"Slow back, aye," Remi replied.

When Sam heard the propeller begin to churn, he leaned hard against the hull, dug his feet into the wet sand, coiled his legs, and shoved. The boat eased back a foot, then another, then floated free. He reached up, snagged the lowermost railing with his hands, then swung his legs up, hooked his heel on the gunwale, and climbed aboard.

"Chumbe Island?" Remi called through the open pilothouse window.

"Chumbe Island," Sam confirmed. "Got a mystery to solve."

THEY WERE A FEW MILES northwest of Prison Island when Sam's satellite phone trilled. Sitting on the afterdeck, sorting through their gear, Sam picked up the phone and pressed Talk. It was Selma. "Good news, not so good news," she said.

"Good news first," Sam said.

"According to Tanzania's Ministry of Natural Resources regulations, the spot where you found the bell is outside sanctuary boundaries. There's no reef there, so no protection necessary."

"And the not so good news?"

"Tanzanian maritime salvage law still applies--'No extraordinary excavation methods.' It's a gray area, but it sounds like you're going to need more than Ping-Pong paddles to free that bell. I've got both Pete and Wendy looking into the permit process--discreetly, of course."

Boyfriend and girlfriend Pete Jeffcoat and Wendy Corden--tan and fit blond Californians with degrees in archaeology and social sciences, respectively--worked as Selma's apprentices.

"Good," Sam said. "Keep us posted."

AFTER A BRIEF STOP at the Stone Town docks to refuel and gather the days' provisions, it took another leisurely ninety minutes' cruising down the coast and picking their way through the channels of Zanzibar's outer islands before they reached the bell's GPS coordinates. Sam went forward and dropped anchor. The air was dead calm and the sky a cloudless blue. As Zanzibar sat just below the equator, July was during winter rather than summer, so the temperature wouldn't climb above the low eighties. A good day for diving. He hoisted the white-stripe-on-red diver-down flag on the halyard, then joined Remi on the afterdeck.

"Tanks or snorkel?" she asked.

"Let's start with snorkel." The bell was sitting in ten feet of water. "Let's get a good look at what we're up against, then regroup."

AS IT HAD BEEN the day before and was ninety percent of the time in Zanzibar, the water was stunningly clear, ranging in shade from turquoise to indigo. Sam rolled backward over the gunwale, followed a few seconds later by Remi. Together they hung motionless on the surface for a few seconds, letting the cloud of bubbles and froth dissipate, then flipped over and dove. Once they reached the white sand bottom they turned right and soon reached the lip of the bank, where they performed another pike dive and followed the vertical face to the bottom. They stopped, knelt in the sand, and jammed their dive knives into the bottom to use as handholds.