The Last Templar ts-1

by Raymond Khoury

  Her doubts were cut short by the appearance of Vance's tall figure. He stepped out from the wheelhouse and joined her at the railing. He seemed annoyed.

  "Nothing yet?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "After this run, we'll have to clear out of here for the day." He stared out, sucking in a chestful of ocean air. "I'm not worried, though. Three more days and we'll have covered the entire search area." He turned to face her and smiled. "We'll find it. It's out there, somewhere. It's just playing hard to get, that's all."

  His gaze was distracted by a faint buzzing in the distance. His eyes narrowed as he scanned the horizon, his brow furrowing when he spotted the source of the noise. Tess followed his eye line and saw it too: a

  tiny dot, a helicopter, skimming the surface of the sea several miles away, on a seemingly parallel heading. Their eyes remained locked on it, tracking it as it followed a straight course before banking away. Within seconds, it was out of sight.

  "That's for us, isn't it?" Tess asked. "They're looking for us."

  "They can't do much out here," Vance said, shrugging. "We're in international waters. Then again, they haven't exactly been playing by die rules, have they?" He glanced up at the bridge, where an engineer was entering the control room. "You know what's funny?"

  "I can't imagine," she said dryly.

  "The crew. There's seven of them, and two of us, which makes nine," he mused. "Nine. Just like Hughes de Payens and his gang. Poetic, don't you think?"

  Tess looked away, failing to find anything even remotely poetic in what they were doing there. "I wonder if they ever had the same doubts."

  Vance arched an eyebrow as he cocked his head and scrutinized her. "You're not having second thoughts, are you?"

  "Aren't you?" She was aware of the tremor in her voice and could see that Vance picked up on it.

  "What we're doing out here, what we might find . . . doesn't it worry you in the least?"

  "Worry?"

  "You know what I mean. Haven't you stopped to think about the shock, the chaos this could bring?"

  Vance scoffed dismissively. "Man is a pitiful creature, Tess. Always desperate to find something or someone to worship, and not just by himself, no—it has to be worshiped by everybody, everywhere, at any cost. It's been the bane of man's existence since the dawn of time . . . Worried about it? I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to liberating millions of people from an oppressive lie.

  What we're doing is a natural step forward in man's spiritual evolution. It'll be the beginning of a new age."

  "You talk about it as though it's going to be greeted with parades and fireworks, but it's the exact opposite, you know that. It's happened before. From the Sassanids to die Incas, history's riddled with civilizations that just collapsed after their gods were discredited."

  Vance was unmoved. "They were civilizations built on lies, on shifting sands—just like ours. But you worry too much. Times have changed. The world today is a bit more sophisticated than that."

  "They were the most advanced civilizations of their time."

  "Give those poor souls out there some credit, Tess. I'm not saying it won't be painless, but . . . they can handle it."

  "What if they can't?"

  He held his palms out in a mock helpless gesture, but there was nothing helpless about his tone. He was dead serious. "So be it."

  Tess's eyes stayed locked on his for a moment before she turned away. She stared out toward the horizon. Wisps of gray clouds seemed to be materializing out of nowhere, and, in the distance, whitecaps were now flecking an otherwise uniformly dark sea.

  Vance leaned against the railing next to her. "I've thought about this a lot, Tess, and, on balance, I have no doubt that we're doing the right thing. Deep down, you know I'm right."

  She didn't doubt he'd thought about it a lot. She knew he'd been consumed by it both academically and personally, but he'd always considered it from a distorted point of view, through a lens that was shattered by the tragic deaths of his loved ones. But had he thought deeply enough about how something like this would affect virtually every living soul on the planet? How it would put into question not just the Christian faith, but the notion of faith itself? How it would be seized upon by the enemies of the Church, how it would polarize people, and how millions of true believers would quite possibly lose the spiritual core that sustained their lives?

  "They'll fight it, you know," she declared, surprised by a hint of hope in her voice. "They'll bring experts out of the woodwork to discredit it, they'll use everything they can think of to prove that it's just a hoax, and given your history ..." She suddenly felt uncomfortable elaborating that point.

  He nodded. "I know," he calmly agreed. "Which is why I'd much prefer if you presented it to the world."

  Tess felt the blood drain from her face. She stared at him, taken aback by his suggestion. "Me . . . ?"

  "Of course. After all, it's as much your discovery as it is mine, and, as you said, given that my recent behavior hasn't been exactly—" he paused, searching for the most appropriate term "—praiseworthy ..."

  Before she could formulate an answer, she heard the big ship's engines wind down and felt it suddenly slow to a crawl before turning into the breeze. She spotted Rassoulis emerging from the bridge and, in the swirling fog of her mind, she heard him calling out to diem. Vance kept his eyes locked on her for a moment before turning to the captain, who was gesturing excitedly for them to join him and yelling what she thought sounded like, "We've got something."

  Chapter 73

  Standing quietly at the rear of the bridge, Reilly watched as De Angelis and the Karadeniz's skipper, a stocky man by the name of Karakas who had dense black hair and a bushy mustache, leaned over the patrol boat's radar display and selected their next target.

  There was no shortage of them. The dark screen was lit up with dozens of green blips. Some of them had small, digital alphanumeric codes tagged on, which indicated a ship with a modern transponder. Those were easier to identify and rule out, using Coast Guard and shipping databases, but they were few and far between. Overwhelmingly, the contacts on the screen were just anonymous blips coming from the hundreds of fishing boats and sailing craft that crowded this very popular strip of coastline. Figuring out which one of them was carrying Vance and Tess, Reilly knew, wouldn't be easy.

  This was his sixth day at sea, which, as far as Reilly was concerned, was already plenty. It had become quickly obvious to him that he wasn't a sea dog, not by a long shot, but at least the sea had been reasonably well behaved since they'd started their search and, mercifully, the nights were spent on dry land. Each day, they would sail out of Marmaris at the break of dawn and work their way up and down the coastline from the Gulf of

  Hisaronu to the area south of the Twelve Islands. The Karadeniz, a SAR-33 class patrol boat, gleaming white with a wide, slanted red stripe on its hull next to the words Sahil Gvenlik in bold, unmissable letters— the Turkish Coast Guard's official name—was lightning quick and reasonably comfortable and was able to cover a surprisingly large patch of sea over the course of a day. Other boats based at Fethiye and Antalya were scouring the waters further east. Agusta A-109 helicopters were also involved, performing visual sweeps at low altitude and alerting the speedboats to promising sightings.

  The coordination between the various air, sea, and land components of the search was almost flawless; the Turkish Coast Guard had extensive experience in patrolling these busy waters.

  Relations between Greece and Turkey were always less than cordial, and the close proximity of the former's Dodecanese islands was constantly a source of fishing and tourism disputes. In addition, the narrow strip of sea separating the two countries was favored by human traffickers of desperate migrants trying to reach Greece and the rest of the European Union from the still non-EU Turkey.

  Still, there was a lot of sea to cover, and, with most of the traffic consisting of innocuous pleasure craft without anyone on radio watch, sifting th
rough them was proving to be a laborious, grueling endeavor.

  As the radar operator pored over some charts next to his screen and the radioman compared notes with the crew of one of the helicopters, Reilly stepped away from the screen and looked out the windshield of the Karadeniz. He was surprised to see some nasty weather lying to the south. A billowing wall of dark clouds lay just above the horizon, separated by a thin strip of bright yellowish light. It looked somewhat unreal.

  He could almost feel Tess's presence, and, knowing that she was out there somewhere, frustratingly within reach and yet beyond it at the same time, grated at him. He wondered where she was, and what she was doing at that very moment. Had she and Vance found the Falcon Temple already?

  Were they already on their way to . . . where? What would they do with "it" if they found it? How would they announce their find to the world? He'd thought a lot about what he would tell her when he did catch up with her, but, surprisingly, the initial anger he had felt at being abandoned had long since abated. Tess had her reasons. He didn't agree with them, but her ambition was an intrinsic part of her and helped make her what she was.

  He looked across the cockpit and out the opposite side of the boat, and what he saw unsettled him. Far to the north of their position, the sky was also darkening ominously. The sea had taken on a gray, marbled look, and whitecaps littered the distant swell. He noticed the helmsman glance across to another man on the bridge, who Reilly assumed was the first officer, and indicate the phenomenon with a nod of the head. They seemed to be sandwiched between two opposite fronts of bad weather. The storms appeared to be moving in tandem, converging on them. Again, Reilly looked at the helmsman who now appeared a bit ruffled, as did the first officer, who approached Karakas and was clearly discussing it with him.

  The skipper consulted the weather radar and the barometer and exchanged a few words with the two officers. Reilly glanced over at De An-gelis, who picked up on it and translated for him.

  "I think we might have to head back earlier than planned today. We seem to have not one, but two rather nasty weather fronts, both of them heading our way and fast." The monsignor looked at Reilly uncertainly, then arched an eyebrow. "Sound familiar?"

  Reilly had already made the association before De Angelis had mentioned it. It was uncomfortably close to what Aimard had described in his letter. He noticed that Plunkett, who was out smoking a cigarette on deck, was eyeing the gathering storm with some concern. Turning to the cockpit, he saw that the two officers he'd been watching were now intent on a batch of dials and monitors. This and their frequent glances toward the converging banks of dark clouds told Reilly that the storms were making both men uneasy. Just then, the radar operator called out to the skipper and uttered something in Turkish. Karakas stepped over to the console, as did De Angelis. Reilly tore his eyes away from the storm front and joined them.

  According to the skipper's clipped translation, the radar operator was walking them through a chart onto which he had plotted the movements of some vessels he had been tracking. He was particularly interested in one of the ships, which had a curious navigation pattern. It had spent a noticeable time sailing up and down a narrow corridor of sea. This, in itself, wasn't unusual. It could easily be a fishing boat trawling an area favored by its captain. Several other blips behaved in the exact same way. But the radar operator noted that, whereas over the last couple of days a contact, which he believed could well be the same ship, would spend a couple of hours navigating up and down this particular patch of sea before heading off and trawling elsewhere, the vessel he was now watching had been stationary for the last two hours. Furthermore, of the four vessels in the area, three were now moving out, presumably because they'd spotted die approaching storms. The fourth—the contact in question— wasn't budging.

  Reilly leaned in for a closer look. He could see that the three other contacts on the screen had indeed altered course. Two of them were heading for the Turkish mainland, the third toward the Greek island of Rhodes.

  De Angelis's brow furrowed as he absorbed the information. "It's them," he said with chilling assurance as Plunkett came indoors. "And if they're not moving, it's because they've found what they're looking for." He turned to Karakas, his eyes hardening. "How far are they?

  Karakas scanned the screen with expert eyes. "About forty nautical miles. In this sea, I'd say two—two and a half hours away, maybe. But it's going to get worse. We might have to turn back before we get to them. The barometer readings are falling very quickly, I've never seen anything like it."

  De Angelis didn't miss a beat. "I don't care. Send in a chopper to have a closer look and get us over there as fast as you can."

  Chapter 74

  The camera glided through the forbidding darkness, past streaming galaxies of plankton that lit up the screen before quickly sailing out of the glare of its spotlight.

  The images from the ROV unfurled before a breathless audience in the control room of the Savanna, a cramped space situated behind the vessel's bridge. Vance and Tess were standing, leaning over the shoulders of Rassoulis and two technicians who were seated before a small bank of monitors. To the left of the monitor showing the images from Don's camera, a smaller GPS positioning monitor displayed the current location of the ship as it circled and doubled back on its course, trying to hold its position against a surprisingly strong current. A smaller screen on the right showed a computerized representation of the sonar scan, a big circle with concentric bands of blue, green, and yellow; another, a pixeled compass, showed their heading as just off due south. But no one was giving those monitors more than a fleeting, occasional glance. Their eyes were all riveted onto the central monitor, the one showing the images from the ROV's camera. They watched in rapt silence as the bottom came rushing up, the pixeled reading in the corner of the screen quickly closing in on the 173 meters that the depth sounder of the mother ship was showing.

  At 168 meters, the starry flecks grew thicker. At 171 meters, a couple of jerking crayfish scurried out of the light, and then, at 173 meters, the screen was suddenly flooded by a silent burst of yellow light. The ROV had landed.

  Dorr's highly protective guardian, a Corsican engineer by the name of Pierre Attal, was locked in concentration as he used a joystick and a small keyboard to manipulate his robotic ward. He reached for a small trackball at the edge of the keyboard and, responding to his fingers' orders, the camera rotated on itself, panning across the seabed. Like the images from a Mars probe, the pictures showed an eerie, inviolate world. All around the robotic visitor was nothing but a flat expanse of sand that disappeared into a stygian darkness.

  Tess's skin was tingling with guarded anticipation. She couldn't help but feel excited, although she knew they weren't necessarily there yet, not by any means. The low-frequency, side-scan sonar only provided the rough position of any promising target; the ROV then had to be deployed, its high-frequency sonar allowing the eventual pinpointing and examination of those sites. She knew the ocean floor underneath the Savarona dropped as deep as 250 meters in places and was covered with scattered coral reefs, many the size they'd expect the Falcon Temple to be. The sonar scans weren't enough to distinguish the wreck from these natural mounds, which was where the magnetometers came into play. Their readings would help detect the wreck's residual iron, and, although they were carefully calibrated—Rassoulis and his team had calculated that after seven hundred years of saltwater corrosion, there would be, at most, a thousand pounds of iron left in the Falcon Temple's remains—they still carried the risk of triggering false alarms due to natural pockets of geomagnetism or, more commonly, from more recent wrecks.

  She watched as the procedure she had witnessed twice in recent days unfurled again. Using the most minute of tugs on the joystick, Attal con-fidentiy guided the ROV across the seafloor. Every minute or so, he would set it down in another cloudburst of sand. He would then hit a button that would cause its pinger to initiate a 360-degree sweep of its immediate surroundings. The team wou
ld carefully study the resulting scan before Attal would be back at the controls, firing the small robot's hydraulic thrusters and propelling it forward on its silent quest.

  Attal had repeated the exercise over half a dozen times before an inchoate patch appeared in the corner of the screen. Guiding the ROV to the spot, he initiated another sonar scan. The screen took a couple of seconds to record the results before Tess saw the patch coalesce into an oblong pinkish shape, beckoning to her from its blue surroundings.

  Tess glanced at Vance, who met her eyes calmly.

  Without looking up at them, Rassoulis said to Attal, "Let's get a closer look."

  The ROV was on the move again, skimming the bottom of the seafloor like an undersea hovercraft as Attal guided it expertly to its target. At the next ping, the pink shape grew more distinct along its edges.

  "What do you think?" Vance asked.

  Rassouhs glanced up at Vance and at Tess. "The magnetometer reading's a bit high, but ..." He pointed a finger at the image on the scan. "You see how it's squared off at this end and pinched in over here at the other end?" He raised a hopeful eyebrow. "It doesn't look like a rock to me."

  The room fell silent as the ROV moved in. Tess's eyes were locked on the screen as the camera floated over a cloud of sea plants that swayed almost imperceptibly in the desolate waters. As it dropped back down and hugged the sand again, Tess felt her pulse quicken. At the edge of the ROV's beam, something was coming into view. Its edges were too angular, its curves too regular. It looked man-made.

  Within seconds, the unmistakable remains of a ship became discernible. The robot banked over the site, revealing the skeleton of a ship, its wooden ribs hollowed out by teredo worms.