by Tom Harper
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 plowing 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 northwestern 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 & 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 vis pacem, para bellum. 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-story 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 a 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.
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.
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“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 toward 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 cinder-block. 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 toward 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 meter of topsoil.” Marina pointed to the track they’d come up from the jetty. Its surface was bare rock, the same color 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 ridge 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-Müller 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 center 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 realized 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.”