by Tom Harper
When the plates had been cleared and the flask of ouzo topped up, Reed took out the tablet and laid it on the tablecloth. Molho hadn't broken it exactly in half — Sourcelles's fragment was larger than Pemberton's, about six inches square. They stared at the painting on the back. It was divided into three panels by two bands of zigzag lines, the stylised sea. In the top panel, just under the crumbling edge where Molho had snapped it, two figures, a man and a woman, stood on either side of a curiously shaped mound. Grant drew a sharp breath. Even three thousand years on he could still recognise the hollowed-out hill on Lemnos where they'd found the sanctuary of the Kabyri. And, in fact, when he looked closer he saw two tiny pot-bellied figures dancing under the mountain, waving hammers. A mottled disc stood between them.
'Those must be the Kabyri. I imagine the two characters in the margins are Hephaestus, the smith god, and Thetis, Achilles' mother.' Reed's academic manner couldn't entirely hide his excitement.
'And that circle — that would be the shield?' said Jackson.
Reed put his hand against his head and tugged a lock of hair. 'I suppose it must be.'
'And there, that's the Trojan war, right.' Jackson pointed to the next panel. The paint had faded here, but the image was still vivid enough. Grant was reminded of the carvings in the shrine on Lemnos. Chariots raced into battle, while under the walls of a hilltop city two files of armed men lined up opposite each other. Between them two men were engaged in combat. One had thrown his spear, which quivered in the other's round shield as he tried to draw his sword.
'Achilles and Hector.' Marina made to touch the picture, then drew back her finger with a sigh of awe.
Fierce, at the word, his weighty sword he drew,
And, all collected, on Achilles flew.
So Jove's bold eagle, balanced in the air,
Stoops from the clouds to truss the quivering hare.
Nor less Achilles his fierce soul prepares:
Before his breast the flaming shield he bears.
Jackson looked at Reed sharply.' "Flaming shield"? What does that mean?'
Reed shrugged. 'It's a common epithet applied to Achilles' armour. The shield was coated with gold. I imagine it just means it gleamed in the sun like fire.'
'Huh.'
'And I take it this is the White Island.' Muir pointed to the bottom part of the tablet. The paint was badly chipped around the edges, but they could make out yet another mountain in the bottom right-hand corner, heavily painted in black. On its summit stood a white tower crowned with sacral horns.
'That must be the temple,' said Reed quietly. 'The underworld temple of Achilles.'
He pulled a sheet of stiff paper out of his bag, a full-scale drawing he had made of Pemberton's piece. He slid it under the tablet. The edge of the drawing and the edge of the tablet fitted together almost perfectly. At last they could see the picture in full. The shrine in the Valley of the Dead stood in the top left-hand corner of what they could now see was the fourth panel, divided from the image below by the pointed waves. All five of them leaned in over the table and stared in wonder.
'Obviously it will require a considerable amount of study.' Reed turned the tablet over, his intellectual mood as changeable as the Oxford weather. 'However, at least we now have the rest of the text.'
'Can you read it yet?' Muir asked.
'That's not the point. The immediate benefit is that we have a clean sample of Linear B. Everything I've deduced about the structure of the language so far has been inferred from our existing crop of Linear B inscriptions. Now that I have a new text, I can test my hypotheses, see if the rules I've inferred hold true. If my predictions are accurate, then I should be in an excellent position to start attempting a decipherment.'
'To start attempting...' Jackson swallowed his ouzo. 'Can't you ever just do something? How long will that take you?'
'I don't know.' Reed's donnish affability had vanished, replaced with something curt and testy. Marina had seen a similar effect in Pemberton sometimes, when a new idea or challenge seized him. Courtesy, patience, tact — all went out of the window as the mind withdrew into itself.
'It took Champollion two years to crack the hieroglyphs — and he had the Rosetta Stone to work with.'
'Two years?' All around the ouzeria locals looked up from their drinks and games to stare at the table of foreigners in the corner. Jackson lowered his voice. 'Maybe you haven't noticed what's been going on the last few days, but we don't have two years. We likely don't have two weeks if the Reds are on to us. We need to get hold of this shield pronto, otherwise we're going to be on the wrong end of the last war in history.'
Everyone at the table stared at him.
Jackson wiped his mouth with his napkin, aware he'd said too much. 'Let's just say you don't want to be around if the Russians get it. Sourcelles as good as told us where the White Island is. I say we go there straight away, before Belzig figures it out.'
'But the island's in Soviet territory,' Grant objected.
'All the more reason to get there as soon as we can. If the Commies figure out this thing's in their backyard, they'll have it in Moscow before we know anything about it.'
Reed shook his head. 'Even if you do reach the island, you won't just walk up to the temple of Achilles and knock on the door. Without the clues on the tablet you'll never find it. Grave robbers have been looting the Valley of the Dead on Crete for centuries: none of them ever found the baetyl shrine, until Pemberton turned up with his part of the tablet.'
'That's not your problem. We've got instruments that can detect Element 61. If the shield's on that island we'll find it.'
* * *
Back in his room, Grant stripped off his shirt and washed himself at the cracked sink in the corner. The whole day seemed to be caked on to his skin: Turkish tobacco from Sourcelles's silver cigarette holder; dried blood where the glass had cut him; soot from the fire and grease from the aeroplane. He scraped it off as best he could, and towelled his cut hands gingerly, then flopped down on the mattress.
The bed was hard and narrow, but after the day he had endured it felt like heaven. He lay there for a few moments, barefoot and bare chested, enjoying the waft of air against his damp skin.
There was a knock at the door. He reached out for the bedside table and put one hand on the butt of the Webley. 'It's open.'
Marina came in. She was dressed simply in a white blouse and a high black skirt that emphasised her waist. Her hair was loose round her shoulders. She paused for a moment as she saw Grant's state of undress, then carried on into the room. Her bare feet barely made a sound on the floorboards. She sat down on the edge of the bed and Grant saw the silvered trails of fresh tears on her cheek.
'I can't stop thinking about Alexei,' she said, perhaps by way of explanation. She turned to look Grant in the eye. 'Is it true?'
'Which part?'
'All of it.'
Grant raised his arm and stroked the hair that hung down behind her back. He could feel her skin through the thin cotton blouse. 'You don't want to know.'
She didn't move. 'Tell me.'
'You remember the ambush at Kastro? The entire band — Nikos, Sophoklis, Menelaos and the rest of them — all gunned down by the Germans. Two days later HQ called me in. Apparently Alexei had betrayed us. I was ordered to bring him to a rendezvous at a valley in the White Mountains, near Impros.'
'You went to kill him.'
Grant fell silent for a moment, remembering the taste of dust in his mouth. That awkward last embrace, neither of them meaning it. Thumbing back the hammer of the Webley and the look on Alexei's face when he realised.
'I couldn't do it. I looked at him and all I could see was you. I didn't know Panos had followed me.'
Marina peeled away a splinter in the bedstead and snapped it in her fingers. 'You never told me.'
'It was better you didn't know. I wanted you to remember Alexei as a hero.' Grant had stopped stroking Marina's hair. 'Besides, I never had the chance. Roussakis
almost killed me too — thought I must have been in cahoots with Alexei. He said if he ever saw me on Crete again he'd kill me. My career with SOE was over anyway: I'd disobeyed a direct order. They'd never have trusted me with a mission again. So I disappeared.'
'I never knew.'
'Alexei was an embarrassment to the British. They didn't want it to get out that one of their star allies had been turned by the Nazis. They buried it.'
For what seemed an eternity neither of them moved. Grant lay back with his head on the pillows, while Marina sat on the edge of the bed, stiff-backed and still. Grant saw her wiping away more tears. Then she turned towards him, leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. 'You should have told me,' she whispered. 'But thank you.'
Grant reacted instinctively. He wrapped his arms round her and pulled her down on top of him. She came willingly. Her lips brushed his cheek, soft and dry against the stubble, her tongue flicking him with quick serpentine kisses. Putting his hand on her head, he steered her back towards his mouth. She forced her tongue inside him. He tasted aniseed, smelled tobacco and musk and perfume as her hair brushed his face.
Pressing her hands against his chest, she pushed herself up and swept her leg across to straddle him. Her skirt rode up over her thighs, revealing the cream silk slip underneath. Grant slid his hands underneath it and dug his fingers into her. She gasped. Swaying, she pulled back so that she sat up over him. She reached to her throat to unbutton her blouse, but Grant was faster. He put his hands on the hem of the blouse and tore it open, pulling it apart over her breasts. She lifted her arms over her head. The lamp on the side table lit her with a smouldering orange glow. Looking up, Grant saw her shadow swaying on the ceiling behind her. With her breasts cupped in the open blouse, her arms outstretched, the pursed skirt writhing over her hips, she seemed to have become an incarnation of the Minoan goddess: primitive, raw, quivering with creative power.
She pulled off her blouse. He reached up to touch her breasts, but she caught his hands in her own and pushed him back, holding him down. She leaned forward and let her nipples brush his chest. When she felt that Grant had stopped resisting her, she took a hand away and unbuckled his belt. She moved her hand lower, popping the buttons one by one, grinding her palm against his erection.
All of a sudden Grant thrust up. It unbalanced her; in that instant Grant twisted round so that they both rolled over. Now he was on top. She writhed and squirmed under him; she scraped deep welts down his back as she dug in her nails, but she couldn't dislodge him. He spread her thighs. She hooked her feet round the backs of his legs and squeezed her heels against his buttocks. Grant wrapped his arms under her slender shoulders, lifting her slightly so that her whole body was bent back against him.
He entered her and she swallowed him in darkness.
Twenty-six
Black Sea, near Zmeiny Ostrov. Twenty-four hours later
They flew in low, at night. The only light inside the aircraft was a dim glow from the instruments, though occasionally they would see the navigation lights of ships ploughing the sea below, tiny constellations like luminous plankton in the water. No one spoke. None of them had any illusions about the dangers that surrounded them.
Jackson, in the pilot's seat, looked out of the left-hand window at a smear of lights on the far horizon. 'That's the border. We've just passed into Soviet airspace.'
'If anyone's thinking of defecting, now's your opportunity,' said Muir. He shot Marina a nasty look. Grant felt her stiffen against him.
'What's that?' Reed, squeezed into the co-pilot's seat, put his hand against the windscreen and pointed. Below and in front of them a white light pulsed in the darkness.
'According to the
Black Sea Pilot
there's a lighthouse on the highest point of the island,' said Marina,
'That must be it, then. There's no other islands around here.' Jackson banked the aircraft to his left, throttled back and put it into a slow descent. They'd timed it well: out of the right-hand window Grant could see the darkness softening to a purplish blue over the eastern horizon.
'Let's hope there's no angry gods waiting to tear us limb from limb.'
* * *
They touched down on the water as the sun rose and taxied into a shallow bay. All of them stared, hardly able to believe where they were. In his mind's eye, without even being quite aware of it, Grant had expected something glittering and majestic: proud alabaster cliffs reflecting the sunlight like snow, or a wall of marble thrusting out of the sea. Even something like the white cliffs of Dover would have satisfied his imagination. But these cliffs were a russet brown. The only white Grant could see were the streaked bird droppings, of which there were plenty.
'Are you sure this is the right place?' said Muir. 'Doesn't look very white to me.'
'The name must be metaphorical.' Reed sounded doubtful, as disappointed as the rest of them.
Muir hummed a few ironic bars of a Vera Lynn tune. Ahead, on the north-western arm of the island, a flight of concrete steps ran down the red cliffs to a jetty. Jackson cut the engines and let the waves carry them the last few yards. The plane shuddered slightly as its pontoon knocked against the dock — then Grant had leaped down on to the dock and wrapped a rope round a rusting bollard. He looked over at the other side of the jetty, where a battered, paint-scarred rowing boat lay tied to an iron ring. 'How many of the opposition are we expecting?'
'There'll be the lighthouse keeper. London thinks there might be a handful of Soviet engineers as well, putting in some sort of radio mast.'
'Then it's just as well we came prepared.'
Jackson passed round four M3 Grease Guns, and satchels with spare magazines and grenades. There was no sub-machine gun for Reed — instead, to his horror, he was presented with a small Smith and Wesson pistol. 'I can't use that,' he protested. 'I've never fired a gun in my life.'
'It's insurance,' Jackson explained. 'If you want peace, prepare for war. Si vispacem, para helium. Aristotle.' He beamed to see Reed's surprise. 'Didn't think I knew that, did you?'
'I would never presume,' Reed demurred.
Jackson pressed the gun into his hands. 'This is the safety, this is the trigger and that's the end you point at the bad guys. Don't use it unless they're so close you can't miss.' He clambered into the back of the plane and called to Grant, 'Give me a hand with this?'
They hoisted down a small wooden box, about the size of a crate of beer. It was surprisingly heavy. Grant had seen Jackson load it the night before and been curious. The only hint as to its contents was a serial number stencilled in black across the top.
Jackson checked his watch. 'What time do you make it, Grant?'
'Five fifteen.'
'Good. Let's hope they're still asleep.'
* * *
They took the climb carefully, trying not to slip on the crust of bird droppings that slathered the stairs like spilled paint. Grant and Jackson carried the wooden crate between them, while Marina scouted ahead. She had swapped her skirt and blouse for baggy green combat trousers and a khaki shirt, but even they couldn't entirely mask the curves underneath. Something inside Grant clenched tighter as he remembered the previous night. For a moment an image flashed in front of his eyes: an undulating vision of silk, skin and perfume. Then his boot caught the lip of the step and skidded out from under him. He threw out a hand to brace himself against the cliff, but planted it in a thick dollop of guano. A flock of turtledoves squawked up out of a cleft.
Jackson glared at him. 'Let's try not to do the Commies' work for them.'
They came to the top of the stairs and peered over the edge. There was the lighthouse, barely two hundred and fifty yards away. It stood on a low summit, a squat octagonal tower about fifty feet high, with a single-storey house beside it. A rocky track, scraped out of the island's thin earth, led up to it.
Jackson put down the wooden crate and took a blue cap with a red band out of his satchel. He pulled it on.
Grant gave him a
sideways look. 'You'll be shot for spying if they catch you.'
'If they find out who we are, they'll shoot us anyway.'
Leaving Reed and the crate at the top of the stairs, they fell in behind Jackson and started up the track. Grant scanned the surroundings, trying to look unobtrusive while still keeping the lighthouse complex in the corner of his eye. There was no cover on the island: no trees or bushes, not even any flowers. It was a dead place, little more than a landing for birds. Their nests were everywhere: Grant wondered where they found the twigs to make them.
A dark shape darted out from the edge of the road and slithered across their path. Jackson jumped; he swung his machine-gun off his shoulder and had whipped back the bolt before he saw what it was: a snake, thin and black, its jaws stretched wide apart round the speckled egg in its mouth. It disappeared into a hole on the far side of the road.
'Easy,' said Grant. He gestured to the lighthouse. 'Don't want them to think we're nervous.'
'Right.'
They reached the top of the ridge. The lighthouse loomed above, while the rest of the island spread out all around them. It wasn't large: less than half a mile long and perhaps quarter of a mile wide. The lack of trees made it seem smaller still. Grant couldn't see any sign of a temple, though there were a couple of unnaturally straight ridges on the western side, sharp creases in the blanket of couch grass. Otherwise, the only buildings were the lighthouse and its attendant cottage.
'Looks like you didn't need your fancy dress after all.' No one stirred around the lighthouse. They were close enough now to hear the whir of its motor still spinning the lamp, like a clockwork toy slowly winding down. Gulls wheeled overhead.
Jackson gestured his gun at the cottage. The wooden shutters, stripped bare by the salt wind, were still closed. 'I guess the engineers are in there.'
Grant and Marina ran to the door and pressed themselves against the walls on either side of it. Jackson and Muir took up covering positions opposite.