“Hey, those spiral shapes have stood for two and a half thousand years.”
“Don’t get me wrong. That’s impressive, I’m just saying I was expecting something bigger on the surface.”
“Don’t let the surface labyrinths fool you; the subterranean versions are much more impressive.”
The island was part of the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago of six separate islands, with Bolshoi Zayatsky being the second most southerly island in the group. It was a small island, having a total surface area of just 0.48 square miles.
The entrances to the labyrinths were all on the southern sides. The labyrinths have five types of settings, but each has only one entrance which also serves as an exit. Genevieve brought the helicopter to a hover, before landing on the southern end of the island.
She shut down the twin engines, turning her gaze toward Tom. “Seems bizarre that an ancient plan to develop a virus capable of ending the human race should have been developed on such a tiny, unimposing island.”
“Everything about this seems unlikely,” Tom agreed, the corners of his lips curling upward. “Are you sure Elise wasn’t pulling your leg?”
“It’s here…” Genevieve suppressed a grin. “Elise hacked into the FBI’s records. The design for the Phoenix Plague was developed on this island more than two and a half thousand years ago, then a secret cult led by Ben Gellie’s parents attempted to recreate the ancient virus.”
“And what does Elise think we’re going to find here?”
Genevieve shrugged. “I don’t know. Answers.”
“How? Surely the Black Ops team that infiltrated the cult would have destroyed everything.”
“That’s just it.”
“What?”
“After the US Defense Department sanctioned the death of every member of the ancient Russian cult, it was determined to leave their prehistoric lab untouched, until they deciphered the meanings of the various pictographs.”
Tom arched an eyebrow. “They left everything there for someone else to find and one day attempt to rebuild?”
She shook her head. “No. According to the Defense Department’s archives, they were concerned that the completed Phoenix Plague had escaped and only the information stored within the ancient pictographs might reveal its antidote.”
Tom opened the side door and stepped out. Genevieve followed him and slid the side storage compartment open. Above, the rotor blades slowed and whirred toward their eventual silence.
Tom asked, “Did they ever find it?”
“What?”
Tom said, “The antidote.”
“No.”
“But they left the ancient structure untouched?”
Genevieve nodded. “My guess is they’re watching it remotely, just in case the ancient cult rears its ugly head again.”
Tom leaned in and removed a pair of dive cylinders. “We’d better be quick then.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Tom and Genevieve slipped into their dry suits, donned their SCUBA gear, and secured a pair of Heckler and Koch MP5 submachineguns onto the attachment of their buoyancy control device. Each went through the systematic approach of checking the other person’s equipment.
All in total, it took less than ten minutes before they were ready to hit the water.
Tom glanced at the closest labyrinth. It had been constructed so that its entrance nearly touched the water’s edge.
His eyes turned from it to Genevieve. “These labyrinths aren’t entirely unique to Bolshoi Zayatsky Island, are they?”
“No. I’ve heard similar designs are constructed throughout northern Russia.”
“All with the entrance facing the water’s edge?”
Genevieve nodded. “I believe so. Why?”
“I read the various theories about their original purpose, and when you remove all the mythical, religious, and superstitious “gateway to the underworld” concepts, it really does leave you with the most obvious hypothesis being that they were simply elaborate fish traps.”
“Yeah, I agree. I think so, too.”
Tom smiled. “But there’s one thing I really don’t get.”
She leveled her dark blue eyes at him, teasingly. “Just the one?”
He ignored her jibe. “The greatest evidence that purports the idea that these labyrinths were used for fishing comes from the fact that all of the labyrinths in the region were built close to the sea and water levels were much higher two and a half thousand years ago, when it is believed they were constructed. The fish would have swum in through the entrance and become trapped in the labyrinth, making it easier for fishermen to retrieve their catch.”
“I read the article. That seems to make sense to me. What don’t you get?”
“If the water was higher when they built it, why then, is the labyrinth we’re going to nearly a hundred feet below us?”
Genevieve grinned. “That’s because the labyrinth we’re going to was constructed a lot earlier.”
“How much earlier?”
“About twenty thousand years to be exact.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tom swam out a hundred feet, to where the water depth dropped dramatically. He dipped his head into the icy water. The White Sea was crisp with visibility extending all the way to the bottom some sixty feet away.
He glanced at the GPS reading on his dive computer.
They were right above the entrance. Back in 1975 a secret investigative team from the CIA tracked a group of suspected bioterrorists to the island, which was how the ancient labyrinth became known to the US Defense Department. That much made sense to Tom. What he didn’t understand was how a group of civilians had located the ancient labyrinth in the first place — and more importantly, how they had managed to keep it a secret for so many years.
“You ready to dive?” he asked.
“Good to go,” Genevieve replied.
Tom released some air from his buoyancy control device — BCD for short — and began his descent. After a few feet he started to swallow, allowing the air within his middle ear to equalize and avoid the pressure build up known as a “squeeze.” There had been a time when he had to consciously do this every ten or so feet, but as the years went by and he started to count his dives in their thousands, the process came as naturally to him as breathing.
At thirty feet, he heard the high-pitched whine of a two-stroke motor.
His gaze drifted upward.
A rubber Zodiac raced by — toward the Bolshoi Zayatsky Island.
Genevieve caught the direction of his gaze. “They might be tourists.”
Tom swallowed. “And they might not be.”
“We’ve been in the water for less than ten minutes. No one knew where we were going. We didn’t lodge any flight plans. It’s impossible to think the CIA has had an elite team stationed here since 1975, just waiting for someone else to show up.”
Tom continued his descent toward the entrance of the ancient labyrinth. “They might not be ours.”
“You think someone else has been watching the island?” Genevieve asked. There was no fear in her voice, but plenty of intrigue and curiosity.
“I don’t know.”
Tom checked the bathymetric map on his dive pad, looking for the key identifying marks that would lead them to the labyrinth’s entrance.
He kicked his fins, diving deeper as he followed the natural contour of the island’s submerged shelf. At eighty feet he spotted what he was looking for.
Three large boulders. Each one roughly the height of an adult and shaped like an irregular sphere. They might have been naturally formed that way, or they may have been painstakingly chiseled and then rolled down into the water. Heck, if what Genevieve had told him was correct, and this ancient labyrinth was built somewhere in the vicinity of twenty thousand years ago, the White Sea would have been shallow enough that the entire entrance was out of the water.