“I have nothing of value in there. Only personal letters and photographs of sentimental value to me and my family.”
“He said open it, boy!” One of the other men, to his left, reached out and kicked him in the left leg, a bolt of pain shooting through him as the knee buckled, but held. Chronopoulos was unarmed, untrained in fighting, and outnumbered three to one by men who were not about to listen to reason. He saw no other option than to open the safe and hope they found no interest in his dusty old scroll. He had considered not paying for the safe and instead keeping the parchment in his berth with his general belongings, not wanting to spend the extra money for safekeeping, but the thought of showing up to his meeting in New York empty-handed was enough to get him to pony up the extra funds.
So now he reluctantly held up the key and turned to the safe. “Okay. Fine, you will see there is nothing of interest in there for—”
Suddenly all four men tumbled to the ground as the ship canted sharply to the right. A muffled crack was heard at the same time. Chronopoulos winced as his elbow hit the floor. He felt the key leave his grasp and then a tinkling sound as the piece of metal landed out of sight. Then he felt the breath leave his body as a booted foot slammed into his abdomen, knocking the wind out of him. The men untangled from one another and were quicker to rise to their feet than Chronopoulos, but just as they did, the ship rolled again and all of them were back on the floor in a mound.
That’s when the water began seeping in from the left, sluicing down the Purser’s Room until it jolted them all awake with its icy reality.
Chronopoulos saw an opportunity to get himself out of a losing fight and seized it. “The Titanic is sinking! We have to get out of here before it goes down!”
One of the drunkards rose to his feet and moved to kick Chronopoulos in the ribs, but slipped on the water and went down hard, the back of his head striking the floor. The scant millimeters of water cushioned his fall just enough to prevent him from blacking out, but even so he made no move to get to his feet. He lay there on his back, cringing, tears running down the sides of his face. Before anyone could say anything else, the lights in the room blinked on and off three times before remaining off, casting the room in complete darkness. Knowing this was his chance for escape, Chronopoulos slithered across the wet, sloping floor to put some distance between himself and his attackers.
“Power musta cut out!” one of the drunks said. Various crashing noises were heard as unseen furniture rocked around the room and items slid off of shelves and tables. Chronopoulos continued to slide across the floor. He changed directions when he felt he had gone some number of yards from the group of assailants. He had given up all hope of retrieving his map now and wanted only to escape this terrible situation with his life.
Then the lights flickered back on and he saw with a start in the unsteady light that he had gone the wrong way — deeper into the room rather than toward the door as he had hoped he had gone.
“He’s trying to get away!” one of the thugs shouted. Chronopoulos managed to stagger to his feet just as the lights stayed on. They were dimmer than before, and the young Greek heard one of the men mutter the word “generator” before he started to run.
“Get him!”
But at that moment, what got him was the wall of the room bursting open as a raging torrent of freezing seawater flooded the room. There was no swimming against it. As water poured into the room with unimaginable force, swift, unrelenting and unbearably cold on contact, Chronopoulos knew that he, nor any of his attackers, would survive this. His mind flashed on his mistake: you should have listened to Apostolos and not come down here.
At first, while the icy waters lifted him higher as the room flooded, he told himself that he might be able to swim up to the hallway, but before he had even completed the thought he was being carried as if on a waterfall up and out of the room where the wall used to be and then bashed into the hallway wall, snapping his neck and saving him the torture of holding his breath until he drowned.
His last thought flowed across the neurons in his brain as his body ceased to function forever: I hope Apostolos made it onto one of the lifeboats.
Noted antiquities collector Charles Miller brought a hand to his mouth in slow motion as he reacted to the headline in that morning’s New York Times: “Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg; 866 Rescued By Carpathia, Probably 1,250 Perish; Ismay Safe, Mrs. Astor Maybe, Noted Names Missing.”
He spent the next hour wringing his hands over whether his appointment with the young Greek archaeologist, whom he knew had chosen the Titanic’s maiden voyage as his means of transportation to New York, would be kept. He re-read the telegraph correspondence he’d had with him to make certain he had the name right: Chronopoulos Dimitrios. So far that name had not shown up on either the survivors or perished lists. Either way, he would miss his appointment with him that day. He knew from the article that the survivors were now en route to New York aboard the rescue ship, Carpathia. He could only hope that Mr. Dimitrios would be among them. For if not, Charles, thought, lifting his gaze from the shocking article….
If not, then the ark is truly lost once again.
Chapter 1
To Carter Hunt’s eyes, the dark speck on the horizon was an anomaly that signaled he was almost to his destination. After over two hours of sitting in the Augusta Bell AB-212 helicopter with nothing to look at but endless open ocean, the still indistinct blob was a welcome sight. At the same time, Hunt reflected, it was a sight that filled him with a certain sadness, for it marked the wreck site of the RMS Titanic, which had sunk at this very spot over a century ago.
“Hey, can I see the binoculars?” Carter’s friend and business partner, Jayden Takada, reached a hand into the cockpit from his seat in the back. Hunt passed him the optics before turning to the pilot of their chartered craft. “Hey Buzz, winds seem pretty light? Should be a good landing?”
The pilot looked over at him and smiled from behind a pair of oversized, mirrored sunglasses. “You know what they say. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one if you ask me. Especially in a ‘copter. In a plane, if you lose an engine, you can still glide. Not so in a chopper. You just drop like a stone.”
“Thanks for making us feel better,” Hunt joked. But he knew the pilot was aware that his two passengers were ex-Navy combat veterans who’d both served with distinction, Carter as an officer and Jayden as a SEAL and submersible pilot. He wasn’t telling them anything they didn’t already know.
“I only see one ship on site,” Jayden informed them from behind the binoculars.
Carter shrugged as he squinted out the window at the distant vessel. “That’s good news, unless of course it means whoever’s been snooping around on the wreck — I prefer to call it a grave site — already took what they were after and left.”
It was Jayden’s turn to shrug. “That’s our job either way, right? Either to get the map, or else to confirm that someone else already snatched it.”
Carter nodded. “There’s a third possibility, too.”