Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  Raine looked at King through the darkness. “I guess,” he said cautiously.

  “It makes perfect sense!” King said triumphantly.

  “It does?” Raine wasn’t so sure.

  “Yes. The Monument lies at 24 degrees, 27 minutes north, one degree north of the Tropic of Cancer. I’m no astronomer but I do know that the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn lie so many degrees to either side of the equator.”

  “23 degrees, 27 minutes north and south, respectively.”

  King’s jaw hung open as he stared at his friend. “How do you know that?”

  “Can’t rely on GPS all the time, Benny,” Raine replied. “It’s important to navigate by the stars, and to navigate by them you’ve got to understand their movements in relation to the earth. The tropics,” he explained, picking up on the archaeologist’s train of thought, “exist because the earth doesn’t spin vertically on its axis. It currently spins at an angle of 23 degrees, 27 minutes. What’s called the ‘obliquity of the ecliptic’ governs the extreme northern and southern position of the sun as it rises along the horizon in the course of the year. When it’s at its northern most declination, summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, the sun is perfectly vertical over the Tropic of Cancer, and casts no shadow. Swap it around and on the winter solstice, the same happens above the Tropic of Capricorn.”

  “So, one degree north of the Tropic of Cancer, here, on the summer solstice,” King realised, “the sun would be standing almost directly overhead.”

  “Now? Yes, almost directly overhead. But I can do better than that, Benny,” Raine replied smugly, pleased to be teaching King something for a change. “The earth’s obliquity changes minutely all the time- roughly forty seconds of arc every century. So, while today, the Monument is one degree north of the tropic, it wouldn’t have always been so. The Tropics move! The maximum possible obliquity is 24 degrees, 30 minutes and the last time that was reached was about nine and a half thousand years ago. So, the Monument stands at 24 degrees, 27 minutes, three minutes less than the maximum, yeah? So, go from nine and a half thousand years ago, wind the clock forward by roughly three minutes of arc at a rate of 40 seconds of arc a century, gives you about an extra four hundred and fifty or so years.”

  “So what are you saying?” King asked, confused.

  “It’s annoying when someone who knows more than you spouts off for half an hour, isn’t it?”

  “Nate,” King warned.

  “I’m saying that, roughly nine thousand years ago, this place would have been sat right smack bang on the Tropic of Cancer, and that at midday on the Summer Solstice, the sun would have shone directly down on this building.”

  “Through the three ‘sun-shafts’,” King added.

  “The light would have been intense, and funnelled through three little holes it would have been focussed on the corresponding points on the ground.”

  “And if I’m right, that light would have been conducted throughout this chamber, illuminating the metal far more brightly than it is now. Nate, this is incredible!”

  “Raine, King, have you found that goddamn mask yet?” Gibbs’ voice suddenly cut into their excitement. King had been so caught up in the discovery that he’d forgotten about the objective.

  “We’re working on it,” Raine lied.

  “Well, you might want to work faster, ‘cause you’ve got company. We tried to stop them but there’s just too damn many.”

  Raine and King both felt a sense of dread overwhelm them. Raine pulled a light stick from his vest, broke it so that the chemicals mixed and then threw it into the centre of the chamber.

  Like the rays of god bursting forth from heaven, the light illuminated the entire temple, muting out the red glow and highlighting dozens, if not hundreds, of intricately carved columns.

  Unfortunately, it also highlighted the silhouettes of dozens of hammerhead sharks as they swam down the access shaft into the newly exposed temple.

  “Nate!” King shouted

  Raine spun.

  And came face to face with death!

  Sid walked unsteadily down the grimy corridor, carrying the tube of antiseptic cream she had retrieved from the SOG team’s gear. The ocean swell was getting stronger and she felt the deck heaving from left to right. Her head felt a little fuzzy and a wave of nausea passed through her belly and up her throat. She held it back, ducked beneath a low hanging pipe which crossed the metal passageway from one side to the other, and opened the door to the room in which she had left Nadia minutes before.

  “Oh my god,” she gasped. “Nadia?!”

  The room was a mess. The bed had been upturned, the cupboards emptied and strewn across the deck. The soldiers had stashed some of their gear here and that too had been thrown haphazardly about the place. But, most disturbingly, a streak of crimson blood was smeared across the window.

  That was when she heard the tell-tale whump, whump, whump of a helicopter’s blades cutting through the air above the deck.

  Her heart skipped a beat. They had Nadia!

  She turned and dashed back out into the corridor. “Nadia!” she cried out and raced down the passageway. Her heart thudded in her ears, drowning out the chopper’s propellers and her own pounding footsteps-

  She skidded to a halt beside another open door.

  The ‘safe’.

  The padlocks had been smashed but then she noticed that the door’s actual lock was undamaged. A key protruded from it. It was what the invaders had been searching for in the SOG team’s gear, she realised. And Nadia must have gotten in their way.

  On the table in the middle of the room, where once there had been two cases, one holding the real Moon Mask and one containing the fake, there was now only one.

  They had the mask!

  She spun again and bounded up the steps to the main deck and burst out through the doors, stepping onto the metal. Her feet slipped out from under her and she slammed down hard. The wind exploded from her lungs, preventing her from screaming as she looked into the lifeless eyes of Murray. The top of his head had been blown clean off, splattering brains and gore across the deck. It was his blood upon which she had slipped.

  Ten feet away lay another body. For an instant she feared it was Nadia but then realised it was the marine Gibbs had ordered to remain on board as cover.

  But, it was who was crouched next to the bloodied body and pulling on a harness lowered from the hovering helicopter that caught her attention.

  “No.”

  The shark lunged at Raine’s head, jaws agape, teeth bared.

  He spun on reflex and slammed his fist into the nightmarish creature’s nose. Despite the resistance of the water, the blow was powerful and the hammerhead whipped around and raced away.

  But there were more.

  Many more.

  And they were coming right for him.

  “Benny, get the goddamn mask!” he practically screamed at his partner as he un-holstered the underwater rifle he had been issued.

  King spun around in an urgent three-sixty pirouette, taking in the scene unfolding around him. More and more sharks poured into the temple from the opening above and slinked their way through the jungle of columns, all of them homing in on Raine.

  Had he been injured? Tank had warned them that hammerheads only usually attacked humans when they were attracted to their blood, but he could see no cut on Raine’s body.

  He didn’t have time to consider that any further. Lit by Raine’s light stick, the entire temple was now exposed in all its magnificent glory. To the far side was what looked like a tunnel descending into the bedrock itself, possibly the original entrance which he guess led to some other area of the Monument or the surrounding structures. But to the other side, raised from the floor on a plinth, stood an altar, carved from the red metal core of the meteorite and similarly covered in pictographs and glyphs.

  He twisted his body and, like Icarus descending to earth, he kick
ed his way quickly down to the altar.

  A face in the gloom!

  Not just a face, but a mask.

  Worked into an intricately carved façade which had been fashioned around it, the missing piece of the Moon Mask gazed back at him.

  A hand reaching out to him!

  He stretched out his arm and grasped the mask.

  Sunlight pierced the temple, blazing down through holes in the ceiling!

  The shafts of light grew narrower, refining to a single laser-like beam until that too was gone.

  Darkness.

  Such utter darkness.

  Then noise.

  The roaring of a beast that could never be stopped.

  It echoed all around, it pounded against the temple walls, it began to break through.

  Then he saw it.

  Such a hideous creature. Terrifying and all consuming.

  It charged at him, gallons of it bursting through the tunnel at the far end. The defences had been breached. Even from the sealed wells above, geysers of seawater poured into the temple as the ocean rose up to swallow the land.

  Just as the High Priest had known it would.

  Just as the mask had shown him.

  “Nate, I’ve got the mask!” he shouted into his radio. He spun around to see Raine fighting a pitched battle with dozens of hammerhead sharks. They were relentless, driven into a frenzy, hunger and instinct overtaking them.

  Raine had backed up to one of the pillars so that none of the sharks could sneak up on him. He fired his submersible rifle and the hydrodynamic bullet slammed into the skull of one of his attackers. Blood clouded around it and instantly attracted the attention of the attacking sharks who tore into their dead brethren, snapping at one another. Chunks of flesh were torn apart, bones stripped bare in moments as the grotesque image of dozens of hammerheads battled with one another to get in on the feast.

  Raine pushed away from the pillar and sank towards King even as King ascended towards him.

  “Behind you!” King called.

  Like Superman flying through the heavens, Raine used his own weightlessness to pirouette onto his back and face the charging shark. He fired again but this time was shot wasn’t true. The bullet grazed the beast’s flank but did not stop it. Instead, Raine turned his rifle into a club and swung it at the shark’s head, smacking it once, twice, then a third time. It finally surrendered its attack and powered away but more kept on coming towards him.

  “Why the hell do they want to eat me?” Raine demanded of no-one in particular. “I’m sure you’re just as tasty!”

  From below the soldier, looking up at his back, King found the answer.

  “This is why,” he said and wrenched a bloodied glove out from where it had been stashed under Raine’s buoyancy vest.

  Their eyes locked in dreadful realisation and they both uttered the same name.

  “Nadia?”

  Sid looked across the deck at her friend as she strapped herself into the harness lowered from the waiting helicopter. In one hand she carried the metal case containing the Moon Mask. In the other was a gun.

  She aimed it at Sid’s chest.

  “Nadia?” she stammered, feeling a tremble of fear blend with the heat of fury. “Why?”

  “I am sorry Sid,” the Russian said. Sid picked up on the twinge of genuine sadness and regret in her voice but it only made her even angrier. She noticed Murray’s handgun lying in a pool of blood only a foot away.

  Nadia pulled the final strap of her harness over her shoulders and fastened it over her bosom. The thunder of the helicopter’s rotors drowned out all other noises and whipped the women’s hair around their faces.

  “I won’t let you take the mask!” Sid warned.

  Nadia’s eyes flicked to the gun on the deck. “Don’t do anything stupid, Sid. You’re my friend. I don’t want to hurt you.” She gestured to the winch man above and her feet lifted up from the deck. She swung in her harness, temporarily taking her eyes off of Sid.

  “You’re not my friend!” Sid launched herself at the gun, rolled through Murray’s blood, grasped the angular metal, twisted and aimed at Nadia. She squeezed the trigger!

  The blast was deafening.

  The pain was excruciating.

  “Sid!” King exclaimed, realising the danger she was in.

  Nadia had betrayed them and, if she had set Raine up like this, then it meant she was making her move now.

  He kicked his legs hard and swam upwards quickly, straight towards the hole. Below him, Raine discarded the glove, throwing it into the fray of sharks. The scent of Nadia’s blood which had pulled them like a zipper through water towards him now redirected their attention away from them and Raine finned after King.

  “Gibbs, get to the surface! Nadia’s taking the mask!” he warned.

  King burst out through the hole and physically shouldered into a shark that had been about to enter it. Dazed, it swam away but it did not slow him down. He raced up past the stunned SOG team who hastily began their own emergency ascent. Raine shot out behind him, powerful legs kicking, and they broke the surface together, just in time to see the feminine shape disappear into the side door of a helicopter.

  Raine pulled his pistol out and fired twice at the behemoth machine but it was no use. The hydrodynamic bullets weren’t designed to fly through air and even if they were, they wouldn’t have made a dent in the aircraft.

  Tilting its nose, the pitch of its rotors changed and it thundered away over the island of Yonaguni and dropped out of sight.

  “Shit!” Gibbs swore as he surfaced.

  King was already powering himself towards the lifeless boat. He hit the aft sea steps, ripped the fins from his feet, the mask from his face, and pulled himself out of the water.

  “Sid!” he screamed.

  Raine followed seconds behind. “Oh god,” he whispered.

  King flew across the deck to where Sid lay in a pool of blood. He threw the retrieved mask aside and slid onto the deck beside her, lifting her head. Her chest was a bloody mess, her clothes drenched. Her breathing was laboured and her eyes held such terror.

  “Help me!” King bellowed. Raine was already there, pressing a hand against the woman’s gunshot wound. The bullet had hit her in the centre of the chest and despite knowing how futile it was, he applied pressure.

  “Get the med kit,” he yelled to Lake who ran past and disappeared below decks.

  “Hold on,” King told her. He stroked hair from her face and looked into her eyes.

  “I’m . . . scared.” Her voice was a weak gurgle. Tears rolled down her face.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said, his voice soft. He forced it not to crack. “It’s going to be okay. You hear me? You’re gonna be fine.”

  Crouched beside the lovers, Raine glanced up at Gibbs who paced the deck furiously, cursing over the loss of the mask. He caught O’Rourke’s eye.

  “I’m sorry,” King whispered to Sid. “This is all my fault. I should have listened to you. I should have quit while-”

  “No,” she cut him off. He had to lean down to hear her. “You had to see this through to the end,” she said. “That’s who you are. And that’s why . . .” she arched her back and cried in pain.

  “Where’s that goddamn medical kit?” King demanded.

  “That’s why I love you,” she whimpered and then, just as though someone had dimmed the lights, Benjamin King watched as the life faded from her eyes until all that stared up at him were two lifeless orbs.

  “No,” he choked. He felt as though he was going to vomit.

  “Benny,” Raine said gently, placing a hand on his shoulder. Tears rolled in his eyes too.

  “No!” King shrugged him off, placed Sid on the deck and then climbed on top of her. He began pressing her chest, pumping it desperately. How many movies had he seen someone be pulled back from the brink like this?

  “Ben,” Raine said.

  “Come on!” h
e pleaded with Sid’s lifeless body. Tears streaked his face and his breath was ragged.

  Lake erupted upon to the deck but she did not carry a med kit. She carried one of the metal cases for the mask.

  “Where’s the medical kit?!” King screamed at her.

  She ignored him, walked up to Gibbs and opened the case.

  Despite his concern for his friend, Raine watched the interaction. Gibbs began to laugh. It started as a chuckle then erupted into a belly-laugh. All eyes except King’s turned to him at the inappropriateness of his amusement.

  “She took the wrong case,” he chuckled. “The stupid bitch took the fake mask!”

  “Fuck the mask!” King bellowed at him. “Help me! Help her! Get the medical kit.”

  “Ben,” Raine said more firmly. “Ben.” He grasped the other man’s shoulder and pulled him around. “They’re not bringing the medical kit.”

  “We can still save her!”

  Raine’s eyes locked onto Gibbs’ own. A knowing smile twisted the other man’s ugly features.

  “They don’t want to save her,” he said.

  This brought King up short. He frowned at Raine, trying to clear his head.

  As if on cue, the CIA team all raised their semi-automatic P-90s. Tank and the other marine, Aiko, were pushed over to Raine as he helped King to his feet. The four of them stood near the rear of the boat, an execution squad lined up before them.

  “What’s going on?” Tank demanded.

  “Just following orders,” Gibbs replied.

  “I don’t understand,” King stammered. “There’s still a piece of the mask to find-”

  “They’ve had the other piece all along,” Raine cut him off. He glanced at O’Rourke with a disappointed frown. “Rudy? You knew all along?”

  O’Rourke wouldn’t meet his gaze. “I’m sorry Boss,” he muttered.