“I do not understand. Cape Cross is there.” Heinrick pointed emphatically northward. “It can not be here.” He touched the spot on the map.

Sloane realized that despite a lifetime at sea, Papa Heinrick had never seen a nautical chart. She groaned inwardly.

For the next two hours Sloane laboriously talked the old fisherman through the places where he had lost nets or had lines tangled. Because the desert continued under the ocean for hundreds of miles from the coast, anything that tore lines or ripped nets was either a rock outcropping or a shipwreck. Papa Heinrick would tell her that two days sailing southwest from Sandwich Bay was such a place, or five days northwest was another. Each one he described corresponded with the map she’d made over the past days talking to the commercial fishermen and day excursion captains at Walvis.

But there was one spot that only Papa Heinrick mentioned. It was nearly seventy miles out by Sloane’s estimation, well away from any other. In fact, none of the other captains had even mentioned fishing in the area. Papa Heinrick said that there was little out there to attract marine life and he’d only been there himself because a freak wind had pushed him off course.

Sloane circled the spot on her chart, noting the water depth was over a hundred and fifty feet, at the limit of her scuba abilities but still doable. However, it was too deep for even the clearest water to reveal the outline of a ship against the sandy bottom — even from the helicopter they planned to rent to investigate the other sites.

“You must not go there,” Papa Heinrick warned when he saw the far-off look in Sloane’s eyes.

His comment refocused her attention. “Why not?”

“The seas are alive with great metal snakes. It is bad magic, I think.”

“Metal snakes?” Tony scoffed.

The old man lunged to his feet, his expression fierce. “You doubt Papa Heinrick?” he thundered, spraying Reardon with clots of saliva. “There are dozens of them, a hundred feet long or more, twisting and thrashing on the water. One nearly sank my boat when it tried to eat me. Only I could have escaped its evil mouth, for I am the greatest sailor who has ever lived. You would have pissed yourself in fear and died crying like an infant.” He looked back at Sloane, the edge of madness in his eyes a bit more keen. “Papa Heinrick has warned you. Go there and you will surely be eaten alive. Now leave me.” He settled back at his little smoke fire, rocking on his heels and muttering in a language Sloane didn’t know.

She thanked him for his help but he didn’t acknowledge her. She and Tony returned to their inflatable and slowly paddled out of Papa Heinrick’s isolated camp. When they emerged from the secret cleft in the reeds Tony exhaled a long breath. “That man’s utterly daft. Metal snakes? Pleeease.”

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.’ ”