Chyna Stone Adventures: First Three Novels Read online

  In the living room, the professor and his team were rolling up maps and putting folders into briefcases for the move. All of Oscar’s equipment was back inside their black cases and being loaded carefully into one of the vans. Fariha was being helped by two agents to put the suitcases in the back of an Escalade while Lana made and packed sandwiches into brown paper bags with fruit, water and Cokes for everyone.

  “We move out at oh-four-hundred hours!” Anthony called as he placed his suitcase with the others by the door and went to take Chyna’s from her hand.

  “Looks like we are all on schedule, Agent,” she said.

  “It seems so, Miss Stone,” he replied.

  They smiled at each other and Chyna went to help Lana in the kitchen. When the last of the suitcases were loaded, Fariha came to take over from her, allowing Chyna to go to the basement to assist with the securing of the detainees for transportation. They looked ready to go as well.

  “Hans, you’ll be with me for this one and I want your full cooperation,” Chyna instructed. “Agent Stewart will deal with getting everyone and everything on board but you and I will be on the bridge. Don’t get any cute ideas, I’ll put a bullet in your head and throw you overboard faster than you can say ‘Hello’. Got it?”

  “Yes, Miss Stone,” he replied.

  “Good. Now all of you, listen up. This is how it is; you can either consider yourself fully integrated into this mission, after which you will be considered witnesses of the State against Ethan Doyle and be granted the leniency and consideration that affords, or you can decide to get stupid and try to double-cross us. Either way, only one choice is going to see you live through this, the other turns you into shark food. Personally, I’d recommend playing nice; the outcome is bound to be better for all involved. We’re all watching you.”

  With that she nodded to the agents, who threw black hoods over the prisoners’ heads and moved them out of the cells and up to the first floor. They placed them in the back of one of the vans and locked the doors. Chyna got into the car beside Anthony and the convoy eased out onto ‘Embassy Row’ and in the direction of the Izmir Canal.

  Thirty-six hours out to sea, they could see the island of Psara coming into view. They would take the strait that ran between Psara and Chios. They couldn’t approach the site directly from the North between the Cesme coast and Chios because the water around the island of Inousses was too shallow for the platform vessel. That was probably the same reason why Artemesia’s ships had been wrecked there almost 3,000 years before. They would reach their intended location in another twelve hours or so, but for the moment they were waiting for word from Doyle.

  Chyna found it strange that he hadn’t radioed the ship as yet. The map had been scheduled to be delivered at his apartment at noon. Her concerns were soon put to rest when at 6 o’ clock that evening the radio buzzed to life. With a stern look at Hans, Chyna motioned for him to pick it up and respond.

  “This is the Renaissance. Cargo vessel 5 5 3 4 8. Hans Svennson speaking. Come back.”

  “Renaissance, this is Ethan Doyle. Hans, is everything on schedule? Come back.”

  “Mr. Doyle, everything remains on schedule. The Renaissance is making way South in the Psara channel and awaiting further instructions. Come back.”

  “Very good, Hans. The target coordinates are 38.318230, 26.231997. What is your ETA to that location? Come back.”

  “I’d say twenty-four hours to that location, Mr. Doyle. Come back”

  “Perfect. Expect me onboard at six o clock tomorrow evening, Hans. Over and out.”

  The radio went silent and he handed it back to Chyna so she could put it back in the cradle. It seemed as if everything was going according to plan and Chyna breathed a sigh of relief. She sat down in her chair by the door to the bridge and opened her brown paper bag. Lana had been preparing portable meals for everyone during the days and a hot dinner at night. It was a good plan since most of the crew were on the move all day onboard the vessel. The work never seemed to end. Anthony stepped through the door just then.

  “Any news?”

  “Yeah. Doyle just called. He’s meeting the ship tomorrow around 6 p.m. at the wreck site.”

  “Perfect.”

  He opened the cuff that secured Hans’ left hand to the controls of the ship and slipped it over his right wrist. Then he led him to an empty chair across the room and handed him a paper bag.

  “Eat something, you look exhausted. I’ll take over for a while.”

  Hans looked grateful. He took the pastrami sandwich out of the bag and bit into it voraciously. There was an apple and a bottle of orange juice as well, which he polished off in no time. After a short break, Anthony cuffed Hans back to the wheel. He seemed resigned to his status as captive now. He was just glad to be treated like a human being in light of how badly things could have gone if he had remained a part of Ethan Doyle’s plan.

  At eight, one of the other agents, James, came to relieve them so Anthony and Chyna could go down to the galley for dinner. He was drinking a bottle of water and handed Hans one to refresh himself as well. Lana had made lasagna and James had already told them that it was amazing. He would watch Hans until they returned, at which point they would allow their prisoner to take a break and eat. Anthony stopped by his cabin and came back out showing off a small 250ml bottle of Chianti he had smuggled on board with him. Chyna smiled and shook her head in amusement. In the galley, everyone was noisily chatting in their little groups about this and that and enjoying their supper immensely. Fariha was helping by handing out bottles of water to everyone, one table at a time. She put water down for them and Lana brought over two plates of lasagna, Oscar passed them a basket of garlic bread.

  “If I had known you guys eat so well in the field I would have insisted on tech support for every mission,” he said, laughing. Lana cuffed him on the back of his head and the whole galley burst out laughing at his expense.

  Anthony shared the contents of the bottle of wine between their two glasses and then made a toast.

  “To us,” he said.

  “To us,” Chyna repeated, “and to finding the Minoan Mask.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, there was a strange silence on the platform vessel. After eating his dinner and gulping down another bottle of water, Hans had been unable to keep his eyes open to sail any longer. James had agreed when he suggested that they station it for a few hours to rest, he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes open either. Hans pulled up the brake on the rudders, killed the engines and set the moors down and curled up in his handcuffs in a corner of the bridge where he had laid out his sleeping bag. No one heard the choppers approaching or saw the tiny figure on the deck of the vessel laying out the lit flares to signal the landing area. By morning when they finally woke, everyone on board found themselves handcuffed and they were soon being led to the deck of the ship and made to sit down in a single line.

  Ethan Doyle stood over them smiling with a small army of twelve men. Beside him, wearing a stern expression, was Fariha, the Greek girl.

  Chapter Five

  The morning sun was high in the sky when they were brought out onto the deck in their handcuffs and made to sit in a single file line.

  Ethan Doyle stood before them grinning like the evil cartoon villain he was. He just couldn’t help feeling immensely proud of himself at having outsmarted them. In all truth, it did seem that he had finally turned the tables on their entire group. He had come prepared, Chyna gave him that much. Doyle had managed to land twelve security enforcers, six divers, a technician, a ship’s captain and himself onboard the vessel, all while they were unconscious. That wretch Fariha had spiked their water at dinner and as it turned out Hans had been the worst affected. James had brought him a bottle before and another with his meal. Even now it seemed he was having trouble sitting up straight.

  “It still amazes me that you thought you were smart enough to double cross me!”

  Ethan was shouting at Hans, who sat on the p
avement trying to cover his ears as best he could with his cuffed hands. He must have had a headache the size of the European Union. Even the sunshine was being a complete torture to him. He alternated shielding his eyes and covering his ears. Ethan kept berating him and finally swung his right leg and kicked Hans over onto his side.

  “You’re all soon going to see what this is ultimately about; I’m going to be the one who goes down in history as finding the oldest shipwreck of all time, not you Professor Cartwright or your little band of teenage mutant misfits and certainly not the overinflated Chyna Stone and her vagabonds from Found History. Everyone gets a back to ride on, but when I decided to take my destiny into my own hands you call me a criminal. Cartwright, you would never have gotten where you are if it wasn’t for Sir Evans spoon-feeding you everything you know back at Oxford, you practically lived at Boar’s Hill until the old man died. And you, Miss Stone, your father gave you everything, all you had to do was make the obvious choice to take it and follow in his footsteps. A gleaming reputation and a successful company with its own following and legacy; handed to you on a silver platter while you indulged yourself in luxury and elite para-military training to validate yourself.

  “This is all your fault, you know,’ he said, pointing at them. “You should have let me do what I needed to do instead of trying to get in my way. It’s your own fault you’re sitting here in handcuffs now as my hostages and when I’ve found what I’m looking for I’m going to push each and every one of you off this ship into the channel and watch you drown.”

  Then Ethan turned to Agent Stewart and said, “You should never have gotten yourself involved in this. It has nothing to do with the F.B.I. Now the blood of all these agents will be on your head.”

  As dismal as their situation seemed at the moment, Anthony couldn’t help but smirk at Doyle’s comments. He was showing his cards; a rookie mistake and he had just let Anthony know that the Doyles had no idea they were under investigation for money laundering and racketeering. He couldn’t know then that all Anthony’s superiors in Washington and at the Pentagon were fully aware of the operation and they were in constant contact with him to discuss progress and strategy. As soon as he didn’t check in, they would be sure to be checking things out. He also wouldn’t know that the onboard surveillance system had been patched into the F.B.I. satellite system and was streaming live to both the house in Izmir and to the database at the J. Edgar Hoover building twenty-four hours a day since they had boarded the vessel two days ago.

  “Take them to their cabins and lock them in,” Ethan shouted.

  With that, his armed militia men stood them up and walked each of them back to their cabins. They were secured and locked inside. It was clear that their cabins had been searched and every means of communication confiscated. He intended for them to silently bide their time and accept that he had gotten the best of them.

  Chyna lay on her bunk smiling to herself.

  You think you’re so smart Doyle, she thought to herself, You fancy yourself to be some sort of a badass, a mastermind criminal maybe? Ha!

  She jumped from the bed and went to the cabin door. From the porthole she could see that all of Doyle’s men had cleared the corridor. They had probably made it back to the deck by now, but just to be sure she waited five more minutes watching carefully to both the left and right of her door. When she was satisfied, she went to her suitcase and opened it. She threw out all the clothes and pulled on a tab that was sticking up out of one corner in the bottom of the case. When she lifted the top of the little compartment and saw its contents were intact, she smiled to herself again.

  Back on the bed she sat with the little black tool kit and her tech pouch. Chyna opened the pouch and pulled out another of her military secured Blackberry® devices, pulling off the back cover and laying it to one side. She dug deeper in the case and found what she was looking for, a fresh battery and a pill bottle containing about a dozen SIM cards. She emptied them into the palm of her hand and sorted through them, finally arriving at the card she needed. She lay it on the bed beside her and returned all of its contents to the pouch.

  With the SIM card in place and the battery fitted, Chyna put the back cover on the phone and turned it over in her hand. She pressed and held down the little power button and almost instantly the red light came on and the phone started to boot up. She knew that as soon as it did, a distress signal would start being broadcast to the systems back at Found History. For as long as the phone was broadcasting, it would deliver an email every fifteen minutes to their administrators’ inbox containing her coordinates. At the Found History office, they all knew better than to try to call that number. Chyna however, could make any call, to anyone, anywhere in the world she pleased and she decided to call her new friend at the United States Consulate in Izmir.

  The guards came for them at noon. They were handcuffed again and shuffled into the galley so they could be more easily monitored as they ate. Doyle didn’t have enough manpower to have food brought to them in their cabins so this was their best alternative. It was a terrible mistake!

  “They didn’t find my tech kit when they searched my cabin,” Chyna whispered discreetly to Anthony as they lined up at the counter for their meager lunch of pork and beans and bread. “I’ve set it up to send the distress messages to admin back at the office.”

  “That’s some good news,” he replied.

  “I also got a chance to call Agent Perez at the consulate in Izmir. He’s gone over to your base house to let your team know what happened.”

  “You think you can trust him?”

  “He’s a young one, but he’s as clean and starry-eyed as they come.”

  Anthony smiled.

  “I guess we just bide our time then, help is on the way.”

  Chyna nodded and moved down the line.

  They sat at random tables seeing as there was no need to aggravate the guards any further than they already were. The slightest sound of conversation got them aiming guns at the hostages so everyone ate in complete silence. Just as they were finishing their meal, there was a blast from the ships horn and the guards told everyone to stop eating and hustled them up to the main deck. Again, they were placed in a single row to sit in the shade of the ships’ bridge. There was another blast of the horn as a winch started pulling in a set of chains that where running over the side of the platform into the water. In a few minutes a basket broke the surface and was hauled onto the deck.

  None of them could believe their eyes. Apparently, Doyle and his diving team had gone ahead and started the search and from the looks of the basket’s contents, not only had they found the ships but they had found a remarkable treasure among their ruins. From where they were sitting, they could see jugs and other vessels of gold and silver, plates, cups, platters and statues. It was a remarkable, extremely valuable cache. The horn blasted again and another set of chains started moving, pulling something else up from the deep, blue waters. This time it was a very large bag made of netting, fashioned to hold smaller items or fragments that might be found on the ocean floor. Through the spaces in the weave, there was a distinctive glint of gold; the bag was filled to bursting with coins.

  Soon after, Doyle and six other divers came to the surface. They climbed into the cage that was set up on the side of the platform and were pulled up to the deck. Several plastic bins on wheels were rolled onto the deck and the divers opened the basket and began to sort the contents. Doyle and one of the guards lifted the heavy bag and poured a river of coins and other fragments of gold into another bucket. Chyna could see from the look on Professor Cartwright’s face that it was particularly hard for him to watch what was going on. The thrill of that discovery was supposed to have been his and he had been brutally robbed of it. The professor looked completely crestfallen.

  Chyna made all efforts to distract herself, she was more interested in getting back to the cabin to see if Ricardo had emailed her with some report of progress. Doyle stopped playing in his mountain of co
ins and walked over to where the other divers were sorting through the contents of the basket. He dipped his hand into one of them and came up holding something in his hands that made the professor groan with disappointment. Chyna looked up, to see what was wrong with Cartwright and she followed his gaze back to Doyle, who was slowly approaching them, holding something behind his back. She watched him intently, determined that if he made one false move she would bring him to his knees and turn him into her own hostage and gain the freedom of the entire group.

  Instinctively, he stopped well out of her reach and crouched down in front of her.

  “Miss Stone, I think that since this morning I have adequately humbled your friend Cartwright over there but it’s your turn to be humbled as well,” he said, pulling the object he held from behind his back and placing it before his face. “Behold, Miss Stone, the Minoan Mask!”

  Chyna was dumbstruck. It was just as the description from the Minoan cuneiform tablet had said. The mask was delicately wrought, clearly by a master craftsman. Its features were smooth and graceful, perfectly rounded. The forehead, the brow, the bridge of the nose and the shape of the nostrils, the apples of its cheek, the jaw line and the chin; all depicted the face of a beautiful, intriguing young woman. Remarkably, the bronze was not darkened by its time beneath the waves. It was the color of dark maple syrup with hardly any evidence of the encrusting that was typical of ocean salvage. Chyna attributed that to the incredible smoothness of it which would hardly have been a suitable surface for such formations.