Juan started unloading equipment while Max lugged an oxyacetylene cutting torch to the large piece of steel. The plate itself was too thick to slice efficiently, so he attacked the bolt heads. With the torch burning at over six thousand degrees, the bolts didn’t stand a chance. He cut off all eight, and silenced the hissing torch. The smell of scalded metal was quickly whipped away by the steady offshore breeze.

The tow hook on the winch attached to the SUV’s bumper slipped over the metal plate, and when Hanley took up the slack the chunk of steel slid smoothly across the rocks and revealed the yawning opening into the earth that had intrigued people for generations.

“I can’t believe I’m about to dive the Treasure Pit,” Juan said. “When I was a kid, I followed Dewayne Sullivan’s expedition in the papers, dreaming of being on his team.”

“Must be a West Coast thing,” Max replied. “I’d never heard of this place until Murph and Stoney’s briefing.”

“Besides, you have no whimsy,” Cabrillo teased, copying Eric Stone’s earlier observation.

The dive gear they had ordered from Seattle was top-of-the-line. Juan would have a full-face dive helmet with a fiber-optic voice-and-data link to Max on the surface. A tiny camera mounted on the side of the helmet would allow Hanley to see everything the Chairman did. Diving alone, especially underground, was never a good idea, but if something happened to Juan when he was in the pit, Max would know about it and be able to haul him back up.

“You ready,” Max asked when Juan finished cinching a utility belt over his dry suit.

Cabrillo gave him the OK sign. Divers never give the thumbs-up unless they are about to surface. “Keep watch on the computer for those motion sensors. If one goes off, get me up to the surface as fast as you can.”

Max had his pistol secreted in the small of his back and Juan’s on the seat next to him. “I doubt they’re coming, but we’re ready.”

Juan clipped the winch hook to his belt and slowly eased himself off the steel plate and into the Treasure Pit. There was no sense of how high he was over the bottom because the shaft was inky black. He had yet to put on his helmet. The air was layered with the thick stench of rotting kelp and the iodine tang of the sea.

His halogen light pushed only a few feet into the darkness before being swallowed up.

“Ready?” Max asked.

“Lower away,” Juan replied, and slipped his helmet over his head and locked it to the collar ring. The air from the tanks on his back was fresh and cool.