Map of Bones: A Sigma Force Novel

by James Rollins

  The lost tomb of Alexander the Great.

  That’s what they had come to find out.

  Behind her, the others were gathered over the pile of scuba gear, checking tanks, regulators, and weight belts.

  “Do we really need all this gear?” Gray asked. He picked up a full-face mask. “Thick dry suits and all this special head gear?”

  “You’ll need it all,” Vigor said. Her uncle was an experienced diver. Being an archaeologist in the Mediterranean, there was no way not to be. Many of the region’s most exciting discoveries were found underwater, including here in Alexandria, where the lost palace of Cleopatra had recently been discovered, sunk under the waves of this same bay.

  But there was a reason these underwater treasures had remained hidden for so long.

  Her uncle explained. “The pollution here in the East Harbor, coupled with the sewage, has made these waters dangerous to explore without proper protection. The Egyptian tourist board has floated concepts for opening a marine archaeological park here, serviced by glass-bottomed boats. Some unscrupulous tour operators already offer dive trips. But exposure to heavy-metal toxins and the risk of typhoid is real for those entering the water.”

  “Great,” Monk said. He already looked a tad green around the gills. He clutched the starboard rail, teeth clenched. He kept his head a bit over the side, like a dog hanging his head out a window. “If I don’t drown, I’ll end up catching some flesh-melting disease. You know, there’s a reason I joined the Army Special Forces versus the Navy or Air Force. Solid ground.”

  “You could stay on the boat,” Kat said.

  Monk scowled at her.

  If they were going to find some underwater tunnel leading to a secret treasure chamber under the fort, they would need everybody. They were all certified divers. They would search in shifts, rotating one person out to rest and guard both boat and gear.

  Monk had insisted on the first shift.

  Rachel sped their boat along the eastern edge of the spit of land. Ahead, the citadel of Qait Bey grew in size, filling the horizon. It hadn’t looked so massive from the pier. It would be a daunting task to explore the depths surrounding the fort.

  A worry began to nag her. It had been her idea to attempt this search. What if she was wrong? Maybe she had missed a clue pointing somewhere else.

  She slowed the boat, nervous energy growing.

  They had mapped out the regions into quadrants for a systematic exploration of the bay around the fort. She throttled down, approaching the first dive spot.

  Gray stepped next to her. He rested one hand on the seatback. His fingertips brushed her shoulder. “This is quadrant A.”

  She nodded. “I’ll drop anchor here and raise the orange flag warning of divers in the water.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked, leaning down.

  “I just hope this isn’t a wild-goose chase, as you Americans say.”

  He smiled, determination warming into reassurance. “You gave us a start. It was more than we had going into the matter. And I’d rather be chasing wild geese, as we Americans say, than doing nothing.”

  Without realizing it, she shifted her shoulder so it pressed against his hand. He didn’t pull away.

  “It’s a good plan,” he said, his voice softer.

  She nodded, at a loss for words, and glanced away from those damn eyes of his. She cut the engine and thumbed the release for the anchor. She felt the shudder under her seat as the chained rope dropped.

  Gray turned to the others. “Let’s suit up. We’ll drop here, check our marine radios, then begin the search.”

  Rachel noted that he kept his hand at her shoulder.

  It felt good there.

  10:14 A.M.

  GRAY FELL backward into the sea.

  Water swamped over him. Not an inch of skin was exposed to the potential pollution and sewage. The seams of the full-body suit were double-taped and double-sewed. The neck and wrist seals were heavy-duty latex. Even his AGA mask completely covered his face, sealing the Viking hood over his head. The regulator was built into its faceplate, freeing his mouth.

  Gray found the spread of peripheral vision through the mask worth the extra time it took to suit up, especially since visibility was poor here in the harbor. Silt and sediment clouded the view to a range of ten to fifteen feet.

  Not bad. It could be worse.

  His BC buoyancy vest bobbed him back to the surface, full of air, compensating for the weight belt. He watched Rachel and Vigor drop into the sea on the other side of the boat. Kat was already in the water on his side.

  He tried the radio, a Buddy Phone, ultrasonically transmitting on an upper single sideband. “Can everyone hear me?” he asked. “Check in.”

  He got positive responses all around, even from Monk, who was taking up the first guard shift on the boat. Monk also had an Aqua-Vu marine infrared video system to monitor the group below.

  “We’ll drop to the bottom here and sweep toward shore in a wide spread. Everyone knows their positions.”

  Affirmatives answered.

  “Down we go,” he said.

  He vented the air in his BC vest and lowered into the water, dragged down by his weight vest. This was the point where many novice divers experienced a panicked claustrophobia. Gray never had. Instead, he felt the opposite, a total freedom. He was weightless, flying, capable of all sorts of aerial acrobatics.

  He spotted Rachel dropping on the opposite side of the boat. She was easy to spot by the broad red stripe across the chest of her black suit. They each had a different color for ease of identification. His was blue, Kat’s pink, Vigor’s green. Monk had already climbed into his suit, too, ready for his shift. His stripe was yellow, somehow fitting considering his attitude toward diving.

  Gray watched Rachel. Like him, she seemed to enjoy the freedom below the waves. She twisted and flew, spiraling down with a minimal flicker of fins. He took a moment to enjoy the curves of her form, then concentrated on his own descent.

  The sandy bottom rose up, cluttered with debris.

  Gray adjusted his buoyancy to keep him drifting just above the seabed. He searched right and left. The others settled into similar postures.

  “Can everyone see each other?” he asked.

  Nods and affirmatives all around.

  “Monk, how’s the underwater video camera working?”

  “You look like a bunch of ghosts. Visibility is crap. I’ll lose you once you head out.”

  “Keep in radio contact. Any problems, you raise the alarm and haul ass over to us.” Gray was pretty confident that they had the jump on the Dragon Court, but he was not taking any chances with Raoul. He didn’t know how much of a head start they had gained. But there were plenty of other boats about. It was broad daylight.

  Still, they needed to act quickly.

  Gray pointed an arm. “Okay, we’ll head to shore, keep no greater distance than fifteen feet apart. Visual contact with each other at all times.”

  The four of them could sweep a swath of about twenty-five yards across. Once at shore, if nothing was detected, they would shift down the coastline another twenty-five yards and swim back toward the waiting boat. Back and forth, quadrant by quadrant, they would comb the entire coastline around the fort.

  Gray set out. He had a dive knife attached to a sheath on the back of his wrist and a flashlight on the other. With the sun directly overhead and the water only forty feet deep, there was no need for the extra illumination, but it would come in handy to explore nooks and crannies. He had no doubt that the passage they sought would not be plain or it would have already been discovered.

  It was another riddle to solve.

  As he swam, he pondered what they had missed. There must have been more of a clue to the map drawn on the stone than merely pointing to Alexandria. It must have also held some clue embedded about the location here. Had they missed something? Had Raoul stolen a clue out of the cave below Saint Peter’s tomb? Did the Dragon Court already have the
answer?

  Unconsciously he had begun to swim faster. He lost sight of Kat on his right. He was last in line on this side. He slowed and she reappeared. Satisfied, he moved onward. A shape appeared ahead, jutting from the sandy bottom. A rock? A ridge of reef?

  He kicked forward.

  Out of the silty gloom, it appeared.

  What the hell…?

  The stone face stared back at him, human, worn by the sea and time, but its features were surprisingly clear, the expression stoic. Its upper torso rode atop the squat form of a lion.

  Kat had noted his attention and swept slightly closer. “A sphinx?”

  “Another one over here,” Vigor announced. “Broken, on its side. Divers have reported dozens of them littered around the seabed in the shadow of the fort. Some of the decorations from the original lighthouse.”

  Despite the urgency, Gray stared at the statue, amazed. He studied the face, sculpted by hands two thousand years old. He reached one arm out and touched it, sensing the immense breadth of time between himself and that sculptor.

  Vigor spoke out of nowhere. “Fitting that these masters of riddles should be guarding this mystery.”

  Gray pulled back his hand. “What do you mean?”

  A chuckle. “Don’t you know the story of the Sphinx? The monster terrorized the people of Thebe, eating them if they couldn’t solve its riddle. ‘What has one voice, and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?’”

  “And the answer?” Gray asked.

  “Mankind,” Kat said next to him. “We crawl on all fours as babes, then upright on two feet as adults, and lean upon a staff in old age.”

  Vigor continued. “Oedipus solved the riddle and the Sphinx threw herself off a cliff and died.”

  “Toppling from a height,” Gray said. “Like these sphinxes.”

  He pushed away from the stone statue and swam onward. They had their own riddle to solve. After another ten minutes of silent searching, they reached the rocky coastline. Gray had come across a tumble of giant blocks, but no passage, no opening, no clues.

  “Back again,” he said.

  They shifted down the coast and set out again, swimming away from the shoreline toward the boat.

  “Everything quiet up there, Monk?” Gray asked.

  “Getting a nice suntan.”

  “Make sure you use SPF 30. We’ll be down here a while.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Gray continued for another forty minutes, sweeping to the boat, then back again. He came across a sunken husk of a rusted ship, more chunks of stone blocks, a broken pillar, even an inscribed chunk of obelisk. Fish in a rainbow of hues danced away.

  He checked his air gauge. He was breathing conservatively. He still had half a tank left. “How’s everyone’s air holding up?”

  After comparing, it was decided to go topside in twenty minutes. They’d take a half-hour break, then back into the water.

  As he swam, he went back to his original pondering. He kept sensing they had missed something critical. What if the Dragon Court had taken some object from the cave, a second clue? He kicked harder. He had to let that fear go. He had to proceed as though he had the same intel as the Court, an equal playing field.

  The silence of the deep pressed on him. “This just doesn’t seem right,” he mumbled.

  The radio transmitted his voice.

  “Did you find something?” Kat asked. Her shadowy form drifted closer.

  “No. That’s just it. The longer I’m down here, the more I’m convinced we’re doing this wrong.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel said from out of nowhere, sounding hopeless. “I probably put too much emphasis—”

  “No.” Gray remembered her worry topside. He kicked himself for rekindling it. “Rachel, I think you’ve targeted the correct place to search. The problem is my plan. This whole searching quadrant by quadrant. It just doesn’t feel right.”

  “What do you mean, Commander?” Kat asked. “It may take some time, but we’ll get the area covered.”

  That was just it. Kat had clarified it for him. He wasn’t one for systematic, dogged methodology. While some problems were best solved that way, this mystery wasn’t one of them.

  “We’ve missed a clue,” he said. “I know it. We recognized the map in the tomb, realized it pointed to Alexander’s tomb, then flew here. We searched records, books, and files, trying to solve a riddle that has baffled historians for more than a millennium. Who are we to solve it in one day?”

  “So what do you want us to do?” Kat asked.

  Gray settled to a stop. “We go back to square one. We’ve based our search on historical records available to anyone. The only advantage we have over all the treasure hunters of the past centuries is what was discovered under Saint Peter’s tomb. We missed a clue down there.”

  Or one was stolen, Gray thought. But he did not speak this worry aloud.

  “Maybe we didn’t miss a clue at the tomb,” Vigor said. “Maybe we didn’t look deep enough. Remember the catacombs. The riddles were multilayered, multifathomed. Could there be another layer to this riddle?”

  Silence answered him…until an unexpected voice solved it all.

  “That goddamn fiery star,” Monk swore. “It wasn’t just pointing down at the city of Alexandria…it was pointing down at the stone slab.”

  Gray felt the ring of truth in Monk’s words. They had been so focused on the inscribed map, the fiery star, the implication of it all, but they had ignored the unusual medium of the artist.

  “Hematite,” Kat said.

  “What do you know about it?” Gray asked, trusting her background in geology.

  “It’s an iron oxide. Large deposits have been found throughout Europe. It is mostly iron, but sometimes it contains a fair amount of iridium and titanium.”

  “Iridium?” Rachel said. “Isn’t that one of the elements in the amalgam? In the Magi bones?”

  “Yes,” Kat said, voice suddenly sounding strained over the radio. “But I don’t think that’s the significant part.”

  “What?” Gray asked.

  “I’m sorry, Commander. I should have thought of it. The iron in hematite is often weakly magnetic, not as strongly as magnetite, but it’s sometimes used as a lodestone.”

  Gray realized the implication. Magnetism had also opened the first tomb. “So the star wasn’t just pointing to Alexandria, it was pointing to a magnetized stone, something we’re supposed to find.”

  “And what did the ancient world do with lodestones?” Vigor asked, excitement growing in his voice.

  Gray knew the answer. “They made compasses!” He fed air into his BC vest and rose toward the surface. “Everyone topside!”

  11:10 A.M.

  IN A matter of minutes, they were shedding tanks, vests, and weight belts. Rachel climbed into the pilot’s seat, glad to sit down. She pressed the button to raise the anchor. It chugged upward.

  “Go slow,” Gray said. He had taken up a post at her shoulder.

  “I second that,” Monk said.

  “I’ll watch the compass,” Gray continued. “You keep us on a snail-paced circuit around the fort. Any twitch on the compass needle and we drop anchor and search below.”

  Rachel nodded. She prayed that whatever magnetized stone lay down there, it was strong enough for their shipboard compass to detect.

  With the anchor retracted, she eased the throttle to the barest chop of her propellers. Motion forward was barely detectable.

  “Perfect,” Gray whispered.

  Onward they glided. The sun slowly rose into the sky overhead. They pulled up the boat’s canopy to shade the group as the day’s heat climbed. Monk lay sprawled on the portside bench, slightly snoring. No one spoke.

  Worry grew in Rachel with each slow turn of the boat’s propeller.

  “What if the stone isn’t out here?” she whispered to Gray, who kept a vigil on the compass. “What if it’s inside the fort?”

  “Then we’ll search there next,�
�� Gray said, squinting toward the stone citadel. “But I think you’re right about a secret entrance. The hematite slab sat over a secret tunnel to the cavern that led down to a river channel. Water. Perhaps that’s another layer of the riddle.”

  Kat heard them, a book open on her lap. “Or we’re reading too much into it,” she said. “Trying to force what we want to match the riddle.”

  Up in the bow end, Vigor massaged a sore calf muscle from the swim. “I think the ultimate question of where the stone might lie—on land or in the water—depends on when the alchemists hid the clue. We estimated the clues were hidden sometime around the thirteenth century, maybe a little before or a little after, but that’s the critical era of conflict between Gnosticism and orthodoxy. So, did the alchemists hide their next clue before or after the Pharos Lighthouse collapsed in 1303?”

  No one had an answer.

  But a few minutes later, the compass needle gave a shaky twitch.

  “Hold it!” Gray hissed.

  The needle steadied again. Kat and Vigor glanced to them.

  Gray placed a hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “Go back.”

  Rachel tweaked the throttle into neutral. Forward momentum stopped. She let the waves bob them backward.

  The needle pitched again, swinging a full quarter turn.

  “Drop anchor,” Gray ordered.

  She pressed the release, hardly breathing.

  “Something’s down there,” Gray said.

  Everyone began to move at once, grabbing for fresh tanks.

  Monk woke with a start, sitting up. “What?” he asked blearily.

  “Looks like you’re going on guard duty again,” Gray said. “Unless you want to take a dip?”

  Monk scowled his answer.

  Once the boat was secure and the orange flag raised, the same four divers fell back into the water.

  Rachel bubbled out her buoyancy and sank under the waves.

  Gray’s voice reached her through the radio. “Watch your wrist compasses. Zero in on the anomaly.”

  Rachel studied her compass as she descended. The water was fairly shallow here. Less than ten meters. She reached the sandy bottom quickly. The others dropped around her, hovering like birds.

  “Nothing’s here,” Kat said.