Serpent (7 page)

A lowlying island topped by an anorexic scraggle of stunted pines guarded the entrance. She planned to swim directly toward the island and bisect the lagoon: She would explore each half separately, making a series of parallel runs at. right angles to the baseline. The search pattern was similar to that used to find a wreck in the open ocean. Her eyes would take the place of a sidescan sonar or magnetometer. Precision measurements came later. She simply wanted to get a feel for what lay underwater.

Once below the clouded surface, the water was relatively clear, and Nina could see to the bottom, a depth of no more than twenty feet. This meant she could snorkel and conserve air. A series of intersecting straight lines materialized and formed into rectangles created by carefully fitted stone blocks.

The stairway had continued down underwater to an old quay. It was a significant discovery because it indicated the lagoon was once a real port and not a temporary anchorage. The bottom was likely to be covered with layers of civilization over a long period of time instead of junk tossed over the side by transient sailors.

Soon she picked out thicker lines and piles of rubble. Building ruins. Bingo! Storage sheds, housing, or headquarters for a dock and harbormaster. Definitely not an overnight anchorage.

Darkness loomed, and she thought she was at the end of the quay. She passed over a large square opening and wondered if it could be a fish tank, what the ancients, called a piscine. Far too big. The size of an Olympic swimming pool.

Nina spit out the snorkel, bit down on the regulator mouthpiece, and dove straight down. She moved along one side of the yawning cavity. Coming to a corner, she turned and followed another edge, swimming until she had covered the entire perimeter. It was around one hundred by one hundred fifty feet.

Nina flicked her headlamp on and dove into the opening. The muddy floor was perfectly flat and about eight feet below the quay level. The light's narrow beam picked out broken pottery and debris. Using her knife, she pried potsherds from the mud and put them into the collection bag after carefully marking their positions. She discovered a channel and followed it seaward until it broke out into the lagoon. The opening was easily big enough to allow for the passage of an ancient ship. The space cut into the quay had all the characteristics of an artificial harbor known as a cothon. She discovered several slipways, each big enough to accommodate ships more than fifty feet long, and a true piscine, which confirmed her theory about the cothon.

Leaving the quay, she continued on her baseline course using the land spit to her right as a reference point. She swam between the island and the mainland until she found a submerged mole or breakwater a few yards below the surface, constructed of paralleJ stone walls filled with rubble. In a drier time it would have connected the mainland and the island.

Coming to the island, she shed her dive gear and walked across thorncovered slabs of rock to the other side. The island was more than fifty feet wide, almost twice as long, and mostly flat. The trees she had seen from shore barely came up to her chin.

Near the lagoon entrance were piles of stones, probably foundations, and a circle of blocks. It was the perfect spot for a lighthouse or a watchtower, offering a sharpeyed sentinel a panoramic view of ship traffic. Defenders could be summoned from the mainland whenever a sail was sighted.

Stepping inside the circle, Nina climbed onto a fragmented stair and looked out at the anchored ship she had seen earlier. Again she wondered what would bring an American government vessel to this arid and lonely coast. After a moment she retrieved her scuba equipment. The cooling and weightless environment back in the water was refreshing, and she decided her fishy ancestors had made a big mistake when they crawled from the sea onto dry land.

Nina swam across the lagoon entrance. The other peninsula started low from the land, gradually widening as it rose to a knobby crag. The sheer reddish rocks dropped straight into the water like the ramparts of a fortress. Nina dove until she was at the base of the blank wall, looking for a footpath. Finding none, she continued underwater to the seaward end of the promontory which terminated in a rocky shelf. A. perfect defensive position where archers could set up a murderous cross fire to rake the decks of any invader entering the harbor.

A horizontal slab protruded like a Stone Age awning from the rock face near the platform. Beneath the slab was a rectangular opening the size and shape of a doorway. Drifting closer, Nina squinted through her face mask lens and tried to pierce the menacing blackness. She remembered her headlamp and switched it on. The shaft of light fell on a whirl of ghostly movement. She drew back in alarm. Then a laugh bubbled from her regulator The silverscaled school of fish that had made the tunnel its home was more startled than she was.

As her pulse returned to normal she recalled Dr. Knox's warning: Don't risk your neck for a nugget of knowledge that would end up in a dusty tome read by a few. With fiendish delight he'd relate in grim detail the fates of scientists who went too far. Furbush was devoured by cannibals. Rozzini was consumed by malaria. ONeil dropped into a bottomless crevasse.

Nina was convinced Knox made the names up, but she took his point. She was alone, without a lifeline to unreel behind her. Nobody knew where she was. The very element of danger that should have repelled her was seductive in its appeal. She checked her pressure gauge. By snorkeling, she'd used her. air supply sparingly and still had time left.

She made a pact with herself to stop just inside the opening and go no farther. The tunnel couldn't be very long. Primitive tools, not diamond drills, had been used to cut through the rock. She shot some pictures of the entrance, then moved forward.

Incredible!

The floor was almost perfectly flat, the walls smooth except for shaggy marine growth.

She went in deeper, forgetting her pact and Knox's sage advice as well. The tunnel was the most beautiful artifact she had ever seen. It was already longer than a similar passageway at the submerged city of Apollonia.

The smooth sides ended abruptly, becoming a roughsided cave that narrowed and widened, meandering in more or less of a straight line, with smaller passages branching off. Sconces for lamps were set into the carbonblackened walls. The tunnel borers had extended the natural cave by making an artificial one. Nina marveled at the skill and determination of long dead Bronze Age sandhogs.

The passageway once again became wider and more polished. Nina squeezed over the top of a pile of rubble, encouraged by a greenish glow in the distance. She swam to the light, which became brighter the nearer she came.

In pursuit of knowledge Nina had crawled through piles of bat guano and lairs guarded by badtempered scorpions. As wondrous as the tunnel was, she was anxious to be out of it and drew a sigh of relief when the passage ended. She floated up a stairway and through an archway, emerging into an open space surrounded by crumbled foundations.

Nina suspected Dr. Knox had an idea of what she might find in the lagoon, but he couldn't have known the extent of it. Nobody could. Hold on, girl. Order your thoughts. Assess the details. Start acting like a scientist, not like Huckleberry Finn.

She sat underwater on a waisthigh stone block and pondered her findings. The port was probably a combined military and trading post that kept out foreign traders and guarded commercial shipping. There was a growl in her ear The dogs of skepticism were hungry for their dinner of solid scientific fact. Before she made her findings definitive, every square foot of the port would have to be explored and evaluated.

She ventured a guess that the port had sunk from a shifting of tectonic plates. Maybe during the big earthquake of A.D. 10. Quakes were not as common here as in the Mediterranean, but it could happen. Growl. I know, I know. No conclusion until all the evidence is in. She watched the bubbles from her exhalations rise to the surface, thinking there might be a quicker way to get to the truth.

Nina had a talent that went beyond the ordinary and the explainable. She had discussed it with only a few dose friends, and then in forensic terms comparing herself to an FBI criminal scene profiler who reads a crime scene like an eyewitness. Nothing psychic about it, she had convinced herself. Only a superb command of her subject combined with a photographic memory and a vivid imagination. Something like the way dowsers find water veins with a forked twig.

She discovered her talent accidentally on her first trip to Egypt. She had pressed her hands against one of the huge foundation blocks on the Great Pyramid of Kufu. It was a natural gesture, a tactile attempt to comprehend the enormity of the incredible pile of stones, but something strange and frightening happened. Her every sense was assaulted by images. The pyramid was only half as high, its leveled summit crowded with hundreds of dark men in breechcloths hoisting blocks with a primitive scaffolding. The sweat on their skin gleamed in the sun. She could hear shouts. The squeak of pullies. She yanked her hand away as if the rock had turned red hot.

A voice was saying, "Camel ride, missy?"

She blinked her eyes. The pyramid soared in a point toward the sky again. The dark men were gone. In their place was a camel driver. Grinning broadly, he leaned onthe pommel of his saddle. "Camel ride, missy? I give you good price."

"Shukran. Thank you. Not today" The driver nodded sadly and loped off. Nina pulled herself together and went back to the hotel, where she sketched out the block and pulley arrangement. Later she showed it to an engineer friend. He had stared at her drawing, muttering, "Damned ingenious." He asked if he could steal the idea to use on a crane project he had been working on.

Since Giza there had been similar experiences. It wasn't something she could turn on and off at will. If she got a long distance call from the past every time she picked up an artifact, she'd be in an insane asylum. She had to be drawn to something like an iron filing to a magnet. At a smaller version of the Coliseum, located at an imperial resort outside Rome, the images of pain and terror were so strong, the bloodsoaked sand, severed limbs, and cries of the dying so vivid, that she retched. For a while she thought she had lost her mind. She didn't sleep for several nights. Maybe that's why she didn't like the Romans.

This was no Roman amphitheater, she rationalized. Before she talked herself out of it, she swam to the edge of the quay, placed her palms on the fitted stones, and closed her eyes. She could picture the longshoremen hauling amphorae filled with wine or oil, and the slap of sails against wooden masts; but these were only imaginings. She breathed a sigh of relief. Served her right for trying to shortcut the scientific process.

Nina shot a few photographs, disappointed only that she hadn't found a shipwreck. She collected more pottery, found a halfburied stone anchor, and was taking a few last shots when she saw the roundish protuberances rising from where the bottom was sandy.

She swam over and brushed the sand away. The lump was part of a larger object. Intrigued, she got down on her knees and cleared more covering from a large stone nose, part of a huge carved face about eight feet from its blunt chin to the top of the scalp. The nose was flat and wide and the mouth broad, with fleshy lips.

The head was covered by a skullcap or closefitting helmet. The expression could best be described as a glower. She stopped digging and ran her forgers over the black stone.

The fleshy lips seemed to curl as if in speech.

Touch me. 1 have much to tell you.

Nina drew back and stared at the impassive face. The features were as before. She listened for the voice. Touch me. Fainter now, lost in the metallic burble of her breath going through the regulator.

Girl, you've been underwater way too long.

She pressed the valve on her BC. Air hissed into the inflatable vest. Heart still pounding, she ascended slowly back to her own world.

2 THE SWARTHY THICKSET MAN SAW Nina approaching the circle of tents and ran over with his hand extended. In his thick Spanish accent, Raul Gonzalez said, "May I help you carry your bag, Dr. Kirov?"

"I'm fine" Nina was used to hauling her gear around, and in fact preferred to keep a tight rein on it.

"It would be no trouble," he said gallantly, displaying his painted on grin to the fullest. Too weary to argue and not wanting to hurt his feelings, Nina handed the load over. He took the heavy bag as if it were full of feathers.