather was bad enough to blow the plane off course a little—probably as cold and windy as it’ll be here in a few hours. She went into the water, but it weren’t the Gulf of Mexico. Let your brain work on that while I go outside, like a good boy, and have myself a chew of tobacco.”
    I was picturing the Gulf basin, Cuba to the south, Key West dangling long into the Florida Straits, floating like a compass needle. Florida can be more accurately described as a land mosaic, not a landmass. The state is three hundred miles long, only a hundred miles wide and mostly water.
    I thought about it for a moment, before saying, “There’s only one other possible explanation,” as the man pushed the screen door open. “If the plane didn’t crash in the Gulf, it went into a lake. They