by Tom Harper
'Anyway,' said Marina, 'the Russians must have excavated most of the site when they were digging the foundations for the lighthouse. If there was a cave, they would have found that too.'
'Great. So the shield's not here and we are. What do we do now?'
'The best we can do is examine Sourcelles's tablet. The pictures on the back may hold some clues.' Reed patted his pocket, where he had the tablet wrapped safely in a cigar box. 'It worked on Crete.'
Jackson stared at him incredulously. 'I was actually thinking more short-term, Professor. Like, how the hell do we get off this island with those fighters overhead and probably the whole Black Sea fleet steaming over here?'
'We wait,' said Grant. 'Those fighters are going to run out of fuel sooner rather than later. When they go, we'll go.' He cocked his head. 'It sounds as if they're already on their way out.'
He stuck his head outside the door. It took him a moment to find the fighters against the grey sky: they were higher than he'd expected, climbing steeply into the west.
'Looks like you're right,' said Jackson. 'They're giving up.'
'Maybe.' Grant shielded his eyes. There was something familiar in the way the planes were manoeuvring for altitude: something ominous.
'Get in the lighthouse!'
Grant shouted suddenly.
'Quick!'
The fighters wheeled round and turned back, dipping their noses towards the island. Following Grant, the others ran across to the lighthouse, into the safety of its massive walls. The Russian pilots must have seen them — but they weren't interested in Grant. Their cannons opened fire. Lines of tracer streaked down like hard, phosphorous rain a couple of hundred yards away. Watching from the lighthouse doorway, Grant couldn't see them hit, but he knew where they'd struck. He imagined the shells stitching neat white lines of boiling foam in the waves, licking up towards the concrete jetty and…
The air shook with the explosion. From below the cliffs on the north-eastern spit a cloud of flame and black smoke mushroomed up, hung in the air for a moment, then began to spread out in a canopy. A host of smaller explosions popped in the background like a string of squibs. Above, the pilots pulled out of their dives and banked sharply to avoid the smoke. Grant saw one of them dip his wings in an ironic salute; then the two planes climbed away and disappeared towards the western horizon.
'Now what do we do?' said Jackson.
* * *
They stared down at the jetty from the top of the cliff, trying to see through the smoke that still floated up from the floatplane's carcass. There wasn't much to see. The Yaks must have hit the fuel tanks — the plane had been blown to pieces. One of the pontoons floated like a basking shark; scorched pieces of metal bobbed in the water around it, or nestled in the rocks at the foot of the cliffs where they had already washed up.
'At least the rowing boat's still there,' said Reed, trying to find something to be optimistic about. It was true: the concrete pier had protected the lighthouse keeper's little boat from the worst of the blast and the Russian shells, though it looked slightly lower in the water than it had before.
'We're not escaping in that. The nearest safe harbour must be two hundred and fifty miles away — if we even managed to find our way there without getting lost. I wouldn't trust that thing to get me across the Thames to Vauxhall.' Muir coughed as the wind blew a puff of oily smoke in his face.
'The Russians won't leave us here for long,' said Grant, glancing out to sea. 'Remember, they still don't know who we are or what's happened here. They're just playing for time. Somebody must be coming to find out.'
'And what do we do when they get here?'
* * *
They had plenty of time to think about it. Morning slipped into afternoon, but the fighters didn't return. Grant posted himself at the top of the lighthouse and scanned the horizon hour after hour, but there was no sign of any approach. 'They're afraid of us,' he announced. He'd come down from the lighthouse to get a cup of tea: Muir had managed to repair the urn in the bunk house. 'The only way on to this island is through that jetty. A couple of men with machine-guns could pin them down for days.
'Just like Thermopylae,' said Reed. The thought seemed to cheer him up. 'Three hundred Spartans resisting the entire Persian army.'
Marina arched her eyebrows. 'And not one of them survived.'
* * *
The afternoon crawled on. With nothing better to do, Muir and Jackson continued trawling the island with the Bismatron, in the ever-receding hope of finding a signal. Grant kept watch, spelled sometimes by Marina.
Only Reed looked totally unfazed by their situation. He sat in the bunk house with his notebook and a sheaf of papers, poring diligently over his work. No one disturbed him, except once when Muir looked in. He peered down at the large piece of notepaper, extended on every side by other scraps of paper sellotaped or pasted on, which formed the nexus of Reed's efforts, and grunted. 'Any progress?'
'Hmm?' Reed was running through the pages of a notebook that seemed to contain nothing but long columns of the Linear B characters. 'I'm working on the place names at the moment.'
Muir's cigarette almost dropped out of his mouth on to the paper — which would have been unfortunate. 'Have I missed something? I thought this was all still gibberish. How do you know they're place names?'
'It's a guess. But a good one. If you look at the original tablets that Evans found in the palace at Knossos, certain words appear at irregular intervals in the text but always in the same order.'
'I don't follow.'
'The Knossos tablets observe certain conventions.' Reed searched for a metaphor. 'Imagine you're trying to learn something about English by listening to the shipping forecast. The actual forecast varies each day, but the order of the stations never changes. If you looked at transcripts, you'd see the same words always appeared in the same sequence, although with differing intervals. Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea…'
'I see.' Muir scowled. 'So — what exactly? Are we looking at three-thousand-year-old weather forecasts?'
Reed sighed. 'In the context of the Knossos tablets I imagine we're looking at tallies of taxes or tributes brought from the satellite towns of Crete. Presumably, each time the taxes were collected they were registered in the same order.'
'And do any of them appear on our tablet?'
'That's not exactly the point. Place names are often preserved in languages when everything else is forgotten. Think of London. The name pre-dates the Romans, perhaps even the Celts, and it's survived Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, Middle English. It'll probably still be known in a thousand years. So if we can identify place names that survive — Knossos, for example — we've every likelihood of being able to put phonetic values on the symbols that spell them.'
He pushed his spectacles back up his nose. 'However, since you ask, there is one name from the Knossos lists that appears on our tablet.' He rummaged on the table, looking for a piece of paper. 'Here.'
Muir peered at the three symbols — an ankh, a quartered circle and a simple cross.
'Where's that, then?'
Reed gave a shy smile, trying to hide his obvious self-satisfaction. 'Well, if it appears on the Knossos tablets it's probably on Crete and it would make sense for it to be somewhere we've been. There's a modern settlement at the mouth of the Valley of the Dead called Kato Zakro — Old Zakro. The British School excavated there in 1901 and found evidence that there was a settlement there in Minoan times — probably a harbour on the main Aegean-Levantine trade route. So if one assumes that the name remains more or less the same, that would give values for these three symbols Za-ka-ro.'
'Why "ka"?' Muir pointed at the middle symbol. 'Why not just "it"?'
'Most of the symbols are syllabic — that is, a consonant sound and a vowel sound. If your word contains two consonants together, or a consonant on its own, you usually have to insert an extra vowel to spell it.' His eyes flickered over Muir's shoulder for a second, then refocused. 'So if you wanted to spell, say, "b
iscuit" in a syllabic alphabet, you would have to write it "bi-su-ki-ta".'
'Extraordinary,' said Muir, shaking his head in disbelief. 'Keep up the good work.' He tossed a box of matches on to the broad sheet of paper. 'You'd better have this.'
'I don't smoke,' said Reed politely.
'It's so you can burn it if we're caught.'
* * *
Late that afternoon Grant saw a smudge on the horizon. He watched through the field glasses as it drew nearer: a Soviet patrol boat. On his way down to alert the others he unlocked the storeroom and pulled out the lighthouse keeper — a wiry man with wild grey hair, a straggly beard and a surly face. Through signs, Grant indicated that he should light the beacon.
'What the hell did you do that for?' Muir asked when Grant emerged. Dusk was coming early to the overcast sky and by tipping back his head he could already see the beam sweeping across the clouds above.
'We don't want the Soviets to lose their way in the dark.'
'Don't we?'
'If they don't come, we're never going to find a way off this island.' Grant strapped a knife round his shin and pulled down his trouser leg to cover it. 'For now, we need to stay indoors. If they can't see us they'll start to wonder if we're here.'
The sun sank behind the western horizon — agonisingly slowly for Grant, who watched it from the radio room in the lighthouse. He lost count of the times he looked out of the window, only to see that the sun had hardly moved. At least the patrol boat didn't seem in any hurry either.
At last, when it was dark enough, they set out. Grant was the last to leave: he bolted the steel door from within, then climbed to the top of the tower and shinned down the ladder on the outside. He rejoined the others behind the bunk house. Peering out, he could see the patrol boat's green and red navigation lights bobbing out at sea. Then, suddenly, they vanished.
'They're coming. Let's go.'
They crawled on their hands and knees, trying to keep the hump of the slope between themselves and the Russian boat. To Reed, who had never liked the dark, it felt like an initiation rite into some cruel black cult. He couldn't see where he was going: his world became a dark and nasty place, alternately sharp with rocks or sticky with bird droppings. Unseen creatures flapped, croaked, slithered and hissed all around him. Once he put his hand in a nest and felt the eggs crack under him; his hand came away wet and he let out an involuntary whimper.
'Shh,' came back Grant's stern whisper. 'We're almost there.'
'So are they,' answered another voice — Muir's, probably. From over the hill to their left they could hear the throb of engines approaching the dock.
'Muir, you take the others on to the end of the peninsula.' Grant had scouted it out that afternoon. Right at the very tip of the north-east corner a sliver of land extended its beckoning finger into the sea. 'Wait there.'
The darkness swallowed them quickly. As soon as they were gone, Grant and Marina turned left and began elbowing their way up the slope. Grant felt his way carefully, trying to weave a path between the nests that surrounded them like a minefield. Several times, Grant was almost smacked in the face by gulls rising up from their interrupted sleep. He could only hope that the boat's engines would drown the noise.
They came to the edge of the cliff and looked down into the little harbour. In the grey hues of darkness he could see the patrol boat just offshore. White foam bubbled at its stern where the engines held it against the tide, while on the foredeck he could see the machine-gun swivelling back and forth. On the concrete pier a small knot of men crouched in firing positions, rifles aimed at the clifftop.
'Shit'
Grant ducked back. He was too late: if he opened fire now he'd be a sitting duck. He thought about trying a grenade, but then the boat might take fright and leave altogether. And that was what he didn't want.
'Plenty of time,' he told himself. He waited for his heartbeat to calm again — a technique that had served him well — then wriggled back to Marina. 'We'll have to let them come up. I reckon they'll make for the lighthouse first.'
'Shall we take them on the path?'
Grant shook his head. 'Let them go. We'll wait until it's clear, then see if we can get down.'
They edged away — not a second too soon. They heard heavy boots running up the stairs and a moment later a figure appeared at the top of the cliff. His silhouette seemed to fade in and out of darkness as the lighthouse beam swept round the sky. A second figure joined him, then a third. Others followed. With tense, jerky movements that betrayed their nerves, they fanned out from the head of the stair and formed a loose cordon round the harbour perimeter. Then they stopped.
'What are they doing?'
A shot broke the night air, followed by a ragged volley from along the Russian line. Marina raised her gun; instantly, Grant put his hand on her arm and pushed it back down. 'They're just shooting at seagulls. Or else trying to scare us into returning fire.'
The firing petered out, replaced by a babble of anxious shouts. Grant couldn't make out the words, probably wouldn't have understood them anyway, but the sense behind them seemed to be relief. That was good.
The unexpected flashes from the rifles had temporarily ruined Grant's night vision. While he waited for it to come back, he pressed himself into the ground and listened. The Russian soldiers still weren't moving — almost as if they were waiting for something. Then he heard it. A low hum to the west, growing steadily louder.
Grant eased his head up and looked out. Light from the lighthouse still blinked across the sky, a metronomic pulse flashing on the underside of the clouds like distant lightning or shellfire. He waited, watching. The hum got louder. Then, suddenly, he saw it, picked out in the sky. It was a flying boat, with a smooth silvery skin and a strange, curved shape like a banana. It passed under the wand of light and disappeared again. A few seconds later Grant heard it splash down.
He grinned and edged himself over the top of the cliff. 'That's our ticket off the island.'
* * *
Lieutenant Maxim Sergeiovich Soloviev of the Soviet Naval Infantry watched the dinghy glide towards the jetty. The oars splashed in the water; in the back of the boat he could see a tall figure sitting stiffly, with a shorter and stouter figure slouched beside him. He glanced nervously up towards the encircling cliffs to make sure his men still had it secured. The instructions from Odessa had been vague, but the threat if he failed unmistakable.
The boat knocked against the pier, next to the floating wreckage of the American seaplane. The tall passenger clambered out. Soloviev clicked his heels together and saluted smartly. 'Comrade Colonel.'
The man returned it with a razor-sharp salute of his own. Soloviev tried to get a glimpse of him in the darkness. The face was gaunt and filled with violence: a white scar puckered his cheek from ear to jaw, and his right eye was covered by a triangular patch. It didn't make much difference, Soloviev thought: the remaining eye was sunk so deep in its hooded socket that it was as black and impenetrable as the other.
Soloviev took a deep breath. 'Comrade Colonel, I am pleased to report we captured the harbour without incident. My men control the cliffs and are ready to advance on the lighthouse. If our enemies are still here, I believe that is where they will have barricaded themselves.'
The colonel grunted. His companion had emerged from the boat now; over the colonel's shoulder, Soloviev caught a brief impression of a heavy, jowled face and short fair hair. He didn't seem to be wearing a uniform — though, as Soloviev had learned, those were often the men to fear most in Stalin's Russia.
'Do not underestimate them.' Even on the warm night, there was something chilling and harsh in the colonel's voice. 'Many of our men have already paid the price for such a mistake.'
'And they have something that is very valuable to us.' The other man spoke for the first time. His Russian was poor, the accent harsh. Soloviev wondered where he was from. Poland, perhaps? 'It is imperative to take them alive.'
Soloviev's heart sank. He look
ed to his colonel for reassurance, but got none — only a harsh twist of the mouth and a curt, 'Be careful. Comrade Stalin will be most disappointed if you fail.'
As if to echo his worst fears, at that moment a volley of machine-gun fire burst out from the cliffs away to his right. A second light appeared halfway up the tower of the lighthouse. Soloviev threw himself on to the dock, though the firing was wild and the bullets nowhere near him. To his shame, the colonel never moved, but simply swivelled his good eye round to see where the shots were coming from. Soloviev shamefacedly got to his feet and was further mortified to see he had bird droppings smeared all over his uniform. Up above, more shots rolled over the island as his men returned fire. Perhaps they had hit the gunman, for the shooting from the tower had stopped as abruptly as it began.
The colonel turned towards him. The promise of an eternity of Siberian winters seemed written in the harsh lines of his face. 'Send the patrol boat round to the west to cover your advance. Then take your men and take that fucking tower.'
* * *
Twenty yards away, crouched in the rocks at the bottom of the cliff, Grant watched the hapless officer run up the stairs. The patrol boat revved its engines and headed away from the pier. Its wake sent cold water sluicing round Grant's ankles, but he ignored it. Out on the dock the colonel gave the lighthouse one more look, as though something was puzzling him, then followed the lieutenant with his companion in tow. Grant tried to imagine the look on his face when he got inside the lighthouse.
But he wanted to be well off the island before that happened. The harbour was deserted now, except for a solitary guard posted on the jetty. A little further out the Russian flying boat bobbed in the water. It was too awkward a shape to try to bring to the pier; instead, the Russians had anchored it in the bay.
Grant pulled out the knife strapped to his leg and bit it between his teeth. Without a ripple he slid into the water and kicked his way towards the jetty.
* * *
Soloviev peered round the bunk-house wall and stared up at the tower. His men had cleared the cottage and found no one; all that was left now was the lighthouse. There had been no more shots fired from inside — perhaps his men had killed the gunman despite the Colonel's orders. A shiver went through him at the thought. But there must be others: the radio message had said there were four enemies on the island. Maybe the colonel could overlook one more or less.