"Ambition leads me not only farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go."

- Captain James Cook

Waipio Valley, Island of Hawaii

Bubbles released from the exhausts of two separate regulators, trailing up to the surface 50 feet above as two divers gracefully glided through the warm, azure water. To the left was the great darkening abyss of the Pacific Ocean, and to the right, tropical fish darted in and out of colourful corals set against the islands shear wall face, like children playing as they fed on the nutrients.

The divers had been under for almost 35 minutes, the lead diver, Nathan Drake with blue eyes and short brown hair, checked his gauge. He still had 120-bar left in his tank. He turned to his dark-haired female counterpart who, holding a small underwater video camera, was looking between at an outcropping of finger coral. He tapped his tank with a metal rod looped around his wrist, the sound a dull thud in the water, and waited for his companion, Mia, to look his way.

When she did, he tapped the palm of his hand which was the divers signal asking how much air she had left.

Her brown eyes glanced down to her gauge and then back at him and made a 'T' sign with her hands and then held a single finger up.

110-bar. Plenty of time.

They continued their search along the Upolu Bottomfish Restricted Fishing Area along the Northern part of the Island of Hawaii, between Halaula and Kukuihaele. It had been a long week for them both, but they were confident they were close.

They swam along the coral watching it stretch out along the wall, and the delicate nature of the corals made it difficult to explore as thoroughly as they wanted and that was the story for the past three days, three dives a day. Searching amongst the corals looking for hints or clues to finding the cave they were looking for.

Just as he was about to signal to begin their ascent, fearing another failed search, Drake – as he was known to friends and enemies alike - noticed a small gap well hidden by corals and fallen rocks. He swam for a closer look, disturbing a school of reef fish and peered inside. It was too dark to see anything, so he unclipped his dive torch from his BCD and shone the light inside.

The light barely penetrated the gloom, highlighting artefacts floating in the water creating an eerie scene but even with the little illumination he could tell it opened into a larger cavern, extending further back. It didn't provide a lot of information, but Drake was certain this was what they were looking for.

To the untrained eye, it looked like these rocks had collapsed above at some point, but to Drake, they looked meticulously placed. Notably the larger, more boulder-like, at the bottom and as it rose, they gradually got smaller. As if they were placed there by someone or someone's who did not have the strength to lift the heavier boulders above ground level. He also noted they were all square-shaped and stacked like blocks rather than a haphazard pile you would expect from naturally fallen rocks.

Drake indicated to Mia that this was the right spot with the 'Ok' hand signal and then pulled out his surface marker buoy with attached line reel from the pocket of his Buoyancy Control Device, or BCD, and pulled his backup regulator from its hook attached to the BCD. He held the regulator to the opening in the SMB and pressed the purge button. The SMB filled with oxygen, Nate released it and it shot to the surface, leaving him with only the reel and string. He tied it to a rock, happy that the boat above would see them and know where they would be when they surfaced.

Nate turned back to the closed-up entrance and sized up the small hole. Mia, being only a couple of inches over five feet and clearly someone who looked after her body, would definitely fit through the hole, even with a tank on her back. Nate, on the other hand, being taller and more solidly built would find it a bit more of a challenge.

Deciding to make it a bit more roomier for himself, Drake started pulling at the top rocks to try to move them off but no matter how much he pushed and pulled, the rocks wouldn't budge. Mia, seeing what Nate was trying to do, pocketed her video camera and swam over to help. Together they pushed, straining themselves and wasting precious oxygen in the process but eventually the rock moved and then rolled through the gap and into the darkness

Nate shone his torch in the hole again and then poked his head through. The darkness seeped around him and the torch didn't do much to help but he could tell that this wasn't a cave, but a tunnel and it extended back into the island.

He pulled out and looked at Mia, she looked at him back. He indicated the hole and that she should go in. She gave him a face that, even underwater, was unmistakable. She wasn't going first.

Nate rolled his eyes and went to enter the cave, but Mia grabbed him by the calf. Nate sighed into his regulator, spewing forth a flurry of bubbles, and looked at her. Mia was pointing to her oxygen gauge and then pointing up.

He looked at his own gauge, he had 80-bar left. Mia had 70. The cautious part of him said they should surface and re-fill their tanks and come back with a full tank and plenty of time to explore. They had marked the location of the cave and there was no way of knowing how far back it extended. But Nathan Drake was not a cautious man, not when it came to discoveries and treasures and instinct had usually led him right, even if it sometimes led him into sticky situations. Besides, he would only take a quick look, what was the harm in that?

Famous last words he thought.

Indicating to Mia that he was going in, he ignored her attempts at gaining his attention and shimmied through the narrow hole, his steel tank scraping along the roof. He held his torch aloft and looked around, the cave was filled with school of triggerfish slowly gliding this way and that.

Nate felt a little disoriented and a sense of vertigo come over him. The cave started to rotate, and Nate closed his eyes, focused on his breathing, until the feeling dissipated. Opening his eyes, he looked back the way he came to get his bearings and watched Mia gliding through with little difficulty. He allowed himself a small smile before signal-asking if she was ok.

She gave the OK signal in response and they turned around, torches shining out in front of them and swam further into the cave.

It only took a couple of minutes for them to discover that Nate was correct, that the cave was in fact a tunnel with a path. As he glided along, Nate examined the floor of the cave and found that there were smooth, rectangular stones set into the ground at equal distance. It was clearly man made. Excitement growing, Nate got Mia's attention and indicated they should follow. Mia nodded her agreement and they swam forward, following the path.

It was only another couple of minutes before their excitement reached breaking point. The path led to a stairway cut into the stone, it was about three metres wide and, like the path, it was man-made. They ascended, following the stairs up until they surfaced.

Nate spat out his regulator as Mia surfaced and he grinned at her, "And you wanted to go for more oxygen."

Mia rolled her eyes, "That tunnel could have stretched on for ages! You got lucky"

Nate chuckled as he unbuckled his BCD, "You don't get as far as I have in this business without a bit of luck." Then, while unclipping the dry pack attached to his thigh, he added, "And some daring."

Resting his BCD and tank, as well as his fins, on the steps, Nate helped Mia out of her BCD and fins and placed her equipment next to his. They stood on the stairs looking around with their torches. They were in a large cavern, the dimensions impossible to guess at in this gloom. Above them, the cavern roof disappeared into the darkness and the ocean water filled the tunnel to about halfway up the long set of steps to which they stood on.

Dry pack in hand, Nate climbed the steps slowly, each footstep a risk of slipping on his butt due to the centuries of water and moisture. His breath fogged out in front of him with every step and he shivered, it was freezing cold. The steps lead them up to a wide platform with a stone doorway. Laying on the ground near the door was a pile of masks. And above the stone doorway was a relief where a wooden statue sat.

Nate approached the door and ran his hand over it. It was smooth and cool to the touch, wet with years of damp. He pushed them but they didn't budge. Mia joined him and they put all their weight against it, but it still refused to move.

"Well that's a no go" he said and pointed his light at the masks piled near the door. There were four of them and he picked one up. It was made of wood, slightly rotten but otherwise in surprisingly good shape, he flipped it over and found the back was smooth with a notch near the top.

"So, you're the expert, what do you think?" he asked Mia still studying the mask.

She grinned at him, "This has to be it," she said and then pointed, "Look at the statue above the door."

Nate shone his torch on the statue. It was made of wood and looked to be about a meter in height. It was humanoid in shape, at least in the arms, torso and legs but the head had a large mouth shaped into a snarl and looked as wide as the Cheshire Cat's grin. Covering its head was a headdress that covered its eyes and the tails of it ran down either side of its head down to the shoulders. It stood on a flat dais.

"Creepy" said Nate.

"It is" agreed Mia, "but also relevant."

"Oh?"

"That's Kūkaʻilimoku, one of the four main Gods of Hawaiian religion. Ku was, among other things, the God of War but also the Guardian of King Kamehameha I."

"So, what better place would the Guardian of King Kamehameha be watching than the King's resting place?"

"Exactly!" Mia said excitedly.

Nate's torchlight traced down from the statue of Kūkaʻilimoku, past the masks, and across to where there were some etchings carved into the wall.

"What's this?" he wondered, walking over to them.

Mia followed her torchlight over the pictures scratched into the wall. They depicted a face with an elongated snout, almost like a dragon, with its head covered in what looked to be feathers. The dragon stood over two people on a dais, one of them seemed to be laying on a table.

"Let me guess, that's Kuka...Kukaili...That's Ku?"

Mia nodded, "It looks like it. See the people next to him? It looks like a sacrifice. If you look closely at the person standing, it seems there is something in their hand. Maybe a club?"

Taking a closer look, Nate shrugged. "Could be. Could be an imperfection in the stone. The "people" are basically stick figures."

"Unlikely" Mia insisted. "What they are standing on. It looks like a luakini heiau, or a war temple. Human sacrifices only occurred in these temples, and only to win wars."

"Human sacrifices?"

"Yes. Ku was the only God to whom sacrifices were made to."

"Charming" Nate said.

Mia shrugged, "That's just how it was back then. No different from the Greeks for Zeus, or the Dahomey Kingdom. Egyptians pharaohs had servants sacrificed so they could serve them in the afterlife and even the Incans performed child sacrifices-"

Nate held up his hands, "Ok, ok. You've convinced me, the question is, how do we get in?"

"The doors could it be stuck?" Mia asked. "I mean it has probably been two centuries since these doors were last opened."

"Maybe" Nate said. "Let's give it another shot."

They stood in front of the doors and braced themselves, "On three" Nate said.

They pushed on his third count, but it didn't give at all.

"Well if they are stuck, they are stuck good" Mia said, frustration evident in her voice. They were so close to an amazing find, yet so far.

"Maybe" Nate said distantly. He was deep looking from the mask in his hand to the door. Then he grabbed the dry pack and pulled out his ever-present brown, leather notebook.

"Hey, shine your light here" he said, indicating the notebook. "Remember when we saw the statue of Ku in Salem?"

"The one you almost destroyed?"

He was flipping through the pages of notes and hand-drawn pictures he had taken and drawn since Mia had employed him to assist in the search, "And we had to flip it over?" he said, ignoring her jibe.

"I remember you swinging on rope and slamming into it and it fell over." She said in a tone that indicated she was not pleased with Nate's methods.

Nate wasn't too happy about it either, he still wore the bruises on his ribs and shoulder from that misadventure.

"While that wasn't the greatest idea in the world, it did give us this." He flipped the journal over and pointed to the page it was on.

Mia shone her torch over it. It showed Nate's sketch of the bottom of the statue of Ku he'd toppled over at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts depicting the same four masks that were laying at their feet.

Initially the search for King Kamehameha's final resting place began over a decade ago in Kamakahonu where he lived out his final days and included his personal shrine, 'Ahuʻena heiau, of the King'. But the years of research and investigations of various sites produced nothing and it was thought that the final resting place of the unifier of the islands and first king of Hawaii would never be found. However, years later a cryptic message found in old research papers was given to Mia indicating Kamehameha was buried elsewhere on the island and when discussing this with colleagues from various backgrounds and museums, she was put on to Nathan Drake and told that "he may be a rogue but he gets results."

Mia got in contact with Nate and all the warnings about him were correct. He was roguish and charming, but he immediately got results. He worked out the cryptic message contained a clue regarding the three giant statues of Ku.

It was a little over a week ago that they had broken into the Peabody Museum due to Nathan's insistence that the statue's contained key information to their search. A proper inspection of the statue during museum hours, and from professional courtesy, bore no clues. That it was just a plain statue carved out of breadfruit tree wood and in reverence to the War God Ku. But Nate, not one to be deterred so easily, realised that any information would be hidden so after he inspected every inch of the statue, he decided it must be underneath it.

They had no success in convincing the Peabody Museum curator to organise to inspect the underside of the statue. In fact, he was, in no certain terms, tired of their antics and asked them to leave before he called security.

So, they broke into the museum after hours and they had no success in trying to push, pull, shove, hit, and leverage the 200 kilogram statue, so Drake hooked some rope over the rafters and tied it to the statue. Then he took a running jump, hoping to use momentum and his body weight to bring it down but instead swung like a pendulum and slammed into it.

It wasn't the best idea he'd had but the weight of his body and the speed created enough force to topple the statue over and reveal some etchings on the base.

The etchings depicted drawings of the sun, a leaf, a spear and a circle with eight protrusions that Mia later determined to be an octopus. Mia immediately dismissed the etchings as nothing but the simplistic drawings of a tribe and they had wasted their time and risked jail for nothing but in Nate's experience anything hidden was almost always a key to something and was adamant about copying down the drawings.

He copied them down in his notebook and then they managed to pull the statue upright using the rope and rafters and a great deal of pulling and, though not exactly placed how it was originally and despite the chunk taken out of the top of the headdress, they escape before any security appeared to investigate.

After escaping in the nick of time, Drake was so excited about the findings that he shut himself in his hotel room for the next day before emerging late one night, thumping on Mia's bedroom door just as excited as he was when he first entered the museum.

Working on a hunch, he had spent all day speaking to the British museum, where another statue of Ku resided, and trying to convince them to send him a photo of what was underneath the statue. They finally relented and he held a photocopied picture of the second statue of Ku and announced they were going to Honolulu.

On the plane, Drake explained that he was certain the two Ku statues held clues to where King Kamehameha was buried but they needed to check the third statue located at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

Lucky for them, Mia worked for the museum and access to the statue was not difficult, although it was met with scepticism when Mia wouldn't explain why they needed to see the bottom of it. She wasn't confident of Nate's expectations but managed to get it done and, as with the others, there were etchings underneath.

After gathering the drawings of all three statues, Nate was convinced he knew the location of Kamehameha's burial location and just over a week later they were now on the verge of a significant Hawaiian discovery.

Mia's initial scepticism that Drake was chasing clues that weren't there had subsided for an ever-growing excitement, for not only finding the old King's burial site, but what it would do for the museum and her career as a researcher.

Her risk in employing Nathan Drake was paying off