The Man of Bronze (16 page)

His last word caught my attention. I turned and saw where he’d been looking. At the far corner of the tabernacle, in the shadows against the rock wall, an electric device had begun to blink atop a stack of what looked like gray bricks.

“That’s a bomb, isn’t it?” Ilya whispered.

I nodded. The bricks were plastic explosive: maybe C-4, maybe one of the new military-grade plastiques circulating on the black market. Whatever it was, I was sure the stack contained enough firepower to bring the cavern down around our heads.

“Ilyosha,” I said, “how good are you at disarming bombs?”

“Never tried it,” he replied. “So who knows? I might be brilliant. How about you?”

“My preferred technique is running like mad to get out of the blast radius. But since that would involve abandoning you . . .”

Ilya didn’t bother arguing. He knew I wouldn’t leave him . . . even if there was enough time to do so, which I doubted. Urdmann would have set the bomb’s timer for only a few minutes—long enough to let us agonize over our predicament but not long enough to defuse the bomb or get ourselves clear.

Still, maybe I
could
defuse the bomb. If I was lucky. In movies, you just had to cut the red wire . . . or was it the green? I walked carefully forward, hoping the great mound of explosives didn’t have a motion sensor to set it off if I got too near.

A piece of paper lay folded on the stack. I debated touching it—a demolitions expert might have rigged a trigger that went off when the paper was moved—but if Urdmann had left me a note, he wouldn’t want to kill me before I’d read it. Urdmann liked to gloat . . . and this note was his chance to say
Ha-ha, Lara, I beat you.

Nothing went boom as I opened the message:

Lara dear,

As soon as you drew near, the warmth of your lovely body triggered this bomb’s detonation sequence. You now have ten minutes to live. What a pity I’ll never know how you chose to pass the time.

All my best wishes,

Lancaster Urdmann, O.B.E.

P.S. If you get out of this alive, let’s meet for a return engagement in the Sargasso Sea.

“O.B.E.?” I squawked. Who on Earth had Urdmann blackmailed to get an Order of the British Empire? He must have held a gun on the queen’s favorite corgi. Or maybe he was just lying about the O.B.E. so I’d spend my final minutes in anguish. “That does it,” I said. “We’re getting out of here
now.
”

I glanced at the guts of the bomb, but it was a snarl of electronics with nothing that cried out
I’m the deactivation switch.
Urdmann would surely have put in false circuits, touch-sensitive triggers, and all kinds of other tricks to discourage tampering. The moment might come when I’d be desperate enough to yank out wires at random on the off chance I’d get the right one. But not yet.

Instead, I looked around the cavern, searching for means of escape. We’d passed all those side tunnels as we walked along the cavern’s edge; who knew where they led? Possibly into private living quarters for the shamans: dead-end crawl spaces whose only way out was back the way we’d come. If we went down a tunnel and the bomb went off, the cavern would collapse, trapping Ilya and me in a lightless hole until we ran out of air, water, food, or all three. Not good. Or perhaps the cavern would turn out to be the lair of more monsters, in which case the end result would be the same, only quicker. But what else was there? As I gazed upon the cavern, all I could see was dark unforgiving stone . . . and of course, light from the two terrace lenses we’d uncovered . . .

Hmm.

“Ilyosha,” I said, “drag yourself to the escape tunnel. Watch for traps but get ready to leave.”

“What about the avalanche blocking the passage?” Ilya asked. “You think the warmth of your smile will melt the snow away?”

“Close.” Without waiting to explain, I ran for the nearest terrace.

At the back of the terrace, another lens had been covered with hides to shut out the light. My katana blade went
snicker-snack,
and sunshine flooded in . . . or as much of a flood as one gets from the near-arctic sun in December. I grabbed the lens’s frame and aimed the light straight at the escape tunnel. Two more seconds to focus—three cheers for arcane devices that defy the laws of physics—then I stepped back to judge my handiwork.

A beam of sun illuminated the mouth of the escape tunnel like a theater spotlight. Ilya, lying near the opening, blinked at me through the glare.

“Does it feel warm?” I yelled.

“A little,” he replied. I couldn’t tell if he was just humoring me or if the lens really was focusing the sun like a magnifying glass, heating up the blockage of snow between us and the outside world. Only one way to find out: more light, more sun, and—I hoped—more heat.

I ran from terrace to terrace, uncovering lenses and aiming them at the barrier of snow. When I’d done a dozen terraces on the lowest level, I pulled myself up to the next highest tier and repeated my rounds. One by one, beams of light converged on the frozen wall that sealed off our escape; one by one, the heat sources accumulated, combining their thermal strength. Ilya was forced to crawl back from the tunnel mouth: first, to remove himself from the increasingly toasty brilliance of the lenses, then to avoid the meltwater and toppling chunks of ice that fell from the hole once the weight began to loosen.

Meanwhile, I kept an eye on my watch. Urdmann’s note said the bomb would go off in ten minutes. Under other circumstances, that might be a lie—Urdmann would cheat for cheating’s sake, promising ten minutes but setting the detonator for nine. Or two. In this situation, however, I believed he’d allow the full time. He wanted to prolong our suffering; he wanted to savor the thought of us wallowing in despair till the very last moment. If anything, he’d let the clock run a little longer . . . maybe ten minutes and ten seconds, so we’d have a brief moment of false hope that the bomb had fizzled. Then
boom
and the end of all things.

So I gave myself nine minutes. Nine minutes of racing from terrace to terrace, setting up lenses. Then a final dash to the escape tunnel, where dozens of light beams converged with blowtorch intensity. The blockage was almost clear . . . but we had no more time to wait. Over Ilya’s protests, I picked him up in a firefighter’s lift and threw myself at the opening.

Ice in front of me, fire behind: a blast of heat as we entered the area where the lens lights merged. I slammed against the frozen obstruction, smelling acrid fumes as my parka smoldered. Then the cold gave way and I stumbled up a steep, shadowed tunnel. Clouds of steam accompanied me: melted snow that had flash evaporated under the focused beams. I blundered fog blind up the tunnel; the barrage of light receded behind me, but the heat didn’t. Near-boiling mist soaked my face, obscuring my vision and slicking the stone under my feet. If I slipped, off balance with Ilya’s weight, we’d both hit hard on the rock—maybe even tumble down the slope, back into the fierce burning light.

And the explosion.

We were nearing open sky when the bomb went off. All my complaints about jungle-hot steam seemed trivial in the face of the skin-searing fireball that burst up the shaft behind us. It threw Ilya and me the last few paces, tossing us out onto oozy mud that had melted under earlier gushes of heat. Even so, the flaming eruption that reached the surface could only have been a tiny fraction of what ripped through the cavern below. It was no fifteen-megaton blast—nothing to make seismographs dance around the world—but the ground beneath us shuddered, and I dug my fingers into the mud to hold on.

Nearby, the frozen lake cracked. Its flat sheet of ice collapsed; Urdmann’s bomb must have ruptured the cavern’s roof under the lake. A slurry of mud, ice, and near-frozen water gushed down into the caves, filling them after all these years: blotting out the murals and all other traces of the underground civilization. Perhaps some vestiges would survive—I’d pass the word to archaeologist friends who might like to mount an expedition—but I doubted there’d be much to find. Any remaining mammoths, saber tooths, and other monsters would be drowned in the deluge . . . nibbled by fish and reduced to gnawed bones, just like all the other prehistoric carcasses that turn up each year in Siberia.

Another Tunguska enigma.

I helped Ilya to his feet. Slightly burned, our parkas in tatters, we started back to the copter.

8

THE SARGASSO SEA:
ABOARD
UNAUTHORIZED
INTERVENTION

Two days later—give or take a few hours lost to time zones, jet lag, and the international date line—I stood on the deck of the good ship
Unauthorized Intervention,
tossed by the North Atlantic.

According to maritime registries,
Unauthorized Intervention
was a private yacht owned by Lord Horatio Nelson-Kent, Viscount of Aylsford, retired rear admiral of the Royal Navy. According to Lord Horatio, the ship was a man-of-war, loyally serving the Crown whether the Crown liked it or not.
UI
sailed the world in search of trouble—pirates to hunt, atrocities to quash, shipwrecked sailors to rescue—crewed by thirty stalwarts like Lord H. himself: ex–Royal Navy or ex–Royal Marines, retired but still fighting the good fight.

Don’t get the wrong impression. These weren’t old fogies spending their twilight years pretending to be heroes.
Unauthorized Intervention
’s crew were hard, experienced men in their fifties or slightly more, tougher than most young bravos half their age. Each had his own reason for leaving the regular services, but none did so out of frailty. Some were put off by the military bureaucracy; some had grown tired of “personality conflicts” with younger officers; some couldn’t stand “those idiot politicians” who’d “never worn a uniform” but were now “forcing changes down everyone’s throat”; some had simply grown bored with routine and had shopped around for a change.

Lord Horatio enlisted them all in a new type of service: his private go-anywhere commando squad, “protecting Her Majesty’s interests” on land and sea. If such a team had been assembled by Lancaster Urdmann, they’d just be malignant thugs, looting and wreaking mayhem wherever they could get away with it. Lord Horatio, however, was a grand old man in the finest English tradition. Like Churchill, like Nelson, like leaders all the way back to Arthur, Lord H. was a military genius who clung to the noble code of “doing the right thing.” Also like Churchill and the rest, he was a swooping mad eccentric who might do anything on a whim . . . such as saying, “Of course, Lara, it sounds like a good bit of fun,” when I asked if he’d sail me into the most haunted part of the Sargasso Sea.

Sargassum
is a brown seaweed that floats on the ocean’s surface, most notably in a swath of the Atlantic that starts in the Bermuda Triangle and reaches halfway to Africa. This is the Sargasso Sea: more than two million square miles of water calm enough for
Sargassum
to accumulate. Early sailors worried the sea might have places where weeds grew so thick they could trap passing ships, but individual
Sargassum
plants seldom clump together. They just waft loosely like leaves on an autumn pond.

Still, the Sargasso Sea has its share of doomed vessels. Any ship that goes derelict on the Atlantic—whether the crew dies of thirst, starvation, storm, disease, inept navigation, or any of the other dangers that have plagued mariners since humans first plied the waves—gradually drifts toward the Sargasso. Currents carry things to the region, then peter out . . . as if the Sargasso were a nexus of ocean flows, a magnetic place that attracts all loose flotsam. Some call it the graveyard of the seven seas; but from the deck of
Unauthorized Intervention,
it looked and smelled more like a sewage dump.

Night was falling as I gazed over the waters. This close to the equator, the sun set quickly—a big change from Siberia, where dawn lasted two hours and dusk the same, with no time in between. I turned to say as much to Ilya, who sat nearby in a deck chair . . . but he’d fallen asleep, thanks to powerful painkillers prescribed by a doctor in Alaska. (For reasons known only to global airline schedulers, flying by way of Anchorage worked out to be the fastest route from Tunguska to Bermuda, where we’d boarded
Unauthorized Intervention
.)

I watched Ilya breathe for a few moments, then bent to make sure he was all right. If I’d had my way he’d be resting in some hospital, but he absolutely refused. He wasn’t the sort to stay quietly behind while I followed Urdmann’s taunting invitation to a “return engagement in the Sargasso Sea.” Even if Ilya was too injured to take an active part in the hunt, he wanted to be close when Urdmann went down. Reuben had been Ilya’s friend too . . . and there was also the matter of the bullet Urdmann had pumped into Ilya’s leg. I’d decided I had no right to stop Ilya from coming along. Besides,
Unauthorized Intervention
had medical facilities as good as any army field clinic. I straightened the blanket over Ilya’s legs and silently assured myself he’d get all the care he needed.

“He’ll be fine, my dear,” Lord Horatio said. He stood on my opposite side, watching the sunset: a grizzled leather-skinned man in a dark gray uniform that blended into the twilight. I’d known him all my life—he’d taught me to tie bowline knots when I could barely walk—and since I’d turned twenty, every year on my birthday he gave me the greatest gift he could imagine: yet another invitation to become the first female member of
Unauthorized Intervention
’s crew. Each year, I had to say no . . . with a kiss on his wind-rasped cheek and a whispered, “Thank you, but I can’t. Not now. Not yet.” Though I’d visited the ship several times—a few days in Hong Kong, a week near the Falklands, an unplanned two hours when we happened to run into each other on Krakatoa—I’d never taken part in one of Lord H.’s “quiet little operations.”

Not until now. Now we were headed into dangerous seas: where the Sargasso intersected the Bermuda Triangle. Last known location of the bronze man’s lower leg.

Once upon a time—400
B.C.
or earlier, according to Reuben’s notes—the leg had been a secret treasure of Carthage. The city’s priesthood had used their bronze talisman more cautiously than the shamans of Tunguska; Carthage chose a look-but-don’t-touch approach that saved them from Siberian-style degeneration. Still, the leg’s influence gave its owners an advantage over their neighbors. In the course of a few centuries, Carthage grew from a small North African town to a major Mediterranean power: a rich city-state, one of the greatest trading ports of its day, with outposts reaching from the Middle East to Spain.

Too bad for Carthage it shared the region with another rich city-state, equally adept at trading and expansion: the feisty Republic of Rome.

The two cities began battling each other in 264
B.C.
, at the start of what’s called the First Punic War. The fighting continued off and on for more than a century until in 146
B.C.
, Rome finally came out on top, crushing its enemy’s army and navy. To make sure Carthage never caused trouble again, Roman legions demolished the city and scattered the people; but the night before Rome’s scorched-earth invasion, Carthaginian priests loaded their most sacred treasures onto a fast trireme and sailed off under cover of darkness.

One of those treasures was the bronze leg, pulsing with arcane power. Perhaps that fluky power was what allowed the galley to slip past the Roman fleet blockading Carthage’s harbor . . . but even magic has its limits. The treasure ship was spotted during its escape and pursued westward by a Roman patrol. The chase stretched for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond into the Atlantic. Finally a storm arose, during which the Romans lost their quarry . . . and that was the last anyone saw of the leg for more than a thousand years.

In 1710, a half-drowned pirate washed ashore on Florida’s Dry Tortuga islands, claiming that he and his men had sighted a genuine trireme in the midst of the Sargasso Sea. The galley floated at the center of a gridlocked flotilla of ships, some many centuries old. Naturally, the pirates investigated, thinking the ships might contain treasure . . . but they never got close enough to find out. When they came within a few hundred yards, the pirates were suddenly mobbed by “haunts”: walking corpses like the zombie mercenary who’d attacked us in Siberia.

The pirates, being sensible men, turned their ship around and raced off as fast as they could. Not fast enough. One of the attacking haunts set fire to the pirates’ powder magazine, filled with twenty barrels of gunpowder for the pirate ship’s cannons.
Kaboom
. The only survivor was the man who’d reached the Tortugas—a chap blessed with admirable luck, not only getting thrown clear of the explosion but waking up afterward amid wreckage that included a lifeboat, half a barrel of drinkable water, and some not-too-green dried beef. The supplies had kept him alive long enough to get back to civilization, where he told his tale to anyone who’d listen.

That was when his luck ran out. The night after washing ashore he died “under mysterious circumstances.” Some people said the haunts finally caught up with him. More likely, a gang of civic-minded Floridians returned the pirate to the sea, this time with weights around his ankles. In those humorless times, before Errol Flynn gave piracy an air of swashbuckling romance, drunkenly admitting you were a pirate could severely shorten your life expectancy.

But without the pirate’s tale-telling, Reuben Baptiste would never have discovered the leg’s whereabouts. How could anyone guess that a Carthaginian galley last seen off Spain would end up near Bermuda, almost all the way across the Atlantic? And even if we knew that, how would we find a single galley in the two-million-square-mile Sargasso?

No matter how much we knew, without the exact location from the Osiris statuette, we were still searching for a needle in hundreds of square miles of haystack. The galley could have drifted a long way from its position in 1710 . . . and that was assuming the galley was still afloat. Derelict ships eventually sink, worn down by weather and waves. Any normal galley from 146
B.C.
would have gone to the bottom long ago. Only the power of bronze mumbo jumbo could have preserved the Carthaginian ship into the 1700s . . . and how much longer could the bronze energy work? The waterlogged galley might now be lying in Davy Jones’s locker, far out of anyone’s reach.

As if reading my mind, Lord H. patted my arm. “Don’t worry, child. This won’t be a fool’s errand. The sea’s getting ready for something big.” He inhaled deeply through his nostrils, sniffing the air. “Some nights, you can smell it on the wind.”

“Smell what?” I asked.

“Change. As if the sea has made a decision. Time for things to come together.”

He turned his eyes to the horizon, where the last red of sunset was fading. “The ocean’s so vast, my dear, it’s rare to cross paths with anything out here. Most naval battles take place near known harbors or along well-used shipping lanes. On the high seas, off any standard route, ships have trouble finding each other. In a thousand square miles of ocean, you’re lucky if there’s one other vessel . . . and how likely is it you’ll sight each other in all that great area? But sometimes . . . some nights . . .” He sniffed the air again. “Once in a while, the sea decides it’s time for a bit of fun.”

“You mean we’ll find the Carthaginian treasure ship? Or will we find Lancaster Urdmann?”

Lord Horatio took one last sniff. “Sometimes,” he said, “the sea likes a
lot
of fun.”

Five minutes later, we intercepted an encrypted radio signal. Its source was almost exactly where we expected the galley to be.

“It’s no code I’ve ever seen, Captain.”

The radio man was called Amps. Everyone on
Unauthorized Intervention
had a nickname like that: short, snappy, and twee. Amps was built like an aging sumo wrestler, huge as he sat at his radio console on a too-small chair; but his oversized head had oversized ears—the better to hear you with, my dear. Like most encrypted signals, the transmission he’d picked up sounded more like random static than anything intelligible. Amps’s highly trained ears, however, recognized it as a coded message. The only problem was deciphering what the code was.

“Does anyone on board have experience breaking codes?” I asked.

Lord Horatio gave me a pained look. “We
all
do, dear. And we keep several dozen computers in the lower hold, programmed with thousands of decryption algorithms . . . many of which are supposed to be top secret.”

Amps nodded. “If anyone found out what we can decode, MI5 and the NSA would have right massive coronaries . . . not to mention the World Bank and the RIAA. Considering the work
Unauthorized Intervention
does, it’s handy to understand what the opposition says to each other. But this code we’ve picked up—it’s new. Fits none of the usual patterns.”

“Can you pinpoint the source?” I asked.

“I’ve got a line on it,” Amps replied. “Can’t triangulate to get a precise point, but I know the direction it’s coming from.”

“Thank you, Amps,” Lord H. said. “Send the coordinates to the bridge, if you please, and ask the helm to set course on that heading.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Also raise the ship’s readiness level to Precaution Three.” He glanced at me. “We’re assuming the signal came from your Mr. Urdmann?”

“That’s a safe bet,” I said. “I wish I knew where he acquired fancy new cryptography gear.”

I wished I knew a lot of things about Urdmann: not just where he was getting his high-tech equipment—particularly the Silver Shield force fields—but how he’d tracked the bronze leg to the Sargasso. The Osiris statuette was made in 1250
B.C.
: long before Carthage rose and fell. Long before the treasure ship fled from the Romans and ended up in the Bermuda Triangle. The statue couldn’t possibly have been inscribed with the bronze leg’s current location . . .

. . . unless the statuette’s makers were more clairvoyant than I thought. Perhaps their prophecies had focused on where the bronze pieces would actually be recovered, not where the pieces happened to be in 1250
B.C.
When I thought about it, that made sense. If you were a seer scrying for an arcane talisman, asking
Where is the object now?
wasn’t as good as
Where will the object eventually be found?
If, for example, a bronze fragment was currently at the bottom of the sea, knowing its exact location didn’t help. What you wanted was where it would finally wash up.