Riptide by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child (1998)
Every time you think you've hit rock bottom, you find there's a bottom below.
That could be the basic theme of Riptide, a treasure hunting adventure thriller based on the legend of Oak Island.
Legend had it that notorious English pirate "Red Ned" Ockham had buried his vast hoard of treasure on Ragged Island, off the coast of Maine. Red Ned was the deadliest, most feared, and most successful pirate of his day; his fleet consisted of nine ship laden down with booty -- gold, silver, jewels, artwork, fine clothes, and much more -- including the legendary St. Michael's Sword, which gave its bearer the power of life and death over his foes. Red Ned had his treasured buried at the bottom of a huge pit -- the Water Pit (for some reason, I want to call it the Money Pit) -- designed to frustrate anyone other than Red Ned who tried to retrieve the treasure. But before Red Ned could retrieve his fabulous wealth, his ship was found with all aboard mysteriously dead.
The first attempt to retrieve the treasure was in 1792; it ended in tragedy when a seal was broken and sea water rushed in to claim the Water Pit's first victim. Over the years, other unsuccessful attempt to get the treasure failed -- in 1800, in 1831, in 1840, in 1869, in 1883, then three more time between 1900 and 1907, and finally in 1940. All attempts ended in failure, bankruptcy, and death...
The 1940 attempt was made by Alfred Westgate Hatch, Sr., who had gone so far as to purchase the island from a land speculator, and to move his family to the nearby, isolated village of Stormhaven. As had happened every time ion the past, the island defeated the treasure hunter and Hatch soon found himself bankrupt. Hatch turned to drink and soon died, leaving the island to his nineteen-year-old son. the son, A. W. Hatch, Jr., destroyed all of his father's papers and refused to have anything to do with the island, which remained barren and unoccupied for more than two decades.
In 1971, young Malin Hatch was bored and, because his parents were not at home, convinced his older brother Johnny to go with him to explore the forbidden island as a great adventure. The two boys rowed out to the island and were not impressed...a few scrawny trees, a lot of rocks, and not much else. Then they discovered a fissure in the ground, which led to a cave or a tunnel. Now, this was more like it; this was adventure! They entered and slowly made their way through the tunnel until they came to a door. By this time Maline was getting scared and wanted to leave, but Johnny called him a coward. Johnny opened the door. A blast pushed him into the darkness, water began to converge, and Johnny was swept away. Malin had no real memory of what had happened. The townspeople and the Coast Guard searched for Johnny's body, but could find nothing. The curse of the Water Pit had struck again, and Malin grew up with the guilt of his brother's death.
Fast forward some twenty years. Malin's father drowned soon after, bereft, and possibly a suicide. Malin and his mother stayed in Stormhaven for a few years, enduring the looks of the townspeople, and finally moved to Boston. As if to make up for Johnny's death, Malin pushed himself through college and medical school, spent years working the world's most dangerous spots for Doctors Without Borders, and then began a practice and research at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.
Over the years, Malin had been approached by many people -- clairvoyants, dowsers, psychics, oil barons, engineers, and other, all with their own "foolproof" scheme -- seeking to recover the treasure, and had rejected them all; the treasure could be real, or could be a myth, but the search for it had cost many lives over the past three centuries, and Malin, still stricken by the death of his brother, refused to have any part of it. Then Malin was approached by Captain Gerard Neidelman, an experienced "recovery specialist" and the head of a company called Thalassa Holdings, who also wanted to recover the treasure. Neidelman -- and Thalassa -- had found and recovered many hidden treasures in the past, many of them thought impossible to retrieve, using the very latest in scientific methods and equipment. a group with deep pockets, Thalassa had raised 22 million dollars to fund such an expedition to Ragged Island. Their researchers had estimated the Water Pit treasure to be worth, conservatively, two billion dollars. He offered Malin half of the amount -- one billion -- for permission to search the island. Malin rebuffed Neidelman at first, but then began thinking about the offer. Here was a chance to put his demons at rest, perhaps find Johnny's body, and use the money to set up a foundation in his brother's name. He decide to agree, but with several conditions: first, that he join the team as their medical doctor, and also that he reserved the right to cancel the project at any time if he felt such a decision was neccessary.
Time was of the essence. Neidelman had about a month before the start of hurricane season, which would halt all work on the project. But Neidelman had done his preliminary work: he had already assembled a team of experts in everything from engineering and computing to archaeology and history, and had discover a lost dairy of the seventeenth century architect who had designed the Water Pit. Sir William Macallan was acknowledge to be England's greatest architect next to Christopher Wren. Macallan had been a passenger on a vessel sailing to America when it was taken by Red Ned, who slew everyone on board except for Macallan, forcing him to design a foolproof place to protect his treasure. But Macallan had also been a government secret agent, and kept a detailed description of his plan and how to get around all the traps designed in it in his journal, using invisible ink and several highly sophisticated codes. Neidelman's experts had already broken the code for the first part of the journal using the latest computer technology, and were working on breaking the second part, recorded in another highly complicated code.
So, Malin returned to Stormhaven for the first time since he had left as a teen. His mother, for some reason, had kept the family home their, unoccupied, all this time, and since her death from cancer, Malin had done the same. The small village of fishermen and lobstermen had not changed much in the intervening years, except perhaps with the addition of the Reverend Woody Clay, a dour and uncompromising fundamentalist minister who had married Malin's high school sweetheart. Stormhaven was a poor town and its residents welcome the sudden influx of cash that Thalassa's crew brought, but they also feared the so-called curse of the fog-bound and normally unapproachable island.
Among the experts that Neidelman had brought on board were Isabel Bonterre, archaeologist and dive leader, Christopher St. John, the expedition's historian who was researching Macallan, Kerry Wopner, a rather unusual computer expert, Lyle Streeter, the stoic team foreman, Sandra Magnusen, the team's chief engineer and remote sensing specialist, and Roger Rankin, geologist. Most appeared friendly, but Malin got bad vibes from Streeter, who had been working with Neidelman throughout the latter's career. As for Neidelman, Malin soon learned that the competent, highly organized man was also a driven monomaniac determined to achieve his goal at any cost.
The Water Pit itself was a maze of tunnels, some natural and some engineered, and traps; it descended hundreds of feet below the surface, shored up by buttresses and blocked off at several points. The first tragedy soon took place: a worker had somehow triggered the collapse of a buttress which had him pinned to the ground, water began seeping into the area and would soon drown him. Efforts to remove lift the heavy buttress from the victim failed and Malin was forced to amputate the man's legs on the spot in order to possibly save his life. This helped to increase the talk of a curse among the townspeople.
Other problems kept cropping up. Macallan's traps kept being sprung. The computers kept giving conflicting data for no discernable reason. Workmen began to appear at Malin's onsite clinic with varying complaints. And Bonterre had discovered a large gravesite which held the skeletons of at least eighty men from Red Ned's crew -- the skeletons showed no sign of violence but had still been hastily placed in the grave; tests on the various bones showed that the men had died of disease, but each of a different disease, eliminating the theory that plague had struck the island. Talk became frequent of the island's curse and of a possible supernatural explanation.
Injecting dye into the Water Pit revealed that five of the tunnels went directly to the sea, so Neidelman used explosives to block each of the tunnels at its entry point to the Atlantic. Still the money pit flooded. Eventually, Neidelman elected to build a wall around the island to keep the sea out, much as Macallan had Red Ned's men do while the Water Pit was being constructed.
Meanwhile, the townspeople were getting restless. Clay, the minister, had been fomenting opposition to the project and was organizing a large group of fishermen and lobstermen to go to the island to protest. And then a fierce Northeaster struck... And Lyle Streeter began hunting Malin and Isabel Bonterre with a high velocity weapon... All this as Neidelman finally reached the treasure: wealth and riches beyond imagining, as well as the legendary jewel-encrusted St. Michaels Sword...But the curse of the Water Pit was not finished, because there is always a bottom below...
A highly detailed and richly imagined novel that pulls the reader page by page to its exciting and inexorable ending, Riptide was an early standalone novel from the writing pair best known for their long-running thrillers about Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast. It was the fourth book from the pair and their second standalone. Interestingly, it is the only one of the pair's four standalones in which they did not mine some of their characters and later insert them into their Prendergast, Nora Kelly, or Gideon Crew series; this, in itself, gives the novel a unique sense of completeness.
Riptide is a thrill ride that stands well with the best of modern adventure novels, a battle between modern science against an ancient -- and possibly supernatural -- foe.
