Текст книги "Trojan Odyssey"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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After swimming in and through brown crud, one drop on her skin could prove fatal. She did not dare remove her Viking dry suit with attached Turbo hood and boots, gloves sealed by locking rings and full face mask, just yet. After unsnapping her weight belt and buoyancy compensator, she turned on two valves that activated a strong sprinkling system, washing down her wet suit and gear with a special decontamination solution to remove any brown crud residue. Certain she was properly sanitized, she turned off the valves and rapped on the door to the main lock.

Although the masculine face that appeared on the other side of the view port belonged to her twin brother, there was little resemblance. Though they were born within minutes of each other, she and her brother Dirk Jr. were about as nonidentical as twins could get. He towered over her at six feet four, and was lean and hard and deeply tanned. Unlike her straight red hair and soft gray eyes, the thick mass of hair on his head was wavy and black, the eyes a mesmeric opaline green that sparkled when the light hit just right.

When she stepped out of the chamber, he removed the yoke and collar seal between the neck of her suit and head mask. By the look in his eyes that were more piercing than usual and the grim expression on his face, she knew she was in big trouble.

Before he could open his mouth, she threw up her hands and said, "I know, I know, I shouldn't have gone off alone without a dive partner."

"You know better," said her brother in exasperation. "If you hadn't sneaked off at the crack of dawn before I was awake, I would have come after and dragged you back to the lab by your ear."

"I apologize," said Summer, feigning remorse, "but I can accomplish more if I don't have to be concerned with another diver."

Dirk helped her undo the heavy, riveted waterproof zippers on her Viking dry suit. First removing the gloves and pulling the inner hood down behind her head, he began peeling the suit from her torso, arms and then legs and feet, until she could step out of it. Her hair fell in a cascade of copper red. Underneath, Summer wore a skintight polypropylene nylon body suit that nicely displayed her curvaceous body.

"Did you enter the crud?" asked Dirk with concern in his tone.

She nodded. "I brought back samples."

"You certain there was no leakage inside your suit?"

Holding her arms over her head, she did a pirouette. "See for yourself. Not a drop of toxic slime to be seen."

Pitt put a hand on her shoulder. "Words to remember: 'Don't ever dive alone again.' Certainly not without me if I'm in the neighborhood."

"Yes, brother," she said with a condescending smile.

"Let's get your samples in a sealed case. Captain Barnum can take them back to the ship's lab for analysis."

"The captain is coming to the habitat?" she asked in mild surprise.

"He invited himself for lunch," Pitt answered. "He insisted on delivering our food supplies himself. Said it will give him a break from playing ship's commander."

"Tell him he can't come if he doesn't bring a bottle of wine."

"Let us hope he got the message by osmosis," Dirk said with a grin.

A cadaverously built man, Captain Paul T. Barnum might have been taken for a brother to the legendary Jacques Cousteau, except that his head was almost desolate of hair. He wore a shorty wet suit and left it on after entering the main lock. Dirk helped him lift a metal box containing two days of food onto the galley counter where Summer began stowing the various supplies in a little cupboard and refrigerator.

"I brought you a present," Barnum announced, holding up a bottle of Jamaican wine. "Not only that, the ship's cook made you lobster thermidor with creamed spinach for dinner."

"That explains your presence," Pitt said, slapping the captain on the back.

"Spirits on a NUMA project," Summer murmured mockingly. "What would our esteemed leader, Admiral Sandecker, have to say about breaking his golden rule of no booze during working hours?"

"Your father was a bad influence on me," said Barnum. "He never came aboard ship without a case of vintage wine while his buddy Al Giordino always showed up with a humidor filled with the admiral's private stock of cigars."

"It seems everybody but the admiral knows that Al secretly buys the cigars from the same source," said Dirk, smiling.

"What's for a side dish?" asked Barnum.

"Fresh fish chowder and crab salad."

"Who's doing the honors?"

"Me," muttered Dirk. "The only seafood Summer can prepare is a tuna sandwich."

"That's not so," she pouted. "I'm a good cook."

Dirk gazed at her cynically. "Then why does your coffee taste like battery acid?"

Panfried in butter, the lobster and creamed spinach were washed down with the bottle of Jamaican wine, accompanied by tales of Barnum's seafaring adventures. Summer made a nasty face at her brother as she presented them with a lemon meringue pie she had baked in the microwave. Dirk was the first to admit she had performed a gourmet wonder, since baking and microwave ovens were not suited to one another.

Barnum stood to take his leave, when Summer touched his arm. "I have an enigma for you."

Barnum's eyes narrowed. "What kind of enigma?"

She handed him the object she'd found in the cavern.

"What is it?"

"I think it's some kind of pot or urn. We won't know until we clean off the encrustation. I was hoping you'd take it back to the ship and have someone in the lab give it a good scrubbing."

"I'm sure someone will volunteer for the job." He hoisted it in both hands as if weighing it. "Feels too heavy for terra-cotta."

Dirk pointed to the base of the object. "There's an open space free of growth where you can see that it's formed out of metal."

"Strange, there doesn't appear to be any rust."

"Don't hold me to it, but my guess is it's bronze."

"The configuration is too graceful for native manufacture," added Summer. "Though it's badly encrusted, it appears to have figures molded around the middle."

Barnum peered at the urn. "You have more imagination than I do. Maybe an archaeologist can solve the riddle after we return to port, if they don't go into hysterics because you removed it from the site."

"You won't have to wait that long," said Dirk. "Why not transmit photos of it to Hiram Yaeger in NUMA's computer headquarters in Washington? He should be able to come up with a date and where it was produced. Chances are it fell off a passing ship or came from a shipwreck."

"The Vandalialies nearby," offered Summer.

"There's your probable source," said Barnum.

"But how did it get inside a cavern a hundred yards away?" Summer asked no one in particular.

Her brother smiled foxlike and murmured, "Magic, lovely lady, voodoo island magic."

Darkness had settled over the sea when Barnum finally bid good night.

As he slipped through the entry lock door, Pitt asked, "How does the weather look?"

"Pretty calm for the next couple of days," replied Barnum. "But a hurricane is building up off the Azores. The ship's meteorologist will keep a sharp eye on it. If it looks like it's heading this way, I'll evacuate the two of you and we'll make full speed out of its path."

"Let's hope it misses us," said Summer.

Barnum placed the urn in a net bag and took the pouch of water samples Summer had collected before he dropped out of the entry lock into the night-blackened water. Dirk switched on the outside lights, revealing schools of vivid green parrot fish swimming in circles, seemingly indifferent to the humans living in their midst.

Without bothering to don air tanks, Barnum took a deep breath, beamed a dive light ahead of him and stroked to the surface in a free ascent fifty feet away, exhaling as he rose. His little aluminum rigid-hull inflatable boat bobbed on its anchor that he'd dropped earlier a safe distance from the habitat. He swam over, climbed in and pulled up the anchor. Then he turned the ignition and started the two one-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Mercury outboard motors and skimmed across the water toward his ship, whose superstructure was brightly illuminated with an array of floodlights embellished with red and green navigation lamps.

Most oceangoing vessels were usually painted white with red, black or blue trim. A few cargo ships sported an orange color scheme. Not the Sea Sprite.As with all the other ships in the National Underwater and Marine Agency fleet, she was painted a bright turquoise from stem to stern. It was the hue the agency's feisty director, Admiral James Sandecker, had chosen to set his ships apart from the other vessels that roamed the seas. There were few mariners who didn't recognize a NUMA vessel when they passed one at sea or in port.

Sea Spritewas large, as her type of vessel went. She measured 308 feet in length with a 65-foot beam. State of the art in every detail, she had started life as an icebreaker tug and spent her first ten years stationed in and around the north polar seas, battling frigid storms while towing damaged ships out of ice floes and around icebergs. She could bulldoze her way through six-foot-thick ice and tow an aircraft carrier through rough seas and do it with motion stability.

Still in her prime when purchased by Sandecker for NUMA, he ordered her refitted into an ultra-multipurpose ocean research and dive support vessel. Nothing was spared in the major refurbishment. Her electronics were designed by NUMA engineers as were her automated computerized systems and communications. She also possessed high-quality laboratories, adequate work space and low vibration. Her computer networks could monitor, collect and pass processed data to the NUMA laboratories in Washington for immediate investigation that turned the results into vital ocean knowledge.

Sea Spritewas powered by the most advanced engines modern technology could create. Her two big magnetohydrodynamic engines could move her through the water at nearly forty knots. And, if she could tow an aircraft carrier through turbulent seas before, she could now pull two without breathing hard. No research ship in any country in the world could match her rugged sophistication.

Barnum was proud of his ship. She was one of only thirty research ships in the NUMA fleet but easily the most unique. Admiral Sandecker had placed him in charge of her refit and Barnum was more than happy to oblige, especially when the admiral told him cost was no problem. No corner was cut and Barnum never doubted that this command was the pinnacle of his marine career.

Deployed a full nine months a year overseas, her scientists were rotated with every new project. The other three months were spent in voyaging to and from study sites, dock maintenance and upgrading equipment and instruments with newer technical advances.

As he approached, he gazed at the eight-story superstructure, the great crane on the stern that had lowered Piscesto the bottom and was used to lift and retrieve robotic vehicles and manned submersibles from the water. He studied the huge helicopter platform mounted over the bow and the array of communications and satellite equipment growing like trees around a large dome containing a full range of radar systems.

Barnum turned his attention to steering alongside the hull. As he shut down the engines, a small crane swung out from above and lowered a cable with a hook. He attached the hook to a lift strap and relaxed as the little boat was lifted aboard.

Once he stepped onto the deck, Barnum immediately carried the enigmatic object to the ship's spacious laboratory. He handed it to two intern students from the Texas A&M School of Nautical Archaeology.

"Clean it up the best you can," said Barnum. "But be very careful. It just might be a very valuable artifact."

"Looks like an old pot covered with crud," said a blond-haired girl, wearing a tight Texas A&M T-shirt and cutoff shorts. It was obvious that she didn't relish the job of cleaning it.

"Not at all," said Barnum with icy menace. "You never know what vile secrets are hidden in a coral reef. So beware of the evil genie inside."

Happy to have the last word, Barnum turned and walked toward his cabin, leaving the students staring suspiciously at his back before turning and contemplating the urn.

By ten o'clock that evening, the urn was on a helicopter heading toward the airport at Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, where it would be put on a jetliner whose destination was Washington, D.C.

3

The NUMA headquarters building rose thirty stories beside the east bank of the Potomac River overlooking the Capitol. Its computer network on the tenth floor looked like a sound-stage from a Hollywood science fiction movie. The remarkable setting was the domain of Hiram Yaeger, NUMA's chief computer wizard. Sandecker had given Yaeger free rein to design and create the world's largest library on the sea, without interference or budget restraints. The amount of data Yaeger had accumulated, assembled and cataloged was massive, covering every known scientific research study, investigation and analysis, dating from the earliest ancient records to the present. There was none like it anywhere in the world.

The spacious setting was open. Yaeger felt that, unlike most government and corporate computer centers, cubicles were a nemesis to efficient work habits. He orchestrated the vast complex from a large circular console set on a raised platform at its center. Except for a conference room and the bathrooms, the only enclosure was a transparent circular tube the size of a closet that stood off to one side of an array of monitors spread around Yaeger's console.

Never quite making the transition from hippie to pin-striped suit, Yaeger still dressed in Levi's with matching jacket and very old, worn lowboy boots. His graying hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he peered at his adored monitors through granny glasses. Peculiarly, the NUMA computer wizard did not lead the life he exhibited in his appearance.

Yaeger had a lovely wife who was an acclaimed artist. They lived on a farm in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where they raised horses. Their two daughters attended private school and were making plans to attend the college of their choice after graduation. Yaeger drove an expensive V-12 BMW to and from NUMA headquarters while his wife preferred a Cadillac Esplanade to haul the girls and their friends to school and parties.

Intrigued by the urn that had been air-shipped from Captain Barnum on Sea Sprite,he lifted it out of its box and set it in the tubular enclosure a few feet from his leather swivel chair. Then he punched in a code on his keyboard. In a few moments the three-dimensional figure of an attractive woman wearing a floral-patterned blouse with matching skirt materialized in the chamber. A creation of Yaeger's, the ethereal lady was an image of his own wife and was a talking and self-thinking computerized manifestation that had a personality all its own.

"Hello, Max," greeted Yaeger. "Ready to do a little research?"

"I'm at your beck and call," Max replied in a husky voice.

"You see the object I placed at your feet?"

"I do."

"I'd like you to identify it with an approximate date and culture."

"We're doing archaeology now, are we?"

Yaeger nodded. "The object was found in a coral cavern on Navidad Reef by a NUMA biologist."

"They could have done a better job of dressing it up," Max said dryly, looking down at the encrusted urn.

"It was a rush job."

"That's obvious."

"Circulate through university archaeological data networks until you find a close match."

She looked at him slyly. "You're coercing me into a criminal act, you know."

"Hacking into other files of historical purposes is not a criminal act."

"I never fail to be impressed with the way you legitimize your nefarious activities."

"I do it out of sheer benevolence."

Max rolled her eyes. "Spare me."

Yaeger's index finger touched a key, and Max slowly disappeared as though she was in a state of vaporization while the urn sank into a receptacle beneath the floor of the tube.

In that instant the blue phone amid a row of colored receivers buzzed. Yaeger held the earpiece against his ear as he continued typing on his keyboard. "Yes, Admiral."

"Hiram," came the voice of Admiral James Sandecker, "I need the file on that floating monstrosity that's moored off Cabo San Rafael in the Dominican Republic."

"I'll bring it right up to your office."

James Sandecker, age sixty-one, was doing push-ups when Yaeger was ushered into the office by the admiral's secretary. A short man a few inches over five feet, he had a thick carpet of red hair matched by a red Vandyke beard. He glanced up at Yaeger through cool assertive blue eyes. A health addict, he jogged every morning, worked out in the NUMA gym every afternoon and ate vegetarian. His only vice was a penchant for huge custom cigars, rolled to his special order. A longtime member of the Beltway crowd, he had built NUMA into the most efficient bureaucracy in government. Though most presidents he had served under during his long term as director of NUMA did not find him a team player, his impressive record of achievement and admiration by Congress assured him of a lifetime job.

He literally jumped to his feet as he motioned Yaeger to a chair across from his desk that had once belonged in the captain's cabin of the French luxury liner Normandiebefore it burned in New York Harbor in 1942.

They were joined by Rudi Gunn, Sandecker's deputy director of the agency. Gunn was less than an inch taller than the admiral. A highly intelligent individual and a former commander in the navy who had served under Sandecker, Gunn stared at the world through thick-lensed horn-rim glasses. Gunn's main job was to oversee NUMA's many scientific ocean projects operating around the world. He nodded at Hiram and sat down in an adjacent chair.

Yaeger half stood and laid a thick folder in front of the admiral. "Here is everything we have on the Ocean Wanderer."

Sandecker opened the folder and stared at the plans for the luxury hotel that was designed and constructed as a floating resort. Self-contained, it could be towed to any one of several exotic locations throughout the world, where it would be moored for a month until it was hauled to its next picturesque site. After a minute of studying the specifications, he looked up at Yaeger, his expression grim. "This thing is a catastrophe waiting to happen."

"I have to agree," said Gunn. "Our engineering staff carefully scrutinized the interior structure and came to the conclusion that the hotel was inadequately designed to survive a violent storm."

"What brought you to that conclusion?" asked Yaeger innocently.

Gunn stood and leaned over the desk, unrolling plans of the anchor cables that were attached to pilings driven into the seabed to anchor the hotel. He pointed with a pencil at the cables where they were secured to huge fasteners beneath the lower floors of the hotel. "A strong hurricane could rip it off its moorings."

"According to the specs, it's built to withstand one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds," pointed out Yaeger.

"Not the winds we're concerned about," said Sandecker. "Because the hotel is moored out to sea instead of firmly embedded on hard ground, it's at the mercy of high waves that could build up as they approach shallow water and beat the structure to pieces, along with all the guests and employees inside."

"Wasn't any of this taken into consideration by the architects?" asked Yaeger.

Sandecker scowled. "We pointed out the problem to them, but were ignored by the founder of the resort corporation who owns it."

"He was satisfied that an international team of marine engineers pronounced it safe," added Gunn. "And because the United States has no jurisdiction over a foreign enterprise, it was out of our hands to interfere with its construction."

Sandecker put the specifications back in the file and closed it. "Let us hope the hurricane building off West Africa will either bypass the hotel or fail to build to a Category Five with winds exceeding a hundred and fifty miles an hour."

"I've already alerted Captain Barnum," said Gunn, "who is supporting the Piscescoral investigation not far from the Ocean Wanderer,to keep a wary eye on any hurricane warnings that might put them in the path of a coming storm."

"Our center in Key West is watching the birth of one now," said Yaeger.

"Keep me informed as well," advised Sandecker. "The last thing we need is a double disaster in the making."

When Yaeger returned to his computer console, he found a green light blinking on the panel. He sat down and typed in the code that prompted Max to put in an appearance, along with the urn that rose from inside the floor.

When she fully appeared, he asked, "Have you analyzed the urn from Pisces?"

"I have," Max answered without hesitation.

"What did you find out?"

"The people on board Sea Spritedid a poor job of scouring away the growth," Max complained. "The surface still had a calcareous scale adhering to it. They didn't even bother to clean the interior. It was still filled with accretions. I had to apply every imagery system I could tap to get a relevant reading. Magnetic resonance imaging, digital X rays, 3-D laser scanner and Pulse-Coupled Neural Networks, whatever it took to obtain decent image segmentation."

"Spare me the technical details," Yaeger sighed patiently. "What are the results?"

"To begin with, it is not an urn. It is an amphor because it has small handles on the neck. It was cast from bronze during the Middle to Late Bronze Age."

"That's old."

"Very old," Max said confidently.

"Are you certain?"

"Have I ever been wrong?"

"No," said Yaeger. "I freely admit, you've never let me down."

"Then trust me on this one. I ran a very meticulous chemical analysis of the metal. Early hardening of copper began about thirty-five hundred B.C., with the copper enriched with arsenic. The only problem was that the old miners and coppersmiths died young from the arsenic vapors. Much later, probably through an accident sometime after twenty-two hundred B.C., it was discovered that mixing ninety percent copper with ten percent tin produced a very tough and durable metal. This was the beginning of the Bronze Age. Fortunately, copper was found throughout Europe and the Middle East in great supply. But tin was fairly rare in nature and more difficult to find."

"So tin was an expensive commodity."

"It was then," said Max. "Tin traders roamed the ancient world buying ore from the mines and selling it to the people who manned the forges. Bronze produced a very advanced economy and made many of the early ancients rich. Everything was forged, from weapons – bronze spearheads, knives and swords – to small necklaces, bracelets, belts and pins for the ladies. Bronze axes and chisels greatly advanced the art of woodworking. Artisans began casting pots, urns and jars. Taken in proper perspective, the Bronze Age greatly advanced civilization."

"So what's the amphor's story?"

"It was cast between twelve hundred and eleven hundred b.c. And in case you're interested it was cast using the lost-wax method to produce the mold."

Yaeger sat up in his chair. "That puts it over three thousand years old."

Max smiled sarcastically. "You're very astute."

"Where was it cast?"

"In Gaul by ancient Celts, specifically in a region known as Egypt."

"Egypt," Yaeger echoed skeptically.

"Three thousand years ago the land of the pharaohs was not called Egypt, but rather L-Khem or Kemi. Not until Alexander the Great marched through the country did he name it Egypt, after the description in the Iliadby Homer."

"I didn't know the Celts went back that far," said Yaeger.

"The Celts were a loose collection of tribes who were involved with trade and art as far back as two thousand b.c."

"But you say the amphor originated in Gaul. Where do the Celts come into the picture?"

"Invading Romans gave Celtic lands the name Gaul," explained Max. "My analysis showed the copper came from mines near Hallstatt, Austria, while the tin was mined in Cornwall, England, but the style of artwork is suggestive of a tribe of Celts in southwestern France. The figures cast on the outer diameter of the amphor are almost an exact match to those found on a cauldron dug up by a French farmer in the region in nineteen seventy-two."

"I suppose you can tell me the name of the sculptor who cast it."

Max gave Yaeger an icy stare. "You didn't ask me to probe genealogical records."

Yaeger thoughtfully soaked in the data Max reported. "Any ideas how a Bronze Age relic from Gaul came to be in a coral cavern on the Navidad Bank off the Dominican Republic?"

"I was not programmed to deal in generalities," answered Max haughtily. "I haven't the foggiest notion how it got there."

"Speculate, Max," asked Yaeger nicely. "Did it fall off a ship or perhaps become scattered cargo from a shipwreck?"

"The latter is a possibility, since ships had no reason to sail over the Navidad Bank unless they had a death wish. It might have been part of a cargo of ancient artifacts going to a rich merchant or a museum in Latin America."

"That's probably as good a guess as any."

"Not even close, actually," Max said indifferently. "According to my analysis the encrustation around the exterior is too old for any shipwreck since Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I dated the organic composition in excess of twenty-eight hundred years."

"That's not possible. There were no shipwrecks in the Western Hemisphere before fifteen hundred."

Max threw up her hands. "Have you no faith in me?"

"You have to admit that your time scale borders on the ridiculous."

"Take or leave it. I stand by my findings."

Yaeger leaned back in his chair, wondering where to take the project and Max's conclusions. "Print up ten copies of your findings, Max. I'll take it from here."

"Before you send me back to Never-Never Land," said Max, "there is one more thing."

Yaeger looked at her guardedly. "Which is?"

"When the glop is cleaned out from the interior of the amphor, you'll find a gold figurine in the shape of a goat."

"A what?"

"Bye-bye, Hiram."

Yaeger sat there, totally lost, as Max vanished back into her circuits. His mind ran toward the abstract. He tried to picture an ancient crewman on a three-thousand-year-old ship throwing a bronze pot overboard four thousand miles from Europe but the image would not unfold.

He reached over and picked up the amphor and peered inside, turning away at the awful stench of decaying sea life. He put it back in its box and sat there for a long time, unable to accept what Max had discovered.

He decided to run a check of Max's systems first thing in the morning before sharing the report with Sandecker. He wasn't about to take a chance on Max somehow becoming misguided.