Riptide, page 1
OUTSTANDING PRAISE FOR RIPTIDE
“A damned good page-turner, filled with historical intrigue, modern-day technology, and old-fashioned, seat-of-your-pants adventure.”
—Copley News Service
“These guys are masters at scaring the hell out of people.”
—Tampa Tribune
“An amazing thriller; it out-Crichtons Crichton in its grasp of technological detail, and far surpasses him in character and suspense. Steven Spielberg, where are you?”
—STUART WOODS, author of Dead in the Water
“A hold-your-breath exciting tale filled with all the twists that could come with the most wicked of common sins-greed.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Michael Crichton and Peter Benchley, move over. I couldn’t put Riptide down. It’s nonstop action and adventure from a terrific team.”
—DAVID MORRELL, author of Double Image
“A highly satisfying sea adventure… RIPTIDE pulls you in and doesn’t let you go… Has been compared to the adventure stories of Michael Crichton. It is that and more… This is one to remember.”
—Maine Sunday Telegram
“Machine-gun pacing, startling plot twists, smart use of legend, scientific lore, and the evocative setting carry the day… an exciting adventure tale that’s bound to be one of the most popular of the summer reads.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Unstoppable suspense and mystery… thrilling adventure!”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A ripping good yarn… Nonstop action adventure… The red-hot authors of Reliquary score another big winner.”
—Library Journal
“Solid gold… once you start reading RIPTIDE, it won’t let you go… Preston and Child expertly deliver a thrilling adventure story that matches any novel written by Michael Crichton, Peter Benchley, or even Robert Louis Stevenson.”
—New Mexican
“Taut and compelling… An excellent read for those who enjoy a good mystery and are tired of detectives and politicians.”
—Chattanooga Free Press
“Intriguing… exciting.”
—Southern Pines Pilot (NC)
“The Relic and Reliquary were terrifying, and now this duo deliver Riptide, probably their most exciting thriller yet!… Plot twists and likable characters drive this story to its stunning conclusion.”
—Albuquerque Monthly
“The ultimate Clive Cussler-style adventure… a perfect blend of atmospheric settings, pulse-pounding action, human conflict, and nerve-wracking suspense… Riptide is exactly what is meant by the phrase ‘perfect summer read.’”
—Flint Journal
“A good action-packed mystery… Preston and Child have once again conquered new territory… [and] prove that they are talented enough to write within several different genres.”
—Sunday Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA)
“Graphic and gripping… a high-pitched, fast-paced plot with vivid description, intriguing characters, and vibrant scenes… The suspense never lets up and the smashing ending, with its unexpected symbolism, grabs the reader.”
—Bangor Daily News
BY DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD
The Book of the Dead
Dance of Death
Brimstone
Still Life with Crows
The Cabinet of Curiosities
The Ice Limit
Thunderhead
Riptide
Reliquary
Mount Dragon
Relic
BY DOUGLAS PRESTON
Tyrannosaur Canyon
The Codex
The Royal Road
Talking to the Ground
Jennie
Cities of Gold
Dinosaurs in the Attic
BY LINCOLN CHILD
Deep Storm
Death Match
Utopia
Tales of the Dark 1-3
Dark Banquet
Dark Company
Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter, Veronica
Douglas Preston dedicates this book to his brother,
Richard Preston
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Excerpt from The Book of the Dead copyright © 2006 by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
Warner Books and the “W” logo are trademarks of Time Warner Inc. or an affiliated company. Used under license by Hachette Book Group USA, which is not affiliated with Time Warner Inc.
Originally published in hardcover by Warner Books
First eBook Edition: July 2001
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2518-4
Contents
Outstanding Praise For Riptide
By Douglas Preston And Lincoln Child
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
About The Authors
A Preview of "The Book of the Dead"
Acknowledgments
We own a great debt to one of Maine’s finest doctors, David Preston, for invaluable help with the medical aspects of Riptide. We also wish to thank our agents, Eric Simonoff and Lynn Nesbit of Janklow & Nesbit; Matthew Snyder of Creative Artists Agency; our superb editor, Betsy Mitchell, and Maureen Egen, publisher, of Warner Books.
Lincoln Child would like to thank Denis Kelly, Bruce Swanson, Lee Suckno, M.D, Bry Benjamin, M.D., Bonnie Mauer, Chérif Keita, the Reverend Robert M. Diachek, and Jim Cush. In particular, I wish to thank my wife, Luchie, for her support, and for her stringent (and sometimes astringent) criticism, over the past five years, of four novels-in-progress. I want to thank my parents for instilling in me, from the beginning, a profound love for sailing and salt water that continues to this day I also wish to acknowledge the shadowy company of centuries-dead buccaneers, pirates, codemakers and codebreakers, dilettantes, and Elizabethan intelligence agents, for providing some of the more colorful archetypes and source material in Riptide’s arsenal. And, lastly, I want to give a long-overdue thank-you to Tom McCormack, ex-boss and mentor, who with enthusiasm and perspicacity taught me so much about the art of writing and the craft of editing. Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.
Douglas Preston would like to express his appreciation to John P. Wiley, Jr., senior editor of Smithsonian magazine, and to Don Moser, editor. I would like to thank my wife, Christine, for her support, and my daughter Selene, for reading the manuscript and offering excellent suggestions. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my mother, Dorothy McCann Preston, and to my father, Jerome Preston, Jr., for keeping and preserving Green Pastures Farm so that my children and grandchildren will be able to enjoy the real place that figures as one of the fictional backdrops to Riptide.
We offer our apologies to Maine purists for reconfiguring the coastline and moving islands and channels about with brazen abandon. Needless to say, Stormhaven and its inhabitants, and Thalassa and its employees, are fictitious and exist only in our imaginations. Similarly, though there may be several Ragged Islands found along the Eastern seaboard, the Ragged Island described in Riptide—along with the Hatch family that owns it—is a completely fictitious object.
H
Such a day, rum all out:—Our company somewhat sober:—A damned confusion amongst us!—Rogues a-plotting:—Great talk of separation—so I looked sharp for a prize:—Such a day took one, with a great deal of liquor on board so kept the company hot, damned hot; then all things went well again.
—From the logbook of Edward Teach,
aka Blackbeard, ca. 1718
Applying twentieth-century solutions to seventeenth-century problems affords either absolute success or absolute chaos; there is no middle ground.
—Orville Horn, Ph.D.
Prologue
On an afternoon in June 1790, a Maine cod fisherman named Simon Rutter became caught in a storm and a strong riptide. His dory overloaded with fish, he went badly off course and was forced to put in at fogbound Ragged Island, six miles off the coast. While waiting for the heavy weather to pass, the fisherman decided to explore the deserted spot. Inland from the rocky bluffs that gave the islet its name, he found a massive old oak tree with an ancient block and tackle dangling from one low-slung limb. Directly underneath it the ground had subsided into a depression. Although the island was known to be uninhabited, Rutter found clear evidence that someone had visited many years before.
His curiosity aroused, Rutter enlisted the aid of a brother and returned one Sunday several weeks later with picks and shovels. Locating the depression in the ground, the men began to dig. After five feet they hit a platform of oak logs. They pulled up the logs and, with increasing excitement, kept digging. By the end of the day, they had dug almost twenty feet, passing through layers of charcoal and clay to another oak platform. The brothers went home, intending to renew their digging after the annual mackerel run. But a week later, Rutter’s brother was drowned when his dory capsized in a freak accident. The pit was temporarily abandoned.
Two years later, Rutter and a group of local merchants decided to pool their resources and return to the mysterious spot on Ragged Island. Resuming the dig, they soon reached a number of heavy vertical oak beams and cross-joists, which appeared to be the ancient cribbing of a backfilled shaft. Precisely how deep the group dug has been lost to history—most estimates assume close to one hundred feet. At this point they struck a flat rock with an inscription carved into it:
First will ye Lie
Curst shall ye Crye
Worst must ye Die
The rock was dislodged and hoisted to the surface. It has been theorized that the removal of the rock broke a seal, because moments later, without warning, a flood of seawater burst into the pit. All the diggers escaped—except Simon Rutter. The Water Pit, as the flooded shaft became known, had claimed its first victim.
Many legends grew up about the Water Pit. But the most plausible held that around 1695, the notorious English pirate Edward Ockham buried his vast hoard somewhere along the Maine coast shortly before his mysterious death. The shaft at Ragged Island seemed a likely candidate. Shortly after Rutter’s death, rumors began to circulate that the treasure was cursed, and that anyone attempting to plunder it would suffer the fate threatened on the stone.
Numerous unsuccessful efforts were made to drain the Water Pit. In 1800, two of Rutter’s former partners formed a new company and raised money to finance the digging of a second tunnel, twelve feet to the south of the original pit. All went well for the first hundred feet of digging, at which point they attempted to dig a horizontal passage beneath the original Water Pit. Their scheme was to tunnel up from underneath the treasure, but as soon as they angled in toward the original pit, the passage rapidly began filling with water. The men barely escaped with their lives.
For thirty years, the pit lay fallow. Then, in 1831, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company was formed by a downstate mining engineer named Richard Parkhurst. A friend of one of the original merchants, Parkhurst was able to gain valuable information about the earlier workings. Parkhurst decked over the mouth of the Water Pit and set up a large steam-driven pump. He found it impossible to drain the seawater Undaunted, he brought in a primitive coal-drilling rig, which he positioned directly over the Pit. The drill went well beyond the original depth of the Pit, striking planking as deep as 170 feet, until the drill was stopped by something impenetrable. When the drilling pipe was removed, bits of iron and scales of rust were found jammed in the torn bit. The pod also brought up putty, cement, and large quantities of fiber This fiber was analyzed and found to be “manilla grass” or coconut fiber. This plant, which grows only in the tropics, was commonly used as dunnage in ships to keep cargo from shifting Shortly after this discovery, the Bath Expeditionary Salvage Company went bankrupt and Parkhurst was forced to leave the island.
In 1840, the Boston Salvage Company was formed and began digging a third shaft in the vicinity of the Water Pit. After only sixty-six feet, they unexpectedly struck an ancient side tunnel that appeared to lead from the original Pit. Their own shaft filled instantly with water, then collapsed.
Undaunted, the entrepreneurs dug yet another, very large shaft thirty yards away, which became known as the Boston Shaft. Unlike earlier tunnels, the Boston Shaft was not a vertical pit, but was instead cut on a slope. Striking a spur of bedrock at seventy feet, they angled downward for another fifty feet at enormous expense, using augers and gunpowder. Then they drove a horizontal passage beneath the presumed bottom of the original Water Pit, where they found cribbing and the continuation of the original backfilled shaft. Excited, they dug downward, clearing the old shaft. At 130 feet they struck another platform, which they left in place while debating whether to pull it up. But that night, the camp was awakened by a loud rumble. The diggers rushed out to find that the bottom of the Water Pit had fallen into the new tunnel with such force that mud and water had been ejected thirty feet beyond the mouth of the Boston Shaft. Among this mud, a crude metal bolt was discovered, similar to what might be found on a banded sea chest.
Over the next twenty years, a dozen more shafts were dug in an attempt to reach the treasure chamber, all of which flooded or collapsed. Four more treasure companies went bankrupt. In several cases, diggers emerged swearing that the flooding was no accident, and that the original builders of the Water Pit had designed a diabolical mechanism to flood any side shafts that might be dug.
The Civil War brought a brief respite to the diggings. Then, in 1869, a new treasure-hunting company secured the rights to dig on the island. The dig foreman, F.X. Wrenche, noticed that water rose and fell in the Pit in accordance with the tides, and theorized that the Pit and its water traps must all be connected to the sea by an artificial flood tunnel. If the tunnel could be found and sealed, the Pit could be drained and the treasure removed safely. In all, Wrenche dug more than a dozen exploratory shafts of varying depths in the vicinity of the Water Pit. Many of these shafts encountered horizontal tunnels and rock “pipes,” which were dynamited in an attempt to stop the water. However, no flood tunnel to the sea was ever found and the Water Pit remained flooded. The company ran out of money and, like those before, left its machinery behind to rust quietly in the salt air.
In the early 1880s, Gold Seekers Ltd. was formed by a consortium of industrialists from Canada and England. Powerful pumps and a new kind of drill were floated out to the island, along with boilers to power them. The company tried boring several holes into the Water Pit, finally hitting pay dirt on August 23, 1883. The drill came up against the plate of iron that had defeated Parkhurst’s drill fifty years before. A new diamond bit was fitted and the boilers were stoked to a full head of steam. This time the drill bored through the iron and into a solid block of a softer metal. When the corer was extracted, a long, heavy curl of pure gold was found inside its grooves, along with a rotten piece of parchment with two broken phrases: “silks, canary wine, ivory” and “John Hyde rotting on the Deptford gibbet.”
