Devil's Garden

Chapter 15

Once the God Zeus released two eagles from opposite ends of the earth, and they met at Delphi, high on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in Greece. It was the center of the world, the navel of the earth, the center of Greece itself, and the heart of an ancient mysterious Oracle that carried the words of Apollo when she spoke, revealing the fate of men and nations in days yet unseen. Now it was a national park and ski resort, with a tourist center at the Oracle site ruins that drew over two million visitors every year.

They were in the Strait of Artemisia. Argos Fire sped on through the night as the mission was being prepared. Now MacRae looked out the cabin window, watching the hills rising in the pre-dawn light, the Rocks of Phaedrades on the high slopes as they tumbled to the Malian Gulf below. His mind was still brooding over all he had heard the previous evening. That and the gin was enough to send his head spinning. That and the scent of the woman as he sat close to her on the loveseat. He spent a long, restless night with her there, and they finally joined in a way he had always dreamed about, though there was a hurried urgency to it all, as if they both could hear that clock ticking in the room.

“O lente, lente currite noctis equi!” she had whispered in his ear. “Go slow, go slow, ye chariot horses of the night…” It was a reference to from Ovid's "Amore," and a plea to slow time’s chariot and extend the hours they had together that night, both the first night as well as the last night in this world they would share that way together.

Yet MacRae was a well read man, and he also knew it was a phrase uttered by Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. He was awaiting the arrival of Lucifer at midnight, who would come to collect his soul, and Faustus was trying to do anything possible to put off that terrible moment. MacRae felt that same way when Elena whispered her Latin, a swell of both longing and dread rising in his chest. Some devil was at work in the world now and its work was drawing nigh. He could not see him. He did not know where he was, but he suspected he might be the Captain of that damn ship-Kirov-the battlecruiser that had sailed through hell into some distant past.

Where were they going now as the Argos Fire raced through the Aegean under a black, starlit night? It all seemed impossible, the wildest stuff of Hollywood movies, but Elena had told it to him with a straight face, in the same no-nonsense tone of voice he had heard so often at her business meetings. She was deadly serious. ‘The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike; the devil will come, and Faustus must be damned…’

“Alright then,” he said when morning came. “The Helicopters are ready for operations.”

“How many can we carry?”

“How many? Well as you know we’ve modified those helos specifically for the Argonauts. Each one takes a squad of twelve men. We’ve three ready on the fantail this morning.”

The night had given her the time to explain that there was a place they needed to be the following day. MacRae wasn’t happy about leaving the ship but she persuaded him that it was necessary. Yet he perceived a real struggle within her, and an anguish that was something more than fear, something more akin to grief and sadness.

“Good enough,” he caught the tormented look in her eyes, and put his arms around her. “What’s wrong? You told me so much about this time displacement last night that we never got round to the 48 hours. What is really going on here? Why this rush to Delphi?”

“No time now, Gordon. Get medical supplies, ammunition, water, communications equipment on those helos. Oh yes-we’ll need shovels. Something to dig with.”

“That sort of equipment is already there-standard loadout. Along with the missiles and everything else.”

“Forget the missiles. You can leave all that behind, if it will give us more room for food and supplies. The Argonauts should be armed, however.”

“Aye, armed to the teeth.”

“Then have the men pack additional clothing, uniforms, ammunition, anything essential. You do the same.”

“I see…” He could see her distress, but knew now was not the time to probe deeper. On the one hand she said the mission would be brief, yet on the other she was making it sound as though they would be gone for some good length of time. The lady obviously had something in mind, and so he quickly moved into operational mode in his own mind, a military precision to his thought now.

“I’ll see that the lads are ready.”

After he left her to head for the fantail, Elena Fairchild passed a quiet moment in her office. Her eyes strayed over the furniture, the artwork on the walls, and the desk where she had spent so much of her time in the past, evaluating charts, monitoring the oil markets, researching deals. It seemed such a fruitless effort now, but it was her life before the Watch, and once it had been important to her. She realized she was letting go inwardly, releasing it all with a heavy sigh, and quiet tears. Then she flipped the hidden switch that would open the movable bulkhead and entered the special room behind her office.

There it sat. The phone, the phone, the red phone of doom. She wasted no time now, quickly keying a code to open the glass and then punching in a brief message on the keypad. “WS11 — ON SITE — 08:00 HRS.”

She pushed the send button, waited, eyes darkly fixed on the digital screen that had flashed so many messages in the past seven years, codes of alarm, of warning, bidding her constant vigilance, setting the course of the Argos Fire to seas through her regional patrol zone. All that was over now too.

The confirmation code returned. “RECEIVED.” There was a brief pause and she started to lower the protective glass cover again. Then a second message flashed onto the screen. It was just one word, as always, but this one was not in the lexicon of codes and call signs she had memorized over the years. This one came from a human heart. It read simply: FAREWELL.

It was time.

She replaced the glass, keyed one additional command to disable the phone, then retreated quickly to her outer office, sealing off the bulkhead. The sound of men moving from the lower decks seemed like a rumble of thunder, echoing through the corridors of the ship. She looked for the bag she had packed the previous evening, then felt for the chain around her neck, her hands clasped to her breast in a fleeting moment of reassurance. Time to leave. They needed to get to the site as soon as possible with her team of Argonauts.

To make their flight as short as possible, the ship had altered course, moving into the narrow Strait of Artemisia where the Greeks had thought to block the Persian fleet of Xerxes in 420 B.C. Now they were north of the fabled pass of Thermopylae where the 300 Spartans had made their gallant stand. She was through the corridors to emerge on the fantail of the ship in little time, and saw Gordon there consulting with Mack Morgan. Seeing her, he raised his hand, rotating his finger to signal the pilots. The helos began their ignition cycle as the last of the Argonauts filed into the rear compartments. My fistful of Spartans, she thought, and God forgive me that I can’t take all of them, the whole of her crew of 300. She would live with that the rest of her life, however much of that was left to her now.

* * *

She gave the ship a long look in farewell as the sleek helos rose above the fantail, engines roaring to break the quiet of the dawn. Go with God, she whispered a silent prayer. The three helicopters raced south, gaining altitude as they approached the coast and rose towards Mount Parnassus. The X-3s were one of the fastest helicopters in the world, so they would catch only a brief glimpse of the wrinkled mountains on the quick run to Delphi. They were soon hovering over the orange roofs of the town, drifting slowly to the east where the famous ruins could be seen below. The severed columns and remnants of elegant Greek architecture were laid out below them like broken teeth. They were spread out in narrow enclaves surrounded by green olive groves, monuments of ages past, the Athenian Treasury and Theatre, the Temple of Apollo, the Navel of the Earth, the Sacred Way, and the Shrine to Athena.

‘I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised…’ The words ran through her mind as she thought about the ancient deity, and how she had been represented through many cultures over the millennia. She was the goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, and all of that would be laid on her altar now. Some said she had deeper roots, arising from Egyptian stories of Neith, the Goddess of War in one depiction, and a mother Goddess of the loom in another, weaving the strands of the earth together to make each new day. If ever there was a description of Mother Time, that was it, thought Elena. Well, my dear lady, I must beg your pardon a thousand times, but we’re about to ruffle your skirts.

“There,” she pointed to the pilot from the seat just behind Gordon, who was flying co-pilot on the mission. “That circle there. See the standing columns? Can we put down there-at the edge of those trees?”

The pilot nodded, and they began a gradual descent, the outline of the ruins sharpening as they dropped closer. Normally the area might be overrun with tourists, but not this early in the day, not with the ominous news on the airwaves about the rising tide of war. It was relatively quiet, and there were just a few vehicles at the north end of the ruins where a small building housed staff who looked over the shrine.

“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.