Kirov Saga: Devil's Garden (Kirov Series) (18 page)

Where
were they going now as the
Argos Fire
raced through the Aegean under a
black, starlit night? It all seemed impossible, the wildest stuff of Hollywood
movies, but Elena had told it to him with a straight face, in the same
no-nonsense tone of voice he had heard so often at her business meetings. She
was deadly serious.
‘The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike;
the devil will come, and Faustus must be damned…’

“Alright
then,” he said when morning came. “The Helicopters are ready for operations.”

“How
many can we carry?”

“How
many? Well as you know we’ve modified those helos specifically for the
Argonauts. Each one takes a squad of twelve men. We’ve three ready on the
fantail this morning.”

The
night had given her the time to explain that there was a place they needed to
be the following day. MacRae wasn’t happy about leaving the ship but she persuaded
him that it was necessary. Yet he perceived a real struggle within her, and an
anguish that was something more than fear, something more akin to grief and
sadness.

“Good
enough,” he caught the tormented look in her eyes, and put his arms around her.
“What’s wrong? You told me so much about this time displacement last night that
we never got round to the 48 hours. What is really going on here? Why this rush
to Delphi?”

“No
time now, Gordon. Get medical supplies, ammunition, water, communications equipment
on those helos. Oh yes—we’ll need shovels. Something to dig with.”

“That
sort of equipment is already there—standard loadout. Along with the missiles
and everything else.”

“Forget
the missiles. You can leave all that behind, if it will give us more room for
food and supplies. The Argonauts should be armed, however.”

 “Aye,
armed to the teeth.”

“Then
have the men pack additional clothing, uniforms, ammunition, anything essential.
You do the same.”

“I
see…” He could see her distress, but knew now was not the time to probe deeper.
On the one hand she said the mission would be brief, yet on the other she was
making it sound as though they would be gone for some good length of time. The
lady obviously had something in mind, and so he quickly moved into operational
mode in his own mind, a military precision to his thought now.

“I’ll
see that the lads are ready.”

After
he left her to head for the fantail, Elena Fairchild passed a quiet moment in
her office. Her eyes strayed over the furniture, the artwork on the walls, and
the desk where she had spent so much of her time in the past, evaluating
charts, monitoring the oil markets, researching deals. It seemed such a
fruitless effort now, but it was her life before the Watch, and once it had
been important to her. She realized she was letting go inwardly, releasing it
all with a heavy sigh, and quiet tears. Then she flipped the hidden switch that
would open the movable bulkhead and entered the special room behind her office.

There
it sat. The phone,
the
phone
,
the red phone of doom. She wasted
no time now, quickly keying a code to open the glass and then punching in a
brief message on the keypad. “WS11 – ON SITE – 08:00 HRS.”

She
pushed the send button, waited, eyes darkly fixed on the digital screen that
had flashed so many messages in the past seven years, codes of alarm, of
warning, bidding her constant vigilance, setting the course of the
Argos
Fire
to seas through her regional patrol zone. All that was over now too.

The
confirmation code returned. “RECEIVED.” There was a brief pause and she started
to lower the protective glass cover again. Then a second message flashed onto
the screen. It was just one word, as always, but this one was not in the
lexicon of codes and call signs she had memorized over the years. This one came
from a human heart. It read simply: FAREWELL.

It
was time.

She
replaced the glass, keyed one additional command to disable the phone, then retreated
quickly to her outer office, sealing off the bulkhead. The sound of men moving
from the lower decks seemed like a rumble of thunder, echoing through the
corridors of the ship. She looked for the bag she had packed the previous
evening, then felt for the chain around her neck, her hands clasped to her
breast in a fleeting moment of reassurance. Time to leave. They needed to get
to the site as soon as possible with her team of Argonauts.

To
make their flight as short as possible, the ship had altered course, moving
into the narrow Strait of Artemisia where the Greeks had thought to block the
Persian fleet of Xerxes in 420 B.C. Now they were north of the fabled pass of Thermopylae
where the 300 Spartans had made their gallant stand. She was through the corridors
to emerge on the fantail of the ship in little time, and saw Gordon there
consulting with Mack Morgan. Seeing her, he raised his hand, rotating his
finger to signal the pilots. The helos began their ignition cycle as the last
of the Argonauts filed into the rear compartments. My fistful of Spartans, she
thought, and God forgive me that I can’t take all of them, the whole of her
crew of 300. She would live with that the rest of her life, however much of
that was left to her now.

* * *

She
gave the ship a long look in farewell
as the sleek helos rose above the fantail, engines roaring to break the quiet
of the dawn. Go with God, she whispered a silent prayer. The three helicopters
raced south, gaining altitude as they approached the coast and rose towards
Mount Parnassus. The X-3s were one of the fastest helicopters in the world, so
they would catch only a brief glimpse of the wrinkled mountains on the quick
run to Delphi. They were soon hovering over the orange roofs of the town,
drifting slowly to the east where the famous ruins could be seen below. The
severed columns and remnants of elegant Greek architecture were laid out below
them like broken teeth. They were spread out in narrow enclaves surrounded by
green olive groves, monuments of ages past, the Athenian Treasury and Theatre,
the Temple of Apollo, the Navel of the Earth, the Sacred Way, and the Shrine to
Athena.

‘I
am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto
raised…’
The words
ran through her mind as she thought about the ancient deity, and how she had
been represented through many cultures over the millennia. She was the goddess
of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, and all of that
would be laid on her altar now. Some said she had deeper roots, arising from
Egyptian stories of
Neith
, the Goddess of War in one depiction, and a
mother Goddess of the loom in another, weaving the strands of the earth
together to make each new day. If ever there was a description of Mother Time, that
was it, thought Elena. Well, my dear lady, I must beg your pardon a thousand
times, but we’re about to ruffle your skirts.

“There,”
she pointed to the pilot from the seat just behind Gordon, who was flying
co-pilot on the mission. “That circle there. See the standing columns? Can we
put down there—at the edge of those trees?”

The
pilot nodded, and they began a gradual descent, the outline of the ruins
sharpening as they dropped closer. Normally the area might be overrun with
tourists, but not this early in the day, not with the ominous news on the
airwaves about the rising tide of war. It was relatively quiet, and there were
just a few vehicles at the north end of the ruins where a small building housed
staff who looked over the shrine.

“Have
the Argonauts clear and secure the entire site,” she said firmly. “No one from
that facility there is to be admitted. If they get pushy about it, be polite,
but firm. I’ll need three or four men with spades.”

“Very
good, Madame.” MacRae adopted his more formal tone in front of the other men.
He still had no idea what this mission was about, or why they would in any way
be interested in the relics of this old monument.

The
Argonauts were quick and efficient, leaping from the helos as they alighted on a
narrow patch of open ground by the edge of the trees. One squad fanned out in
the surrounding orchard to one side, flanked by the other. The third squad
swept north, herding a couple of early rising site visitors and a tour guide
politely away. A team of four men unpacked a number of containers with the
supplies they had stowed, and then opened a side compartment and produced
folding shovels running to join Elena and the Captain in the center of the
shrine. It was a series of three elevated slabs of smooth, grey stone, concentric
circles laid on top of one another, each one slightly smaller to create three
steps. The center of the topmost slab was hollow, like a stone donut, and
filled with a sward of green grass.

All
that was left of the stones gathered about the site sat there in mute silence,
set down thousands of years ago by human stone wrights, and quietly keeping
their vigil on the site through the ages.

“There,”
Elena pointed. “Dig, gentlemen, if you please.”

MacRae
gave her a wide eyed look. “Here? Right in the middle of the shrine?”

“It’s
at least four feet deep,” she said, folding her arms.

“Very
well, lads. Put your backs into it.” He’d dig a hole through the earth to Hell itself
to get to the bottom of this business today. He’d dig in the devil’s own garden.

The
men began to dig, and they made short work of the site, quickly shoveling away the
turf and plowing away the loamy soil beneath it. For them it was just another
field position, and they had dug many defensive sites in the past, though never
under circumstances like these. The site staff fretted audibly to the north,
held at bay by a line of dour faced Argonauts in black commando fatigues. They
could see that something was going on, but a partial wall behind the last three
standing columns blocked their view of the digging. To quiet them Elena sent
over a man to tell them they were from the Greek Ministry of Culture, here to
do a complete site survey to protect the monuments. It seemed to have had the
desired effect.

It
wasn’t long before the shovels struck something hard, and from the sound of it
MacRae thought it was metallic, and not buried stone. They worked quickly,
clearing away the soil to reveal a smooth metal surface, gleaming in the dull
light, with a single cowling plate held in place by screws. Mack Morgan stood
there, hands in his pockets, watching the men work with interest. What was her
ladyship up to this time?

Someone
produced a Swiss Army knife and they used a tool attachment to quickly remove
the screws and metal plate. It revealed a familiar fixture, but one that was
completely out of place in the setting—a simple keyhole. Elena reached slowly
to her throat, kneeling over the dig, which was now a four by six foot trench.
MacRae helped her down onto the metal structure in the trench, thinking this to
be a special maintenance facility, or storage site that may house additional
relics. What she could be doing here was beyond his imagining at that point,
but he waited, giving Morgan a dark eyed glance, arms folded on his chest.

Elena
produced, quite appropriately, a simple metal key that she had been wearing on
a chain about her neck. MacRae watched as she knelt, leaning over the site,
eyes closed, as if she were poised at the edge of some indefinable moment, some
crossing point on the meridian of her life that would soon change everything.
Then she slowly inserted the key in the lock, which produced an immediate,
audible tone.

MacRae
and Morgan watched intently as the top of the metal structure seemed to lift,
hinging up with a low hum and forcing Elena to scoot to one side as it
elevated. In light of what they had learned about the Russian ICBMs, the
thought briefly crossed the Captain’s mind that this could be some kind of bomb
shelter, some sanctuary from the impending chaos that threatened to engulf the
world.

“What
in the good Lord’s name is this?” said Morgan, his eyes bright with curiosity
beneath his wavy black hair. He scratched his charcoal beard as he watched.

“Secret
passage,” said MacRae with a wink. Someone produced a flashlight and it
illuminated the shadowy recesses of the compartment below.

“That
looks to be six inches of titanium reinforced steel!” Morgan gaped at the
thickness of the elevated door hatch.

Elena
looked over her shoulder, smiling up at the men. “Captain, If you’d care to do
the honors.” She gestured at the open compartment where the light illuminated a
ladder down. “Be our trailblazer here.”

The
big Scott was nimble in reaching the ladder, as he had been up and down a
thousand or more on ships throughout his long naval career. Down he went,
swallowed by the earth, until he vanished into the deep metal shaft below the
shrine, and with each step down he had the harrowing feeling that he was
leaving the world above behind forever, slowly descending to a new world below.

He
was.

Part VI

Escape

“I was an
escapist at heart . . .
I’ve
always been able to yank myself out of this world and plunge myself into
another. ”