by Sean Ellis
"Go to hell, Grimes."
The large man inclined his head. "Pray that our paths never again cross."
With that, he ducked through the door and escaped into the night. As soon as he was gone, Irene poured out the story of her abduction by the commandos, told how they had scaled the outer wall of the residence, stealthily gaining entry and taking her hostage while Kismet and Grimes talked.
Kismet tried to listen but found that his nerves were too jangled to make sense of her tale. Part of him was still wondering if he had made the correct decision in shutting Grimes out; what if the man truly did have insight into the events that had changed his life that night in the desert? With almost trembling hands, he set the rifle on the table and downed another shot of vodka.
Anatoly joined him, gulping down a similarly copious dose of the spirit. "Kristanovich. Was there something you wanted to ask of me tonight?"
Kismet laughed in spite of himself. "I honestly don't remember."
TWELVE
Despite his fatigue, Kismet's sleep was troubled. His mind would not let go of the things Grimes had revealed, but continued churning them over and over, looking for some bit of information he might have missed that would supply the necessary confirmation. It would have been almost too easy to accept the traitor's statements as fact; indeed, Grimes' assertions fit perfectly in many respects. And if Grimes was telling the truth, then he was standing on the brink of a replay of those events. Even now, Lysette Lyon was poised with a team of CIA operatives, ostensibly to capture Grimes, but what if they were receiving orders from the so-called ‘shadow government' to seize the Golden Fleece as soon as Kismet located it? Had he unwittingly played, once again, into the hands of that conspiracy by trusting Lyse?
On the other hand, Grimes could just as easily have cooked up a deception after reading Kismet's own after-action report from that doomed mission into the desert. If Hauser and his team had indeed been American Special Forces soldiers, then why had they conversed in a language that, more than a decade later, Kismet still could not identify? Furthermore, why had Hauser spoken of Kismet's mother as though he knew her personally?
In the end, he could not make Grimes' statements gel with the facts as he saw them. Grimes remained the enemy, and one of the most basic rules of warfare was to ignore enemy propaganda, even when it sounded plausible.
Anatoly kept watch throughout the night, an old shotgun resting on his lap. Over breakfast the following morning, the big Russian listened patiently as Kismet attempted to explain the events of the preceding night.
"There is much that I do not understand," intoned the Russian. "You tell me that my old friend Petr is alive, but was a prisoner of these spies? And that they have brought him back here?"
"Until we rescued him yesterday," Irene supplied.
"Foreign agents—soldiers--moving illegally through my country. Very bad. Worse that they have threatened my friends in my own house. Why have they done this?"
Kismet sublimated a nagging urge to withhold the full explanation from Anatoly. It was time to show a little trust. "Grimes—the unpleasant fellow you met last night—believes that there is treasure hidden up on the mountain."
"Ah, yes. The Golden Fleece. He spoke of it to you. And do you also believe?"
"It's not where he thinks it is. Peter—Petr—knows where it is. He told me where to find it, and how to get to it. That's where you come in."
Anatoly raised a hand. "A moment, please. If you have rescued Petr Ilyich, then where is he now?"
"Safe. And probably already on his way home."
"And how was this accomplished?"
Kismet abruptly realized there were still a few things he wasn't ready to give up. Before Irene could reply, he answered in a decisive tone: "Petr Chereneyev is a problem solver. He escaped once before. It's probably better that we don't know where he is, or how he plans to get out."
Anatoly nodded slowly. "Of course. A pity though that I could not see my old friend."
"After we recover the Fleece, you could leave with us," Irene suggested. "You could start a new life for yourself in America."
Anatoly chuckled at the idea, but offered no comment. Instead, he turned his attention back to Kismet. "So, where do I, as you say, come in?"
"The artifacts that Petr Ilyich discovered weren't up on the mountain. There was an old camp up there, probably a mining camp, but it was abandoned. The relics came from the sea. Petr showed me where he found them."
"I do not understand. From the sea? Did he drag the bottom with hooks and nets?"
"No. He used an old diving apparatus and walked on the bottom of the Black Sea."
Anatoly registered disbelief. "It would appear that my old friend had more talents than even I was aware of."
"The suit and compressor are in the cellar. He told me how to use the equipment, but I need a boat to operate from. That is where, as I say, you come in."
The big Russian stroked his shaggy beard thoughtfully. "Well then. We should get started."
* * *
Had anyone paused to notice, they would have observed their neighbor Anatoly, along with his two visitors, shuttling between the dock and his home. By midday the equipment was loaded and tested, and Kismet announced his readiness to commence. Anatoly cast off the moorings, coaxed his trawler out of its slip and headed for open water.
The fisherman navigated according to the chart Kismet had given him, while the latter remained in the bow, fastening air lines to the compressor. Despite their age, both the suit and the compressor proved to be in remarkably good repair. Chereneyev might have been a daredevil in his own way, but he took pride in his work and apparently valued safety. The suit was a little tight, but not uncomfortably so, and Kismet donned it with help from Irene.
The journey to the dive site was brief. The weather was clear and the sea calm when Anatoly went aft to drop anchor. Kismet scanned in all directions, assuring himself that no one was watching. The shoreline and the towering mountains stretched across the eastern horizon, but the village was an indistinct speck. No other boats were visible, although Kismet knew that the fishing fleet had departed from the harbor hours before.
To give the illusion that they were simply fishing in the remote area, Anatoly lowered his nets into the water. Meanwhile, Kismet made the final step in putting on his aquatic suit of armor: the helmet. Cast of solid copper, the critical piece of headgear was typical of the hard-hat dive rigs that had been in use before the invention of the Aqualung and self-contained breathing apparatus. Its creators had simply called it tryokhboltovoye snaryazheniye, literally "three-bolt equipment" because of the fact that the helmet was secured to the chest piece by three bolts spaced evenly around the apparatus at roughly chin level. The helmet and chest plate together weighed nearly eighty pounds. It looked like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up, and in fact an earlier version of it had been in use during Verne's lifetime. Nevertheless, for extended dives with long decompression periods, the old hardhat system was superior to SCUBA, and the three-bolt suits had served the Russian Navy's purposes well into the twentieth century.
As soon as the metal globe enveloped his head, Kismet experienced a wave of trepidation. The helmet was a tangible manifestation of the fact that he was about to plunge into a wholly foreign and potentially fatal environment. His only means of communicating with the surface took the form of three small orange floats, which he would release to signal either his need for a gradual ascent, or an emergency withdrawal from the depths. The words Kerns had uttered the night before now echoed in his head with ominous finality. The thought of being trapped below and suffocating, or being forced to make an ascent too rapidly and suffering the painful effects of the bends, or of losing his cognitive abilities to nitrogen narcosis, now seemed not simply to be requisite risks, but unavoidable certainties.
Kismet had SCUBA dived before and would have preferred the independence of carrying his own supply of air, relying only on himself to survive the unpredictab
le variables of a descent, but that just wasn't practical. Not only was there the obvious problem of acquiring the equipment, but the depth to which he would be diving was at the limit of what was termed recreational diving. At the depth Peter Kerns had indicated, bottom time for a SCUBA diver using compressed air was measured in mere minutes; in fact, with decompression stops, the dive would more than exceed the capacity of what he could bring along in two tanks. Most deep diving of this sort was now done with helium-oxygen mixtures, which were much safer but required even more in the way of specialized equipment and topside support. Like it or not, Peter Kerns' old school diving technique, despite the inherent risks, was simply the only option under the circumstances.
A tapping on the left porthole distracted him from his rising apprehension. It was Irene. "Are you going to be alright?"
Kismet turned his head to face her. The barrier between them muffled her voice. Her concern was evident, yet Kismet could see that she really had no idea of the dangers he was about to confront. He wanted to scream, to tear the metal and rubber from his body. Instead, he forced a smile and nodded. Anatoly started up the compressor and a rush of oily smelling air filled the helmet.
"Great," he murmured to himself. Without further delay, he ambled across the deck to the nets and lowered himself into the water.
As soon as he was beneath the surface, he felt better. Though the dampness from the water could not penetrate his suit, its cold quickly seeped in, calming his nerves.
Underwater, everything was different. The compressor was still audible, chugging and hissing to provide him with breathable air, but the undersea world was a place of perpetual green twilight and serenity. He released his hold on the net and allowed himself to sink. Anatoly was controlling his descent from the boat. A cable attached to a winch was gradually played out to provide him with a measured rate of descent, as well as a lifeline back to the surface. Even so, the bottom quickly rushed up to greet him.
At this depth, darkness reigned; very little light from the surface could penetrate. When he looked up, Kismet had no difficulty seeing the keel of Anatoly's trawler, with its nets spread out behind it like drably colored plumage. But that light could not pierce to the shadows around him. When his booted feet touched down, sinking several inches into the sediment and kicking up a tremendous cloud of silt, he discovered even greater respect for Petr Chereneyev, who had made this same journey without support from allies on the surface. When the cloud finally settled, Kismet looked around at the alien landscape where he was the intruder.
Faint silhouettes of the rocky outcropping surrounded him, a veritable labyrinth of obstacles. After a few moments, Kismet became conscious of fish swimming through the maze. Even in this inhospitable place he was surrounded by life.
As he surveyed the submarine environment, he gradually became aware of an unusual light source off to the west. The quality of the illumination was negligible, but Kismet knew that nothing in the natural world could account for it. Kerns' comment about golden light shining from beneath the sea echoed in his head. He hadn't really expected to witness any such manifestation, but if the Golden Fleece was indeed the source of the light he was now seeing, then he would have little difficulty locating it.
A step in that direction created yet another obscuring silt cloud. Rather than wait for it to subside, he proceeded more cautiously, taking long, deliberate steps. By this method he was able to keep silting to a minimum while making good progress toward the light source.
In terms of actual distance, the light was very close. Kerns' coordinates had been right on the mark. Nevertheless, distances in the underwater realm were exaggerated. It took Kismet almost half an hour to cross a few hundred yards. From time to time he would gaze upward toward the idle trawler, and was amazed to find that its position in relation to his seemed unchanged. The cable connecting him to the boat was still being played out as needed, but he was beginning to wonder if he had actually gone anywhere.
The amount of time he was spending below was beginning to concern him. Kerns had outlined decompression recovery times for him on the previous night. Kismet knew that minutes spent under the influence of the sea's tremendous pressure might require hours of gradual ascent to avoid the bends—bubbles of gas in the bloodstream that caused painful cramps or even death. In spite of the risk of further obfuscation due to the silt clouds, Kismet strove to pick up his pace.
He was quickly rewarded. The glow soon became a ray of golden brilliance guiding him through the underwater labyrinth. He passed from behind a large outcropping and got his first look at the place where Petr Chereneyev had discovered the relics of a forgotten age.
The rocky maze gave way to a broad plain, broken up by a scattering of small rocky nubs that barely poked out of the soft mud. Chereneyev's footprints were still visible, as were the depressions in the sediment where he had removed artifacts. As Kismet's eyes roved across the plain, he made out dozens of holes, and realized that the artifacts Harcourt had showed him were merely the tip of the iceberg.
As he continued west, his gaze began to focus on the source of the golden illumination, directly ahead. Another of Kerns' caveats occurred to him as he crossed the expanse. The old Russian had warned him of unusual activity from the fish; he had used the word "aggressive." Kismet was now seeing exactly that kind of behavior. The area before him was thick with schools of fish. Smaller fish from the herring family formed a virtual curtain, sparkling in the unnatural golden light, while larger fish—dogfish, rays and even enormous sturgeon, all of which should have been devouring the smaller prey creatures—cut harmlessly through the traffic, content to patrol the region without feasting. Kismet realized that he was becoming the object of their interest when a large stingray seemed to erupt from the silted seafloor. The creature's barb hovered dangerously close as it circled his chest, and Kismet decided it was time to bare the blade of his kukri. The ray's flanks rippled menacingly and then it retreated into the silt cloud.
A few more steps brought him close enough to discern the outlines of a sunken wreck laying on its side, half buried in silt, in the midst of the yellow brilliance. The lack of distinctive features led Kismet to believe that he was looking at the underside of the vessel. He noted also that the sediment, which had built up around the craft, did not significantly eclipse the golden light; it seemed to shine evenly from the hull of the wreck, passing through the silt as through a veil of gauze.
Suddenly something struck him from behind and sent him stumbling. He struggled to recover his balance, but the weight of the helmet took him over and he ended up face down in the muck. He pushed himself up, but saw only a dark shadow pass over him and faint eddies in the swirling murk. With one glove he smeared away the algae that clung to the front view port of the helmet.
When he got to his feet, he realized that the crowd of bottom dwellers had moved away from the wreck and begun orbiting a new axis: him. Like a squadron of fighter planes, the larger fish seemed to be circling, preparing to dive-bomb their target. Before he could raise the knife in his own defense, an enormous sturgeon, like some prehistoric monster from the fossil record, veered toward him.
Instinctively, he tried to dodge the creature. The fish smacked into his shoulder, but did not succeed in knocking him down. As it flashed past, he slapped at it with his empty hand, striking it in the gills. Enraged, and possibly injured, the sturgeon retreated hastily toward the wreck. With its flight, the attack ended. Kismet remained ready to slash at the next assault, but the schools held their distance. He took a tentative step toward the wreck, then another.
His earlier assumption about the vessel lying on its side was soon confirmed. As he drew closer, he could discern the outline of the keel just above the mud line. Kismet was not an archaeologist by trade, and certainly not an expert on maritime history, but he had studied Jason and the Argonauts during his classical education and knew enough about ships of the era from various contemporary sources to recognize a Greek galley about fifty feet long a
nd twenty feet broad of beam—more a big boat than a ship in the modern sense. But no galley in myth or history looked quite like this one, ablaze with golden brilliance. The illumination was indeed shining from the skin of the craft, which to Kismet's surprise, did not appear to be wood.
A few more steps brought him close enough to place a gloved hand against the ship. As he pressed experimentally against the surface he could feel a tingling in his fingertips but no heat. When he moved his hand away, he saw the indentations left behind, as though he had pushed into stiff clay. Pondering this observation, he started walking toward what he presumed to be the stern of the craft.
The coating on the hull was uniform, like a layer of paint. The natural world was filled with luminescent fungi, plants, insects and fish, but Kismet was certain that some other phenomenon was at work. The overlay on the ship was smooth and consistent, whereas lichen growth would adhere to a more chaotic pattern and would certainly have rubbed off when touched. There was only one explanation: the ship was coated in luminous gold.
Kismet was also not a metallurgist, but he did know a thing or two about the corrosive power of salt water. Even in the Black Sea, where the salinity was about half that of the world's oceans, time and oxidation would have corroded any other substance, leaving a wooden ship to decay into pulp. Only gold could resist ravages of the sea for so many centuries. The vessel had evidently been overlaid with gold in a manner similar to the helmet fragment Harcourt had displayed in Kismet's office. What he could not fathom, as he rounded the stern and got his first look at the topside of the ship, was why the ancients had covered their sea-going craft in one of the heaviest substances known to man, and why that normally inert element was glowing like an incandescent light bulb.
The galley held yet another surprise. Situated aft, but extending forward to dominate roughly a third of the craft, was an enclosed superstructure. He had been expecting an open craft; essentially a big rowboat. The ancient Greeks, despite their mythic reputation for adventurous wanderings, had never perfected the art of sailing on the open sea. They had preferred to row, assisted by a single square sail, within sight of the shore by day, and would beach their vessels at the onset of night. Their ships, much like Viking longboats, had little in the way of creature comforts. Even the description of the Argo in legend suggested an open craft, not a ship with a superstructure. Kismet found himself wondering if Kerns' discovery perhaps had nothing do with the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The answer, he reasoned, must lie within the enclosure.