end and a huge stone fireplace and grill at the other. Originally, that’s where most of the cooking was done. When Carl built his house on the west side, overlooking the small beach and sandbar, I’d bought a top-of-the-line-oven for it. A big, commercial type oven and six-burner stove. Charlie cooked for everyone and a few times that had been more than twenty people.
I heard a small splash to my right and glanced over. There was a widening circle in the first tank of the aquaculture system we’d built. Carl was in the process of enlarging it, but for now there were only three tanks, each twenty feet by eight feet. He’d added the third just a few weeks earlier. The first tank was deeper than the other two, which were up on a platform so the tops were slightly higher than the first one. In the first were crawfish, separated into several sections with different-size mesh so the bigger ones couldn’t eat the littler ones. The second tank held a system of racks that grew several kinds of vegetables. The third one was to grow even more vegetables, and the one Trent was now building would grow tilapia, a farm-raised freshwater food fish that tastes like snapper.
Water was pumped from the bottom of the crawfish tank up to the first vegetable tank, where it flowed through to the second one before being gravity fed back to the crawfish. The nitrates in the water from the crawfish tank fed the plants, and the oxygenated water from the plants was returned to the crawfish tank. It was all Greek to me, but Trent had a friend in South America doing it and learned all there was to it. Apparently, it was working, because we always had fresh tomatoes, broccoli, and lettuce. He wanted to try to grow corn in the third tank, and the shoots were just starting to come up.
Chapter Three
It was two hours later, after the Trents had gone to put the kids to bed, that Chyrel came out of her little office, the coconut in one hand and a file folder in the other.
“I used the laser scanner to capture the markings digitally,” she said. “I had to do a few passes and jigsaw them together.” She lost me at the word laser. She handed the nut back to Doc, who put it back in the chest. “Then I upped the contrast, fiddled with the levels, and cleaned up the image some.” I nodded as Chyrel went into an in-depth explanation of pixels, resolution, and a histogram she’d edited to “punch up latent markings.” I knew if I asked about whatever that meant we’d lose thirty minutes. She was the guru, so I let her do her job. “My guess is that those worn places were caused by decades of wind blowing the tree it was hidden in and moving the coconut around inside the box.”
“So, after all your techno magic, what does it say?” Doc asked.
She opened the file and handed the three of us sheets of paper, then turned so that the light from a gas lantern fell across her shoulder. “It says, ‘ Después de la niebla, la tempestad recato atravesó el istmo y nos rodearon y ahora la mujer inquieta ahora descansa. Su envío suprimido fuera el pilar prodigioso ochenta contundentes avances ausente del comercio. 23 de septiembre, 1566 .’ That’s one really old coconut.”
“Jimmy said he recognized a few words,” I said. “Mist, woman, suppressed, and trade. But, he said it was what he called ‘old Spanish,’ not like the Cuban that’s spoken around here.”
“I spent a year in Rota,” Tony said. “Gimme some light.” Tony Jacobs was one of Deuce’s first recruits, along with another member of his SEAL team, Art Newman. Tony’s a wiry, very dark-skinned, easy going black guy. His dedication to service was evident by his just being here. Last winter, he was captured by a terrorist cell operating out of Cuba and tortured. They’d cut off the tips of his right forefinger and middle finger, at the first knuckle. His only response, once we got him out, was that he was glad the SEALs had taught him how to shoot with either hand.
“Yeah,
I heard a small splash to my right and glanced over. There was a widening circle in the first tank of the aquaculture system we’d built. Carl was in the process of enlarging it, but for now there were only three tanks, each twenty feet by eight feet. He’d added the third just a few weeks earlier. The first tank was deeper than the other two, which were up on a platform so the tops were slightly higher than the first one. In the first were crawfish, separated into several sections with different-size mesh so the bigger ones couldn’t eat the littler ones. The second tank held a system of racks that grew several kinds of vegetables. The third one was to grow even more vegetables, and the one Trent was now building would grow tilapia, a farm-raised freshwater food fish that tastes like snapper.
Water was pumped from the bottom of the crawfish tank up to the first vegetable tank, where it flowed through to the second one before being gravity fed back to the crawfish. The nitrates in the water from the crawfish tank fed the plants, and the oxygenated water from the plants was returned to the crawfish tank. It was all Greek to me, but Trent had a friend in South America doing it and learned all there was to it. Apparently, it was working, because we always had fresh tomatoes, broccoli, and lettuce. He wanted to try to grow corn in the third tank, and the shoots were just starting to come up.
Chapter Three
It was two hours later, after the Trents had gone to put the kids to bed, that Chyrel came out of her little office, the coconut in one hand and a file folder in the other.
“I used the laser scanner to capture the markings digitally,” she said. “I had to do a few passes and jigsaw them together.” She lost me at the word laser. She handed the nut back to Doc, who put it back in the chest. “Then I upped the contrast, fiddled with the levels, and cleaned up the image some.” I nodded as Chyrel went into an in-depth explanation of pixels, resolution, and a histogram she’d edited to “punch up latent markings.” I knew if I asked about whatever that meant we’d lose thirty minutes. She was the guru, so I let her do her job. “My guess is that those worn places were caused by decades of wind blowing the tree it was hidden in and moving the coconut around inside the box.”
“So, after all your techno magic, what does it say?” Doc asked.
She opened the file and handed the three of us sheets of paper, then turned so that the light from a gas lantern fell across her shoulder. “It says, ‘ Después de la niebla, la tempestad recato atravesó el istmo y nos rodearon y ahora la mujer inquieta ahora descansa. Su envío suprimido fuera el pilar prodigioso ochenta contundentes avances ausente del comercio. 23 de septiembre, 1566 .’ That’s one really old coconut.”
“Jimmy said he recognized a few words,” I said. “Mist, woman, suppressed, and trade. But, he said it was what he called ‘old Spanish,’ not like the Cuban that’s spoken around here.”
“I spent a year in Rota,” Tony said. “Gimme some light.” Tony Jacobs was one of Deuce’s first recruits, along with another member of his SEAL team, Art Newman. Tony’s a wiry, very dark-skinned, easy going black guy. His dedication to service was evident by his just being here. Last winter, he was captured by a terrorist cell operating out of Cuba and tortured. They’d cut off the tips of his right forefinger and middle finger, at the first knuckle. His only response, once we got him out, was that he was glad the SEALs had taught him how to shoot with either hand.
“Yeah,
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