The Navigator (7 page)

“I won’t say I’ve been living a monk’s life because you’d never believe me. I stopped by to show you a project I started months ago.”

“Project S? You can fill me in while we work on a couple of beers,” Austin said.

He put the shooting gear in a bag, wrapped the pistol in a soft cloth, and led the way up a staircase to a wide deck that overlooked the river.

Austin had bought the boathouse near Langley when he was with a clandestine undersea unit of the CIA. The purchase was beyond his budget, but the panoramic view of the river had closed the deal, and he got the price down because the boathouse was a wreck. He had spent thousands of dollars and countless hours transforming it from a run-down repository for boats to a comfortable retreat from the demands of his job as director of the Special Assignments Team.

Austin got couple of cold Tecate beers from the refrigerator, went out to the deck and handed one to Zavala. They clinked bottles and took a swig of the Mexican brew. Zavala took a sheet of computer paper from his pocket, placed it on a table, and smoothed out the folds with his hand.

“What do you think of my new wet submersible?”

In a wet submersible, the pilot and passenger wore scuba gear and sat on the outside of the vehicle rather than inside an enclosed cockpit. Wet submersibles commonly echoed the shape of their dry counterparts, with propellers at one end of a torpedo-shaped vehicle, the pilot at the other end.

The vehicle that Zavala had designed had a long, sloping hood, tapering trunk, and a wraparound windshield. It had dual headlights, white, so-called cove panels on the side, and a two-toned interior. The submersible had four thrusters instead of wheels.

Austin cleared his throat. “If I didn’t know this was a submersible, I’d swear it looked like a 1961 Corvette.
Your
’Vette, in fact.”

Zavala pinched his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “This is turquoise. My car is red.”

“She looks fast,” Austin said appraisingly.

“My car can do zero to sixty in about six seconds. This is a little slower. But she’ll move out on or under the water and handles the curves as if they weren’t there. She’ll do everything a car can do except peel rubber.”

“Why the departure from more, uh, conventional submersible models, like the saucer, torpedo, or bulbous shape?”

“Apart from the challenge, I wanted something I could use on NUMA assignments that would be fun to drive.”

“Will this thing work?”

“Field trials have gone well. I’ve designed a complete vehicle transport, launch, and recovery system too. The prototype is on its way to Turkey. I’m going over in a week to help out with an underwater archaeological dig of an old port they found in Istanbul.”

“A week should give us plenty of time.”

“Time for
what
?” Zavala said, suddenly wary.

Austin handed Zavala a science magazine that was open to an article describing the work of a ship that lassoed and towed icebergs threatening Newfoundland oil and gas rigs.

“How would you like to join me on a cruise to Iceberg Alley?”

Zavala scanned the magazine article.

“I don’t know, Kurt. Sounds mighty cold. Cabo might be more appealing to my warm-blooded Mexican American nature.”

Austin gave Zavala a look of disgust. “C’mon, Joe. What would you be doing in Cabo? Lying on the beach sipping margaritas. Watching the sun set with your arm around a beautiful señorita. Same old same old. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Actually, my friend, I was thinking of watching the sun come
up
as I sang my señorita love songs.”

“You’d be pressing your luck,” Austin said with a snort. “Don’t forget, I’ve
heard
you sing.”

Zavala harbored no illusions about his singing voice, which tended to be off-key. “Good point,” he said with a sigh.

Austin picked up the magazine. “I don’t want to push you into this, Joe.”

Zavala knew from past experience that his colleague didn’t push; he
leaned
. “
That
will be the day.”

Austin smiled and said, “If you’re interested, I need a quick decision. We’d leave tomorrow. I just got the okay. What do you say?”

Zavala rose from his chair and gathered up his submersible diagrams. “Thanks for the beer.”

“Where are you going?”

Zavala headed for the door.

“
Home
. So I can pack my flannel jockstrap and a bottle of tequila.”

NEAR MA’ARIB, YEMEN

“DOWN THERE, MISTER, is tomb of queen.”

The wizened Bedouin jabbed the air, his bony finger pointing to a fissure about a yard wide and two feet high in the side of the pockmarked limestone hill. The rough-edged layers of strata above and below the opening were like lips afflicted with a bad case of trench mouth.

Anthony Saxon got down on his hands and knees and peered into the hole. He pushed aside thoughts of poisonous snakes and spiders, unwound his turban, and pulled off his beige desert robe to reveal long pants and a shirt. He flicked on a flashlight, probed the darkness with its beam, and took a deep breath.

“Down the rabbit hole I go,” he said with a carefree jauntiness.

Saxon dove into the opening, wriggling his lanky six-foot frame like a salamander, and disappeared from sight. The passageway sloped downward like a coal chute. Saxon experienced a claustrophobic moment of panic when the chute narrowed and he pictured himself stuck, but he shimmied his way through the tight squeeze with the use of creative finger-toe coordination.

To his relief, the passageway widened again. After crawling for about twenty feet, he popped out of the chute into the open. Mindful not to bump his head on a low ceiling, he slowly stood erect and explored his surroundings with the flashlight.

The bull’s-eye of light fell on the mortared-stone-block wall of a rectangular space about as big as a two-car garage. There was an opening with a corbeled arch about five feet high on the opposite wall. He ducked through the breach and followed a passageway for around fifty feet until he came to a rectangular room about half the square footage of the first.

The dust that covered every surface started him on a coughing fit. When he recovered, he saw that the room was bare except for a wooden sarcophagus that was tipped on its side. The lid lay a few feet away. A vaguely human form swathed in bandages from head to toe was half tumbled out of the ancient casket. Saxon cursed under his breath. He had arrived centuries too late. Grave robbers had stripped the tomb of any valuables hundreds of years before he was born.

The sarcophagus lid was decorated with a painting of a young girl, probably in her late teens. She had dark, oversized eyes, a full mouth, and black hair tied back from her face. She looked vibrant and full of life. With gentle hands, he rolled the mummy back into the case. The dissected corpse felt like a dried bag of sticks. He righted the sarcophagus and slid the lid back on.

He ran the flashlight beam around the walls of the tomb and read the letters carved into the stone. The words they formed were in epigraphic Arabic of the first century A.D. Off by a thousand years.
“Crap,”
he muttered.

Saxon patted the sarcophagus cover. “Sleep well, sweetheart. Sorry to disturb you.”

With a last, sad glance around the tomb, he followed the corridor back to the chute opening. He grunted his way through the tight spot and pulled his dust-covered body out of the hole into the hundred-degree heat. His pants were ripped, and his knees and elbows were scraped and bleeding.

The Bedouin had an expectant expression on his dark face.

“Bilqis?”
he said.

Anthony Saxon responded with a belly laugh. “
Bilked,
is more like it.”

The Bedouin’s face fell. “No queen.”

Saxon recalled the portrait on the sarcophagus. “A princess, maybe. But not my queen. Not Sheba.”

A car horn beeped at the bottom of the hill. A man standing next to a beat-up old Land Rover had one hand in the car and the other waving in the air. Saxon waved back, slipped into his desert robe and turban, and led the way down the slope. The man blowing the horn in the sandblasted vehicle was an aristocratic-looking Arab whose upper lip was hidden under a luxuriant mustache.

“What’s up, Mohammed?” Saxon said.

“Time to go,” the Arab said. “Bad people come.”

He brandished the barrel of the Kalashnikov automatic rifle toward a point about a half mile distance. An oncoming vehicle was kicking up a dust cloud.

“How do you know they’re bad people?” Saxon asked.

“They
all
bad people around here,” the Arab said with a gold-toothed smile. Without another word, he got behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.

Saxon had learned to respect Mohammed’s skill at keeping him alive in the Wild West atmosphere of Yemen’s backcountry. Every chieftain in the area seemed to have his own private army of brig-ands, and larceny and murder in his heart.

He slid onto the passenger seat. The Bedouin piled into the back. Mohammed mashed the accelerator. The Land Rover kicked up dirt and sand. As the driver ground through the gears, he managed somehow to steer and hold on to his weapon as well.

Mohammed kept checking his rearview mirror. After several minutes, he patted the dashboard as if it were the neck of a trusty steed.

“We’re okay,” he said with a wide grin. “You find your queen?”

Saxon told him about the sarcophagus and the mummy of the young girl.

Mohammed jerked his thumb at the Bedouin in the backseat. “I told you. This son of a camel and his village are all crooks.”

Thinking that he was being praised, the Bedouin displayed a toothless grin.

Saxon sighed and shifted his gaze to the barren countryside. The locale changed, but the scene was always the same. A native con man would tell him in excited tones that the queen he was looking for was literally beneath his nose. Saxon would make a hair-raising crawl into the middle of an ancient necropolis that the con man’s forebears had looted hundreds of years before. He couldn’t count the number of mummies he had encountered. He had met a lot of nice people along the way. Too bad they were all dead.

Saxon dug a few riales out of his shorts pocket. He handed the coins to the delighted Bedouin and declined the man’s offer to show him another dead queen.

Mohammed dropped the Bedouin off at a cluster of desert tents, then he drove to the old city of Ma’arib. Saxon was staying at the Garden of the Two Paradises Hotel. He asked Mohammed to come by the hotel the next morning and they would decide on his plan.

After a hot shower, Saxon changed into long cotton slacks and shirt and went down to the lounge, his mouth feeling as if he’d swallowed a pound of desert sand. He sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay Sapphire martini, and the drink’s astringent sweetness washed the grit out of his throat.

He chatted with a couple of Texas oil company rednecks. A second martini revived his spirits, until one of the oilmen asked him what he was doing in Ma’arib.

Saxon could have responded that it was the last leg of a doomed quest to find the fabled Queen of Sheba among the ruins of old Ma’arib, the city that was said to be her home base.

He said simply, “I’m here to test the waters.”

The oilmen exchanged puzzled glances and then broke into hearty laughter. Before they headed back to their quarters, they bought Saxon a third martini.

Saxon was at that wonderful point where all brain activity was clouded by an alcoholic haze when an elderly bellhop shuffled into the bar and handed him a sheet of hotel stationery with a brief message scrawled on it:

I believe I can introduce you to the man of the sea. If you are still interested in meeting him let me know soonest.

He blinked the blurriness from his eyes and read it again. The sender was a Cairo antiques finder named Hassan, whom he had spoken to by phone before coming to Yemen. He scrawled an answer at the bottom of the note and handed it to the bellhop with a tip and instructions to arrange transportation for a morning departure. Then he ordered the first of several pots of strong black coffee and buckled down to the job of getting sober.

ZAVALA HAD HIS DUFFEL BAG packed and was ready to go when Austin swung by the former library building in Alexandria, Virginia, that his friend had converted to a bachelor pad with a southwestern flair. The two men caught a morning Air Canada flight, and their plane touched down on the tarmac at St. John’s, Newfoundland, late in the afternoon, after a stop-off in Montreal.

A taxi took them to the busy waterfront, where the two-hundred-seventy-foot-long
Leif Eriksson
was tied up. The forty-six-hundred-ton vessel was a brawny ship, less than five years old, its hull reinforced for protection against the punishing North Atlantic ice.

The captain, a native Newfoundlander named Alfred Dawe, knew when their flight was coming in and was waiting on deck in anticipation of their arrival. As the men came up the gangway, he introduced himself and said, “Welcome aboard the
Eriksson
.”

Austin extended his hand in a bone-crushing grip. “Thanks for having us, Captain Dawe. I’m Kurt Austin, and this is my colleague, Joe Zavala. We’re your new iceberg wranglers.”

Dawe was a compact man in his fifties who liked to brag that he’d been born in a place with the forlorn name of Misery Cove, and that his family was so dumb they still lived there. Schoolboy mischief lurked in his clear blue eyes, and he had a dimpled grin that came easily to his ruddy face. Despite his self-deprecating humor, Dawe was an accomplished skipper with years of experience running ships in the cantankerous waters of the Northwest Atlantic. He had often encountered NUMA’s distinctive turquoise-hulled research ships, and knew that the American agency was the most highly respected ocean exploration and study organization on the globe.

When Austin had called and asked to go on an iceberg cruise, the captain had checked with the ship’s owners for permission to have guests aboard. He’d gotten a go-ahead and called Austin back with the date for the ship’s next departure.