LAST ASSAULT ON OAK ISLAND 36

Chapter 36

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In the confines of the half-submerged cave in Joudrey's Cove, a menagerie of equipment was collecting. Batteries of all sizes and shapes awaited operation at the inner dry end of the sandy floor. Two plastic children's snow sleds leaned against the rock walls on the dry bank, out of reach of the lapping tidal changes. Mining lamps, flashlights, torches, axes, and picks stood nearby. Lauren and Maruso's footprints were added to those they had found beside the tunnel, eventually obliterating the first set.

Maruso knew nothing of shoring, nor did he pretend to, and what they had learned of vertical cribbing from other shafts on the island would be useless in a horizontal tunnel.

Lauren understood this, too. Brielle's coded entry stated his depository was buried two rods into the cave wall, or about thirty-three feet. There was some comfort in knowing they would not be burrowing into the depths of the island as other operations had in the past.

Even thinking of tunneling brought up Saul Clemens and his scrape with near-death. It also made her think of Miles Clemens, who was now dealing with defeat to Lucy Yearbright, public scrutiny, and a hospitalized father. She did not envy him.

It took the remaining daylight hours of Tuesday and all of Wednesday to stock the needed equipment in the cave. During that time, the media buzzed about the Yearbright discovery. Everyone who did not have a theory before suddenly adopted one or made up their own.

One Eastern religious sect was claiming the cache protected the bones of Buddha; another, the Ark of the Covenant. Some people said it contained the real Pandora's Box, or the first time capsule, or Jesus Christ's burial shroud, or the spaceship that brought life to Earth, or an atomic device developed by ancient Egyptians, or even a mathematical equation to give mankind the secret of eternal youth.

On a more believable note, Saul's condition had stabilized. He had not regained consciousness, but was moved from the critical care ward to the intensive care unit at the hospital. Miles was questioned daily by every television and radio station about his father's actions that near-fatal day, but he refused to say more than a tempered "No comment" to all.

Just as the sun peeked over the eastern waters Thursday morning, Maruso and Lauren wound Rudy's Jeep up the gravel road to Lot 11 and into one of the few small clumps of oak trees. When they were convinced the vehicle was hidden well enough from the one-track road, they made their way northeast to the shore until they were directly over the cave site. The shore there was not a beach front; instead it ended in a steep hill that proved difficult to scale from the water and nearly impossible to descend without the aid of a secured rope from the incline above.

The face of the hill showed no outward signs of the collapse evident in the cave below, unlike the area around Cave-In Pit the woman had found in the nineteenth century. There were no wells or other potentially weakening disturbances above the cave. Satisfied that the collapse in the cave was not a major land shift, Lauren and Maruso headed to Dr. Geiger's house to have her stitches removed.

By lunch, they were back in the cove aboard the Second Wind, ready to dive.

"I think we should at least dig it out and see how bad it is," Maruso said as they appraised the collapse in the cave half an hour later. Around them were cluttered the digging equipment they had slowly collected over the last few days. "It could be shallow. Whoever didn't come back out could have died some other way inside."

Lauren wrinkled her face. "Such as?"

He shrugged. "Lack of air. Stupidity. If it is Brielle, he wouldn't be in too good condition after escaping a British prison. This could have caved in recently—even when Lucy blew up the flood tunnel."

She sat on her knees in the soft dirt, nodding at the yawning hole in the wall. "I never thought of that."

"Well, we're not going to need cribbing for three meters at least, and we probably won't get farther than that today." He sized-up the hard clay walls. "For some reason I never pictured the Money Pit treasure hunt coming to this."

She looked around at the small, submerged cave. "Neither did I."

They arranged the sleds, lights, and ropes to facilitate pulling the loose dirt out as smoothly as possible. Lauren deposited the dirt Maruso had removed on the far side of the cave, where she carefully rummaged through it with a colander, looking for possible traces of the earlier excavation.

It was a long, tedious process, scooping out the dirt, moving it, and digging through it again. Not until evening, when the smells of bug spray and sulfur lamps were making them both giddy, did anything of interest result.

"Do you think this is something?" Maruso asked, holding a small lump of dirt in his hand out for her to see.