Billie took her first step into the jungle and away from the Pirahã tribe, and then she stopped, because the jungle darkened with a thick cloak of smoke. Through the forest, she heard the strange and eerie whistling of four hundred Pirahã. It was somewhere between the high pitch scream of a child and the piercing trill of an exotic bird. A voice in her head told her it was time to resume the work.
The Black Smoke had returned.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The helicopter rested its skids on the deck of the Maria Helena. Sam opened the door and stepped out while Genevieve was still in the process of shutting down the engine. It was another warm day, late in the summer. A cold breeze suggested a change was coming. The sky above was clear but dark clouds were on the horizon suggesting the change would be violent when it arrived. Hurried by the weather, he entered the ship’s main structure.
Spotting Matthew first, he asked, “How was your vacation skipper?”
“Good,” Matthew said. “What I got to take of it. You recalled me a week early.”
Sam shrugged. “Hey, no one said I was easy to work for. But the pay’s all right and you get to go to some amazing places.”
“The pay’s modest and the places you take us to usually nearly get us killed.”
“Hey, you’re still here.” Sam was always surprised by how conservative his skipper was. Their job was dangerous, but so far he hadn’t lost a single one of the crew. “Have you seen Tom?”
“Down below. He’s looking at launching the Sea Witch II within the hour.”
Sam glanced at the dark storm clouds on the horizon. “Will they have time?”
Matthew handed him the synoptic charts from the communications room. “The weather report says he’s got twenty-four hours.”
“All right, that’ll have to do.”
Sam walked down the steel stairs into the dive-room. He spotted Tom and Veyron going over the dive plan next to Sea Witch II. The submarine was a bright yellow Triton 36,000/3. Cables were already secured to its lifting hooks, ready to maneuver the sub into the water for launch. It often reminded Sam of a futuristic hovercraft. It had twin yellow hulls and a large borosilicate glass dome in the middle that housed up to three divers. Two pilot seats were located at the front of the bubble, and one passenger crammed behind to form the shape of a V. The dome provided 270 degree visualization. The unique glass had been slowly built over nearly eight months, using boron instead of soda-lime, which gave it the unusual property of compressing upon itself the deeper it went. At the back of the dome, a square box stood out like a small doghouse. Inside a very expensive ROV— Remote Operated Vehicle or basically an underwater drone — was attached to an umbilical tether like a leash.
“Hello, gentlemen,” he greeted both men.
“Welcome back,” Veyron said. It was an acknowledgement of his presence and then Veyron immediately returned to his calculations for the dive.
“Sam!” Tom smiled, genuinely pleased to see him. He turned to a man who strolled over from the opposite side of the submarine. “This is Peter Smyth. He was the first to locate the Mary Rose and is keen to stay with us while we complete our search for the map to what we think is the Third Temple.”
Sam shook Peter’s hand. “Good to have you on board.”
Tom said, “Peter and I were about to take the Sea Witch II down to the Mary Rose and then run the ROV out to see if the stone tablet is in her lower decks. There are some interesting things I’d like you to see. Did you want to join us?”
“To dive to 3000 feet and search an old shipwreck?” Sam asked.
“Yeah.”
“Absolutely.” Sam looked at Veyron who was eager to launch the submarine. “Elise is shore side in Istanbul. She has my samples from the ancient lava tube I looked at and she’s carbon dating them at the Marmara University. If she gets an answer for me before I return, have Genevieve take the chopper and bring her in. I want those answers as soon as possible.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Tom piloted the Sea Witch II in a direct line to the bottom. On the way down, Sam filled him in with what he’d found in the lava tube and Peter brought Sam up to date with everything he’d learned about the Emerald Star and the pyramid inside the Kalahari Desert. The entire journey took thirty minutes. He checked the depth gauge at 2800 feet and reduced his descent until 2950 feet. Once there, he leveled the submarine and hovered motionless.
He turned to Sam. “All right, you ready to look at this thing?”
Sam nodded. His eyes were wide and his jaw set firm, with a slight glint of a smile that betrayed his wonderment. Some things, Tom realized, one never got bored with.
Tom flicked on the powerful floodlights, which hung out from above the dome like a pair of giant bug-eyes. The Mary Rose lit up in front of them.
Sam gasped. “I’d heard about the salinity, but had no idea how much it would preserve the wreck.”
“Told you that you needed to see some things in person,” Tom said.
In front of them the Mary Rose stood upright in the silty seabed. The individual planks of wood that made up her hull were undamaged. All four masts of the Spanish galleon were entirely intact and a series of ropes showed how the great vessel was rigged. The intricate wood carvings of the helm flickered in the light, as though a restless ghost was commanding her through the dark. The wood was so well-preserved that chisel and tool marks were still visible on individual planks. Rigging materials, coils of rope, tills, rudders, and even carved wooden decorative elements survived. It was conceivable the ship might have been sunk a year or two ago, but in 1653? The concept was absurd, and yet that made it no less true.
If there was any doubt left in their minds about the age of the ship, it was shattered when the brass bell located amid ship, hanging from the main mast, bore the name, Mary Rose.
Sam said, “I heard the high levels of salinity preserved some of these ships, but I had no idea.”
Peter spoke, with the confidence of a man who’d been studying the Black Sea and her depths for the past two years. “During the last Ice Age the Black Sea was really the Black Lake. As the planet warmed and sea levels rose, saltwater from the Mediterranean began spilling over a rock formation in the Bosphorus Strait. This meant the Black Sea was now fed by saltwater as well as freshwater rivers, resulting in two distinct layers of water — an oxygenated upper level with less salt and a lower level with plenty of saltwater and no oxygen.”
Sam said, “That’s amazing. In most seawater, wood and rope are among the first things to decay. But here they look entirely untouched. All right, time to get the ROV out, and find our stone map.”
Tom set Sea Witch II to hover automatically, locking in a depth alarm — something that would alert him the instant their depth substantially increased or decreased — and then turned his focus to the computer monitor that displayed the image seen from the front of the ROV. There were two monitors. The first one showed the primary view, while the second one was split into five barely visible views — above, below, left, right and behind. Any of them could change the primary view so that the larger image was the one they viewed.