Austin sorted through the options. They could run and hide, but eventually as they became more exhausted they'd screw up. The Hard Suits weren't made for the kind of demands being placed on them, and eventually they would run out of power or air.
“Okay let's show them where we are. I'd flip to see who gets to be bait, but I don't have a coin. How are you at imitating a firefly?”
“You just get your little crossbow ready Robin Hood.”
The intruders had paused, distracted by their spinning comrade who was bouncing erratically around the cargo space. Zavala turned on every light on his suit and flashed them on and off for effect. For a moment he hung suspended in the darkness like a bizarre road sign. Then he disappeared. That caught their attention. The attackers moved toward his last sighting. Only he wasn't there. He moved several meters off to the right. Flash. Clickclick. The chest and head lamps came on and off. He shifted again. Lights on. Lights off.
The effect was startling even to Austin, who knew what was going on. Zavala clones seemed to be popping up all over the place.
“Never thought I'd end up as a flasher,” Zavala said.
“Your mother would be proud of you; Joe. It's working. They're coming closer.”
It would be only a matter of time before they were on top of Zavala.
“One more time, Joe,” said Austin. “I'm right behind you.”
Zavala again blinked on and off like a Christmas tree. The attackers picked up speed and headed for the last place they had seen him. Directly toward Austin.
He brought the weapon up to his shoulder. “Five seconds to get out of the line of fire, Joe,” he said evenly. “Beat feet.”
“Going down,” Zavala said in a parody of an elevator operator. He dropped several yards. Austin counted slowly, his sights transfixing the darkness behind the nearest approaching light. When he was sure Zavala was in the clear he squeezed the trigger mechanism and felt the crossbow kick slightly as it loosed the bolt. It was impossible to see the missile, but the shot must have been true because the light beam on the right jerked crazily.
Austin levered the bowstring back for another shot, reloading a new bolt in its cradle, swearing at the clumsiness of the mechanism especially in the dark. By the time he brought the crossbow to his shoulder for another shot, the second attacker had figured out what was going on and snapped off his light. Austin let off a bolt anyhow but knew just from the feel of things that it had missed.
“I nailed one of them, Joe. Missed the other guy. Let's see if we can find him. I've got the weapon, so I'll take the lead.”
He stared into the darkness. Useless! He'd have to take a chance. He flicked the lights on the front of his suit and his head lamp and saw a reflection. He headed for it.
“He's making a break for the hole.”
“I see him,” Zavala said. “I'm right behind you.”
They started after their quarry like two blimps on an attack run. Austin was pumped up with excitement, but even as he flew through the water with Zavala keeping pace, he couldn't help think that this must be one of the strangest battles of all time. Men encased in metal skins fighting to the death with ancient weapons in the massive cargo space of a mortally wounded ship.
A shadow flitted through the opening and was gone.
Damn. “Too late, Joe.” Austin powered down. “He's in the open.”
“You said there were six. One went down with the truck. You nailed another, and the third is imitating a whirlagig. That leaves three.”
"That's my guess, but I wouldn't swear to it. You'll recall my miscount on the Nereus.
“How could I forget it? Close enough for government work, as they say. Let's wrap this thing up,” he said wearily. “I'm tired as hell, I have to take a leak, and I've got a date this Saturday with a beautiful agricultural lobbyist. She's got cactus flower eyes that are blue like you've never seen, Kurt.”
One day scientists would tap into Zavala's libido and unleash one of the strongest forces in the universe, Austin reflected.
“I wouldn't want to stand between you and your sex drive, Joe. It might be dangerous. You're the weapons officer. Got anything up your sleeve?”
“I think I see the torch hose.” Zavala rose several yards and grabbed the dangling torch. “Got it. Don't know what use it is. Hey, the slab is gone.”
Austin rose until they were both almost directly under the huge hole in the ship's side. Where the stone slab had floated earlier on its airfilled pontoons, the bluegreen of water was impeded only by nosy fish.
“They hijacked it while we were busy” Austin pictured the theft in his mind. “They'd need at least two guys to swim that load through the water. They'll have their hands full. They'll never expect us to go for them.”
“What are we waiting for?” Zavala shot back He threw the useless torch aside, and they both hit their vertical thrusters. They popped out of the ship into the open ocean. They were still deep beneath the cold dark Atlantic, but Austin was happy to escape the claustrophobic darkness inside the Doria's corpse.
The diving bell was gone, and the only illumination was the filtered shimmer from the surface. The giant hull of the Andrea Doria stretched out in both directions, grayish near them and black beyond their immediate proximity. Austin saw a metallic glint in the distance, but it could have been a fish. He wished he could reach up and rub his eyes. The best he could do was squeeze them shut, then open them. No good. Only the unbroken bluish monotone.
Wait.
There it was again. He was sure of it.
“I think I see them near the bow.”
They moved higher, then leveled out and glided toward the bow in fighter plane formation. Zavala saw a movement and called Austin's attention to it. The slab was being pushed along, floating on the pontoons. Two divers, one on either side. A tow line stretched off into the gloom ahead, probably being pulled by an unseen diver.
“We'll try to bluff them. Give them a light show. I'll take a shot.”
The beams washed the slab and the divers on either side.
The divers accelerated, as if they thought they could outrun their pursuers. Austin loosed a bolt, trying not to puncture a pontoon. He thought he saw the projectile bounce off the slab. The attackers shot off into the murk. The tow line went loose. The slab came to a slow stop above the old bridge wing of the Doria.
“Let them go, Joe. We've got to tend to this thing.”
They swooped down and started to swim the stone back toward the hull opening where McGinty could find them with the bell. It was slow going because they were pushing against the current flowing over the ship.
A voice crackled in Austin's earphones. “It's McGinty. Are you okay?”
“We're both fine. Got the stone. We're moving it back to the work area. You can drop the bell anytime.”
There was a pause followed by a faint snort. “That might be a problem,” the captain said, his voice burred with irritation. “We've lost the bow anchors. From the looks of the lines, they've been cut. Surface current's pushing us around. If we drop the bell, it'll swing like a big pendulum. Could knock us over.”
“Looks like our pals covered their escape, Joe.”
“I heard. Any chance of reattaching the anchor lines?”
Austin and Zavala were dangerously tired. The Hard Suits were not designed for hand-to-hand combat, and the metal skins with all their paraphernalia had become personal prisons.
“It's doable, but not by us. It'll be easier just to wrassle this thing up on our own. And that's not going to be easy.” He asked the captain if he could get the boat roughly into the same position and hold it there.
“Not exactly, but close enough,” McGinty said.
They were approaching the hull opening. The Monkfish should be right above them.
McGinty did a skillful job. The line they had used to lift the hull section dangled a short distance above the wreck. They attached the line to the slab, not easy without the fingers of the saturation divers to do
the detailed work, then gave the captain the go-a-head.
“Okay, Cap,” Austin said. “We're coming up.”
Serpent
45
AUSTIN HAD A GOOD VIEW OF THE impenetrable wall of fog bearing down on the Monkfish as he dangled like a hooked flounder over the ocean. The crane pivoted and lowered him onto the deck, where crewmen helped him out of the dripping gym suit like pages attending to an armored knight.
Hauled aboard a few minutes earlier, Zavala looked strangely shrunken without the benefit of his form-fitting hull. Like those of an astronaut coming out of free fall, Austin's first steps were wobbly. Zavala handed him a mug of hot coffee. A few sips of the strong brew got his blood circulating. Then they dealt with their top priority, a stiff-legged race for the nearest head. They came out smiling, After changing into warm dry clothes they went back on deck.
The trip up from the Andrea Doria wreck had been uneventful but tense, especially during the first few moments as the winch eased the strain with slow stop-and-go pulls and at the surface where the load lost its buoyancy. The skilled Monkfish crew attached more floats to make sure they didn't lose the stone, got it into a sling, then winched it aboard using the stern A-frame.
Austin gazed at the innocuous-looking block, now lying on a wooden pallet, and found it hard to believe it had caused so much trouble and cost so many lives. The slab was shaped vaguely like an oversized headstone, which was appropriate given all the people who'd been killed for its sake. The object was a little longer than a tall man, almost as wide and as thick. Austin knelt on the deck and ran his hand over the surface, which was going from black to dark gray as it dried. He traced the hieroglyphics, but they made no sense to him. Nothing about this case made sense.
Crew members covered the slab with a quilted protective material, then wrapped it in a plastic tarp. A small forklift transported the slab to a storage space at deck level. It didn't seem fragile, having weathered nearly half a century in a submerged armored truck and a ride to the surface, but he didn't want to take the chance that it would break into a thousand brittle pieces.
With sad eyes, Donatelli watched the stone being taken away. “So that's what all those men died for.”
“The killing still hasn't stopped,” Austin answered grimly as he squinted at the fog, which now encased the salvage ship in a yellowgray tomb that muffled sound and light. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees. He shivered as he remembered Angelo's description of a similar fog bank that hid the Andrea Doria from eyes on the Stockholm.
“Let's check in with the captain,” he suggested, and they climbed to the bridge.
Inside the wheelhouse McGinty motioned for them to come over to the radar screen and pointed to a white, blip against the green backdrop. Austin blinked. Maybe he'd been underwater too long. The blip's rapid progress across the screen was more like that of an aircraft than a boat.
“Is that vessel moving as fast as I think it is?” Zavala said.
“Goin' like a banshee,” McGinty growled.
Austin tapped the screen with his finger. “Could be our bad boys.”
McGinty's eyes sparkled. "When I was growing up in Southie the cops would swing the cruiser through the housing project and you'd see guys running in every direction. Cops
always found someone wanted for something. If you had a guilty conscience all you had to do was see that blue bubble atop the cruiser to get your legs moving. Same thing here, I'll bet."
“The guilty flee when none pursueth,” Austin said. The blip passed other craft moving in the same direction as if they were stationary. “My guess is that those folks fleeth at about fifty knots.”
McGinty let out a low whistle. “This looks like a big ship to me. I don't know of any vessels of size that can move like that.”
“I do. It's called a Fast Ship. It's a new design. Company called Thornycroft and Giles makes them. They use a semiplaning monohull with water jets that eliminate propeller cavitation. Even a Fast Ship container vessel can cruise at fortyfive knots. The newer versions might even be faster. Cap, did you see any big boats around the wreck just before the attack?”
“This is a busy place.” McGinty pushed his cap, back on his forehead as if it would help his memory “Lots of boats, fishermen mostly, coming or going. Did we actually see this ship? Maybe. There was a good-sized craft hunkering a mile or so away, but we lost it in the fog bank. I was busy with dive operations.”
“My guess is that if we could cut through the corporate red tape, we'd find it was owned by Halcon Industries.”
“Can we get air surveillance?” McGinty asked.
“Impossible in this fog. But what if we do find it? We'd need a warrant to go aboard.”
Zavala had been listening silently, his mouth in an uncharacteristic frown. “Something's been bothering me,” he said. “Those guys knew where we were and what we were doing. How did they know? We just decided to go after this thing a few days ago. We didn't exactly advertise our plans.”
Austin and McGinty exchanged glances. “This operation involved a lot of people. Any one of them could have dropped enough of a hint to let the cat out of the bag.” It was an explanation Austin didn't believe himself. His attackers were too well prepared.
Before long the wind shifted, blowing away the fog, Donatelli bid goodbye to the NUMA men and the Monkfish captain, and he and Antonio set off in the yacht. Austin promised to update the Doria survivor on NUMA's every move.
The Monkfish plowed through the fog and rounded Cape Cod, and before long they could see the lights of planes taking off and landing at Logan Airport. They steamed past the Boston Harbor Islands and tied up at a dock near the aquarium. Austin called an excited Dr. Orville and asked him to arrange for a truck to pick up the stone. Austin and Zavala followed the truck to Harvard and saw it safely under lock and key. Orville said he would work through the night to decipher the inscriptions if he had to and invited them to stay. Austin declined the invitation. He and Zavala were exhausted from the day's events and wanted to catch an early flight to Washington. After a light dinner they had a nightcap of Irish whiskey with McGinty, then crawled into their bunks and fell asleep almost immediately.
The tubular green-glassed tower of NUMA headquarters was like the welcome beacon of a lighthouse as the taxi navigated the unpredictable seas of Washington traffic. Austin and Zavala had caught the water shuttle to Logan Airport and were back in Washington by late morning. McGinty bid him adieu with a lung-shaking slap on the back and the highest of praise. Austin, he proclaimed, was a chip off his old man's block.
“Wonder what the Trouts are up to.” Zavala's musings cut into his thoughts.
Austin had called their team colleagues from the salvage ship the night before to tell them about the fight in the Doria and the retrieval of the stone. Gamay said she and Paul had new information they'd share with them the next day. Austin was too tired to ask what it was. The Trouts were waiting with Hiram Yaeger in the private conference room where they held their first meeting. Rudi Gunn showed up a minute later and said Sandecker was having brunch at the White House. The vice president the admiral would have blown off, but not the president.
Gamay opened the meeting. “You've all been briefed so I won't go into the details of my Yucatan jungle adventure with Dr. Chi. As you know we discovered a stash of stolen Mayan artifacts awaiting shipment out of the country. The storage was centrally located with respect to roads and water routes. We found hundreds of objects taken from a number of important sites, known and unknown to legitimate excavators. When Dr. Chi inventoried the goods, in addition to ceramics he found a number of stone carvings, apparently removed from Mayan buildings with a diamond-edged saw. The unusual boat motif on them must have caught the eye of the chicleros. His guess was that the carvings were taken from temple observatories similar to a structure he showed me at the Mayan site called MIT There was only one problem: the carvings were not identified as to location.”
She paused as Trout
passed the pile of folders he'd been guarding to the others at the table. Gamay waited until the rustling of papers died down, then continued.
“The paper you see on top has eight sketches drawn by Dr. Chi. These profiles are glyphs that represent the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl, who also went by the name Kukulcan. At first glance the drawings appear identical, but if you look closer you'll see subtle differences.”
Yaeger brought his quick eye for detail to the task. “Jaw's a little more prominent on this one,” he said. “This one's got a thicker eyebrow”
Gunn squinted at the sketches. “This guy's nose looks as if it ran into a right cross.”
Gamay smiled like a proud schoolmarm. “You catch on fast, gentlemen. These facial differences indicate a particular place. Each city or urban center interpreted the god in a way that was peculiar to it.” '
“Like the owl was the symbol of ancient Athens?” Austin ventured.
“Correct. In this case the god also represents the planet Venus.”
Austin stirred impatiently in his seat, his eyes glazing over.
He was expecting to hear information with a direct bearing on the case, not a lecture on Mayan theology.
“Gamay, this is all very interesting,” he said, making no effort to hide his impatience, “but I'm not sure where you're going with it.”
She flashed her disarming tomboy grin. “These glyphs were all incorporated into carvings of the boat motif.”
Austin's interest was piqued. He leaned forward. “The Phoenician boat?”
“We don't know yet for sure whether it was Phoenician or not. But, yes, the inscriptions apparently marked the event we saw, strange boats and strange people being received by Mayans.”
Paul Trout chipped in. “Dr. Chi had already guessed that the carvings came from temple observatories. Dr. Chi used the city glyphs to pinpoint the location of the observatories. Mayan observatories are scattered all over Central America. But only eight, as far as he knew, have that particular boat theme.”
Austin said, “You've got eight identical observatories at separate locations, dedicated to Venus, keyed into its cycles, and all having something to do with a mysterious fleet of boats.”