Текст книги "Trojan Odyssey"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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6

With Summer in the lead, they dropped out of the entry lock, checked each other's equipment and then moved into the sea that was as black as deep space. Together, they switched on their dive lights and startled the nearby night fish who had emerged after dark to feed in their coral domain. Above, there was no moon to sweep the surface with shimmering silver. The stars were cloaked by ominous clouds, the precursors of the vicious storm soon to come.

Dirk stroked his fins behind his sister, following her into the dark void. He knew she enjoyed the underwater world by her graceful, languid movements. Her bubbles rose in clusters of balloons indicating the comfortable breathing of an expert diver. She looked back at him through her mask and smiled. Then she pointed to her right and kicked off over the coral illuminated by her dive light in a maze of muted colors.

There was nothing sinister about the silent sea beneath the surface at night. Curious fish were attracted by the dive lights and came out of their coral hiding places to study the unfamiliar and awkward swimming creatures intruding in their midst who were carrying sealed housings that beamed like the sun. A huge parrot fish swam at Dirk's side, staring at him like a curious cat. Six four-foot barracudas materialized out of the gloom, their lower jaws protruding beyond their noses and displaying rows of needle-sharp teeth. They ignored the divers and glided past without the slightest sign of interest.

Summer finned through the coral canyons as if she was following a road map. A little blowfish, startled by the glare of the light, puffed its body into a round ball with spikes protruding from its sides like a cactus, making it impossible or extremely unlikely a big predator would be dumb enough to attempt to swallow such a throat-ripping morsel.

Their lights threw eerie, flickering shadows against the distorted coral whose surface varied from jagged sharpness to round and globular. To Dirk, the complex hues and shapes took on the look of a continuous abstract painting. He glanced at his depth gauge. It read forty-five feet. He glanced ahead as Summer suddenly dropped down into a narrow coral canyon with steep sides. He descended in her wake, noticing a number of openings in the coral leading to shallow caves and wondering which one had attracted her the day before.

Finally, she hesitated before a vertical opening with squared corners sandwiched between a pair of unnatural-looking columns. Turning briefly to see that her brother was still following, Summer swam unhesitatingly into the cavern beyond. This time, with a dive light in hand and the security of her brother beside her, Summer penetrated deeper into the cavern, past the place in the bottom sand where she had discovered the urn.

The cave was not crooked or irregular. The walls, ceiling and floor were almost perfectly flat, stretching into the darkness like a corridor without twists and turns. Deeper and deeper it led them on.

Becoming lost in a cave system is the number one cause of cave-diving fatalities. Mistakes prove deadly. Here, fortunately, there was no problem of orientation. This was not a dangerous cave dive, nor was there a fear of becoming lost in a complex system of adjoining caves. The chamber had no side openings or separate shafts that could cause them to lose their way. To regain the entrance, they had only to reverse their course. They were thankful there was no fine silt on the bottom that when disturbed could cloud vision for an hour before it settled again. The floor of the coral shaft was covered with coarse sand too heavy to swirl in the water if disturbed by their fins.

Abruptly, the shaft ended in what teased Summer's imagination. Though infested with marine growth, it seemed as if the shaft rose with a flight of steps. A school of angelfish twirled in a corkscrew above her head, then darted past as she began to ascend. Her skin and the nape of her neck suddenly tingled with expectation. Her earlier feeling that there was more to the cavern than met the eye came back with a rush.

The coral thinned this far under the reef. With no light to encourage marine growth the encrustation on the walls of the shaft was less than an inch thick and consisted more of slimy growth than hard coral. Dirk took his gloved hand and brushed away the greasy coating and felt his heart quicken as he recognized grooves in granite rock that he theorized were put there by ancient hands when the sea was lower.

Then, through the water, he heard Summer utter a distorted squeal. He kicked upward and was stunned when he broke the surface of the water into an air pocket. He looked up as Summer's light swept over a domed ceiling of seemingly chiseled stones fit tightly together without mortar.

"What have we got here?" Dirk spoke through his underwater communications system.

"It's either a freak of nature or an ancient man-made vault," Summer murmured in awe.

"This is no freak of nature."

"It must have been submerged after the melting of the Ice Age."

"That was ten thousand years ago. Impossible to be that ancient. More likely, the vault sank during an earthquake like the one that struck Port Royal, Jamaica, the pirate haven that slipped into the sea after a massive tremor in sixteen ninety-two."

"Could it be a forgotten ghost city?" asked Summer, her excitement mounting.

Dirk shook his head. "Unless there is much more buried under the surrounding coral, my gut instinct is this was some sort of temple."

"Built by ancient natives of the Caribbean?"

"I doubt it. Archaeologists have found no evidence of stone masonry in the West Indies before Columbus. And the local natives certainly didn't know how to forge a bronze urn. This was built by a different culture, a lost and unknown civilization."

"Not another Atlantis myth," Summer said sarcastically.

"No, Dad and Al put that to rest in the Antarctic several years ago."

"Seems incredible that ancient peoples of Europe sailed across the ocean and built a temple on a coral reef."

Dirk slowly ran his gloved hand on one wall. "Navidad Reef was probably an island back then."

"When you think about it," said Summer, "we must be breathing air thousands of years old."

Dirk deeply inhaled and then exhaled. "Smells and tastes good to me."

Summer pointed over her shoulder. "Help me with the camera. We must get a photo record."

Dirk moved behind her and removed an aluminum carrying case attached to a clip beneath her air tanks. He pulled out a minidigital Sony PC-100 camcorder mounted inside a compact Ikelite clear-acrylic housing. Setting the controls on manual mode, he attached the arms for the floodlights. Since there was no ambient light there was no need for a light meter.

There was an illusive grandeur to the submarine chamber and Summer was more than proficient enough with a camera to capture it. The instant she flicked on the floodlights the bleak cave came alive in a montage of green, yellow, red and purple hues from the growth on the sheer walls. Except for a mild distortion, the water was nearly as clear as glass.

While Summer photographed the vault below and above the water, Dirk dove down and began exploring the floor along the walls. The lights from Summer's camera cast weird quivering images in the water as he slowly worked his way around the perimeter.

He almost passed by without seeing a space that opened up between two walls. It was a corner entrance no more than two feet wide. Dirk barely shouldered through with his air tanks, keeping the hand gripping the dive light extended in front of him. He entered another chamber slightly larger than the outer one. This one had recessed seats in the walls and what looked like a large stone bed in the center. At first he thought it was empty of artifacts but then his light revealed a round object with two large holes on the sides and one smaller hole at the top lying on the bed, like armor that covered the torso. A gold necklace rested on the stone above the object with two coiled armbands placed on each side. What looked like an intricate metal lace headpiece sat above the necklace and above it an ornate diadem.

Dirk began to imagine that a body once lay inside the relics. Where the legs might have been were a pair of bronze greaves, ancient armor worn below the knees. A sword blade and dagger blade were situated on the left side while a socketed spearhead without its shaft lay on the right. If there was a body, it was long ago dissolved or consumed by sea creatures that devoured anything organic.

Sitting at the foot of the bed was a large cauldron.

Rising a few inches over four feet, the circumference of the cauldron was too large for him to circle his arms around and touch his fingertips. He rapped the hilt of his dive knife against the side and heard a dull metallic thud. Bronze, he thought to himself. He smeared away the growth on the surface and revealed the figure of a warrior throwing a spear. Using his glove to brush his way around the cauldron, he discovered an army of sculpted men and women wearing armor and posed as if fighting a battle. They carried man-sized shields and long swords. Several held spears with short shafts but extremely long heads in a spiral form. Some fought in body armor that covered their torso.

Others fought naked, but most all wore huge helmets, many with horns protruding out the top.

He swam above the rim, shined his light through the wide neck and peered inside.

The interior of the big cauldron was filled almost to the top with jumbled, intermingled but still recognizable artifacts. Dirk identified bronze spearheads, dagger blades with the hilts eroded away, edged and winged axes, coiled bracelets and chain waist belts. He left the relics as he had found them, all but one. He gently picked it out of the cauldron and held it between his fingers. Then he moved through an archway that loomed on the opposite side of what he now supposed was an ancient bedroom used as a tomb.

He quickly identified the chamber beyond as a kitchen. There was no air pocket here and his bubbles trailed to the ceiling and flowed outward in confused streams like quicksilver. Bronze cooking tureens, amphors, urns and jars lay scattered on the floor along with broken clay pots. Beside what appeared to be a fireplace he found bronze tongs and a large ladle, all partially buried in the silt that had filtered into the chamber over thousands of years. He swam over the debris and examined the artifacts closely, trying to find distinguishing artwork or markings, but they were half buried in the silt and covered with little hard-shell crustaceans that had made their way over the centuries into the room.

Satisfied there were no more doorways or side rooms to explore, he returned through the bedroom chamber and approached Summer, who was focusing and furiously recording every dimension of the arched vault below the water surface.

He touched her arm and pointed up. After they surfaced, he said excitedly, "I found two more chambers."

"This gets more intriguing by the minute," Summer said, without taking her eye from the viewfinder.

He grinned and held up a bronze lady's hair comb. "Run the comb through your hair and try to imagine the last woman to use it."

Summer lowered her camera and stared at the object in Dirk's hand. Her eyes widened as she delicately took the comb and held it between her fingers. "It's lovely," she murmured. She was about to run the comb through a few strands of her flame-red hair that trailed past her cars when she stopped and suddenly looked at him seriously. "You should put it back where you found it. When archaeologists examine this place, and they will, you'll be condemned as a relic thief."

"If I had a girlfriend, I bet she'd keep it."

"The last of your long string of women would have stolen the charity box from a church."

Dirk feigned looking hurt. "Sara's streak of larceny made her irresistible."

"You're just lucky Dad is a better judge of women than you are."

"What's he got to do with it?"

"He gave Sara the boot when she showed up at his hangar looking for you."

"I wondered why she never returned my calls," said Dirk, without a hint of distress.

She gave him a baleful glare and studied the comb, trying to conjure up an image of the last woman to touch it, wondering what style and color her hair might have been. After a few moments, she carefully laid the ancient relic in her brother's open hands so she could photograph it.

As soon as Summer took several close-up photos, Dirk returned the comb to the cauldron. He was soon followed by Summer, who recorded more than thirty images of the bedroom chamber and the ancient artifacts on her digital camera before entering and shooting the ancient kitchen. Satisfied that she had achieved a detailed photographic inventory of the three chambers and their artifacts, she passed the camera to Dirk, who disassembled the lights and slipped it back into its aluminum container. Rather than reattaching it to Summer's back, he held the grip handle tightly in one hand as insurance against losing or damaging the case.

He made a final check of both their air gauges and determined they had more than an ample air reserve for the journey back to their habitat. Well trained by their father, Dirk and his sister were cautious divers who had yet to come remotely close to the fatal danger of empty air tanks. He led the way this time, having memorized the bends and curves in the coral they had passed through earlier.

When they finally reached the comfort of Piscesand passed into the main lock, the waves above were rising, driven by a mushrooming wind that forced the waves to build and pound the reef like a jack-hammer against a piling. As Dirk took his turn at fixing dinner, he and Summer looked forward to discovering the riddle of the underwater ghost temple. They relaxed and ate dinner under a false security. Neither had any conception of how vulnerable they were fifty feet beneath the surface of a vicious sea, certainly not with waves that were about to reach a hundred feet high, with troughs that would expose the habitat to the full force of the horrendous killer storm.

7

Punching into the whirling wall of the hurricane, scourged by screaming winds, blankets of hail and rain, and tossed by downdrafts and updrafts through unimaginable turbulence, the twenty-nine-year-old Orion P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft took the beating in stride. Her wings flexed and fluttered like blades on a fencer's sword. The big propellers on her four Allison forty-six-hundred-horsepower engines chopped her through the deluge at three hundred knots. Built in 1976, the Navy, NOAA and NUMA had never found a better aircraft that could stand up to the punishment of violent weather.

Remarkably stable, Galloping Gertie,as she was affectionately named, with an animated painting of a cowgirl riding a bucking bronco on her bow, carried a crew of twenty: two pilots, a navigator and flight meteorologist, three engineering and electronic communication specialists, twelve scientists and a media passenger from a local TV station who asked to come aboard when he learned that Hurricane Lizzie was building into a record-setting storm.

Jeff Barrett sat relaxed in the pilot seat, his eyes sweeping the instrument panel every other minute. Six hours into a ten-hour flight, the gauges and lights were all he had to look at, since the only thing to be seen through the windshield was a view similar to peering inside a washing machine on the soap cycle. With a wife and three children, Barrett saw no more danger in his job than if he were driving a trash truck through a downtown alley.

But danger and death lurked in the swirling cloud of moisture smothering the Orion, especially when Barrett made passes so low over the water that salt spray spun off the propellers and glazed the windows with a frostlike film before he spiraled up to seven thousand feet, flying in and out of the worst part of the storm. Corkscrew penetration was the most efficient way to record and analyze the hurricane's strength.

It was not a job for the unintrepid. Those who flew into hurricanes and typhoons were a special breed of scientists. There could be no observing storms from a distance. They had to get down and dirty, flying directly through the aerial maelstrom, not once but as many as ten times.

They flew without complaint under incredibly appalling conditions to sample wind speeds and direction, rain, air pressure and data on a hundred other measurements they sent to the hurricane center. There, the information was fed into computer models so meteorologists could forecast the strength of the storm and issue warnings for people living in the predicted track to evacuate the shoreline in an effort to save countless lives.

Barrett wrestled easily with the controls that were modified to endure extreme turbulence and checked the numbers on his Global Positioning satellite instrument before making a slight course adjustment. He turned to his copilot. "This is a real bad one," he said, as the Orion was jolted by a sudden wind surge.

The crew spoke through microphones and listened through headsets. Any conversation without the radio had to be shouted into an upturned ear. The shriek of the wind was so piercing it drowned out the exhaust roar of the engines.

The rangy man slouched in the copilot's seat was sipping coffee from a covered cup through a straw. Neat and fastidious, Jerry Boozer prided himself on never spilling a drop of liquid or a sandwich crumb in the cockpit during a hurricane stalk. He nodded in agreement. "The worst I've seen in the eight years I've been chasing these things."

"I'd hate to be living in her path when she reaches land."

Boozer picked up his microphone and spoke into it. "Hey, Charlie, what's your magic department reading of the storm's wind?"

Back in the science compartment packed with an array of instruments and consoles crammed with meteorological electronic systems, Charlie Mahoney, a research scientist from Stanford University, sat strapped in a chair facing a matrix of sensors that measured temperature, humidity, pressure, winds and fluxes. "You ain't gonna believe this," he answered in a Georgia accent, "but the last dropwindsonde profiling system I released recorded horizontal wind speeds of up to two hundred and twenty miles an hour as it fell through the storm toward the sea."

"No wonder poor old Gertieis taking a beating." Boozer had hardly mouthed the words when the aircraft soared into calm air and the sun glittered on the shiny aluminum fuselage and wings.

They had entered Lizzie's eye. Below, a restless sea reflected the blue of the sky. It was like flying into a giant tube whose circular walls were forged with swirling, impenetrable clouds. Boozer felt as if he was flying inside a vast whirlpool whose pit led to Hades.

Barrett banked and circled within the eye while the meteorologists behind gathered their data. After nearly ten minutes, he turned the Orion and headed into the tortured gray wall. Again, the aircraft shuddered as if it was under attack by all the furies of the gods. Abruptly, it felt like a giant's fist had smashed into the starboard, sending the plane over on one wing. Anything that wasn't tied down in the cockpit – papers, folders, coffee cups, briefcases – was hurled against the starboard bulkhead. No sooner had the gust passed than a blast of even increased force hurled the aircraft through the turmoil like a balsa wood glider tied to a fan, sending all that loose debris crashing against the opposite side of the cockpit. The double shock came like the blow of a tennis ball from a racket against a backstop. Barrett and Boozer were nearly frozen in shock. Neither had ever experienced a collision with a wind gust of that magnitude, and not one but two in almost as many seconds. It was unheard of.

The Orion shuddered and fell off in an uncontrolled bank to the port.

Barrett felt a sudden loss of power and his eyes immediately swept the instrument panel as he struggled to level out the aircraft. "I'm getting no readings on number four engine. Can you see if she's still turning?"

"Oh God!" muttered Boozer, staring through his side window. "Number four engine is gone!"

"Then shut it down!" Barrett snapped.

"There's nothing left to shut down. It's fallen away."

His mind and strength fully concentrating on righting the Orion, Barrett twisted the wheel on the control column and fought the pedals, not comprehending Boozer's dire report. He sensed something terribly wrong with the aerodynamics. The plane was not responding to his physical commands. All response was extremely sluggish. It was as if a giant rope with a weight was pulling the starboard wing from behind.

At last he brought Gertieinto level flight. Only then did Boozer's words come home to him. It was the loss of the engine, torn from its mountings by the violent assault of the storm that threw the Orion out of control and was causing the starboard drag. He leaned forward and stared past Boozer.

Where the Allison turboprop engine had been attached to the wing was now an empty gap with twisted and torn mountings, severed hydraulic, oil and fuel lines, mangled pumps and electrical wiring. It shouldn't have happened, thought Barrett, incredulous. Engines simply did not drop off aircraft, not even under the worst turbulence.

Then he counted nearly thirty empty, tiny holes in the wing where the rivets had popped out. His foreboding grew as he saw several cracks in the stressed aluminum skin.

A voice from the main compartment came over his headphones. "We have injuries back here and most of the equipment is damaged and malfunctioning."

"Those who are able, tend to the injured. We're heading for home."

"If we can make it," Boozer said pessimistically. He pointed out Barrett's side window. "We have a fire in number three."

"Shut it down!"

"In the process," Boozer answered calmly.

Barrett was tempted to call his wife and say goodbye, but he was far from giving up. Getting sorely wounded Gertieand her scientists out of the storm and safely back to land would take a miracle. He began to mutter a prayer under his breath as he used every fraction of his experience to fly the Orion through the vortex into calm air. If they escaped the worst of the chaos the rest would take care of itself.

After twenty minutes the wind and rain began to diminish and the clouds lighten. Then, just as he thought they were through the clouds, Lizzie threw one more punch and sent a wind blast that struck the Orion's rudder a punishing blow and crippled what little control Barrett and Boozer had.

All bets on a successful attempt to reach home were now off.