Текст книги "Medusa"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“What do youthink, Mr. Whittles?” Lee asked.

“I think that the reality is more prosaic but still marvelous. The city was the site of temples, administrative centers, burial vaults, houses for priests and nobles, and a pool said to have been the home of a sacred eel . . . How may I help you, Dr. Lee?”

“Do you know of any ruins engraved with unusual carvings similar to those on another island?”

“Only one instance,” Whittles said. “The temple known as the Cult of the Healing Priests. I’ve heard reports of a similar temple elsewhere but have never been able to verify it.”

“What exactly was this cult?” Austin asked.

“It originated on one of the islands near Pohnpei. The priests traveled around the islands tending the sick and became known for their miraculous healing.”

Austin exchanged glances with Lee.

“As a doctor,” she said, “I’m very interested in the healing part.”

“Wish I could tell you more,” he said, “but the civilization degenerated from the effects of internecine warfare. And while there is a good chance that the beliefs and ceremonies of the cult survived in some more primitive form, most of what we know today was passed down by word of mouth. There is no written record.”

“Wouldn’t the carvings be considered a written record?” Austin asked.

“Sure,” Whittles said. “But from what I’ve seen, they’re more symbolic and allegorical than historical.”

“What do the carvings at Nan Madol represent?” Lee asked.

“I can show you better than I can tell you,” Whittles said.

He went into his study and dug through his file cabinets, returning with a brown envelope. He opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of five-by-seven photos. He fanned the photos like a deck of cards, picking out one and handing it to Lee.

“This is the facade of the temple as seen from a canal,” he explained. “There’s a hollow space under the temple’s floor that seems to have been some sort of pool. This picture shows the carvings on the interior.”

Lee stared at the photo for a moment, then passed it over to Austin, who studied the bell shapes in it and then looked up.

“Jellyfish?” he asked.

“It appears to be,” Whittles said. “Not sure why they decorated the wall of a temple with those creatures. But, as I said, there’s a pool dedicated to the sacred eel, so why not one to jellyfish?”

“Why not indeed?” Lee said, her dark eyes sparkling with excitement.

“I’d like to see this place in person,” Austin said. “Can you tell us where it is?”

“I can show you exactly, but I hope you brought your bathing suit. The platform the temple rested on got knocked around in an earthquake years ago and sank into the canal. Not too deep. Maybe twelve feet or so.”

Austin looked at Lee.

“What’s your pleasure, ma’am? Head off to our ship or check out Nan Madol?”

“I think the answer to that question is obvious,” she said.

He wasn’t surprised by her reply, given what he had seen of her determination.

Austin asked to borrow a local telephone book and within minutes had arranged to rent a boat and some scuba equipment. Whittles marked the temple’s location on a tourist map of the ruined city. They thanked him and said their good-byes, then went back out to the waiting Pontiac station wagon. As the taxi headed toward the harbor, the Chevy Silverado pulled away from the curb and followed a few lengths behind.

CHAPTER 35

DR. LYSANDER CODMAN GREETED THE TROUTS IN THE LOBBY of a building that overlooked the grassy square off Longwood Avenue where Harvard Medical School was part of a campus with some of the most prestigious such institutions in the country. The professor was a tall, loose-boned man in his sixties. He had the type of long, big-toothed face that seemed to raise the possibility that some of the old Yankee families had bred with horses.

Codman led the way along a hallway and swept the Trouts into his spacious office. He asked his visitors to make themselves comfortable and poured cups of Earl Grey from an electric kettle. He then plunked himself behind his desk and asked a few questions about their work with NUMA, then held up a bound report so the Trouts could read the title on its dark blue cover:

THE NEW BEDFORD ANOMALY:

A STUDY OF IMMUNE RESPONSE AMONG

CREW FROM THE WHALING SHIP PRINCESS

Codman took a noisy slurp from his cup.

“I’ve had a chance to browse through Dr. Lee’s paper,” he said. “It’s even more curious than I remember.”

Paul asked, “Curious in what way, Professor Codman?”

“You’ll understand when you get into it. The first section of Dr. Lee’s treatise is based mostly on newspaper reports. The reporter was interviewing retired whaling men, looking to chronicle their exploits, and realized that he was onto something. He noticed that a group of whalers in their seventies and eighties had been almost completely disease free for a good part of their very long lives.”

“We were in the New Bedford Seamen’s Bethel earlier today,” Gamay said. “The walls are lined with tablets memorializing whaling crews. Paul remarked at how tough the old-timers must have been.”

“It went beyondtoughness in this case,” Codman said. “These men had never suffered a single illness, not even the common cold. They died at an advanced age, usually from some geriatric condition such as congestive heart failure.”

“Newspaper writing can be overblown,” Gamay said.

“Especially in the nineteenth century,” Codman said. “But the stories caught the eye of a doctor in immunology named Fuller here at the medical school. He organized a team of physicians to investigate. They talked to the men and the physicians who had treated them. What they found was even stranger than what newspapers had reported. The men enjoying the most robust health had all served on the whaling ship Princessduring a single voyage in 1848. They had been infected on that voyage with a tropical illness then making the rounds through the Pacific whaling fleet. While some of those men shipped out again later and died in whaling accidents, fourteen were still living. They were compared to men from other ships, and the statistical differences healthwise were startling. The doctors backed up their findings with tables and graphs and so on.”

“Yet you expressed doubts over Dr. Lee’s findings,” Gamay said.

Professor Codman sat back in his chair, tented his fingers, and stared into space.

“The preliminary stating of facts didn’t bother me as much as her conclusions,” he said after a moment. “The basis for Dr. Lee’s paper was built on empirical evidence that I found hard to swallow: primarily, her observations on the anecdotes told by the men involved. Unfortunately, the ship’s captain died before the interviews took place. His logbook was never found.”

“Don’t firsthand observations have somevalidity?” Paul asked.

“Oh, yes, but think of it: these men had been ill at the time, some even in fever comas, and their recollections were recorded decades after the event.”

“What was the nature of those recollections?” Paul asked.

“They all had the same story: they fell ill after leaving port, became unconscious, and woke up the next day in good health.”

“Was spontaneous remission a possibility?” Gamay asked.

“Dr. Lee presented reports of a flulike plague that rampaged through the fleet then. Judging by its speed and ferocity, as well as influenza’s high mortality rate, I’d say spontaneous remission was not likely.”

“You said the crewmen all told the same story,” Gamay said. “Wouldn’t that strengthen the account of what happened?”

“A whaling vessel was a small community unto itself. I think they developed a shared story line.” He paused. “Only the first mate had a different version.”

“Did he contradict the crew’s version?” Gamay asked.

“No. In fact, the first mate supplementedit. He recalled the ship dropping anchor at an island, even going ashore with the captain. He also remembered seeing glowing blue lights and feeling a stinging sensation in his chest. He woke up feeling as if he had never been sick.”

“That’s interesting about the sting,” Gamay said. “Do you think he was talking about a primitive version of inoculation?”

“He seemed to have been going in that direction. He said all the surviving crew and officers had a reddish mark on their chests. The lights could have been hallucinations or the electrical phenomenon known as Saint Elmo’s fire and the marks insect bites. In any case, inoculation can prevent disease but isn’t known to cure it.”

“Did the Harvard team take blood samples from the men?” Gamay asked.

“Yes. The samples were subjected to microscopic analysis. There was apparently some unusual antigen activity, but you have to understand that the optical instrumentation then was primitive by today’s standards. The science of immunology is comparatively young. Jenner and Pasteur had yet to make their groundbreaking discoveries explaining why people, having survived a disease, rarely caught it again after that.”

“Could the blood samples be analyzed today?” Gamay asked

“Sure, if we had them. Apparently, the samples were thrown out or just plain lost.” He handed the report to Gamay. “In any event, I’m sure you will find it fascinating reading.”

The Trouts were walking back to their car when Paul’s cell phone trilled.

He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He clicked the phone shut, and said, “Guess we owe our friend Brimmer an apology.”

“He’s found some papers from Caleb Nye’s traveling show?” Gamay asked.

“Better,”Paul said. “Brimmer’s got the 1848 logbook from the Princess.He’ll meet us at his workshop to turn it over.”

HARVEY BRIMMER PUT THE phone down and eyed the four Asian men in his office. They were in their twenties, dressed identically in black leather jackets and jeans, and all wore black headbands with Chinese characters in red on them. They had arrived in New Bedford not long after Brimmer had made the call about the logbook. Their leader, a thin-faced youth with a scar running down his right cheek, was the one who had visited the bookshop looking for the book. He had told Brimmer to call the Trouts.

“They’re on their way,” Brimmer said. “Why do you want to see them?”

The leader pulled a gun out of his shirt. He smiled, revealing a tooth inlaid with a gold pyramid.

“We don’t want to seethem, old man,” he said. “We want to killthem.”

He ripped the phone line from the wall, then ordered Brimmer to hand over his cell phone, which he pocketed.

Brimmer’s blood ran cold. He was smart enough to figure out that, as witness to a double murder, he would not be allowed to live. As he sat behind his desk, he thought about the spare cell he kept locked in one of its drawers. When he saw his chance, he would make his move.

CHAPTER 36

LIKE MANY OLDER BOATS CONSTRUCTED BEFORE BUILDERS were sure how thick to make a hull with the then-new fiberglass, the battered twelve-foot-long skiff Austin had rented on the Kolonia waterfront was built like a battleship. The wide-beamed craft was powered by a pitted fifteen-horsepower Evinrude outboard that belonged in a museum of nautical artifacts.

Austin was glad to see that the scuba gear he’d rented was in far better shape than the boat or the motor. He inspected the regulator, hoses, and tank and found all the equipment had been well maintained. As an afterthought, he purchased a throwaway underwater camera encased in plastic. Then, after stowing the dive-gear bag, he helped Song Lee into the boat. After a couple of pulls on the starter cord, the Evinrude hiccupped and caught. Once it got going, it proved to have a stout mechanical heart as it powered the heavy boat through the water at a slow but steady pace along the coast.

Nan Madol was about forty-five minutes by boat from Kolonia. As they came up on the city on the southeast shore of Tenwen Island and caught their first glimpse of the enigmatic islets, Austin reached back into his memory trying to recall what Whittles had told him about the ruins years before. The place had been a ceremonial center going back to the second century A.D., but the megalithic architecture did not start to take shape until the twelfth century.

The city served as a residence for nobility and mortuary priests, and its population never went beyond a thousand. The mortuary spread over fifty-eight islands in the northeast part of the city, a sector called Madol Powe. Whittles had taken Austin there and shown him the islets where the priests lived and worked. Madol Pah was the administrative sector on the south-western part of Nan Madol. That was where the nobles lived and the warriors were quartered.

Nan Madol’s builders had put up seawalls to protect the city from the Pacific’s whims. The rectangular islets were all basically the same. Retaining walls, built by stacking heavy, prismatic basalt columns log-cabin style, surrounded cores of coral rubble. Once the walls reached several feet above sea level, platforms were built on top as foundations for living areas, or temples, or even crypts. The more elaborate of these islets, like the spectacular mortuary at Nandauwas, had two twenty-five-foot walls enclosing the royal compound.

In the drawing Whittles had sketched out for Austin, the temple of the Cult of the Healing Priests was in the mortuary sector of Nan Madol. It was a smaller version of Nandauwas, which suggested that the islet had some importance among the inhabitants. The temple was entered through a portal in the outer wall, which enclosed a courtyard, then through another portal in a second wall.

Following Whit’s map, Austin steered the boat into the city, cruising past crumbling walls that seemed out of place in the remote location. They waved at the passengers in a couple of open tour boats carrying camera-toting tourists protected from the tropical sun by colorful canopies. Nan Madol had become a popular destination for day trips, and the boat went past a guide leading several kayaks like a row of ducklings.

Consulting the map, Austin left the main area of tourist activity and turned onto a quiet, dead-end canal lined on both sides by basalt walls and palm trees. In bygone days, the temple of the Healing Priests would have presided over the terminus of the canal, but the only sign it had ever existed was a jumbled pile of columns that stuck a foot or so above the surface. Austin killed the engine, let the boat drift to within yards of the debris, and dropped anchor.

Austin had purchased a Hawaiian surf-print bathing suit at the dive shop, flaming orange-red with hula dancers, the only thing that the shop had in his size. He tucked his wallet and phone in the waterproof dive-gear bag and slipped into the buoyancy compensator, weight belt, tank, and fins. He rolled over the gunwale into the tepid water, came up and gave Song Lee a quick wave, then bit down on the regulator mouthpiece and did a surface dive that took him down several feet into the slow-moving brownish green water.

He switched on a waterproof flashlight he had bought at the shop. Visibility was limited in the murky water, but the light picked out the broken basalt that had once been the islet’s foundation. Austin swam around the perimeter, then came back up to the rental boat.

Whittles had suggested that the coral core supporting the temple had crumbled when the earthquake throttled the city, causing the building to sink to the bottom of the enclosure and the walls to collapse on top of it.

Austin swam around the pile again, this time at a different depth, and saw an opening where basalt slabs had fallen down at an angle. He poked his flashlight into the cavity. The light petered out, suggesting that there was open space behind. Austin twisted through the tight space, banging his air tank against the basalt.

Once he was through the passage, Austin swept the flashlight around and saw that he was in a cavelike chamber created when the inner and outer walls collapsed against one another. Even if the temple had not been destroyed, it was hidden behind the wreckage of the inner wall, which had fallen on top of and around it.

Austin thought he had reached the end of his explorations and was preparing to retrace his route when he made another sweep of the chamber with his light. This time, there was something peculiar about the way the shadows fell on the debris to his right. He swam closer, and saw that a slab had fallen and was blocking some columns, thus creating a breach.

Austin slithered through the breach, and, after swimming a few yards, came upon an almost perfectly rectangular entryway. The temple slanted down to the left, and the entry should have been plugged by debris except that its lintel had fallen in such a way that the opening was intact. He made a quick visual check to assure himself that the entryway wouldn’t collapse, then swam through it and into the temple itself.

Austin’s flashlight immediately fell on the pool that Whittles had described. It was rectangular, about twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. Debris had fallen in it, but Austin estimated it was around six feet deep. Playing his light against one of the walls, he saw that he was not alone.

Carved on the wall were six male figures dressed in loincloths. They were standing in profile, each holding a basin over his head. Three figures faced one another on either side of a huge bell-shaped jellyfish whose tentacles dropped down to a three-by-six-foot waist-high stone dais built against the wall. Austin flashed the light around the room and saw identical carvings and daises on each wall.

He moved in closer, tracing the contours of one of the jellyfish with his fingers, as if doing so would connect him with the ancient cult of healers. Then he backed off several feet and dug out the throwaway flash camera. He clicked off a dozen shots, then tucked it away.

Eager to tell Lee what he had found, Austin swam out of the temple and wriggled through the outer and inner walls. Looking up to get his bearings, he saw the boat silhouetted against the shimmering surface. As he ascended, his ears picked up the muted buzz of a boat engine. The high-revving noise grew louder. Austin wondered why anyone would be speeding through the peaceful canal. Then an alarm went off in his brain.

He followed the anchor line up. His head broke the surface a few feet from the boat. Pushing his mask up on his forehead, blinking into the bright sunlight, he saw an inflatable pontoon boat coming from the entrance of the canal and speeding his direction. It was too far away for him to see the passengers’ faces clearly, but the sun glinted off the shiny bald pate of Chang, the Triad’s gang leader who had attacked the Beebe.The needle on Austin’s danger meter swung into the red zone.

Song Lee was sitting in the rental boat, oblivious to the looming threat. Austin yelled, pointed at the fast-moving inflatable coming in their direction. The smile Lee had greeted his reappearance with became a puzzled frown. Austin glanced back at the inflatable. He was close enough to see the grin on Chang’s face as he knelt in the bow with a weapon up to his shoulder. He would have been on them in seconds, but the kayaks seen earlier entered and blocked the way. The inflatable swerved to miss the kayaks, but its wash capsized two of them.

Austin took advantage of the seconds lost in performing the tricky maneuver.

“Jump!”he yelled to Lee.

She put her hands on the boat’s gunwale and leaned over the water, not comprehending the danger she was in, until she saw the muzzle flashes and heard the rattle of gunfire. A line of geysers erupted across the water that led directly to her boat as inexorably as a buzz saw. She froze with fear.

Austin pushed himself out of the water as high as he could go, reached up, and grabbed Lee by the front of her blouse and pulled her back down with him. She tumbled over the gunwale into the canal just seconds before Chang’s bullets ripped into the boat, sending up a shower of fiberglass splinters.

Lee’s additional weight dragged them both down several feet. Austin then expelled air from his buoyancy compensator and they sank even deeper. He put one arm around her waist, as if leading her through a waltz step, and with his free hand pointed the flashlight at his face. She had reflexively taken a gulp of air before hitting the water but now had used up her supply and was flailing in panic. Austin released her, took a deep breath, then removed the regulator from his mouth and pointed to the bubbles streaming from the mouthpiece.

Lee’s eyes were wide with fright, but she understood what Austin was trying to convey. She took the mouthpiece and clamped it between her teeth. As she filled her lungs, the panic in her eyes subsided. She then passed the mouthpiece back to Austin.

Buddy-breathing would keep them alive, but there was still Chang and his men to deal with. This became abundantly clear when Austin saw a foamy splash in the water, then another. Chang’s men were diving off the boat.

The men easily could have tracked Austin and Lee in the shallow waters of the canal by following their air bubbles on the surface. Eventually, Chang might get lucky, or he simply could wait until the two used up their air supply. But he was impatient.

Austin drew air into his lungs, passed the mouthpiece back to Lee, and pointed with his index finger.

This way.

Taking Lee by the hand, he swam deeper, toward the entrance of the temple enclosure. Chang’s men were at a disadvantage without air and were quickly outdistanced. By the time their prey vanished through the temple wall, the men were swimming back to the surface. Chang’s boat moved back and forth, searching for telltale bubbles. Not seeing any, Chang assumed that his targets had slipped past him. He ordered that the inflatable move farther out into the canal. By then, Austin and Lee were inside the temple.

Lee was buddy-breathing like a pro, but she almost gulped down a mouthful of water when Austin showed her the wall carvings. Like Austin, she too put her hand on the jellyfish. She shook her head in frustration at not being able to talk. Austin pointed to the camera clipped to his vest and signaled OKwith his thumb and index finger.

They perched on the edge of the temple pool, sharing the air supply and taking in the marvelous carvings. Austin checked the supply, then tapped his wristwatch and pointed toward the temple entrance. Buddy-breathing was using up the air in the tank twice as fast. Lee nodded in understanding. They swam side by side, as if joined at the hip, until they came to the outer wall. Austin signaled Lee to wait. He slipped out of his vest and swam out into the canal. All was quiet. He looked up at the surface but saw no sign of Chang or the rental boat.

He heard the sound of a engine, but to his practiced ear it sounded different from the inflatable’s high-revving one. He decided to take a chance. Moving closer to the foundation of the islet, he surfaced and peered out from behind an outcropping where the basalt base had collapsed.

A tour boat was moving along the canal toward the rental boat, which was submerged except for the bow, which stuck out of the water at an angle. More important, Chang and his men had vanished.

Austin waved until someone in the tour boat saw him. When the boat turned his direction, he took a deep breath and went back for Song Lee. He gave her a thumbs-up, then pointed upward. She repeated the OK,and together they slowly rose to the surface.