The Minoan Cipher (A Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Adventure Book 2) (8 page)

“Right on target,” the captain said. “The rest is up to you, my friends.”

Hawkins said, “Thanks, Captain Santiago. We can start as soon as Dr. Kalchis gives the word.”

“We can start immediately as far as I’m concerned,” Kalliste said. “But we are guests in Spanish waters, and it is Senor Rodriguez, as his country’s official observer, who has the final say.”

Rodriguez had been standing behind the captain, a mug of coffee in his hand. He was a short, pudgy man with several receding chins and a completely bald head partially covered by an ill-fitting toupee. He was dressed in a shiny dark suit and tie. He smiled and in a soft voice, said, “I am here as a colleague who wishes to help, not hinder.” Setting the mug down, he pulled a notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket. “Since I am also the official government record keeper, could you tell me what your survey will entail?”

“Dr. Kalchis and I will dive together in the manned submersible, take a look at what’s on the bottom and try to confirm the initial Coast Guard assessment,” Hawkins said.

Rodriguez repeated what he had made clear a number of times since boarding the boat that morning. “My main job on this expedition is to guarantee that the wreck is not disturbed, and to make sure no artifacts are removed.”

Hawkins nodded. “We’ll hover at a safe distance. The only thing we plan on taking is video and photographs to study later.”

Rodriguez licked his lips. “It is my job to see that protocol is followed. If you don’t mind, I will have to make a call to ask for final permission.”

“We hope that will not take long,” Kalliste said. “Your government has given me permission for this survey. You must know, as a fellow archaeologist, that I would hardly risk damaging my reputation by allowing a physical inspection of an ancient site without first carefully mapping every detail.”

“I am aware of that, Dr. Kalchis, but I must follow my instructions to the letter.”

He jotted something down in his notebook and strolled off.

“Sanctimonious self-important little piglet,” Kalliste said. “It drives me crazy the way he wets his lips with his tongue. Ugh.”

Hawkins smiled, but his narrowed eyes watched Rodriguez go to the stern where he stopped to take out a phone and turned his back to them. Three tours of duty as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan had honed Hawkins’s observational skills. Something wasn’t quite right. The guy was as slippery as an eel. Hawkins knew a number of marine archaeologists and none of them dressed for a shipwreck survey in a suit. Even odder, Rodriguez had shown no interest in the potential archaeological importance of the shipwreck other than to say it could not be disturbed.

Hawkins gave a mental shrug. Maybe he was reading too much into his first impression. Then again, maybe not.

When Rodriguez returned, he paused for a second, obviously enjoying the drama, and dabbed his lips with his tongue before he announced:

“I have secured you permission to make your dive.”

“Very good,” Matt said. “Dr. Kalchis and I will discuss the launch and retrieval procedures with the captain and his son.”

After he was left alone, Rodriguez lit up a cigarette and took a deep drag. He had to watch himself, but the job had been easier than he thought it would be. He had expected to have to use all his considerable experience as a con man. But these scientists were as gullible as the usual victims of his cons.

When he was working a scam, he dispensed with the toupee. He was aware that with his bald head, watery blue eyes, pink face, and negligible chins, he resembled a very large baby. He capitalized on his innocent appearance, offering free counsel to elderly women who willingly turned over their money for investments that never panned out. But he had made a big mistake recently, conning a frail widow who just happened to have been related to a mobster. Which is how he ended up on this junky old scow in the first place.

He had lost all her money gambling. He knew that it was only a matter of time before the mobster sent some thugs to break his legs, so he’d chosen to lay low in his apartment, but after a few days ventured out to buy cigarettes. As he walked back from the kiosk to his apartment he lit up a cigarette and didn’t see the limo until it was too late. The car pulled up to the sidewalk and two husky men muscled Rodriguez into the back seat where the mobster sat. As the limo pulled away from the curb with a screech of tires, Rodriquez knew his life was about to end. Unexpectedly, the mobster had put his arm around his shoulders.

“I’ve been looking for you, Rodriquez,” he said; his breath held a heavy dose of garlic.

“I can pay the old woman back. I just need more time.”

“Don’t worry about that. I need you to do a favor for a friend.”

He shoved a phone in Rodriquez’s face.

The man on the other end of the line had a job offer. Speaking in a smooth-toned voice, he said he wanted Rodriguez to impersonate an archaeology professor working for the government. The job would only take one day. In return, the man would pay him a large sum of money. Rodriguez had agreed. The widow could go to hell. He had already decided to use the money he made from the job to leave town in search of other fertile hunting grounds full of vulnerable women.

Now, as instructed, he had reported the ship’s discovery to his anonymous employer, who said, “Good. Tell them to dive.”

The voice clicked off. Rodriguez shrugged. He didn’t have the faintest clue what this crazy job was about. He didn’t care. He just wanted to get back to Cadiz, then leave town faster than a mobster could shoot.

Which might have come to pass, if not for one simple thing.

By making the phone call, he had just signed his own death warrant.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After Leonidas had followed the
Sancho Panza
to the wreck site, he moved to within two miles of the anchored boat, the maximum distance that would allow him to make his kill with ease and accuracy. He stood on the deck of the leased forty-three-foot Spanish-built
Astrodona
and studied the vessel through powerful binoculars.

He had removed his disguise. He knew that he now looked like a giant slug but there was no one to see the scar tissue that had replaced his face. He’d smoked a joint on the way out. High-octane weed. He stretched his lipless mouth in a ragged grin. With an eye patch, he thought, he’d fit right in with the fishy crew of Davy Jones in the
Pirates of the Caribbean
movie.

The
Astrodona
’s twin 330 horsepower Volvo Penta engines rumbling under his feet could kick the boat up to a maximum speed of 35 mph. He’d finish this job and be back in Cadiz in time for dinner. A Galician fish stew would be nice, paired with a 2005 Lusco wine. Isabel would be his dessert.

Opening a storage compartment, Leonidas lifted out the king-size backpack that he’d bought in a wilderness equipment supply shop. He set the bag down on the deck, unzipped the top and pulled out a narrow cylinder around two feet long and slightly more than two inches in diameter.

At one end of the cylinder was a set of fins; at the other end was the plastic housing protecting a camera lens. He placed the Spike missile on the deck and pulled out three more projectiles, which he laid beside the first. When he’d first been hired to deal with the survey ship he intended to plant timed explosives on board as he’d done with the earlier assignment. But Salazar had insisted that nothing be left to chance, so he’d acquired the four missiles from his armaments supplier in Amsterdam.

The U.S. Navy had developed the 5.5-pound shoulder-launched Spike to pick off swarming attack boats that might leak through standard defenses. The missile could hit a target moving at sixty miles per hour. Nailing a stationary object like the
Sancho Panza
would be a piece of cake. He removed a launcher from another bag and placed it next to the missiles.

A camera in the missile’s nose could transmit a real-time picture along a fiber optics connector. It was like taking a photo with a cell phone. The shooter puts a box around the target and BANG! That was it.

The one-pound warhead was a firecracker compared to bigger missiles, but the Spike had a focused explosion that packed a punch. Even better, the shooter could put the missile exactly where it would do the most damage. It was fast, too. The missile attained a velocity of six hundred miles per hour within 1.5 seconds of launch. The Spike had a reduced smoke motor, making it invisible as it flew toward the target. Missiles fired in a tight cluster would blast a huge hole in the hull. The boat would sink to the bottom within minutes.

He raised the binoculars again and saw activity on deck. A man and a woman were climbing through a hatch down into what looked like a giant bubble. The round vehicle was lifted off the deck and lowered into the water where it disappeared below the surface. He guessed that the man was Hawkins. Didn’t matter who the woman was. For her, it was simply bad luck. The IED had blasted away his capacity for empathy along with his face.

However, Leonidas hadn’t planned on Hawkins leaving the boat so soon. If he shot now, he’d miss two people. Salazar had been adamant. Everyone on the boat must go. No big deal. He had nothing else to do, so he’d wait. Lighting up another joint, he took a deep drag of the intoxicating fumes and blew the smoke out the twin nostril holes.

CHAPTER NINE

Color drained from the world outside the transparent passenger sphere as the submersible sank into the ocean’s depths. The red and orange glow filtering through the sea sparkle disappeared first. Then the rest of the spectrum was absorbed. Violet light faded into blue and black.

Hawkins switched on the floodlights. A school of silver-scaled fish were caught in the twin cones of brilliance that penetrated the darkness.

“Meet the welcoming committee,” Hawkins said. “Are you comfortable with the temperature?”

The interior of the cabin was cool, but Hawkins and Kalliste had changed into jeans and windbreakers before entering the sphere.

“I’m fine, thanks. Let’s go make history.”

“Aye, aye, and down she goes.”

Hawkins put
Falstaff
into a slow, descending spiral around the marker buoy line.

Kalliste gazed with wonder through the wall of the transparent sphere. “I can’t believe we’re making this dive,” she said. “Thank you so much for doing this, Matt.”

“I’m the one who should be thanking you, Kalliste. I’d be in my office back in Woods Hole instead of being here on the brink of a great discovery.”

She glanced around at the encroaching ocean. “I’m getting very nervous.”

“Don’t be. You’re as safe here as on your living room sofa.”

“It’s not the dive,” she said. “I feel perfectly comfortable with you. It’s the ship. What if it’s
not
Minoan?”

“We’ll know soon enough. We’re almost on the bottom.”

The submersible set down close to where the buoys anchor flukes were embedded in the sand.

“Almost no vegetation,” Hawkins said. “That’s a good sign. The temperature at this depth discourages the growth of marine organisms that feed on wood.”

Hawkins powered the vertical thrusters.
Falstaff
rose around six feet, coming to a hover. He put the submersible into a slow spin. The floodlights stroked the darkness like beams from a shore beacon. He was flicking on the video camera when he heard Kalliste say, “Oh!”

He looked up from the control panel. Directly in front of the submersible was a tall pillar that had a knob on top. The shape was indistinct because of an uneven covering of concretion, but the knob had the vague shape of a bird, with the beak pointing directly at them.

Kalliste murmured something in Greek. “
Omorphi
.
Poly Omorphi
.”

“Don’t know what you said, but I wholeheartedly agree,” Hawkins said.

“I said it was very beautiful. In more ways than one. You see how it looks vaguely like the head of a bird? This may be important. The bird motif was a common bow feature on Minoan vessels. Can we take a look at the stern section?”

Hawkins reached for the controls that would move
Falstaff
vertically. They rose several feet higher than the knob, and he angled the submersible into a forward tilt, piloting
Falstaff
slowly over the wreck. Although the deck was covered in sand they glimpsed some of the ship’s ribs and amorphous lumps here and there.

Kalliste dug a cellphone out of a waterproof neck pouch and put it on video mode.

“I know the submersible has cameras,” she said. “But I want something I can get back to the Hidden History channel as soon as we come out of the water.”

The submersible traveled around a hundred feet. The floodlights fell on a section of fish net draped around the high stern.

Kalliste leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. “That’s where the fisherman’s net snagged the wreck. See that long plank projecting from the stern right about where water level would ordinarily be? We call vessels with that feature ‘frying pans,’ because that’s what they look like.”