The Mask of Troy

by David Gibbins

  The Russian went limp in Jack’s hands. His mask quickly filled up with blood, his eyes still open behind it, like some ghastly avant-garde artwork. Jack ripped off the man’s mask and hood, spraying dollops of blood everywhere. His nose was a mess of blood and mucus and protruding bone fragments, and his eyes were covered in a film of red. Suddenly they flickered and he bellowed, pushing back from Jack and scrabbling to the far side of the chamber. He still had the knife in his hand and he leapt forward, swinging. Jack swerved sideways and caught the man’s head in a massive swipe with the flat of his hand, pushing it sideways into the wall. He had wedged his feet against the rock, and as he held the man, who seemed to hang there, limp again, he realized that the razor-sharp halite crystals on the cavern wall had driven into the Russian’s head. The man lurched again, snorting blood, his eyes crazed, and dragged his head backwards as Jack pressed on it, leaving a smear of blood and skin along the wall of the chamber.

  Jack let go, and drew back, panting. The man would not go down. The Russian heaved himself half out of the water and stood there, panting, his head a blood-soaked mess, still holding the knife. Jack remembered the miners’ tools Costas had mentioned, on the ledge. He dropped down underwater, reaching blindly, and felt a handle. He wrapped his hand around it and pulled, releasing it from the salt accretion. It was a pick, with a flat, adze-like blade on one side, and a long, flat-ended spike on the other. He reared upwards out of the water, lurching sideways to give himself enough room to swing the pick in both hands. The man lunged again with the knife, missing and staggering back to the ledge. Jack swung the flat end of the pick, catching the man below the left ear, sinking it into his neck. He pulled the blade out and flipped the pick to the spike, bringing it back and swinging again, as hard as he could. The spike caught the man in the same place and went through his neck, protruding out of the other side in a geyser of blood. The man’s tongue lolled out, dripping blood, and he made a terrible gurgling noise, his eyes rolling upwards in their sockets.

  Jack shook and shook until the pick came free, the man’s body flopping like a rag doll. He staggered sideways, finding a better foothold, and then drove the pick again into the Russian’s head. This time it came away easily as the man’s head split open. Jack was bellowing with rage. He struck again and again, until the head was unrecognizable pulp. You bastard. You bastard. Nobody messes with my daughter. He realized he was yelling himself hoarse, bringing the pick down again and again, slower now, his visor flecked with blood. He stopped, and dropped back into the water, panting. He felt sick to the stomach, exhausted beyond belief, but as if a terrible burden of guilt and anger had been released from him. The adrenalin was pumping through him like a massive painkiller. It felt good.

  He sank back into the water, tensing his arms to stop them from shaking, and forced himself to concentrate on his equipment. He had to stay focused. He checked his hoses and helmet. The only damage was the scrape on his suit, and that had not punctured. He was panting hard, too hard, and he tried to calm himself. He looked at his helmet readout, and realized that a red warning light had been flashing, hardly visible with the blood all round. It was telling him that it was time to surface. The rebreather tanks were running low, and they were only a few minutes from crossing the decompression threshold. He checked his wrist computer, and did a swift calculation. Five minutes more would take him to the limit of the safety margin. He dropped back down, looking up to see the smudge of the body on the surface and a darkness in the water that seemed to follow him, swirling tendrils of blood that hit the rocky base of the tunnel and slowly pooled in cracks and fissures. He reached Costas, who was still entirely focused on the bomb, and came up slowly beside him, trying to control his breathing, to calm himself, to slow the sound of his heart, which was still pounding in his ears.

  ‘Problem solved?’ Costas said, without looking round.

  ‘One down, two to go,’ Jack said hoarsely.

  ‘I heard it all,’ Costas said distractedly. Jack saw what Costas was doing, and suddenly forgot about what had just happened. Costas had pocketed his tools and was in the final stages of unscrewing the fuse from the bomb. He released it, held it up and then pocketed it, keeping one hand pressed into the fuse pocket. ‘For my collection.’ He moved his head to get his lamp beam angled correctly, and peered into the socket. ‘Yep, ZUS-40. God damn it. I knew it.’

  ‘Three minutes, Costas.’

  Keeping his fingers in the fuse pocket, Costas whipped out a handful of threaded plugs from his pocket, dropped several until there was only one in his hand, handed it to Jack, pulled out a socket wrench, took the plug back from Jack and leaned over, quickly screwing the plug into the fuse hole. ‘Okay. What happens is this. When I push the bomb out of the hole, it hits the floor of the cavern and arms itself. If it moves again after that, if it’s jolted, it goes off. It’s the only way we’re going to get it out of the entrance to the chamber.’ Without waiting for a reply, he finned back and then upside down, wedging his feet against the ceiling of the tunnel and pressing on the tail fins of the bomb. It tilted, and then slid out of the opening, clanging sickeningly on the floor of the tunnel and coming to rest about five metres down the slope, sliding part of the way.

  ‘That floor’s slippery as hell,’ Jack said. ‘Anything could move it.’

  ‘Okay. You’re in, Jack, then we go.’

  Jack pulled himself into the aperture where the mine had been. The chamber was roughly square, about three by three metres. He looked quickly round. There it was. In the centre of the floor was a black metal box the size of a small suitcase. He reached down to the handle, and pulled. It was unlocked. Someone had opened it. Inside, he saw another metal case, about twenty centimetres across, with a Nazi swastika emblem on the top. He opened it, and stared, his heart pounding like a jackhammer.

  It was there. But it wasn’t. He saw the shape, but only the impression, where the metal case had been formed to fit it. The reverse swastika. The palladion had been there, but it had been removed. The German officer. The story was right. But the Russians, their controller, must not know. He shut the smaller case, unrolled the mesh bag on his waist belt and shoved the case inside, then twisted around and powered out of the chamber, nodding at Costas and swimming hard alongside him away from the chamber, up the passage towards the lift shaft. Ahead of them he could see one of the other Russians, hanging in the water.

  ‘Well?’ Costas said, breathing hard.

  ‘Not there. But it once was. I’ve got the case, which will look convincing. The Luftwaffe officer must have come down here to get it, using the prisoners to shift the bomb, then armed it, maybe to look convincing to the guards, before they executed the Jews and he killed them. He probably dumped the lift cable from the top of the shaft.’ They were more than halfway back to the shaft now. Jack twisted on his back, still finning hard, and looked down to where they had been. The white haze in the water had mingled with the blood from the Russian. He twisted back, then realized he had seen something and turned again, stopping finning. ‘Come on,’ Costas said, pulling him. ‘We have to keep going up.’

  ‘Costas, something awful is happening.’

  Costas stopped too, and they both stared. The body of the Russian was slowly sinking from the air pocket above, a dark shape in the dead man’s float, arms and legs hanging down, a haze of blood where the head had been. It hit the floor, bounced upwards in a macabre slow-motion dance, and then stopped. ‘Forget it,’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Now let’s go.’

  ‘No. Look.’ Jack’s eyes were glued to the body. To his horror an arm lifted up, as if the Russian had come alive again, and then very slowly flopped back. The body began sliding, barely perceptibly. Sliding towards the bomb.

  Jack glanced at his gauges. ‘We can go back. We can wedge it.’

  ‘No way. Going back down there means going beyond our no-stop deco time. And if we had to do a ten-minute stop on the way up, we’d run out of air.’

  ‘The shock wave from the explos
ion would kill everyone in the water anyway, right the way up to the top of the shaft.’

  ‘At least by carrying on and getting out we have a chance. Our Russian might take a breather from his dance of death and stay put. Now come on.’

  They turned and powered back up the tunnel. Jack felt that every pulse of water from his fins was pushing a current back to the corpse, edging it ever closer to the bomb. He dared not look back again. But now there was another problem. The second Russian was barring their way. Jack pointed towards the shape in the bag at his waist, and did a thumbs-up sign. The man took out his knife. Not again. This time there was something wrong. It was the one who had been breathing heavily near the surface. Jack had noticed that he was a terrible diver, useless at maintaining his buoyancy. The man kicked upwards and began to sink, and then injected too much air into his buoyancy compensator, rising up in front of them. He flailed and kicked, nearly hitting Jack, and then pressed his exhaust valve and bled off air from his jacket, sinking down between them again, hyperventilating. Jack glanced down and saw that the man’s tank pressure gauge was less than 200 psi. That meant that his tanks were nearly empty. He glanced at Costas, pointing at the man’s gauge. ‘We may be about to lose another one of our valued colleagues.’

  Costas craned his head up at the ceiling of the chamber, a good eight metres above them. It looked like quicksilver, a shimmering pool in reverse, reflecting his headlamp beam. The Russian’s exhaust bubbles cascaded against it. The man stopped and swivelled round to look at them. He seemed to be staring past Jack, his eyes wide. Jack had seen that look in divers many times before, the look of hypoxia, of someone struggling to breathe, in this case compounded by narcosis and alcohol. Normally he would be unhooking his safety regulator to allow the man to buddy-breathe, but even if he had wished to do so, the rebreather system only had a back-up hose that could be hooked into another helmet, without a mouthpiece. The Russian suddenly turned towards Costas, grasping his arm, then began fumbling for Costas’ hoses. Costas held the man like a vice, staring at him, then pushed him away forcefully, pointed at his depth gauge, then drew a hand across his throat. He pointed up. The man looked, realized there was what appeared to be an air pocket at the top of the chamber and began to fin for it. Jack saw him press the inflator to bleed air into his jacket, buoying him up to the surface but emptying his tank completely of breathing gas. He watched him hit the surface in an explosion of bubbles, and then bob about. The Russian threw off his mask, which came tumbling through the water beside them to the floor of the cavern. He seemed to be struggling with his arms, and was kicking spasmodically.

  ‘How was it the miners cleared methane?’ Costas said. He had unravelled a length of detonation cord and crimped a blasting cap on to it. ‘Should be just enough oxygen from his exhaust up there to give this a good helping hand.’ He activated the time delay and let the cord loose in the water, then ducked under it and pressed the purge valve on his rebreather, sending the length of cord writhing like a snake towards the surface beside the man. ‘Fire in the hole,’ he said. There was a ripple of light and a crack as the cord detonated, and then a flash of orange as the gas in the chamber ignited. The man’s legs trembled for a moment, and then went still. His arms slowly dropped down, hanging lifeless.

  Costas glanced at Jack. ‘Two down.’ They swam to the base of the shaft, and looked up. The third Russian, the one with the Chechnya tattoo, was where he was supposed to be, clinging to the wood on the edge of the shaft about fifteen metres above them. ‘I saw him down here at the base of the shaft to begin with,’ Costas said. ‘Bad idea. He’ll be way beyond his no-stop time. And all that alcohol should help to give him some nice little cramps as he goes up.’

  They began to rise, letting their computers take over and adjust their buoyancy to maintain the optimal ascent rate. Another minute down there and they would have been doing a ten-minute stop on the way up, impossible with the tank pressure they had left. Jack calmed his breathing, taking strong, deep breaths, sensing the change as the rebreather increased the proportion of oxygen in the gas mix, feeling it cleanse his blood. The last ten metres would be on pure oxygen, the critical time to avoid the bends. He looked up. The Russian was rising way above them, far too fast, close to the surface. ‘He must have decided to take us out at the entry point,’ Jack said.

  ‘He won’t be able to move, if he’s still alive.’

  Three minutes later they reached the ten metres mark, where the computer halted them for two minutes. Jack’s mind had been blank for the ascent, as if he knew that contemplating what might happen at any moment with the bomb was simply a waste of effort, when his whole system, body and mind, needed to focus on the battle to keep him from succumbing to the effects of pressure and nitrogen build-up. But now, floating still in the water and seeing the shimmering pool of the surface above, he suddenly, desperately wanted to get out. The shock wave from the explosion would be virtually instantaneous, and they would die here as quickly as they would have done with the bomb beside them. He saw Rebecca’s face again. He had to survive.

  Costas signalled him, and they began to rise, coming out of the shaft into the pool in the chamber. Jack saw the man’s fins where he had pulled himself out and was lying on the edge, one leg drawn up. They both rose out of the water, cautiously. The man was on his side, his tanks still on but his mask and hood pulled off. He was moaning, saying something in Russian. He tried to move, and groaned. Costas crawled up out of the water, snapped up his visor and leaned over the man’s face. He was drooling, one side of his face collapsed, and he stared at Costas in desperation. Costas picked up the man’s regulator mouthpiece, and sniffed it. He crinkled his nose and dropped the regulator, looking at Jack. ‘This man’s been drinking. Should never have gone diving.’

  The man feebly raised one arm. He spoke in heavily accented English. ‘My arm. I can’t feel it. Help me.’

  Costas leaned over him again, took his chin in his hand and twisted it savagely, raising the man’s face close to his own. ‘Remember what you said to me before we went in? I’ll fucking break you before today is over. I remember that. I remember that well.’ He jabbed his other hand at the water, wrenching the Russian’s head so he could see it. ‘Well, Chechnya. This is my world. That’s why I’m walking out of here, and you’re not. You trespass in my world, you die.’ He let go of the man’s head, backed into the water and made a show of wiping his hand on his suit.

  ‘My leg. I can’t straighten it,’ the man continued.

  ‘That’s why they call it the bends.’

  ‘Help me. Please. Help me.’

  Costas paused. ‘Well, Chechnya, you have a choice. With all that nitrogen fizzing in your bloodstream, another bubble will form, a big one, and go to your brain. Maybe it will kill you straight away, maybe not. Maybe you’ll live for hours, screaming in pain, insane. And then you will die. Or you can go back down and join your friends. Going deep, the pressure will ease your pain. And you will drown, an easier death.’

  The man pathetically waved his right hand as if to reach for his regulator, and flapped one fin. ‘Help me get in. I can’t move.’

  Costas sighed. ‘It seems you’ve made your choice.’ He turned to go, wading towards the entrance to the sump, behind Jack. They both crouched through the hole created by the rockfall, and knelt in the water on the other side. They could see a glimmer of light through the water from the pool where they had entered, where they had left Wladislaw only forty minutes before. Costas felt the rock, peering at it, then looked at the man still visible in the background, groaning. He unhooked the remainder of the detonation cord from his gear, coiled it into a crack at the top of the rockfall and crimped a blasting cap on to it. Then he glanced at Jack. ‘Ready?’ Jack nodded. Costas kept one hand on the cap, and stared back through the jagged hole. The man was moaning, his eyes pointing in different directions, sightless.

  ‘Hey, Chechnya,’ Costas bellowed. ‘Happy hangover.’ He clicked the cap, snapped shut his visor
and dropped down into the sump, quickly finning behind Jack up into the green pool. There was a thump and a rumble of falling rock. Costas came up alongside Jack, visor to visor, and they rose to the surface. ‘Three down,’ Jack said.

  ‘Not for a little while yet, I hope,’ Costas said grimly.

  They broke surface. The light bulb was still on. Jack quickly scanned the tunnel up the line of the train track. There was no one to be seen. Wladislaw must have followed his instructions. Good. He dragged himself on to the edge of the pool, then quickly unhooked his hoses and his rebreather unit, slipping it off. He unhooked his helmet and dumped it beside him, and took a deep breath. Costas did the same, then sniffed loudly. ‘It smells better here than when we left. That vodka breath. Phew.’

  ‘How’s your deco?’

  Costas glanced at his gauge. ‘Fine. You?’

  ‘Three minutes margin.’

  ‘My guess is we’re going to go flying. We’ll have to go in the recompression chamber on the Embraer.’

  Jack stood while Costas unzipped the back of his e-suit. He remembered claustrophic hours spent in that chamber, a long metal tube with barely enough room to kneel in.

  ‘At least we can lie down,’ Costas said, yanking on the zipper.

  Jack grunted. He bent down and drew the neck seal over his head, then pulled out his arms. He saw that the suit was still covered in blood. ‘Hard stuff to get off, blood,’ he murmured, turning to unzip Costas.

  ‘Forget it. What you did, you had to do.’

  ‘I don’t have a problem with that. I just mean a ruined e-suit.’