Lincoln Child - The Third Gate

“What makes you think of sabotage, Fenwick?” Rush said in a quiet voice. “You of all people know how carefully the entire crew was vetted.”

“I know,” March replied, lowering his eyes. “But I’ve never been on an expedition where so much has gone wrong. It’s as if-” He paused. “It’s as if someone wants our mission to fail.”

“If that were the case,” Rush went on, “there are much easier ways to accomplish that than compromising a generator.”

Slowly, March raised his eyes and looked meaningfully at Rush. “That’s true,” he said. “That’s very true.”

Jack Wildman hung suspended, thirty-five feet below the surface, as he watched his dive partner, Mandelbaum, prepare to fire up Big Bertha. “Watched” wasn’t exactly the right term, he decided: Mandelbaum was little more than the vaguest blur in the muddy horror that surrounded them on all sides, a smudge, black against black, detectable only because it was in motion.

“Able Charlie to base,” Mandelbaum spoke into his radio. “We’re ready to start scouring grid G three.”

“Able Charlie, roger,” came the squawked reply from up top. “Bubble status?”

“Eighty-nine percent.”

Wildman glanced at the digital readout on the device strapped to his forearm. “Whiskey Bravo here,” he said into his own radio. “Bubble at ninety-one.”

“Roger that,” came the response from base. “Proceed.”

There was a low drone as Mandelbaum started up Big Bertha. Immediately, Wildman felt the resulting pressure as thick muck was eddied past him by the machine’s jets of compressed air. It was like standing in a vat of molasses.

Actually, it was worse than that. Because the muck and mire that surrounded them were treacherous. He had to constantly watch his step: sticks and bracken were hidden everywhere, often sharp, ready to pierce his suit. And the Sudd was so damned thick, every move was an effort, like trying to work in an atmosphere of 10 g’s…

“Able Charlie to base,” Mandelbaum radioed. “Scouring under way.”

Now Wildman turned on the heavy spotlight fixed to his right shoulder and approached the stone face: the freshly bared bed of the Sudd, scoured temporarily clean by Big Bertha. It was Mandelbaum’s job to operate Big Bertha; his own job to examine the scoured areas it left behind for any evidence of caverns, lava pipes, or ancient construction. He felt like an astronaut on some nightmare gas planet, with his heavy wet suit and its powerful light and the helmet video camera and the bubble apparatus all conspiring to weigh him down.

Actually, he was glad about the bubble. Very glad. It kept him oriented in this soup. If not for the bubble, you could easily lose your bearings, forget which way was up. He couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to Forsythe: panicking over a blocked regulator, trying desperately to surface… The thought chilled him. If you got disoriented in this black ooze, lost your guide cable-forget it. Your only hope was that your dive buddy would find you. Otherwise, you were dead meat…

His foot slipped in the greasy muck of the bottom and he slid backward, only to feel something hard strike him in the calf. He reached down, felt it. A stick. Since he was unable to make out anything unless it was inches before his mask, he brought it up into visual range. Sure enough. Goddamn Sudd. Good thing the stick hadn’t penetrated his suit-the one time that had happened, the smell had been so awful it had taken him three showers to get rid of it.

He went back to examining the scoured area.

“Able Charlie,” Mandelbaum said into the radio. “I think Big Bertha needs another cleaning. I’m having trouble keeping the throttle steady.”

“Roger that,” repeated the voice from the surface.

Pushing mud and ooze away from his face, Wildman moved to his right, preparing to examine a fresh area. The feeling of muck streaming past his limbs in the wake of the machine’s air jets was horrible. A few days before, one of the divers on another crew had had his mouthpiece jarred loose by his partner’s elbow. The poor sap got a mouthful of the shit, started puking his guts out, and had to do an emergency surface before he aspirated…

“Able Charlie,” Mandelbaum said again, “I’m afraid we need to terminate the dive. I’m having more trouble with Big Bertha-”

As he spoke, Wildman heard Bertha’s engine suddenly roar, the throttle going wide open. Mandelbaum quickly killed the throttle, but not before an irresistible wave of black muck, thrown up by the jets, knocked Wildman back a foot into the dense soup. Again, he felt something hard prod him, this time in the lower back. Shit. Reaching around, he grabbed for it, felt his hands close over the slippery stick. He brought it around toward his mask. He ought to beat Mandelbaum over the head with it. The thought brought a smile to his face until he got a look at the thing and found it wasn’t a stick, after all.

It was a bone.

Late that afternoon, a small group gathered in the forensic bay of Rush’s tidy medical suite. In addition to Rush himself, there was an assisting nurse, Tina Romero, and Jeremy Logan. When Logan had entered, Rush opened his mouth-apparently to protest, given Porter Stone’s standing order for compartmentalization-but then he simply shrugged, smiled faintly, and gestured him forward.

The archaeological team had finished their initial examination of the skeleton discovered by the dive team-now it was up to Rush to perform what would be, in essence, a postmortem.

The collection of bones themselves sat in a blue plastic evidence locker, set upon a wheeled cart of stainless steel. As the others watched, Rush snapped on a pair of latex gloves, then pulled the ceiling-mounted microphone toward him, pressed the Record button, and began to speak.

“Examination of remains found on day sixteen of project, in a shallow cave within grid square G three. Ethan Rush performing the analysis, with Gail Trapsin assisting.” A pause. “The matrix of silt and mud surrounding the remains has apparently acted as a preservative, and the skeleton is in very good condition, considering. Nevertheless, there is considerable decay.”

He took the cover from the evidence locker, then began carefully removing the bones and placing them on the nearby autopsy table. “The cranial and facial bones are intact, as are those of the rib cage, arms, and vertebral column. Dive teams have searched for the remainder of the skeleton, without success, finding only a few leathery fragments of what might once have been sandals. The archaeological team has speculated that only the upper portion of the body was preserved in the silty matrix, and that the lower section has completely decayed and is no longer extant.”

He placed the bones on the table, roughly in anatomical order. Logan looked at them curiously. They were a dark brown, almost mahogany, as if varnished by their five-millennium-long mud bath. As Rush worked, bringing out more bones, the room began to smell of the Sudd: peat, vegetal decay, and an odd, sweetish smell that made Logan feel faintly nauseous.

Rush spoke into the microphone again. “Radiocarbon dating by mass spectrometer indicates that the bones are approximately fifty-two hundred years old, with a two percent margin of error due to the natural contaminants in the surrounding matrix.”

“Contemporaneous with Narmer,” Romero said quietly as she toyed with her ever-present fountain pen.

“Found with the body was a round shield, badly deteriorated, and the remains of what appears to be a mace.”

“Equipment of the pharaoh’s personal bodyguard,” Romero added.

“While, as I mention, the shield is in poor condition,” Rush continued, “the archaeology team has used reverse-investment casting, in concert with digital enhancement, to sharpen the remains of what seems to be ornamentation on the shield’s face. Archaeology believes the ornament to be a serekh, enclosing two symbols: a fish, and what appears to be a tool of some kind.”