The Minoan Cipher (A Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Adventure Book 2)

by Paul Kemprecos

  Hawkins felt a dryness in his throat as he imagined being trapped with Kalliste in the water-filled sphere. “Okay, Abby. This was a very big deal. Falstaff is in bad shape, but may be salvageable.”

  Calvin returned from talking to the captain. “We’ve got two blips on radar, both beyond the effective range of a Spike,” he reported. “No aggressive movement from either one. The captain hailed them on the radio. Both are fishing boats that he knows. I’m going back to the pilot house and keep watch in case someone starts moving in on our perimeter. How long will it take if we have to get the ROV on board in a big hurry?”

  “Around five minutes if nothing goes wrong.”

  “That might work if I’m right about the shooter using a Spike. We’ll see him moving in on us.”

  “And if you’re not right?” Abby said. “What if they used something with greater range than a Spike?”

  “We’ll never know what hit us.” Calvin flashed a wide grin and walked away.

  “Sometimes I wonder about Calvin,” Abby said with a shake of her head.

  “Navy SEAL humor. If you say things may go wrong they’ll always go right.”

  “I hope so,” Abby said, sounding unconvinced.

  Hawkins pointed to the screen. The ROV had stopped in front of the bow.

  “What is that?” Abby said.

  “A carved figurehead. Kalliste said the bird was a common motif on Minoan ships.”

  “Wow! Damn it, Matt, this ship is the Holy Grail you talked about.”

  “Only thing better would be if she’s carrying the real Holy Grail.”

  He moved the ROV up and over the figurehead, then brought it down to within a few feet of the deck, moving the vehicle from bow to stern. He wanted to give Abby a sense of how large the ship was. He wheeled Minnie around at the upturned stern, then moved the vehicle back to hover above the large tapered object he’d seen on the first dive.

  The object was partially covered with sand, which he blasted away using the vehicle’s turbines like twin leaf blowers. He made a number of passes, bringing the ROV down again and again in swooping dives. It was a tricky maneuver, but after a few minutes enough sand was cleared to reveal the entire object.

  “Hooyah,” Hawkins said, uttering the SEAL war cry. “We got ourselves an old-fashioned diving bell.”

  Abby tapped the screen with her fingernail. “Can you get closer to that section?”

  Hawkins brought the ROV to within a few inches of where the bottom flared out of the bell’s curved surface.

  “I can see writing,” Abby said. She read the words engraved in the metal band that ringed the bottom. “It’s French. Dernier and Fils. Does that mean anything?”

  He shook his head. “It gives us something to go on, though. The guys who built something this sophisticated must have had a substantial operation going.”

  Abby pointed to a dark mound about a foot from what would have been the bottom of the bell.

  “Is that an amphora?”

  “Let’s take a look.” He ran the vehicle in circles until the twin thrusters had excavated a channel around the perimeter of the diving bell to reveal several more objects.

  Hawkins stared at the screen. “Those aren’t amphora.”

  “Then what are they?”

  Hawkins struggled with a way to explain to Abby that the objects visible in the ROV’s lights were diving helmets and suits, and their design suggested that they spanned hundreds of years.

  “Abby, you are not going to believe this.”

  Calvin had a case of jangly nerves. He walked around the deck and scanned the horizon in every direction. Seeing nothing, he went back to the pilot house and asked the captain if radar was still picking up the fishing boats.

  “Good news,” Captain Santiago said. “They’re moving away.”

  “Anything headed in our direction?”

  “Nothing closer than twenty miles.”

  He went on the deck. Miguel was doing a good job as ROV tender. Everything seemed to be going as planned, but his gut was telling him that the sooner they got out of there the better he’d feel.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Hawkins recognized the metal globe studded with small circles as an old dive helmet. A few feet away lay an enclosed cylinder rounded at one end. Next to the primitive dive apparatus was a bulbous dive suit that resembled the out-sized armor built for King Henry VIII.

  The metal Michelin man was a Neufeldt and Kuhnke diving-suit. The predecessor of the modern-day atmospheric diving suit that’d been used successfully between World War I and the 1940s. The equipment lying between the ribs of the ship had been state-of the-art, and the best underwater technology of its day had met its match at the bottom of the sea.

  Abby was a trained diver. She knew exactly what she was seeing on the monitor.

  Speaking in almost a whisper, she said, “It’s a graveyard, isn’t it?”

  “I’d guess at least a dozen divers made it down and stayed down.”

  He moved the ROV from suit to suit.

  “That helmet probably dates back to the 1700s. The most recent piece I see was used in the 1940s. The other stuff comes from centuries in between the two.”

  “If that’s the case, people dove on this wreck over a period of two hundred years,” Abby said.

  “Right about that, Ab. The first level of equipment dates to the dawn of deep diving technology.”

  Abby frowned. “Why did the dives stop as the technology was getting better and safer?”

  “My guess is that World War II got in the way. Cruising in the war zone would have been a high-risk proposition. Paper deteriorates if it’s been exposed to conditions at sea. Maybe the charts marking the position crumbled away.”

  “That’s possible, but the intensity during the dive period is impressive. They tried and tried again, even after losing divers.”

  Hawkins nodded. “With every significant advance in equipment, someone gave it a try and died.”

  “But why make this dangerous dive over and over?”

  “Wish I could answer that question. We’ll go over the video later. Calvin’s pacing the deck. Something’s bothering him. His instincts are usually on target. I’d better get Minnie topside.”

  Abby pointed to the screen.

  “What’s that?”

  The rectangular object lay a few yards from the jumble of dive suits.

  Hawkins brought Minnie around to the boxy object—its surface was covered with dark encrustation.

  The twin arms on the front of the submersible extended like a forklift. Hawkins moved the ROV forward until the tips of the arms were under the box, then powered the thrusters. The arms slid under the box, raised it off the bottom then tilted back at an angle. The box tumbled into the collection basket and Minnie began its ascent to the surface.

  When the attack came, it was by air. Calvin squinted through his binoculars at three helicopters headed straight for the salvage boat.

  He shouted at Hawkins. “Choppers. Eleven o’clock. Bring Minnie up now!”

  Hawkins responded with a command to the ROV to increase speed, then called out to Miguel to be ready with the crane.

  Moving with a surreal calmness, Calvin unsnapped the cover to a large suitcase he had muscled aboard the fishing boat that morning. Inside were two mainstays of the SEAL armory; a CAR-15 and a shotgun. He removed the rifle, checked the load, and squatted on the deck using the wheelhouse as cover.

  The choppers were coming toward the boat in a line. He sighted the CAR-15 on the lead helicopter.

  Hawkins called out that Minnie was at the surface. The vehicle rolled in the waves around ten to fifteen feet from the boat. Miguel lowered the cable but it was impossible to snag the eye-bolt because the clasp kept whipping back and forth over the moving ROV. Hawkins kicked off his shoes, climbed onto the rail and launched himself into the water in a shallow racing dive.

  He quickly covered the distance to the vehicle and grabbed on to a sled runner. Then he reach
ed up with the other hand and hooked his fingers on the edge of the plastic housing. The captain had been watching from the pilot house. He edged the boat closer to the vehicle.

  The weight of Hawkins’s body tipped the vehicle and he struggled to hold on. The clasp dangled a few feet above his head, but it swung out of reach. When the cable swung back, he leaped for it, fell off the ROV, grabbed the clasp with one hand, the cable with the other and held on with every bit of strength he could muster.

  Miguel was quick to react at the winch controls. Hawkins was lifted into the air, then lowered onto the ROV. He snapped the clasp onto the eye-bolt. The cable went taut and the ROV stopped rolling. Hawkins straddled the vehicle like a boy on a dolphin and held onto the cable as the ROV rose from the water. The crane swiveled and stopped when its load was over the deck.

  Abby reached up and grabbed on to a runner to stabilize the ROV. Instead, she was lifted off her feet and swung back and forth like the pendulum in a grandfather clock until Miguel skillfully lowered the vehicle, and its two passengers, safely to the deck. Captain Santiago gunned the engine, and the boat slowly picked up speed.

  The unmarked lead helicopter broke out of formation and flew in a wide circle around the boat. After a nerve-wracking minute or so, the chopper veered off, flew back to the wreck site and hovered with the others in a holding pattern.

  Two pellets dropped from the belly of the lead helicopter and splashed into the water. The helicopter darted off and the second one moved in. Two more objects fell. The third chopper followed suit.

  There were two thuds and the water above the wreck site rose in foamy mounds that exploded into twin geysers. Four more explosions followed at close intervals.

  The helicopters banked off and flew back the way they had come. The clatter of rotors faded and the choppers soon disappeared from view.

  Calvin stood up and lowered his rifle.

  “What just happened?” he said.

  Hawkins pictured the ocean bottom. Ancient timbers thrown everywhere. Falstaff’s passenger sphere now nothing but shards. The diving bell and all the other wonderful antiquities had been transformed into scrap metal.

  “They bombed the living crap out of the wreck site,” he said.

  “I got that. But why?”

  “Haven’t got a clue, Cal. Let’s see what we got in return for all the money we’ve thrown into the sea.”

  Hawkins asked Miguel to give him a hand lifting the box out of Minnie’s basket. The young man was strong, but he failed to get his fingers under the edge. As they pulled the box out, it slipped from his grasp.

  Hawkins jumped out of the way. The chest barely missed smashing his toes and thudded onto the deck. The lid jounced off from the impact and something fell out.

  Hawkins got down on his knees and examined the object, which was circular and around two feet across. It looked to be made of bronze, fashioned into a round metal frame that enclosed a number of smaller disks and gears. What he first thought were scratches in the metal turned out to be script and pictographs.

  Abby knelt beside him and ran her fingers lightly over the engravings.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Damned if I know,” he said. He looked off toward the wreck site where the water still boiled and steamed from the explosions. “But I’ve got the feeling that it’s something really, really important.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Kalliste knew it had been a mistake to accuse her superior at the cultural ministry of being destroying her country’s cultural heritage. Too late. Winged words, as Homer would say, had already taken flight. Not that her outburst wasn’t justified. The official, whose name was Papadokalos, had set her off with his haughty dismissal of her Spanish expedition.

  “Madame Kalchis goes to find what she says is a Minoan ship. What does she have to show for her work?” he said, speaking as if she weren’t even in the room.

  With his pink face, razor cut black hair and mustache, and his habit of looking down his nose when he spoke, Papadokalos encapsulated the smugness of many male colleagues. He got his position thanks to the influence of his brother-in-law, a minister of Parliament who had voted to cut archaeological budgets. The cuts had spared the jobs of their own do-nothing relatives on the payroll.

  She tried to moderate her temper.

  Speaking in a calm voice, she said, “Perhaps Mr. Papadokalos is unaware that the expedition did not cost the Greek government a single Euro. I worked on my own time. A television network paid for the boat. The American engineer volunteered his expertise and equipment.”

  “But failing to find a single artifact cost us our prestige.”

  “What prestige? The Greek archaeological establishment is the laughing stock of Europe.”

  An angry murmur came from the half dozen ministry bureaucrats gathered in the conference room at the Greek Archaeological Museum in Athens. It was no secret that the country’s debt crisis was crippling their archaeological reputation.

  A threatened strike of security guards almost shut down the Acropolis. The ministry had lopped thousands of people from the payroll, closed monuments and museums and cut back hours at others. Even the country’s archeological jewel, the museum they were sitting in, was operating with a third of its staff.

  Kalliste’s own position hung by a thread. Yet, she would never consider pandering to Papadokalos.

  When he said, “As you can see, your intemperate remarks have upset your colleagues,” she lost it.

  “Their anger is misplaced, and should be directed at ministers who are allowing foreign investors to build hotels and roads that are destroying our heritage.”

  He lowered his chin into the flesh around his neck. His eyes narrowed in a tight squint.

  “Are you implying that I am responsible for this desecration?”

  Kalliste knew Papadokalos was stuffing his Swiss bank accounts with kickbacks earned for approving the fast-tracking of construction projects on ancient sites.

  “I am implying nothing of the sort, Mr. Minister. I am accusing you and your government cronies of cultural vandalism that surpasses even the worst acts of that English bastard Lord Elgin, who vandalized the Parthenon. Consider this my resignation.”

  She stood and pushed her chair back, then marched for the door and slammed it behind her. Her heart thumped like a pile driver as she strode through the museum corridors. She emerged into the Athenian heat and noise. Hailing a taxi, she barked out the address then sat back in her seat and stared out the window, fighting to get her emotions under control.

  How did I ever get into this crazy archaeology business? She fumed. Stupid question. She knew exactly how. Her grandfather. He worked the land, producing delicious olive oil from his grove on the northeast side of Crete. It was in those olive groves that he unearthed the ancient artifacts that had fascinated her as a little girl and led to her insatiable quest for knowledge of long dead civilizations.

  Recalling the startled look on the minister’s pink face at her accusations, she began to calm down. By the time the taxi dropped her off at her apartment complex in the fashionable neighborhood of Kolonaki, Kalliste felt like herself again. Her sixth floor apartment had a view of Lykabettus Hill. Kalliste would miss her work, but she wouldn’t starve to death. Her parents, both successful professionals, had left her a sizable inheritance, and her late husband had made sure she was well taken care of in his Will.

  She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she did both. When her tears stopped she poured herself a healthy shot of Metaxa brandy. She had drained half the glass when she got a text message on her phone from Hawkins. He was trying to Skype her.

  She powered up her computer and Hawkins’s face appeared on the monitor.

  “Glad I found you at home,” Hawkins said. “I’ve got some interesting news.”

  Kalliste was eager to tell Hawkins about her resignation, but she was curious about the serious expression on his face. “Me, too. But you go first, Matt.”

  “I�
�m calling you from a boat on its way back to Cadiz. Captain Santiago took us out to the wreck site. We were able to put an ROV in the water.”

  “That’s more than interesting, my friend. What did you see?”

  Hawkins described the holes punched in the hull of the Sancho Panza, and Calvin’s theory of a missile strike. “We found Falstaff not far from the salvage boat. The sub was in pretty good shape. Then we took another look at the ship, itself. The object near the stern is definitely an antique diving bell.”

  “I’m stunned. That’s truly amazing.”

  “Even more amazing are the objects we found near the bell. Dive gear that goes back centuries. Helmets and pressure suits, indicating multiple dives made on the wreck. It appears that none of the divers made it back alive.”

  “That would suggest that the wreck’s location was passed along for hundreds of years.”

  “Exactly my take on it. Someone knew about the ship long before we did.”

  “I can’t wait to see the photos and video.”

  “I’ll send the footage along to you for analysis.”

  “Wonderful!” She clapped her hands. “This couldn’t have come at a better time. I just quit my job. This is the material I need to persuade the television network to fund a full-fledged expedition to salvage the wreck. I’ll call Lily Porter immediately.”

  “I wouldn’t do that just yet,” Hawkins said.

  Hawkins told her about the attack helicopters.

  Kalliste was almost numb with grief. “You’re sure everything was destroyed?” she said, looking for a ray of hope.

  “The barrage was pretty intense,” he said. “It’s not all bad news. Minnie brought us back a present. It was in a water-tight bronze chest we found on the ship.”

  He held the artifact up in front of the camera, and rotated it slowly to give Kalliste a full view of the other side. She gulped down the rest of the Metaxa, excused herself, and went to the bar. She poured out a double shot of brandy and carried it back to her computer table.