Atlantis Gold

Chapter 4

The unusual object looked a lot closer than it was. That’s what ran through Hunt’s mind as he and Jayden dropped down into the flooded chamber. The jumble of stone slabs and boulders became more complex as they dropped, forming small hillocks they had to swim either over or around, and large caves they had to swim through in order to continue downward.

But the sight of the object quickened his pulse and led him down further. He glanced at his depth gauge while passing over a concave block section: 125 feet. Too deep to stay down much longer, but the object — now it looked like it could be something interesting, since he saw what appeared to be sculpted detail — still lay some distance down the flooded slope. The extreme water clarity made it difficult to accurately gauge distance. Jayden tapped his shoulder and showed him his air gauge. He, too, was concerned about the depth. Hunt pointed to his watch and held up five fingers, indicating how many more minutes they would spend down here before beginning their return to the surface.

Then they kicked their way toward the light brown object. Hunt’s curiosity grew with every fin stroke as they neared the unknown curiosity. So far, anyway, it appeared to be the only thing in here that wasn’t a building rock. So what was it?

Hunt swept his light beam left to right and back again, scanning the area for anything that might be either noteworthy from an archaeological standpoint, or else a potential danger to themselves. So far he saw neither except for the brownish object, a little lighter in tone than the surrounding rock, which he now guessed was some sort of statue. He and Jayden stopped a few feet from it so as not to disturb it. Both of them played their light beams across the strange find.

Within a few seconds, Hunt was pretty sure he knew what it was, but he wanted to look at it from another angle to be sure, so he swam around the object to his right until he could see another side of it. His suspicion was confirmed.

He was looking at a life-size head, made of what looked to him to be bronze. The head was detached from whatever it had been attached to, whether a full body statue or some kind of pedestal base for the bust alone. Aware that they were rapidly running out of time down here, Hunt quickly snapped off a couple of pictures of the object so that Madison and her team could see it exactly as they had found it.

Then Hunt moved to the statue. He pointed to it and, after making eye contact with Jayden, pointed to the surface. He was going to try and bring it back up. Jayden shrugged and pointed to his watch, the meaning clear to Hunt: Okay, if you can do it, but better hurry up about it.

Hunt eyeballed the way the bronze head lay amidst the crux of stone blocks. It was situated such that it lay over a foot-wide gap; were it to drop into that after being dislodged, it would be unrecoverable. So Hunt made sure to place one hand firmly beneath the head before attempting to lift it out. Then he tried to lift, grunting with the exertion. He made eye contact with Jayden after not having immediate success. This thing is heavy! Then he redoubled his efforts and tried again, this time able to anticipate what he was up against. Bracing a knee against a stone slab, and an elbow against another, he put the muscles of his entire body into wedging the heavy statue head up and out of the crevice it had rested in for untold years.

Slowly and surely, Hunt lifted the artifact from the rocky wedge until it was cradled only in his arms. As he prepared to turn toward Jayden so as to get some support from him, he glanced down through the crack now that it was easier to see down into it without the bronze head being there.

A human skeleton lay sprawled out on a stone slab about twenty feet down. He put his face mask as far as he dared into the crevice and peered down into the crevasse, but he saw nothing else besides the skeleton. He held the statue head in the crook of one elbow while grabbing his camera and holding it up to Jayden. They would definitely want a snapshot of that skeleton. Jayden took the camera and then looked down into the opening. He looked back up once at Hunt, eyes wide, and then snapped off a photograph.

That done, Jayden pushed himself up away from the crevasse and helped Hunt hold the stone head while Hunt added air to his buoyancy vest to overcome the additional weight. Both divers knew that another option would be to ditch his weight belt, with the head itself more than replacing that, but should he then drop the head, he would rocket to the surface with disastrous ill-effects to his health. So that would remain a last resort.

Hunt inflated his vest almost to full capacity before he was able to tread water without sinking while holding the head. Then he and Jayden began a slow and cautious ascent to the surface, which shimmered and sparkled far above their heads when they aimed their dive lights at it. They skirted their way around an overhang of pyramid slabs before resuming their vertical ascent. Jayden stared at his air pressure gauge a lot. It was in the red. He hated to think where Hunt’s was, burdened as he was with the heavy stone, causing him to breathe even heavier and faster.

The thing that kept both of them going was seeing the work lights set up on the edge of the water up above. They seemed so close, like they were within reach, and watching them grow larger was a great comfort. Hunt focused on them so much that he almost didn’t notice the cone of light coming from below.

When he glanced down to make sure he wasn’t too close to the jumble of rock slabs, he saw it. Without a doubt. A piercing cone of light barreling up from the depths, seemingly out of nowhere.

What was that? He almost dropped the stone head out of surprise, and then also out of the urge to have more bodily freedom, but he had the discipline not to do that. He looked over at Jayden and saw his dive buddy staring up toward the work lights. He kicked his right leg out and knocked him in the leg with a fin tip. Jayden looked over at him immediately. Hunt jerked his head downward until Jayden directed his gaze into the deep.

Hunt could tell from his friend’s reaction alone, by simply watching his face, that something was going on. He looked back down again, even though it was difficult to do while carrying the artifact, but the light, whatever it was, was moving fast, It had already travelled beyond his field of vision so that he had to spin around in order to see it. When he did, he felt a pang of adrenaline assault his guts.

An underwater scooter.

The torpedo-shaped vehicle featured, in addition to a nose-mounted halogen light, a single propeller used to drag a diver through the water. Hunt couldn’t see the diver since the headlight blinded him, but he could tell by the speed and sharp upward trajectory of the scooter that this was not a research diver, even if Madison had neglected to mention that she already had divers with equipment on site. And she hadn’t mentioned that, Hunt thought, so then who was this guy?

Make that guys, plural, he thought, as a second scooter-diver rocketed into view from behind a mound of stacked boulders. And how did they get in here? There’s no way they’d entered after them, they would have heard the splashes as they entered the water, and seen the lights as they made their descent. No, they must have come in another way. He tried to visualize the LiDAR imagery he’d seen back in the tent, but with everything going on he couldn’t conjure a detailed enough image to be useful.

And right now, anyway, he supposed it didn’t much matter, because both scooters were heading right for them at what had to be at or near their maximum speed, about five knots. Who were they and what did they want? Hunt had no idea, but underwater in an Egyptian pyramid with a tank running dry of air was no time to stop and chat, so he continued his ascent.

Fortunately, Hunt thought, a decompression stop wasn’t needed on this dive or he’d have to stop at ten or fifteen feet and breathe air for a few minutes before completing the ascent in order to avoid the bends, so he was clear to ascend. Which was a good thing, since his air already seemed like it was getting harder to pull. Probably a good thing my hands are occupied with holding the head or else I’d be staring at the needle on my air gauge drop, Hunt thought.

But as he eyed the surface, which looked to be about thirty feet or so away, Hunt saw that there was something to keep him from getting there after all. The two scooter-divers zoomed in on his position without slowing until one of them stopped a couple of feet above Hunt’s head. But the other wasn’t stopping. Its nose cone was pointed right at Hunt’s midsection. It was going to ram him.

Hunt wanted to stiff-arm the scooter away but knew if he took one arm off of the bronze head that he’d risk losing it to depths of piled slabs. So did the best thing he could come up with and turned sideways to the scooter, presenting his right elbow while still cradling the head.

In spite of Hunt’s readiness, Jayden was the one who thwarted the underwater scooter. The ex-navy man bashed the nose of the underwater vehicle with the closed fist of his right hand, sending it off course to the right, where it glanced off Hunt’s body without serious impact. Hunt still had possession of the metal head while the diver brought the scooter around in an arc to come back again.

Hunt continued his ascent while Jayden continued to fend off the marauding craft. But soon Hunt was butting his head into the bottom the other diver’s legs. That man — and Hunt could tell it was in fact a man by the strength in the legs when he kicked him — ditched his scooter in favor of hand-to-hand combat with Hunt. He swiped a gloved hand at Hunt’s regulator hose in an attempt to dislodge his mouthpiece, but Hunt’s quick head movement caused the assailant to swipe at nothing but water.

Taking a chance on dropping the precious artifact, Hunt gripped the bronze head with both hands and shoved the heavy weight into his opponent’s side. He felt ribs crack and took great satisfaction in the grunt of pain that reached his ears through the water.

He also got the first look at the attacker’s face as he whipped his head to the side in pain. White male, mustache, approximately forty years of age, Hunt ascertained. That’s all he could tell through the face mask. He noted it was the full facemask variety with embedded electronics that allowed him to communicate underwater with his dive partner. As if in confirmation of this fact, Hunt saw the man’s lips moving behind his mask, and then the second scooter’s nose cone was ramming into Hunt’s back.

He bobbled the bronze head but regained control of it before losing his grip on it completely.

But then the gleam of a dive light reflecting off of metal temporarily blinded Hunt as a serrated dive knife was plunged at his neck from above. Hunt dodged the blade and then he saw Jayden’s wetsuit-clad arm gripping the gloved hand holding the knife. No longer could Hunt pass this off as a case of mistaken identity, or losing control of the scooters, or anything like that at all. This was a deliberate attempt to kill them.

But why? The question danced around in his mind even as he fought the underwater battle, double-teaming the knife-man with Jayden, again using the bronze head as an instrument of blunt force trauma, ramming it into the interloper’s back. Hunt heard the piercing snap of bone as Jayden bent the knife-wielder’s hand back until the wrist broke and the blade dropped from his hand.

That assailant went limp and drifted away from the melee while his scooter sank slowly to the bottom. Hunt saw an opportunity and snagged the machine with a fin tip. Maybe it could be his ticket out of here. After the exertion of the fight, he was glad he didn’t have a free hand to look at his air gauge, since he probably had almost none left. In fact, wasn’t it getting harder to pull a breath even now?

Hunt hooked a leg around the battery-powered propulsion device and pulled it to his body. He positioned his midsection over it so that it supported the weight of the artifact head. Above him he could make out a flurry of arms and legs as Jayden grappled with the remaining aquatic assailant, but since he carried the heavy artifact, he decided he should make his exit stage left while he could and let Jayden only have to worry about himself. He found the trigger on the scooter’s hand grip and pressed it all the way down. He was rewarded with the instant purr of the electric motor as the diver propulsion vehicle pulled him away from the fight and towards the surface.

Hunt aimed the nose of the scooter toward the blurry utility lights that were rapidly becoming larger. When he could distinguish individual ripples of water on the surface, meaning he was very close to it, he went to pull his next breath of air, but there was nothing there. He tried once more breath, but still nothing. Eyeballing the distance to the surface, he decided he could make it without ditching the heavy head. The last thing he wanted to do was lose the object of all their effort after everything they’d been through, so close to the archaeology team.

Hunt saw outstretched arms on the shore of the subterranean artificial lake; the sense of having help standing by boosted his confidence and he kicked harder, knowing he was almost there. He rode the scooter up onto the rocks, gripping the artifact with both hands lest it fall back into the water, while one of Madison’s field techs pulled the scooter from the water.

Madison was there, leaning over, her soft features etched with concern. Hunt raised the ancient head up to her. “Take this. Keep it safe and get back. The men down there are dangerous.”

Madison took the head, clearly not expecting the weight. Hunt held it for her while she adjusted to its mass. Hunt stripped off his empty scuba tank and dropped it on the rocks. Then, before Madison could ask him what he was doing, he dove back into the water.

Jayden grappled with the other enemy diver about twenty feet below. The other scooter was nowhere in sight, probably having sank to the bottom after being abandoned by its rider to fight, Hunt surmised. He scissor kicked the remaining distance to the aquatic melee, where he was unable to tell who had the upper hand. Both divers fought like Tasmanian Devils, whirling and flailing in a chaotic blur of arms, legs, fins and bubbles.

He looked around for the second diver, the one whose ribs he’d cracked with the artifact, but saw no sign of him.

Hunt reached down and unsheathed the titanium dive knife strapped to his calf. While operating the scooter and carrying the head, he’d been unable to make use of it, but now he relished the chance. Jayden had to be about to be out of air at any second. He had to end this fight right now. Hunt moved in with is blade at the ready, eyeing the thrashing limbs, looking for an opportunity. Fortunately, the intruder’s tank was painted black, while Jayden’s was yellow, and it was that difference that allowed Hunt to distinguish his target from his friend.

Hunt had no desire to maim or kill another human being, but he would do what he had to in order to protect his friend and himself. He moved in with the knife, grabbing the regulator hose attached to the black tank. He gripped the rubber with his left hand and then sliced it through with a his right. A thick stream of bubbles — the diver’s remaining air supply — immediately poured from the severed hose, making it difficult to see around the white jet of air.

As expected, their foe immediately switched gears from offensive fighting tactics to self-preservation. He twisted and writhed, attempting to get away from his opponents so that he could swim to the surface to breathe. Jayden was still holding onto him but Hunt pulled him away shaking his head. Let him go. He was no threat to them anymore.

Jayden relinquished his grip on the mystery diver and he swam away from them, first laterally, and then vertically toward the air that awaited him above.

Jayden handed Hunt the mouthpiece of his “octopus,” a second regulator scuba divers use in emergency situations. It allowed both of them to breathe out of the same tank, but from different mouthpieces.

With the bubbles out of the way, Hunt took a look around to see if the other diver still lingered, but he saw nothing other than the disorganized pile of stone slabs. Not even a scooter was visible.

When he went to pull a breath from the tank and got nothing, no air, he knew they had extinguished Jayden’s tank, too. The two ex-navy men looked at one another and swam the few remaining feet to the surface.