Serpent's Kiss

by Alex Archer

  Annja knew about the marine archaeologist’s template for site recovery, but she also knew Lochata hadn’t been asking her. She sipped water and waited.

  “Sure,” one of the Indian men said. “He wrote out a study of what happens to a ship that’s gone down and what you can expect from a salvage job. What happens to the ship itself, the materials it’s made out of and what to expect if the shipwreck has been disturbed in the past by other divers or natural phenomena.”

  Lochata smiled in obvious pleasure. “Very good. And that’s exactly what I want you to remember while we’re down there.”

  The professor was also a certified diver and had stated that she would be diving, as well. After seeing Lochata deal with the hardships of the Shakti excavation, not to mention the tsunami, Annja didn’t harbor any fears about the woman. Lochata was quite capable of taking care of herself.

  “Before we go through that shipwreck, provided it’s out there and we find it,” Lochata went on, “we’re going to film it and document its present conditions.”

  “Won’t the tsunami have disrupted it?” the Nigerian asked.

  “Without a doubt,” the professor answered. “We’re not going to get the best look we could have at this site, but we’re going to make sure we do the best we can.”

  “This is not a treasure hunt,” Shafiq interrupted.

  “I heard there was gold down there,” one of the Indian men said. “I was told she—” he nodded at Annja then “—found some gold figures and some coins.”

  He’s well-informed, Annja thought warily. Of course, information like that could be expected to fly through a port.

  “Gold has been found,” Shafiq told them. “And I’ll have you remember that while we’re working that site, we’re working under the umbrella of the ASI. Professor Rai is their representative in this matter.” His eyes turned hard. “If anything goes missing while we’re out there, I’ll see you jailed. You have my word on that.”

  “No prob,” the man said. “But people are talking about this. We might not be the only people working that area.”

  “We will be,” Shafiq said. “All I have to do is make a radio call to the navy and we’ll have reinforcements in place in short order. In the meantime, I’ve hired men aboard this boat who know how to handle weapons.”

  “I was just saying,” the man said defensively.

  “We go slowly,” Lochata said. “That’s how we best learn what history has to teach us.”

  The man nodded.

  “Muckelroy’s model tells us a lot of what we can expect as we sift through the debris,” Lochata said. “Of course the tsunami will have altered some of that. The first thing we want to discover is why the ship went down. Many ships aren’t wrecked. They were abandoned and scuttled because they’d outlived their good years of service.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely in this case,” the German said. “They wouldn’t send a boat to the bottom if they knew it had treasure aboard.”

  “The people who sank it might not have known,” Annja said. “Captains and quartermasters often had hiding places aboard their vessels.”

  “In the same way the pirates and smugglers do now,” Shafiq said.

  “Yes,” Lochata said. “How the ship went down will tell us a lot of what we need to know.”

  “Do you even know what kind of ship you’re searching for?” the Indian asked.

  “No,” Lochata answered. “I hope that’s one of the first things we discover. If it wasn’t scuttled, the ship could have been beached somewhere then slid off into the shallows a long way from where it started out. But there have always been merchant wars and pirates in this area. I think we’re more likely—since gold is probably aboard, as well as the skeletons that were recovered in the sail canvas—to find that the ship was sunk either in battle or as the result of a storm.”

  “If that’s the case,” the Indian said, “there could be more than one ship down there.”

  Lochata nodded. “That’s what we want to find out.”

  DESPITE HER FATIGUE, Annja could barely sleep that night. Since he had the necessary equipment to permit night sailing, Shafiq continued sailing.

  As she lay in the hammock, swaying gently with the boat’s motion across the waves, she knew her mind was too busy to allow sleep. With a sigh, she gave up.

  COOL AIR SWEPT in from the sea and caused Annja to wish she’d brought a jacket. She stood in the stern and gazed up at the full moon. Dark clouds scudded across the bright lunar face.

  “Miss Creed.”

  Startled, Annja turned toward the voice and found Shafiq seated in a camp chair at the stern railing. The orange coal of his cigar glowed briefly and lifted his ebony features out of the shadows.

  “Captain.”

  “What are you doing up?”

  “I’m restless. I got a good night’s sleep last night,” Annja said.

  “You also worked hard today.”

  Annja shook her head. “I guess I’m excited.”

  “I suppose that’s allowed,” the captain said.

  Annja shivered.

  Shafiq reached into a duffel bag at his side. “Here.” He tossed her a wool jacket. “It’s clean.”

  “Thank you.” Gratefully, Annja pulled the jacket on and felt instantly warmer.

  “Do you always get this excited?” Shafiq asked.

  Annja thought about it. “You mean, before I get a chance to look at something that’s probably vanished from the minds of men for hundreds or thousands of years?”

  Shafiq grinned ruefully.

  “Yes,” Annja answered emphatically. “I get this excited every time.”

  With a brief nod at the sails overhead, Shafiq said, “I feel the same way every time I take this ship out onto the salt.” He rolled his broad shoulders. “If I ever lose that feeling, I’ll have to find something else to do.”

  Annja leaned on the railing. Out in the distance she spotted luminescent pools of jellyfish colonies. Moonlight kissed the occasional flying fish as they glided across the waves and dropped back into the silvery sea.

  “I know what you mean,” she replied.

  “What do you hope to find?”

  “The ship,” Annja said. “Answers to questions history has asked but never answered.” She turned back to Shafiq, leaned her hips against the boat railing and smiled. “But that’s not what I expect to find. Only what I hope.”

  “Then what do you expect?”

  “A ship that went down several years ago with interesting trinkets aboard.”

  “Gold trinkets,” Shafiq reminded her.

  “Gold doesn’t impress me much.”

  Shafiq laughed. “Then you’re among the minority, Miss Creed.”

  “Call me Annja.”

  The captain hesitated a moment, then nodded. His cigar glowed. “Gold is the god of many men.”

  “Gold is a metal,” Annja said. “Nothing more. It was prized because of its scarcity, its beauty and because it didn’t corrode or rust like most other metals did.”

  A grin split Shafiq’s face. “You take the romance out of our little exploration.”

  “Platinum was prized more,” Annja said. “It was even more scarce. Silver was important, too, but the sea could claim it.”

  “I know. Saltwater dissolves silver. Gold could be recovered from the sea, but silver—if left down long enough—disappeared.”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s hope they were carrying more gold,” Shafiq suggested. He paused, as if thinking about whether he should continue the discussion. Then he made up his mind. “You’ve heard of the continent that so many people believed was lost under the sea out here, haven’t you?”

  “Lemuria,” Annja answered immediately and grinned. “The land of the lemurs. That was a theory that came out in the nineteenth century. Geologists and biologists at the time believed that Madagascar and India were once part of a larger continent. They were trying to explain the biodiversity of the lemur and rock formation
s found in both areas. So they came up with Lemuria, named for the animal. They believed it was a continent or at least a land bridge that had at one time connected the land masses in this area. Other scientists thought that Lemuria might have extended across the Pacific Ocean and touched Asia and the Americas.”

  “You choose not to entertain the possibility?” Shafiq seemed amused.

  “No. There are some land bridges that can be proven. The Bering Strait, for instance. The land bridge there was called Beringa. It spanned more than a thousand miles and connected Siberia and Alaska, which explains the migration of the North American people.”

  “Then why couldn’t Lemuria have existed?”

  “Some land bridges were real,” Annja said, “but not most of them. Those theories were developed before the theory of continental drift. And before we learned much about plate tectonics. Sea-floor spreading accounts for a lot of the plant and animal migrations.”

  “I find such subjects quite fascinating,” the captain said.

  “Good. I’m glad it’s not just me.”

  Shafiq’s cigar glowed again. “We should reach the dive site tomorrow morning. But before we do, you really should get some sleep.”

  Annja nodded, stripped off the woolen jacket and tossed the garment back to him.

  Shafiq caught the jacket and folded it neatly. “There is another place out here that you might want to keep your mind open about,” he said quietly.

  “What place?” Annja asked.

  “Maybe scientists have given up on the idea of Lemuria, but those who trade in myths and legends still talk about an island that once existed out here. It was known as Kumari Kandam, the Sunken City.”

  22

  Seated in the small galley with her notebook computer, Annja read through the responses her request on the archaeology boards had prompted. Captain Shafiq’s information on the subject of Kumari Kandam was limited to tall tales he’d grown up with. Annja had posted a question to find out how much information was readily available.

  Even though she’d researched the area where the Shakti excavation had been, she’d only targeted history and legends surrounding that culture.

  Kumari Kandam, as it turned out, was a whole new kettle of fish.

  The dhow continued slicing through the waves. Most of the crew was on deck making final preparations to the equipment. Shafiq expected to drop anchor within the next two hours. That would put the time at shortly after 1:00 p.m. There would still be plenty of daylight hours to begin searching for the shipwreck.

  There were a lot of postings, but not much offered anything significant until one got her attention.

  I’ll bet you’re going to get a lot of responses to your question.

  Kumari Kandam is part of reptilian conspiracy. See, there are a number of people—not me—that believe there’s actually a lizard people that lived in that time. Or maybe they’re still living among us.

  Don’t know if you’re familiar with the Reptoid Conspiracy.

  Annja wasn’t, but the name alone conjured interest. She slathered blueberry jelly on a fresh-baked biscuit and kept reading.

  The Reptoid Conspiracy is basically a belief that if the meteor that had brought about the Ice Age hadn’t hit the Earth, the dominant species would have been reptilian, not mammalian.

  Some paleontologists believe the Troodon, a small bipedal dinosaur, was destined to become the dominant species instead of Man. From the bone structure of recovered skeletons, paleontologists also believe that the Troodon’s features were gradually changing. Their vision was definitely more binocular-like than any other dinosaur at the time. And they had partially opposable thumbs.

  Several of those bones have been found in Montana. Others were found in eastern Europe and western China, which definitely puts them in your neck of the woods.

  Some people also believe that the Reptoid Conspiracy can be attributed to alien DNA threaded into the dinosaur DNA.

  Terrific, Annja thought. That’s all I need to add into this. Hints of an alien conspiracy would turn her search for the sunken ship—if it still existed—into a three-ring circus. The pirates would quickly be joined by UFOlogists. She read the rest of the message.

  At the heart of the theory, you’re dealing with aliens or forgotten dinosaurs that are more human-like than anything we’ve ever seen.

  Anyway, thought you might like to know that. Post what you learn. Curious minds are waiting.

  Annja finished her biscuit and sipped her tea. Her mind worked constantly as she tried to sort through the material she’d been given and had turned up. When the Internet connection was interrupted, she adjusted the microsatellite receiver on the table. The connection came back online.

  So, she mused, are we looking for a lost ship? Or a lost world?

  “DEPLOY THE FISH,” Captain Shafiq ordered.

  From the stern, Annja stood in the hot sun and watched as one of the crewmen picked up the “fish.” The side-sonar drone looked like an old V-2 rocket, or maybe a spaceship from 1950s science-fiction pulp magazines. It was three feet long and had fins at the bottom.

  The crewman tossed the drone overboard. The Casablanca Moon crept along before the breeze. A side-sonar scan couldn’t be done effectively at speed. The towing cable that attached the drone to the side-sonar terminal paid out as the device settled into the water. Buoyant, the drone floated on the surface and immediately trailed the dhow.

  A second hull-mounted side-sonar unit was forward of the ship below the waterline.

  Lochata, seated under a canvas tarp Shafiq had ordered hung, stared at the terminal. The unit looked like Annja’s notebook computer but was thicker. The viewscreen glowed.

  “We have a signal,” Lochata announced.

  Annja retreated back to the shelter of the tarp and felt the immediate change in temperature from the deck to the shade.

  The screen showed the computer-assisted representation of the sea floor. The black-and-white image looked a little grainy, but objects, large objects, could be made out easily.

  “Nervous?” Lochata asked as she watched the viewscreen.

  “A little,” Annja admitted.

  “You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t,” Shafiq said.

  “Good to know I’m human,” Annja replied.

  Shafiq laughed. “We’re treasure hunting. Nothing makes a man feel more alive than that.”

  “Not treasure hunting,” Annja corrected. “Relic hunting.”

  “Either way,” Shafiq replied, “the process is the same. It’s us against the sea. And the sea doesn’t like to give up her secrets.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re sure about the GPS coordinates?”

  Annja nodded. She’d taken them with her GPS locator that night and recorded them in her computer, as well as her journal.

  “Then it’s just a matter of hurry up and wait.” Shafiq sighed. “We’ll run the search pattern here, then go out farther to sea as we need to. Or another place closer to shore. Wherever you think we might get most lucky.”

  The search pattern was hard, tedious work. They had to constantly reverse the boat and bring her around to sail back and forth in parallel lines. When they’d covered a big enough area, all carefully charted using the GPS locator on board, they would sail back over the same area in perpendicular lines.

  “It’s going to be a long haul,” Shafiq said. “You might as well make yourself comfortable.”

  Annja took one of the folding metal chairs from nearby and sat. She hated that she didn’t have anything else to do. But sitting and waiting, gazing over Lochata’s shoulder at the black-and-white imagery on the side-sonar screen was part of archaeology, too.

  “WAIT.” Annja pushed up from her chair and looked at the viewscreen. But whatever she’d thought she’d seen was gone.

  The crew leaned in. Only a few of them were required on deck while the Casablanca Moon ran the mile-long search pattern.

  All they needed was a trail.

  �
�Did you see something?” asked Paresh, one of the young Indian divers.

  “I don’t know,” Annja said honestly. “I thought I saw a shape there on the ocean floor.” She sat at the computer beside Lochata. The terminal posted real-time imagery, but it fed into an external drive on the computer that allowed direct image transfer. External drives were swapped out as needed.

  Annja brought up the images, then rewound the copied video loop. Less than a minute later, she had the image.

  Everyone except Lochata looked at it. The professor concentrated on the newest images.

  On the computer screen, Annja froze the image and studied it. It looked bulbous against the light-colored sand of the sea floor.

  “I don’t know,” Paresh said. “It could just be a brain coral. Perhaps even a rock.”

  Annja knew that was true. But it was also the most promising shape they’d seen since taking up the hunt. More than that, she needed to do something.

  “It would take some time to turn the boat around,” Shafiq said.

  “There’s no need.” Annja stood. “What’s the current depth?”

  “One hundred feet,” Shafiq answered immediately.

  “I’ll dive.”

  A FEW MINUTES LATER, Annja wore scuba gear and flippers. After checking to make certain her regulator was working, she sat on the railing.

  Paresh joined her. Shafiq had assigned the young man to accompany her. Annja didn’t mind. The buddy system was the easiest way to avoid trouble underwater.

  She checked the GPS locator around her wrist, made certain her equipment bag containing a flashlight and underwater camera was attached, shot Shafiq a thumbs-up, took the shark stick one of the crew handed her, then toppled backward over the railing and toward the Indian Ocean.

  23

  Hands extended to break the surface tension, Annja hit the sea cleanly. The Casablanca Moon’s engines became muted as the water filled her ears.

  Paresh entered the water a few feet away from her. He slid neatly through the water and righted himself with a couple of practiced flipper movements.