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In the corner of Sam’s right eye he saw a glint, a fleeting flash of gold. He stopped swimming, settled knees first into the sand, then tapped his dive knife on his tank to get Remi’s attention. She stopped swimming, turned, and finned back to him. He pointed toward the spot. She nodded. With Sam in the lead, they swam toward shore until the sandbanks came into view. A wall of sand nearly twelve feet tall, these banks marked a precipice of sorts where the water depth dropped from chest height to twenty feet. They stopped before the bank and looked around.
Remi shrugged Where?
Sam shrugged his shoulders and kept scanning up and down the bank. There. Twenty feet to his right he saw it again, a flash of gold. They swam to it and stopped again. Here the Good-bye Zone precipice was closer still, not eight feet behind their backs. Even at this distance they could feel the surge of the current, like a vortex trying to sweep them into the deep.
Jutting from the bank at waist height was what appeared to be six or seven inches of a barrel’s hoop. Though tarnished and fuzzy with barnacles, in a few places the hoop had been sandblasted by the current, exposing shiny metal.
Sam reached out and fanned the area around the hoop. The exposed portion widened to eight inches, then ten inches, before curving back and disappearing into the bank. Sam moved his paddle upward, hoping to uncover some of the barrel’s staves if the wood hadn’t succumbed to rot.
Sam stopped fanning. He looked to Remi and saw her eyes were wide behind her mask. Above the hoop was not rotted wood but a curved metal facade, mottled green with patina. Sam dropped to his knees and wiggled forward until his chest was nearly touching the bank, then craned his neck and waved his paddle beneath the hoop. After thirty seconds of work a cavity appeared. Gently, slowly, Sam slipped his hand into the hollow and probed the interior with splayed fingers.
He withdrew his arm and backed away from the object until he was again beside Remi. She looked at him with expectant eyes. He nodded back. There was no doubt: Their barrel wasn’t a barrel but rather a ship’s bell.
“WELL, THAT WAS UNEXPECTED,” Remi said a few minutes later after surfacing.
“I’ll say,” Sam replied after removing his mouthpiece. Until now, the biggest artifact they’d ever found was a sterling silver trencher from a torpedoed World War II Liberty Ship.
She shed her fins and tossed them over the gunwale onto the afterdeck of their rental—a commuter-style twenty-five-foot Andreyale Joubert-Nivelt express cruiser complete with lacquered teak woodwork and retro subway windows—then climbed the ladder, followed by Sam. Once they’d shed the remainder of their gear and tucked it away in the Andreyale’s cabin, Remi fished a pair of water bottles from the ice chest and tossed one to Sam. They sat down on the deck chairs.
“How long do you think it’s been down there?” Remi asked.
“Hard to say. Doesn’t take long for patina to set in. We’d have to see the thickness of the growth on the rest of it. The interior felt fairly unblemished.”
“And the clapper?” Remi asked.
“Couldn’t feel it.”
“Looks like we’ve got a decision to make.”
“That we do.”
Not only did the Tanzanian government have some unorthodox laws when it came to maritime salvage, Chumbe Island was officially known as Chumbe Island Coral Park, a good portion of which had been partitioned as a Reef Sanctuary and a Closed Forest Reserve. Before Sam and Remi could do anything, they first had to determine whether the bell officially lay within either of these protected areas. If they passed this hurdle, then they could in good conscience proceed to the next step: determining the bell’s provenance and/or pedigree, a requirement should they want to stake a legal claim before alerting local officials to the bell’s presence. It was a tenuous tightrope on which they tread. If they reached the far side, they may have a significant historical find on their hands, but on either side of the tightrope were laws that could lead to, at best, having the find snatched away, or, at worst, criminal charges. By law they could take any found man-made objects that required “no extraordinary excavation methods.” Trinkets such as Remi’s diamond-shaped coin were fine; a ship’s bell was a wholly different matter.
None of this was new to the Fargos. Together and alone, privately and professionally, Sam and Remi had been hunting for treasure, artifacts, and hidden history for most of their adult lives.
Following in her father’s footsteps, Remi had attended Boston College, emerging with a master’s in anthropology and history, with a focus on ancient trade routes.
Sam’s father, who’d died a few years earlier, had been one of the lead engineers on NASA’s space programs while Sam’s mother, a vivacious lady, ran a charter dive boat.
Sam received an engineering degree from Caltech, along with a handful of trophies for lacrosse and soccer.
While in his final months at Caltech, Sam was approached by a man he would later discover was from DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the government’s research and development arm. The lure of pure creative engineering combined with serving his country made Sam’s choice an easy one.
After seven years at DARPA Sam returned to California, where Sam and Remi met at the Lighthouse, a jazz club on Hermosa Beach. Sam had wandered into the club for a cold beer, and Remi was there celebrating a successful research trip looking into rumors of a sunken Spanish ship off Abalone Cove.
Though neither of them had ever called their first meeting a case of love at first sight, they’d both agreed it had certainly been a case of “pretty damned sure at first hour.” Six months later they were married where they’d first met, in a small ceremony at the Lighthouse.
At Remi’s encouragement Sam dove headfirst into his own business, and they struck pay dirt within a year with an argon laser scanner that could detect and identify at a distance mixed metals and alloys, from gold and silver to platinum and palladium. Treasure hunters, universities, corporations, and mining outfits scrambled to license Sam’s invention, and within two years Fargo Group was seeing an annual net profit of three million dollars. Within four years the deep-pocketed corporations came calling. Sam and Remi took the highest bid, sold the company for enough money to see themselves comfortably through the rest of their lives, and then turned to their true passion: treasure hunting.
For Sam and Remi, the engine that drove their lives was not money but rather the adventure and the satisfaction of seeing the Fargo Foundation flourish. The foundation, which split its gifting among underprivileged and abused children, animal protection, and nature conservancy, had grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade, the previous year donating almost twenty million dollars to a variety of organizations. A hefty part of that money had come from Sam and Remi personally, and the rest of it from private donations. For better or worse their exploits attracted a fair amount of media attention, which in turn attracted wealthy, high-profile donors.
The question they now faced was whether this ship’s bell was something they could turn into philanthropic funds or simply a fascinating historical diversion. Not that it mattered, of course. The pursuit of hidden history held its own joys for them. Either way, they knew where they had to start.
“Time to call Selma,” Remi said.
“Time to call Selma,” Sam agreed.
AN HOUR LATER they were back at their rented plantation-style bungalow at Kendwa Beach, on Zanzibar’s northern tip. While Remi prepared a fresh fruit salad, slices of prosciutto and mozzarella, and
