The Mask of Troy

by David Gibbins

  ‘We’re heading into a sump, completely submerged for a bit and then surfacing again near the head of that shaft. The railway tunnel must have collapsed at some point. I’ll go first.’

  ‘I’m behind you.’

  They ignored the other three and swam down into the gloom, their headlamps reflecting off the walls of green halite, which had been hacked away to widen the tunnel. After about ten metres the salt gave way to bare rock, cracked and jumbled in front of them. ‘Looks like someone got a little ambitious with the pick,’ Costas murmured. ‘Remember what Wlady said, that the miners tried not to dig out all the halite to keep the walls from collapsing.’ He swam down, pulling himself along the rusted metal rails of the track. Jack could see a way ahead, with only a metre or so of clearance below the collapsed rock. He followed Costas, inching along. He heard the three Russians close behind, scraping and clanging their tanks as they hauled themselves along the passage, the exhaust from their breathing cascading along the cracks and fissures above Jack. He swore under his breath. If they caused another rock fall, nobody would be coming out of here alive. He concentrated on looking ahead, and saw that Costas had reached the end of the sump and had knelt up out of the water. Jack came alongside, and broke surface. They had come nearly to the end of the rockfall, and could see the end of the tunnel about ten metres ahead, half submerged.

  ‘This must be where the vertical shaft begins,’ Costas said. ‘I’m looking at my atmospheric sensor. There’s still oxygen here, but methane as well in pockets against the ceiling. Probably breathable, just.’

  ‘Won’t be like that below,’ Jack said. ‘From what Wlady said, we’ll have to assume any gas pockets are methane.’

  They crawled and waded forward, past a ledge that had once been some kind of loading platform. A massive rusted pulley mechanism hung down from the ceiling where the track ended. It was a winch for a lift, but the metal cable was missing, evidently cut off or rusted away and dropped down the shaft with the lift platform. He looked back and saw the first of the Russians haul himself out of the water, spit out his mouthpiece and wheeze heavily, his hands on his knees. Jack turned back, and saw Costas’ fins sticking up. He pulled himself along, below the winch. The view over the edge was astonishing. Costas was hanging upside down, his headlamps aimed down a vertical shaft lined with timbers. The coppery green had gone, and the water was extraordinarily clear. Jack could see down a phenomenal depth, but still not make out the bottom. It was an awesome sight, spine-tingling, as if he were looking down a shaft into the centre of the earth. Costas craned his head up, looked at him. ‘You good with this?’

  ‘Good to go.’ They had been in a mineshaft before, just like this, when Jack had run out of air and nearly died. But now was not the time for flashbacks. Survival instinct overrode that. He remembered Rebecca, why they were here, and steeled himself. He watched Costas drop head first down the shaft, and then followed him. The water was so clear that it was as if he were jumping into air, and he instinctively put out his hands and feet to catch himself on the wooden beams, to stop himself from falling headlong. He made himself straighten his legs and hold his hands ahead like an arrow, spiralling down behind Costas. They dropped quickly, twenty metres, thirty, forty. He was grateful for the automated buoyancy control, the computer that sensed their speed of descent and kept it in check. He tilted his head so that he could see directly ahead. Far below them, thirty or forty metres perhaps, he could now see the glimmerings of the base of the shaft, a mass of collapsed metal machinery lit up by their headlamp beams. Two minutes later they were nearly there. ‘Let’s go neutral,’ Costas said. Jack pressed the manual buoyancy override and injected air into his suit, then tucked into a ball and rolled upright so that he came down feet first like a parachutist. He injected more air to stop just short of the coiled pulley cable and iron platform, coming to a halt alongside Costas. They both looked up. A confused mass of bubbles and light beams moving to and fro was visible far above, where the Russians were coming down.

  Jack looked at his depth gauge. Ninety-five metres. He turned and aimed his beam horizontally into the passageway they were about to enter, the level that would drop at a thirty-degree slope towards their target area about a hundred metres ahead. Costas came alongside and did the same. An extraordinary vista opened up before them. It was clear that they were following a natural fissure in the rock, just as Wladislaw had predicted, with outcrops of halite crystals visible. The crystals shimmered and sparkled as they panned their headlights over them. The fissure had once formed a series of interconnected caverns, but the narrower spaces between the caverns had been hacked away to create a continuous tunnel wide enough for a narrow-gauge track to be laid, identical to the one they had followed at the higher level. Jack could see the track continuing for about thirty metres and then ending at a point where the rock had been left untouched, a much narrower gap. They swam slowly forward. On either side the indentations formed deep chambers, some crudely hacked into a rectilinear shape, one of them with a half-built wooden door and wall enclosing it. Tools lay strewn around, whitened by salt precipitate growing over them. At the end of the track they saw the railway car, a standard narrow-gauge hopper small enough to be pushed by miners, containing a wooden cradle as if some substantial piece of equipment had been carried in it to this point.

  ‘This tunnel doesn’t look like salt mining,’ Costas said. ‘It looks like someone was building a storage facility.’

  ‘And then abandoned it halfway,’ Jack replied. ‘None of the side chambers are finished.’

  ‘The Nazis?’

  ‘It’s difficult to see why miners might have come down here. This deep, it may often have been flooded, by changes in the water table like the one that causes the water to be so deep now. The odd thing is, it might make sense for Neolithic miners to have got this far underground when it was dry, making their way down the natural fissure where that shaft is. We know that Stone Age painters could get a long way into cave systems. And they may have been looking for especially prized halite crystals only found this deep. But for later miners with metal tools, there was a lot of salt still to be dug out much closer to the surface.’

  They reached the end of the metal tracks. Jack rolled over and looked up, seeing the shimmering surfaces of pools where methane gas had accumulated. He looked back to the end of the shaft, where the first of the Russians had appeared. ‘Christ. They’ve come all the way down. At least fifteen metres beyond the safe depth with trimix. About where nitrogen narcosis will really kick in too.’

  ‘Drunk, narked and on a one-way ticket to hell,’ Costas said.

  ‘But dangerous. Did you see their knives?’

  ‘Roger that. Let’s get this done.’

  They swam forward beyond the end of the track, through the crack in the rock. Ahead of them the fissure carried on as far as they could see, with a crudely cut pathway along the floor. On either side were shimmering crystal caverns, some with halite crystals five or six centimetres across. Costas was ahead, and after only a few metres he stopped and sank down to about a metre above the floor, over an area where the crystals seemed to be remarkably uniform in size, as if they had all grown from the same genesis. ‘You remember Wladislaw and his dating of the salt growth to the Neolithic? Take a look at this.’

  Jack peered down. Beneath the crystals was a shape, staring up at him. He had seen this before where calcium carbonate, precipitated minerals, formed stalagmites over bones, but never with salt. It was a human skull. He saw a ribcage, leg bones, arms laid over the chest. He could just make out chipped and polished stone tools laid alongside, hand axes and adzes, several still attached to wooden hafts. ‘It’s a burial,’ he murmured. ‘Maybe that’s what these people were doing down here as well, using it as a burial chamber.’ He stared again at the skull. The jaw had dropped, as if it were leering. He remembered the grim sculptures they had seen in the passageway with Wladislaw, the one that had reminded him of Munch’s The Scream. Perhaps this was what
those medieval miners had seen. Perhaps it was not their own mortality they feared, but some terrible demon of the depths they had encountered down here - in a place that perhaps was never broached again by the miners, and was only reopened when the Nazis decided to create a top-secret storage facility in these depths.

  ‘My sensor registers almost zero oxygen in the water,’ Costas said. ‘That’s why it’s so clear. No life here at all.’

  ‘Ten metres to go, according to my map,’ Jack said, peering into the tunnel. ‘I think I can see something at about that distance, ahead and to the right. A small cavern entrance, maybe. Something blocking it.’

  ‘Jack, there’s something strange about the floor ahead of us. Odd shapes.’

  Jack dumped air from his suit and sank down, staring ahead. Too late he realized that he was going to hit the bottom, and he silently cursed. He prided himself on his buoyancy control. And in caves, silt could be stirred up with barely a touch and completely obscure visibility. He injected a burst of air into his suit and just avoided impact, but watched a pressure wave from his body ripple through the silt ahead. In a fleeting second he realized what Costas had seen. Bodies. Human bodies. Lying on either side of the path. But not solid bodies. As the ripple passed through them they disintegrated and exploded upwards into the water, a great cloud of white particles and flakes that engulfed Costas and wafted towards Jack.

  ‘Thanks, Jack. A swim through disintegrated human flesh. That rounds off this little excursion nicely.’

  Jack swam forward, dropping down into the haze. He saw skeletons, two, three along one side, picks and crowbars strewn haphazardly around, the bones wearing the remains of clothing. ‘This looks a little more recent than our Neolithic friend,’ he murmured. ‘The shoes look pretty modern.’

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘The story from Wladislaw? German officer goes in with Jews and guards, only German officer comes out?’

  ‘They’ve all been shot in the head, execution style,’ Jack said. ‘You can see the holes, the shattered skulls.’

  ‘Not these two.’ Costas’ fins were poking out of the cloud of white ahead, and Jack went alongside. The two skeletons below were more contorted, and had fragmented sternums and ribcages as well as holes in their skulls. ‘Different clothing. Look.’ Costas reached down and pulled up a collar. He rubbed it, and Jack saw the SS death’s-head insignia. ‘These must be the two Hungarian SS guards. Remember, the officer came out alone? He must have shot them too. Looks as if he had to catch them unawares, presumably after they’d executed all the Jews.’

  Jack stared at the obstruction in the small cavern ahead. ‘I think I know why the officer had to bring them down here. They were carrying something for him.’ He swam closer, and his heart sank. The entrance to the chamber, carved out of the rock salt, was about a metre square, wide enough for a person to crouch inside. He could see a dark cavity beyond. But wedged into the entrance was an unmistakable shape.

  It was a bomb.

  He was looking at the tail piece of an aerial bomb, four sheet-steel vanes welded to a cone, reinforced with box-shaped struts of bar steel. The cone was striped red and blue, and the rest had been painted green, now streaked with rust. Beyond the cone he could see the extension cylinder with a fuse head, and beyond that the main body of the bomb, but the nose was out of sight inside the cavity. The bomb seemed to be about a metre and a half in length, maybe a little more. It was precariously wedged on the rim of the entrance, with nothing else obvious holding it up beyond.

  ‘German SD-250, thick-cased fragmentation bomb,’ Costas said, coming alongside. ‘Seventy-nine kilograms of TNT, series five and eight fuses, usually. Huh. Never seen one of these live before.’

  Jack shut his eyes. This time, it was going to have to happen.

  Costas eyed him. ‘Looks like we don’t have any Turkish navy ordnance disposal divers around to help with this one.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  Costas pulled open a Velcro flap on his leg and extracted a hammer.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’

  ‘Well, I have to get at the fuse.’

  ‘It’s there, look.’

  Costas shook his helmet. ‘No. That’s the dummy fuse. The actual fuse is further forward in the main casing, just beyond that rock lip, I reckon. It looks as if the bomb’s been deliberately wedged that far forward to conceal the fuse head, yet left balanced on the rim so it could fall into the cavity or into the cavern where we are now.’

  ‘Either way wouldn’t make any difference, would it?’

  ‘Boom.’

  ‘Boom.’ Jack shut his eyes. ‘Okay. What next?’

  ‘The guy was a Luftwaffe officer, right?’

  ‘That’s what Wladislaw said.’

  ‘That makes sense. He knew what he was doing. This bomb’s clearly been put here as a booby trap. In which case, there’ll be anti-handling devices.’

  ‘Anti-handling devices. This gets better every moment.’

  ‘The Luftwaffe had used them since the 1940 London Blitz, for delayed-action bombs. But we’re talking 1945 here. All the sinister genius of Nazi engineering designed to kill anyone trying to defuse this bomb.’

  ‘That means us.’

  ‘Okay,’ Costas murmured, both hands on the bomb casing, leaning forward to see as far as he could into the chamber. ‘Delayedaction bombs had a clockwork fuse. So you take that out, fine. The problem’s what’s underneath. The standard early anti-handling fuse was the ZUS-40. The jolt of impact would release a ball bearing, which would arm a spring-loaded firing pin. Or unscrewing the outer fuse would have the same effect, cocking the firing pin underneath. Or there could be another device entirely, a type 50 fuse with a mercury tilt switch that would arm itself when the bomb hit the ground, and then complete an electrical circuit if anyone tried to move it. Or there could be both devices.’

  ‘Okay. Okay. Just what do we do?’

  ‘Hold the tail unit.’

  Jack backed off, then approached the bomb from behind and reached his arms carefully around the metal fins. He tried to stand on the base of the passageway, but the salt precipitate on the floor was viscous, slippery. He found a rock protrusion with his left fin and wedged it in. ‘Okay.’

  Costas lifted the hammer and hit the edge of the rock cavity. Fragments came tumbling down around Jack. He hit it again, harder. Jack was barely breathing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Russian who had come down the passageway, watching them, hanging in the water just beyond the white haze about ten metres back, his exhaust streaming up into the gas pocket in the ceiling above.

  There was a sudden jolt, and Jack flinched. He thought he felt the bomb move. If it slipped in his direction, there was no way he was going to be able to stop 250 kilograms of steel and high explosive from falling to the floor of the tunnel, pinning him down. But if that happened, they were finished. Costas hammered again, producing a shower of fragments, and then slipped his hammer back in his pocket and took out a tool like a socket wrench. ‘Okay. I’ve exposed the fuse pocket.’

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Watch our friend. I’ve seen him. He’s as likely to blow as this thing.’

  ‘How long?’

  There was a ringing sound of metal on metal. Costas had taken out another tool. He was straining as he spoke, pulling the wrench. ‘Guy who taught the bomb disposal course I did once defused one of these in Portsmouth Harbour. Took him twenty hours to clear the rust around the fuses.’

  Jack looked at his gauge. ‘We have ten minutes. Max.’

  ‘I think I need my hammer again for this.’

  Jack cautiously released the tail unit, then let himself drift back, staring at the Russian. He was coming down, approaching the haze of human decay in the water. ‘Okay, Costas. I’m going to take him out.’

  ‘Just keep him away from me. Any disturbance and this thing could blow. Above those first bodies the fissure rises into a chamber, and I saw a surface. Mu
st be a gas pocket. I saw a couple of miners’ picks on a ledge.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll be back.’

  ‘You better be.’ Costas’ eyes were glued to the bomb, inspecting the surface minutely, selecting tools by touch from his pockets. Jack remained still. The other two Russians were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they were sticking to plan, waiting further up until he and Costas returned. The man coming for them might have no method, no rationale. His mission was suicidal, but could still be murderous. Jack saw the glint of a wicked-looking blade in the man’s hand. He steadied himself. He heard the tap-tap-tap of Costas trying to free the fuse. He tried to remember Rebecca’s face, but it was not there. What he was about to do now was pure instinct, survival. He felt the adrenalin course through him. Not just survival. Rage.

  He suddenly swam towards the Russian as fast as he could, grabbed the man’s jacket inflator and pulled it, sending them both rocketing upwards. He seized the man’s neck in a half-nelson with his left arm and clamped his wrist with his right hand to keep the knife away. The man’s eyes were wild, but his wrist was rock-hard and Jack knew there was no way he was going to move it. The tip of the knife was inches from his intake hose. They surfaced together inside the cavity in a welter of bubbles, creating a wave that sucked them down and then pushed them against the side of the chamber, ripping the left arm of Jack’s e-suit down to the Kevlar mesh. They bounced down again underwater, then up. Jack’s wrist began to shake, his grip loosening. The man had short, thick arms, massively muscled, and Jack’s longer arm could not hold against him, requiring far more leverage than he could muster. He felt a spasm of pain go down his back as he put every muscle in his body into holding the knife away. It was no use. He had only one option. He kicked with his fins as hard as he could, driving them both upwards. The instant he felt they had risen as far as they could go, he let go of the man’s neck with his left hand, reached up and pushed hard against the ceiling, forcing them back down deep underwater. He pulled the emergency inflate on the man’s jacket and it ballooned outwards, forcing them both upwards again and slamming the man’s head against the ceiling. Jack grabbed the head again with his left hand, let go of the wrist with his right and instantly balled his fist, ramming it upwards into the man’s face. It was the killer blow Ben had taught him, a massive upwards punch at the base of the nose that would splinter the bone and drive the fragments into the brain.