by Alex Archer
Bright flares flew from the pipe at both ends and it vibrated within Annja’s grip. She kept it pressed to the bull’s head.
Almost immediately, a mechanism within the pipe slammed into motion and the shrill whir of gears spun through the water and reached Annja’s ears. The pipe became rigid, sticking out from the wall. A little panicked, Annja tried to pull the pipe back only to discover she couldn’t. It had latched on to the bull’s head.
The pipe vibrated again, and this time part of the casing fell away as two lengths thrust out from the pipe at ninety-degree angles. She took hold of one of the lengths that had sprouted from the pipe.
Garin and Roux floated nearby, watching carefully.
Releasing the light, letting it float from her weight belt, Annja took hold of the other length and tried twisting it like a corkscrew because she didn’t know what else to do with it. She tried turning the pipe to the right to no avail, then got the same results when she tried turning it to the left.
“It’s stuck.” Garin swam closer. “Let me.”
Stubbornly, Annja set her feet against the stone wall and pulled.
Snik.
The sound carried well through water, and this was loud enough to be heard through their face masks...and it came from inside the stone. Garin waved his hands and kicked his feet, holding back. Behind his scuba mask, his eyes widened.
Roux held his position, watching intently.
A moment later, as more mechanic thumps and grinding sounded within the rock, the pipe fell free of the bull’s head and a section four feet by three feet slowly swung open. Annja scooped up her lamp and flashed it inside the uncovered area. The door was operated by a mechanical arm powered by clockwork gears mounted on the smooth stone wall inside.
Roux swam forward, adding his light to theirs. “Well done, Annja.”
“If we don’t get killed inside, sure.” Annja put the pipe back in the bag at her belt. “Want to bet that Michalis left his lair and all his toys unprotected?”
Garin gestured for Annja to go ahead. “Ladies first.” He grinned. “Second mouse gets the cheese.”
Annja didn’t care. No one was going ahead of her. She intended to be a clever first mouse. She pushed the lamp ahead of her and followed the bright beam into the side of the island.
30
Aboard Titan, Melina stood with her grandfather and surveyed the images from the small drone they’d launched. The unmanned aerial vehicle sailed briskly above the island and looked down on the lagoon a half mile away.
On the computer screen, five members of Garin Braden’s security force hid in the olive trees around the lagoon. They wore camous and would have been hard to see in the brush except that the UAV’s thermal imaging picked them out of the surroundings easily enough.
One of the men looked up. On the screen, he’d been designated number two.
“Check number two.” Her grandfather peered at the screen. “Normal vision. Magnify.”
The designated guard immediately changed from the reds and yellows against the cooler colors of the forest to a man dressed in camou fatigues and sporting green face paint as the view zoomed in. He was raising a pair of binoculars to his eyes, following the drone’s path.
“Get the drone out of there. That man is suspicious. You’ve been there too long.”
Melina shifted, thinking that the old man and Garin Braden were somewhere nearby, though they had not seen them on the island. She was looking forward to meeting up with them again. This time there would be no escape. They had made good time following Kestrel to her present location. “Roux is in the water.”
The drone operator seated at the control station a few feet away complied with the order he’d been given. The on-screen view dipped suddenly and the leafy foliage blotted out most of the blue sky as the UAV sped across the upper branches.
“We can take them in the water.” Melina pointed at the nautical map of the area spread across the desk in the control room. “It’s a half mile across the island to reach the lagoon, but I can take a team through the water. The journey will be twice the distance, but we have DPVs that will get us there in minutes.”
“Once Roux and Garin Braden see you, they will call for their men.”
“They have five men on the bank of the lagoon. Send another team there to engage them. A surprise sniper attack will put most of them down before we have to risk a man.”
“There are more men aboard their ship.”
“Then take out the ship.” Melina trailed her finger across the map to the position where Garin Braden’s vessel lay in wait off the entrance to the lagoon. “You have enough firepower to easily accomplish that. If you leave at the same moment my team does, then you can intercept them by the time I reach Roux.”
Georgios hesitated only a moment, then nodded. “Be careful. That old man hasn’t lived this long without learning a trick or two.”
The salty taste of her father’s blood filled her thoughts. “My father made a mistake the last time we had him. I will make no such mistake. I will bring you Roux’s head.”
“Then get it done.”
Turning on her heel, Melina radioed the twenty men she’d already selected for her team.
* * *
ON THE DECK less than five minutes later, her wrecking crew assembled around her, Melina strapped a serrated knife to her right calf, caught the APS underwater assault rifle one of her team tossed her, and made sure the waterproof holster for her pistol was properly sealed. The Avtomat Podvodnyy Spetsialnyy had been created in the early 1970s by the Soviet Union for their special-forces teams on underwater operations. The weapon was still manufactured and exported by the Tula Arms Plant in Russia.
Titan yawed slightly on the ocean waves and sunlight glinted into Melina’s eyes. Her team quickly gathered around her, in yellow-and-black dive suits that matched hers. She pulled her hair back, spit into her mask and wiped it clean, then pulled it over her head. Then she shrugged into the air tanks and switched on the regulator, making sure the flow was good. Flicking on the underwater radio, she looked at her team. “Radio check.”
All twenty men gave her a thumbs-up. Behind them, the overland team was already loading into one of the rigid hull boats they’d brought on the expedition. They bristled with automatic weapons.
At the ship’s stern, Melina picked up one of the white Torpedo 3500 DPVs the ship’s crew had brought up from belowdecks. With the battery, the device weighed fifty pounds and was manageable enough. In the water, it was nothing at all. Its top speed was three and a half miles an hour and it could maintain that speed for forty-five minutes. The trip around the island would take less than twenty.
At the stern, Melina looked back. Her grandfather stood on the deck behind the pilot’s cabin and leaned on the railing under the rear boom arm. He grinned at her, looking more piratical than ever.
Melina pitched the Torpedo overboard and followed it down into the cool, blue water. Her team crashed into the sea around her. After orienting herself, she swam to the DPV, grabbed hold and powered it up. Angling her course to take her closer to the island, she accelerated to full speed, leaving a trail of bubbles in her wake.
* * *
SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER, according to the GPS device on her wrist, Melina reached the lagoon inlet. She powered the Torpedo along the channel, cutting the speed only slightly. After checking the GPS again and learning she was only two hundred yards from the bank where the security team had set up camp, Melina cut the DPV’s power completely and turned in the water to face her team.
“Send up the radio relay.”
One of the men pulled a streamlined pack from his shoulders, opened it up and took out a portable marine radio. The depth gauge indicated they were forty feet down. The man filled the flotation device attached to the radio from his air tank till it
swelled up slightly larger than Melina’s fist. When he released it, the device rose steadily toward the surface, trailing an antenna array behind it.
Melina swam over and took the other end of the radio relay. She plugged it into her scuba helmet. “Titan.”
Her grandfather answered at once. The salvage ship’s four diesel engines labored in the background. “Yes.”
“Give us one minute to close on them.”
“Done. Do not fail me, kopela mou. Do not fail your family. Get revenge on our enemies for your father.”
“It will be done.” Melina unplugged the marine radio and handed it back.
The man reeled the antenna back in, bled the air from the flotation device and repacked it.
Melina took her APS underwater rifle from her shoulder and readied it. The weapon carried twenty-six rounds in the unwieldy flat magazine that hung underneath it. The maximum effective distance was sixty feet at a depth of seventy feet. That distance halved at a depth of a hundred and twenty feet. Still, it sprayed steel bolt darts almost five inches in length and was more deadly than a spear gun.
With the rifle ahead of her, Melina swam quickly, searching the water for her prey. A short distance ahead, farther down, a small cluster of lights drew her attention. She angled down, breathing deeply, her heart rate picking up. This time the old man would die, and everyone with him would die, too.
* * *
ANNJA PLAYED THE lamp around the water-filled space, realizing quickly that she was on a spiral staircase. Garin followed her as she went up, staying within arm’s reach. The gloom in the small chamber was complete. Small steps carved into the stone walls cycled up.
“Evidently Michalis preferred a more scenic view.” Annja kicked her fins again, moving up slowly. Lights bounced around her, coming from Garin’s lamp as well as those of Roux and the two security men who had accompanied them in.
“This passageway was widened and the steps were cut into it,” Roux said, “but I think it was already here. Perhaps the lagoon was part of a natural cistern on top of this area, which wore this chamber out of the rock. The uneven width in places makes me think this was part of a natural cave system within the island that engineers took advantage of.”
Only a short distance ahead, a dark opening loomed in the wall. Annja pointed her lamp at it and angled forward. Just as she reached it, a flurry of movement exploded from the shadows and came straight for her. The lamplight caught a momentary glimpse of short, thick tentacles streaking for her face.
She couldn’t get a hand up in time to protect herself, so Annja twisted to one side, throwing her body with as much leverage as she could manage. The tentacles latched on to her scuba mask and yanked her head sideways. Light from Garin’s lamp lit up the thing that had hold of her, but she still couldn’t see it clearly enough to figure out what it was.
It was at least a foot long and seemed to shift colors, matching first the wall, then the water around it, even shifting to match the color of her dive suit. When the creature twisted, wrenching her head, she caught a glimpse of a strangely shaped eye, like a W in a bulb of flesh in what she assumed was its head. Then tentacles blotted out the eye as they slid across her faceplate.
The tentacles seemed to make up half its body, and the other half had lateral fins that undulated. Suckers along the tentacles pulsed against the face mask. A cuttlefish!
Getting an arm up between her and the creature, Annja pushed it away.
Knocked loose, the cuttlefish backed away and flattened against the wall on the other side of the stairway. Annja reached for her sword and pulled it into the water with her. With the blade in her hand, she calmed quickly.
On the wall, the cuttlefish suddenly disappeared. Or, at least, it seemed to. The thing mimicked the color of the stone behind it. If Annja hadn’t known it was there, she wouldn’t have seen it. One of the weird W-shaped eyes stared at her.
“Annja?” Garin swam up to within a few feet of her. He held his spear gun before him, aiming in the general direction of the creature.
“I’m all right.” Annja let the sword vanish and wiped at the thick goo that smeared her faceplate. Most of it slid off. The creature had tried to bite her. She remembered that distinctly, and some part of her knew that would have been bad.
“That was a—”
“Cuttlefish. I know. I’ve seen them before.” Annja took a deep breath and relaxed. “Just never so close up, and never so unexpectedly.”
“Were you bitten?”
“No.”
“Good, because cuttlefish are toxic. They’ve got a strain in Australia that is quite deadly.”
“Pfeffer’s flamboyant cuttlefish, yes.”
Evidently unnerved by the presence of so many invaders, the cuttlefish leaped from the stone wall and shot down the passageway.
Picking up her lamp at the end of its tether, Annja directed the beam into the opening the cuttlefish had come from. The cavity ran back about six feet, tapering to about two feet across at the back. Silt had gathered across the bottom and a few plants struggled to survive among the stones that had probably once formed a wall to close the hole off. It was a good hiding spot for a predator’s ambush, but held nothing else of interest.
Annja finned upward again, conscious of the air she was using and the minutes ticking off her dive watch. Only a short distance ahead, she came to a door made of the same alloy as the clockworks they had found.
31
Shining her lamp over the door’s surface, Annja couldn’t discover any markings or any means of opening it. She looked for another bull’s head, but there wasn’t one.
“It’s not a problem.” Garin floated beside her. “This is why we brought explosives and cutting torches. Trockel.”
One of the security men separated from the others and swam toward them, answering in German, “On my way.” He was already busy rummaging in the backpack he carried.
“Wait. Do not damage the door.” Roux swam up to join Annja and Garin. “Everything we’ve heard of Michalis suggests he was a careful man.” He shone his light around. “This door will be safeguarded against attack. If we force it, there’s no telling what might happen.”
“The Greeks and the Romans didn’t have explosives and cutting torches the way we do now,” Garin argued. “We can get in.”
“And if you’re wrong? What then?”
For a moment, Garin returned Roux’s stony stare. Then he raised a hand to Trockel. The man obediently held his position a few feet away. “Annja? You get to cast the deciding vote.”
“Let’s take a closer look.”
“We’re running out of air. If you wait too long, we’ll have to return to the surface and whatever is down here will go undiscovered.”
“If we make a mistake we could lose what’s behind this door forever.”
Roux pounded on it with the hilt of his knife. The staccato rap sounded solid and immediate. He put his ear to the door and struck the door again. Inside his face mask, he was smiling. His blue eyes cut to Annja. “Do you hear that?”
“There’s no void on the other side of this door.” Annja realized what that meant. “This door is fake.”
“Exactly.” Roux pulled back from it. “Very clever, very tricky man we’re dealing with here. There’s no telling what would happen if you managed to rip the door off those fake hinges, but I’m willing to bet it wouldn’t be good. Especially not in this confined space.”
Annja played her flash beam around the passageway. “There has to be another door, and it has to be within reach of this landing. Michalis didn’t have the benefit of swimming up like we do.” She searched the wall of the landing at eye level. There had to be a lever or trigger of some kind.
“Here.” Garin floated off the edge of the landing in front of the door and pointed to the side.
&n
bsp; Swimming down to join him, Annja directed her light where he indicated. Another bull’s head glinted on the wall. She took the pipe from the bag at her waist and attached it to the mechanism. When the sections sprung out again, she set herself and pulled.
Beside the door and the landing, several stones suddenly jutted out of the wall a couple of feet, making an impromptu staircase that went clockwise this time.
Kicking upward, Annja swam along the revealed steps fifteen feet till she reached a blank section of wall where the steps ended. She immediately searched for another bull’s head and found it on the outside edge of the top step.
Attaching the pipe key again, she pulled and heard metal gears meshing on the other side of the wall. Only this time no door opened up.
“Something’s wrong.” Annja studied the wall, trying to find where the door might be.
Roux swam up beside her, playing his light over the wall, as well. “Perhaps you simply haven’t pulled the locking mechanism out far enough.” He took hold of the pipe key, set himself and pulled, then began twisting. “This one turns.” He turned it to the left, twice.
The wall beside Annja yawned open, revealing darkness within. She anchored herself to peer into the new passageway. On the other side of the entrance, a smaller set of steps curved upward. The passageway here was only six feet across, making for some tight turns.
She pointed her light up the steps till they twisted around on themselves and she couldn’t see any farther. Just as she started to push her head in and follow the steps, the wall to her left vibrated.
Hundreds of metal spikes no bigger around than her little finger shot through the mortise work, filling the passageway and up along the steps, reaching almost all the way across, leaving a safety margin of only three or four inches. The maze of spikes looked like a colony of sea urchins had exploded inside the passageway, filling the area with quills. Three small fish that had been inside the passage writhed on the rods.
Garin sighed in disgust. “It’s a trap. There has to be another door.”