Knight Tenebrae

by Julianne Lee

  Knight Tenebrae

  Book One

  Julianne Lee

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  March, 2012

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-238-9

  Copyright © 2006 Julianne Lee

  For

  Ginjer Buchanan

  Prologue

  One last dive, just to make certain. The dig was finished, the equipment returned to the ship along with the find and he figured there wouldn’t be anything more, but needed one more dive just to make sure. The expedition had been so fruitful, and so many intact objects found in the silt at the bottom of the firth, he couldn’t pack up and leave without taking a last look around for a missed filleting knife or clothing buckle. So while his crew began preparations to return to port he slipped over the side and angled gently down into the dimness of the water.

  The Firth of Clyde was a wonderfully complex place, wide and fed by many rivers. It connected with the Sound of Bute, off the Kilbrannan Sound, and was guarded by islands all about, leaving it clear in some places and impossible in others. That the boat had been found at all had been a miracle. And thank God they had been the ones to locate it. He smiled to himself as he thought of the many trinkets and artifacts his crew had recovered from the fishing boat sunk here centuries ago, not to mention the intact hull of the boat itself. Silt from the river had covered and preserved the hull from complete destruction. Much study would be made of the boat structure and everyday items found here by the river mouth. It had been an incredible find, and his career could he made by it. Would be made. The bright future before him now was nearly blinding, and a smile formed around his mouthpiece.

  At the bottom of the shifting water not far from shore, shallow enough to see without artificial light, he began sifting through the loose bottom at the spot where the boat had been. Carefully and slowly, to minimize the inevitable clouding, he felt his way here and there among the rocks and mud already disturbed by the raising of the ancient boat. His regulator blowing bubbles in steady rhythm, and his heart keeping time with the breathing, he went methodically, left to right, then backward, right to left, his hands obscured beneath the swirling mud.

  Then he frowned. There was something under here. Not rock, for it was too smooth and even. Unnatural. And there shouldn’t be rock here in any case; there should be only more silt. He moved a hand slowly over it, and found the thing to be curved. Not curved like a river rock, nor like a stream bed with dips and channels worn away by running water, but perfect. A perfect long, smooth, convex curve. Another boat hull? Excitement surged through him. Another, older boat? It wasn’t unheard of. A spot risky to navigate was likely to claim more than one craft. One hand dug, dislodging hardened silt to widen the exposure of the surface beneath, and amid the clouding he caught a glimpse of writing.

  Writing? A dark-on-dark character came into sight for an instant, then was gone. Like a capital L. But it was once again beneath the silt, and he wasn’t certain it had not been his imagination.

  He pulled his hand back and looked, but the cloudiness obscured. As he waited for it all to settle and be carried off with the current, he listened to his own breathing and tried to keep from gulping his air while a queer, panicky feeling rose. He backed off, flippers waving lazily and hands spread for balance, and he hovered in the dim, rippled light from the surface. The hole he’d made in the silt cleared, and the L was still there, accompanied by a lowercase t. Slowly the topography of the area before him came into view. He backed off some more, and what he saw made his heart pound in his ears. A line this way, a curve over there, and the thing popped into his vision like an item in a “What’s wrong with this picture?” puzzle. His mind raced, unable to completely grasp what his eyes told him he must be seeing. It was huge. And impossible.

  For the shape he saw under the silt here in the Firth of Clyde, directly beneath the spot where a Scottish fishing boat had lain undisturbed and mostly intact for more than five centuries, was, unless he missed his guess, that of a modern military fighter jet, and he was hovering over the cockpit.

  Chapter One

  “Good morning, ma’am. I’m Lieutenant Alexander MacNeil. I’m told you wish to speak to me.” Alex stood nearly at attention, conscious of the appraising look from the young woman before him. She stood from the wardroom table to greet him with a gentle smile and an outstretched hand.

  “Lieutenant. Thank you for seeing me.” Her voice was low, but soft, lurking beneath the tinny sounds of silverware and crockery about the room. She shook his hand, and they sat opposite each other at the Formica-covered table. She was English, and pronounced his rank “leftenant,” a habit he found less than enchanting. She was a newspaper reporter, and he was there to give an interview that already was making him uncomfortable, for she was staring at his eyes. He shut them against the intrusion. Women thought his green eyes “mesmerizing,” and they always stared. When he opened them again, she was busy with her notebook as if she hadn’t been staring at all.

  Another reason he wasn’t sanguine about this conversation was that saying the wrong thing in print would backlash in ways he couldn’t possibly predict. The guys who had encountered her about the ship during her stay on board said she was a pretty weird chick, and Alex didn’t figure he wanted to field any weirdness from her while he was speaking on the record.

  However, on sight of her he began to think perhaps the risk might be worthwhile, for she was pretty in a tall, dark, angular sort of way. Extremely easy on the eyes, and soft in all the right places. He guessed he could stand to talk to her for a few minutes, particularly since he was under orders to do so.

  She took a deep breath and began. “My name is Lindsay Pawlowski. I imagine your captain told you why I’m here.”

  “My information is you’re writing a fluff piece and want to talk to a pilot about what it’s like to fly a fighter jet.” She’d been on the ship since it left port in Virginia, and they were now just past the Azores on their way to the Mediterranean.

  A bemused smile touched her lips and irritation slipped into her voice. “Well, actually, we have our own jet fighters in the Royal Navy, not to mention the RAF, and so we don’t really need to annoy you Americans with that sort of thing. Also, it’s hardly a fluff piece. Unless, of course, you in the American navy consider yourselves exceptionally fluffy compared to the RAF.”

  A frown tightened his brow and he pressed his fingers to his face to get rid of it. If she kept that up, eventually he wouldn’t give a damn how attractive she was. He stood. “Would you care for some coffee, ma’am?”

  “Might there be tea?”

  He nodded. “Certainly, ma’am.” Tea. Of course. He excused himself and went to get it. At the other end of the wardroom a few other aviators, who had just awakened and were there for breakfast, sat at a table before bowls of cereal. Jake was there, hunched over his breakfast and struggling to look like he wasn’t listening in, and Alex looked back at the reporter to decide whether she was out of earshot.

  Nope, too close. So he maintained silence. Jake was Alex’s Naval Flight Officer—”Guy In Back”—and caught Alex’s eye with a roll of his eyes at the reporter. Alex discreetly shrugged one shoulder in reply to Jake’s unasked query, and proceeded on his mission. On the way back from the counter with the coffee and tea, he swallowed as much of his coffee as he could get down without burning himself.

  Bolstered and well caffeinated by shipboard road tar, he delivered the tea, sat back in the rickety, aluminum tube chair opposite the reporter, and continued the conversation. “With all due respect, ma’am, though it’s no bother to talk with you, if this isn’t for a fluff piece and you’d rather be talking to a British pilot, why are you here?”

  “You’ve not he
ard about the recent find in Scotland?” She sipped her tea and didn’t grimace at it. A point in her favor.

  Alex shook his head and took another careful sip of his coffee as he watched her over the rim of his cup.

  “A few months ago there was found an F-18 under some silt at the bottom of the Firth of Clyde and nobody knows how it got there.”

  He grunted and leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “So...you’re here to find out if we’ve misplaced a plane?”

  Now she smiled, and it was a broad one. Her mouth was wide and her lips full, and her teeth were very white. Suddenly she looked too young to be a reporter. “No, actually, I’m here for background on the American navy. I’ve discussed it with your captain, and some others of your senior officers, and they told me I could talk to you as a typical F-18 pilot. Although, I expect the fact that you have the best flying record on the ship makes you rather atypical.” A note of cynicism had crept into her voice, but she smiled brightly again and the impression went away. “Also, I’m told you’re quite the spit-and-polish sort of fellow.”

  Alex turned out the toe of one brown shoe for a look, and decided it was a good job, but still nothing remarkable. “I polish my shoes, ma’am, for the same reason you brush your hair. Because it looks bad if I don’t. My father is an admiral; I was raised to be this way.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a criticism.”

  He took a long sip of coffee, then set the cup on the table and gazed blandly at her.

  Finally, she said, “Very well, your father is an admiral.” She made a note in a small spiral book on the table before her. “If I know my American accents, I’d say you sound like a Southerner. From Texas, perhaps?”

  All the Brits Alex ever met thought he was from Texas. “Nope. Born in California, and raised everywhere except Texas. My mother is from Kentucky. When I was a kid I wanted to be a cowboy. Maybe that’s why I sound the way I do.”

  “Ah.” She made another note, and consulted something else she’d jotted on another page. “Graduated from the United States Naval Academy.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Honors?”

  “No.” One corner of his mouth lifted in a grin. “Does that mean you don’t want to talk to me now?”

  That brought another smile from her, and he liked that. Note to self: keep her laughing.

  “Why did you want to join the military?”

  “I told you. It’s what I was raised for. It’s who I am.”

  “You never considered anything else?”

  “Well, there was that cowboy thing.” Her smile made him smile, too.

  “Political ambition?”

  He shrugged. “My father is the one in the family with political sensibilities. For me, it’s a job. The pay is good, I see the world, I get shot at every once in a while. Keeps me on my toes.”

  “You’ve flown in combat?”

  He nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “Where?”

  “Kosovo.”

  “What did you do there?”

  “Most notably, I made a SAM site go away.” In response to her puzzled frown he added, “Surface to Air Missile launch site.”

  “You made it ‘go away?’”

  “That’s what things do when you hit them with a missile.” He stared into his cup and waited for the next question. He knew what was coming; he could smell it.

  “How did that feel?” There it was.

  Alex sighed and looked at her. “It felt like my job.”

  “To kill people?”

  “To follow lawful orders. It’s what I do.”

  “Who you are.”

  Now he looked at her closely. Her dark blue, nearly almond-shaped eyes had softened. Widened. They had lost the look of challenge, and that had never happened before, no matter who was asking that question. It was almost as if she might be able to grasp the truth of what it was like to kill someone, and that suddenly made him uncomfortable. So he shrugged and said, “It’s what we FAGs are paid to do, ma’am.”

  That made her blink, and she stuttered for a moment while her cheeks blossomed red. Finally she said. “Perhaps my understanding of American slang is faulty.”

  “Fighter Attack Guy. I’m a Hornet driver.”

  “Oh.” She sighed and laughed, and now looked at him with new eyes. That gave him a grin, and he took another sip of coffee to hide it. She said, “Nothing lacking in you for self-confidence, is there?”

  “No.” If there were, he sure wouldn’t admit it to her.

  A moment passed as she seemed to gawk at her notes while her blush calmed, then another moment. Finally, he said, “What’s the deal with that plane they found? Somebody steal it?”

  Her voice brightened, relieved to have the interview back on track. “Don’t know. Surprisingly, it was an archaeologist who found it. They think it’s very old. As in centuries.” One vague hand waved in a gesture of approximation.

  Alex sat back and blinked. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. As I believe you Americans say, I shit you not. By the levels of corrosion and deterioration of materials, and by the fact that it was found beneath a sunken fishing boat that had lain undisturbed for a very long time, its discoverers are estimating it to be six or seven hundred years old.”

  A short bark of a surprised laugh escaped him. “Well, then, it’s probably not one of ours. Must be one of those medieval F-18s, you know, the really early models.”

  A snicker burbled from the reporter’s nose, and another smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

  “No, seriously, what do they think it is?”

  She shrugged. “I really have not the faintest. They insist it’s an American F-l8. The name of the pilot, painted on the side, has been obscured but they know he was a lieutenant. They haven’t found any of the identification plaques from it. Apparently part of it was burned, including one engine, and the other engine is missing entirely.”

  A realization made Alex’s heart sink. “Wait a minute. You’re not from one of those tabloid rag-type papers, are you?” His tone was unintentionally harsh, so he blinked and added, “Ma’am.”

  She sat up and said rather stiffly, “Not unless you consider the London Times a ‘rag.’”

  He shrugged and shook his head, puzzled. “Well, that’s just nuts. Thinking a jet fighter could be that old. Must be in really bad shape, that’s all.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I mean, that’s just nuts.”

  There was another long pause. “Well, then.” Miss Pawlowski took a deep breath, glanced at her notes, and said brightly, “In any case, so you’ve been piloting fighter jets for how many years?”

  The interview continued.

  Alex felt relieved when it was finished, and he figured he hadn’t said anything that would wreck his career. The mystery fighter slipped his mind easily, for the idea was...just nuts. He forgot about it as he changed into shorts and T-shirt in his stateroom and went to work out. Maybe throw off some of the tension of that interview. Exercise always made him feel better.

  Tucked into a corner of one of the hangar decks was a slab of carpet on which stood a couple of weight machines and a stationary bike. Alex began by stretching, then warmed up on the bike.

  Half an hour later, he was well loosened and had broken a good sweat when he moved to the weights. Sweat was trickling down the middle of his back and had made cooling lines from his hairline past his ears by the time he finished up his arm curls and let the weights down to shake out his arms. Then he bent over to stretch and loosen his back muscles and spotted small, sneakered feet standing on the carpet behind him.

  He looked around, and caught that Pawlowski woman staring at his ass. Busted, she quickly flicked her eyes to his face as he stood and turned, but it was too late. She at least had the good grace for her ears to turn red, and that made him nearly burst out laughing. But he swallowed the smart remark that came to mind and said nothing more than “Hello” as he continued with his workout.

&nb
sp; The reporter cleared her throat, leaned into the other weight machine to adjust the pin, took a deep breath, and lay back on the bench press. Alex paused to watch, curious to see what she would do. A mechanic nearby called to a couple of his buddies, and immediately there was a cluster of guys in dungarees on the hangar deck, staring, their speculative chatter an echoing murmur in the hangar. Alex thought idly of ordering them back to work, but found himself staring also, as Lindsay struggled with the bench press.

  Though she’d adjusted the pin, she could still barely lift the weight. Her elbows shook. Tendons stood out on her arms and neck. Her face turned red. It seemed to take forever for her to extend fully, pause, then let the weights down properly. Alex found himself tensing to help her, shook his head, and wondered what this woman hoped to achieve with this. The crazy lady was going to hurt herself, and had no business using the equipment if it was that difficult for her.

  But then Miss Pawlowski got up from the bench after only one rep, and walked over to the cluster of crewmen with an air of arrogance that puzzled Alex. The first mechanic had a disgusted look on his face and was nodding, shrugging. The woman reached out a hand and he relinquished a wad of bills, which she counted as she sauntered away with a self-satisfied look on her face and a grin for Alex as she passed.

  Alex watched her go. What the hell? Then he stepped over to the other machine to check the pin. Two hundred pounds.

  Whoa.

  He looked around the corner of the bulkhead to continue watching her go, then glanced back at the machine. Whoa.

  So it was with curiosity the next day he approached his flight assignment in the morning, for he was to ferry this very strange woman back to Great Britain. She awaited him just outside the ship’s island, on the flight deck, wearing a zoombag and mae west, helmet under one arm, eyes bright and looking like she wanted to fly the bird herself. He eyed her, then said loudly over the sea wind and the roar of taxiing jets, “Good morning, ma’am. You’re my GIB today?” She gave him a puzzled frown, and he elaborated. “Guy In Back.”