Black Sun

CHAPTER 32

Hawker had surfaced in a dark void filled with the air from Danielle’s tanks. He flipped up his mask and shouted.

“Danielle!”

Grabbing the wall, he steadied himself.

“Danielle!”

There was noise and reverberation from the venting tanks, like being in a hot tub gone out of control. But no sign of Danielle.

He found his LED flashlight and switched it on. The space was no more than five feet across and roughly circular. The ceiling above him was curved like the inside of a dome. He moved along the wall and found an opening.

It was like the rim of a pool. As he sloshed around, water spilled over the side and went sliding down a ramp of some type.

The inner chamber of the temple was dry.

In the dim light he saw a figure lying at the bottom. He clambered over the wall and slid down. Danielle lay on her side, coughing out water and finding her way back to consciousness.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. She was exhausted.

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” he shouted. The sound echoed around them. “Are you out of your mind?”

With great effort, she sat up. “Actually, I think I might be,” she said finally.

“What are you talking about?”

“Nitrogen narcosis,” she said. “Or more likely oxygen narcosis, since we’re using a high-oxygen blend. I had it once before, but on a longer, deeper dive.”

“You’re the diver, the former marine biology student,” he said.

“One of many degrees I started and then abandoned,” she said. “But anyway I’m sorry. I didn’t even realize what I was doing. I just felt like I could get in here. It was right in front of us.”

She put a hand over her eyes, rubbing at her temples. “The problem with that type of narcosis is you don’t feel it coming on. You just feel great. It’s like the fourth stage of tequila, without all the drinking.”

As angry as he was, Hawker had to laugh. “Bulletproof?”

“Invincible,” she replied.

She had seemed to be acting a little crazy ever since they’d spotted the sharks. He looked up the ramp. “Do you even remember what happened?”

“I remember thinking I didn’t want to get cut, and that I was afraid you’d get trapped, too,” she said. “And then, when I was pulling away from you I exhaled and I saw the bubbles pop. It reminded me of a cave dive I was on a couple of years ago. I remembered the exhaust from my regulator getting trapped against the ceiling, creating a thousand little bubbles, perfectly round spheres like silver pearls. But when these bubbles popped, I realized they had to be reaching air. That’s why I kicked you. I couldn’t go back; I had to go forward.”

She looked up the ramp.

“I grabbed this wall as I was blacking out. I guess I hauled myself over.”

He sat down next to her and brushed the wet hair back from her face. “I know what oxygen narcosis is, but why would you get it?”

“It happens.”

“On a dive this short, this shallow?”

He sensed there was something more, perhaps something she didn’t want to tell him. He waited.

“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said. “And they drugged me a lot in China. I don’t know what it was — truth serum, narcotics, barbiturates maybe. They kept me sedated a lot. You said I was there ten days. I remember forty-eight hours.”

“So the drugs are still in your system,” he said.

“Some of it might be,” she admitted. “I didn’t think about it. Didn’t want to, I guess. But I should have. Things like that can affect you when you dive, especially with nitrox.”

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said, aiming his flashlight around. “But where the hell did it get us to, anyway? Back down the rabbit hole somewhere?”

They were in the center of a temple of some kind, one that was sealed against the water. The tunnel, which angled down and then up, acted like an air lock. As long as the roof didn’t leak, the water could never overcome the pressure of the air. It could never push inside.

Above them the ceiling of the room was curved and smooth like the dome of some rotunda. Seams between the blocks of stone were precise and almost invisible. No water dripped or leaked. It was an incredible work of construction.

The beam of Hawker’s flashlight played across the smooth stone walls and stopped on what looked like a stairway covered with hieroglyphics. “McCarter would love this place.”

“If he could get over the sharks,” she said.

“I almost didn’t get over the sharks.” Hawker told her. His light followed the flight of the stairs. Lying prone on an altar at the top was a familiar shape. It looked like a sarcophagus of some kind.

“Can you stand?” Hawker asked

She reached out a hand and he pulled her up. Together they crossed the open floor and began climbing the stairs.

Up on the surface, McCarter sat in the fishing boat. Strangely, his feelings of paranoia had returned at almost the instant Danielle and Hawker had descended beneath the waves.

He found himself checking the GPS every thirty seconds to make sure the wind and the current hadn’t moved him and then scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars, fearful that there might be some miscreants coming toward their position. He hadn’t seen anything so far but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

In addition he had to watch Yuri, and he found his nerves jumping anytime the boy moved away from the very center of the boat. As a precaution he’d tightened all the straps on Yuri’s life jacket and secured a second flotation device to his back.

“Think they’d be mad if they came back up and I had you tied to something?”

Yuri ignored him and McCarter had to laugh at himself.

“I used to be the normal one,” he told Yuri. “Now look at me. I’m seeing things. Hearing things.” He glanced over to Yuri, who was ignoring him and playing with the sunglasses again. “Talking to a child who finds plastic sunglasses more interesting than my learned conversation.”

He raised the binoculars to his eyes once again and looked out over the calm gulf waters. It was midafternoon and the sun was blazing from a cobalt blue sky. To the east, some large cumulous clouds had begun to grow. They were a long distance out, but seemed to be moving his way. The last thing he wanted was to be on the water in some kind of storm.

“Come on,” he whispered to his absent comrades. “Let’s not take all day.”

A slight breeze blew up, wafting audibly past his ears.

Why aren’t you paying attention today?

He spun around, looking for the source of those words. No one there, of course.

Why aren’t you paying attention today?

They were his wife’s words. Said kindly, on the days when he was distracted by some problem and not listening to her.

He looked at Yuri. The boy was staring back at him as if he’d heard something, too.

“I’m not even going to ask,” McCarter said.

Another sound caught his ear, a distant rumble of thunder to the east. The storm clouds were still many miles out but they stretched off to the south. He followed the line with the binoculars, wondering if they would cause a problem getting back to shore. And then he caught sight of something new: Two fast-looking boats were cutting across the sea toward them. They were probably five or six miles off, but hauling ass directly at his position.

“Shit,” McCarter said, pulling the binoculars down.

He glanced at Yuri. “Let’s not make those your first English words.”

The boy did not react, and McCarter turned his attention back to the boats, hoping to see a pyramid of water skiers behind them.

He didn’t. And though the boats could have been anything, he had a terrible suspicion as to what they were and who they were interested in.

He grabbed Yuri, strapped him into the passenger chair, and then started the engines.

Hawker and Danielle reached the top of the stairs. The body lay there in a sarcophagus of some type, wrapped in simple gauze. The setup was nothing elaborate, just simple wood, with carved notches on the sides, like handles for pallbearers.

Danielle peeled the strips of fabric back. The skull was human, barely. Its smooth bone was covered in tiny pores. A filament of wire ran from the empty eye sockets back into the brain cavity. The deformed ribs, the overlarge eyes, all the same defects they had seen on the body in Brazil. Another descendant of man, who’d died several thousand years before he or she would be born.

She looked at Hawker. There was only silence. Respect.

He aimed his light past the body. In the alcove beyond loomed a statue of a Mayan king in full ceremonial dress. It reminded Danielle of the monument taken from the Island of the Shroud, but its arrangement was different. Here the king was holding out his hands the way one might cup falling water. In those hands and protruding into his chest lay a smooth, glasslike object. The stone looked to be the same construction as the one they’d found in Brazil, but it was a different shape and smaller. About the equivalent of a large grapefruit.

Danielle reached over and switched off Hawker’s flashlight. As their eyes adjusted they could see a ghostly white glow coming from the stone.

Hawker walked toward it and reached for it.

“Don’t,” she snapped.

He pulled his hand back, staring at her.

“Just give me a second,” she said, looking around as if there might be a booby trap or two waiting to be sprung on them.

Trying to ignore the concern in his eyes, she stepped toward the stone and pulled it free. It was heavy in her hands, incredibly smooth and warm to the touch. It brought a tingling sensation in her fingers, a wave of energy coursing through her body. She felt a type of elation holding it.

“You all right?” Hawker asked.

His voice brought her back to the present.

“Yeah,” she said. “I just can’t believe we actually found it.”

Carefully she secured it in a pouch, which she zipped shut and clipped to her belt. Following that, she pulled out what looked like an old film camera and began taking pictures.

“Is this part of our retro look?” Hawker said, noting the old-fashioned snap-and-click camera. “To go with the jeep and the boat?”

“Remember how all our electronic equipment went down in Brazil?”

He nodded.

“I figured we’d better have something that wouldn’t be affected.”

She advanced the film with her thumb, asked Hawker to direct his light onto the surface she was shooting, then clicked off the next shot. She took pictures of the statue, the stairwell, and the hieroglyphics there. She took pictures of the ceiling and the walls and the fading murals they contained. She aimed her camera at the body on the altar and then lowered it without snapping the shutter.

Hawker seemed to agree. “Let the poor fellow be,” he suggested.

She finished up and put the camera away. When she was done she thought of destroying the carvings as she and McCarter had done at the Island of the Shroud, but there were no loose stones around and they carried no hammers or other heavy tools. Even the knives, which had been useful against the brittle coral, would be ineffective against the heavy stone of the temple.

She let it go. They didn’t have much time anyway. They still had to get back out and up to the surface within twenty minutes or they’d need a decompression stop, something she didn’t want to do in a shark-infested area.

While she put the camera away, Hawker dove back into the tunnel and retrieved both sets of air tanks. As he swam back in, he perched on the top of the ramp, as if he were sitting on the side of the pool. She climbed up beside him, her eyes settling on the air tank with the split hose.

“Those are yours,” Hawker said.

“You really are hard on equipment,” she said.

“I was trying to save you at the time,” he said.

There wasn’t much she could say to counter that. She crouched down and checked the pressure gauge. The tank’s reserve air feature had activated. Designed to keep all the air from being expended in the event of an accident, it closed an inner valve and reserved a small portion of the mixture to be used only if the diver manually switched to reserve. She disconnected the hose that Hawker had cut and turned the valve so the reserve air would only feed to the spare hose.

“I should have about fifteen minutes on this,” she said. “That ought to be plenty.”

“If not, we can buddy-breathe on this tank,” he replied. “But let’s not waste any more time down here.”

She agreed and slipped over the rim and back into the tunnel.

Just as Hawker had done on the way in, she pushed the tanks ahead of her. In a few seconds she’d made it through and back out in the open sea, thrilled beyond belief to be bathed in the clear blue light once again.

The brief second of euphoria died as her earpiece cackled. Her transceiver had picked up a call from McCarter, one that had been blocked during their time in the temple.

“… coming toward us from the southwest. Do you hear me? Two boats headed right for us at high speed.”