John Schettler - Devil's Garden

“Have the Argonauts clear and secure the entire site,” she said firmly. “No one from that facility there is to be admitted. If they get pushy about it, be polite, but firm. I’ll need three or four men with spades.”

“Very good, Madame.” MacRae adopted his more formal tone in front of the other men. He still had no idea what this mission was about, or why they would in any way be interested in the relics of this old monument.

The Argonauts were quick and efficient, leaping from the helos as they alighted on a narrow patch of open ground by the edge of the trees. One squad fanned out in the surrounding orchard to one side, flanked by the other. The third squad swept north, herding a couple of early rising site visitors and a tour guide politely away. A team of four men unpacked a number of containers with the supplies they had stowed, and then opened a side compartment and produced folding shovels running to join Elena and the Captain in the center of the shrine. It was a series of three elevated slabs of smooth, grey stone, concentric circles laid on top of one another, each one slightly smaller to create three steps. The center of the topmost slab was hollow, like a stone donut, and filled with a sward of green grass.

All that was left of the stones gathered about the site sat there in mute silence, set down thousands of years ago by human stone wrights, and quietly keeping their vigil on the site through the ages.

“There,” Elena pointed. “Dig, gentlemen, if you please.”

MacRae gave her a wide eyed look. “Here? Right in the middle of the shrine?”

“It’s at least four feet deep,” she said, folding her arms.

“Very well, lads. Put your backs into it.” He’d dig a hole through the earth to Hell itself to get to the bottom of this business today. He’d dig in the devil’s own garden.

The men began to dig, and they made short work of the site, quickly shoveling away the turf and plowing away the loamy soil beneath it. For them it was just another field position, and they had dug many defensive sites in the past, though never under circumstances like these. The site staff fretted audibly to the north, held at bay by a line of dour faced Argonauts in black commando fatigues. They could see that something was going on, but a partial wall behind the last three standing columns blocked their view of the digging. To quiet them Elena sent over a man to tell them they were from the Greek Ministry of Culture, here to do a complete site survey to protect the monuments. It seemed to have had the desired effect.

It wasn’t long before the shovels struck something hard, and from the sound of it MacRae thought it was metallic, and not buried stone. They worked quickly, clearing away the soil to reveal a smooth metal surface, gleaming in the dull light, with a single cowling plate held in place by screws. Mack Morgan stood there, hands in his pockets, watching the men work with interest. What was her ladyship up to this time?

Someone produced a Swiss Army knife and they used a tool attachment to quickly remove the screws and metal plate. It revealed a familiar fixture, but one that was completely out of place in the setting-a simple keyhole. Elena reached slowly to her throat, kneeling over the dig, which was now a four by six foot trench. MacRae helped her down onto the metal structure in the trench, thinking this to be a special maintenance facility, or storage site that may house additional relics. What she could be doing here was beyond his imagining at that point, but he waited, giving Morgan a dark eyed glance, arms folded on his chest.

Elena produced, quite appropriately, a simple metal key that she had been wearing on a chain about her neck. MacRae watched as she knelt, leaning over the site, eyes closed, as if she were poised at the edge of some indefinable moment, some crossing point on the meridian of her life that would soon change everything. Then she slowly inserted the key in the lock, which produced an immediate, audible tone.

MacRae and Morgan watched intently as the top of the metal structure seemed to lift, hinging up with a low hum and forcing Elena to scoot to one side as it elevated. In light of what they had learned about the Russian ICBMs, the thought briefly crossed the Captain’s mind that this could be some kind of bomb shelter, some sanctuary from the impending chaos that threatened to engulf the world.

“What in the good Lord’s name is this?” said Morgan, his eyes bright with curiosity beneath his wavy black hair. He scratched his charcoal beard as he watched.

“Secret passage,” said MacRae with a wink. Someone produced a flashlight and it illuminated the shadowy recesses of the compartment below.

“That looks to be six inches of titanium reinforced steel!” Morgan gaped at the thickness of the elevated door hatch.

Elena looked over her shoulder, smiling up at the men. “Captain, If you’d care to do the honors.” She gestured at the open compartment where the light illuminated a ladder down. “Be our trailblazer here.”

The big Scott was nimble in reaching the ladder, as he had been up and down a thousand or more on ships throughout his long naval career. Down he went, swallowed by the earth, until he vanished into the deep metal shaft below the shrine, and with each step down he had the harrowing feeling that he was leaving the world above behind forever, slowly descending to a new world below.

He was.

Orlovran down the stairs, hearing the sounds of battle outside, pistol in hand. He had done what he came here to do, and now it was time to get free of this place and find a life for himself. But what to do? He knew that men from the ship were looking for him. The sound of the helicopter he had heard was unmistakable, though it sounded deeper and more powerful than he ever remembered a KA-40. If they were here then they must have flown all the way in from the Black Sea, he reasoned. They must have lingered near Spain, searching for him, and then tracked the signal from his jacket all the way here.

Yet something did not quite add up in that equation. He kept his jacket computer off most of the time, and knew it would only broadcast its IFF signal five kilometers in that state. The journey he had taken across the Med was on a slow Turkish steamer. Kirov would have had ample time to find and intercept that ship, yet it sailed merrily across the Med and through the Aegean to Istanbul before he transferred to that trawler. And if a ship like Kirov had entered the Black Sea, forcing the Bosporus and Dardanelles, he would certainly have heard something about it.

He knew he had been using the jacket computer in active mode on the journey across the Black Sea in that trawler. That would have extended the range of the signal to fifty kilometers, yet the only thing that had bothered them there was that stupid German submarine. If they tracked him here, then they would have had to be within 50 kilometers of the Black Sea Coast when he made port there with his NKVD handlers. Why didn’t they come for him before he started his train ride east through Georgia to his Grandmother’s farm? It just did not make any sense.

Then he remembered something…that letter he had written in the journal, the note to Fedorov! He had lamented his fate at Kizlyar, and addressed Fedorov by name. Was it possible? Could that letter have survived the war and the long decades afterward to be discovered by Fedorov in the future? If that were true, then the ship made it home safely. If that were true then they must have had a real reason to try and come back for him in the Caspian. But how did they accomplish that? No one knew why the ship was marooned in time, or how it moved back and forth through the centuries-at least not at the time he jumped ship.