Moon Mask (70 page)

“I’m detecting a very strong magnetic signature.”

“The mask?”

“Unlikely,” she replied. “The magnetic reading is off the scale.”

“What are you getting at?”
Gibbs snapped. Already down for over twenty minutes, with no indication of an entrance, constantly battling the powerful current was starting to get to every member of the team.

“I am
getting at
the fact that whatever metallic object I am detecting is very large,” she replied curtly. “In fact it is . . .” her voice trailed off as a conclusion dawned on her. She packed away her magnetometer and spoke through her radio to her buddy. “Garcia, I need the metal detector.”

“Stand
by,”
Sid heard Nadia’s voice instruct all the teams.

Close to the surface the current wasn’t as strong, however she could feel the pull of the waves fifteen feet above as she hovered alongside Kristina Lake directly above the flat top of the sunken structure.

She and Lake had been the only team to think they had found an opening. On the surface of the monument was what she could only describe as three ‘wells’ descending six feet into the rock. Two of the wells were circular but the third, oddly, was vaguely hexagonal, its six sides almost discernable. King had told the team about the two circular depressions but had missed the hexagonal, and therefore less natural, shape in his briefing. Nevertheless, after a brief surge of excitement, it had proven to be, quite literally, a dead end.

From her vantage point, she looked down on the monument in its entirety and could make out the tiny figures of the other teams. She knew King was down near the base and, logically, the most plausible place to find an opening, but was unable to make out which figure he was. Just the thought of him sent her emotions into a spin so she forced herself to blot him out of her consciousness for the moment. There would be time to attend to the demands of a broken heart later.

“Sid,”
Lake’s voice suddenly cut into her thoughts. She heard an echo of concern there.
“Drop down now.”

Sid felt a surge of panic and exhaled the air from her lungs. It took a moment but she finally felt herself dive, assisted by a suddenly outthrust hand from Lake who pulled her to the roof of the structure.

Instantly, the terrifyingly recognisable silhouette of a hammerhead shark sped past, only three feet away. It slowed for an instant and turned her way and Sid felt the wave of panic erupt into terror as one of the creature’s eyes bored into her. Then, with a ripple of muscle, it pushed off and vanished into the gloom.

Sid sucked in the air through her rebreather. She heard King’s voice suddenly erupt in her ear but couldn’t discern the words. Her own heartbeat hammered and echoed through the water. She began to thrash but Lake grasped her arms and held her firmly.

“Sid, it’s okay. It’s okay, don’t panic,”
she told her.
“Take deep breaths. Calm down.”
Slowly, Sid regained her self-control. She forced herself to breathe in and out slowly but she didn’t let go of Lake’s hand. Through their face-plates she could see the other woman’s concern.

“He was just coming to investigate,”
Tank’s voice came from somewhere below, obviously having seen the excitement.
“Sometimes they get a bit close for comfort, but they’re just being curious.”

“You okay?”
King asked, the worry in his voice evident
.

“I’m fine,” she forced herself to reply. “Just don’t expect me to watch
Jaws
with you anytime soon.” Her mental slip stirred up unwanted thoughts again. They wouldn’t be watching any movies together again, curled up on the sofa in front of a fire . . .

“Steven Spielberg’s got a lot to answer for,”
Tank half-joked.

“My god,”
Nadia’s voice suddenly interrupted, snapping everyone’s attention back to the matter at hand.
“This whole structure is a meteorite.”

“What?”
Raine’s voice sounded incredulous through Nadia’s underwater radio.

“This entire structure has been fashioned out of a meteorite,” she elaborated. “More specifically, I believe it could be the same meteorite as the fake mask which we found.”

“I thought you said it was constructed out of the sandstone and mudstone of the bedrock, King?”
Gibbs reminded them all over the open communication channel.

“That’s right,”
King said defensively.
“Geologists have taken samples-”

“I presume the only samples that have been studied are of the surface levels?” Nadia asked. “No one has drilled into the ‘structure’ to take samples from its core? Just like no one, I presume, has bothered to run a magnetometer or a metal detector over it?”

She knew there was a scathing tone in her voice but she did not care. From what King had told them about the structure, most of the scientific community had, at best, given the site only a cursory glance, leaving the ‘science’ to pseudo-scientists, self-taught amateurs with little funding but a lot of imagination.

“I guess not,”
King replied sheepishly, as though the oversight was his responsibility.

“There is a large metallic core at the centre of this structure,” she explained. She had studied her findings as thoroughly as possible given the difficult conditions, and had fine-tuned the metal detector’s discriminator and pulse inductor to the phase response of the meteoric metal from which the fake Moon Mask had been fashioned. “We are looking at the same metal . . . possibly the same meteorite.”

“What about tachyons?”
Gibbs asked urgently and Nadia wasn’t sure whether his question was born out of concern for their welfare or excitement of finding a ‘mother lode’ of tachyon-emitting metal which would dwarf the Moon Mask’s discovery.

“I hate to disappoint you, but no, I detect no tachyon emissions from the structure itself. Hence why I claim it to be of the same, or similar meteorite as the fake mask, not the ‘real’ one.”

“But what you’re saying is impossible,”
Raine said.
“The largest meteorite ever discovered was in Namibia in the 1920s. It was about nine feet square by three deep and weighed something like sixty tons.”

Almost collectively, everyone’s voice came over the com-link at once.
“How do you know that?”

Raine, for his part, ignored their surprise. Nadia had realised that despite his shoot-first-ask-questions-later gung-ho attitude to life, her new lover was anything but the dumb ex-soldier he liked to portray.

“What did you say this thing was, Benny? Almost five hundred feet long, one hundred and fifty wide and ninety deep?”

“A bit less,”
King replied.
“But, yeah, more or less.”

“There’s no way a meteorite that size would survive entry through the atmosphere without breaking up.”

“I believe it did break up,” Nadia replied. “Hence the fake mask. I dare say there are other pieces scattered across the earth. With a shallow enough trajectory, it is plausible for it to have entered the earth’s atmosphere somewhere above South America, breaking up and dropping chunks into the rainforest, before racing westwards across the Pacific and slamming into the bedrock here.”

“Then, the ancient people of this region, when it was still free of water, fashioned it into what we see before us,”
King suggested.

“Is it possible they enclosed the meteorite inside local stone?”
Sid asked.
“Fashioning these steps and terraces around it. There are similar building styles in Egypt, in the Valley Temple at Giza where some scientists think later builders built
over
more archaic and more monumental original constructions. Even the pyramids themselves originally had a façade of limestone covering them.”

“It would explain why geologists say the entire structure was fashioned from local rock,” Nadia agreed.

“So what are you saying?”
Gibbs demanded.
“That there is no temple here? No Moon Mask?”

“No,”
King replied testily. “If there is a meteorite in there then the ancients wouldn’t have just ‘walled’ it up. There would be space between the meteoric core and the constructed monument- a temple. If there was a temple, then there must be a door.”

“Then where the hell is it, Doctor?”
Gibbs snapped.
“In case you hadn’t noticed we’re fighting a pig-ugly current in shark infested waters in China’s backyard. Now, all you nerds can sit around talking about temples and meteors and shit all you like once this is over, but for now all I care about is finding the goddamn door!”

Anger flared through King.
“You think I don’t know that, you-”

“Hey, Benny,”
Raine suddenly cut in, grasping his forearm through the water.
“Chill out, yeah? Gibbs, shut the hell up.”
Expertly, he kept hold of King’s arm, achieving perfectly neutral buoyancy, and reached out with his gloved hand to grasp the side of the monument.
“Relax. Stop kicking, I’ve got you.”
King continued to fin against the current.
“Stop kicking,”
he reiterated in a no-nonsense voice.
“Good, now breathe deeply. Close your eyes, relax your mind-”

“Who are you? Derren Brown?”

“I’m gonna feed you to the goddamn sharks if you don’t shut up,”
he snapped.
“Now, just close your eyes, relax, and try to remember what you saw in your . . . vision.”

King floated there, weightless, putting all his faith in the other man not to let any harm come to him. He took several deep breaths and felt the calming effect of the oxygen flowing through his system. His eyes drifted shut and his mind wandered-

A face in the gloom!

He tried to reach out and grasp the face but it vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

A hand reaching out to him!

He jerked back in fright.

“What do you see?”
Raine’s voice asked but he seemed to be coming from far away.

“I’m . . . I’m in a temple,” he replied, his soft voice being
transmitted to the entire team. “There are . . . pillars . . . dozens,
hundreds
of pillars. An entire forest of them. They’re . . . glowing.”

“Glowing?”
a woman’s voice entered his thoughts, Sid’s or Nadia’s, he couldn’t tell.

“There are . . . pictures . . . images on them . . . glowing red.”

“Is there a doorway,”
Raine asked quietly.
“A tunnel . . . a passage?”

He tried to look around the columned hall but the red glow grew more intense, burning his eyes.
Is this how Kha’um found Imhotep’s tomb?
he
wondered. “No,” he replied. “I can’t see a door.”

“Pointless fucking temple, with no door,”
another voice, Gibbs, invaded his head and produced a flash of anger.

Sunlight pierced the temple . . !

“What?”
Raine asked, feeling him tense.
“What do you see?”

. . .
blazing down through holes in the ceiling!

The shafts of light grew narrower, refining to a single laser-like beam until that too was gone.

Darkness.

Such utter darkness.

Then noise.

The roaring of a beast that could never be stopped.

It echoed all around, it pounded against the temple walls, it began to break through.

Then he saw it.

Such a hideous creature. Terrifying and all consuming.

It charged at him-

“I know how to get in!” He twisted free of Raine’s grip and was almost dragged away by the current. “Gibbs, I need some explosives.”

“They
knew the end was coming,”
King’s voice explained through Nadia’s radio as she came to a neutral hover about half the way up the two megalithic pillars.

Rising from the sea floor almost to the surface sixty feet above, the two enormous columns of rock each weighed almost 200 tonnes and, to the eye, looked almost perfectly straight, with only four inches between them.

They weren’t, however, just rock, as geologists believed from cursory examinations. Rather, just like the main structure itself, they gave of strong magnetic readings. At their core, she knew, lay the same meteoric metal.

Intrigued by King’s description of a columned hall within the temple, while the rest of the team had rendezvoused on the top of the structure and begun carefully setting explosives in one of the three ‘wells’, Nadia had led her buddy, Garcia, to the pillars.

Now she watched as Garcia got to work on the right hand pillar with an air-powered underwater pneumatic hand drill. With a muted pounding, the drill head tore through layers of crusted coral, algae and sponges, creating a cloud of dead micro-organisms which diminished visibility. Then, with a sense of finality, it crunched into the stone proper, adding a mixture of sodden dust to the underwater soup.

“They tried to protect the temple against the flood,”
King continued.
“They blocked the original entrance and then sealed these holes in the ceiling. But it didn’t work.”

The pounding of the drill head suddenly changed again as it bit with a tell-tale, if muted, screech into metal. Garcia stopped the drill and drifted out of the way.

“It’s all yours,”
he said as Nadia finned past him through the swirling debris. There, in a small section which Garcia had laid bare, was the smooth, dull red colour of the meteoric metal which they had unofficially dubbed ‘Xibalbanite’. It was the same metal that the primitive tribes of Venezuela had, thousands of years ago, fashioned into the shape of a human face and venerated until the Progenitors, for reasons unknown, had delivered to them a broken fragment of an almost identical mask which had ultimately changed their culture forever. But why?

Plucking a powerful underwater torch from her vest, she pulled herself closer to the pillar, toggled the switch and watched as the intense beam of light struck the exposed metal.

She gasped!

Erupting from behind the pillars, a pair of razor-sharp jaws gnashed through the water, moving at lightning speed. Come to investigate the sound of the drilling, the hammerhead had been startled by the sudden eruption of light from her torch and acted on deadly, defensive instinct.