Into the Black (35 page)

Leaving under cover of darkness had been essential to Kismet's plan for several reasons.  Primarily, he hoped that it would spare them from the spying eyes of informants in the village. Whether or not they were successful in this regard was difficult to ascertain.  Kismet was confident that his return from the sea had gone unnoticed by the locals, but there could be no disguising the sound of Anatoly's trawler chugging out of the harbor and out to sea after dark.

The night was astonishingly clear, the stars and moon shining down with alarming brilliance.  The still waters of the Black Sea reflected the myriad points of light, giving the journey a surreal aspect, as though they were sailing on a sea of stars.  Kismet found himself wondering if Jason and the heroes of the Argo had experienced such a sight on their voyage.

He knew better.  The story of Jason and the Argonauts was just a fairy tale.  That the Fleece, or rather
a
golden fleece did exist, proved nothing.  Likely, the very real object that he had discovered in the wrecked ship had merely served to inspire the legend.

As his thoughts wandered, Irene joined him.  She had not voiced any misgivings since their coming to an understanding on the previous night.  Remarkably, she had maintained her good mood throughout the day, evincing confidence not only in Kismet's plan, but also in his promise.

After a full day, Kismet was convinced that he had dodged the bullet of decompression sickness.  He had always understood that the bends were by no means inevitable.  Nevertheless, the incautious nature of his escape from the depths had left him feeling like another character of Grecian myth: Damocles, who was forced to sit beneath the point of a sword which was suspended by a single hair.  But twenty-four hours later, with no signs or symptoms of the bends, Kismet dared to believe that the danger had passed.  Returning to the pressurized environment of the deep would actually alleviate the risk by breaking up any pockets of nitrogen gas lurking in his muscle tissue, and Kismet was determined, upon his next descent into the sea, to religiously observe decompression times.

"Is that it?" whispered Irene.

He followed the line she was pointing, expecting to see the buoy left by Severin.  But Irene was calling attention to something else; a faint gleam in the depths, which might have been reflected moonlight, except for its golden hue.

Kismet nodded.  The luminescence from beneath the sea underscored the second reason for his attempting another dive on the golden ship after nightfall.  Because the ship was a superior source of light, it would be much easier to find in the dark.  He had gambled on being able to visually pinpoint the exact location of the ship from the surface, and that risk had paid off.

Irene helped Kismet don the completely repaired diving suit.  Anatoly dropped the bow anchor, although the seas were calm enough to prevent the boat from drifting without its help.  That was about to change.  Still positioned in the bow, Anatoly pitched two small packages, both wrapped in several layers of plastic sheeting and taped watertight, into the water. 

The packages vanished toward the bottom, leaving concentric ripples that disrupted the reflected star field.  "Get ready!"

Fifteen seconds later, the improvised depth charges erupted silently in close succession.  Two enormous bubbles of gas raced upward, heralding a tremendous shock wave.  When the bubbles broke the surface, they released not only the smoke and noise of the underwater explosions, but also the destructive force.  The trawler pitched back and forth in the center of the detonations.

The tumult subsided after a moment however, with no injury to any of its occupants.  A few seconds later, other shapes broke the surface; dozens of fish, stunned or killed by the explosions.  The way to the golden ship was now clear. 

Anatoly dropped another parcel into the water.  This package was substantially larger than the homemade depth charges and did not destroy itself in the course of its downward passage.  Two magnesium flares tied to the bundle blazed with solar intensity as it spiraled toward the sea floor.

Irene placed the helmet over Kismet's head and locked it in place.  She then lifted the telephone handset they had rigged, and spoke into it.  "Can you hear me, Nick?"

"Loud and clear," was the tinny reply.  "I just hope we insulated that cable well enough."

"Are you ready?"

"Ready or not, let's go."

Anatoly joined them.  "The equipment is down."

"Start the compressor."

As soon as air started flowing into the helmet, Kismet made his way to the stern and lowered himself into the dark waters.  This time however, he would not be descending in lonely silence.

"I'm drifting away from the wreck," he called into his microphone.  "There must be a current here."

Irene stopped the unreeling of the cable, while Anatoly jockeyed the boat's engines to give Kismet a better shot at landing precisely on the site.  "That's good," he called.   The downward journey resumed, and a few minutes later Kismet was standing once more on the bottom, facing the wreck of the golden ship.

Its light was brilliant against the ebony expanse above.  He could not see the stars, much less the keel of the trawler.  The perimeter of sentry fish was gone; the depth charges had removed that barrier to the wreck, but he had no idea how extensive the shockwave had been, or how long it would take for other marine creatures to investigate and replace their decimated ranks.  He knew only that time was in critically short supply.

His greatest concern in utilizing the depth charges had been a fear of smashing the golden ship flat.  Not only had the blast left the ship undamaged, at least so far as he could discern, but it had served to scour away several layers of sediment, exposing even more of the vessel's hull.

He did not immediately approach the wreck.  His first task was to locate the equipment package that had preceded him.  He saw its flares blazing a hundred yards from the ship, and hustled toward it.  "I'm going after the gear," he reported.  "I'd say it got caught in the same current that I did.  Probably some kind of upwelling from the depths beyond the shelf."

He was speaking primarily to maintain contact with his friends above.  As long as he kept talking, Irene would know that he was in no danger.

"Everything looks fine up here," she answered.  "I think Severin is going to leave us alone tonight."

"Let me know if anything changes up there."  A few minutes later he reached the bundle and quickly cut away the magnesium torches; they had served their purpose.  The parcel was wrapped in canvas tarpaulins and tied with ordinary ropes. 

He gripped one of those ropes and commenced dragging the package along the sea floor, toward the golden ship.  This labor took several more minutes, and Irene could hear him grunting across the telephone line, though he said nothing until he had accomplished the task.

After untying the package, he began shuttling the different articles within to various points around the golden ship.  When only the canvas tarps remained, he picked these up also, draping them over the decks, both fore and aft.

"I'm going into the hold now." 

He approached the colonnaded superstructure cautiously, as if expecting the electric torpedo rays to materialize at any moment and assault him, but nothing happened.  When he pushed the hatchway open, only a rush of air bubbles greeted him.

Nearly a third of the enclosure, everything above the level of the sideways doorpost, was clear of water.  During the twenty-four hour period since his opening of the Fleece's cask, a great quantity of seawater had been converted into its constituent atomic components.  Kismet smiled and backed away from the enclosure, pulling the door shut as he went.  So far, everything was going according to plan.

He spent nearly an hour moving around the wreck, securing the tarpaulins in place with lengths of rope.  Doing so required him to dig underneath the hull, which he did using an old entrenching shovel that had come down with the equipment package for just such a purpose.  But that was not the strangest article in the bundle.  Large eye-hook screws, truck tire inner-tubes, fishing nets cut to resemble enormous hammocks, and pieces of air hose, spliced together like enormous arteries--all of these came out of the bundled tarps, and were secured to the hull of the golden ship.  The eye-hooks he screwed directly into the metal and wood, while ropes attached the rest of the items.

"I think I'm just about done down here.  Get ready to bring me up."

He made a final survey of the wreck, convinced that everything was in place, and then signaled Irene to take him to the first decompression stop.  He would make several more stops, using up most of the night in the process of evacuating excess nitrogen from his bloodstream.  Finally, at about four a.m. Anatoly and Irene pulled him onto the trawler and helped him out of the diving suit.  Irene threw her arms around him before he could wrestle free of the heavy boots, almost knocking him off his feet.  He didn't mind.

"I hope I never have to lay eyes on that thing again," he said, gazing at the helmet.  His clothes were damp with sweat, leaving him at the mercy of the night air, but zipping into his heavy leather jacket helped ward off the chill.  He carefully dried the
kukri
and returned its sheath to his waistpack.  Then, he ran down his mental checklist, wondering what he had forgotten.  He could think of nothing.

"Let's do it."

The golden ship on the sea floor was connected to the trawler by two different lines, set in place by Kismet and brought back to the surface.  One was a heavy cable, of the same gauge as the one used to lower him into depths.  The other line however was hollow and incapable of lifting any weight.  It was an air hose—actually it was several short lengths of hose, cannibalized from numerous sources and spliced together.  The line from the diving suit was removed from the compressor, and the second, piecemeal line was clamped to the fitting.

Kismet screwed the regulator valve down several notches before nodding to Anatoly.  The big Russian switched on the compressor, and immediately air from the surface began trickling down to the golden ship.

"How do we know if this is working?" Irene inquired.

Kismet shrugged.  "I don't know.  I've never done this before."

Anatoly raised a sincere eyebrow.  "I have difficulty believing there is anything you have not done, Nikolai Kristanovich."

Kismet laughed.  "Thank you, I think." 

He twisted the valve half a turn, and watched the needle on the gauge slowly creep.  He let it build for several minutes, and then tightened the valve.  The compressor immediately began to bleed off the excess, and he shut it off to avoid wasting fuel.  "Anything?"

Irene stared into the inky depths.  The golden light was less visible because of the tarpaulins Kismet had secured over its exposed decks, but she located it without difficulty.  "I don't think so."

"Okay, let's try something else.  Anatoly, fire up the engine.  We'll give her a little tug."

As the Russian throttled forward, Kismet switched on the air a second time.  Irene continued her vigil at the stern.  The trawler glided forward a ways, and then stopped, as if caught on something.  The engines roared louder, churning up a spray of foam, but no further movement was evident.

"I see bubbles!" Irene squealed.

Kismet immediately turned off the compressor and yelled for Anatoly to back off the engines.  He then joined Irene.  Large eruptions were indeed rising from the depths; bubbles of air from the submerged ship.  He placed a hand on the cable, stretched tight between the two vessels, and could feel a tremor in the metal.  "Something's happening."

Indeed, the boiling on the surface grew more intense, while the taut cable fell slack.  A close examination unquestionably revealed that the source of the golden light was moving, getting closer.

An enormous bubble broke the surface, and Kismet intuitively guessed that one of the inner-tubes had burst.  He had attempted to regulate the airflow to the enormous rubber bladders, trying to fill them only partway, so that the reduction of pressure caused by the ascent would not rupture them, but apparently one of them had failed.  Nevertheless, the shape beneath the waves did not recede.  The surface continued to churn as the air he had pumped down into the golden ship expanded and overflowed.

Suddenly, the surface erupted in a foaming mass that dwarfed even the explosive depth charges.  A wave lifted the trawler, heaving Kismet and Irene across the deck, where they remained prone until the turbulence calmed.  Kismet heard the engines shut down, but did not attempt to rise until Anatoly appeared and beckoned.  The big Russian seemed unable to speak; he gazed astern, gesturing weakly for the two of them to look.  Kismet got to his feet and went to see what had so amazed the fisherman.

“I don't believe it," gasped Irene, gazing at the spectacle, which bobbed in their wake.  "Nick, you actually did it."

Kismet was inclined to echo the former sentiment, but instead chose to grin and bask in a moment of pride.  Rocking gently in the becalmed waters of the Black Sea, attached to huge, bloated inner-tubes and covered by bulging, inflated canvas tarpaulins, was the golden ship, sailing once more after untold millennia below the waves.

THE GOLDEN VOYAGE

Using the winch, they drew the two boats closer together.  Kismet leapt over to the deck of the golden ship, tying a second line in place so that trawler was fixed firmly to the galley, which rode slightly higher in the water than Anatoly's trawler.  As he turned, surveying the golden ship for the first time under normal circumstances, he was overcome by the knowledge of where he was.  Bold adventurers, kindred spirits who lived thousands of years before his birth, had stood aboard this vessel.  There was nothing to compare with what he was feeling.

Science had no real knowledge about the design of ancient, pre-Hellenistic sailing vessels.  It was all conjecture, really.  Even the seafaring Phoenician culture had not been survived by as much as a single ship.  Only a few incomplete wall murals and the words of ancient historians, who had given little thought to the fact that those ships would someday crumble to dust, remained to reveal how the ancients had roamed the seas.