Pandemic (38 page)

Monedes watched Elias’s progress around the storeroom with a certain weary detachment. He turned to Stein as Elias added the last items to his growing pile. ‘Your friend knows what
he’s doing, and he’s going deep, I think.’

Stein nodded without comment, then bent down to help Elias carry the equipment out to the car, parked right outside the door. While Elias was stowing the last item in the boot, Stein headed back
into the shop. ‘The hire fee should already have been paid?’ he inquired.

Monedes nodded. ‘Yes, by American Express, but I will need your passport as security.’

Stein didn’t demur – he was carrying three completely genuine American passports in different names – and he immediately handed over the one bearing the name
‘Wilson’.

‘Can I see your diving permit?’ Monedes asked, as something of an afterthought.

Stein stared at him and shook his head. ‘What diving permit?’

‘You should have got a diving permit from the Department of Antiquities if your friend is going to dive here in Cretan waters. I am supposed to see it before I supply you with any
equipment.’

Stein’s face cleared. ‘No, he’s not,’ he said, thinking on his feet. ‘We’re diving well away from Crete – that’s why we need the boat.’

Monedes still looked doubtful, so Stein passed over a handful of notes. ‘If anybody should ask you,’ he said, ‘perhaps you can confirm that you
have
seen our
permit.’

Monedes looked at the notes in his hand and nodded slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said, pushing them into his hip pocket, ‘perhaps I can.’

Stein grinned. ‘And the boat?’ he asked.

Three minutes later their car was pulling up alongside a nearby jetty. Twenty minutes after that Krywald and Stein were sitting side by side on a bench in a grubby but sea-worthy blue-painted
open wooden boat about fifteen feet in length. They watched as Elias started the inboard diesel engine and slowly began to manoeuvre the craft through the harbour and out to the open sea.

HMS
Invincible
, Sea of Crete

The previous evening Richter had spent nearly two hours poring over a selection of navigation charts of the waters surrounding Crete. But he’d spent a few minutes
preparing his criteria before even looking at them. He had decided to eliminate all areas within half a mile of the coast of Crete or any other inhabited islands, on the grounds that an aircraft
wreck so close to the shore would have been discovered long before. He had also excluded all stretches of water greater than one hundred and fifty feet – fifty metres – in depth because
of the difficulties of anyone diving that deep without specialized equipment.

What surprised him was how small – not large – an area that left to be searched. At his self-imposed half-mile cut-off point, there were virtually no locations around the Cretan
coast where the water was less than one hundred metres deep. About the only possible areas on the coast itself were the two north-facing bays at the western end of the island – Kólpos
Chanión and Kólpos Kissámou – but Richter was fairly certain Aristides hadn’t been diving in either of them.

Quite apart from anything else, both inlets contained popular holiday resorts, so anybody diving there would easily become the focus of numerous pairs of eyes and binoculars, not to mention
cameras, and a man who earned his living by illegally recovering ancient artefacts from the seabed would hardly want such a large and attentive audience to witness his activities. No, on balance,
Richter decided that Aristides would have been diving somewhere else.

But there were numerous small islands around Crete itself, most of them uninhabited because they were simply too small to be developed, so the shallower water close to their shores was a
definite possibility. Richter had already marked several of these, starting with Andikíthira and finishing with the Gávdos– Gavdopoúla pair.

Privately, he put his money on three strong contenders: Paximáda in Órmos Mésaras, south-west of Agía Galíni; Chrýsi and its much smaller companion
Mikronissi lying to the south of Ierápetra, though this area lay some way outside his theoretical radius of fifty to sixty miles from Kandíra; and finally the area extending between
Gávdos and Gavdopoúla. The outside bet would be the Koufonísi group located south of the Stenon Konfonisou at the eastern tip of Crete. That was too far for Aristides to reach
in a day and still get back to Kandíra, but it was still a possibility if the diver had spent one or two nights somewhere in the area.

With his target areas established, Richter had worked out a route that would allow the Merlin to check the chosen sites in the most logical order in terms of speed. With
Invincible
still
loitering out to sea north of Réthymno, he decided that the first site to investigate would be Andikíthira lying north-west of the western tip of Crete, followed by Gávdos and
Gavdopoúla, and then Paximáda. Then probably a refuel, although that depended on the amount of time they would spend searching at each location, the Merlin having a top speed of over
160 knots and an endurance in excess of four hours.

If refuelling was necessary, they’d fly north, straight over the Cretan mainland and back to the
Invincible
, undertake the long transit south-east to Chrýsi and Mikronissi,
then a short flight east to Koufonísi and then back to the ship. If by that stage they’d found nothing, Richter was going to have to think again.

‘And we’re looking for what, exactly?’ Lieutenant Commander Michael (‘Mike’) O’Reilly was the 814 Naval Air Squadron Senior Observer – known inevitably
as ‘Sobs’ – and he’d elected to fly this sortie when he’d heard the Merlin wouldn’t just be acting as an airborne taxi cab. They were in the Rotary Wing
Briefing-Room on Two Deck, where the met officer had finished his spiel a few minutes earlier, and Richter had just outlined the route he intended the Merlin to take.

‘A wrecked aircraft on the seabed,’ Richter said. ‘Probably an executive jet of some sort – a Lear, Falcon, that sort of size – and it’s been at the bottom of
the sea for a while, probably ten years or more. It was apparently shot down, so it’s almost certainly going to be severely damaged.’

‘Shot down – how do you know? Who by? And whose aircraft was it?’

‘That’s three questions,’ Richter replied, ‘and the three answers are: it was in the newspaper; no idea and no idea.’

‘In the newspaper?’ O’Reilly grinned broadly. ‘Is that where you spooks get the information you need? It’s hardly Echelon or Carnivore, is it?’

Echelon is a communications intercept programme operated jointly by the American National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, and with contributions from
Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. It routinely monitors all telephone calls, emails and fax transmissions originating or terminating within its operating area, searching for specific
words and phrases. Carnivore is a broadly equivalent programme, but run on a much smaller scale and operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States.

Richter smiled back at him. ‘Sometimes open-source information proves just as valuable, Mike, and in this case I’ve no option but to rely on it because it’s all I’ve got.
And you’re just a touch out of date anyway – the cutting-edge communications intercept programme now running is the National Reconnaissance Office’s Blue Crystal, not the National
Security Agency’s Echelon.’

‘Blue Crystal? Never heard of it,’ O’Reilly replied.

‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ Richter said. ‘If you had, I’d have had to shoot you. Now, do you think you can find this bloody aircraft for me?’

‘Of course,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Finding needles in haystacks is our speciality. Let’s get going.’

Kandíra, south-west Crete

‘He died of what?’ Inspector Lavat doubted the truth of what he’d just heard.

‘He drowned,’ Hardin repeated. ‘Aristides drowned in his own blood. The actual cause of death was respiratory failure as his lungs filled up with blood. This is a type of
pulmonary oedema that’s often called Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome or ARDS. It’s the commonest cause of death in patients suffering from an attack by an arenavirus like Venezuelan
Haemorrhagic Fever, Brazilian Sabia Virus or Lassa Fever.’

‘I’ve heard of Lassa Fever,’ Lavat said, ‘but not the other two. So Aristides died of something like Lassa Fever – is that what you’re saying?’

‘No, or at least not Lassa or any of the other known arenaviruses, because those all act quite slowly. The victim first complains of a headache and muscle pains, which gradually get worse,
then he gets feverish and starts vomiting, has diarrhoea and begins bleeding from the gums. Occasionally those affected suffer haemorrhages in the whites of the eyes. Their blood pressure falls
dramatically, they go into shock, and in the later stages they suffer convulsions and lapse into unconsciousness.

‘In the final stages many display a massive swelling of the head and neck and decerebrate rigidity – a condition that freezes the body into a contorted posture as the higher brain
functions are lost. Some suffer from encephalopathy – that’s an inflammation of the brain – and those who do usually lapse into a coma with severe convulsions.’

‘I’m a little out of date,’ Dr Gravas said, ‘but I think I’ve read about some kind of treatment for Lassa Fever.’

‘Yes,’ Hardin said, ‘there is a treatment now, though it’s still somewhat experimental, and the drug – it’s called ribavirin – must be administered as
early as possible after the diagnosis has been made if treatment is going to be successful.’

Gravas nodded slowly. ‘In this case,’ he said, ‘I doubt very much if ribavirin or anything else would have helped, given the sheer speed of the infection. In some ways,’
he added, ‘from what you’re saying it looks as if Aristides died from a hugely accelerated form of an arenavirus – what you might almost call a kind of “Galloping
Lassa”?’

Despite himself, Hardin smiled. ‘That’s not a bad way of putting it, Dr Gravas. He did die of ARDS, and although a lot of the classic symptoms of Lassa were absent in
Aristides’s case, and the kind of severe bleeding he presented is rare, we can call it that for the moment.’

ASW Merlin callsign ‘Spook Two’, off Andikíthira, Sea of Crete

The Spook Two callsign hadn’t been Richter’s idea, but Mike O’Reilly had thought it amusing enough to suggest using it for communications on a discrete
frequency between helicopter and ship, and Wings had raised no objections. If they had to talk to Soúda Bay or any outside controlling authority, they would instead use the aircraft’s
side number.

The transit to Andikíthira had taken only a few minutes in the Merlin flying at one hundred and forty knots and by ten-thirty local time the aircraft was in the hover just over a mile to
the east of that tiny island. Andikíthira is arguably the most isolated speck of land in the Aegean and is inhabited by a population of about fifty people living mostly in the port of
Potamos at its northern end.

Potamos boasts one of almost everything: one policeman, one telephone, one doctor, one teacher and one monastery. But there’s no bank or post office, and the only way on or off the island
is by a ship that stops there once a week on its journey to Crete from the much larger island of Kíthira, lying a few miles to the north-west. Running water and toilets are either scarce or
unavailable, depending on the time of year. There is a café and a restaurant, and about ten rooms available for tourists sufficiently determined to spend time there.

The island’s chief claim to fame is the celebrated ‘Andikíthira Mechanism’, which was pulled from the sea just off the island in 1901 and is now on permanent display in
the Greek National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The fragmentary remains of a highly complex object fabricated from bronze around two thousand years ago, it appears to have been designed as an
astronomical clock, and is unique in that no equivalent device is known of until the time of the Renaissance. Hence it has been argued that this mechanism was the progenitor of all subsequent
timepieces.

None of this, however, was of the slightest interest to Richter, or to any of the other men aboard the Merlin. All they were concerned about was locating the wrecked aircraft as soon as
possible.

The pilot had used the flight control system to auto-transition the helicopter into the hover, and was now flying the aircraft hands-off, waiting for further instructions from Mike
O’Reilly, who was the senior officer and therefore the aircraft captain. And O’Reilly wasn’t saying much presently because his entire attention was concentrated on the displays
directly in front of him. Below the helicopter a cable snaked vertically downwards into the blue of the Aegean and at the end of it dangled a Flash lightweight folding acoustic dipping sonar from
Thales Underwater Systems which was capable of searching depths down to two thousand feet. It was the data received from this sonar which O’Reilly was analysing.

‘Anything yet?’ Richter leaned closer to Sobs in the cramped rear compartment, still trying to get used to the slight warble in his voice caused by the throat microphone.

He had spent nearly a thousand hours flying Sea Kings before he had made the jump sideways to train on Sea Harriers, but he had always sat in one of the front seats, so what went on in the
aircraft’s darkened rear compartment was a complete mystery to him. Essentially, the observer in the back of a Merlin fights the aircraft. He tells the pilot where to go and what to do when
he gets there, and not for nothing are ASW helicopter pilots referred to as ‘taxi drivers’. That was one reason why Richter himself had switched to fixed wing: he had quickly got tired
of sitting twiddling his thumbs and looking out at different-coloured bits of various oceans while the guys in the back had all the fun.

O’Reilly dragged his eyes away from the display and began hoisting the sonar body from the water. He glanced sideways at Richter. ‘Yes, there’s quite a lot of stuff down there,
but we can eliminate most of it for reasons that I won’t bore you with. I’ve marked three contacts that I’d like to have another look at, but first we should do a general survey
of all the waters around the island.’ O’Reilly checked to make sure that the sonar body was inboard. ‘Pilot, jump three five zero, distance two thousand yards.’