“About a quarter the speed you can pull ‘em off,” Drake observed drily.
Alicia ignored his comment, finally ready, and reached out for her air tanks. The group then spent another few minutes climbing into the Zodiac Hurricane RIB—rigid hull inflatable boat—and waiting for Kearns to make ready.
“All right,” he said. “We’re just taking a look here. Nothing too invasive. If this lost kingdom is down there we’ll see the signs. If the enemy have beaten us to it we’ll see the signs. Reconnaissance and verification mission only. Understood?”
Drake nodded for all of them, already staring out to sea. Dahl shouted to those that remained on the dock, ensuring Hibiki and Mai remained vigilant, but with everything that was happening between those two and Chika and Grace at the moment they barely registered his call. The Swede stared over at Drake with a worried expression.
“Sorry, mate, but all that shit between them? It needs sorting or we’re going to be looking at casualties.”
Drake bit back the snappy comeback. Dahl was right and he dreaded to imagine the effect of losing another member of the SPEAR team. “I’m open to suggestions,” he said finally. “But with the four of them it’s like picking through an SAS obstacle course loaded with mines. Naked.”
Alicia caught the final word and looked over. “What?”
Drake shook his head. “Life used to be simpler than this didn’t it?”
Dahl shrugged. “Simple usually means no ties, no family and no real love. I prefer complicated.”
The Zodiac began to rumble as its engines started and then powered forward through the slight swell. Its higher-than-normal sides protected the occupants from little of the spray and wind but the roomy interior was adequate for their gear. Spluttering from a faceful of spray, Drake remembered he hadn’t dived seriously in many years and put his mind to recalling the basics. Kearns, at the front of the boat, used a satnav system to zero in on preinstalled coordinates.
As the docks grew smaller, the wind whipped up, and they neared their destination in the middle of the Taiwan Strait, Drake held on tight and caught the leader’s attention.
“One thing bothers me,” he shouted. “Well, more than one thing, but this the most. Something’s down there. We all know that. But how can anyone be certain it’s Mu?”
Kearns made a noise. “Shit, how the hell do I know? Miss Jaye, though, she explained a lot of this whilst we were waiting for you guys.” He stressed the word “waiting” just a little. “First, like you say, something’s down there. Second, they now have these ancient, once undecipherable tablets to back ‘em up. Third, can anyone in government ever afford to be wrong?”
Dahl laughed knowingly.
“Nah, didn’t think so. Fourth, let’s tip their hand and see what gives. Fifth, they also have the Peking Man fossil on the table and that boy’s as real as they come. It all adds to the credibility, see? Add to that the fact that these tricky bastards inside the Chinese government all seem to want to go to war with Taiwan then you can see why the US is worried. Any excuse, Miss Jaye said.” He spread his hands. “And here we are.”
“Reconnaissance and verification,” Dahl said. “Nothing ventured nothing gained.”
“Easy in, easy out. Nobody loses,” Kearns said.
“Can we stop with the clichés?” Alicia moaned. “Friggin’ Navy Seals.”
“Pride of the Navy,” one of the men—Sims—spoke up.
A sudden explosion shook the skies, making Drake almost tip out of the boat. When he looked up he saw a streak of silver flying overhead, a jet fighter with loaded missiles.
“What the hell?”
“That’s a Taiwan military jet,” Kearns said. “Now I don’t believe in coincidence and they can’t have spotted us, so I’m guessing the Taiwan government have figured something out. Maybe they were tipped off. But when they start doing flyovers like that—the Chinese see it as a threat and a challenge. We’d best make this quick, guys.”
Drake sat up straighter as the boat slowed. A blue horizon stretched ahead, China so far away its coastline appeared only as a haze. Blue seas lay to all sides, empty of marine traffic and seemingly deserted. He assumed that would not actually be the case. If the Pythians were laying claim to this find they would be keeping it under a twenty-four-hour watch. Kearns was wasting no time, already strapping into his air tanks and readying his face mask. The Seals checked their rebreathers.
“We’re using the buddy system,” Kearns said. “We’re all shipmates here, so Drake you’ll be mine. Now pair off.”
Moments later the group were tipping themselves into the water. Drake breathed through the mouth, employing a deep and slow breathing technique to help cope with the extra demands on his lungs. The divers limited their descent, allowing their ears and other senses to adjust as the underwater environment slowly darkened. Drake equalized his ears as the pressure built, seeing Dahl and Alicia do the same. He decided to check the comms unit.
“All well over there?”
Alicia’s head turned in slow motion. “Be better once I get you outta my head. First in Kobe and now here.”
“Not what you used to say,” Drake reminisced.
“Don’t slow the ascent,” Kearns’ voice interrupted.
Drake’s flippered feet fell further, drifting down at negative buoyancy. The world around him was a brilliant blue and above the light was bright white and suffused. Descending was a truly different world. Bubbles rose all around his colleagues, racing each other toward the surface and certain expiration. A shoal of silver fish flicked past. Darkness beckoned below and Drake fell into the heart of it.
“We’re dead on the coordinates.” Kearns checked a waterproof device. “Passing forty meters.”
Drake again equalized his ears, slowing his descent. This wasn’t exactly a technical dive but nevertheless still had to be conducted by the book as they were exceeding the recommended scuba diving depth. The Seals, he noted, carried numerous bits of equipment around their waists, including torches, cameras, sediment-hoovers and weapons. None of them ever stopped checking equipment and observing their surroundings.
At last the darkness enveloped them and finally they reached their depth at seventy meters. Kearns’ feet brushed the sediment at the bottom, not landing too fast, and Drake was soon to follow, feeling an odd sensation as he set foot on flat ground far below the surface of the sea.
Alicia wobbled, drifting before setting herself straight.
“Bit out of your depth, love?” Drake quipped with a laugh.
“Har, har, your one-liners used to be as good as DATY, now they’re about as funny as VD.”
“Oh aye? What the heck are you on about?”
“And you can stop your Yorkshire-ishness right there. It ain’t cute. And you’ve never heard of Dining At The Y? No wonder Mai’s become a frustrated bitch.”
“Hey!”
Alicia kicked off the bottom and tilted, waving her flippered feet at his face. Kearns swam to the right and Drake followed. The Seal team leader spoke. “A few miles that way,” he indicated China, “and you would reach the Yonaguni Monument, a popular tourist attraction for divers. Who’d have thought this would end up being so close to it?”
“Makes sense to me,” Alicia muttered.
“Nothing to see yet,” Drake observed.
“Then you’re not looking.” Kearns surprised him and slowed. He reached out a gloved hand, brushing at a slab-like, moss-covered object on the sea bottom. “See that? Now look here.” He scissored his legs, swimming around the side of the slab.
Drake followed, now seeing the stone staircase cut into the black rock. Six risers high it rose, each descending step wider than the other, ending at the sea bed. Kearns swam lower and brushed at the accumulated sand and sediment. Drake saw sharp little flakes drifting away.
“Goes deeper,” Kearns said. “See?” As his fingers cleared the silt more of the staircase became apparent.
“How much sediment is there likely to
be?” Drake asked.
“At the bottom of the sea? That’s like asking if you’d like to live one, one-thousand-year life or ten one-hundred-year lives, but in a storm-tossed, windy environment like the one we have above it could be a meter a year, maybe more.”
“And they reckon this place is about ten thousand years old.”
“Big dig, eh?”
Drake began to understand now why the Pythians might be ransoming the lost kingdom to China. He didn’t understand how, but the why was clear. The task of uncovering it was impossible, even the task of exploration practically unthinkable. Having said that, China was the world’s most influential emerging superpower.
“Castle walls.” Kearns swam even further. “See the red walls? An ancient castle already discovered in the 1980s. And yet—nobody knows. Did you know?”
Drake shook his head, then realized Kearns probably couldn’t see the gesture behind his mask. “No. Why?”
“They’re pretty much unexplainable. Six- to ten-thousand-year-old, mortar-laced castle walls under the South China Sea? Thirty to seventy meters deep? At least five discovered by sonar graph? According to Miss Jaye the sonar graphs also showed many protrusions near the walls, indicating alleys, staircases and other walls.”
Drake saw where the man, through Hayden, was going. Back to the old “out of place” artefact impasse. Ten thousand years had passed since this place became submerged. But none of that mattered now.
Through the others they began to get a feel for the size of the area, the depth and width of the walls and what other objects lay in the vicinity. Kearns noticed that several silt piles had been recently built.
“Somebody else has been here,” he said. “A short time ago. Either they were doing a recce, like us, or . . .”
Drake stopped what he was doing. “Or what?”
“Or they left something behind. What the hell is that?”
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Dudley grinned from ear to ear, a smile so wide it threatened to split open the corners of his mouth, turning him into an evil clown.
“Aye, aye,” he cackled. “The gang is all here. Time to die, I tink.”
His brother, Malachi, stood staunch as ever by his side. “You’d better ring yer Pythian mates first, Callan. Them boys gonna make us richer than the Queen of England.”
Dudley nodded knowingly. “Aye they are,” he said, taking out a slimline smartphone and pressing a speed dial preset. All seven members of the 27-Club stood around a window on the fourth floor of an apartment building half a mile away from Hsinchu Harbor, powerful binoculars either set to their eyes or resting at their chests. The Pythians’ plan had always seemed masterful; now it was also proving inspired.
Dudley waited for the call to connect, imagining what he could do to the SPEAR team right at that very moment, then wishing he could watch the devastating real-time effects. His eyes flicked momentarily to the wireless device that sat on the otherwise bare, rickety table behind them.
An explosive daisy chain? Fuuuuuuuck! The thought made him want to dance for joy. Even more, it made him want to act on impulse.
Luckily, the call was answered on the next ring. “Yes?”
“I have me finger on the trigger. Are we a go?”
Tyler Webb’s sharp intake of breath said not. “Wait, just wait. The Chinese agreed to the Peking Man ransom only an hour ago. I have men en route now to acquire the Z-boxes from them.”
“Men?” Dudley repeated, looking around. “But we’re all here.”
“I do have other men,” Webb said caustically. “I’m sure you understand that your methods, whilst they do bring me great joy, have their time and place. A twitchy, strained meeting between the Chinese Politburo’s closest guard and the Pythians’ armed representatives is not that place.”
Dudley cackled. “We’d just blow ‘em to hell and take the feckin’ boxes.”
“Quite. The good news though is very good news. The Peking Man has effectively purchased our Z-boxes. The Chinese have a healthy interest in Mu, but it’s an interest trumped by their higher aspirations. I have to say it is as we all thought.”
“Taiwan knows too?”
“They do now. But too late,” Webb said with a smile in his voice. “And they won’t be able to deny that they knew about Mu. Wait . . .” Webb sounded like he was taking another call.
Dudley stared impatiently at the handset, wondering if he should just throw it out the window and get down to using the wireless device. Then Malachi, reading his brother’s mind, put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“Remember, brother. Our plan. Make sure them boxes are comin’ here.”
Dudley nodded, memory jogged. “The Z-boxes,” he said into the dormant speaker. “When will they be here?”
“Good news,” Webb came back on the line, “my men have successfully exchanged the Z-boxes and are on their way to you now. Please get them here as soon as possible. And Mr. Dudley . . . ?”
“Aye?”
“You can detonate that device now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Drake swam over to Kearns, perturbed at the Seal team leader’s obvious horror. The man appeared to be quite simply dumbstruck, not an emotion normally associated with any Special Forces soldier. Kicking his flippered feet he closed the gap in seconds, twisting his body to glide in.
“What ya got, mate?”
“Explosive device,” Kearns said after a moment. “And it looks like it’s been daisy chained.”
Drake felt his blood run hotter. “What?”
Through the comms shouts of disbelief went up.
Kearns swam as close as he dared, Drake at his side. Together they peered at the small, black circular object, noting the blinking red light on its cover.
“The positioning.” Kearns indicated the nearby underwater structures, mostly buried beneath the sea’s accumulated sediment. He flicked his body sideways, following his own circuit and soon unearthed another device, its light also blinking. “The mad, crazy bastards have mined this entire area to explode and it’ll take your lost kingdom with it.”
Drake stared into the dark depths of the ocean. “I don’t see how they can detonate. That thing’s wireless and wireless signals don’t work down here.”
Kearns held up a hand. “You clearly haven’t been keeping yourself up to date. Whilst it’s true that radio waves carry the wireless signals and are sluggish in water, cutting edge research has developed a prototype that relies mostly on sound waves. A large underwater modem emits chirps that can carry almost a mile. That means—”
“All they need is a boat up top,” Drake cut him off abruptly. “Oh crap, are those lights flashing faster?”
“Move! The good news is that those underwater modems are slower than the old dial-up systems. We have a few seconds.”
“Seconds!”
Drake kicked out, angling his body away from the chain of devices. Was this what the Pythians wanted? To blow up the ancient civilization that they had just found? Had the Chinese refused their offer?
What was going on?
Alicia’s black shape darted past, sleek as a seal. Dahl was already scissor-kicking upwards, bubbles streaking all around him. The Seal team ascended in their wake, but then Kearns drew them up short.
“Slow down, people. Ain’t no quick escape here unless you want the decompression to kill you. Move sideways as fast as you can to escape the blast radius.”
Drake quelled a surge of horror. Depending on the number of devices—and judging by the first two’s distance apart they were going to add up to a shitload—it was unlikely that they would escape the blast radius.
“Move!” Kearns cried, already swimming for his life.
*
Hibiki took a phone call, the number revealing it was his contact within the Chinese Politburo. Heart thumping, he assumed this must be regarding the outcome of the special emergency meeting in Beijing.
“Guys,” he said. “Sorry, I have to take this.”
>
Only Yorgi acknowledged his words. Mai and Grace were nestled together in an intense heart to heart—which to Hibiki’s light relief was now actually producing one or two genuine smiles—and Chika was perched on the edge of a tractor tire, staring out to sea.
A sharp voice came through the handset. “Hello?”
“Yes, I’m here. Sorry.” Hibiki heard a sound like rolling thunder behind him and frowned at the skies. The clouds were white and the heavens were blue, not stormy and gray.
“You must act quickly or we’re all doomed. My government . . . I am shocked by the arrogant greed of my government.”
“What is it? What have they done?”
“Placed themselves before our history. Put avarice and desire before our citizens. Government is but a ravenous glutton, consuming the energies of its greatest natural resource—its public, its society. We are doomed.”
“I don’t understand.” Hibiki almost ducked as thunder cracked again in the bright blue skies.
Mai glanced straight up from her tête-a-tête with Grace. “Oh no.”
“Dai, listen closely to me. We don’t have much time and but a small chance. The inner circle have decided they want Mu destroyed so that they finally have a clear-cut reason to go to war with Taiwan. It’s happening now. They’ve wanted this for years and its finally happening.” The man sounded like he wanted to cry.
“War? War? Why?”
“Check your history later, but for now use every resource you have to try to delay it. Every resource! If China attack Taiwan, imagine what the US will do in retaliation and then . . .”
Hibiki didn’t need it explaining. The thunder cracked once more above his head and finally he saw its source—fighter planes bearing the flag of Taiwan. They were streaking toward the Taiwan Strait.
“Don’t freak out on me, Dai. One more thing quickly—they also ransomed a historical item today. The Peking Man for something called a Z-box. I don’t know what that is but you can bet your life it’s hugely important.”
The Lost Kingdom (Matt Drake Book 10) Page 18
