Serpent (NUMA Files 1)

Now, as Nina surveyed the lagoon, the lines and squiggles on a map translated themselves into physical features. The basin was roughly circular, embraced by two pincers of blasted brick red rock. Beyond the entrance were shallows that at low tide revealed rippling mud flats. Thousands of years ago the lagoon opened directly onto the ocean. Its naturally sheltered waters would have attracted ancient mariners who commonly anchored on either side of a headland to wait for good weather or daylight. Nearby was a dry riverbed, what the locals called a wadi. Another good sign. Settlements often grew near a river.

From the lagoon a narrow, sandy path led through the dunes and eventually terminated at the ruins of a small Greek temple.

The harbor would have been too tight for Roman ships and their massive jetties. She guessed the Greeks used the inlet as a temporary anchorage. The steep shoreline would have discouraged hauling goods inland. She 'had checked the old maps, and this site was miles from any known ancient settlement. Even today, the nearest village, a sleepy Berber encampment, was ten miles away over a rutted sand road.

Nina shielded her eyes from the sun and stared. over the water at a ship anchored offshore. The vessel's hull was painted from waterline to superstructure in turquoise green. She squinted, just making out the letters NUMA, the acronym for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, emblazoned on the hull amidships. She idly wondered what a vessel belonging to a U.S. government agency was doing off a remote shoreline in Morocco. Then she picked up a large mesh bag and descended a dozen worn stone steps to where the water gently lapped the bottom stair.

As she removed her UPenn baseball cap, sunlight glinted off braids the color of ripe wheat woven together behind her head. She slipped out of an oversized Tshirt. The floral bikini she wore underneath revealed a strong, longlegged body nearly six feet tall.

Nina inherited her first name, her golden hair, her slightly roundish face, and a peasant stamina that could put male counterparts to shame from her greatgrandmother, a sturdy farm worker who found true love in a Ukrainian cotton field with a Tsarist soldier. From Nina's Georgian mother came the bold, almost Asian eyes of stormy gray, high haughty cheekbones, and lush mouth. By the time the family emigrated to the United States, the genetic airbrush had slimmed the Kirov female silhouette, narrowing thick waists and .wide hips, leaving a pleasing width and a healthy bustline.

From the bag .Nina took a Nikon digital camera in a custom-built Ikelight plastic housing and checked the strobe light. Next came an air tank and US. Divers buoyancy compensator, a blackandpurple Henderson wetsuit, booties, gloves, hood, weight belt, and mask and snorkel. She suited up and on her head attached a Niterider Cyclops light that would keep her hands free, then fastened the quickrelease buckles of her BC and snapped on her weight belt. Finally, she strapped a seven-inch Divex titanium knife to her thigh. After dipping a collection bag to a utility hook, she set. the time on her latest toy, an Aqualand dive watch with a depth display.

With no dive buddy to check her equipment, Nina went through the routine predive inspection twice. Satisfied with the results, she sat on the stair and worked her feet into her fins, then she slipped off the step before the blistering North African sun cooked her inside the wetsuit. The tepid water seeped between her skin and the neoprene wetsuit and quickly warmed to body temperature. She tested her main and extra regulators, then pushed away from the stairs, turned, and slowly breaststroked into the pondlike lagoon.

There was virtually no wave motion, and the slimy water was slightly brackish, but even with the surface scum Nina reveled in her freedom. She glided along with gentle fin flutters, pitying the expedition's land archaeologists as they crawled on sore knees wielding trowels and whisk brooms, eyes stinging with sweat-caked dust. Nina could maneuver in comfortable coolness like a plane making an aerial survey

A lowlying island topped by an anorexic scraggle of stunted pines guarded the entrance. She planned to swim directly toward the island and bisect the lagoon: She would explore each half separately, making a series of parallel runs at. right angles to the baseline. The search pattern was similar to that used to find a wreck in the open ocean. Her eyes would take the place of a sidescan sonar or magnetometer. Precision measurements came later. She simply wanted to get a feel for what lay underwater.

Once below the clouded surface, the water was relatively clear, and Nina could see to the bottom, a depth of no more than twenty feet. This meant she could snorkel and conserve air. A series of intersecting straight lines materialized and formed into rectangles created by carefully fitted stone blocks.

The stairway had continued down underwater to an old quay. It was a significant discovery because it indicated the lagoon was once a real port and not a temporary anchorage. The bottom was likely to be covered with layers of civilization over a long period of time instead of junk tossed over the side by transient sailors.

Soon she picked out thicker lines and piles of rubble. Building ruins. Bingo! Storage sheds, housing, or headquarters for a dock and harbormaster. Definitely not an overnight anchorage.

Darkness loomed, and she thought she was at the end of the quay. She passed over a large square opening and wondered if it could be a fish tank, what the ancients, called a piscine. Far too big. The size of an Olympic swimming pool.

Nina spit out the snorkel, bit down on the regulator mouthpiece, and dove straight down. She moved along one side of the yawning cavity. Coming to a corner, she turned and followed another edge, swimming until she had covered the entire perimeter. It was around one hundred by one hundred fifty feet.

Nina flicked her headlamp on and dove into the opening. The muddy floor was perfectly flat and about eight feet below the quay level. The light's narrow beam picked out broken pottery and debris. Using her knife, she pried potsherds from the mud and put them into the collection bag after carefully marking their positions. She discovered a channel and followed it seaward until it broke out into the lagoon. The opening was easily big enough to allow for the passage of an ancient ship. The space cut into the quay had all the characteristics of an artificial harbor known as a cothon. She discovered several slipways, each big enough to accommodate ships more than fifty feet long, and a true piscine, which confirmed her theory about the cothon.

Leaving the quay, she continued on her baseline course using the land spit to her right as a reference point. She swam between the island and the mainland until she found a submerged mole or breakwater a few yards below the surface, constructed of paralleJ stone walls filled with rubble. In a drier time it would have connected the mainland and the island.

Coming to the island, she shed her dive gear and walked across thorncovered slabs of rock to the other side. The island was more than fifty feet wide, almost twice as long, and mostly flat. The trees she had seen from shore barely came up to her chin.

Near the lagoon entrance were piles of stones, probably foundations, and a circle of blocks. It was the perfect spot for a lighthouse or a watchtower, offering a sharpeyed sentinel a panoramic view of ship traffic. Defenders could be summoned from the mainland whenever a sail was sighted.

Stepping inside the circle, Nina climbed onto a fragmented stair and looked out at the anchored ship she had seen earlier. Again she wondered what would bring an American government vessel to this arid and lonely coast. After a moment she retrieved her scuba equipment. The cooling and weightless environment back in the water was refreshing, and she decided her fishy ancestors had made a big mistake when they crawled from the sea onto dry land.

Nina swam across the lagoon entrance. The other peninsula started low from the land, gradually widening as it rose to a knobby crag. The sheer reddish rocks dropped straight into the water like the ramparts of a fortress. Nina dove until she was at the base of the blank wall, looking for a footpath. Finding none, she continued underwater to the seaward end of the promontory which terminated in a rocky shelf. A. perfect defensive position where archers could set up a murderous cross fire to rake the decks of any invader entering the harbor.

A horizontal slab protruded like a Stone Age awning from the rock face near the platform. Beneath the slab was a rectangular opening the size and shape of a doorway. Drifting closer, Nina squinted through her face mask lens and tried to pierce the menacing blackness. She remembered her headlamp and switched it on. The shaft of light fell on a whirl of ghostly movement. She drew back in alarm. Then a laugh bubbled from her regulator The silverscaled school of fish that had made the tunnel its home was more startled than she was.

As her pulse returned to normal she recalled Dr. Knox's warning: Don't risk your neck for a nugget of knowledge that would end up in a dusty tome read by a few. With fiendish delight he'd relate in grim detail the fates of scientists who went too far. Furbush was devoured by cannibals. Rozzini was consumed by malaria. ONeil dropped into a bottomless crevasse.

Nina was convinced Knox made the names up, but she took his point. She was alone, without a lifeline to unreel behind her. Nobody knew where she was. The very element of danger that should have repelled her was seductive in its appeal. She checked her pressure gauge. By snorkeling, she'd used her. air supply sparingly and still had time left.

She made a pact with herself to stop just inside the opening and go no farther. The tunnel couldn't be very long. Primitive tools, not diamond drills, had been used to cut through the rock. She shot some pictures of the entrance, then moved forward.

Incredible!

The floor was almost perfectly flat, the walls smooth except for shaggy marine growth.

She went in deeper, forgetting her pact and Knox's sage advice as well. The tunnel was the most beautiful artifact she had ever seen. It was already longer than a similar passageway at the submerged city of Apollonia.

The smooth sides ended abruptly, becoming a roughsided cave that narrow

ed and widened, meandering in more or less of a straight line, with smaller passages branching off. Sconces for lamps were set into the carbonblackened walls. The tunnel borers had extended the natural cave by making an artificial one. Nina marveled at the skill and determination of long dead Bronze Age sandhogs.