The Solomon Curse

CHAPTER 18

Sam and Remi drove to the airport the next morning to meet the American divers. Even with a chartered jet from Brisbane to Honiara, the flight time from Los Angeles had taken thirty hours, and they expected the men to be stiff and tired. They were surprised when the four divers descended the steps from their plane looking chipper and rested. The tallest of the group approached them without hesitation and extended his hand.

“Mr. and Mrs. Fargo? Pleased to meet you. I’m Greg Torres and this is Rob Alderman,” he said, indicating the man next to him, who nodded.

“Please. Sam and Remi,” Sam said, shaking Greg’s hand.

“And these two are Steve Groenig and Tom Benchley,” Greg said, looking to his right where the final pair of fit young divers was standing. None was older than early thirties, and Sam recognized the unmistakable bearing of former SEALs — battle-hardened veterans who would be as comfortable in the water as sharks.

The customs and immigration clerks sauntered out onto the tarmac and did a cursory inspection of the men’s dive gear and duffel bags before stamping their passports. The immigration clerk eyed the men and shook his head.

“You best be careful and stay in town, yeah? With what happened wit’ the aid workers, it’s not safe anywhere else,” he said in heavy patois.

“What happened with them?” Remi asked. All they’d heard the day before was that the two Australians had gone missing, with no official word of explanation.

“It’s all over the web. Rebels got them.” The clerk shook his head. “It’s bad. They threatening to kill them, they are.”

“Kill aid workers? They’re here to help.”

“These fool rebels say they all part of the foreign plague. Dat’s what they calling it. Fools blaming everything on others, like none of our problems is our doing. But they saying all the foreigners gotta go or there goin’ to be big-time trouble.”

“So they kidnapped unarmed humanitarians who are here to help the underprivileged and they’re going to kill them?” Remi said, her tone disbelieving.

“Dat what they saying. Crazy in the head, dese fools be.”

Sam’s eyes hardened as he studied the divers. “Well, looks like you flew into the eye of the hurricane. All of this just happened.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Greg said, his words clipped, his tone flat. Sam believed him.

“You’ll be on the boat all the time in any case, so any local issues shouldn’t affect the expedition.”

Greg shrugged as if it was all part of the job.

Sam and Remi had rented a four-wheel-drive Toyota van from a different agency and the men loaded their gear in the cargo area before wordlessly taking their seats. The drive to the site took an hour longer than the day before. They were stopped three times by uncomfortable-looking policemen at makeshift roadblocks, who, after searching the van, cautioned them against proceeding any farther into an area of the island that was out of official control. Sam and Remi remained courteous, but firm, and each time the lead officer shook his head when he waved them past as though he were directing them through the gates of hell.

Sam looked over at Remi from the driver’s seat. “They seem pretty wound up, don’t they?”

“Sounds like we were lucky we didn’t meet the aid workers’ fate on our little drive the other day,” she said.

“That occurred to me. But it wasn’t for wont of the bad guys trying.”

When they arrived at the bay, Greg’s team moved quietly and efficiently to set their equipment out on the sand as they awaited the arrival of the skiff. Remi fished a two-way radio out of her bag and called the ship. She was rewarded by a burst of static and then Captain Des’s cheerful voice.

“Good morning to you both,” he said. “Ready for a ride?”

“We are. Six of us, and enough gear to sink the boat.”

“We’ll make room. Be there in a jiffy.”

Once they were on board, Simms showed the men to the guest quarters while Sam and Remi joined Des and Leonid on the bridge.

Leonid looked up from a photograph he was studying when they entered and grunted before returning to his project. “About time,” he grumbled.

“I hope you were able to get something accomplished without us,” Sam said, ignoring the Russian’s barb.

Des nodded. “Two dives so far. We’ve got the layout nicely mapped now. Leonid here was just going over the images so we could work on each building in a systematic fashion.”

Leonid tapped a finger on the glossy printout. “This is by far the largest ruin. We should start there. It’s easily double the size of any of the others, which indicates it was the most important.”

Remi inched closer. “That would make sense, given the orientation.”

Sam nodded. “It’s east of the one we were looking at.”

“It looks to be in better shape than many of the others. Next dive, we’ll go over it carefully and see what’s under all the sea life,” Leonid said.

Kent Warren, the dive master, tromped up the steel steps and entered the pilothouse. “G’day. Just met the new lot. Serious gents, they are,” he announced.

Leonid pushed the underwater image away and stood. “I want to clear as much of the surface area of this large structure as possible by nightfall. The more bodies in the water, the faster it will go.”

“Too right. Let me run the calcs on bottom time and I’ll put together some dive schedules,” Warren explained.

“How many surface supplied air rigs do we have?”

“Only two,” Warren said. “We’re usually in shallower water and don’t use ’em much. But this seems ideal, so we’ll keep two men down for as long as feasible. Between them and the scuba, we should be able to make short work of clearing the worst of the clutter.”

“We don’t want to damage anything. And every step needs to be captured on film so we have a record,” Leonid reminded.

“Absolutely.”

Half an hour later, the on-deck compressor was clattering away as a member of Warren’s crew fed out hoses carrying air to the divers below. They were accompanied at the bottom by a pair of the recently arrived American divers in scuba gear and their slow approach to the sunken ruin flickered on the bridge monitor, where Leonid, Sam, Remi, and Des watched.

The image was high-res, creating the illusion they, too, were peering through dive masks as the swimmers approached the mound. Light filtering from the surface lent the scene a spectral quality. They watched as the lead diver moved near the closest surface and twisted the valve on a hose, directing a blast of high-pressure air at the crust of barnacles and seaweed.

The camera distorted in a cloud of debris as the water instantly turned opaque from centuries of accumulation being blasted off. Leonid had researched the best way to clean the structures with the least chance of damage and had hit on the idea with Des — use the compressor’s power to clean them.

The downside was that visibility was only a foot, and the divers had to give it a rest so the sediment could settle. The camera feeds flickered in the brownish cloud, and after a few minutes everyone could begin to make out the unmistakable shape of large limestone blocks.

Two hours later, enough of the wall had been cleared so they could appreciate the scope of the ruin — the wall measured at least one hundred feet long.

“It’s huge. Hard to believe that was built by the islanders,” Leonid said, his voice hushed. “Nothing hints at them having the means to construct anything like it.”

Remi peered at the screen and turned to Des. “Can you communicate with the divers?”

“Yes. The surface breathers have a comm line.”

“Ask them to zoom in on the area to the far right of what they’ve cleared.”

Des lifted a microphone to his lips and gave the instruction, and they waited as a diver moved in slow motion to the section that interested Remi. As the camera closed in on the block, Sam and Remi smiled and Leonid nodded.

Remi was the first to break the silence. “Looks like glyphs, and, if I’m not mistaken, that’s a totem of a sea god,” she said. “And look there. Looks like a depiction of a column of men. Hauling cases.”

Leonid squinted and Des cleared his throat. “What do you make of that?”

Remi sat back and smiled.

“Unless I’m completely garbling the glyph, it’s a group of warriors carrying something into a temple.”

“Something?” Leonid said.

When Remi spoke, it was almost a whisper. “Treasure. An offering to the gods.”