Gorgon

CHAPTER 3

Terrorism and hostages — they were trigger words that immediately called in Kemel Baykal. That morning forty tourists and a guide had entered the Sunken Palace, and none had returned. The site manager had then entered, and also failed to return. A single scream had stopped any other management or security personnel from going after him. The police had been next, and they had also vanished. It was if the caves were consuming people, and not even throwing back their bones.

After a frustrating hour with no contact from the police officers, another squad was sent in, with the same results — no return, no contact. Once again, the cave had eaten them.

The severity of the incident was escalated immediately. Now it was Kemel Baykal’s turn. Baykal was an Atsubay, or commander, of the Special Forces Command. The Turkish military was NATO's largest armed force after the United States, and included two fully functional Special Forces groups. The first, the Askeri Komandos, numbered over 30,000 soldiers, and were used in frontline insertions and higher-grade operational activities. The second group were the elite Special Forces Command, or SFC. This group, Baykal’s group, comprised the most professional soldiers, the best of the best, drawn from the ranks of the Turkish army, navy, air force, and gendarmerie. And counterterrorism was one of their specialties.

The big man stood with his arms folded in the darkened truck, listening to the agitated police komiser give his report of the situation. Baykal’s unblinking eyes were a bottomless black under his bushy eyebrows, and a brush-thick moustache jutted from his upper lip. His large bulk filled the interior of the mobile command center.

When the police chief had finished, Baykal saluted and turned away, thinking over the information. Turkey had twelve active entities on its significant terrorist list that sought either to destabilize the region through a political process, or, more crudely, to blow as many Turkish people as they could into atoms every chance they got. In the last twelve months alone, Baykal’s unit had engaged twenty-two times — and twenty-two times they had stopped an attack before it occurred. His negotiations were short and simple: total surrender, or death. The political agitators ended up in jail, and the fanatics who wished to die for their cause ended up in bodybags — everyone got what they wanted.

He watched, his concentration hawk-like, as his six men split into two teams of three and moved up the left and right flank of the now drained cistern in a standard insertion V-pattern, M4 assault rifles at their shoulders, mounted flashlights throwing long pipes of light into the gloom. Communication and visual relay equipment was built into the men’s helmets, and though most dialogue was performed with short and sharp hand signals, they also listened for Baykal’s deep and calm voice.

Baykal leaned forward on his knuckles and stared hard at the screen that was split into six individual frames. As his two teams came to the dark pit, their torchbeams illuminated circular steps leading down into the near impenetrable darkness. There was some sort of debris at its edge.

‘Hold it there.’ Baykal squinted at the objects on the screen. ‘What’s that?’

A soldier advanced and zoomed the focus on his small camera, and the object increased and clarified. He spoke briefly back to his commander. ‘Broken statue.’

Baykal grunted. There shouldn’t be that sort of debris on the chamber floor, but it may have been submerged. After all, there should have been millions of gallons of water in the cistern, and no access to some secret lower chamber.

‘Proceed,’ he ordered.

There was complete silence as the men darted forward, the images onscreen sweeping back and forth, the barrels of their guns up and visible. The soldiers fanned out around the pit, swung around the area briefly, then looked over the pit’s edge. ‘No bodies,’ reported the insertion team leader.

For Kemel Baykal, that wasn’t good news. Nearly fifty people had entered the cisterns, and if there were no bodies, warm or cold, that meant they must have been taken down into the hole in the ground. They had no information on what was down there, what the terrain was like, or why the hostages had been taken there — or, for that matter, where the opening had even come from. It also meant a blind firefight with terrorists was probably unavoidable, which in turn increased the likelihood of civilian deaths.

‘Break formation,’ Baykal ordered. ‘Mizrak team to lead in. Çekiç team’s one and two, in after ten seconds. Çekiç three, hold at rim of pit. Acknowledge.’

The instructions were repeated back immediately, and the first trio entered the dark hole, followed exactly ten seconds later by two members of the second team, leaving the remaining man down on one knee at the edge of the circular pit.

Baykal watched Çekiç three’s camera image as it moved from the inky blackness of the pit to the surrounding chamber, then back down to the pit’s depths. Already the other team’s lights were being swallowed by a darkness blacker than Hades.

Baykal’s eyes moved to the other five image feeds that showed what his men were encountering as they descended into the pit. They traveled downwards for approximately one hundred steps until they came to the damp floor of a large vault-like room. Though the walls were thick with slime and moss, the men’s flaring pipes of light picked out mosaic images and what looked to be Roman script, as well as several other languages.

The Mizrak team leader signaled his men to spread out. The five images moved slowly forward, each soldier’s light beam cautiously sweeping left and right. As the men came to the end of the circular room, Baykal could see arched stone doorways leading off into more velvet-thick darkness. For a fleeting moment, he imagined the Colosseum of ancient Rome, where slaves huddled in the center of the arena, waiting for savage beasts to spring upon them from arched doorways just like these.

The men were drawn to one central doorway, larger than the rest, which looked as if it had once been bricked up. Bricks lay scattered before it, evidently roughly chipped and pulled out of position. The Mizrak team leader pointed to new cuts and breaks in the stone, revealing the paler granite beneath.

A hundred questions sprang into Baykal’s mind, but now was not the time to ask them. Distractions could be lethal.

A boot pushed aside some of the debris, to reveal a metal chisel and hammer. Modern tools, Baykal thought. Someone had pulled those stones out recently. The tourists? Why?

The five onscreen images came together, and a hand went up flat in a hold it gesture. All five images froze.

‘Proceed?’ the team leader asked.

Baykal responded quietly. ‘Affirmative.’

The flat hand came down to point at the broken-open doorway. Baykal stared with fierce concentration as his men stepped cautiously forward, careful not to stumble over the broken stone and bricks, careful not even to nudge the rubble and make a noise. The images jumped as the soldiers looked down for foot placement, then quickly back up at the doorway. On the ground, Baykal saw more pieces of what looked like broken statue — multiple statues — and also, strangely, piles of dusty clothing.

One camera focused in on the closest carved figure and Baykal saw that the detail on the face was exquisite. The artist had truly captured the emotions of pain, agony, fear, and a sort of hellish torment. He could only wonder at the artisans’ intentions as they crafted those tortured visions. He frowned; there was something at the back of his consciousness bothering him. Being a former Special Forces soldier himself, he was trained to miss nothing — but he felt he just had.

The five images onscreen coalesced as the men reached the doorway and stood before it. Baykal leaned across and put his arm on the technician’s shoulder. ‘Rewind the last thirty seconds.’

The man’s fingers leaped forward on the keyboard, and immediately the dark images raced backward, then replayed at normal speed.

There — he knew it. On the slender finger of one of the broken statues — a gold ring. Baykal knew Roman statues had often been adorned with laurels of gold and other embellishments, but the ring didn’t look right given the antiquity of the tunnels. He straightened and reached up to pinch his chin.

A soft noise drifted around the chamber.

The team leader moved the barrel of his gun slowly across the space. ‘Are you picking that up?’

Baykal leaned forward and the technician amplified the sound. Baykal frowned — it sounded like weeping.

‘We got it,’ he said. ‘Maybe one of the tourists. Proceed.’

The images moved forward again, slow and controlled. Baykal was about to get the technician to play back footage of the statues’ faces when the tomb-like silence exploded into chaotic sound. Shouts quickly turned to screams, followed by gunfire, and the images on all five screens bounced and jerked. On each appeared a fleeting image of something large and mottled — a face? Frustratingly, the image refused to clarify and become distinct. It was well over the tallest man’s head, hanging there for a second or two, motionless, but not still. Its edges seemed to boil with movement, like coiling ropes thrashing in fury.

Baykal felt like his brain was being squeezed, and he turned to throw up. He wiped his mouth and spun back. Around him, the technicians vomited, or fell from their chairs unconscious.

The screens were a chaos of light and movement, then transformed into a snowstorm of static. Only noise was being relayed now from the pit’s depths — that same cacophony of screams, shouts, and rapid bursts of full automatic gunfire.

Before Baykal could give his instructions, the remaining Çekiç team member flew down into the darkness to support his comrades. For the first time in years, Baykal’s calm exterior burst and he pounded the table, roaring into his handset — but no one listened, no one responded.

As the last man reached the deep chamber floor, his screen turned to static and new screaming started.

‘Someone’s coming up!’ The shout immediately quietened the frantic movement and chatter of the command center.

An unmanned drone used for bomb disposal had been sent into the cisterns. Its tractor wheels had easily navigated the sludge and small pools of water, and it was perched at the top of the pit, its single eye on the end of a crane-like structure that reached out and down, scanning for the slightest movement on the dark circular stairs. For hours there had been nothing.

Kemel Baykal had been joined by the head of the local police and his counterpart from the Askeri Komandos, as well as dozens of local security personnel and a growing army of media that had to be corralled and kept well back from every entrance to the Basilica Cistern. It was proving to be a frustrating and enormously distracting job when all Baykal wanted to do was get back in and find his men. He was convinced they’d been attacked by an unknown number of assailants with access to superior weapons technology. He would have staked his men against any unit in the world, and knew there was not a chance in hell they would have allowed themselves to be ambushed and either killed or incapacitated so easily.

Just as he was contemplating sending in a larger force with more firepower, the shout had come from the technician monitoring the robotic camera.

There was complete silence as the technician zoomed and refocused the lens. Someone was coming up the stone steps on their hands and knees, crawling in the agonizingly slow manner of the heavily fatigued or mortally wounded.

Baykal pushed police and commandos out of his way to get back in front of the screens. His eyes still watered after glimpsing the floating face and he had a headache like he’d been hit with a sledgehammer, but he concentrated on the image. As the figure came closer to the rim of the pit, the camera was able to pick out further features. It was a man, and he was entirely gray, as though he’d been painted or showered in plaster dust.

At last, he placed one hand on the rim of the pit and pulled himself out. In agonizing slow motion, he rose from his knees to his feet.

Baykal could see that it was his last soldier, the man who had been stationed at the pit’s rim. He whispered the man’s name softly. ‘Zeren.’

Finally on his feet, Special Forces soldier Zeren Yanar opened his eyes and blinked several times. He slowly lifted one arm in front of himself and waved it about, as though blind, then let it drop it as if it was too great a weight for him to sustain.

The technician telescoped the camera upwards, level with Yanar’s face, and zoomed in on the man’s eyes. They were completely white, from sclera to pupil, blank orbs.

Zeren Yanar opened his mouth wide, as if to scream, and revealed a tongue and throat that were also chalk-white. Though the sound was being fed back to the communications command center, they heard nothing. All that emanated from the man’s ghostly white lips was a small cloud of powder that twinkled in the harsh light of the robot’s cyclopean eye.

As Baykal and the dozens of other military and security personnel watched, the Special Forces soldier tried to raise his arms again. They appeared even heavier than before, and showered more of the powder to the cistern floor, before cracking at the elbows and shoulders. The cracks became fissures, and then the wretched man simply fell to pieces before their eyes.

There was complete silence in the command center. It was nearly a full minute before Atsubay Kemel Baykal realized his mouth was hanging open. For the first time in his life the Turkish Special Forces commander had no idea what to do.

He finally spoke just two words. ‘Seal it.’