The Lost Temple (33 page)

“Great,” said Jackson. “Should be plenty of time.”

Marina stared at him. “Are you familiar with the basic principles of archaeology?” she asked. “You cannot just pluck these things out of the ground. It would take weeks to survey this island.”

Jackson knelt down beside the wooden crate and prised it open with the blade of his knife. Everyone peered in. Tucked in a bed of hay lay a black box about the size of a cinder-block. A chrome handle stuck out of the top, with some sort
of gauge or meter at one end and a number of buttons and switches down the sides.

“What is it?” asked Reed.

“It’s a Bismatron. It, uh, detects Element 61.”

“They knocked that together pretty quickly, if they didn’t even know it existed until three months ago,” said Grant.

Jackson gave a patently false smile. “Don’t ask me. I leave all that stuff to the smart guys. Anyway, if the shield’s on this island this baby’ll find it.”

He flicked a switch. The needle on the gauge darted across to the far side of the dial, then settled back, twitching every now and again. A low hum rose out of the machine, overlaid with a steady chattering of squawks and clicks.

“Talkative creature,” said Reed.

With Muir in tow, Jackson set off down the slope toward the west side of the island. Grant, Reed and Marina watched them go.

“Sourcelles said there was a temple on this island,” said Grant, surveying the desolation. “If the shield’s anywhere, it must be near that.”

Marina reached in her pack and pulled out a slim book bound in brown cloth. “Sourcelles’s monograph. It has a copy of the map Kritskii made when he came in 1823.” She turned through the book. To Grant’s unscholarly eye it looked as though someone had taken translations in half a dozen languages and thrown them together. Almost every page was a densely woven tapestry of French, Greek, Latin, German, Russian—even, in rare fragments, English.

Marina found the map and spread the book flat on her knee. It was a simple map. A few swirls sketched the main contours; dotted lines indicated the retaining walls Grant had seen from the top of the lighthouse. Plumb in the middle of the island, at its highest point, a subdivided square marked the temple. Grant looked around. From where they were, they could see the whole island: an almost too-perfect facsimile of the lines on the map.

“That’s here,” said Reed, voicing the conclusion they’d all reached. “We must be standing on top of it.”

“But there can’t be more than half a meter of topsoil.” Marina pointed to the track they’d come up from the jetty. Its surface was bare rock, the same color as the cliffs. The earth embankments on either side were little more than a foot high.

“Then we shouldn’t have far to dig.”

They fetched the tools they had brought in the plane. Marina scratched a line in the ground that more or less bisected the ridge and they started digging. It didn’t take long. On his third stroke Grant’s spade rang on solid rock. In less than a quarter of an hour they’d cleared a trench about a foot wide and ten feet long, a ruddy stone scar in the grass.

“Even if the temple’s foundations are here somewhere, there’s not much space for buried treasure,” said Grant, mopping his brow. Leaden clouds covered the sky, and the breeze off the sea had died.

“There must be some sort of cave or tunnel in the rock. Like on Lemnos.” Marina sat cross-legged by the rim of the trench and sifted the earth they’d excavated through her fingers.

“Jackson’s magic box doesn’t think so.” A few hundred yards away, Jackson and Muir had reached the bottom of the slope and were standing at the cliff edge, little more than silhouettes against the heaving sea beyond.

“Do you think it can really detect this mysterious element?” said Reed.

Grant laughed. “It can certainly detect something. I’ve seen a similar sort of thing in the Congo. The prospectors use them.”

Reed was intrigued. “Can it detect gold too?”

“The men who were using it weren’t looking for gold.” Grant got up and stuck his spade in the ground. “Do you know what a Geiger-Müller counter is?”

Reed shook his head.

“It detects radiation. The men who used them were prospecting for . . .”

“
Look at this
.”

Marina was sitting bolt upright. Her arms were filthy, smeared with dirt up to the elbows, but she had something in
her hand. It just looked like a flat pebble to Grant. She spat on it and rubbed it on the knee of her trousers, then passed it wordlessly to Reed.

He squinted at it, scraping away some earth with his fingernail. His eyes widened. “Remarkable.”

Grant snatched it out of his hand. It wasn’t a pebble; it was a black-glazed piece of clay that had been spun into a flat disc about the size of a coaster. A red serpent wound round the edge and in its center the letters “AX” had been scratched into the glaze.

Grant frowned, puzzled. “Who’s Ax?”

“Ach,” Reed corrected him with a throaty “ch” that sounded strangely Scottish. “Short for
Achilleus
.”

Marina took it back from Grant. “It’s a votive plaque. The ancient Greeks would have dedicated them with a prayer and left them at the temple. Like lighting a candle in church. It means the temple must have been . . .”

She trailed off as she realized Grant and Reed weren’t paying attention. They were staring over her shoulder, both of them listening to the low mechanical hum being blown in on the wind.

Grant grabbed his knapsack and pulled out his field glasses, scanning the leaden sky. “Yaks—two of them, coming in from the west.” He kicked a smattering of earth back into the trench to try to hide the scar. “Quick—into the house.”

“What about the others?”

Grant looked down toward the cliffs, then back to the west. Even with the naked eye the planes were now clearly visible, swooping in low beneath the clouds. “No time.”

They ducked into the cottage, still a mess of discarded blankets and abandoned clothes. They were barely inside when the whole building seemed to tremble: windows rattled and the tea urn fell off the stove as the two aircraft roared overhead. They seemed so close it was a surprise they didn’t hit the lighthouse.

“I thought you said the engineer didn’t have time to send an SOS,” said Reed.

“Well, someone did.” Grant looked out of the window. “They’re fighters. Must just have come to take a look.”

“They’ll see our plane,” said Marina. “What will they make of that?”

“Maybe we can reassure them.” Grant grabbed a green engineer’s uniform hanging over the end of one of the bunks. He pulled off his boots and trousers and tugged on the uniform. The trousers barely reached to his ankles, and when he pulled the tunic over his shirt the buttons stubbornly refused to meet.

“Is that how you plan to reassure them?” Reed asked doubtfully.

“Something’s better than nothing. If they don’t see anything, they’ll know something’s wrong.” Grant grabbed a forage cap to complete his ensemble, then laced his boots back on. “At least we can try.”

He stepped out of the door and jogged over to the lighthouse. To his right he could see the planes banking sharply over the open sea to come back for another run. He took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the muffled shouts from the storeroom; he ran past the radio room, then backtracked and grabbed a pair of headphones from beside the wireless. He hooked them round his neck, hoping the Yak pilots would spot them.

Grant emerged on to the balcony, dizzied by the spiral stair. The planes were on to him almost before he could get his bearings. The blast from their engines was immense: the iron balcony shivered beneath his feet; the cap was snatched from his head and he had to brace himself against the railing to keep from being blown over the side. The planes banked again and roared back, so low he could see the pilots’ faces behind the canopies, the flared intakes down the cowling and the stubby cannons behind the propellers. They seemed to be heading straight for him. He waved, tapped his ear to mimic a broken headset, then gave a cheery thumbs-up. Did Russians use the thumbs-up, he wondered?

At the last moment the two planes broke apart. They shot past on either side of the tower with an ear-splitting roar.
Grant tried tugging the headset over his ears but it did nothing. He looked back to see the planes racing away behind him. Had it worked?

By the time he got to the bottom of the tower, Jackson and Muir had made their way back from the cliffs. They gathered in the bunk house, occasionally looking out of the windows to watch the planes still circling overhead like crows.

“Haven’t they seen enough?” said Jackson. “Why the hell are they sticking around?”

Grant pulled on his trousers and buckled the Webley back on. “They’ve done their reconnaissance and they don’t like what they’ve seen. My guess is they’ve been ordered to keep an eye on us until the Soviets can get a boat here.”

“Shit.” Jackson kicked the empty tea urn across the floor. “Can’t we shake them off, make them think it’s just a busted radio or something?”

“I tried that. Anyway, that excuse wouldn’t have lasted long. There’s supposed to be a team of radio engineers here, remember.”

“We could wait until it’s dark.”

Muir looked at his watch. “That’s hours away. They’ll have half the Red Army landed here by then. And there’s no way we can take off in the flying boat while they’re around. They’d shoot us out of the water.”

“And we still haven’t got what we came for,” said Jackson. “The Bismatron hasn’t registered shit. It’s deader than my grandpa’s Johnson.”

“Are you sure it’s working?” said Muir.

“Kind of hard to tell if there’s nothing to find.”

Grant unbuckled his watch. Dangling it by its strap, he held it against the black machine. The needle twitched and the speaker emitted a series of pops like air being blown through a straw.

“It’s working.” He slipped the watch back on to his wrist. “Radium dial. Makes the numbers glow in the dark.”

Muir’s mouth tightened in a suspicious stare. “Very clever. Now have you got a parlor trick to get us off this fucking island?”

“We’re not leaving without the shield,” Jackson insisted. “There’s . . .” He paused as the roar of engines overhead drowned him out once more. “There’s got to be a way to find it.”

Reed, standing by the door, cleared his throat. “Actually, I think I know where the temple is.”

Jackson looked down at his feet, as if expecting to see a Corinthian column rising out of the concrete. “How exactly do you figure that, Professor?”

“Come and have a look. Quickly.”

They trooped over to the doorway, glancing anxiously at the sky. The Yaks’ orbit had taken them back out to the west and for the moment they were out of sight. Reed pointed to the lighthouse, to the patch on its wall where the concrete cladding had been chipped away. That was his own handiwork, Grant realized, from the bullets he’d fired at the Russian who’d escaped through the bathroom window. It had exposed the original wall underneath, square-cut lumps of stone mortared together.

“Look at that block. What do you see?”

Grant picked up his field glasses again. A soupy blur filled his vision as he twiddled the focus knob. Soft lines emerged from the haze, sharpened and resolved themselves into a circle, with thin lines in its center radiating to form a delicately veined rosette.

“That’s not Russian workmanship,” said Reed. “And look there.”

Grant followed his gaze to the foot of the lighthouse. Now that he looked closer, he could see that the concrete coat didn’t quite reach to the bottom. He ducked out of the
house, ran over and knelt by the wall. He peeled back the grasses that grew around it to expose the foundation: layers of roughly finished limestone, huge blocks laid together with barely an ounce of cement.

Reed joined him. “There’s your temple. The Russians must have dug up the remains and used them to build the lighthouse.”

Grant looked back. The others were watching them from the bunk-house door, while beyond, the planes were circling round yet again. “We’d better get back under cover.”

Jackson took the news badly. “When did the lighthouse go up?”

“Some time in the nineteenth century. It’s mentioned in the Admiralty
Pilot
for 1894.”

“The men who built it: do you think . . .”

Reed shook his head. “I doubt it. You couldn’t have kept it a secret, not on this rock. It would have been the most sensational discovery of the age.”

“So it’s not here.
Fuck
.” Muir kicked one of the bunk beds in frustration, then lit a cigarette. The nicotine seemed to calm him a little.

“It might be here,” said Reed cautiously. “There could have been a tunnel complex under the temple, as on Lemnos. Perhaps your instrument wouldn’t be able to detect it there.”

“This piece of shit was built to detect . . . stuff . . . deep underground. I don’t think a bunch of Stone Age wops could have dug deep enough to make a difference.”

“They were Bronze Age, actually,” Reed murmured.

“Anyway,” said Marina, “the Russians must have excavated most of the site when they were digging the foundations for the lighthouse. If there was a cave, they would have found that too.”

“Great. So the shield’s not here and we are. What do we do now?”

“The best we can do is examine Sourcelles’s tablet. The
pictures on the back may hold some clues.” Reed patted his pocket, where he had the tablet wrapped safely in a cigar box. “It worked on Crete.”

Jackson stared at him incredulously. “I was actually thinking more short-term, Professor. Like, how the hell do we get off this island with those fighters overhead and probably the whole Black Sea fleet steaming over here?”

“We wait,” said Grant. “Those fighters are going to run out of fuel sooner rather than later. When they go, we’ll go.” He cocked his head. “It sounds as if they’re already on their way out.”

He stuck his head outside the door. It took him a moment to find the fighters against the gray sky: they were higher than he’d expected, climbing steeply into the west.