by Tom Wilde
Rhea heard the sound and was over beside me in an instant. “Did you find it?” I just gave the wall another push and this time it gave way, exposing an inner set of stairs heading downward. “Fantastic!” Rhea said, and in her excitement she threw an arm around me and gave a squeeze that caught me on my injured side. I kept from venting a howl of pain as she turned to her men. “Castor, you take the lead, then I’ll bring Blake as the rest of you follow.”
The stone steps were steep and the passageway narrow, and then the passage gave way to a tunnel cut through the rock. I was at a disadvantage, as the soldier ahead of me was blocking the light of his flashlight and my own body cast a shadow from Rhea’s light behind me. As the cave continued to twist and turn in a claustrophobic, angled path, Rhea spoke and gave words to my own growing fears. “This is wrong,” she said. “There’s no way anyone could have carried something as large as a sarcophagus down this tunnel.”
I was poignantly aware of Rhea’s penchant for stabbing people in the back as I replied, “Let’s at least see where this leads.”
Rhea said in a sweet-sounding half whisper, “Maybe we’ll just find a good place for us to say good-bye to each other.”
We continued our cramped, twisting, single-file descent. There were signs here and there where the dark gray granite had been artificially chipped away to widen the fissure. Finally, we reached an area that opened into a small cavern, and over the shoulder of the man in front of me I saw a black iron door had been bolted onto the rock, a door that reminded me of the one I saw at the underground torture chamber back in the Château de Joux. The man in front put his shoulder to the metal and grunted. “Locked,” was all he said.
Rhea pulled me aside and I watched as another soldier unslung his pack and opened it up on the cavern floor, while a third soldier held a light overhead. I saw that the pack contained flat packages of explosive and other demolition tools. Rhea’s boys worked with smooth efficiency as they took a small lump of C-4 and molded it along the edge of the door. One soldier placed a pencil-sized detonator cap into the explosive and then waved us back to the tunnel. We went back along far enough to be out of the line of fire, then I warded my ears with my hands as the soldier thumbed a radio detonator and unleashed a clap of compressed thunder.
The air was laced with the smell of spent explosives and hot iron, and before I could say anything the lead soldier ran to the doorway. I could see the iron door was bent and slightly ajar, and the soldier gave it a kick. Only then the door kicked back with a fiery explosive blast that dropped the man like a disjointed doll. Rhea tackled me and took me to the hard rock floor as the rest of her men opened fire over our heads, battering our eardrums with the staccato concussions of their silenced submachine guns, mixed with the crack of jacked bullets hitting rock and the drumbeat gongs of rounds slamming into the metal door. Then there was nothing but the ringing in my ears and the weight of Rhea across my back, pressing my splintered ribs into the stony ground.
I lifted my head up while the gunmen quickly dropped spent magazines from their assault rifles and slammed fresh ammunition in place. In the waving beams of the weapon-mounted flashlights, I saw the young man who had been blown back from the door sprawled on the ground, his chest a wet red ruin. One of the remaining three soldiers shot a light beam ahead, and through the doorway I saw a short-barreled shotgun affixed to a wooden frame tripod, now broken and askew. It was a death trap rigged to shoot anyone who came through the door. The lead soldier reached in and grabbed the weapon, roughly yanking it free from its cradle. I heard Rhea’s soft whisper, spoken in Japanese, as she went to the man on the ground. She knelt down, stroking his face, but his sightless eyes showed he was beyond the reach of any earthly comfort.
Rhea stood up and her face in the reflected light was a hard mask of frozen anger. She held out her hand, and the soldier with the shotgun handed it over to her with a short bow of obeisance. Rhea motioned for a light, and as she examined the gun I saw to my surprise that the rusty antique shotgun was of a type that wasn’t manufactured until about a hundred years after Napoleon’s time.
That’s when a scent came to me, one that cut through the odors of burnt gunpowder and fresh blood. I could suddenly sense we were close to the sea; it was a sharp, tide-pool smell that came from farther down the cavern. Rhea caught the scent as well, and she gave her men hand signals to move past the door. Rhea pushed me ahead of her, and I walked into another chamber of the cavern, only this area looked like it’d been used as a refuse dump. Rusted cans and containers were heaped near flat piles of broken glass. But one stack caught my eye. “Hold it,” I whispered.
Rhea didn’t stop me as I carefully stepped among the trash until I came to a set of six rusty, rectangular metal boxes with handles built onto the tops. I selected the closest one to me, and held it up to catch a beam of light. It was an old German Army ammunition box of World War II vintage. I could clearly make out the winged eagle and swastika stamp on its battered side. The box was empty, but when a beam of light caught on the inside, I saw streaks of gold specks glitter back at me from the metal sides. “What is it?” Rhea hissed from behind me.
“Proof that this place has been visited since at least the last World War,” I whispered back. “And evidently by the Nazis.”
Rhea’s strained voice was pure anger. “No!”
I turned and held the German ammo box up for her. “See? With something like this, you might as well have a sign that reads ‘Hitler slept here.’”
“But if the Nazis found the hiding place of the tomb of Alexander, then why…?”
I finished the thought for her. “Then why didn’t Hitler announce it to the world? Who knows? But it’s looking like this is a dead end.” Literally, I thought.
Rhea’s arm fell, splashing her light on the ground and casting her face into darkness. One of her men said, “The tunnel continues,” in a voice that was devoid of hope. Finally, Rhea said, “Then let’s see this through to the bitter end. Come, Blake.”
We followed the intensifying smell of brackish seawater until the rough-hewn tunnel opened up again, this time into a cathedral-sized cavern. The flashlights waved around the enormous cavity until one cut across something that reflected back with a dull gleam. We all walked forward, spreading out as everyone’s lights converged on a massive form that seemed to grow out of the ground.
The area ahead sloped downward and we could see the ground disappear into black water. At first glance, I saw what looked like a huge beached whale, colored dark green in the lights, lying half submerged near the rocky shore. As we drew closer, I could make out a rounded raised section on the top of the thing that glittered back as if it were a cyclopean eye. I felt an electric charge run down my spine as I heard myself say, “My God! It’s a submarine!”
“What?” Rhea hissed. “How can that be?”
I started walking toward the craft, drawn as if by a magnet. “Look, there’s the conning tower on top. I bet this ship is like the mini-subs that the British made during the Second World War.”
“Mini-subs? But what’s it doing down here?”
“Hell if I know,” I answered. Heedless of the men with guns behind me, I ran around one side, sloshing into the cold water up to my knees. As the lights scoured the surface, I saw that the ship was resting in a metal cradle that had partially collapsed, leaving the vessel listing slightly to one side. The ship was nearly thirty feet long, but even as I marveled at the sight, my eyes were drawn to strange, anomalous features. What I first took for the conning tower was only three feet off the deck, just big enough for a man’s head and shoulders, with rounded glass viewing portholes on all sides. A vicious-looking ram, like the head of a giant pike, crowned the bow and gave the ship the aspect of a beached narwhal. Along the spine of the ship, nearer the stern, was a row of teardrop-shaped metal barrels the size of oil drums. The plating of the armored leviathan was the color of ancient jade, except for the reinforced ram on the prow that was the rust-red shade of old b
lood.
Then a beam of light illuminated the side of the bow, and all the pieces of the puzzle locked into place. That’s when I saw the single, stylized letter emblazoned on the greenish copper hull that stopped me dead in my tracks. “It can’t be,” I whispered.
“Can’t be what?” Rhea demanded. “What are you talking about?”
I numbly pointed to the listing ghost ship as I uttered, “The submarine. It must be over two hundred years old. And if I’m not mistaken, Jules Verne has a lot of explaining to do.”
“What? What the hell are you babbling about?”
My voice, echoing through the cavern, sounded strange to my ears. But nothing was as strange as the words that came out of me next:
“It’s the Nautilus.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
At this point in my life, I’d never seen anything as amazing as the scarred old hulk before me.
Years ago, the Argo Foundation sent me on an expedition to hunt for a sunken German U-boat off the coast of Argentina, to chase down some rumors that the submarine contained stolen Nazi treasures. Prior to departure, I spent some time in the foundation archives to study up on World War II–era submersible boats, but at one point I got distracted by the history of much older and far more interesting submarines. In between Bushnell’s Revolutionary War–era Turtle and Hunley’s Civil War attack submarine was Robert Fulton’s Nautilus. I remember poring over Fulton’s designs, burning up time I should have spent becoming familiar with U-boats. The Nautilus was an incredible invention for her time, and I remembered reading how Napoleon Bonaparte financed the building of the submarine, but then later gave up on the idea and cut Fulton’s funding, even after Fulton demonstrated his ship’s lethal abilities. And with that, the history of maritime warfare was set back, all because no one at the time could see the tremendous advantage of submarines as the future of naval warfare.
Now I found myself standing right next to one of the greatest inventions in the history of the world. I was so lost in the moment that I failed to notice Rhea had waded into the water and was standing right beside me, until I was dimly aware she had said something.
“What?”
Rhea waved her light across the side of the ship, exposing the green-hued corrosion that looked like frozen algae at the waterline. “I said, just what the hell are you talking about? And how did this thing get in here?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the ship. “Like I said, it’s the Nautilus, one of the first submarines ever constructed.” Rhea allowed me to take the flashlight from her hand, and I trained the beam on the bow, illuminating the stylized letter N, wreathed like a Roman emperor’s seal. “Robert Fulton built one for Emperor Napoleon, but His Majesty wasn’t impressed with the result. Or so he said at the time.”
“But why would it be buried in here?”
I waved the light around the cavern, and spotted heavy, rusty iron chains that ran through metal rungs built into the rock ceiling. I traced the path of the chains and saw they ran from the wall across the flooded portion of the chamber to a giant spoked-wheel contraption that used suspended boulders for counterweights. “There,” I said as I pointed out the chains, “that’s how they did it. The whole seaward wall works like a medieval drawbridge. I’m betting the outside wall just looks like one big slab of stone, concealing the entrance to the underground harbor that used to be a sea cave.”
“But who could have built such a thing?”
I laughed, and heard my voice echo across the chamber. “Napoleon’s engineers were geniuses; hell, they built the Arc de Triomphe! Something like this would be a minor construction project for those guys.” I turned the light back onto the Nautilus. Maybe, I thought, with any luck, Rhea would let me board the ship as a last request before she killed me.
“Rhea!” a voice came booming out of the darkness. “Rhea!”
She took her flashlight back and marched through the cold, black water toward the inner cavern, leaving me in pitch dark. I felt my legs getting chilled from the water, but couldn’t leave without touching one of the most wonderful things I’d ever seen. I reached out my hand, feeling the cold, pitted surface of the marvelous, man-made machine. Then the spell was broken by the sound of Rhea’s voice calling my name.
I sighed, and sloshed through the blackness and the water back to the granite shore. “Blake!” Her echoing voice held a mixture of triumph and urgency. I could see a cluster of lights ahead and above me—another offshoot of the cave. My eyes winced from the reflection cast by the beams, and I tried not to trip on the uneven rocky ground as I made my way toward the lights. Evidently I wasn’t moving fast enough, as one of Rhea’s men came down and grabbed me by my right arm and pulled me up the slope. I made better progress with the help of the light mounted on my guard’s rifle, and then I saw what Rhea was shouting about.
Rhea, flanked by her two other guards, was standing behind an enormous, translucently glowing block, looking like a high priestess and her acolytes before a crystalline altar. Their flashlights illuminated the massive edifice, whose surface scattered their beams around the cavern in shards of flitting light. Rhea’s hand caressed the glowing surface of the slab as she said in a voice gone soft, “This is it. We’ve found it. This is the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great. And it’s ours!”
I almost lost my footing as the impact of her words hit me. I couldn’t doubt the evidence before my own eyes: a sarcophagus made of glass, built by Ptolemy IX to hold the body of Alexander of Macedonia. The walls of the coffin were thick and massive, resembling giant frozen blocks of ice. I could see the edges of gilt metal built to frame the heavy walls of glass. As Rhea lovingly moved her light across the surface of the sarcophagus, I saw a blurred reflection from within, shaded in a deep blue—a blue the color of royalty.
And that’s when I began to laugh.
I couldn’t help myself. All of a sudden, connections started snapping in my brain like overloaded electric circuits:
The letter of Fouché, writing about the “American ship,” no doubt the Nautilus, its voyage to Alexandria, and its return to its ‘secret island harbor.’
The death of Percy Shelley, who had learned from Lord Byron the secret of the Corsican watchtower, and whose boat was rammed and sunk in the middle of a storm before he could explore the watchtower himself. No other ship in the world at the time could have attacked Shelley’s boat during a storm. No other ship than a submarine like the Nautilus.
I thought of an exiled emperor who had escaped from the island of Elba, leaving by sea in such a way that no one saw him depart.
I thought of the words of Peter Weir, who spoke of a “ship in the shape of a wine cask and painted the color of the sea.” A ship to rescue from exile one of the greatest military minds the world had ever known.
And I thought of the last wishes of an emperor regarding his final resting place.
I couldn’t stop laughing. Not even when Rhea grabbed a gun from one of her men and pointed it straight at my head. “What is the matter with you?” she screamed.
I pointed my free hand toward the sarcophagus. “I can’t help it. It’s the greatest joke in the world!” I spat out.
Rhea ripped back the cocking bolt of the automatic rifle. “Blake,” she hissed in warning.
I kept laughing as I pointed and said, “That’s not Alexander in there!”
“What?” Rhea howled.
“It’s goddammed Napoleon Bonaparte!”
Rhea’s head snapped down toward the coffin and she peered inside through the translucent glass. The light reflecting off the top of the sarcophagus underlit her face as it slowly transformed into a mask of horror as she began to see what lay within.
I could barely contain my maniacal glee as I said, “Napoleon said he wanted to be buried back home on Corsica. He also once said he wanted to be laid to rest in the tomb of Alexander. And the little bastard genius got his way after all. But, hey, look at the bright side.”
Rhea stood frozen, as still as the glass cof
fin she stood over, as I said, “Maybe Vanya’s scientists can still work it out for you. If you took Napoleon’s genetic material and mixed it with yours, you could hatch out a lovely bunch of sawed-off little megalomaniacs!”
Rhea screamed.
That was my starting gun. I had to unleash my inner monster or die in my tracks. The gunman to my right didn’t stand a chance as I whipped my arm free and slipped behind him, grabbing his head with both hands and exploding my pent-up fear into the controlled combination of force that broke his neck like an old stick and left him functionally dead before he hit the ground. I grabbed his rifle as his body dropped, and I raised the weapon, triggering a short stuttering burst that clattered off the rocks above Rhea and her men. I let myself fall in a rolling back somersault then got to my feet and moved in a crouching run back toward the Nautilus, the closest cover I had, while my path was lit by staccato strobes of red firelight and shots cracked off the stones around me. I took a final flat dive into the black water just past the prow of the submarine, all the while cursing myself for my instinctive inability to shoot directly at Rhea for fear of hitting the ancient sarcophagus.
I pushed out of the chilling water, spiting the briny, brackish stuff out of my mouth, and crouched behind the bow of the Nautilus. The ship was vibrating as dozens of rounds punched through the hull and rang like steel hammers hitting a giant gong. Then everything went quiet and black, and all I could hear was the ringing in my ears, which pulsed with the rapid beat of my heart. Until I heard a sound that froze me worse than the water I was drenched in as Rhea called out through the darkness in a childish, singsong voice, “Blake … Blake … Where are you…?”
