by Sean Ellis
Kismet recalled something Dr. Leeds had told him during their first encounter, that the snake was an ancient symbol of life. In the Bible, a snake had tricked Eve into eating from the forbidden fruit, an action which had led to banishment from Eden and the Tree of Life. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a snake had devoured a similar plant with the same properties, depriving the hero of the prize of eternal life.
Now it seemed they would be the one’s snatching the prize of life from the serpent’s devouring jaws.
* * *
Despite Kismet’s reluctance—and Higgins verbalized objections, there seemed little choice but to accept Russell’s offer. The major would be able to provide them with resources that might help them pinpoint the location, but more importantly, the soldiers would keep Leeds off their back. That would be of particular importance if they actually found the Fountain, though when he discussed it with the major over coffee the following morning, he omitted mention of their ultimate goal, saying only that they were looking for a cavern that might be an important archaeological site. Russell seemed to accept the explanation without question as he arranged for a convoy to take them south. The major and his three guests rode in the relative comfort of a government issue passenger van, while a platoon of soldiers from Russell’s battalion, part of the National Guard’s 78th Homeland Response Force, bracketed them in Humvees.
About an hour into the five-hour journey down the Interstate however, the officer finally indulged his curiosity. “So, I’ve played along this far. Care to let me in on the big secret?”
Kismet gazed back at him, impassive. “What do you want to know?”
“This is a treasure hunt, right? Your ‘archaeological’ site...” He made air quotes. “I get that people are willing to kill for money. What I don’t buy is that you want it bad enough to take that chance. So what’s really going on?”
Kismet felt Higgins’ eyes on him as well as Russell’s. He glanced off into the distance at the scenery flashing by.
They had just passed Macon, Georgia, which Kismet had been surprised to learn in his research had once been inhabited by the same mound building culture that settled near Lake Jackson. Had those early settlers brought the secret of the Fountain of Youth to American? Were they the “Serpent priests” Leeds had spoken of, carrying the Seed of the Biblical Tree of Life, or something like it?
He put on his best poker face and answered. “I haven’t deceived you, major. I’m following up on a lead that someone sent to my office, regarding an otherwise undiscovered cave—a natural wonder—that may also have special historical significance. You'll have to ask Dr. Leeds why he thinks it’s worth killing for.”
Russell continued to watch him, unconvinced, but did not press the point. “You served, right? Army?”
“Yes.” Kismet was nonplussed by the change of subject. “Army intelligence during the first Gulf War. It was ages ago. Didn’t end well. Why?”
“Basic military wisdom: know your enemy. Now I know who the enemy is, but without knowing why—his motivation—I can't very effectively defend against him. I think you know more than you are telling. Now, my orders don’t require me to know the ‘why’ but I think that, sooner or later, you're going to have to tell me what makes this cavern so important.”
It was early evening when they arrived in Gainesville, where they spent the night at a budget motel just off the Interstate. Russell’s men set up a rotating guard schedule that not only maintained security on the vehicles but also watched access to their rooms.
The following morning, they headed east, into the Ocala National Forest. A remote campsite near Juniper Springs was selected, and while the soldier went to work erecting four GP, Small tents, Kismet reviewed topographical maps of the nearby lake country to establish parameters for their search. If the entrance to the cavern lay at the “snake’s mouth” as Fontaneda’s map suggested, then they would have to concentrate their search at the point where the St. Johns River flowed into Lake George. On the map, the tributary looked eerily similar to a serpent’s forked tongue.
* * *
In another site, not far from the lake and just to the north of the army encampment, another group was establishing a campsite for the night. To a curious observer, they appeared to be clients of a commercial fishing tour operator, but there were two people in the party who looked completely out of place among the plaid shirts and ball caps that were de rigueur among the rest of the group. One was an attractive blonde woman in her early thirties, who might have been lovely were she not so bedraggled by days of travel at an exhausting pace. The humidity had caused her golden hair to frizz about her head like a halo, and she seemed to be attracting more than her fair share of interest from flies and mosquitos, despite the fact that she maintained an almost constant cloud of cigarette smoke around her. The winged insects weren’t her only problem either; she was the only woman in a group of men that ordinarily wouldn’t have even been in the same zip code as someone with her pedigree, and like a forbidden fruit ripening on the tree, she had unfortunately attracted their attention. Only one man in the group seemed to be immune to her charms and despite her initial ambivalence about him, Elisabeth Neuell now found herself irresistibly attracted to Dr. John Leeds.
She had felt a similar attraction to Kismet, though for much different reasons, and for a long time thereafter, she considered what might have happened if she had stayed with him. That of course hadn’t been possible; too much had gone wrong between them. Kismet had always been, at best, nothing more than a means to end.
She had felt similarly about Dr. Leeds at first, but perhaps because he, unlike Kismet, had not succumbed to her repeated seductions, she now found herself obsessed with the idea of having him. Him, and the thing he sought—the secret of Eternal Life.
They had worked well together. It had been she, and not the occultist, who had recognized the clue in Joseph King’s letter to Kismet’s agency, and realized that it was a literal reference to a cemetery. Without Kismet's interference, they would almost certainly have learned the Fountain's location from Joe and Candace King. And while it was Leeds’ money that was paying for their army of redneck renegades, it was her feminine presence that had staved off desertion and mutiny, particularly following the twin disasters at the cemetery and again on the train. Three had been killed and several more wounded. One of them had been arrested and had probably already spilled his guts to the authorities. Her flirtations were about the only thing that kept the rednecks from bolting.
More important even than that, it was she that knew where Kismet and his military escort were going next. “I’ve got a few secrets of my own,” she’d told Leeds. “People in high places who are willing to do whatever I ask.”
That explanation wasn’t strictly speaking the truth in this case, but it was close enough.
Elisabeth envied Leeds’ power, but she too had power, the power to control men—to command them with nothing more than a subtle promise of sexual reward. She rarely fulfilled that promise; to do so would break the puppet strings from which her servants dangled.
But her particular brand of power was a slippery thing. This adventure was proof of that. Dressed in jeans and a man's t-shirt, unable to regularly bathe, check her makeup or keep her hair under control, her visual appeal was diminishing.
There were ways to mitigate that, but it made her think about the real enemy, the irreversible hand of time. Her natural beauty had launched a successful movie career and attracted the notice of one of the wealthiest men on earth, but all of that had been years ago. Botox injections, collagen treatments, even human growth hormones and cosmetic surgery...none of these extraordinary measures could sustain her beauty...her power...more than a few years, a decade at most. The Fountain of Youth would change all of that. It would sustain her power indefinitely.
She hadn’t believed in the Fountain at first; she had other reasons for aligning herself with Leeds. It was not Leeds’ persuasive certitude that had eventually convinced her that it mi
ght be real, but rather the fact that Nick Kismet was looking for it too...and seemed poised to find it first.
She found Leeds, dressed as always in black and seemingly impervious to the oppressive humidity, standing at the edge of the camp, gazing south in the direction of the other expedition. His arms were folded across his chest, but she could see a steel hook, barely visible beneath his left elbow, where his right hand had once been.
Leeds had been disdainful of his doctor’s attempt to save his maimed extremity, and as soon as the wound had been stitched, he had asked to be fitted with an artificial hand. The doctor had tried to explain patiently that the injury would have to heal completely—a period of several weeks if there were no complications—before they could begin the equally lengthy process of crafting a custom prosthetic and teaching him how to use it. Leeds rejected the advice, and in the end, the doctor had fitted a simple cuff with a fixed hook over the swollen stump.
Even his disfigurement, and the lethal hardware, Elisabeth found strangely appealing.
Noting her approach, he turned to face her. “Everything is in place,” he observed, a tight smile visible on his face. “You know, my dear, I do believe we would have saved ourselves a good deal of effort by simply leaving Kismet alone, and letting him lead us to the Fountain.”
“Are you admitting to a mistake?” she asked, incredulous. Could it be that the ever implacable and well-rehearsed Dr. Leeds, was cognizant of his human fallibility. If so, perhaps he had other human weaknesses and appetites to which, despite all evidence to the contrary, he was vulnerable.
Leeds’ smile frosted over, but did not vanish. “All things considered, no. He is an unpredictable, dangerous variable. As long as he lives, he threatens the success of our venture. Yet, as fate seems to have given him the lead, I am content to wait.”
“And if he finds it first?”
“My dear, why do you suppose I have been so diligent in trying to exterminate him? At every step he has proven more resourceful than I would have believed.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “It’s enough to make me believe the things they say about him are true.”
Then he shook his head as if the thought irritated him. “It does not matter. I am everywhere. Kismet cannot find the Fountain unless I permit him to, and when he does, I shall be there to take it away.”
* * *
The next morning, the search began in earnest.
Fontaneda's map gave Kismet a good approximation of where the cavern lay, but even if it was precisely accurate, there was a lot of ground to cover, and no indication at all what they should be looking for. The entire region was little more than a thick layer of limestone known as karst, shot through with innumerable wormholes, most of them flooded sinkholes and cenotes. Did the Fountain lie in one of them? Fontaneda’s diary seemed to indicate a dry cavern, but that account had been written more than three hundred years earlier; who could say how the topography had changed. To find it, they would have to employ a brute force approach.
They organized in the fashion of a military patrol. The platoon deployed in an echelon formation, spread out in a line that ran north-south, while cutting across the area described by the map from west to east, and then back again in overlapping search lanes. The soldiers carried their M4 carbines, but on Russell’s orders, the weapons weren’t loaded. They were in a national recreation area, and while they could explain away their presence, even equipped for battle as they were, as a training exercise, live ammunition would raise suspicions and draw unwanted attention to their presence. If they ran into trouble, the weapons could be loaded in a few seconds. Kismet hadn’t been able to replace his Glock, but Russell had provided him with an army-issued M9 Beretta. His kukri had also been returned.
The first pass followed the edge of Lake George, from the point where it began to curve north and ended at the St. Johns River. The ground was saturated and in some places, they had to wade through knee deep brackish water. Enormous waterlogged cypress trees blocked their path at every turn, throwing the carefully organized search into disarray. To make matters worse, because Kismet had no idea what exactly they were looking for, it was necessary to stop and investigate every sinkhole or depression or unusual lump in the ground to see if it was a clue left by Fontaneda. By the third pass, they were unable to see the lake and the only way to stay on course was by constantly consulting a GPS device.
With the sun settling in the west, they finished their last pass of the day and hiked back to the campsite, tired and dispirited. Russell dispatched two of his men to make the drive into town and bring back pizzas, while Kismet laid out a topographical map of the area and used a highlighter pen to record their progress.
“Doesn’t look like we’ve accomplished much,” Annie observed, looking over his shoulder.
Kismet regarded her thoughtfully. She seemed a very different person than the wisp of a girl he’d wrestled with back on The Star of Muara. He knew that her bout of claustrophobia in the tunnel under the cemetery had left her feeling embarrassed and vulnerable, but there was something else. She seemed to be clinging to her father, as if afraid to let him out of her sight. Though Kismet was only now realizing it, she had been like that since the incident in Central Park, and he wondered again what had happened to them that day.
“You’re right,” Kismet admitted. “I think all we did today was eliminate the most unlikely location.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Look at where the lines cross.” The previous night, he had transferred the information from the highway map to this smaller scale map, doing his best to accurately pinpoint the trajectories Fontaneda had used. The result had been a diamond shaped area, the northern tip of which lay out in the midst of the lake. Most of the diamond covered the inflow of the St. Johns River and its maze of tributaries. Only a very small portion of the diamond fell within the search grid they had employed. “We should have been looking here: in the serpent’s mouth.”
“In the river?”
Higgins shook his head. “And me without my gummies.”
Russell surveyed the map as well. Though he had not been made privy to the original map tattooed on Fontaneda’s skin, Kismet had seen no advantage to keeping him out of the loop regarding the area of the search. “We can use boats,” he suggested. “I’ll make the arrangements.”
“Beats the hell out of tramping through the woods,” Kismet said.
“Or wading through the muck,” Higgins added.
Russell took a long look at the map, as if committing it to memory, then clapped Kismet on the shoulder. “Tomorrow, we’ll find it. Whatever it is.”
* * *
The next morning, Kismet was surprised and a little dismayed to learn that the boats Russell had arranged for were inflatable three man rafts. The rubber boats were more portable than hard-shelled craft like canoes, but more vulnerable to hazards hidden just below the surface, such as fallen tree branches. Eager to get on with the search, he kept these concerns to himself.
They hiked to the lake shore and inflated the boats using portable battery operated pumps. There were six boats in all, accommodating eighteen of them altogether—the rest of the platoon would remain at the camp. Kismet and his friends were assigned to separate boats, each with a two man escort, and the entire element was split into two groups to double their effectiveness.
Russell’s boast of finding the goal that day proved overly optimistic. Kismet’s concerns about the risk of using inflatable soft boats however, proved prophetic.
It was a little after four o’clock when Kismet and his escort were just paddling out of a minor creek—so tiny that it did not even appear on the detailed topographical map—when the little boat snagged on something.
At first, Kismet thought they had merely grounded on a submerged rock, but the audible hissing noise warned that the situation was far more critical.
“Damn it,” raged the soldier at the front of the raft. “I missed that.”
Kismet felt a shudder pass thr
ough the boat they back-paddled away from the snag. A submerged root shifted beneath the murky water, visible for only an instant as the water came alive with bubbles of air escaping from the ruptured air cell.
Kismet didn’t think the raft would sink. The inflatable air cells were all independent, so one leak would not compromise the craft’s buoyancy. At the very worst, it would lose some rigidity and take on a little water. Unconcerned, he was about to resume paddling when the soldier nearest to the leak panicked, scrambling away from collapsing cell.
Water suddenly poured into the boat as the undamaged section of the raft became overloaded. The shift caused everyone to pitch forward, and the hasty soldier tumbled into the creek. As he struggle to avoid being likewise dislodged, Kismet realized that the something was moving in the water all around them.
“Snakes!”
“Son of a bitch!” The soldier who had fallen in screamed at almost the same instant, splashing frantically. Amid the froth of white water, Kismet saw a dark, writhing mass fall away from the man’s wrist.
Water moccasins!
Kismet’s heart lurched into overdrive as he became aware of more of the squirming shapes. He couldn’t tell what was a snake and what was just a shadow, but for a moment, they seemed to be everywhere.
Something moved near his foot.
The other boats in the party were already paddling over to help. Russell had his pistol out and was searching for a target, but Kismet barely noticed. At least one of the deadly vipers was in the stricken raft with him, squirming in the water just inches from his leg. Meanwhile, all around the boat, the water was alive with dark wriggling shapes. Before he could move, the man in the water was attacked again.
“Help him!” Annie cried from another boat. She started paddling furiously, as if she might, all by herself, somehow reach the struggling soldier and save him.