Emerald

by Brian January

  But that wasn’t what was worrying her. Something else was going on. There was a bad feeling to it, making something move and twist and claw at the bottom of her stomach.

  For a moment she paused, staring at the screen. Her every instinct yelled at her run, to jump into her car and start driving. Anywhere. Just away. As far away from Washington DC as she could get.

  But reason overtook her. Steeling herself, she sat up, her spine rigid, and started to type.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Sevastopol, Crimea

  FROM the air, Sevastopol Harbor looked to Skarda like a giant blue snake trying to eat its way into the Crimean coastline. From Geneva they’d taken a Lufthansa flight to Simferopol, the busy travel hub where they’d boarded a train to Sevastopol and the coast. While the train twisted and turned through the mountain passes, where forests of pine, beech, oak, and juniper plunged down to the shores of blue-green bays, Skarda turned over in his mind the events of the past few days. He knew he could count on April. He could always count on April. She was sitting across from him, meditating, her face looking oddly serene with her black, fierce eyes closed against the world. But when he considered the odds they were up against, he wasn’t so sure of his own abilities. Jaz was a dangerous enemy: fast, lethal, and unpredictable. And backed by big money. That was why it was so important to find the Tablet and the source of the isomer before she did, because whoever had hired her would unleash its destructive capacity to its fullest potential. And the same went for the mysterious commandos with the Mi-25. They still had no clue who they were.

  Rolling an ache out of his shoulders, he watched a hillside strewn with wildflowers flash past. Even through the thick plate glass window the spicy scent of juniper reached his nostrils, reminding him of some pleasant memory he couldn’t pin down. But it was Flinders who worried him. He felt had no right to expose her to danger, and she didn’t even have the most rudimentary of survival skills to combat the forces they were up against. Yet at the same time he respected her wishes and her free choice. She was stubborn and determined and he admired her for those qualities. He looked over at her in the opposite seat, sprawled out with her eyes closed, her lush body rocking gently with the motion of the train. He knew he would do what he had to do to keep her alive.

  The train lurched sharply, rumbling around a steep promontory. The change of motion jerked him from his reverie as the sun-drenched S-shape of Sevastopol Bay burst into view.

  “We’re here,” he announced.

  April’s eyes snapped open, her body uncoiling as she sat up straight.

  Flinders yawned and gave her arms a stretch. Far below, past a stand of oaks, she caught a glimpse of azure blue water and clusters of white buildings straddling the slopes of lush hillsides. “Pretty.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” April said.

  ___

  It was just after noon when April piloted the rented Rinker Express power cruiser along the rocky coast, where the eons had punctuated the ancient limestone with innumerable inlets, coves, and sea arches. The hunched shoulders of the headlands, blanketed with a patchwork of dull greens, browns, and reds and tapering down to conical sea stacks reminded Skarda of Big Sur. There was hardly a ripple on the surface of the sea, just the gentle tug of the tide, and the sunlight bouncing off the flat sheet of water into his eyes made him break out in a slight sweat.

  “GPS says this is it,” April called out. Before they’d started out, Flinders had worked out her estimation of where the Temple of Artemis had stood in classical times.

  Consulting her laptop monitor, Flinders compared the images on the screen with the headland in front of them. At its western end a towering sea stack jutted from the surface, its base creaming with laces of foam, attached by a limestone swayback arch to a cliff that curved to the east along a rocky beach clumped with bright green seaweed. A lone rock stuck up out of the water like a miniature island.

  Shielding his eyes with his hand, Skarda craned his neck back, surveying as much of the top of the cliff as he could. It would have been the perfect spot for an ancient temple with a commanding view over the sea.

  April throttled the engine back while he tossed the anchor over the side. The tide caught the cruiser, rocking it gently. Then he moved to the stern where April was zipping up one of the dry suits he had rented. They’d decided she would make a preliminary dive to try to locate the cave opening, if there was one.

  The problem, as Flinders had explained it, was that there was no way of knowing the depth of the original shoreline, because the flood sea water would have spread out around the perimeter of the Euxine Lake instead of just filling it like a bathtub. The farther the water spread, the less the rise in sea level.

  When April had strapped on her BC backpack and disappeared over the side, Skarda gave Flinders basic instruction in scuba operation. She proved herself to be a strong swimmer and unafraid of being under the surface of the sea. By the time April returned he was satisfied she could make the short trip into the interior of the headland.

  Surfacing next to them, April pulled off her face mask. “There’s a split in the rock about thirty-seven feet down, but I don’t think it was part of the original beach. It looks like this area was hit by a pretty big earthquake at some point and the rock face split. I went inside. It leads to an open cave system above the water level that looks like it runs through the whole interior.”

  Skarda looked at Flinders. “Good. It’s under forty feet. That means it’s a no-stop dive, so we won’t have to decompress.”

  ___

  Sunlight filtered through the clear water as Skarda angled his body down along the wall of the submerged cliff, trailing behind April in the lead and Flinders between them. Now he understood why April had presumed an earthquake had struck the coastline: on a projecting ledge below he could see the silhouettes of huge boulders that had at some time tumbled from the cliff, now forming grottoes and fissures that were home to crabs, eels, and octopi.

  In front of him a school of gray mullets flashed apart and reformed as April darted into a black aperture in the rock wall about seven feet in length and three in width. For a moment Flinders hesitated, but then she gave a kick to her fins and the hole swallowed her up.

  Skarda followed.

  Immediately claustrophobia closed around him. His stomach lurched. He fought down panic, pushing himself forward even though his brain screamed at him to back out and head for the clean, fresh air of the surface. Ignoring the impulse, he willed his mind to a blank slate, concentrating on the bobbing cone of April’s dive light ahead.

  The light disappeared in a burst of bubbles and then he was aware of Flinders’ legs thrusting downward in front of him, kicking up another storm of bubbles, then rocketing upward out of sight. Giving his own legs a scissor-kick, he shot to the surface, yanking off his mask. Then he hauled himself onto a flat rock and climbed to his feet.

  They were standing on the floor of a low-domed cavern whose slick walls glistened with light reflected from April’s lamp. Skarda wrinkled his nose. The odor of dead fish and ancient mold made him want to gag. Algae and lichens covered the walls, and fallen stones and blocks of limestone littered the cave floor, more evidence of at least one earthquake in the past.

  April unzipped her dry suit. They’d worn jeans and sweatshirts under their suits, carrying their boots in dry bags. Shedding his own suit, Skarda laced up his boots and took out his own lamp, flashing it toward the opposite end of the gallery, where the rock floor led upward at a steep angle.

  April was already moving ahead. Skarda followed Flinders up the incline to the mouth of a smaller passageway whose ceiling reached no more than six or seven feet off the ground. Again his head spun with claustrophobia, but he gritted his teeth and drove himself forward, hunched over. At least this tunnel was short. When he pushed himself through he was standing in a massive gallery, too enormous for their LED’s to penetrate more than a few feet in front of them. It was chillier here also, cold and clammy, and t
he dampness hung like a mist in the air. The stench of age and must assaulted his nostrils, making him hack out explosive coughs.

  They started forward carefully, April’s lamp spearing a cone of light over the rough rock five feet in front of her. Skarda and Flinders followed closely at her back, their boots slipping on the dank slabs of rock that composed the floor. Every small noise they made echoed, then bounced off the walls and came back again, the sound magnified. The tunnel twisted and curved, but from the strain on his legs, Skarda knew they were traveling upward at a fairly steep angle.

  The passageway narrowed. Up ahead, April stopped. “Hang on!” she called out. Her flash probed the darkness, then she made her way back to their position. “You’re not going to like this,” she said to Skarda. “The tunnel narrows up there. About two feet high, three feet wide. It’s hands and knees time.”

  Twenty minutes later they crawled out of the claustrophobic passageway, their clothing scuffed and streaked with dirt. Skarda’s face and shirt were slick with sweat and his breathing was coming in ragged gasps.

  He climbed to his feet as April panned her LED around the more spacious chamber they had entered. Now he could see that they were standing on a wide spine of rock whose outer edge dropped precipitously into a black chasm. He aimed his flash into its depths, but the beam made little penetration into what looked like a bottomless pit.

  April’s lamp stabbed ahead, picking out the entrance to another passageway. Walking single file as far away as possible from the rim of the chasm, they stepped through the opening, their feet slipping on a slick-floored tunnel that tilted upward at a steep angle. This ended abruptly in a small chamber, littered with fallen stones dripping with moisture and covered with green slime. But here were signs of human activity: some of the rocks had been worked by tools.

  Flinders sprang ahead, examining the blocks of stone. Then she cried out and stooped. “Look!” she said, tilting her lamp at a verdigris-covered object in her hand. “It’s a copper chisel! Definitely Chalcolithic!”

  April’s LED had found a narrow, oval-shaped opening at the far end of the cavern. She disappeared into it.

  A moment later she was back. “I found the mummy!”

  ___

  With a cry, Flinders clutched at Skarda’s forearm, then raced toward April, with Skarda following on her heels. Squeezing through the opening, he found himself in a natural stone cavern whose walls had deliberately been sculpted into a low, square-cut chamber. On three sides the stone had been smoothed and polished by hand; on the fourth, an ornately carved throne, hewn from the solid rock, projected from the wall, inscribed with glyphs in the same language that had covered the Pillars at Siwa. On each side of the throne great undulating waves had been crudely chiseled out of the stone, each wave cradling smaller images of sea nymphs astride the backs of rearing dolphins and sea monsters.

  Flinders was standing stock-still, staring in awe.

  Seated on the throne was a withered mummy.

  For a moment, she twisted around to stare at Skarda and April, her eyes unbelieving, and then she was running toward the throne, stumbling over chunks of fallen rock. They scrambled after her. Up close, Skarda could see the mummy in detail in the glare of his lamp. Its shrunken skin, plastered to the bone like a collage over a wire frame, was the color of teak. The arms had been crossed from shoulder to shoulder as if they were clasping something precious to the chest. Sightless eyeholes gazed into eternity over a hooked nose and a thin slit of a mouth.

  Flinders translated the glyphs. “This is Thoth’s mummy! He was a real man!” She bent closer. “The Tablet is supposed to be here with him.”

  April stepped forward, examining the crossed arms. Scraps of ancient linen had been mummified along with skin and bone. At one time the corpse was fully dressed. “There’s a space for something to fit in here.”

  Flinders’ face fell. “The Tablet.” She slumped against the throne, letting her lamp hang listlessly in her hand.

  April scowled. “It looks like somebody beat us to it.”

  Shaking her head sadly, Flinders straightened, moving the hand that held the lamp. The angled beam of light illuminated a spot of color. Crying out, she darted to the other side of the throne and stooped. When she rose again she held out her hand, showing them a black-and-red-colored shard of pottery. Her face glowed with newfound excitement.

  “There’s a broken bowl here—maybe a water jug. It’s definitely Badrian, meaning from Pre-Dynastic Egypt about 4,500 BCE.”

  “Meaning…?” Skarda asked.

  “Meaning…we know these caves were hit by at least one earthquake, right?” Her words were tumbling out in breathless gasps. “So let’s say that a thousand years or so after the flood, the Atlantean survivors decided to move the mummy and the Tablet back to their new homeland in Egypt. They used the information on the Pillars to locate this cave, then before they could get the mummy out the earthquake hit, but they were able to grab the Tablet and escape.”

  “And they never came back for the mummy?” April asked.

  Flinders threw her hands apart and shrugged. “Maybe the earthquake blocked their access. That was a long time ago. Subsequent earthquakes could have changed the whole configuration of these caves since then.”

  To Skarda it was a plausible scenario. “If that’s true, then there must be another way to get in and out of these caves. They didn’t have scuba gear sixty-five hundred years ago!”

  “It doesn’t matter what happened,” April said, frowning. “We’re still back to Square One again. Where’s the Tablet now?”

  In the gloom, Flinders’ teeth flashed in a grin. “Well…this might sound crazy, but a theory’s been floating around in the archaeological world for years, that there’s a secret chamber under the paws of the Great Sphinx on the Giza Plateau. It’s supposed to house an ancient Hall of Records that contains knowledge of the world before a huge flood. Naturally, most professional researchers just relegate this to pseudoscience, but recently passageways have been found leading into the Sphinx: one on its back, near the head; one near the north hip; and one on the north side in the middle that’s been bricked up.” Her grin broadened. “Of course, there’s also a theory—which lacks any credible evidence to support it—that the Sphinx was carved in 11,000 BCE.”

  But Skarda was unconvinced. “But I thought the Sphinx dated from around 2,500 BCE. You said the Badrians were about two thousand years earlier.”

  “That’s true. But there’s some evidence that an earlier version of the Sphinx was begun before the present one—maybe a tomb or temple complex on the plateau that predates the Dynastic Egyptian structures. Don’t forget—the sphinx image, associated with tombs and temples, is extremely ancient. The earliest known sphinx is from Gobekli Tepe, Turkey, dated to 9,500 BCE.”

  “But even if there is a chamber,” April said, “how do we get in?”

  Skarda snapped his fingers and laughed. “Remember? Stephen thought he’d found a tunnel in his shaft that might lead under the Sphinx. Behind a false wall.”

  “Has anyone else explored the shaft?” Flinders asked.

  He gave a firm shake to his head. “No. OSR made sure to set it up with the Antiquities Council. We wanted it to be Stephen’s dig—no one else’s.

  “So we can get in?”

  “We can get in. We’ll get OSR to send us a copy of the permit.”

  “Well,” April muttered. “Off to see the Wizard.”

  ___

  Five minutes later they were just starting back on the downward passage towards the sea when the side of the mountain exploded in front of them.

  TWENTY-NINE

  ON the inner slope of the headland, Jaz stood in the dense shadow of a stand of junipers, watching a cloud of dust spume out from the wakes of the two Deep Digger bunker busters. Looking like a small cruise missile, each Digger fired off a series of seven rapid-fire cannons to hammer through solid rock, using high-density gas to clear away the pulverized debris as it drove itself
forward. And each was fitted with a BROACH warhead with IM PAX explosive that would blow a huge tunnel in the side of the mountain after it bored through.

  The first warhead had just exploded, touching off a shockwave that rocked the ground under her feet. Jaz glanced at the readout screen of the GPR unit, seeing the round shape of the tunnel blasted out by the warhead.

  A man next to her watched a time readout. “Three seconds for the next one.”

  Jaz’s cat’s eyes glowed with satisfaction. “Okay. Get the men ready. We’re going in.”

  ___

  With chunks of pulverized rock hurtling past her head, April whipped around, throwing her arms wide as she launched herself at Skarda and Flinders, catching their shoulders and dragging them to the floor beneath her. Rocks rained down on her back, caroming off the rock walls with a staccato drumming. A cloud of dust choked the cave.

  “What the hell was that?” Skarda yelled in her ear.