The Lost Temple

by Tom Harper

  “What about the others?”

  Grant looked down toward 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 parlor 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.”

  CHAPTER 27

  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 realized, 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 lumps 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 center 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.

  “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 gray 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 maneuvering for altitude: something ominous.

  “Get in the lighthouse!” Grant shouted suddenly. “Quick!”

  The fighters wheeled round and turned back, dipping their noses toward 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 toward 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 toward 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 harbor 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 harbor 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 ‘k’?”

  “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, ‘biscuit’ 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 afte
rnoon 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 gray 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—agonizingly 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.