Dirk began to imagine that a body once lay inside the relics. Where the legs might have been were a pair of bronze greaves, ancient armor worn below the knees. A sword blade and dagger blade were situated on the left side while a socketed spearhead without its shaft lay on the right. If there was a body, it was long ago dissolved or consumed by sea creatures that devoured anything organic.
Sitting at the foot of the bed was a large cauldron.
Rising a few inches over four feet, the circumference of the cauldron was too large for him to circle his arms around and touch his fingertips. He rapped the hilt of his dive knife against the side and heard a dull metallic thud. Bronze, he thought to himself. He smeared away the growth on the surface and revealed the figure of a warrior throwing a spear. Using his glove to brush his way around the cauldron, he discovered an army of sculpted men and women wearing armor and posed as if fighting a battle. They carried man-sized shields and long swords. Several held spears with short shafts but extremely long heads in a spiral form. Some fought in body armor that covered their torso.
Others fought naked, but most all wore huge helmets, many with horns protruding out the top.
He swam above the rim, shined his light through the wide neck and peered inside.
The interior of the big cauldron was filled almost to the top with jumbled, intermingled but still recognizable artifacts. Dirk identified bronze spearheads, dagger blades with the hilts eroded away, edged and winged axes, coiled bracelets and chain waist belts. He left the relics as he had found them, all but one. He gently picked it out of the cauldron and held it between his fingers. Then he moved through an archway that loomed on the opposite side of what he now supposed was an ancient bedroom used as a tomb.
He quickly identified the chamber beyond as a kitchen. There was no air pocket here and his bubbles trailed to the ceiling and flowed outward in confused streams like quicksilver. Bronze cooking tureens, amphors, urns and jars lay scattered on the floor along with broken clay pots. Beside what appeared to be a fireplace he found bronze tongs and a large ladle, all partially buried in the silt that had filtered into the chamber over thousands of years. He swam over the debris and examined the artifacts closely, trying to find distinguishing artwork or markings, but they were half buried in the silt and covered with little hard-shell crustaceans that had made their way over the centuries into the room.
Satisfied there were no more doorways or side rooms to explore, he returned through the bedroom chamber and approached Summer, who was focusing and furiously recording every dimension of the arched vault below the water surface.
He touched her arm and pointed up. After they surfaced, he said excitedly, "I found two more chambers."
"This gets more intriguing by the minute," Summer said, without taking her eye from the viewfinder.
He grinned and held up a bronze lady's hair comb. "Run the comb through your hair and try to imagine the last woman to use it."
Summer lowered her camera and stared at the object in Dirk's hand. Her eyes widened as she delicately took the comb and held it between her fingers. "It's lovely," she murmured. She was about to run the comb through a few strands of her flame-red hair that trailed past her cars when she stopped and suddenly looked at him seriously. "You should put it back where you found it. When archaeologists examine this place, and they will, you'll be condemned as a relic thief."
"If I had a girlfriend, I bet she'd keep it."
"The last of your long string of women would have stolen the charity box from a church."
Dirk feigned looking hurt. "Sara's streak of larceny made her irresistible."
"You're just lucky Dad is a better judge of women than you are."
"What's he got to do with it?"
"He gave Sara the boot when she showed up at his hangar looking for you."
"I wondered why she never returned my calls," said Dirk, without a hint of distress.
She gave him a baleful glare and studied the comb, trying to conjure up an image of the last woman to touch it, wondering what style and color her hair might have been. After a few moments, she carefully laid the ancient relic in her brother's open hands so she could photograph it.
As soon as Summer took several close-up photos, Dirk returned the comb to the cauldron. He was soon followed by Summer, who recorded more than thirty images of the bedroom chamber and the ancient artifacts on her digital camera before entering and shooting the ancient kitchen. Satisfied that she had achieved a detailed photographic inventory of the three chambers and their artifacts, she passed the camera to Dirk, who disassembled the lights and slipped it back into its aluminum container. Rather than reattaching it to Summer's back, he held the grip handle tightly in one hand as insurance against losing or damaging the case.
He made a final check of both their air gauges and determined they had more than an ample air reserve for the journey back to their habitat. Well trained by their father, Dirk and his sister were cautious divers who had yet to come remotely close to the fatal danger of empty air tanks. He led the way this time, having memorized the bends and curves in the coral they had passed through earlier.
When they finally reached the comfort of Pisces and passed into the main lock, the waves above were rising, driven by a mushrooming wind that forced the waves to build and pound the reef like a jack-hammer against a piling. As Dirk took his turn at fixing dinner, he and Summer looked forward to discovering the riddle of the underwater ghost temple. They relaxed and ate dinner under a false security. Neither had any conception of how vulnerable they were fifty feet beneath the surface of a vicious sea, certainly not with waves that were about to reach a hundred feet high, with troughs that would expose the habitat to the full force of the horrendous killer storm.
7
Punching into the whirling wall of the hurricane, scourged by screaming winds, blankets of hail and rain, and tossed by downdrafts and updrafts through unimaginable turbulence, the twenty-nine-year-old Orion P-3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft took the beating in stride. Her wings flexed and fluttered like blades on a fencer's sword. The big propellers on her four Allison forty-six-hundred-horsepower engines chopped her through the deluge at three hundred knots. Built in 1976, the Navy, NOAA and NUMA had never found a better aircraft that could stand up to the punishment of violent weather.
Remarkably stable, Galloping Gertie, as she was affectionately named, with an animated painting of a cowgirl riding a bucking bronco on her bow, carried a crew of twenty: two pilots, a navigator and flight meteorologist, three engineering and electronic communication specialists, twelve scientists and a media passenger from a local TV station who asked to come aboard when he learned that Hurricane Lizzie was building into a record-setting storm.
Jeff Barrett sat relaxed in the pilot seat, his eyes sweeping the instrument panel every other minute. Six hours into a ten-hour flight, the gauges and lights were all he had to look at, since the only thing to be seen through the windshield was a view similar to peering inside a washing machine on the soap cycle. With a wife and three children, Barrett saw no more danger in his job than if he were driving a trash truck through a downtown alley.
But danger and death lurked in the swirling cloud of moisture smothering the Orion, especially when Barrett made passes so low over the water that salt spray spun off the propellers and glazed the windows with a frostlike film before he spiraled up to seven thousand feet, flying in and out of the worst part of the storm. Corkscrew penetration was the most efficient way to record and analyze the hurricane's strength.