The Man of Bronze

by James Alan Gardner

  So I gave myself nine minutes. Nine minutes of racing from terrace to terrace, setting up lenses. Then a final dash to the escape tunnel, where dozens of light beams converged with blowtorch intensity. The blockage was almost clear . . . but we had no more time to wait. Over Ilya’s protests, I picked him up in a firefighter’s lift and threw myself at the opening.

  Ice in front of me, fire behind: a blast of heat as we entered the area where the lens lights merged. I slammed against the frozen obstruction, smelling acrid fumes as my parka smoldered. Then the cold gave way and I stumbled up a steep, shadowed tunnel. Clouds of steam accompanied me: melted snow that had flash evaporated under the focused beams. I blundered fog blind up the tunnel; the barrage of light receded behind me, but the heat didn’t. Near-boiling mist soaked my face, obscuring my vision and slicking the stone under my feet. If I slipped, off balance with Ilya’s weight, we’d both hit hard on the rock—maybe even tumble down the slope, back into the fierce burning light.

  And the explosion.

  We were nearing open sky when the bomb went off. All my complaints about jungle-hot steam seemed trivial in the face of the skin-searing fireball that burst up the shaft behind us. It threw Ilya and me the last few paces, tossing us out onto oozy mud that had melted under earlier gushes of heat. Even so, the flaming eruption that reached the surface could only have been a tiny fraction of what ripped through the cavern below. It was no fifteen-megaton blast—nothing to make seismographs dance around the world—but the ground beneath us shuddered, and I dug my fingers into the mud to hold on.

  Nearby, the frozen lake cracked. Its flat sheet of ice collapsed; Urdmann’s bomb must have ruptured the cavern’s roof under the lake. A slurry of mud, ice, and near-frozen water gushed down into the caves, filling them after all these years: blotting out the murals and all other traces of the underground civilization. Perhaps some vestiges would survive—I’d pass the word to archaeologist friends who might like to mount an expedition—but I doubted there’d be much to find. Any remaining mammoths, saber tooths, and other monsters would be drowned in the deluge . . . nibbled by fish and reduced to gnawed bones, just like all the other prehistoric carcasses that turn up each year in Siberia.

  Another Tunguska enigma.

  I helped Ilya to his feet. Slightly burned, our parkas in tatters, we started back to the copter.

  8

  THE SARGASSO SEA:

  ABOARD UNAUTHORIZED

  INTERVENTION

  Two days later—give or take a few hours lost to time zones, jet lag, and the international date line—I stood on the deck of the good ship Unauthorized Intervention, tossed by the North Atlantic.

  According to maritime registries, Unauthorized Intervention was a private yacht owned by Lord Horatio Nelson-Kent, Viscount of Aylsford, retired rear admiral of the Royal Navy. According to Lord Horatio, the ship was a man-of-war, loyally serving the Crown whether the Crown liked it or not. UI sailed the world in search of trouble—pirates to hunt, atrocities to quash, shipwrecked sailors to rescue—crewed by thirty stalwarts like Lord H. himself: ex–Royal Navy or ex–Royal Marines, retired but still fighting the good fight.

  Don’t get the wrong impression. These weren’t old fogies spending their twilight years pretending to be heroes. Unauthorized Intervention’s crew were hard, experienced men in their fifties or slightly more, tougher than most young bravos half their age. Each had his own reason for leaving the regular services, but none did so out of frailty. Some were put off by the military bureaucracy; some had grown tired of “personality conflicts” with younger officers; some couldn’t stand “those idiot politicians” who’d “never worn a uniform” but were now “forcing changes down everyone’s throat”; some had simply grown bored with routine and had shopped around for a change.

  Lord Horatio enlisted them all in a new type of service: his private go-anywhere commando squad, “protecting Her Majesty’s interests” on land and sea. If such a team had been assembled by Lancaster Urdmann, they’d just be malignant thugs, looting and wreaking mayhem wherever they could get away with it. Lord Horatio, however, was a grand old man in the finest English tradition. Like Churchill, like Nelson, like leaders all the way back to Arthur, Lord H. was a military genius who clung to the noble code of “doing the right thing.” Also like Churchill and the rest, he was a swooping mad eccentric who might do anything on a whim . . . such as saying, “Of course, Lara, it sounds like a good bit of fun,” when I asked if he’d sail me into the most haunted part of the Sargasso Sea.

  Sargassum is a brown seaweed that floats on the ocean’s surface, most notably in a swath of the Atlantic that starts in the Bermuda Triangle and reaches halfway to Africa. This is the Sargasso Sea: more than two million square miles of water calm enough for Sargassum to accumulate. Early sailors worried the sea might have places where weeds grew so thick they could trap passing ships, but individual Sargassum plants seldom clump together. They just waft loosely like leaves on an autumn pond.

  Still, the Sargasso Sea has its share of doomed vessels. Any ship that goes derelict on the Atlantic—whether the crew dies of thirst, starvation, storm, disease, inept navigation, or any of the other dangers that have plagued mariners since humans first plied the waves—gradually drifts toward the Sargasso. Currents carry things to the region, then peter out . . . as if the Sargasso were a nexus of ocean flows, a magnetic place that attracts all loose flotsam. Some call it the graveyard of the seven seas; but from the deck of Unauthorized Intervention, it looked and smelled more like a sewage dump.

  Night was falling as I gazed over the waters. This close to the equator, the sun set quickly—a big change from Siberia, where dawn lasted two hours and dusk the same, with no time in between. I turned to say as much to Ilya, who sat nearby in a deck chair . . . but he’d fallen asleep, thanks to powerful painkillers prescribed by a doctor in Alaska. (For reasons known only to global airline schedulers, flying by way of Anchorage worked out to be the fastest route from Tunguska to Bermuda, where we’d boarded Unauthorized Intervention.)

  I watched Ilya breathe for a few moments, then bent to make sure he was all right. If I’d had my way he’d be resting in some hospital, but he absolutely refused. He wasn’t the sort to stay quietly behind while I followed Urdmann’s taunting invitation to a “return engagement in the Sargasso Sea.” Even if Ilya was too injured to take an active part in the hunt, he wanted to be close when Urdmann went down. Reuben had been Ilya’s friend too . . . and there was also the matter of the bullet Urdmann had pumped into Ilya’s leg. I’d decided I had no right to stop Ilya from coming along. Besides, Unauthorized Intervention had medical facilities as good as any army field clinic. I straightened the blanket over Ilya’s legs and silently assured myself he’d get all the care he needed.

  “He’ll be fine, my dear,” Lord Horatio said. He stood on my opposite side, watching the sunset: a grizzled leather-skinned man in a dark gray uniform that blended into the twilight. I’d known him all my life—he’d taught me to tie bowline knots when I could barely walk—and since I’d turned twenty, every year on my birthday he gave me the greatest gift he could imagine: yet another invitation to become the first female member of Unauthorized Intervention’s crew. Each year, I had to say no . . . with a kiss on his wind-rasped cheek and a whispered, “Thank you, but I can’t. Not now. Not yet.” Though I’d visited the ship several times—a few days in Hong Kong, a week near the Falklands, an unplanned two hours when we happened to run into each other on Krakatoa—I’d never taken part in one of Lord H.’s “quiet little operations.”

  Not until now. Now we were headed into dangerous seas: where the Sargasso intersected the Bermuda Triangle. Last known location of the bronze man’s lower leg.

  Once upon a time—400 B.C. or earlier, according to Reuben’s notes—the leg had been a secret treasure of Carthage. The city’s priesthood had used their bronze talisman more cautiously than the shamans of Tunguska; Carthage chose a look-but-don’t-touch approach that saved t
hem from Siberian-style degeneration. Still, the leg’s influence gave its owners an advantage over their neighbors. In the course of a few centuries, Carthage grew from a small North African town to a major Mediterranean power: a rich city-state, one of the greatest trading ports of its day, with outposts reaching from the Middle East to Spain.

  Too bad for Carthage it shared the region with another rich city-state, equally adept at trading and expansion: the feisty Republic of Rome.

  The two cities began battling each other in 264 B.C., at the start of what’s called the First Punic War. The fighting continued off and on for more than a century until in 146 B.C., Rome finally came out on top, crushing its enemy’s army and navy. To make sure Carthage never caused trouble again, Roman legions demolished the city and scattered the people; but the night before Rome’s scorched-earth invasion, Carthaginian priests loaded their most sacred treasures onto a fast trireme and sailed off under cover of darkness.

  One of those treasures was the bronze leg, pulsing with arcane power. Perhaps that fluky power was what allowed the galley to slip past the Roman fleet blockading Carthage’s harbor . . . but even magic has its limits. The treasure ship was spotted during its escape and pursued westward by a Roman patrol. The chase stretched for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond into the Atlantic. Finally a storm arose, during which the Romans lost their quarry . . . and that was the last anyone saw of the leg for more than a thousand years.

  In 1710, a half-drowned pirate washed ashore on Florida’s Dry Tortuga islands, claiming that he and his men had sighted a genuine trireme in the midst of the Sargasso Sea. The galley floated at the center of a gridlocked flotilla of ships, some many centuries old. Naturally, the pirates investigated, thinking the ships might contain treasure . . . but they never got close enough to find out. When they came within a few hundred yards, the pirates were suddenly mobbed by “haunts”: walking corpses like the zombie mercenary who’d attacked us in Siberia.

  The pirates, being sensible men, turned their ship around and raced off as fast as they could. Not fast enough. One of the attacking haunts set fire to the pirates’ powder magazine, filled with twenty barrels of gunpowder for the pirate ship’s cannons. Kaboom. The only survivor was the man who’d reached the Tortugas—a chap blessed with admirable luck, not only getting thrown clear of the explosion but waking up afterward amid wreckage that included a lifeboat, half a barrel of drinkable water, and some not-too-green dried beef. The supplies had kept him alive long enough to get back to civilization, where he told his tale to anyone who’d listen.

  That was when his luck ran out. The night after washing ashore he died “under mysterious circumstances.” Some people said the haunts finally caught up with him. More likely, a gang of civic-minded Floridians returned the pirate to the sea, this time with weights around his ankles. In those humorless times, before Errol Flynn gave piracy an air of swashbuckling romance, drunkenly admitting you were a pirate could severely shorten your life expectancy.

  But without the pirate’s tale-telling, Reuben Baptiste would never have discovered the leg’s whereabouts. How could anyone guess that a Carthaginian galley last seen off Spain would end up near Bermuda, almost all the way across the Atlantic? And even if we knew that, how would we find a single galley in the two-million-square-mile Sargasso?

  No matter how much we knew, without the exact location from the Osiris statuette, we were still searching for a needle in hundreds of square miles of haystack. The galley could have drifted a long way from its position in 1710 . . . and that was assuming the galley was still afloat. Derelict ships eventually sink, worn down by weather and waves. Any normal galley from 146 B.C. would have gone to the bottom long ago. Only the power of bronze mumbo jumbo could have preserved the Carthaginian ship into the 1700s . . . and how much longer could the bronze energy work? The waterlogged galley might now be lying in Davy Jones’s locker, far out of anyone’s reach.

  As if reading my mind, Lord H. patted my arm. “Don’t worry, child. This won’t be a fool’s errand. The sea’s getting ready for something big.” He inhaled deeply through his nostrils, sniffing the air. “Some nights, you can smell it on the wind.”

  “Smell what?” I asked.

  “Change. As if the sea has made a decision. Time for things to come together.”

  He turned his eyes to the horizon, where the last red of sunset was fading. “The ocean’s so vast, my dear, it’s rare to cross paths with anything out here. Most naval battles take place near known harbors or along well-used shipping lanes. On the high seas, off any standard route, ships have trouble finding each other. In a thousand square miles of ocean, you’re lucky if there’s one other vessel . . . and how likely is it you’ll sight each other in all that great area? But sometimes . . . some nights . . .” He sniffed the air again. “Once in a while, the sea decides it’s time for a bit of fun.”

  “You mean we’ll find the Carthaginian treasure ship? Or will we find Lancaster Urdmann?”

  Lord Horatio took one last sniff. “Sometimes,” he said, “the sea likes a lot of fun.”

  Five minutes later, we intercepted an encrypted radio signal. Its source was almost exactly where we expected the galley to be.

  “It’s no code I’ve ever seen, Captain.”

  The radio man was called Amps. Everyone on Unauthorized Intervention had a nickname like that: short, snappy, and twee. Amps was built like an aging sumo wrestler, huge as he sat at his radio console on a too-small chair; but his oversized head had oversized ears—the better to hear you with, my dear. Like most encrypted signals, the transmission he’d picked up sounded more like random static than anything intelligible. Amps’s highly trained ears, however, recognized it as a coded message. The only problem was deciphering what the code was.

  “Does anyone on board have experience breaking codes?” I asked.

  Lord Horatio gave me a pained look. “We all do, dear. And we keep several dozen computers in the lower hold, programmed with thousands of decryption algorithms . . . many of which are supposed to be top secret.”

  Amps nodded. “If anyone found out what we can decode, MI5 and the NSA would have right massive coronaries . . . not to mention the World Bank and the RIAA. Considering the work Unauthorized Intervention does, it’s handy to understand what the opposition says to each other. But this code we’ve picked up—it’s new. Fits none of the usual patterns.”

  “Can you pinpoint the source?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a line on it,” Amps replied. “Can’t triangulate to get a precise point, but I know the direction it’s coming from.”

  “Thank you, Amps,” Lord H. said. “Send the coordinates to the bridge, if you please, and ask the helm to set course on that heading.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  “Also raise the ship’s readiness level to Precaution Three.” He glanced at me. “We’re assuming the signal came from your Mr. Urdmann?”

  “That’s a safe bet,” I said. “I wish I knew where he acquired fancy new cryptography gear.”

  I wished I knew a lot of things about Urdmann: not just where he was getting his high-tech equipment—particularly the Silver Shield force fields—but how he’d tracked the bronze leg to the Sargasso. The Osiris statuette was made in 1250 B.C.: long before Carthage rose and fell. Long before the treasure ship fled from the Romans and ended up in the Bermuda Triangle. The statue couldn’t possibly have been inscribed with the bronze leg’s current location . . .

  . . . unless the statuette’s makers were more clairvoyant than I thought. Perhaps their prophecies had focused on where the bronze pieces would actually be recovered, not where the pieces happened to be in 1250 B.C. When I thought about it, that made sense. If you were a seer scrying for an arcane talisman, asking Where is the object now? wasn’t as good as Where will the object eventually be found? If, for example, a bronze fragment was currently at the bottom of the sea, knowing its exact location didn’t help. What you wanted was where i
t would finally wash up.

  So maybe the statuette did tell Urdmann the leg’s present location, not where it had once been. And the villain was on the scene now, sending secret messages to someone.

  To whom? An unknown partner? A partner who might be the source for supercold silver shells and bleeding-edge encryption techniques? If so, I longed to know what Urdmann was saying.

  “Are you sure you can’t decrypt that message?” I asked Lord Horatio.

  He pursed his lips. “I might get in touch with a chap I know in Whitehall; he has access to MI6’s code-breaking supercomputers. But security agencies monitor everything so tightly, it’s almost impossible to sneak processing time unnoticed. If this was some major terrorist threat, the risk might be justified . . . but I’m reluctant to ask my friend to jeopardize himself over a little bit of bronze.” Lord H. gave me a look. “Didn’t you do some work for the CIA? Maybe you could—”

  “No,” I cut him off. “I won’t ask them for help. They’re just gagging for an excuse to get their hooks into me again.”

  Lord Horatio shrugged. “You have friends all over the world, my dear. Don’t you know some keen young mathematician who’s a dab hand at breaking codes and is dying to do you a favor?”

  I was about to say no . . . then I mentally smacked my forehead at overlooking the obvious. “Amps,” I said, “can you set up a radio link to Poland? A place called St. Bernward’s Monastery.”

  Before I’d left St. Bernward’s, Father Emil had scribbled down phone numbers, web addresses, radio frequencies, etc. for getting in touch with the Order of Bronze. I handed the list to Amps. In thirty seconds, he’d established a secure audio link with the man of bronze himself.

  “Yes?” came the metallic voice.