Black Sun

“They brought these things back here for a reason,” McCarter added. “They gave the people they found a legend designed to explain what they were for, but they didn’t want anyone disturbing them.”

“So why are we messing with them?” Hawker asked.

McCarter and Danielle exchanged glances. At times the whole thing was too monumental to think about. Strange, glowing stones that were actually machinery, devices of some kind sent back from a future time period. Someone had seen fit to go through whatever hell it took to send them back here, but now they were building toward something, and if the legends were correct, even tangentially, it could mean a cataclysmic change for everyone on the earth. Leaving them in place without trying to understand what they might have been for was almost too much to ask.

“We have a good reason,” she said. “We need to understand what they’re going to do at zero hour.”

She searched Hawker’s face and waited for a response. She sensed he was not quite convinced.

Before Hawker could say anything, Yuri stood abruptly, looking off to the port side of the boat. He stepped to the rail, staring at a spot ahead and to the left. He followed the spot with his eyes as they moved past it.

Danielle slowed the boat further and began to turn back toward the area. The depth sounder began to beep and Yuri became more agitated. He leaned out over the edge of the boat, moving his head back and forth as if he were trying to see through the water.

Suddenly he raced from the port side of the boat to starboard, grabbing that rail and repeating his agitated actions.

“Siren!” he shouted. “Siren, siren, siren!”

He seemed unable to control himself, shouting aggressively, rocking back and forth. He went from one side of the boat to the other and began to climb overboard. Hawker grabbed him.

“Calm down!” Hawker urged.

“Siren, siren, siren!”

The depth gauge was beeping louder; they’d moved over a shallow spot.

Yuri wriggled in Hawker’s arms trying to break his grip. He lunged at Hawker’s hand to bite it. “Siren!” he screamed. “Siren!”

“Get us out of here!” Hawker shouted.

She gu

Yuri looked toward the wake behind them. “Siren,” he said, softly and wistfully. “Siren.”

And then he was calm.

Danielle slowed the boat once again and when Hawker released his grip, Yuri ran to Danielle and clung to her leg.

“What the hell did they do to this kid?” Hawker asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, stroking Yuri’s hair. She crouched down beside him.

“What’s ‘siren’ mean, sweetheart? Can you tell me?”

He just stared at her. It was no use; he didn’t understand.

“It’s okay,” she said, looking into his eyes and touching his face. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

He locked his eyes on hers and it seemed as if he was troubled, but then he broke free and found his sunglasses again and began clicking them beside his ear.

“You think he’s okay?” McCarter asked.

Sadly, she looked up at him. “I don’t know. But I think we’ve found the Tip of the Spear.”

CHAPTER 29

Danielle punched the keys on the dive computer to calculate their time available underwater. Air use, type of mixture, and decompression stops would all be factored in. While she worked on the details, Hawker took off his shirt and began hauling the gear from the equipment locker.

She glanced over at him. His shoulders and back muscles formed a broad V that tapered down to his waist. His muscles went taut as he stacked the heavy tanks by the boat’s stern rail.

His ta

“Don’t get too distracted,” McCarter said, catching her.

“Right,” she replied, somewhat embarrassed.

“Don’t worry,” McCarter added. “I caught him staring at you earlier. He almost fell off the boat.”

“Good,” she said, smiling to herself. “I’d hate to think I was losing my touch.”

She turned back to the computer. If the depth finder was correct, the sea floor was a sandy plain eighty feet below. But at the spot where Yuri had begun screaming, the depth finder had registered successive pings ranging from fifty-five to seventy feet. Something was down there rising out of the sediment: a reef, the remnants of some island or some type of construction.

She stepped to the front of the boat for some privacy and changed into her dive skins, a thin, formfitting suit of Lycra, similar to a neoprene wet suit but designed for warmer water. Dive skins were good against abrasion and didn’t affect buoyancy, like neoprene suits could.

With the suit fitting like a glove, Danielle sheathed a four-inch titanium knife around her calf and then walked to the back of the boat. Hawker stood there, wearing dive shorts and a rash-guard of a shirt. He was examining their masks.

The full-face diving masks had radio communications built into them and a miniature head-up display that projected depth, time, and compass direction on the top right corner of the mask, like a modern fighter pilot’s helmet.

They had cost a thousand dollars apiece and when added to the two diver propulsion vehicles, or DPVs, the twin aluminum tanks, the setup came to twenty grand or more.

“I see where our budget went,” Hawker said.

“I had these flown in yesterday,” she said. “The boat … well, I had to make do with what was already available.”

Hawker lifted the tanks onto her back.

“We’re using nitrox,” he said referencing a special mixture of oxygen and nitrogen that allowed divers to go deeper, and stay down longer.

“Forty percent mixture.”

For a dive into eighty feet of water they didn’t really need nitrox but she hadn’t known what the depth of the site would be, and if they found something in deeper waters she didn’t want to go back for new tanks.

“With the nitrox we can do an hour and ten minutes without decompression,” she explained. “Max time on the bottom is two hours, saving thirty-two minutes for decompression on our way up.”

Hawker set his watch and heaved his set of tanks up onto his shoulders.

She turned to McCarter. “I programmed a waypoint into the GPS. Don’t delete it. You’re going to drift a little, even with the anchor down. You’ll need to be able to home in on that spot if we need a pickup.”

“I thought you had radios in the masks,” he said.

“We do but the transmitters are not as powerful as the one you have on board.” She motioned to the surface unit.

“We’ll be able to hear each other and you, but once we go deeper than thirty feet you won’t be able to hear us.”

McCarter nodded and Danielle pulled on her mask and went over the side, splashing into the warm Caribbean water.

Hawker followed and a moment later they were both in the water, testing out the DPVs: torpedo-shaped machines with stubby wings and handlebars that resembled a motorcycle’s.

Cruising through the gin-clear water of the gulf, Danielle activated the head-up display. A series of brilliant green lines formatted on the glass of her mask like some kind of high-definition video game.

Depth: 4, Bearing: NNW (323), Temp: 88, Time Elapsed: 1:17.

“Which way?” Hawker asked.

“We need to head back under the boat and follow the one-oh-seven bearing.”

And with that she peeled off to the left like a dolphin turning away from the pod. Hawker followed and the two of them tracked back underneath the boat, heading for the hidden rise in the sand half a mile away.