Moon Mask (69 page)

“We’ll be buddying up into five teams of two. I’ll go down with Tank; O’Rourke, you’ll be with Aiko.” Aiko was one of the other two marines, also a local to the area. “Lake, you’ll be with Siddiqa, Garcia with Yashina; Raine and King, you’ll obviously be a team so that you can extract the package once we have confirmation. Murray, you’ll stay on board and keep an eye out for any problems. Noriko,” the final marine, “you’ll stay on board to keep up the pretence of being a local fishing boat. Any questions?” Upon the team’s silence, he continued. “Tanaka will talk you through your designated search coordinates.”

Tank stepped up and indicated the whiteboard. “I’ve dived this site dozens of times,” he began. His English was perfect but King could detect a hint of a local accent. “I’ve never seen any opening into the structure, but if Doctor King’s assumption is correct, then there must be a way in.” None of the marines had been apprised of the Moon Mask, nor the less than regulation-specific intelligence that had led them here. “So we split up. Each team has been designated with a specific area to search. I tried to base this on experience levels to make it as safe as possible, but remember the currents in this area are extremely strong. We’ve timed our arrival reasonably well and it is now low tide, when the current is at its weakest but you’ll still experience a strong pull. If you get into difficulties, surface, inflate your vest and wait for the boat to come pick you up.”

“Remember, if you find an opening, you call it in and wait for Raine and King to arrive,” Gibbs added. “You’ll all have radiation detectors affixed to your gear, but diving gear isn’t a hazmat suit. It will not offer you any protection against the radiation. You wait at the entry zone so we don’t lose it again, then Raine and King will go in. Any questions?” Again, the response was negative.

“And don’t forget,” Tank added. “This whole area is a feeding zone for hammer-heads. Generally, leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone, but remember they are attracted to blood. You so much as nick yourself on a piece of coral, you get the hell out of the water, got it?”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Raine grumbled.

“Right, let’s kit up.”

The deck became a hive of activity then as the SOG team issued out the diving gear they had picked up in Okinawa. Even though the three civilians all had some experience with scuba diving, O’Rourke took it upon himself to assist them along with Raine.

He held up a full-face mask, connected via a series of tubes which were fastened securely in-place to a black rubber vest, not dissimilar to the Buoyancy Control Device, or BCD, that King was used to using when diving. His father had insisted on him learning to dive at an early age, insisting that if they were going to find a lost race then most of that evidence would likely lie submerged underwater. He had dived numerous wrecks as well as underwater archaeological sites, mostly off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt, and considered himself fairly experienced. Sid and Nadia, on the other hand, he knew, had only limited experience diving which was why they had been assigned the shallower search areas.

“This is a LAR V Draeger Closed-Circuit Rebreather,” the soldier explained in his usual, mild mannered voice. “It’s different to the standard Open-Circuit systems you would have used while scuba diving, in that it minimises noise and doesn’t emit any bubbles.”

“Don’t want the bad guys to spot your bubbles when you’re sneaking up on them,” Raine explained light-heartedly as he peeled himself into a thick neoprene wetsuit. His movements were swift and easy, checking all of his gear in a matter of seconds. A professional diver. A professional soldier.

“You know how you got creeped out on your first ever dive,” O’Rourke said, “thinking that Darth Vadar was coming to get you?”

Raine made a deep breathing sound, imitating the sci-fi villain which every diver sounded like when breathing through the stages of a scuba regulator. The three civilians, even Nadia, laughed lightly.

“Well, now you’re going to get creeped out because of the silence,” O’Rourke finished. “They’re full-face masks and are fitted with MSHR submersible radios. That means that we’ll all be able to talk to each other down there, so there’s nothing to worry about. The soldier in each pair – Doc, you’re stuck with Raine I’m afraid,” he added jokingly. Again they all laughed, thankful for the soldier’s good nature. Whatever dark history there was between him and Raine, King realised that O’Rourke was trying to put it in the past. Raine had proven himself again and again in the last few days.

“Each soldier,” he said again, “will be issued with an APS underwater assault rifle and an SPP-1 underwater pistol. You don’t need to know the ins-and-outs of it, but basically they fire specially designed hydrodynamic bullets, so if the ‘bad-guys’ do show up and we get into a fire fight, we’re not going to be defenceless down there. Each of you will have diving knives as well. Comprende?”

“Comprende,” they all replied.

Over the next few minutes they each wriggled and squeezed themselves into their tight, full body wetsuits. Even though the water in these areas was warm, they could be underwater for a while- luckily, breathing pure oxygen through the military rebreathers instead of the compressed nitrogen/oxygen mix used in commercial diving, would allow them to remain underwater for longer without suffering any ill effects. The full suits, including boots, gloves and hoods, would keep them warmer for longer too.

“Kinda reminds you of that time in Sri Lanka, ay, Boss?” O’Rourke asked Raine, laughing as the civilians struggled with their gear. King felt a pang of annoyance flare through him. Presumably the soldier was referring to their lack of finesse in suiting up.

Raine glanced at O’Rourke for a second, frowning until he grasped whatever memory it was and laughed at the private joke.

Once suited, Raine and O’Rourke helped them all into their gear. Despite his experience, King allowed O’Rourke to assist with putting on equipment he had never seen before. This included a hard vest that felt like it was laced with metal and, until O’Rourke handed him a weight belt, he assumed that it was some military-style weight vest. After that he slipped a ‘bib’ made up of plastic pockets over his head. Each pocket sloshed with some sort of liquid which the soldier explained helped even out buoyancy with the rebreather. Next, he wrapped the rebreather and air vest around him, pointing out the various components, such as the scrubber which cleaned and recycled the air, and the compass board which included a dive computer, compass, depth gauge, watch, GPS unit and air-pressure. It was not dissimilar to what he had trained with but much more complex.

“Is all this gear really necessary?” he asked, irritated and hot as he slowly roasted in the wetsuit beneath the sun. “I’ve dived with a lot less.”

“This is Special Ops, Doc,” O’Rourke replied. “Not PADI.” With a final tug of a strap, the big soldier slapped him on the shoulder with a smile then moved on to help Sid.

“I learnt with BSAC,” he grumbled before waddling like a penguin to the side of the boat. He balanced there while pulling on his fins and glanced at Sid. She similarly looked like a cyborg abducted from a sci-fi movie as O’Rourke laced equipment around her. A nauseating swell of emotions rushed through him but he forced himself to switch them off as best he could. Now wasn’t the time.

Raine, meanwhile, helped Nadia. He noticed an intimacy to their interactions that hadn’t been there days earlier, a closeness that had newly developed. Her eyes watched his every move with a dozy gleam that seemed totally out of place on her normally stoic face. The twitch of a smile was likewise a newly added feature which had been there permanently whenever Raine was around.

So, he’d finally melted the Ice Queen, King thought with a grin, pleased for his friends despite his own very recent estrangement.

“Okay,” Gibbs’ voice broke abruptly into his thoughts. He and the other military personnel waddled to the side of the boat and joined their respective buddies. Sid offered King a weak, distant, nervous smile and then perched beside Lake. Raine slapped Nadia’s rump, earning him an angry glare and an irritated glance from Gibbs as he finished his statement. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Then, in twos, they rolled backwards off the side of the boat, splashed into the water and descended into the unknown depths below.

51:

The Monument

Off the Coast of Yonaguni Island,

Japan

Raine
and King descended through the gloom of the East China Sea, finning hard to battle the powerful current which dragged at their bodies, fighting to keep themselves oriented towards the face of the Yonaguni Monument.

At sixty five feet, the sunlight was tepid, the water inky, but there was no mistaking the looming presence of the ‘structure’ before them.

The object of scholarly debate for thirty years now had finally been consigned to the realms of unorthodox pseudo-history. Historians generally agreed that no civilisation had existed nine thousand years ago to have built the structure. Geologists generally agreed that, although irregular in its startling regularity, it was not only possible, but
plausible
to state that it was a product of nature.

Weeks ago, King might have agreed with that assessment. But not anymore
. Any doubts he had harboured about the existence of the Progenitors had been cast aside the moment he had laid eyes on the Xibalban mask, clutched in the arms of the human remains of Edward Pryce.

Staring through the full face mask, cocooned within the eerie silence of the rebreather, there was no denying the phenomenally straight edges, the right angles, the steps, triangles and squares of the monument. Flattened, smoothed and rounded by nine millennia of battling the tremendous currents that had exhausted King in minutes, the vaguely pyramid-shaped structure, not too dissimilar to Djoser’s in Egypt, was still perceptible. Troughs, ravines, gulleys and tunnels wound their way in a network around the structure, dwarfing the tiny teams of divers who searched its surfaces.

Other ‘structures’ lay nearby; platforms of rock, one of which had been dubbed the ‘turtle’ due to its shape; two megalithic pillars of rock, and even a ‘face’. Weathered and disfigured, the towering visage of an elongated head, its soulless eyes staring forlornly into the depths, nevertheless stirred memories of the Easter Island statues.

Could they somehow be linked together, just as his father had once suggested? Was he looking at the citadel of some great civilisation, or merely an outpost? Had the crafters of Easter Island’s famous Moa been inspired by the face beneath the waves, a memory passed from generation to generation, just as they had been inspired by the mask that fell from heaven?

Another thought occurred to him. He remembered reading on the internet on the team’s journey here about theories linking the architecture to other monumental constructions such as Sacsayhuamán in Peru, Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, Copán in Honduras and Chichén Itza in Mexico. They in turn stemmed, he now believed, from Xibalba in Venezuela.

The comparisons continued, flitting through his mind in quick succession. He saw in the alignment of the Yonaguni Monument, its outlying temple-like formations and monumental ‘head’ another similarity, this one with Egypt’s Giza Plateau: a pyramid, its surrounding temples and enclosure walls, as well as its own monumental sculpture, the Great Sphinx.

Even as he knew his quest for the Moon Mask was nearing its end, he felt that a greater adventure was unravelling. It was as though echoes of this place reverberated through the architecture of the ancient world, as though all those cultures, separated by oceans, deserts and mountain ranges, had been touched by the same hand.

The hand of the
Progenitors
?

Am I floating above the origins of civilisation?
he wondered. Then Sid’s words stabbed back at him, raw and hurtful, because they were true: ‘
And then what? We live happily ever after . . . until your next great obsession comes along. What will it be next time? Atlantis? El Dorado?’

So soon after losing the woman he loved, his mind was already reaching out for new adventures, new discoveries beyond the completion of this one. Was she right? Was he really addicted to the same life, and death, as his father?

“Has anyone found an opening yet?”
Gibbs’ voice suddenly blared loudly through his radio. In the tomb-like silence, the sound was like thunder.

All the teams checked in negative, earning a disgruntled complaint from the team leader.

“As I said,”
Tank’s voice came over his ear piece,
“people have been diving this site for years. If any opening had ever been found, it would have shaken the scientific world. Even the most outlandish claims say that it is a solid
monument
, not an accessible
temple
.”

“There’s a way in,” King replied irritably.

“Dosimeters detect no indication of tachyon radiation,”
Nadia’s voice replied.

“That doesn’t mean the mask’s not here. In Cornwall it was contained inside Imhotep’s lead-lined coffin.”

“If that was the case here,”
the Russian’s voice replied, “
I should be able to pick up a large metallic object with a magnetometer. Hold on.”

Thirty
foot below the surface, Nadia finned hard against the current, struggling to keep herself steady. As well as all her diving gear, she also had an array of scientific equipment, specially designed for underwater work, attached to her vest. She plucked a Fluxgate magnetometer from it and wrapped the strap around her wrist so she didn’t lose it. She flicked it on and tried to study the screen through the magnifying effect of the gloomy water. “That’s incredible,” she breathed, forgetting herself for a moment. The current pulled her sharply and she forced herself to kick against it.

“What?”
King’s voice was urgent, excited.