by Rob Jones
“We can add Pavlopetri to the list as well,” Hawke said.
Ryan gave him a thumbs up. “Whoever created these symbols had a worldwide presence. It links up with what Blankov was saying about a global capital city.”
“But they’re so ancient,” Kim said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Wait, I think I see something,” Lea said. “Over there where the octopus was.”
Lexi spun around in the water and pushed herself across the temple. “I see it too!”
“It’s a bull’s horn!” Lea dived down to the floor and started to rub silt off the floor with her hands. “This is the mosaic in Alexander’s map!” She cleared it off until the entire bull’s head was visible, but one of the horns was obscured by a giant slab of granite that had fallen from the roof.
“It’s the entrance, guys.” Lea hovered above the slab with Lexi at her side and both women were shining their lights down into a narrow hole in the floor. “But it’s partially blocked by this slab.”
Hawke and the others swam over. “Damned thing probably came off the roof during an earthquake.”
“Time for more Big Bang Theory?” Ryan said.
Hawke raised his hand and gave him the thumbs up sign. “I’ll set the charge at the end of this gap between the slab and the mosaic. Should be enough to make a hole big enough for us to dive down.”
He pulled the explosives from his bag and started to fix them into place.
“Wait,” Lexi said through the comms. “Is that little fucker NG?”
“Of course.”
“What’s the problem?” Ryan asked.
Hawke replied as he worked. “NG, or nitroglycerine is best for this job. The other option is an ammonium nitrate explosive, but that needs a contact primer.” He set up a NONEL, non-electric detonator and made some final checks. “Nitro is less stable but cheaper. We’re on a budget after all.”
“We have a private jet,” Scarlet said.
“What are you?” Hawke finished setting the underwater explosives and looked up at her. “My accountant?”
“You couldn’t afford me, darling.”
He looked at her eyes hidden behind the gloom of her mask. “Shall we detonate?”
“You always know how to turn me on.”
They shared a look and then swam back outside the temple with the others in their wake. Safely tucked down behind the wall of a house opposite the temple, Hawke pushed his thumb down on the trigger and activated the explosives. The explosion was muted by the water pressure, but the shockwaves were still powerful enough to blow them back away from the house and onto the street.
Hawke was first to his feet and saw the cloud of sediment forming around the temple as dead fish floated up to the surface. “I’d say that was a job well done.”
“Fish killer,” Lea said, yanking on his arm.
They swam inside the temple again and soon found the bull mural. The explosives had done the job and cleared an enormous hole in the floor. They dived inside and swam along a wide, natural tunnel which ended when they surfaced in an underwater lake.
Hawke scanned the area and then pulled his mask off. The others joined him and after swimming to the shore they crawled out of the water. Standing in the cavern, they took off their fins, tanks and diving masks and checked their weapons. When they fired up some glow sticks they soon realized they were standing in not just a cave but another manmade temple.
Kim gasped. “What now?”
“We follow this tunnel, I guess,” Lea said.
They walked down into the tunnel and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Lea saw a marble column plinth supporting an impressive statue. “Wow.”
“Minoan snake goddess,” Ryan said casually.
Ahead of them a stone ramp descended into a lower level. Statues of unknown gods lined the sides of the tunnel, each one a little more obscured by the darkness of the caves. On the far wall was an enormous arch carved into the stone. At the bottom of it, on an elaborately carved stone table, was a beautiful shrine supporting three life-size statues. Just to the left of the shrine was a deep chasm filled with black water. Hawke shone a light down at the surface and winced.
“They’re gods,” Ryan said without hesitation. “Brahma, Pangu and Ra.”
“Brahma, who and Ra?” Hawke said.
When Ryan looked at him, he shrugged. “Well, I’ve heard of two of them!”
“Thank heaven for small mercies,” Ryan muttered. “Brahma was the Hindu creator god, their head deity. The same distinction applies to Pangu who was the creator deity in Chinese mythology and Ra for ancient Egypt.”
“And their statues are in a sunken city off the coast of Greece… why?” Reaper asked.
“It’s all connected to my parent culture hypothesis,” Ryan said. “And if King Alexander was right there should be…”
“Too late,” Lea said with a wink. “I saw them first… the idols!” She stepped closer to get a better look.
“And not just any idols,” a voice in the darkness said. “But the final idols.”
Lea felt her skin crawl as she turned slowly in the gloom and took in the Oracle’s withered, ashen face.
“And your final destination,” he said, lifting a speargun and aiming it directly at Lea.
With a depraved smile on his face he squeezed his thumb on the trigger and fired the weapon. The spear burst from the gun and darted across the small space before anyone could react.
“No!” Hawke yelled and dived in front of her, pushing her roughly to the floor and out of the way, but the triple-pronged spear head buried itself into his leg. He screamed out in pain and staggered back over the edge of the chasm.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
He tumbled down into the void with the harpoon buried deep in his leg. Crashing through the surface of the black water, he started to sink deeper. The pain was electric, radiating out from the wound over his entire body. He screamed in the darkness and lashed out with his hands, desperately fumbling for something to hang onto and stop his descent.
The slit of light created above him by the lamps in the temple was rapidly growing smaller as he sank faster in the underwater chasm. He checked his depth gauge and realized he was speedily approaching his maximum limit.
An experienced diver from his former life with the Special Boat Service, he knew the extreme dangers of diving too deep. As the inert gases built up in his tissues he could expect disorientation, tremors, exhaustion… Now, the icy water started to cause a serious cramp in his legs. If he didn’t act fast it would be too late and he would die down here.
Glancing down he saw no end to the chasm. It was entirely possible that this hole was hundreds more meters deep. Waiting to hit the bottom was suicidal. He grabbed the harpoon in his leg and wrenched it out with all his strength. Only he heard his screams as the steel endblade ripped out of his thigh muscle and finally came free. A cloud of blood burst into the water behind the endblade’s exit and twisted up above him in scarlet tendrils.
He grabbed the harpoon with both hands and held it above his head. As he brought it level it jammed up against the two sides of the narrow chasm’s walls and acted like a bar fixed into place in the tunnel. He jerked to a sudden stop and found himself hanging like a marionette from the harpoon’s main shaft. His plan had worked, but now he had to swim to the surface with a badly wounded leg.
His head started to swim around in the darkness. Disorientation, just as he had expected. He glanced at the depth gauge on his forearm but the glass face was smashed and it was broken. He must have belted it against one of the chasm walls as he plunged down through the depths. He cursed and craned his neck up. The slit of light was still visible – just, but was almost razor thin. He guessed he had fallen several hundred feet before he was able to extract the spear.
He was running out of air as well. Another curse. He pulled himself up over the spear and started swimming back up to the chasm’s black surface. Lea was still up there, with the rest of his team
– and all at the mercy of the Oracle. He hadn’t come this far to let him win now. He had to get back to the others and stop that bastard getting his hands on the idols. Praying his friends were still alive, he forced his arms through the black water and powered himself to the surface.
The gaping wound in his leg slowed down his usual lightning pace and when he reached the top and broke through the surface he was surprised to find the chamber totally empty. He was less surprised to see the idols were all gone, too. Gripping the ground around the top of the chasm, he dragged himself up out of the water, screaming with pain when the wound on his leg scraped against the rocks around the edge.
“Dammit all!”
He blew out a breath as the blood pumped out of the deep cut and spilled out onto the sandy dirt on the chamber’s floor. He was feeling a little light-headed as he tried to calculate how much blood he had lost. Pulling his torn wetsuit away from the wound, he immediately saw the three deep gouge marks made by the Oracle’s triple-pronged spear head and the mess they had made when he had ripped them out of his leg. He thanked God the blades hadn’t gone too deep and tore strips of rubber off his suit to use as a tourniquet.
Staggering to his feet, he walked carefully along the tunnel until he found the rest of his team. He saw a minisub on the surface of the lake they had entered the cave by, and realized from its size they could easily have used the hole they’d blown in the temple floor to navigate here.
He heard a scream and turned to see his team were fighting the Athanatoi divers. Lea knocked one of them out with the stock of her speargun and turned to see him limping along the tunnel.
“Oh shit!” she ran to him and looked at his leg.
“It’s worse than it looks.”
“Fuck that. Get over here out of sight.” She grabbed her Scuba dry bag. Reaching inside for a bandage, she hurriedly cleaned and dressed the wound on his leg. “You absolute bloody eejit, Josiah.”
“Eh?”
“You could have killed yourself, you damned fool!”
“Eeejit? Damned fool? I thought I saved your life?”
She finished securing the bandage and looked deep into his eyes. “I know.”
“We have to get back to the fight,” he said. “They need us.”
“You can’t be serious? With a leg wound like that?”
“I already told you it’s not….”
The explosion knocked them both off their feet and sent then crashing backwards into the sand. When they sat back up, Hawke rubbed his head. “What the buggering hell was that?”
“Oh no!” Lea cried out. “They’re firing grenade launchers at them!”
Before he could say anything, she ran forward to help her friends. He tried to follow, but collapsed down on one knee, screaming in pain at the bloody wound in his thigh.
A deep rumble boomed inside the underwater cavern as a section of one of the pillars broke away and crashed down on a frescoed wall. It smashed through the ancient tilework and almost crushed him. He dived out of the way and landed in a pile of rubble.
When he finally clambered to his feet he could barely believe what he was seeing. The Oracle and Blankov were climbing inside the top hatch of the submersible while the Athanatoi were firing on his team with grenade launchers. Kruger and Venter had taken Devlin and Lea hostage and were forcing them inside the minisub behind the Oracle.
“Lea!”
But she never heard and now he watched as the rest of the team sprinted for cover in every direction to avoid the grenades blowing up all over the chamber, blasting car-size chunks of roofing plaster and rock all over their heads.
“Bastards!” he yelled, struggling forward to help.
Scarlet fired on the sub while Lexi dragged a woozy Ryan away from more rubble and chaos, but they were submerged in seconds. Nothing was left except some bubbles on the surface.
Hawke ran over to them. “We can’t let them get away! They’ve got Lea and Danny!”
They hurriedly got into their diving gear and grabbed the spearguns.
“This is it,” Hawke said. “It’s now or never!”
*
Venter grabbed the controls and increased power to the machine’s propulsion system. The mighty combat submersible lurched forward, spewing a trail of bubbles in its wake as it widened the distance between them and the pursuing ECHO team.
They had turned just under the lake’s surface and were now making good progress along the tunnel leading back to the temple. Lea and Devlin were gagged and bound and pushed up against the rear bulkhead wall, staring at the muzzle of Blankov’s submachine gun.
Requiring two operators, one of Venter’s men was sitting at the navigator panel while his boss steered the sub through the hole in the temple floor and out into the streets of Pavlopetri. “We’re almost beneath the Anapos. We need to surface.”
They heard a banging sound on the hull. Clunk clunk clunk.
The Oracle started wheezing and needed to grip the control consul to regain his balance. “Dammit! That’s Hawke! Do something, Blankov!”
Blankov never hesitated, immediately ordering the sub to speed up and turn in an arc. “If they want to play games, then we’ll play games.”
“We have the idols!” Kruger yapped. “Why not forget about them? We’re so close to getting what we want! We can afford to leave them behind and kill them later whenever we desire!”
“Kill them,” the Oracle croaked. “Kill them all.”
“Venter!” Blankov said. “Operate the claws.”
Venter looked over at Kruger for his orders. The South African arms dealer immediately backed down and told him to sit at the claws’ control panel. Venter followed his orders and seated himself in the small area at the front of the sub. Taking a joystick in each hand, the enormous metal claws at the front of the sub responded immediately, swivelling around and grabbing at the warm water.
“There’s one of them!” Blankov yelled. “The Chinese woman!”
The Oracle smiled. “Crush her.”
Almost on them now, Venter activated the grappling claws and extended them toward Lexi’s legs. “We must get closer!” he snapped at Venter.
“I’m at full power.”
The claws grabbed hold of Lexi’s right fin. She was trapped, kicking out in the water. She turned and tried to take the fin off. Kruger laughed and Venter brought the other claw around and snapped at her head. Watching her struggling to save herself underwater raised a good laugh inside the sub.
Lea and Devlin watched in silent horror, their rage muted by the gags in their mouths.
“We’re coming up to the Anapos.”
“Radio the captain and have him destroy their boat.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lexi managed to free her foot from the fin and kick herself clear as the other claw scratched down her back and cut a groove in her suit. A plume of blood burst out in the water as she kicked herself away from the sub. Some of the others were in view now, Ryan, Reaper and Scarlet. The Oracle decided the clanging noise was Hawke trying to break in through the top hatch.
They watched the torpedo tube at the front of the yacht’s starboard side open. “Good, they’re firing.”
The torpedo launched from the tube and raced at the head of a jet of bubbles toward the ECHO team’s trawler. The impact of brand-new torpedo technology on a fifty-year-old trawler was predictable and the explosion lifted the forty-ton trawler partly out of the water before blasting its iron hull all over the bay in thousands of scorched, twisted pieces.
“Return to the Anapos,” the Oracle ordered. “Their boat is destroyed and there’s no way they can follow us, or rescue you.” He looked at the prisoners, wrapped in rope and duct tape and dumped on the floor behind the control consul. “We have what I want. We have the codex and seven of the eight idols. Something tells me getting the final idol from ECHO won’t be too hard now we have something to barter.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The exploding trawler had blasted the
ECHO back through the water away from the sub and spiralling down toward the ocean floor. Hawke got it together first. Spinning around he gave the signal for everyone to get to the Anapos as fast as they could.
The sub was already at the stern, being hoisted out of the water by the davit crane and they all knew when the Oracle gave the order to move out they would be impossible to catch.
Reaper reached the yacht first, climbing up one of the many deck ladders and hauling himself on board. Scarlet and Lexi were next followed by Ryan. Camacho and Kim were next with Hawke and his wounded leg at the rear.
Hawke crawled on the deck, the pain coursing from his leg wound. Scarlet and Kim helped pull the wounded man up. “How are things up here?”
Scarlet said, “Apart from a handful of Athanatoi it’s mostly a skeleton crew of not very well-trained oilers and wipers and a few stewards.”
“Shouldn’t take too long then,” Hawke said. “And this time, can we please not let Kruger and the Oracle get away?”
Scarlet and Lexi ran up the steel steps and were soon heavily engaged in action on the promenade deck and Ryan was making progress on the portside of the same level. Camacho and Reaper had fought their way up the portside steps and were now pinned down on the navigation deck directly above Hawke’s position.
He sprinted over the deck and shot his way up the starboard steps until he was also on the navigation deck but on the opposite side of the ship to Camacho and Reaper. His idea was to work with them to create two fronts pushing toward the bridge, but things changed fast when a grenade landed a few meters in front of him and instantly exploded, blasting him clean off the side of the yacht.
He flew through the air, struggling not to pass out. Realizing the awkward angle he was about hit the sea at, he tried to swivel around in mid-air but it was too late. The navigation deck wasn’t high enough for him to make the manoeuvre and now he hit the ocean’s surface hard and heavy. It felt like he’d landed on concrete as he sank down beneath the waves once again, desperately clinging onto his consciousness.
