Into the Black (33 page)

Kismet yawned again, struggling to keep his eyes open.  He felt extraordinarily drowsy and found the trail of bubbles ascending from the cask to be almost hypnotic.  "Got to stay awake," he muttered to himself, hoping that the sound of his own voice would do the trick.  Hypoxia was taking him to the brink of consciousness.  If he could not hold on for just a few more minutes, he would die without seeing the object of his quest, the reason for his sacrifice.  Blinking away the somnolence, staying awake by a sheer act of will, he took the golden artifact into his arms.

It was much heavier than he expected, but he succeeded in raising it out of the cloud of air bubbles and into full view.  Despite the fog that clouded his mind, he felt a shudder of excitement and incredulity as he held aloft the Golden Fleece.

It appeared as nothing more than a lambskin, heavy with gold.  The wool was indistinguishable, matted with glowing metal flakes of varying size.  Kismet estimated that it probably weighed at least a hundred pounds.  Curiously, the Fleece continued to issue bubbles of gas, no larger than the effervescence in a glass of soda water.  Though tiny, the bubbles, which seemed to trickle from every surface of the golden artifact, formed a veritable swarm.  Kismet tilted backwards to get a look at the starboard side of the hold, where the globules were collecting into a great mass.

Inspiration crashed over him like a wave. 

Hovering over his head was a pocket of gas, growing larger by the second.  He could not explain how that atmosphere had been stored, or perhaps generated within the Golden Fleece.  Nor did he pause to consider whether the gas was poisonous, or whether he would be able to survive a pressure change if he attempted to breathe it in.  In the fugue of carbon dioxide poisoning, he was unable to conceive of such notions.

Casting aside what vestiges of caution remained, he dropped the Fleece into its cask and seized his air hose.  He kinked it in his left hand, and then sliced it in two with the razor sharp edge of his
kukri
.  The long end, still connected to the compressor, trailed impotently away like a decapitated python.  Kismet took the remaining end, still bent double in his hand, and thrust it up into the growing air pocket.  As he did, he relaxed his hold, which allowed the hose to open and the gas pocket to flow into and mix with the stale air in his helmet.  He detected no immediate change.  His tunnel vision did not brighten, yet neither did his delirium increase.  He didn't smell anything noxious in the confines of his helmet, but then he knew that most gases, even the poisonous ones, were odorless and tasteless.  In the absence of any other alternative, he continued to take deep breaths, hoping against hope that the gas pocket held breathable air.

He glanced back down at the Golden Fleece.  The fizz of bubbles continued to trickle from it without interruption.  Kismet knew that what he was witnessing could not be the result of trapped air; the volume of gas that had ascended exceeded the total volume of the crate.  The only other explanation was that the Fleece was somehow producing the atmosphere he now breathed.

He vaguely recalled Harcourt's words that fateful day in his office; that the gold—or rather
ubergold
—layer on the helmet shard could pull electrons out of the air.  He knew that water was simply a combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, both of which existed separately in a gaseous state, but bonded together in a liquid molecule that could be broken by the application of an electrical current The Fleece was evidently doing exactly that, electrically breaking the molecular bond of the water and separating its gaseous constituents.

Kismet gazed once more at the air pocket over his head, amazed that he was breathing in atmosphere produced by a talisman of ancient legend.  Hydrogen, the lightest of all elements, occupied the uppermost reaches of the air pocket, leaving him with a layer of almost pure oxygen, which was even now mixing and diluting with the carbon dioxide he had exhaled.

That he was able to put this chain of reasoning together was evidence enough that he was recovering.  How exactly the ancient object was able to perform that miracle remained a mystery, which even under the best of circumstances he feared he would be unable to resolve.

Though the Fleece had given him a second chance, he still felt like a man living under a death sentence.  He could breathe again, and probably had a virtually inexhaustible air supply, but he was trapped on the sea floor.  If he left the safety of the enclosure, he would at best have a few minutes of breathable air in his helmet, hardly long enough to make a free ascent.  Moreover, the suit was too heavy to permit him to swim free, and even if he could, such a journey would carry the risk of decompression sickness.  He could not remain here indefinitely, yet there was no way for him to reach the surface.  Marooned in the wreck of the golden ship, Nick Kismet gazed at the object of his quest and began to despair.

* * *

Captain Severin tossed the severed and useless hose to the deck.  Anatoly tightened his embrace on Irene, fearful that she might further endanger them by lashing out against their tormentor, but she did not move or say anything.  She merely choked back her sobs and kept her head down, denying the Russian sailors a look at her tears.

"A most unusual way to catch fish," repeated Severin, mockingly.  "I hope you have better success in the future.  However, I must now order you to raise your anchors and leave this area.  Whatever activity you were truly engaged in is finished, and tragically it would seem."

"We'll go," rasped Anatoly.  "Now get off my boat."

Severin nodded, gesturing for his first officer to begin the egress.  "
Do svidania
, Petrovna," he sneered, boarding the launch.  "Give my regards to your poor, sick fiancé."

Anatoly watched them go, aware that his boat would remain under the shadow of the destroyer's artillery emplacements until he obeyed the Russian captain.  He tenderly released Irene, turning her so that he could see her face.

"He's gone," she whispered.

"There's nothing we can do for him.  He took a great risk; he knew this might happen.  We must save ourselves."

Fifty yards away, as the captain of the
Boyevoy
was heralded back onto the deck of his ship, a great splash signaled the deployment of a marker buoy.

"We must leave here," urged Anatoly.  "Can you help me?"

She nodded.

"I need you to bring up the forward anchor."  He brought her to the motorized capstan and briefly showed her how to operate the device.  "I must haul in the nets and start the engine.  Can you do this?"

In a haze of grief, Irene nodded again.  Kismet was gone; nothing else mattered. 

* * *

Kismet bent the remnant of his air hose in his fist.  He had no intention of giving up.  He had been prepared for that eventuality before entering the enclosure, but discovering the Fleece had changed everything.  If he was not going to suffocate quickly, then neither was he about to settle for a protracted death by thirst or starvation.  There had to be a way for him to reach the surface and he was going to find it.

With the hose blocked and only a few minutes of air in his helmet, Kismet approached the door and pulled it open.  There was no sign of the rest of his air line and he could only surmise that Severin had pulled it up after finding nothing attached to the cable.  When the cut hose reached the surface, everyone would assume that he had suffered some tragedy below.  The Russians had surely guessed that he had dived on the site, but had Severin been able to extract from Irene or Anatoly the reason for his descent?

Beyond the opening, the sentry fish had resumed their defense perimeter.  Kismet wondered if they would attack him if he was moving away from the wreck; it was a sure bet that they would do their best to prevent him from regaining the safety of the hold.  He decided not to take that risk, venturing out only with his head and shoulders.  The fish did not move.  He looked up and could see the activity on the surface as the motor launch shuttled back to the massive destroyer.  A chain of ripples spread out from the point where the Russians dropped the marker buoy, and he could just make out the steel float bobbing on the surface, held in place by an anchor which plummeted through the water to bury itself on the sea floor less than a hundred yards from the wreck of the golden ship.  A cloud of sediment rose up around the impact but did not obscure Kismet's view of the cable connecting the buoy to the anchor.

It was enough to give him hope.  If only there was a way for him to climb up that cable....

He realized right away how impossible that would be.  But time was running out.  The two vessels on the surface would not remain in the vicinity much longer.  Once they left, he would be stranded.

He considered releasing one of the signal floats, but quickly discarded the idea.  Irene and Anatoly would never believe that he could still be alive, while Severin might interpret the signal as a reason to linger in the area.

The deployment of the marker buoy suggested that the Russian captain planned to return to the site.  He would probably put into port at Sevastopol, take on a salvage crew and divers of his own, then return to discover what fate had befallen Kismet at the bottom of the sea.  It would likely be days before the
Boyevoy
returned.  Even with an inexhaustible source of oxygen, he could not hope to stay alive that long, and in the unlikely event that he did, he would most certainly face a much worse fate at Severin's hands.

Kismet ducked back into the hold and refreshed his air supply.  There was a solution to this—there had to be—but loitering in the interior of the golden ship wasn't going to get him back to the surface.  The Fleece remained in its box, giving him a plentiful supply of air, but offering no other insight.  He realized with a defeated grimace that he would have to leave the Fleece behind.  It was much too heavy for him to carry across the ocean floor.

Even as he considered this, a plan began to take shape; all of the pieces of the puzzle came together in an astonishing moment of clarity.  He took several more deep breaths, trying to super-oxygenate his blood, then kinked his hose again tightly in his left hand.

This time he did not linger in the hatchway, but hastened though the portal as if escaping a burning building.  The ring of fish immediately shifted toward him but he was not attacked.  Moving with the greatest possible speed he bounded along the floor of the shelf toward the anchor that secured the buoy.  As he had feared, there was no way he could ever ascend the heavily greased metal cable, but that was no longer his intention.

He was standing almost directly under the
Boyevoy
.  It loomed above him like a great black cloud.  He gazed up at it, but could not see what he was looking for.  A churning of the water off her stern signaled that the destroyer's screws were now turning; she was about to get underway.  Kismet abandoned his first plan, leaving the buoy anchor behind, and charged out across the sea floor yet again.

He tried to place himself directly beneath the shadow of Anatoly's fishing trawler.  It was a much smaller area to locate, made more difficult by the vertical distance and the distorting effects of the water.  A moment later however, he spied his goal.

It was the movement that caught his eye.  Thirty yards away, well to the left of where he had positioned himself, the small anchor from Anatoly's boat was being reeled up.  Rather than rising vertically, the anchor and the boat were performing a sort of tug-of-war.  The slack in the anchor line had allowed the boat to drift a ways, but now both the boat and the anchor were swinging toward each other.

As soon as the bow of the trawler came directly over the weight at the other end of the line, the anchor would rapidly disappear toward the surface.

Kismet hastened toward it, watching as the anchor was dragged along the bottom, plowing a furrow of silt.  Suddenly the cross-shaped hook of iron swung like a pendulum and began to rise.  It seemed to jump towards the surface, moving in sudden bursts.  Kismet, three steps away, found himself staring at the crosspiece, which was now at eye-level.  He took two more steps toward it, but it jumped again, almost out of the reach of his fingertips.  He bent his legs, then leaped straight up.  His hand caught the upright, just above the flukes.  It was enough.  When the anchor rose again, he rose with it.

Kismet held on with all his might, unable to lift himself any higher or to improve his tentative hold on the anchor.  He did not try; doing so might result in his sinking back to the bottom and there would be no second chance at this.

Kerns' warning about decompression sickness was ringing like a siren in his head, but there was simply no other option.  The possibility of suffering from the bends was preferable to the certainty of a slow death beneath the Black Sea. 

The ascent seemed to take forever.  As the surface became more distinct, he imagined that he was getting heavier; that his grip would eventually fail.  He stared at the crimped hose in his left hand and thought about releasing it, in order to use that hand also to secure himself to the anchor.  He resisted the impulse. 

Soon, he felt the pressure increasing inside the helmet.  The relief valve began hissing, equalizing the pressure inside by venting out some of the air.  This surprised him at first, but he quickly realized it was a normal function of the helmet's regulator.  As he rose from the depths, the gas molecules would naturally expand, increasing the volume of air.  Kerns had warned him not to hold his breath at any time, especially when coming up; the air in his lungs would also expand, causing the delicate tissues to rupture if he did not maintain steady respiration.  Kismet reminded himself to keep breathing, wondering as he did if there was sufficient oxygen remaining in the helmet to keep him conscious until he reached the surface.

The
Boyevoy
lurched into motion, plowing up a frothy wake as it angled away from the trawler.  The destroyer suddenly cut sharply to port, crossing the trawler's bow in an unmistakable display of force.  The threat was apparently understood, for the reeling in of the anchor line seemed to take on a frenetic urgency.  Kismet could feel the change in temperature as he rose up into the warmer layer of water near the surface.