Into the Black

by Sean Ellis

  The packages vanished toward the bottom, leaving concentric ripples that disrupted the reflected star field. "Get ready!"

  Fifteen seconds later, the improvised depth charges erupted silently in close succession. Two enormous bubbles of gas raced upward, heralding a tremendous shock wave. When the bubbles broke the surface, they released not only the smoke and noise of the underwater explosions, but also the destructive force. The trawler pitched back and forth in the center of the detonations.

  The tumult subsided after a moment however, with no injury to any of its occupants. A few seconds later, other shapes broke the surface; dozens of fish, stunned or killed by the explosions. The way to the golden ship was now clear.

  Anatoly dropped another parcel into the water. This package was substantially larger than the homemade depth charges and did not destroy itself in the course of its downward passage. Two magnesium flares tied to the bundle blazed with solar intensity as it spiraled toward the sea floor.

  Irene placed the helmet over Kismet's head and locked it in place. She then lifted the telephone handset they had rigged, and spoke into it. "Can you hear me, Nick?"

  "Loud and clear," was the tinny reply. "I just hope we insulated that cable well enough."

  "Are you ready?"

  "Ready or not, let's go."

  Anatoly joined them. "The equipment is down."

  "Start the compressor."

  As soon as air started flowing into the helmet, Kismet made his way to the stern and lowered himself into the dark waters. This time however, he would not be descending in lonely silence.

  "I'm drifting away from the wreck," he called into his microphone. "There must be a current here."

  Irene stopped the unreeling of the cable, while Anatoly jockeyed the boat's engines to give Kismet a better shot at landing precisely on the site. "That's good," he called. The downward journey resumed, and a few minutes later Kismet was standing once more on the bottom, facing the wreck of the golden ship.

  Its light was brilliant against the ebony expanse above. He could not see the stars, much less the keel of the trawler. The perimeter of sentry fish was gone; the depth charges had removed that barrier to the wreck, but he had no idea how extensive the shockwave had been, or how long it would take for other marine creatures to investigate and replace their decimated ranks. He knew only that time was in critically short supply.

  His greatest concern in utilizing the depth charges had been a fear of smashing the golden ship flat. Not only had the blast left the ship undamaged, at least so far as he could discern, but it had served to scour away several layers of sediment, exposing even more of the vessel's hull.

  He did not immediately approach the wreck. His first task was to locate the equipment package that had preceded him. He saw its flares blazing a hundred yards from the ship, and hustled toward it. "I'm going after the gear," he reported. "I'd say it got caught in the same current that I did. Probably some kind of upwelling from the depths beyond the shelf."

  He was speaking primarily to maintain contact with his friends above. As long as he kept talking, Irene would know that he was in no danger.

  "Everything looks fine up here," she answered. "I think Severin is going to leave us alone tonight."

  "Let me know if anything changes up there." A few minutes later he reached the bundle and quickly cut away the magnesium torches; they had served their purpose. The parcel was wrapped in canvas tarpaulins and tied with ordinary ropes.

  He gripped one of those ropes and commenced dragging the package along the sea floor, toward the golden ship. This labor took several more minutes, and Irene could hear him grunting across the telephone line, though he said nothing until he had accomplished the task.

  After untying the package, he began shuttling the different articles within to various points around the golden ship. When only the canvas tarps remained, he picked these up also, draping them over the decks, both fore and aft.

  "I'm going into the hold now."

  He approached the colonnaded superstructure cautiously, as if expecting the electric torpedo rays to materialize at any moment and assault him, but nothing happened. When he pushed the hatchway open, only a rush of air bubbles greeted him.

  Nearly a third of the enclosure, everything above the level of the sideways doorpost, was clear of water. During the twenty-four hour period since his opening of the Fleece's cask, a great quantity of seawater had been converted into its constituent atomic components. Kismet smiled and backed away from the enclosure, pulling the door shut as he went. So far, everything was going according to plan.

  He spent nearly an hour moving around the wreck, securing the tarpaulins in place with lengths of rope. Doing so required him to dig underneath the hull, which he did using an old entrenching shovel that had come down with the equipment package for just such a purpose. But that was not the strangest article in the bundle. Large eye-hook screws, truck tire inner-tubes, fishing nets cut to resemble enormous hammocks, and pieces of air hose, spliced together like enormous arteries--all of these came out of the bundled tarps, and were secured to the hull of the golden ship. The eye-hooks he screwed directly into the metal and wood, while ropes attached the rest of the items.

  "I think I'm just about done down here. Get ready to bring me up."

  He made a final survey of the wreck, convinced that everything was in place, and then signaled Irene to take him to the first decompression stop. He would make several more stops, using up most of the night in the process of evacuating excess nitrogen from his bloodstream. Finally, at about four a.m. Anatoly and Irene pulled him onto the trawler and helped him out of the diving suit. Irene threw her arms around him before he could wrestle free of the heavy boots, almost knocking him off his feet. He didn't mind.

  "I hope I never have to lay eyes on that thing again," he said, gazing at the helmet. His clothes were damp with sweat, leaving him at the mercy of the night air, but zipping into his heavy leather jacket helped ward off the chill. He carefully dried the kukri and returned its sheath to his waistpack. Then, he ran down his mental checklist, wondering what he had forgotten. He could think of nothing.

  "Let's do it."

  The golden ship on the sea floor was connected to the trawler by two different lines, set in place by Kismet and brought back to the surface. One was a heavy cable, of the same gauge as the one used to lower him into depths. The other line however was hollow and incapable of lifting any weight. It was an air hose—actually it was several short lengths of hose, cannibalized from numerous sources and spliced together. The line from the diving suit was removed from the compressor, and the second, piecemeal line was clamped to the fitting.

  Kismet screwed the regulator valve down several notches before nodding to Anatoly. The big Russian switched on the compressor, and immediately air from the surface began trickling down to the golden ship.

  "How do we know if this is working?" Irene inquired.

  Kismet shrugged. "I don't know. I've never done this before."

  Anatoly raised a sincere eyebrow. "I have difficulty believing there is anything you have not done, Nikolai Kristanovich."

  Kismet laughed. "Thank you, I think."

  He twisted the valve half a turn, and watched the needle on the gauge slowly creep. He let it build for several minutes, and then tightened the valve. The compressor immediately began to bleed off the excess, and he shut it off to avoid wasting fuel. "Anything?"

  Irene stared into the inky depths. The golden light was less visible because of the tarpaulins Kismet had secured over its exposed decks, but she located it without difficulty. "I don't think so."

  "Okay, let's try something else. Anatoly, fire up the engine. We'll give her a little tug."

  As the Russian throttled forward, Kismet switched on the air a second time. Irene continued her vigil at the stern. The trawler glided forward a ways, and then stopped, as if caught on something. The engines roared louder, churning up a spray of foam, but no further movement was evident. />
  "I see bubbles!" Irene squealed.

  Kismet immediately turned off the compressor and yelled for Anatoly to back off the engines. He then joined Irene. Large eruptions were indeed rising from the depths; bubbles of air from the submerged ship. He placed a hand on the cable, stretched tight between the two vessels, and could feel a tremor in the metal. "Something's happening."

  Indeed, the boiling on the surface grew more intense, while the taut cable fell slack. A close examination unquestionably revealed that the source of the golden light was moving, getting closer.

  An enormous bubble broke the surface, and Kismet intuitively guessed that one of the inner-tubes had burst. He had attempted to regulate the airflow to the enormous rubber bladders, trying to fill them only partway, so that the reduction of pressure caused by the ascent would not rupture them, but apparently one of them had failed. Nevertheless, the shape beneath the waves did not recede. The surface continued to churn as the air he had pumped down into the golden ship expanded and overflowed.

  Suddenly, the surface erupted in a foaming mass that dwarfed even the explosive depth charges. A wave lifted the trawler, heaving Kismet and Irene across the deck, where they remained prone until the turbulence calmed. Kismet heard the engines shut down, but did not attempt to rise until Anatoly appeared and beckoned. The big Russian seemed unable to speak; he gazed astern, gesturing weakly for the two of them to look. Kismet got to his feet and went to see what had so amazed the fisherman.

  “I don't believe it," gasped Irene, gazing at the spectacle, which bobbed in their wake. "Nick, you actually did it."

  Kismet was inclined to echo the former sentiment, but instead chose to grin and bask in a moment of pride. Rocking gently in the becalmed waters of the Black Sea, attached to huge, bloated inner-tubes and covered by bulging, inflated canvas tarpaulins, was the golden ship, sailing once more after untold millennia below the waves.

  PART FOUR:

  THE GOLDEN VOYAGE

  FIFTEEN

  Using the winch, they drew the two boats closer together. Kismet leapt over to the deck of the golden ship, tying a second line in place so that trawler was fixed firmly to the galley, which rode slightly higher in the water than Anatoly's trawler. As he turned, surveying the golden ship for the first time under normal circumstances, he was overcome by the knowledge of where he was. Bold adventurers, kindred spirits who lived thousands of years before his birth, had stood aboard this vessel. There was nothing to compare with what he was feeling.

  Science had no real knowledge about the design of ancient, pre-Hellenistic sailing vessels. It was all conjecture, really. Even the seafaring Phoenician culture had not been survived by as much as a single ship. Only a few incomplete wall murals and the words of ancient historians, who had given little thought to the fact that those ships would someday crumble to dust, remained to reveal how the ancients had roamed the seas.

  While it would have been far simpler to just enter the enclosure and grab the Fleece, that would have meant abandoning the galley and all its other secrets to Severin. And since the galley was completely intact and relatively small, raising it in its entirety was only a matter of hard work, not technical know-how. The fact that it now bobbed a few feet away seemed to bear witness to his abilities as an amateur marine salvager.

  The canvas blankets concealed much of the ship from his view, but he immediately began comparing the suppositions of contemporary scholars with what he was seeing. The colonnaded superstructure was inconsistent with theory, but other features were right on the mark. A girdle of ropes, now gilded, encircled the hull like a net. Kismet recalled that the purpose of this arrangement was to add strength to the overall structure, especially when battle conditions required the sailors to ram another vessel.

  The bow of the ship--a galley, and not an early Bronze Age explorer scout as the Argo would have been--rose high above the gangway, even above the roof of the enclosure. Kismet could make out a gilt ladder ascending to the bowsprit and the carved foremast. The latter, an ornate spar that protruded out over the water ahead of the vessel, had been crafted to resemble a woman both delicate and fear-inspiring. Remembering the altar stone he had first viewed in Harcourt's photograph, Kismet wondered if he wasn't looking at a likeness of Medea herself. Directly below the bowsprit, the hull swept ahead at the waterline and continued forward beneath the surface to form the galley's ram.

  Irene crossed over to stand beside him. "I'm really very impressed, Nick."

  "You're not the only one. Come on; let's clear some of this stuff away."

  As they started removing the three remaining makeshift float bladders from the net slings, Irene noticed something that Kismet had missed. "It's not glowing anymore."

  Kismet stood up and scanned the golden surface. He could see the impressions of their footprints, stamped in the soft metal overlay, but there was no hint of the illumination that had pierced the undersea darkness. A sudden wind came up, blowing against the tarps and causing them to flap noisily. "That's strange." His words were lost in the clamor.

  Anatoly crossed over to join them. "May I see it?"

  Kismet nodded and led the way back to the entrance to the hold. The interior was dark, no longer illuminated by the glowing metal. "I guess we'll need a light or something. Wait here."

  Before either of them could protest, Kismet had ducked out of the hold and jumped back over to the trawler. Anatoly quickly followed, but Kismet waved him off.

  "I'll just be a minute. Stay there."

  He knew exactly where his flashlight was; tucked in his waist pack, the batteries still relatively fresh. But he had another purpose for returning to the fishing boat; a detail which had been nagging at the back of his mind ever since the failure of his previous attempt to recover the Golden Fleece. It was a matter that he had not been able to resolve, primarily for lack of an opportunity, but now a chance had presented itself.

  The instruments were basic; the trawler was almost as much an antique as the golden galley. He quickly located the bulky marine band radio transmitter and laid a hand on the case; it was still warm. The radio had been used recently. He drew back his hand and stared at the metal box, as though it had confirmed his suspicions. There was nothing he could do about it now.

  A glance over his shoulder confirmed that the others had not left the golden ship. He raised the headphones to one ear and switched on the radio, making a note of the frequency to which it was tuned. He then adjusted that knob to another position and sent out a brief message, nothing more than a greeting, but using code words in the Russian language. He continued to do this, nudging the tuner until he received a reply. He then rattled off several sentences, all of which would have seemed harmless and not especially noteworthy to any eavesdroppers. He waited for a confirmation then switched the set off, after which he quickly loosened the antenna wire. He had almost passed from the wheelhouse before remembering to return the tuner to its original frequency. As he departed the wheelhouse a second time, his gaze fell on a battered electric lantern, powered by a large dry cell battery. Deciding that the lamp was better suited than his MagLite to the pretense upon which he had made his exit, he scooped it up then raced back to the golden ship, painfully aware that he had been gone for nearly five minutes.

  "Here it is," he called, waving the light like a trophy. He pushed past them into the hold and switched the lamp on. Its beam shot through the darkness, glinting off of the now dormant metal and was reflected throughout the structure.

  "It's beautiful," gasped Irene.

  The cargo had not shifted dramatically during the ascent. The ship had rolled over almost right away, guided to an upright position by the air bladders strategically positioned on the hull. The cask which had contained the Golden Fleece itself had tipped over, and was now lying in the aisle at the center of the hold. "Give me a hand here."

  With Anatoly's help, he turned it over so that the opening he had made was facing up. He then set the lantern down, and thrust both hands into
the crate. "It's still here," he said, grinning.

  It felt profoundly heavier as he lifted it from the confines of the box. Anatoly and Irene reached out to help him lay it out flat on the empty crate.

  "So that's the Golden Fleece," Irene remarked.

  Spread out before them, Kismet had to admit that it seemed rather ordinary; an animal skin, maybe large enough to be worn as a shawl over the shoulders but for the prodigious weight of the gold. He brushed a hand through the gilt wool, and then inspected his fingertips in the lamplight. Tiny particles of metal dust glinted in the whorls of his fingerprints. Impelled by curiosity, he flipped back one corner of the Fleece, revealing sodden leather.

  "Not what you were expecting?" Anatoly inquired.

  "I'm not sure what I was expecting," confessed Kismet. He played the beam of the flashlight around the hold once more, inspecting the dozens of almost identical cargo crates that lined the walls.

  "Shall we open them?"

  "Maybe in a minute. First, I want to test a theory." He set his flashlight down beside the Fleece and switched it off, plunging them into darkness. Irene's sigh of irritation was audible in the sudden blackness that filled the hold.

  "Scientific method," he muttered. His fumbling fingers unscrewed the wire leads from the battery terminals. He then brought the wires in contact with the Fleece and was instantly rewarded with illumination. "Aha! I think we can safely say that it is an electrical phenomenon at work here, not a magical..."

  The light at his fingertips suddenly flared with blinding intensity. Before he could even think about letting go, the bulb imploded with a pop that startled all of them and returned them once more into darkness.

  "Was that part of the experiment?" remarked Irene.