The Solomon Curse (15 page)

Sam slipped the dive mask over his head and glanced at Remi, standing beside him in a wet suit. “Fits you like a glove,” he said, admiring her figure.

“It's too loose, but I'll manage. You ready to do this?”

“I was born ready.”

“Let's not start on that again,” she said as she cleared her regulator and moved to the edge of the dive platform. She stepped off the lip and dropped into the water. Sam cleared his line with a hiss and followed her into the sea with a splash.

Once they were below the surface, Sam swam toward Remi and gave her a thumbs-up signal, which she returned. He glanced to his right and pointed and she nodded. He began swimming toward the hazy outline of the ruins, bleeding air from his BCV as he descended. Remi did the same, and several minutes later they were beside Warren and one of his divers, wearing commercial diving suits and Kirby
Morgan dive helmets. Warren pointed at the gap in the wall and Sam swam toward it.

He paused and ran his gloved hand over the edge, noting the scrapes along the rim. He turned back to Warren and pointed at the marks and Warren signaled
No
. They hadn't made them.

Remi joined him and Greg Torres swam near. Sam fished a flashlight from his dive bag and switched it on, and Remi did the same. Greg tapped his watch and pointed up, his message clear: he was running low on air and would need to begin his decompression run to the surface. Sam gave him an
OK
signal and watched as Greg and his companion began their ascent.

Sam returned his attention to the gap and shone his light in it. The darkness lit up, and he and Remi could make out a passage. The floor of the corridor was littered with broken chunks of block, seaweed, and barnacles.

Remi directed her flashlight beam into the opening and waited for Sam to lead the way as Warren waited nearby. Sam pushed himself cautiously into the passage, wide enough to accommodate both Remi and him side by side. He moved slowly, his fins barely propelling him along. Remi's light bounced off the sheer face of the walls and played over the ceiling.

Slivers of daylight glinted through cracks overhead. Sam stopped at the end of the passage where it made a hard right and paused before shining his beam into the inky darkness. He recoiled abruptly as a long black form swam toward him, the creature's predatory smile eerie in the flashlight's glow. The eel's sleek body, at least four feet long, undulated in serpentine waves as it darted past Remi toward the opening.

Remi followed the eel with her light until it faded into a shadow by the gap and then turned back to where Sam waited motionless. He wiped away the edge of the corner block and pointed to where more of the distinctive scrapes could be made out.

Sam resumed his progress, brushing away a trail marker along the walls to guide their way out.

Remi was behind him. When they made the turn, they found themselves in a large, partially collapsed chamber. Their flashlight beams roamed over the floor and walls, and Remi's stopped at another gap—this one in the floor.

Sam drifted toward the opening, pausing to look around, and hovered over it, before pointing at the scrapes along the edges. Remi nodded with an exaggerated waggle of her head so he would see it and then she stopped, wincing. The doctor's warning about taking it easy had been forgotten in the fray, but it came screaming back as a lance of pain shot down her spine.

Sam, unaware of his wife's discomfort, flashed his lamp into the hole, the darkness closing in as the amount of light in the chamber halved. With another look to Remi, he swam into the opening.

Remi followed him down, the shriek of pain in her neck subsiding as quickly as it had come. They found themselves in a smaller chamber, the walls as encrusted with barnacles and marine life as the one above. Sam edged to the nearest wall and rubbed it with his glove. A smear of greenish brown came away, floating in the water like a cloud, as he eyed the stone beneath. A line a quarter inch deep ran from top to bottom.

He scrubbed again lower down and peered at where the line intersected another. Two minutes of this and he had a three-foot section cleared, enough to see that the indentations were carvings.

A glint caught his eye, and he neared the wall until his face was only inches away. The light caught the spot again and it sparkled.

Remi was nearby, also scrubbing with her glove, but along the floor. She waited for the floating residue to clear and tapped Sam's arm. He spun to where she floated weightless near the floor and she pointed to a lump on the surface. There was still too much debris in the water to see well, but he focused his lamp where she was indicating and approached.

His eyes widened when he made out what Remi had found. It looked like a long knife.

Sam reached down and freed the blade from the silt, but most of it disintegrated at his touch, leaving him holding a worn piece of wood. He inspected it for several long beats and then directed Remi's gaze to the wall as he placed the find in his dive sack. She swam closer to the lines and he joined her, taking care to shine his light along the etching so she could see what had caught his attention. The section he'd pointed to gleamed in his beam and she reached out to touch it.

After scrubbing more of the wall, Sam tapped his watch and then his air supply gauge. Remi checked hers and gave him a thumbs-up. It was time to return to the surface.

They turned and were swimming toward the doorway when a low rumble trembled through the structure. Several large blocks dislodged in the chamber above them and dropped in a cloud of debris, barring their exit as the small earthquake shifted the foundation. Sam and Remi held deathly still until the shock subsided, their light beams filtering through the cloud of sediment. They exchanged a glance through their masks—their means of escape was sealed off.

Sam swept the area with his flashlight, looking for another opening. At the far end of the chamber, the light disappeared into darkness where previously there had been wall. Sam pointed to the new gap and swam cautiously toward it, Remi by his side. They reached the opening and found themselves peering into a passageway encrusted with marine life, long tendrils of seaweed drifting in the water like wisps of green smoke. Sam looked over at Remi and gestured at his air supply gauge. Remi glanced at hers and gave him a
So-so
signal with her right hand.

They swam into the narrow corridor together, Sam in the lead, the glow of his lamp of little help through the curtain of marine growth in their path. He groped with his free hand as the passageway curved, and slowed when he came to a bend, the bottom rising in a mound of debris.

Another glance at his watch confirmed that they were almost out of time—their ascent would require a decompression stop to allow the nitrogen in their systems to disperse, which would require air to breathe. At the rate they were going, they'd run out before they had sufficient decompression time and would have to rush to the surface, risking the painful and sometimes fatal condition known as the bends.

Which assumed they'd be able to escape in the first place and didn't drown when their dwindling air supply ran dry.

Sam pushed ahead until he came to a point where the rubble pile rose so high it blocked his way forward. He looked overhead at the ceiling and spotted a narrow section of opening created by several of the stone blocks collapsing. He inched to it and groped along the rim. More sediment filled the water as he broke loose a crumbling edge.

After two minutes of painstaking effort, he'd cleared an opening large enough to squeeze through without his tank. He slipped out of his BCD, took a final deep pull of air from his regulator, and then swam up into the darkness, pulling his rig along behind him. Remi waited, and twenty seconds later Sam reappeared and gestured for her to follow him up.

She repeated his maneuver with her BCD and wriggled into the gap. Once through the breach, they were in another chamber, this one smaller than the expansive one they'd entered through. Their lights scanned along the walls, and Sam pointed to where the sea growth was waving.

Remi swam toward the corner, slid her dive knife from its thigh sheaf, and hacked away at the seaweed until she'd cleared a section. Shattered blocks littered the floor beneath, and they could both make out another opening in the ghostly glow of their lamps, this one larger than the previous one. Remi took the lead and just managed to make it without having to remove her tank. Sam wasn't so fortunate and had to remove his harness again before slipping through.

They now found themselves enveloped in a solid mass of seaweed.
Sam and Remi cut through it with their knives. His blade encountered stone, and Sam pushed himself upward, continuing to cut.

A shaft of light pierced the gloom when his knife sliced through the last of the seaweed. The glow increased, and then they were in open water, on the far side of the ruin from where they'd entered. Sam drove through the water to where Warren was waiting at the entry and motioned to him to return to the surface with them. The Australian gave him an acknowledgment, and then Sam and Remi were rising, the sun's rays seeping through the water above like a starburst.

Warren shared his air at the decompression stop, but still the tanks were empty by the time they reached the surface. Sam gasped in relief as his head popped out of the water, Remi close behind him, and they bobbed in the gentle waves, catching their breath, the
Darwin
's distinctive crimson hull fifty yards away.

Ten minutes later, they had shrugged off their dive gear, dried off, and changed into shorts and T-shirts. After a brief discussion about how to best proceed, Sam and Remi returned to the pilothouse with Sam's dive bag in tow, where Leonid was seated by the monitors, his expression typically dour.

Sam sat next to him and told him about the earthquake and near miss.

“You're lucky you made it out alive.”

“That seems to be how our fortunes run, thank goodness.” Sam paused. “Your theory that there have been a decent number of earthquakes slowly eroding the ruins seems accurate. That wasn't a very big one, but it was large enough to cause damage and almost trap us.”

“Why did you tell the others to come back up?” Leonid asked. “They were outside and barely felt anything.”

“Because we need to discuss what we saw inside the big structure and I don't want to repeat myself,” Sam said.

Warren had joined Des by the helm. The rest of the dive team stood around the area, waiting to hear what Sam and Remi would say. Sam
cleared his throat, and his gaze slowly swept the room before settling back on Leonid.

“Remi found something that changes everything.”

“What?”

Remi interrupted. “First, let's talk about what we didn't find. There was no treasure.”

Leonid's shoulders sagged almost imperceptibly. Remi smiled and continued. “That would have been nice. But one of the things we saw were deep grooves in the walls of a chamber beneath a larger room that appeared to be a central gathering place. It's hard to know until we clean everything off, but I'd say that the building was the main temple and the chamber was a treasure vault.”

“Grooves in the walls?” Des asked, his tone puzzled.

Sam nodded. “Yes. Carved into the stone. Once we get the hoses in there and clean the area, my hunch is we'll find glyphs covering every surface in the chamber. Probably depicting holy places, or maybe images of gods.”

“How can you be so sure?” Leonid asked.

Remi raised an eyebrow. “Because the carvings were filled with gold.”

“Gold!” Warren blurted.

Leonid appeared puzzled. “But I thought you said there was no treasure.”

It was Remi's turn to nod. “That's right. There were only traces of gold left in the carvings. The rest had been removed. I could see where they'd dug it out of the etchings. But they couldn't get it all.”

“They? Someone has been inside this temple before us?” Leonid asked.

“That's right. There's evidence on every wall. Probably a team of divers in surface-breathing equipment. You can make out where the hoses scraped the edges of the openings, rubbing at them. They weren't taking any care to conceal their presence, that's for sure,” Remi said.

“But surely we'd have heard about a find of this magnitude. Are you saying that someone located a modern-day Atlantis and didn't tell anyone?”

“Obviously, that's puzzling. Since we never heard of it, as unlikely as it sounds, that appears to be the case.” Remi paused. “It had to be a painstaking process to chip all the gold out of the walls—it probably took weeks of work with a team of divers.”

Leonid shook his head. “I don't understand. Who beat us to this?”

Sam eyed him. “We can't be certain . . . but Remi found a clue.”

“A clue?” Warren asked.

“That's right.” Sam reached into his bag, extracted the object he'd brought from the chamber bottom, and considered it for a long moment before holding it up. The men drew nearer, pressing close to see what Sam held. Leonid was the first to react with a snort.

“What is that? A piece of junk?”

“Not junk, Leonid.”

“You found a piece of wood? What am I missing?”

Sam gave him a disapproving look. “For a scientist, it amazes me that you haven't asked the key question.”

“What's that?” Leonid said with a scowl.

Remi cut in. “Why would Sam bring a piece of junk to the surface and call a meeting?”

Sam grinned. “Correct. That's the question.”

Leonid scowled. “What's the answer? Or do we have to guess that, too?”

Sam sighed and glanced at the seemingly insignificant piece of flotsam. “The only reason I brought this back up is because the rest of it dissolved to nothing when I tried to retrieve it.” He placed the wooden scrap with metal attached to it on the counter. “Looked to me like a broken bayonet. Broken, I suspect, when whoever looted the chamber was digging gold out of the wall with it.”