City of the Lost

I

The suspension of the horse-box had been stiffened to suppress excessive movement. The undercarriage had been lubricated to minimize creaking. An observant passer-by might still, however, have noticed its fractional rocking or heard the faint squeak of metal on metal as a series of bolts were drawn beneath the floor, then a metal panel was lifted up and slid to one side.

But there were no passers-by.

The horse-box settled again. There was silence for perhaps half a minute. Then a man sat up slowly and broke a glow-stick, enough to see by but not enough to be seen from outside. It gave a greenish tint to his hand and wrist as he set it down, as though in sympathy with how he felt inside, for it was no joke lying for two hours in a fume-filled, poorly ventilated and overheated space some thirty centimetres high — a space, what was more, that he’d had to share with three other men.

Haroon moved away from the floor panel, stretched his cramped legs. Erol now emerged. Samir and Mehmet. When all four of them were safely out, Haroon and Erol went to the wall that separated the main body of the horse-box from the back of the driver’s cab. They pushed hard against it and the internal locking mechanisms released. Two large, flat panels now swung outwards, revealing shallow cavities filled with grey packing foam that had been precision cut to accommodate weapons, munitions, clothing and other equipment.

In silence, they removed and distributed this equipment. They closed the panels again then stripped to their underwear and began to dress. The body-armour and the bomb vests first. Then the uniforms, jackets, boots and caps of Special Protection Squad officers. Assault rifles and spare clips. Handguns, grenades and enough military-grade explosives to blast their way through bulletproof glass and reinforced doors.

Ideally, tonight would happen on the front steps, for maximum visual impact. But they’d take it inside if they had to.

The glow-stick faded. Darkness returned. Haroon put in the earpiece of a digital radio and tuned it to the news. The crowds in Güven Park had apparently been dispersed by the police, but the riots were ongoing elsewhere. He shared this bulletin with his comrades, then they settled down to wait.

II

There was little breeze tonight, but Butros wouldn’t have ordered the masts rigged even had there been. They needed to keep as low a profile as possible. He stood on deck as they left their mooring and passed out through the harbour mouth, headed east-south-east out to sea, off for their supposed night of fishing. Then he went into the bridge, where Michel was at the helm. ‘Any more news on Visser and Black?’ he asked.

‘They haven’t moved,’ Michel assured him.

‘Visser’s phone hasn’t moved, you mean.’

‘Sami’s sitting outside the apartment building,’ said Michel. ‘The moment anything happens, he’ll let us know. But I must tell you, Father, I don’t like this. It’s too big a risk, your going in. Think what it would do to the bank if you were caught. Think what it would do to the family.’

‘We’re doing this,’ stated Butros flatly. ‘That being the case, we need someone there familiar enough with Phoenician history and material culture to make good decisions about what to bring out. That effectively means me. However, you have some small expertise in this area. If you’re genuinely so concerned about my being caught, you could lead the team in yourself, and both Georges and I could stay behind. That way, only one member of the family would be at risk. How about that for an idea?’

Michel flushed. ‘This is foolishness, Father. This whole thing is foolishness.’

Butros nodded to himself. ‘I won’t make this decision for you,’ he told him. ‘But, if you choose to stay here, I assure you I will go with Georges.’

Silence stretched. It went on so long, it was clear that Michel had got the double message. ‘If that’s what you think best, Father.’

‘Yes.’ He went back out on deck. For years he’d tried to convince himself that his son was merely prudent, as befitted a banker; but the hard truth was that he was a coward. He gripped the rail tight as they left the shore behind. The old harbour dwindled to a twinkling of coloured lights. Georges and his team had unpacked the two black inflatable dinghies on deck and now began pumping them up. They were eight-seaters, and only six of them were going in, but they needed both in case they found the site and had to bring out artefacts. They secured them with ropes then lowered them over the seaward side. They made splashes like silvery soft felt. They climbed down the ladder onto them. Water sloshed around the bottom so that his feet quickly grew wet and cold, almost as if with fear. They attached the outboards, passed down packs that were bulky not just with their comms and night-vision equipment, but with more old-fashioned supplies too: torches, cameras, emergency medical kit, coils of rope both to climb down into the site and to hoist up artefacts. They also had food and water to last them for a day or two should anything happen to trap them ashore. A final check then they hunkered down and let go the ropes, drifting to a stop behind the Dido as she burbled sweetly on her way. They lay still in their inflatables for a full two minutes, lest some diligent sentry was watching from the shore. Then Butros murmured the word and they sat up carefully, turned on their electric motors and puttered quietly for the beach.

The water was dark yet faintly florescent in places, perhaps from algae. Though the chop was light, inevitably they all took their share of splashes. The inflatables soon smelled of fuel; his lips smacked of salt. Headlamps lit the roads to their right before being eaten by the black hole of Varosha, a mere silhouette of darkness. Yet he remembered it well from their earlier approach. A thin strip of sand in front of a jagged wall of beach-front ruins, their guts exposed and dangling, red flags fluttering weakly on the roofs of the tallest hotels in a feeble assertion of Turkish sovereignty. The rusting cranes behind that surely would soon topple.

They turned their engines down to a mutter as they neared the beach. The waves were so weak they barely broke at all. It would be reckless to leave unnecessary footprints on the sand so they burbled south to a crumbling pier where pleasure boats would once have moored. They hitched the inflatables to it then climbed a rusted ladder and made their way ashore. He glimpsed movement on the beach but wasn’t unduly alarmed. It was so long since people had used this beach that birds and turtles had taken to nesting here.

Their first task was to establish a communications link. Georges set up the modem a little way inland from the pier. It sought out and quickly connected to its geostationary satellite, providing them with an encrypted, high-bandwidth link to the Dido’s bridge, where Michel was monitoring local army and police radio channels for any signs that their incursion had been detected. Nothing yet, he assured them, and still no sign of Visser or Black, but he’d contact them the moment anything changed.

They couldn’t move the modem without breaking its satellite link. They could, however, link their cell radios to it. These were tactical, ultra-high-frequency models based on an British army design, with a range of around 250 metres in built-up areas that made them all but invisible except to the most sophisticated of scanners. Yet they could work in relay, too, so that by dropping them off at intervals, like breadcrumbs in a children’s story, they could extend their effective range to well over a kilometre.

All the packs were now ashore. They hoisted them to their shoulders then pulled on their night-vision goggles and slipped stealthily into the lost city of Varosha.

III

The lift was still out of order, but at least gravity made the stairs easier on the way down, allowing Andreas to brief them on Varosha as they went. Superficially, it appeared almost impregnable, what with the sea to its east, army garrisons to its north and south, and checkpoints and guard-posts along its western flank — a lightly used road that ran all the way south to a closed border with the Cypriot Republic. It had high walls topped with barbed wire and festooned with menacing signs showing soldiers with guns that warned people not even to photograph, let alone intrude.

‘So how do we get in?’ asked Karin.

‘Easily,’ he assured her. For one thing, Varosha was huge. They were only interested in the northern third themselves, where the resort had been. But the Forbidden Zone as a whole was a rough oblong several kilometres long and over a kilometre wide. That was a lot of ground to watch. More to the point, nothing had happened there for over forty years, other than for a few incursions by mischievous children and reckless thrill-seekers. It had become such a burden and an embarrassment that people barely even acknowledged its existence any more. Its perimeter walls had crumbled and even collapsed. The wire had stretched and sagged and snapped. Such repairs as had been made at all were shoddy efforts of corrugated sheets and nailed planks that had themselves fallen apart, making it absurdly porous. And so the guards yawned away their days and made tired jokes about the world’s most closely protected nature sanctuary.

They stopped en route for supplies: dark clothes, torches of varying power, a compass, some water and energy bars, matt-black packs to carry it all in. Then they continued south until they were driving alongside it. The crumbling wall to their left looked as easy to clamber over as Andreas had promised, but the road itself was another matter. Instead of a deserted lane, army Jeeps and trucks were driving by every thirty seconds or so, their headlights on full beam. ‘Shit,’ said Andreas, turning onto a side road, pulling in and dowsing his lights. ‘I’ve never seen it like this.’

‘Never?’ asked Iain.

‘Never. Nothing like.’

‘Are they here for us?’ asked Karin.

‘Why else?’ asked Iain.

‘All the trouble in Turkey,’ she suggested. ‘Maybe they don’t want it spreading to Cyprus.’

Andreas shook his head. ‘Then they’d be in the Old City or up by the University. Not down here.’

‘So what do we do?’ asked Karin. ‘Do we wait until they’re gone?’

‘When they’re gone, all that will mean is that we’re too late,’ said Iain. ‘We need to do this while it can still make a difference. But we don’t all need to go in. No offence, guys, but I’d be safer on my own. I’m trained for this shit. It’s what I do. I’ll take the camera, find this place, explore it and film it. Then we’ll reconvene and decide what to do next.’

‘Find it, explore it, film it,’ said Andreas drily. ‘That’s a lot for one person to handle with half the Turkish army on their back. Besides, there’s more to journalism than footage, even these days. A story like this, you have to know how to frame it so that people will believe it, so that it will gain traction. I teach that shit. I’m coming with you.’

Iain shook his head. ‘If they catch me, there’s a chance they’ll just deport me again. You they’ll fuck for sure.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Andreas, with unexpected intensity. ‘This is my town. My country. I’ve been covering politics here my whole life. But sometimes covering it isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to pick a side.’

‘Okay.’ Iain turned to Karin. ‘Then you stay here, keep an eye on things. If it goes to shit, kick up a fuss for us.’

‘No,’ said Karin.

‘No?’

‘No, I’m not staying safe back here while you two go in. Professor Volkan is quite capable of kicking up a fuss for all of us. But I’m coming with you.’

‘Seriously, Karin,’ said Iain, ‘the more of us there are, the more likely we are to—’

‘The more likely we are to find this thing,’ she said. ‘Look at us. Three people with a few scribbles on a map and a matter of hours to prevent a coup. No moon to speak of and we can’t risk torches. We’ll be down on our hands and knees looking for this fucking place, so we’ll need all the eyes we can get. Besides, what do we know about it? The only thing we know is that it has some kind of Phoenician or Trojan War connection. What if that proves significant in some way? I know that stuff. Do you?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Enough,’ said Karin. ‘If you two are both going, then I’m going too. I mean, Jesus, if they don’t spot Andreas vaulting the wall, they’re not going to spot me.’

‘Hey!’ said Andreas. But then he shrugged ruefully. ‘She’s got a point.’

‘Good,’ she said. She nodded back along the road at the perimeter wall of the Forbidden Zone. ‘Then let’s stop wasting time and get in there.’