Trojan Odyssey (Dirk Pitt 17)

"As good as any," Dirk echoed. He looked at Summer. "Why don't you and I dive first thing tomorrow morning and search the walls for inscriptions? Besides, I think it only fitting that we pay our respects to our high priestess for the last time."

"Don't linger too long," said Parks. "The captain has given notice that the anchors come up at noon. He wants to transport the artifacts to Fort Lauderdale as soon as possible."

As they exited the laboratory, Summer looked at Dirk with a curious gleam in her eye. "Since when are you overcome with nostalgia?"

"There is a practical method to my madness."

"Oh, and what is that?" she asked dryly.

He stared back at her with a crooked little grin. "I have an idea something important was missed."

Now that they knew where to continue the search, they swam straight to the anteroom. The ancient compartments were empty now. Only yesterday it had looked like an airport waiting room. The ship's scientists were probing every nook and cranny. Now, with all the artifacts removed and under preservation aboard Sea Yesteryear, and their investigation all but finished, they were back on board, compiling and evaluating their findings. Dirk and Summer had the submerged rooms all to themselves. Now that there were no archaeologists looking over their shoulders, they saw little reason to treat the walls with gloves of velvet.

As planned, they began their search in the entry chamber, Summer examining one wall while Dirk took the other, scraping away any sea growth or encrustation with putty knives until they reached bare stone, knowing they were committing sacrilege in the eyes of a conscientious archaeologist. They worked the walls, scraping in long horizontal bands, concentrating from four to five feet from the floor. Because the average height of people three thousand years ago was several inches shorter than in the present, their eye level would have been lower. Using this historical fact, Dirk and Summer decided to compress their search area.

It was slow going. After an hour of fruitless inspection, they returned to Sea Yesteryear to replace their nearly empty air tanks. Although all NUMA dive support vessels carried hyperbaric chambers, Dirk meticulously checked the repetitive dive tables with his computer to avoid decompression sickness.

Twenty minutes into their second dive, after they moved from the antechamber deeper into a long hallway, Summer suddenly tapped the handle of her putty knife on the wall to attract Dirk's attention. He immediately swam to her side and stared at the section on the wall she had scraped and was excitedly pointing at.

She had scraped the letters pictographs in the growth.

Dirk nodded and gave a thumbs-up in elation. Together, they began feverishly cleaning the encrusted stones with their gloved hands and fingers, working cautiously so they did not damage the precious relic that slowly materialized in the gloom. Finally, the carved images in the stone were exposed. Brother and sister felt a sense of triumph in knowing they had outfoxed the professionals and were looking at something no other human had laid eyes on in three thousand years.

The pictographs offered a much-sought-after clue to the mystery of the sunken house. Dirk turned his dive light on the stone depictions to highlight their details. Further investigation revealed that the images traveled down both sides of the hallway in two bands two feet wide and about five feet off the floor. The pattern was similar in design to the Bayeux Tapestry that illustrated the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Dirk and Summer hung in the water and stared in almost religious awe at the sculpted carvings that depicted men sailing in ships. They were strange-looking men, with large round eyes and thick beards. Their weapons consisted of long daggers, short swords with an angle and battle-axes with curved edges. Several of the soldiers rode in chariots alone, but most fought on foot.

Battle scenes with much carnage were rendered. The scenes seemed to portray several battles in a protracted war. There were also images of women with bared breasts throwing spears into their enemy.

Summer lightly ran one gloved hand over the female figures. She turned to Dirk and smiled a superior feminine smile.

The ornamental scenes began with ships leaving a burning city. Farther along, the ships were tossed about by storms, followed by land battles with odd-looking creatures. Near the bottom, there was only one ship left of the fleet, the rest having been destroyed. Then it too was depicted sinking in a storm. Near the end, an image showed a man and woman embracing before he sailed away on what looked like a raft with a sail.

They had found a classic chronicle carved in stone by an ancient artisan that had stood unseen by human eyes under the sea for thousands of years. Dirk and Summer gazed at each other through their face masks in exhilaration, never imagining that they would find anything so incredible and so extraordinary.

Dirk motioned toward the doorway leading out into the reef. The dive light blinked out, and they turned and swam toward the surface, leaving the precious treasure exposed for those who would soon follow and photograph and reveal the pictographs in their full glory.

25

Poco Bonito passed through the mouth of the Rio Colorado in the early afternoon in water that changed from the traces of the brown crud to the algae green of the river. Burly white clouds splashed the blue sky, some dropping light showers as they blocked out the sun. The NUMA crew stood on the deck and waved to the fleet of small fishing boats that darted past, outboard motors buzzing like a swarm of hornets, fishermen proudly displaying their catch of tarpon, snook and barracuda. One boat celebrated with raised bottles of beer as they passed the crippled research boat. Two of the anglers held up a tarpon that looked as if it weighed more than a hundred pounds.

Gunn ran Bonito in slowly, keeping to one side of the river out of the way of the little fiberglass fishing boats, skirting the buoys and angling around a slight bend. He made a half turn on the wheel, setting the bow on a heading past the Rio Colorado Lodge and beyond, to a dock that led to a covered walkway bordered by flowers that trailed up to a large house set under a grove of palm trees.

"It looks heavenly," said Renee, admiring the lush beauty of the tropical forest surrounding the house that was built from lava rock with a large thatched palm frond roof.

"A fisherman's paradise," Gunn said from the pilothouse. "Built by an old friend from my academy days, Jack McGee. If you enjoy seafood, you'll get your fill of exotically prepared fish here. He's accumulated thousands of recipes from around the world and has written several books on the subject."

Pitt jumped to the dock and took

the lines thrown by Giordino and tied them to the cleats. By law, they stayed close to the boat until their papers were checked by the local border guards, who were surprised at the damage suffered by Poco Bonito. Renee used her Spanish to spin a wild story of how they escaped a fleet of drug-smuggling pirates, as cutthroat as any of their ancestors who pillaged the Spanish Main.

Since the incident happened in Nicaraguan waters, the guards didn't request a report. Rita Anderson, on the other hand, would have created a sticky problem. She had no papers, and since Pitt and Gunn had no wish to explain her presence on board their boat, Renee bound and gagged her before she and Giordino crammed Rita into a storage closet in the engine room. The guards made a cursory inspection of the boat, and had no desire to stain their starched and neatly pressed uniforms in the engine room after seeing Giordino looking like James Dean after the oil well came in in Giant.

After the guards had walked up the dock out of earshot, Dodge turned to Pitt. "Why are we treating Mrs. Anderson like a criminal and keeping her as a prisoner? Her husband was murdered and her yacht seized by pirates."

"She's not what you think," said Renee curdy.

Pitt kept his eyes trained on the guards as they climbed into a Land Rover and drove from the dock over a dirt road muddied from rain. "Renee is right. Mrs. Anderson is no pawn. She's mixed up to her ears in shady business. Admiral Sandecker has contacted Costa Rican law authorities, who agreed to take her into custody and launch an investigation. They should be along any time."