From the top of the mountainside the frigid night air started to roll in, grazing the skins, and the hearts, of the small group.
"Can we make a fire? I'm fucking freezing," Gary asked his colleagues.
"That will not be smart. It would lead them right to us," Purdue answered. "Give it some time. If they go back to the village we can find a cave or somewhere to get warm."
Another gunshot clapped somewhere on the lower road and a bunch of male voices called out strategies to one another to encircle the intruder who killed their brethren.
"I suppose we will not see Calisto again," Sam lamented.
"Oh, God, I hope they didn't kill her," Nina answered, but after some thought, her naturally positive demeanor dealt her some hope. "Then again, if she were dead, what would they be shooting at?"
"Aye, that is true. Then again, it could be a hunting rifle somewhere else. There are a few hunters out getting wild," Sam inadvertently put a damper on Nina's rising relief. She clutched a water bottle she took from her backpack and stared into space. They were in trouble, and they were unarmed on top of it. Thoughts of being hacked to death in the high altitudes of Nepal did not sit well with her and she wondered if they would ever be able to make it out alive. They stood out from the locals and word would be spread quickly about something as serious as the destruction of the shrine. Now they were fugitives, out of food and slowly freezing to death while having to keep awake and alert for the people who closed in on them with no good intention.
A rustling came from somewhere down the riverbed, the snapping of branches in the oblivion of the frozen darkness. Nina moved closer to Sam, her body just touching his for comfort.
"Please let that be a fucking yak or something," she whispered in heavy breath.
"Quiet," Purdue whispered. They listened closely, practically holding their breaths the whole time. Another crunch sounded from the opposite direction and they all jumped. Nina shivered against Sam who used his arm to push her behind him protectively.
In the distance the voices still echoed occasionally, but there was less of a furor. Purdue was tempted to switch on his flashlight and just look. His curiosity had always been his bane and he could take the tension no more. If he was going to die from the cold anyway, he might as well take his chances locating the source of the suspicious sounds.
"Don't do that," Sam told him. "We are, for now at least, safe and whole. Don't change the dynamic just because you have to know what that is."
"We cannot stay here. If they discover us here tomorrow, and they will, we are all as good as dead. In the daylight tracking our movement would be exceedingly easy. We don't stand a chance," Purdue retorted.
"Where will we go, Mr. Purdue?" Gary chipped in. "We don't know the terrain in the dark. God, it's bad enough navigating these hills in broad daylight and braving the thin air up here. Moving now would be suicide."
"I agree with Gary," Nina said. Once more she found herself in the middle of a two-faction argument where the most votes would be the way to go. But Purdue was not adamant about his plan and yielded to the opinions of the others.
"Well, it appears, my friends, that we are fucked," Purdue sighed and sat down to face a bitter night ahead.
"I suggest we just stay put and keep quiet so that they don't find us. Once we hear that there are no more voices out there, maybe we can just slowly start changing our location at least," Nina said.
"Look, I know where we are. It's not like we are lost," Gary said, briefly holding his GPS out for them to see, "but we have to worry about hiking in the dark and that cannot end well."
Suddenly, snapping twigs alarmed them into a defensive mode and they huddled together to face what was coming. With the approaching crack and clatter of the branches came heavy panting, the sound of laborious movement.
"Shall I use my light now?" Purdue asked in a low voice, stoking the sarcasm.
Nina's fingers dug into Sam's arm as Dave Purdue switched on his flashlight to see what was coming at them. In the pale beam of his torch the familiar physique of his bodyguard appeared, her arms outstretched to find her way in the dark.
"Calisto!" Nina cried, making her way to the wounded woman to support her.
"We thought you were dead," Gary said, clearly happy to see her.
"So did I," she gasped. "In fact, I still kind of feel like death warmed up. Did you lose this, perhaps?" she asked Purdue. She handed him his satellite phone, which had almost been lost in the chaos of the attack.
"Oh, my God, Calisto! You are worth every penny!" Purdue smiled and took the device from her while Nina retrieved a med pack from her side bag to dress Calisto's wounds. She had a flesh wound from a bullet intended for her head, which had instead ended up just above her collarbone. Other than that and her ankle, sprained in that awkward landing, she was in good shape. Purdue did not wait another moment to call for assistance from one of his aviation companies in Malaysia.
Now they had the good fortune of an extraction, relieved that the next stop on their search would be wonderfully close to home.
☼
Chapter 27
A few days later Deep Sea One received its owner and his expedition members by helicopter. The weather was mild on the North Sea and the group was eager to get on with the quest for the Spear of Destiny. They were welcomed with a feast of breakfast, courtesy of the kitchen staff who had heard about their ordeal.
"Bacon and eggs. Oh, my God, I thought I would never taste bacon and eggs again," Sam groaned in ecstasy, as he piled up the food and drove his fork through it. He shoved the entire forkful in his mouth, to the amusement of Nina and Calisto, who were seated opposite him. Dave chose to have only black coffee and a slice of toast. His pathetic little plate immediately got their attention, compared to their stacked plates.
"Are you pregnant?" Sam asked Purdue, who gave him a silly nod to profess that he was.
"Congratulations, Dave," Nina said, "I knew your whoring would pay off one day."
He gasped as the others roared with laughter. It was a good one. Purdue shook his head and chuckled. It was not far from the truth, actually. The sorts he had previously gotten involved with in his business ventures and other pursuits were guaranteed to fuck him at some point. And many did. Before he became an insanely rich man he had his share of misadventures and close calls by mucking with the wrong people.
"I'm just feeling a bit queasy this morning," he admitted sincerely, "I am nervous about the dive. My control room tells me that there had been a spate of uncharted storms here in the last few days, just coming out of nowhere. It makes the dive quite perilous."
"Do you think the Spear is on the German submarine?" Nina asked. He nodded.
"The map we fed into the geographical mapping system revealed that it was within a two-mile radius from the oil rig, and I'm thinking it is better to commence the search in a place where there were actual traces of it, you know? No use going out in the open sea and hoping for another revelation."
"True. So when are you planning to go?" Nina asked.
Purdue looked at his gluttonous photographer, "As soon as Mr. Cleave has worked his way through that pig."
On the map they had charted and printed, the approximate vicinity of the item was quite vast. It made Purdue nervous and he kept harboring concerns that they might have misinterpreted the signs in the Godwomb, that perhaps the point on the map they worked from was just a coincidence. Never before had he doubted his efforts so much, or himself, for that matter. Maybe it was his most recent close call or finding out that Walter Eickhart, whom he trusted, would not have hesitated to put lead in his skull. For the first time in his adult life, Dave Purdue felt vulnerable.
The group, Purdue, Calisto, Sam, and Nina, decided to start with the Type XXI, entombed at the bottom of the ocean below the platform. Pressed for time, they soon found themselves in the ice-cold murky water outside the carcass of the German sub. While waiting for Sam to open the hatch Purdue took a good look around the vicinity for
anything suspect or interesting that could help them with the location of the relic. All he could see apart from an endless expanse of sand and the colossal tarnished posts of Deep Sea One, where most of the smaller sea creatures had congregated and made their homes against the steel, were dark patches of jagged rock. It reminded him of his missing minisub that they still had not recovered. Such a machine was not easy to be carried away by the current. It had to still be somewhere nearby, perhaps trapped in the trenches of the lopped rocks or even just out of sight on the sandbank. In the opaque water it would not be absurd to imagine that it was just invisible to the eye at this range.
After another fruitless tour of the enormous streamlined submarine, they exited the hatch, electing to link to one another with rope, spreading around the wreck to look for the lost minisub. Calisto headed for the leviathan legs of Deep Sea One, hoping that all sharks were on vacation to a tourist beach. It was perhaps one of the few things on earth that scared her and she made sure to look about her all the time.
She swam through the jungle of iron skeletons spread out over the seabed from years of oil drilling and fallen beams from the towering structures above the surface. It gave her chills. The silent, glacial desert of dead machines gave her a feeling of deep melancholy as she traversed the deserted junk yard, looking for a modern, newly sunken vehicle, which should be easy to tell apart from the other pieces.
Nina made her way to the rocks with Sam, and Purdue searched the flat sandy surface on the other side of the wreck. Where the sandbank plummeted a few meters downward almost instantly, he crossed the edge of it to explore. Deeper he dove to examine the area, determined to find something, anything, as not to have wasted another hour down below. His eyes ran over the obscure line where the distant ocean floor melted into the dull grey and blue of the deep. A lonely land of nothingness lay around Purdue, where only the mounds of current-swept sand broke the monotony of the landscape.
Further to his left there was something in the water, a darker shade of blue outlining a shape he was not familiar with. Again his inquisitiveness dictated his common sense and he headed toward it, propelled by curiosity. As he drew closer, the true size of the object became evident. Its shape made it look deceivingly small from the edge of the sandbank, but now he could see that it was in fact quite large. A tentacle lashed out at his face from nowhere. Purdue got a terrible fright and backed away as rapidly as the inhibiting water would allow. But another flaccid appendage stroked his back and neck, sending him into a raging panic. His furious struggle to get out of danger alarmed his colleagues as his rope tugged madly at their buckles. Quickly all three came to his aid, only to find that he had been attacked by the loose umbilicals of the lost ROV, which lay half buried just a meter or so from some submerged rocks. Purdue was elated that he had recovered his minisub, even more elated that it did not eat him. They tied it down with super tensile rope and headed back up to the oil rig.
"I think I need a new diving suit," Purdue jested about his frightening ordeal before he had realized that it was not a sea monster. The others had a good chuckle about it, but there was a roaming vehicle to retrieve. While Sam was using the laptop to load all his pictures, Nina and Calisto had a cup of tea on the balcony overlooking the east side of the structure, well above the rest of the buildings on the drilling platform.
"Where is Tommy" Purdue asked Darwin as he entered the control room where Liam came to report a blown fuse in one of the boxes.
"He is off for a few days, isn't he, sir?" Darwin asked, perplexed.
"Why? What's wrong with him?" Purdue asked.
"Don't know, sir, we assumed the shift boss informed you," Liam said.
Purdue frowned, "So how the hell are we?—" he stopped. "Can you ready the LARS by yourself or do you need another engineer, Darwin?" Purdue decided to get his priorities in line and concentrate on recovering his minisub before bothering with staff absentees.
"I can do it, sir. Liam will help," Darwin did not have to ask. The old mechanic stepped up and nodded, ready to assist with the activation and navigation of the hydraulic arm that they were going to use.
"Good man," Purdue said with a light slap on Darwin's back and left the control room. "Let me know when it is in the docking bay."
"Yes, sir."
As Purdue vanished from sight, Liam shoved his torso up against Darwin's and whispered, "I told you something fookin' weird's going on 'ere. That hard hat from the other night? I have not seen him at any of the stations and believe me, I checked."
Let's get the ROV up here before we play detective."
"Aye, but I tell ya, something is going on here. Keep your eyes open, son," Liam said with a serious glare of concern.
They located the vehicle at the end of the diving rope and had it brought up carefully with the hydraulic system employed for heavy lifting. Darwin maneuvered the vehicle from the surface toward the platform's docking bay. He looked through the wide observation window as he supervised the recovery. The vehicle had sustained a few dents from the punishment of the rocks and steel beams it was thrown against by the shifting waters. Apart from that it was perfectly intact. Darwin did notice something stuck in the grappler of the submersible, a cubical object, but his attention was momentarily stolen by a visible and sudden change in atmospheric pressure.
"Quick! Get that object out of the ROV's grappler, Liam! Before the ocean reclaims the thing again!" Darwin called to his friend. Liam raced to the docking bay and locked down the submersible in the violent little waves around it, rocking it wildly. From the damaged compartment he cautiously dislodged the wooden chest, which he took into the control room while the staff secured the ROV and quickly closed in the docking area. Mr. Purdue could take a look at it and decide what to do with it.
"Call Mr. Purdue, Darwin," Liam panted, as he placed the chest on the table. Darwin's eyes fell on the wet, dark texture of the antique and at once he could feel the hair on his skin stand erect. It had a presence to it.
"Darwin," Liam urged, and Darwin snapped out of his insidious trance, abandoning the chest from his sight as he turned to call Mr. Purdue on the intercom. Liam heard his colleague calling the boss on the radio, but Darwin's voice began to fade away, as if he was speaking from a distant dimension tucked away in the back of his soul. The mechanic's eyes beheld the intricate symbols carved in the wood a hundred lifetimes ago and in his heart he felt a snaking terror possess him. He did not want to know what was inside, yet he could not resist the urge to pry it open. Outside the ocean was furious for relinquishing the chest and raged in the company of the rain clouds. Thunder spoke its secrets in the faraway place where Liam stood fixed on the object.
"Geez, did you notice how quickly it got cold?" Calisto asked Nina, as the two women fled from the onslaught of the cold wind on the steel balcony where they had been having their tea. For the first time Calisto decided to wear her hair loose and then the wind had to disrupt it.
"Yeah, I don't think I was prepared for that. Look at my nipples!" Nina joked, as she put her hands over her breasts. On the intercom they heard the control room summon Purdue. It did not sound like the usual monotonous announcements they normally heard. There was a shiver in the announcer's voice, denoting that something profound was about to be revealed. Sam emerged from his room, having loaded all his pictures and arranged them accordingly. He stepped out in the corridor behind them. Purdue's sexy bodyguard had her long black tresses free and it snaked over her back and shoulders like a regal fur coat. It softened her considerably and he actually observed her as a beautiful woman now, instead of a wayward mercenary.
"Ladies!" he exclaimed, as he trailed them closely, "What are you running from?"
"Jesus, Sam, don't you take note of anything when you work with your pictures?" Nina snapped. "We are being hammered by another storm."
"I had my earphones in, Dr. Gould," Sam retorted, "that way I don't have to remember that I am stuck on an oil rig in the middle of nowhere with you." He smiled sweetly, as Nina
gave him the finger.
"Don't worry, laddie, I'll make sure your time here is A-grade excitement, all right?" Calisto winked from the other side of Nina.
Sam was about to call her bluff when the announcement came, "Dr. Gould, please come to the control room immediately. Dr. Gould to the control room."
Nina looked very surprised. She looked at Sam, who shrugged, and then she gave Calisto her cup before she hastened to the office where she was summoned.
"I wonder what that is about." Sam said.
"Maybe Mr. Purdue wants her alone," Calisto purred.
Sam would not be surprised. He still remembered the advances Purdue had made numerous times toward Nina and suddenly he almost considered the possibility.
"You are sweet on her. We can see that," the bodyguard smiled without looking at Sam.
"What gave you that idea?" he asked, feeling a bit vulnerable and inept at concealing the fact that she was correct in her assumption.
"In case you have not noticed, I am very perceptive. And you are easy to read," she replied as they turned into the kitchen where she rinsed out the two mugs.
"Do you always read men this well, sergeant?"
"Yes, in fact, I do," she smiled. It was a suspicious little grin that felt more like a warning.
It turned him on in a twisted way, but he played into her hand.
"So, when are you leaving? Tuesday?" he asked, with a less-than-subtle scratch in his throat.
"My contract was for the trip to Nepal this time. I am still waiting to hear when I am leaving," she said, as she dried her hands. "Are you going to miss me?"
Her onyx eyes glinted with confidence as she stared him down intently. She rested her hip against the table and tapped her fingers seductively on the wooden surface. Sam felt his body grow warm at the thoughts she instilled in him and he smiled slyly.
"Of course, I'll miss you. Who else is going to save my ass from the maniacs?" he smiled suavely, and felt compelled to move closer to her. He could smell her hair and her skin. It was intoxicating.
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