Kismet looked up from where Rudy had knocked him. Grimes and Harcourt were staring down with amused expressions. The giant was positively gleeful, taking a step forward, balling his enormous fists in preparation to take Kismet apart, limb-by-limb. Kismet scrambled backward without rising, and scooted along the deck to put some distance between himself and the enormous fighter. His escape was abruptly blocked. He turned his head and saw that he had backed into the column that stood to the right of the hatchway. Somewhere in the blackness of the hold, the explosive device Anatoly had planted was ticking inexorably toward zero. About five seconds had passed since the big Russian's flight. Rudy took another step toward Kismet, towering over him.
Suddenly, a brilliant flash of light burst at the far end of the cargo compartment. A tongue of flame and a wave of compressed air as hard as concrete raced through the structure, driving gold covered cargo crates and debris ahead of it.
Anatoly's bomb had detonated.
SEVENTEEN
The explosive device, placed near the far end of the enclosure, was relatively small; it was the same design as the depth charges Kismet had employed to eliminate the threat posed by the sentry fish near the wreck site. Anatoly, realizing that Grimes and his men were about to seize the galley, had rigged a timer to one of the bombs and planted it in the rear of the cargo area, then waited for his chance to escape. But Kismet had stalled him too long, and forced him to take a desperate plunge into the sea.
In the hyper-awareness of adrenaline, Kismet could see the ball of flame rolling through the hold toward the opening. He was directly in its path.
Unlike Rudy, Kismet was expecting the bomb to go off and did not require a split-second in which to decide what to do. As the blast hurtled toward him, he rolled forward at an angle that took him a hair's breadth from Rudy's size sixteen boots.
The former boxer may have had lightning-fast reflexes when it came to blocking a punch, but he was totally unprepared for the detonation of an improvised explosive device. His eyes widened slightly as a pillar of fire erupted from the portal and erased him from existence.
The entire superstructure swelled like a balloon about to burst. The columns bowed outward as the enclosure changed from a roughly cubic shape to something more closely resembling a sphere. However, that seemed to be the extent of the damage caused by the explosion. The blast did not rip apart the hold as Kismet had expected; it was as if the enclosure had almost completely absorbed the violent release of energy. Almost. Though barely perceptible to the naked eye, under the skin of gold, the wooden frame of boat had been smashed into splinters, and those splinters had been driven outward, through the foil-thin layer, allowing water to begin seeping in.
The flames that had vomited from the hatchway ceased immediately. Kismet felt the blast beating against his back, but was unhurt. Grimes and Harcourt had likewise passed through the explosion unscathed, although the British archaeologist was having difficulty keeping his balance.
"Back to the gunboat!" Grimes shouted. "Quickly, before it sinks!"
Harcourt protested. "We can't just abandon ship. This discovery is too important."
Kismet ignored them and searched for Irene. He found her on hands and knees, thankfully untouched by the blast. "Stay there!" he shouted at her, but stopped motionless after only a step.
Something else was happening. At first, it was nothing more than an unsettling sensation, but that premonition quickly manifested into something more profound, if no more tangible. An invisible crackle of energy passed through the length of the ship. Kismet felt it tingling on his skin; a spider web of static electricity that tickled his face and caused his hair to stand on end.
The phenomenon was not limited to the ship. As if harmonizing with the vessel's energetic discharge, the pitch of the storm changed abruptly. The sky directly above the galley began to swirl like a vortex of shadow, and the golden ship was now the nexus of the tempest.
Grimes prevailed in his argument. A loud, eerie groan shivered through the ship, and Kismet felt the galley begin slowly rolling to starboard. Though no leaks were evident, the vessel was nonetheless taking on water and beginning to list. The time remaining before the golden ship began her final voyage, the one that would take her to the unreachable depths of the Black Sea, would be measured in mere minutes.
The soldiers stumbled over one another in their haste to flee. Harcourt watched them in mute amazement, as if he were merely a spectator. Grimes too, hastened to the edge of the galley and lowered himself to the deck of the trawler.
No one seemed to care any longer about Kismet or Irene. He crossed to her and embraced her as if they had all the time in the world. "Are you all right?"
She nodded into his chest. "Anatoly?"
"I don't know. But Grimes was right about one thing: this ship is going to sink." He glanced down at the trawler. The commandos had already cast off the belaying lines that secured the Anatoly’s vessel to the gunboat. Grimes stood at the rail of the patrol craft, gazing over at the prize that had been denied him, while his men pushed away from the doomed galley and the smaller boat that would inevitably be dragged down when the golden ship went under. As if to punctuate their peril, a blinding tongue of lightning licked across the water, less than a stone's throw from the port side of the galley. The ear-splitting concussion of thunder that followed made the explosion in the hold seem insignificant by comparison.
"That was too close," Kismet muttered. He wasn't sure if he had actually spoken; his ears were ringing and no other sound was audible. He looked at Irene to see if she had heard him but found her gaping in amazement at something behind him. She spoke but her words were indistinct. He turned to look, expecting to find Rudy, back from the dead and seeking vengeance.
Instead, he saw something wonderful. Golden light was pouring from the passageway that opened into the hold, the same hue he had witnessed when first discovering the ancient ship on the coastal shelf off the Georgian shore. That light had fallen when their salvage efforts brought the galley to surface, but now it was back.
The radiance was momentarily limited to the interior of the hold, but as he watched, luminescence pooled on the exterior surface, spreading like puddles of fire, connecting and redoubling until the columns glowed incandescent.
Another flash of lightning, more distant than the first, overwhelmed the glory of the golden ship and underscored the need for a hasty departure. It seemed a shame to abandon their discovery, especially with its power suddenly waking, but that power would be of little help when the ship slid beneath the waves. Kismet turned back to Irene. "We've got to get to the trawler!" he yelled.
The list of the galley was already at twenty degrees. The bilge pump on the port deck began to whine as the slope carried the water away from its intake, causing it to suck air, while the starboard pump was completely flooded and stalled. In that instant however, before they could take a single step, the radiance of the gold began to shine beneath their feet.
Kismet gripped Irene's hand as they made their way down the length of the tilted deck toward the rope ladder that led to the trawler. The list of the larger, ancient vessel was causing the fishing boat, still lashed to its bowsprit, to twist dangerously in the water. As they looked down from the galley they saw Harcourt, standing alone in the stern of the trawler with the Golden Fleece still weighing on his shoulder. The archaeologist was fumbling with the belays, trying to free the smaller craft from the galley’s death grip.
"Harcourt! Help us!"
The Englishman looked up, as if surprised that Kismet was still alive. "Sorry, old boy!" he shouted over the din. "Not going to let you take this one away from me."