Serpent nf-1 Read online

  Austin was removing the cassette from the mini-sub's video camera when McGinty strode over. "Well, don't keep me in suspense," he said with excitement in his voice. "How's the old gal look?"

  "She's showing her age, but you can see for yourself." Austin handed over the cassette. The captain glanced at the mini-sub and chuckled. "That's some hot rod," he said, and led the way to his quarters. He set Austin and Zavala up with soft chairs and hard drinks, then popped the video into his VCR. McGinty sat in uncharacteristic silence, taking in every detail as the sweptback hull and its patina of anemones rolled across the TV screen. When the video ended he punched the rewind button.

  "You boys did good work. She looks pretty much the way she did when I last dove on her in 'eightyseven. Except there are more trawler nets. And like you said," he sighed, "she's getting a, little worn around the edges. It's what you can't see that's the problem. I've heard the ship's interior bulkheads are rotting away. Won't be long before the whole thing collapses in on itself."

  "Could you give us an idea what we'll be dealing with down there?"

  "I'll do my best. Want a refill?" Not waiting for an answer he poured the equivalent of a double shot of Jack Daniel's into each glass and dropped in a couple of token ice cubes. He took a sip, staring at the blank TV screen. "One thing you can't forget. The Doria may look pretty, even with all that scum mucking up her hull, but she's a man-killer. They don't call her the Mount Everest of divers for nothing. She hasn't killed as many as Everest, around ten last time I got counting, but the guys who dive on the Doria are looking for that same adrenaline rush from the danger that mountain climbers get."

  "Every wreck has its own character," Austin said. "What are the major hazards on this ship?"

  "Well, she's got all sorts of tricks up her sleeve. First of all there's the depth. With a two-hour decompression. You need a drysuit because of the cold. Sharks come to feed on the fish. Mostly blues. Not supposed to be dangerous, but when you're hanging on the anchor line decompressing you just hope some near-sighted shark doesn't mistake you for a fat pollock."

  "When I first started diving my father told me to remember that in the water you are no longer the top of the food chain," Austin said.

  McGinty grunted in agreement. "None of that stuff would be major except for the other problems. There's always a wicked current. It can be bad all the way down and even runs through the boat. Sometimes it seems like it will pull you right off the anchor line."

  "I felt it pushing against the mini-sub," Zavala said.

  McGinty nodded. "You saw what the visibility was like."

  "We could see pretty well today. We found the wreck without our lights," Austin said.

  "You were lucky. Sun was shining, sea wasn't stirred up much. On a cloudy or foggy day you can be practically on the wreck without seeing it. That's nothing compared to inside. Black as Hades, silt all over the place. Just touch it and you're surrounded by a cloud so thick your light won't penetrate it. Real easy to get confused and lost. But the biggest problem is entanglement. You can get into real trouble with all the wires and cables hanging down from the ceilings. That's if you get past those nets and ropes all over the hull and the monofilament from the party boats that fish the wreck. It's invisible. You don't know it's there until it's grabbed on to your tank. With scuba you've got twenty minutes max to get yourself out of trouble."

  "That's not much time to explore a huge ship."

  "That's one of the reasons it's so damned dangerous. Fellows want that piece of pottery or dish with the Italia crest on it. Figure they've spent all that time training and money to get out there. They forget. They get tired real fast, especially if they're fighting the current and breathing trimix. Make mistakes. Get lost. Forget the plans they memorized. Equipment's got to be working perfectly. One guy died because he had the wrong mix in his tanks. On my last dive I had five tanks, weight belt, lights, knives. I was carrying two hundred twenty-eight pounds. It takes a lifetime of experience to dive the ship. Even so, it's easy to become disoriented. You've got the ship lying on its side, so the deck and floors are overhead, the bulkheads between the decks are vertical."

  "The Andrea Doria sounds like just our kind of place, doesn't it, Joe?"

  "Only if the bar still serves tequila."

  McGinty furrowed his brow. Ordinarily this kind of cockiness before a Doria dive was a one-way ticket to a body bag. He wasn't sure about these two. The big man with the hair that didn't match the unlined face and the soft-spoken dark man with the bedroom eyes exuded an unusual confidence. The captain's worried expression disappeared, and he grinned like an old hound dog. No, it wouldn't surprise him to see them belly up to the Doria's firstclass bar and order a drink from a ghostly bartender.

  Austin said, "What's the weather going to be like, Captain?"

  "Weather tends to be cantankerous as hell out here on the shoals. Calm one day, howling gale the next. Fog is notorious. The guys who were aboard the Doria and the Stockholm could tell you how thick it gets. Wind's blowing southeast now, but it will come around more westerly, and my guess is you'll have flat seas. Don't know how many days that will last out here."

  "That's okay, we're in something of a hurry to get the job done," Austin said. "We don't have days."

  McGinty grinned. Yup, damned cocky. "We'll see. Still, I've got to admit you boys have got brass. What's this you're looking for, an armored. truck in the hold? That's going to require some doing. Especially where you don't know the wreck." He shook his head. "Wish I could help you, but my diving days are over. You could use a guide."

  Austin saw a blue hull come into view through a porthole. The name Myra was painted on the bow

  "Excuse me, Captain," he said. "I think our guide has just arrived."

  Georgetown,Washington, DC

  40 "GAMAY, DO YOU HAVE A MINUTE?" Trout called out from his study. He was bent over the monitor of his computer, staring intently at the oversized screen he used for developing graphics for his various undersea projects.

  "Yrrph," Gamay answered with a muffled grunt from the next room. She lay on her back, suspended horizontally above the floor like a yogi in a trance, balanced on a narrow plank scaffolding supported by two ladders. She and Paul were constantly remodeling the interior of their Georgetown brick townhouse. Ruch Gunn ordered her to take a few days off to rest before reporting to NUMA headquarters. But the second she got back home she picked up on a project she had left undone, painting life-like flower garlands on the ceiling of their sunroom.

  She walked into the study wiping her hands on a rag. She was wearing old jeans and a chambray work shirt. Her dark red hair was stuffed under a white cap with the words TruTest Paint on it. Her face was smudged with green and red splatters except for a racoonish area around her eyes where she'd worn protective goggles.

  "You look like a Jackson Pollock painting," Trout said.

  She wiped a gob of crimson from her mouth. "How Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is beyond me. I've only been at it an hour, and I've got a badcase of painter's elbow"

  Trout peered upward over non-existent glasses and broke into an easy grin.

  "What's with the wolfish smile?" Gamay said warily.

  He put his hand around her slim waist and pulled her closer. He'd touched her at every opportunity since they had returned home, as if he feared she would disappear into the jungle again. The days she was missing were a nightmare for him, but his Yankee upbringing would never allow him to come out and say so.

  "Just thinking about how sexy you look with paint splattered on your face."

  Gamay gently tousled his fine hair and brushed it down over his forehead. "You perverts really know how to sweettalk a gal." Her eye caught the images on the screen. "Is that why you called me?"

  "So much for sudden impetuous romantic gestures." He indicated the screen. "Yes. Tell me what you see."

  She leaned on Paul's shoulder and squinted at the monitor. "No brainer. I see beautifully detailed sk
etches of eight fantastic-looking heads." Her voice lapsed into the scientific mode, like the monotone of a pathologist conducting an autopsy. At .first glance the profiles appear identical, but upon further examination I detect subtle differences, mostly around the jaw and mouth but on the cranium as well. How am I doing, Sherlock?"

  "You not only see but you also observe, my dear Watson."

  "Elementary, my dear fellow. Who drew these sketches? They are works of art in themselves."

  "The esteemed Dr. Chi. A man of varied talents."

  "I saw enough of the good professor not to be surprised at anything he does. How do you happen to have them?"

  "Chi showed them to me when I was at Harvard. He asked me to run them by you. He remembered your background in archaeology before you switched to biology. But mostly he wanted a fresh eye." Trout leaned his long body back and laced his fingers behind his head. "I'm an ocean geologist. I can take this stuff and make all the pretty pictures I want to, but it doesn't make any sense to me."

  Gamay pulled a chair up beside her husband.

  "Look at it this way, Paul. It's no different from somebody handing you a rock from the bottom of the ocean. What's the first thing you'd ask?"

  "Easy. Where they got it."

  "Bravo." She pecked him on the cheek. "The same thing applies in archaeology. Mayan studies wasn't my area of expertise before I switched to marine biology, but here's my first question to you. Where did these glyphs come from?"

  Trout tapped the screen. "This one here is from the site Chi calls MIT Where you first ran into the chicleros."

  Gamay felt a frisson along her spine at the reminder of beating sun, jungle rot, and unshaven, unfriendly men. "What about the others?"

  "All from different locations Chi has visited."

  "What made him pick these, aside from the fact that they are almost identical?"

  "Location. Each face was from an observatory carved with the frieze showing the boats that may or may not be Phoenician."

  "Intriguing."

  "Uhhuh. The professor thought so. The boat theme tied them together."

  "What's it all mean?"

  "I don't know," he said with a shrug. "I'm afraid that's the extent of my Meso-american expertise."

  "Why don't we call Professor Chi?"

  "Just tried. He wasn't in his Mexico City office. They said he was there earlier but would be unavailable."

  "Don't t tell me. They said he was in the field."

  Trout nodded. ."I left a message."

  "Don't hold your breath now that he's got his HumVee back. What about Orville?"

  "The nutty professor? Exactly what I had in mind. First I wanted to run this stuff by you in case you had any inspiration."

  "Call Linus Orville. That's my inspiration."

  Trout flipped through his card file and punched out a number. When Orville answered Trout put him on the speaker phone.

  "Ah, Mulder and Scully" Orville said, referring to the FBI characters in the popular TV program. "How are things with the X-Files?"

  In the most serious tone he could muster, Trout said, "We've uncovered solid proof that those mysterious carved boats are from the lost continent of Mu."

  "You're kidding!" Orville replied breathlessly.

  "Yeah, I'm kidding. I just like to say the word Mu."

  "Well, moo to you, too, Mulder. Now please tell me the real reason you called."

  "We need your opinion on those sketches Professor Chi left with Paul," Gamay said.

  "Oh, the Venus glyphs."

  "Venus?"

  "Yes, the series of eight. Each figure represents an incarnation of the god Venus."

  Gamay looked at the grotesque profiles with their protruding jaws and foreheads. "Ugh. I've always thought of the goddess of love as a delicate maiden drifting out of the sea foam on a scallop shell."

  "That's because you've been brainwashed. by Botticelli's vision and wasted your time on classical studies before you got out of the Temple of Doom game. The Mayan Venus was a male. "

  "How chauvinistic."

  "Only to a point. The Maya were firm believers in equal opportunity when it came to human sacrifice. Venus symbolized Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan. The feathered serpent. It's all tied in. The analogy of birth and rebirth. Like Quetzalcoatl, Venus disappears for part of its cycle only to reappear."

  "I get it," Trout said. "The Maya decorated their temples with representations of the god to make him happy so he'd come back."

  "There was some of that, yeah, toadying up to the big guy. You have to understand how architecture was worked into theft religion. Mayan buildings were often fixed on key points like the solstice and equinox or where Venus appears and disappears. A celestial calculator. in other words."

  Gamay said, "Professor Chi compared the observatory tower at the MIT site to a computer's hardware, the inscriptions on its side to software. He felt that it was only part of the whole picture, the way one circuit is part of a computer."

  "Yes, he ran that theory by me, but your carved tower has a long way to go before it becomes an IBM clone."

  "Still, it's possible that the tower and the others were part of a unified plan?" Gamay persisted.

  "Don't get me wrong. The Maya were incredibly sophisticated and always manage to surprise. They often lined up palace doorways and streets to point to the sun and stars at various times of the year. You see, predicting the movements of Venus would give the priests tremendous power. The Venus god told the farmers about important dates like planting, harvest, and rainy season. The Caracol at Chichen Itza has windows that line up with Venus at various points on the horizon."

  "There are no boat inscriptions on the Caracol, as far as I know," Gamay said.

  "Only on those eight temples the glyphs came from. Venus disappears for eight days during its cycle. A scary thing if you were depending on the planet for important decisions. So the priests tossed a few maidens into a well, did some creative bloodletting, and everything was peachy again. Speaking of bloodletting, I've got a class in five minutes. Can we resume this fascinating discussion later?"

  Gamay wasn't through. "You say Venus disappears for eight days and that there are eight temples we know of with the boat carvings. Coincidence?"

  "Chi didn't think so. Got to go. Can't wait to tell the class about the Musters."

  The phone clicked off. Paul picked up a yellow legal pad.

  "That was edifying. Let's go over what we have. We've got eight temple observatories. Each one was built to chart the movements of Venus." Trout made a note. "These structures were also dedicated toward a single theme, the arrival of boats that could have been Phoenician, bearing great treasure. A wild guess. The observatories and Venus have something to do with the treasure."

  Gamay agreed. She took the notebook and drew eight circles at random. "Say these are the temples." She drew lines connecting the circles and stared at her doodles for a moment. "There's something here," she said.

  Paul looked at the scribbles and shook his head. "Looks like a flat-footed spider."

  "That's because we're thinking in earthbound terms. Look." She drew two stars near the edge of the page. "Rise above the earth. Let's say this is Venus at its extreme points on the horizon. That temple I saw at MIT had two slot-like openings like an archer's port in a castle. Here's what you would see if you drew a line from the window to one extreme of Venus. Now I'll do it out the other window." Satisfied with her artwork, she drew lines from each observatory to the Venus points.

  She stuck the rough grid she'd produced under Paul's nose.

  "Now it looks like the mouth of an alligator about ready to have dinner," he said.

  "Maybe. Or a hungry serpent."

  "Still thinking about that snake?"

  "Yes and no. Dr. Chi wore an amulet around his neck. He called it the feathered serpent. That's what this reminds me of, the jaws of Kukulcan."

  "You need the exact locations of the observatories, even admitting it's possible to make sense fr
om this. Too bad Chi is in the field."

  Gamay was half listening. "I just thought of something. That talking stone Kurt and Joe are out looking for. Wasn't it supposed to show some kind of grid?"

  "That's right. I wonder if there's a connection."

  Trout picked up the phone. "I'll call and leave a message for Chi to get in touch with us as soon as possible. Then we'll give Kurt a ring to tell him you may have something."

  She examined her doodlebug sketches again. "Yes, but what?"

  Nantucket Shoals

  41 THE CABIN CRUISER THAT HAD BEEN circling the salvage boat pulled alongside within hailing distance and cut its engine to an idle. The white, red, and green tricolor of Italy fluttered on the signal mast under the American flag. The slim, silver-haired figure of Angelo Donatelli stepped out of the pilothouse and waved.

  "Hallo, Mr. Austin, I've come on a rescue mission. I understand you are running out of grappa. May we make a delivery?"

  "Hallo, Mr. Donatelli," Austin yelled back. "Thank you for the resupply. Until now we've had to drink battery acid."

  Captain McGinty cupped his hands around his mouth, an entirely unnecessary gesture because his normal voice was a bellow. "Skipper thanks you, too, and invites you to come aboard on your mission of merry."

  Donatelli saluted in acknowledgment and went back into the pilothouse. The anchor dropped into the water with a rattle and a splash, and the engine died. Donatelli and his cousin Antonio stepped into an outboard launch the yacht had been towing, buzzed the short distance to the salvage ship, and climbed aboard.

  Donatelli handed the captain a bottle of the fiery Italian liquor. "With my compliments," he said, then turned to Austin and swept his hand toward the cabin cruiser.

  "How do you like my blue beauty, Mr. Austin?"