by Graham Brown
“What were you thinking, hiring that American?”
Saravich turned to face Ropa. “It seemed a good way to keep us out of the picture. And it has. You notice there is no backlash.”
Ropa laughed and Saravich wondered if the laughter was directed at his attempt to justify the failure or some other, deeper fact. Whatever the truth, Saravich was too tired to worry about it tonight.
He turned and began to walk again, soon reaching the stairwell.
Ropa followed, just a foot or so behind him. It gave Saravich the distinct impression of being herded somewhere.
The two men exited into the frigid Moscow air. Snow was falling, illuminated by the city lights. Five inches or more already coated the streets. A light snow by Russian standards. Waiting in that snow was a black Maserati sedan. Twenty years ago it would have been a boxy Zil, the Russian equivalent of an American Lincoln or Cadillac. But with the new wealth in Russia, Mercedes and BMW were favored. Always looking to top his peers, Ropa went a step beyond.
A Maserati with oversized, studded snow tires. What would the Italians think? It was like a runway model wearing galoshes.
“You’re coming with us,” Ropa said.
“Where?”
“To explain yourself.”
With that Saravich felt Ropa’s paw of a hand fall heavily on his shoulder. It guided him to the sedan’s rear door.
A moment later Saravich found himself in the back with another man, one he didn’t recognize. Ropa squeezed through the front door and filled the passenger seat to capacity as the driver put the car in gear.
So this is how it ends, Saravich thought. On a snowy night in Moscow I’ll disappear. Perhaps not to be found until the spring thaw.
The car moved through traffic and crossed the Moscow River. A minute later they were pulling to a stop at the very center of Red Square.
Would they really do it here? Maybe, if they want to send a message.
Another vehicle pulled up beside them, pointing the opposite direction and berthing so close that neither vehicle could open a door.
Ropa lowered his window. Quick words were exchanged and he snatched something being held out by the passenger of the other car.
“Let’s go,” he said to the driver.
As the Maserati began to move, Ropa did what he could to turn and face Saravich, handing him a padded envelope.
“You have one more chance,” Ropa told him. “The orders come straight from the FSB now.”
“What are they?” Saravich asked disdainfully.
“Go there, find the boy, and bring him back to the Science Directorate. If you can’t capture him, then you are to kill him and everyone who has touched him.”
Saravich looked inside the envelope. A new passport, cash, instructions. “I don’t do that kind of work anymore,” he said. “Tell them to send one of their own.”
“It was your disgrace,” Ropa said angrily. “Petrov was your brother.”
“My half brother,” Ivan insisted.
“Still,” Ropa said. “It is your family that has ruined this. You must be the one to pay for it.”
Saravich looked outside. He’d done much and given up much for the Soviet Union, but despite a life of work, his name was now a mark of dishonor. Then again, what did he care of honor anymore? What had it ever gotten him?
“You will be met in Mexico City,” Ropa added. “The men will take orders from you, but you will not be free to leave them. Do you understand?”
Of course he understood. The men would be FSB, from the ninth directorate, assassins with orders to kill whomever he asked them to kill. And then to eliminate Saravich himself if they did not bring the boy home, or perhaps even if they did.
“You may think you have nothing to lose,” Ropa told him, “but you still have nephews, nieces. These people will suffer if you do anything less than what’s necessary.”
Saravich stared at Ropa, but the Mountain did not blink. The threat was real. He tucked the envelope in his jacket and glanced out the window. They were approaching Moscow International. He would be boarding a plane without ever going home.
Apparently there would be no rest for the wicked.
CHAPTER 28
The thirty-foot V-hulled fishing boat sliced across the Gulf of Mexico with surprising grace; surprising because the boat itself was a battered veteran of twenty years, with dents, peeling paint, and saltwater corrosion plainly visible on every surface. Even the engines had sputtered and coughed when Danielle had started them, sounding like old tractor motors as the boat traveled at low speed.
But once she’d coaxed the throttles forward, the twin outboards had begun to sing. And now, cruising across relatively flat seas, with a long wake trailing out behind them, Danielle had begun to feel a sense of confidence and of freedom. Those feelings seemed to be mirrored on the faces of at least two of her three passengers.
Beside her, McCarter looked familiar again, smiling and shaved. Two days of proper dressings and mega-doses of antibiotics seemed to have broken the back of his infection. Sleeping pills had granted him some rest and he now looked like the man she remembered instead of a lunatic who’d escaped the asylum.
Yuri seemed happier as well, much as he had on the freighter to the Philippines. She wondered about him. If he could really see or sense energy fields as the Russian captain had claimed, even a sleepy town like Puerto Azul might be something in the way of overstimulation.
It was true that autism created similar feelings of sensory overload in those who suffered from it, but for Yuri it was worse. He could be in a silent, darkened room and the waves of electromagnetic energy others could not see or feel would bombard him.
Appliances, cellphones, power lines, anything that used electricity created a small magnetic field. If one could see these things or hear them or sense them, as Yuri supposedly could, the modern world might feel like a room where everyone was shouting, blowing trumpets, and banging cymbals, all at the same time.
But out here there was little of that and it seemed that the open sea brought him peace.
And that left only Hawker to be unhappy. He stood near the bow, digging through the various boxes of equipment, looking more and more disappointed with each new find. He reached for a spot of corrosion on the metal hull, snapping off a flake of rust.
“Is this really the best we can do?” he said, tossing the flake overboard.
“It matches our jeep,” she replied.
“Where are the missiles?” he asked. “The machine guns and the mini-torpedoes?”
“Couldn’t afford any options,” she said. “Just basic transportation. At least it’s a fast boat. They normally rent these things out to chase after wahoo.”
Hawker’s eyebrows went up. Apparently he wasn’t a fisherman. “A wahoo?” he asked. “What the hell is a wahoo?”
“A fish,” she said. “An extremely fast fish. This boat is set up to catch them.”
Looking out over the horizon, he grunted his approval. “I guess that’s something.”
She motioned toward one of the lockers he’d been through. “At least the dive gear is first-rate,” she added. “That’s what we’re going to need.”
“If we find anything,” he said, looking at the control panel. “Only we would look for a sunken city with a fishfinder.”
Danielle followed his gaze. The only pieces of additional equipment were a GPS receiver and a cheap sonar depth sounder. But they had checked and rechecked McCarter’s calculations. If he was right, the Tip of the Spear was a spot seven miles offshore, in the relatively shallow water of the Campeche plain. The underwater data from that area was limited, but it was a sedimentary plain, relatively shallow and flat. If a ruin of some type was present, it should stick out like a sore thumb.
Danielle looked to McCarter. “I think he doubts us,” she said.
“Don’t worry,” McCarter insisted. “We’ll prove him wrong.”
Hawker shook his head. “I just don’t see how the Maya built
something out here underwater.”
“There are two possibilities for that,” McCarter said. “The first is that they didn’t build anything underwater. They could have built something on an island only to have it sink over time.”
He waved his hand around. “The gulf is a very active zone of currents and plate tectonics. Not only that, but much of the underlying rock is sedimentary, so relatively soft. Islands can rise or fall on a human scale. A thousand years can create quite a change. As far as we can tell, the Maya and their predecessors were active in this area for two or three times that length.”
“We’re not talking Krakatau or anything, right?” Hawker asked.
“No,” McCarter said. “More like a deflating cake or a home dropping into a sinkhole.”
Danielle was glad to see McCarter acting more like himself again.
“And the other option?” Hawker asked.
“We believe the natives we found in Brazil had assistance and training from whoever brought these stones back. That’s how they built the temple down there. That’s why it’s still standing. It’s not too hard for me to imagine them building an underwater structure. Concrete hardens in a chemical reaction. Use the right forms and it can set up and cure underwater. Especially when using volcanic ash as an ingredient.”
McCarter looked her way. “Our trip to the Island of the Shroud showed that these people were traveling to the volcanic regions. It was a long trek, one that I doubt they would have made without an important reason. We thought it was to create a temple to house the new stone, and in a way it might have been, but maybe we had it backward. The effort was related to housing the stone, but they weren’t going there to place the stone. Instead it was to get the ingredients they needed to do the job down here.”
That sounded about right to Danielle. She could imagine trains of burros loaded down with volcanic ash, trouping down the slopes of Mount Pulimundo. She checked the GPS. “I guess we’re going to find out soon enough,” she said. “We’re almost there.”
She backed off the throttles and the boat slowed to a calmer pace.
Their plan was simple: enter the area, cruise a grid pattern for an hour or two, and dive on anything that looked suspicious. Twenty minutes in, they hadn’t found anything, but the depth had remained almost constant.
“That’s a good sign,” Danielle said.
“I’ve been thinking about what we’re looking for,” McCarter said. “The stone we found in Brazil was hidden but in a monument of some presence. And it was guarded. As if the people who put it there wanted it to be protected, but also in a known position.”
“Hard to get at, but easy to find,” she paraphrased.
“Not necessarily easy to find,” he said. “After all, it was in the middle of the Amazon. But if ‘easy to find’ is the wrong description, how about ‘impossible to lose.’”
That seemed apt.
Hawker nodded. “Those animals defended the temple in Brazil like a nest.”
Danielle thought she understood. “Hard to lose, but well defended,” she said. “You’re saying this is the same kind of thing. Put a temple out here and it’s even more inaccessible.”
“They brought these things back here for a reason,” McCarter added. “They gave the people they found a legend designed to explain what they were for, but they didn’t want anyone disturbing them.”
“So why are we messing with them?” Hawker asked.
McCarter and Danielle exchanged glances. At times the whole thing was too monumental to think about. Strange, glowing stones that were actually machinery, devices of some kind sent back from a future time period. Someone had seen fit to go through whatever hell it took to send them back here, but now they were building toward something, and if the legends were correct, even tangentially, it could mean a cataclysmic change for everyone on the earth. Leaving them in place without trying to understand what they might have been for was almost too much to ask.
“We have a good reason,” she said. “We need to understand what they’re going to do at zero hour.”
She searched Hawker’s face and waited for a response. She sensed he was not quite convinced.
Before Hawker could say anything, Yuri stood abruptly, looking off to the port side of the boat. He stepped to the rail, staring at a spot ahead and to the left. He followed the spot with his eyes as they moved past it.
Danielle slowed the boat further and began to turn back toward the area. The depth sounder began to beep and Yuri became more agitated. He leaned out over the edge of the boat, moving his head back and forth as if he were trying to see through the water.
Suddenly he raced from the port side of the boat to starboard, grabbing that rail and repeating his agitated actions.
“Siren!” he shouted. “Siren, siren, siren!”
He seemed unable to control himself, shouting aggressively, rocking back and forth. He went from one side of the boat to the other and began to climb overboard. Hawker grabbed him.
“Calm down!” Hawker urged.
“Siren, siren, siren!”
The depth gauge was beeping louder; they’d moved over a shallow spot.
Yuri wriggled in Hawker’s arms trying to break his grip. He lunged at Hawker’s hand to bite it. “Siren!” he screamed. “Siren!”
“Get us out of here!” Hawker shouted.
She gunned the throttles and the boat leaped forward, racing away from the offending spot.
Yuri looked toward the wake behind them. “Siren,” he said, softly and wistfully. “Siren.”
And then he was calm.
Danielle slowed the boat once again and when Hawker released his grip, Yuri ran to Danielle and clung to her leg.
“What the hell did they do to this kid?” Hawker asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, stroking Yuri’s hair. She crouched down beside him.
“What’s ‘siren’ mean, sweetheart? Can you tell me?”
He just stared at her. It was no use; he didn’t understand.
“It’s okay,” she said, looking into his eyes and touching his face. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
He locked his eyes on hers and it seemed as if he was troubled, but then he broke free and found his sunglasses again and began clicking them beside his ear.
“You think he’s okay?” McCarter asked.
Sadly, she looked up at him. “I don’t know. But I think we’ve found the Tip of the Spear.”
CHAPTER 29
Danielle punched the keys on the dive computer to calculate their time available underwater. Air use, type of mixture, and decompression stops would all be factored in. While she worked on the details, Hawker took off his shirt and began hauling the gear from the equipment locker.
She glanced over at him. His shoulders and back muscles formed a broad V that tapered down to his waist. His muscles went taut as he stacked the heavy tanks by the boat’s stern rail.
His tanned skin was marred with sets of scars: an old knife wound that traveled down from one shoulder blade, road rash or shrapnel scars on his right side, and two small, circular scars that she guessed were bullet wounds. As terrible as it might sound, she thought, they suited him, the way the beat-up old helicopter and the rusting jeep suited him.
“Don’t get too distracted,” McCarter said, catching her.
“Right,” she replied, somewhat embarrassed.
“Don’t worry,” McCarter added. “I caught him staring at you earlier. He almost fell off the boat.”
“Good,” she said, smiling to herself. “I’d hate to think I was losing my touch.”
She turned back to the computer. If the depth finder was correct, the sea floor was a sandy plain eighty feet below. But at the spot where Yuri had begun screaming, the depth finder had registered successive pings ranging from fifty-five to seventy feet. Something was down there rising out of the sediment: a reef, the remnants of some island or some type of construction.
She stepped to the front of the boat for some privacy
and changed into her dive skins, a thin, formfitting suit of Lycra, similar to a neoprene wet suit but designed for warmer water. Dive skins were good against abrasion and didn’t affect buoyancy, like neoprene suits could.
With the suit fitting like a glove, Danielle sheathed a four-inch titanium knife around her calf and then walked to the back of the boat. Hawker stood there, wearing dive shorts and a rash-guard of a shirt. He was examining their masks.
The full-face diving masks had radio communications built into them and a miniature head-up display that projected depth, time, and compass direction on the top right corner of the mask, like a modern fighter pilot’s helmet.
They had cost a thousand dollars apiece and when added to the two diver propulsion vehicles, or DPVs, the twin aluminum tanks, the setup came to twenty grand or more.
“I see where our budget went,” Hawker said.
“I had these flown in yesterday,” she said. “The boat … well, I had to make do with what was already available.”
Hawker lifted the tanks onto her back.
“We’re using nitrox,” he said referencing a special mixture of oxygen and nitrogen that allowed divers to go deeper, and stay down longer.
“Forty percent mixture.”
For a dive into eighty feet of water they didn’t really need nitrox but she hadn’t known what the depth of the site would be, and if they found something in deeper waters she didn’t want to go back for new tanks.
“With the nitrox we can do an hour and ten minutes without decompression,” she explained. “Max time on the bottom is two hours, saving thirty-two minutes for decompression on our way up.”
Hawker set his watch and heaved his set of tanks up onto his shoulders.
She turned to McCarter. “I programmed a waypoint into the GPS. Don’t delete it. You’re going to drift a little, even with the anchor down. You’ll need to be able to home in on that spot if we need a pickup.”