“Settle down, kids.” Nina slipped the pilot a fifty-dollar bill and told him to wait, and to “forget hearing anything to do with explosions.”
Alexander wasn’t sure the guide’s English was that good anyway but realized this could be problematic.
Aria, however, wasn’t concerned, and was still marveling at the size of the basalt columns and walls. “How did they move these things? And where did they come from?”
“That’s the really fun part,” Alexander said, enjoying her enthusiasm. “Like at Stonehenge and Baalbeck in Lebanon, and Easter Island even… the source of the incredibly heavy stones were miles and miles away. Here, the quarry is even more ridiculously located. Over mountainous terrain, it would have been impossible to transport these stones which are ten times heavier than anything used at the Great Pyramid. A Discovery Channel team attempted to move one but couldn’t succeed with anything weighing over one ton. Not over land, or on boats — as archaeologists guess they did.”
He thought for a moment, then asked the guide: “What do the locals say about this? How were the stones moved?”
The pilot’s old and wrinkled face turned back to them. Confirming he could understand and speak English, he said: “Two brothers come, long ago. They raise stones with magic. Magic sounds and words, harmonies, a staff of power. Float rocks into place.”
With that, he took a swig of something in a dark brown bottle, and then spat over his shoulder.
“Well,” Jacob said. “There you go. You heard the man. Magic iTunes. Now can we go?”
“And a dragon,” the guide added as a mere afterthought. “Dragon come, breathing fire and creating the canals, and the other cities, now underwater.”
“Hang on,” Alexander said, perking up. “Sunken cities?” He’d read about legends from several early explorers confirming such things. “Before the war, the Japanese excavated and explored the area, bringing up relics and treasures, especially coffins made of platinum.”
Aria perked up. “Coffins?”
“Yeah, but not always full of bones. Mostly jewels and gold, or so they said. But once the war broke out, the Japanese left this island, and everything just stopped. But there were earlier stories too. A German explorer, Joharnes Kubary in the 1870s mentioned something about sunken ruins. Stories he’d heard from early pearl divers who would descend more than a hundred feet into Madolynym Harbor. They saw a ‘castle’ down there, and roads and columns disappearing into the silt.”
Aria gripped his shoulder. “You and Nina are the only ones who are going to scuba that deep. I snorkeled once in my YMCA pool, and that’s it.”
“It’s okay, I don’t think we need to. Not if we can get into that tunnel.”
“Maybe there’s more treasure and some of that platinum stuff,” Jacob said, hunger in his voice.
“Maybe. But Kubary wrote in his journal that he loaded a boat with everything he found here…”
“Fucking thief,” said the guide, spitting again over the side as he jumped out and pulled the boat up to a hitching post.
“…and the vessel sank near the Marshall Islands during a storm.” Wearing his diving boots, Alexander stepped into the low tide canal and carefully made his way around urchins and sea fans, carrying the tank and scuba bag to the shore.
A sudden thought spiked his confidence. What if the wrong question got answered, and we’re searching someplace where the Tablet had been, instead of where it is now?
He froze.
… at the bottom of the ocean, inaccessible, and lost forever in a sunken ship full of other treasures. Maybe Kubary never knew exactly what he had found.
Should they RV the wreck? He hesitated, standing there dripping on the hard, coral path, amidst the ancient walls and massive sixty-foot walls marking the entrance to Nan Dowas, the largest of the ninety-two artificial island complexes.
“How about we focus on the map?” Nina suggested, readying the bags, slinging a backpack over her shoulder and sliding a Beretta into her belt. “And then we blow stuff up…”
The others started splashing out after Alexander. Aria winced as she dropped into the cool water up to her waist, but Jacob was there in a moment, splashing in after her. He took her arm before Alexander could think to come back, and helped her to the coral edge and the rough path.
Alexander dropped their gear and was about to move to her but realized they had bigger issues to deal with than jealousy or petty rivalries.
As if on cue, a guttural cry came from the boat.
“Agggh!” The guide spat out a local curse, and he clutched his temples. “What… sorcery is this?”
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Jacob asked, still trudging out of the water.
“Visions!” the guide screeched. “I’m seeing… death and fire!” His eyes were wild as he scrambled back in the corner of the boat, where he dug into a pack and pulled out a huge machete. “You’ll not steal from us! You and the others, coming in the helicopters!”
“What?” Alexander felt like he had stepped outside his body. This wasn’t happening. It was surreal and impossible, and one moment they were all fine, but now it was like an invisible wave passed through them all, affecting only…
The guide suddenly charged, machete raised high for a strike, about to leap off the boat into their midst — when a flash of silver whistled through the air and a short fishing knife buried itself into the center of his throat.
He gagged, slipped on the boat’s edge and went down hard, cracking his skull on the basalt wall perimeter, then sinking below the water.
“Jesus!”
Jacob backed away, scrambling to shore, as his mother calmly leapt out of the boat, crossing the water onto the path in one leap. She watched the water another moment to make sure the floating body wasn’t moving, then brushed herself off and pulled out her trusty Beretta. She met their looks.
“Don’t ask me. I heard ‘helicopters’. I would guess either our guide was hiding a special talent at perception, and we’re about to have visitors, or…”
“Or somehow he just got those powers?” Alexander swallowed hard, frowning. His earlier intention to RV the German explorer’s shipwreck now was supplanted by a more urgent question:
What the hell just happened?
And why was he sure, absolutely convinced in fact, that it had something to do with his father, his dream of the chair, and something about a global catastrophe?
4
In Xavier Montross’ head, the chopper’s engine roared like some ancient behemoth roused from its slumber, and all too eager to start the apocalypse. He couldn’t think or focus. His lover, Diana Montgomery, who had risked her life to save him back there, now suffered the full onslaught of psychic awareness; her brain had become a jumbled cacophony of sights and sounds and emotions, and who knew what else?
Xavier should have been able to console her, to calm her and get her to focus. After all, he had dealt with exactly this on a deeply personal scale, drawing images of death and personal loss since an early age, unaware of why he could see these things that were happening far away or were about to happen, and no one else could. What had made him special, or cursed?
Now she suffered as well, a hundred-fold, and not used to it one bit.
Somehow the pilot was unaffected, or they’d all have crashed now into the hell he’d witnessed on a few glances out the window: New York City, smoke rising from buildings, traffic at a standstill everywhere, mobs storming the streets, apartments on fire.
As bad as those glimpses were however, worse was what he kept seeing in his own mind, from his own unwanted psychic video shots. His particular ‘gift’, to foresee events that would lead to his own demise. So far, this talent had come in handy, allowing him to avert the scenario in most cases.