by Tom Harper
Grant looked across at Marina and gave her a thumbs-up. 'Ready?'
She nodded. The wind ruffled the ribbon that tied back her hair and her eyes were bright with excitement. Grant raised three fingers.
Two… one…
The door swung in — a split second before Grant's boot would have made contact with it. An incongruous figure in longjohns and a woollen cap stood in the doorway, rubbing his eyes.
'Shto eta?'
He never knew what hit him. Grant's boot smashed into his groin with all the force intended for the door. He doubled over with a howl of agony and staggered back under the impact. Grant, unbalanced, careered in, collided with him and went down in a tangle of arms and legs. He sprang up — and almost knocked into Marina coming in behind him.
'Jesus Christ'
Grant looked around. They were in a small room with a table at one end, an iron stove in the middle and three bunks pushed up against the walls. Four of the beds were occupied by young conscripts, staring at him with varying degrees of confusion and terror as they emerged from under their blankets. Grant jerked the M3 at them. 'Nobody move.'
The man by his feet groaned and hauled himself across the concrete floor to the nearest empty bunk. Grant heard a movement behind him and flicked a quick glance over his shoulder. Jackson and Muir had come to the door and were peering in.
'You get them all?'
'Looks like it. I…'
A click sounded from the far end of the room. Grant looked up and for the first time noticed there was a door in the back wall. He cursed himself; he ran to it, punched three bullets through the flimsy plywood, then kicked it in. It was a bathroom, with a steel sink in one corner, a lidless toilet in the other and a fresh breeze blowing through the open window in between. Grant looked out, just in time to see a half-naked figure running towards the lighthouse. He lifted his gun to the window frame and fired, but the fugitive was already out of sight. All the bullets did was chip away the whitewashed concrete at the base of the tower.
'Fuck.'
Grant ran back through the bunk room, past Muir and Jackson, and out into the wan daylight. He was just in time to see the lighthouse door slam shut and hear a bolt shoot home inside. He raised the gun and dropped it almost at once. The door was a classic piece of Soviet workmanship, a solid steel plate built to resist everything the Black Sea's storms could throw at it.
Muir ran out of the cottage behind him. 'What the hell's going on?'
'One of them just locked himself in the tower.'
Muir swore, then shrugged. 'I suppose he's harmless enough. He can't do anything there.'
'Yes, he can.' Jackson, who had emerged into the doorway, pointed up at the nest of wires strung round the top of the lighthouse. 'That's a fucking radio antenna.'
Grant ran round the octagonal tower. It had been built for navigation, not fortification: on its far side a row of iron staples in the wall formed a rough ladder up to the gallery round the light. Slinging the machine-gun over his shoulder, he started climbing. The lighthouse was in a pretty shabby condition: bare concrete patches showed where it had recently been repaired and little Xs of white masking tape still covered the windows, slowly peeling away.
The wind rose as he climbed higher. Now he could see the whole island spread out below him — and the sea beyond. Without breaking his ascent he checked the horizon: a few freighters and oil tankers, but nothing dangerous. Not yet.
He reached the top of the ladder and squeezed under the railing. Wherever the Russian had gone, he hadn't come up here: the glass dome was empty, except for the mirrored lantern still spinning on its turntable. Better still, there was a door. He tried the handle — and it gave. With a brief squeak of resistance from the rusted hinges it swung open, then slammed shut in the wind almost before he'd stepped through.
After the tumult outside, the lighthouse was eerily quiet. The lantern grumbled on its axis, and through the open hatch in the floor he could hear the muffled slapping of hurried footsteps. Grant dropped down the ladder, on to a narrow landing at the top of a staircase. He ran down the curving stair to the next floor. Through an open door he saw a plain, whitewashed room. A sandy-haired man wearing nothing but his trousers was crouched in front of a wireless set on a trestle table, twiddling frantically at the dial.
Grant slipped the gun off his shoulder and aimed it at the Russian's chest. With a panicked yelp, the man flung up his hands and edged away from the wireless set. Grant thought about shooting anyway, but decided against it. Whatever damage the Russian had achieved, it was already done.
* * *
Grant and Marina locked the prisoners in a storeroom in the base of the lighthouse — six engineers, plus the elderly lighthouse keeper Grant found cowering under his bed on the second floor. Jackson fetched Reed and the mysterious wooden crate. They gathered outside the lighthouse, looking apprehensively at the sky and the surrounding sea.
'How much time do you think we have?'
Grant looked reflexively at his watch, as if it might somehow show the answer. 'I don't think he had time to get a message off. Even if he did, it'll take at least a couple of hours for them to get a boat here.'
'Great,' said Jackson. 'Should be plenty of time.'
Marina stared at him. 'Are you familiar with the basic principles of archaeology?' she asked. 'You cannot just pluck these things out of the ground. It would take weeks to survey this island.'
Jackson knelt down beside the wooden crate and prised it open with the blade of his knife. Everyone peered in. Tucked in a bed of hay lay a black box about the size of a cinderblock. A chrome handle stuck out of the top, with some sort of gauge or meter at one end and a number of buttons and switches down the sides.
'What is it?' asked Reed.
'It's a Bismatron. It, uh, detects Element 61.'
'They knocked that together pretty quickly, if they didn't even know it existed until three months ago,' said Grant.
Jackson gave a patently false smile. 'Don't ask me. I leave all that stuff to the smart guys. Anyway, if the shield's on this island this baby'll find it.'
He flicked a switch. The needle on the gauge darted across to the far side of the dial, then settled back, twitching every now and again. A low hum rose out of the machine, overlaid with a steady chattering of squawks and clicks.
'Talkative creature,' said Reed.
With Muir in tow, Jackson set off down the slope towards the west side of the island. Grant, Reed and Marina watched them go.
'Sourcelles said there was a temple on this island,' said Grant, surveying the desolation. 'If the shield's anywhere, it must be near that.'
Marina reached in her pack and pulled out a slim book bound in brown cloth. 'Sourcelles's monograph. It has a copy of the map Kritskii made when he came in 1823.' She turned through the book. To Grant's unscholarly eye it looked as though someone had taken translations in half a dozen languages and thrown them together. Almost every page was a densely woven tapestry of French, Greek, Latin, German, Russian — even, in rare fragments, English.
Marina found the map and spread the book flat on her knee. It was a simple map. A few swirls sketched the main contours; dotted lines indicated the retaining walls Grant had seen from the top of the lighthouse. Plumb in the middle of the island, at its highest point, a subdivided square marked the temple. Grant looked around. From where they were, they could see the whole island: an almost too-perfect facsimile of the lines on the map.
'That's here,' said Reed, voicing the conclusion they'd all reached. 'We must be standing on top of it.'
'But there can't be more than half a metre of topsoil.' Marina pointed to the track they'd come up from the jetty.
Its surface was bare rock, the same colour as the cliffs. The earth embankments on either side were little more than a foot high.
'Then we shouldn't have far to dig.'
They fetched the tools they had brought in the plane. Marina scratched a line in the ground that more or less bisected the ri
dge and they started digging. It didn't take long. On his third stroke Grant's spade rang on solid rock. In less than a quarter of an hour they'd cleared a trench about a foot wide and ten feet long, a ruddy stone scar in the grass.
'Even if the temple's foundations are here somewhere, there's not much space for buried treasure,' said Grant, mopping his brow. Leaden clouds covered the sky and the breeze off the sea had died.
'There must be some sort of cave or tunnel in the rock. Like on Lemnos.' Marina sat cross-legged by the rim of the trench and sifted the earth they'd excavated through her fingers.
'Jackson's magic box doesn't think so.' A few hundred yards away, Jackson and Muir had reached the bottom of the slope and were standing at the cliff edge, little more than silhouettes against the heaving sea beyond.
'Do you think it can really detect this mysterious element?' said Reed.
Grant laughed. 'It can certainly detect something. I've seen a similar sort of thing in the Congo. The prospectors use them.'
Reed was intrigued. 'Can it detect gold too?'
'The men who were using it weren't looking for gold.' Grant got up and stuck his spade in the ground. 'Do you know what a Geiger-Muller counter is?'
Reed shook his head.
'It detects radiation. The men who used them were prospecting for…'
'Look at this.'
Marina was sitting bolt upright. Her arms were filthy, smeared with dirt up to the elbows, but she had something in her hand. It just looked like a flat pebble to Grant. She spat on it and rubbed it on the knee of her trousers, then passed it wordlessly to Reed.
He squinted at it, scraping away some earth with his fingernail. His eyes widened. 'Remarkable.'
Grant snatched it out of his hand. It wasn't a pebble; it was a black-glazed piece of clay that had been spun into a flat disc about the size of a coaster. A red serpent wound round the edge and in its centre the letters 'AX' had been scratched into the glaze.
Grant frowned, puzzled. 'Who's Ax?'
'Ach,' Reed corrected him with a throaty 'ch' that sounded strangely Scottish. 'Short for Achilleus.'
Marina took it back from Grant. 'It's a votive plaque. The ancient Greeks would have dedicated them with a prayer and left them at the temple. Like lighting a candle in church. It means the temple must have been…'
She trailed off as she realised Grant and Reed weren't paying attention. They were staring over her shoulder, both of them listening to the low mechanical hum being blown in on the wind.
Grant grabbed his knapsack and pulled out his field glasses, scanning the leaden sky. 'Yaks — two of them, coming in from the west.' He kicked a smattering of earth back into the trench to try to hide the scar. 'Quick — into the house.'
'What about the others?'
Grant looked down towards the cliffs, then back to the west. Even with the naked eye the planes were now clearly visible, swooping in low beneath the clouds. 'No time.'
They ducked into the cottage, still a mess of discarded blankets and abandoned clothes. They were barely inside when the whole building seemed to tremble: windows rattled and the tea urn fell off the stove as the two aircraft roared overhead. They seemed so close it was a surprise they didn't hit the lighthouse.
'I thought you said the engineer didn't have time to send an SOS,' said Reed.
'Well, someone did.' Grant looked out of the window. 'They're fighters. Must just have come to take a look.'
'They'll see our plane,' said Marina. 'What will they make of that?'
'Maybe we can reassure them.' Grant grabbed a green engineer's uniform hanging over the end of one of the bunks. He pulled off his boots and trousers and tugged on the uniform. The trousers barely reached to his ankles, and when he pulled the tunic over his shirt the buttons stubbornly refused to meet.
'Is that how you plan to reassure them?' Reed asked doubtfully.
'Something's better than nothing. If they don't see anything, they'll know something's wrong.' Grant grabbed a forage cap to complete his ensemble, then laced his boots back on. 'At least we can try.'
He stepped out of the door and jogged over to the lighthouse. To his right he could see the planes banking sharply over the open sea to come back for another run. He took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the muffled shouts from the storeroom; he ran past the radio room, then backtracked and grabbed a pair of headphones from beside the wireless. He hooked them round his neck, hoping the Yak pilots would spot them.
Grant emerged on to the balcony, dizzied by the spiral stair. The planes were on to him almost before he could get his bearings. The blast from their engines was immense: the iron balcony shivered beneath his feet; the cap was snatched from his head and he had to brace himself against the railing to keep from being blown over the side. The planes banked again and roared back, so low he could see the pilots' faces behind the canopies, the flared intakes down the cowling and the stubby cannons behind the propellers. They seemed to be heading straight for him. He waved, tapped his ear to mimic a broken headset, then gave a cheery thumbs-up. Did Russians use the thumbs-up, he wondered?
At the last moment the two planes broke apart. They shot past on either side of the tower with an ear-splitting roar. Grant tried tugging the headset over his ears but it did nothing. He looked back to see the planes racing away behind him. Had it worked?
By the time he got to the bottom of the tower, Jackson and Muir had made their way back from the cliffs. They gathered in the bunk house, occasionally looking out of the windows to watch the planes still circling overhead like crows.
'Haven't they seen enough?' said Jackson. 'Why the hell are they sticking around?'
Grant pulled on his trousers and buckled the Webley back on. 'They've done their reconnaissance and they don't like what they've seen. My guess is they've been ordered to keep an eye on us until the Soviets can get a boat here.'
'Shit.' Jackson kicked the empty tea urn across the floor. 'Can't we shake them off, make them think it's just a busted radio or something?'
'I tried that. Anyway, that excuse wouldn't have lasted long. There's supposed to be a team of radio engineers here, remember.'
'We could wait until it's dark.'
Muir looked at his watch. 'That's hours away. They'll have half the Red Army landed here by then. And there's no way we can take off in the flying boat while they're around. They'd shoot us out of the water.'
'And we still haven't got what we came for,' said Jackson. 'The Bismatron hasn't registered shit. It's deader than my grandpa's Johnson.'
'Are you sure it's working?' said Muir.
'Kind of hard to tell if there's nothing to find.'
Grant unbuckled his watch. Dangling it by its strap, he held it against the black machine. The needle twitched and the speaker emitted a series of pops like air being blown through a straw.
'It's working.' He slipped the watch back on to his wrist. 'Radium dial. Makes the numbers glow in the dark.'
Muir's mouth tightened in a suspicious stare. 'Very clever. Now have you got a parlour trick to get us off this fucking island?'
"We're not leaving without the shield,' Jackson insisted. 'There's…' He paused as the roar of engines overhead drowned him out once more. 'There's got to be a way to find it.'
Reed, standing by the door, cleared his throat. 'Actually, I think I know where the temple is.'
Twenty-seven
Jackson looked down at his feet, as if expecting to see a Corinthian column rising out of the concrete. 'How exactly do you figure that, Professor?'
'Come and have a look. Quickly.'
They trooped over to the doorway, glancing anxiously at the sky. The Yaks' orbit had taken them back out to the west and for the moment they were out of sight. Reed pointed to the lighthouse, to the patch on its wall where the concrete cladding had been chipped away. That was his own handiwork, Grant realised, from the bullets he'd fired at the Russian who'd escaped through the bathroom window. It had exposed the original wall underneath, square-cut lu
mps of stone mortared together.
'Look at that block. What do you see?'
Grant picked up his field glasses again. A soupy blur filled his vision as he twiddled the focus knob. Soft lines emerged from the haze, sharpened and resolved themselves into a circle, with thin lines in its centre radiating to form a delicately veined rosette.
'That's not Russian workmanship,' said Reed. 'And look there.'
Grant followed his gaze to the foot of the lighthouse. Now that he looked closer, he could see that the concrete coat didn't quite reach to the bottom. He ducked out of the house, ran over and knelt by the wall. He peeled back the grasses that grew around it to expose the foundation: layers of roughly finished limestone, huge blocks laid together with barely an ounce of cement.
Reed joined him. 'There's your temple. The Russians must have dug up the remains and used them to build the lighthouse.'
Grant looked back. The others were watching them from the bunk-house door, while beyond the planes were circling round yet again. 'We'd better get back under cover.'
* * *
Jackson took the news badly. 'When did the lighthouse go up?'
'Some time in the nineteenth century. It's mentioned in the Admiralty Pilot for 1894.'
'The men who built it: do you think…'
Reed shook his head. 'I doubt it. You couldn't have kept it a secret, not on this rock. It would have been the most sensational discovery of the age.'
'So it's not here. Fuck.' Muir kicked one of the bunk beds in frustration, then lit a cigarette. The nicotine seemed to calm him a little.
'It might be here,' said Reed cautiously. 'There could have been a tunnel complex under the temple, as on Lemnos. Perhaps your instrument wouldn't be able to detect it there.'
'This piece of shit was built to detect… stuff… deep underground. I don't think a bunch of Stone Age wops could have dug deep enough to make a difference.'
'They were Bronze Age, actually,' Reed murmured.