Lucy struggled across the heaving deck and hurled herself down alongside Ethan.
‘We can’t keep this up forever,’ she said. ‘Sooner or later one of us is going to get hit!’
‘They’re coming back!’ Michael shouted as the speedboat suddenly turned hard into them and rushed head-on once again.
Ethan glanced at the towering cliffs nearby and then at the surface of the ocean ahead. The waves were crashing across rock features just below the surface, and to his amazement he realized that the Yonaguni formation was large enough to breach the surface, that it was not entirely submerged.
‘Run away from them! Bring them down the port side!’ Ethan shouted.
‘I thought you told me not to run away?!’ Michael yelled back.
‘Do it, and let them see you do it!’
Ethan shifted his position slightly and aimed his rifle aft as he heard the speedboat’s powerful engines growling and the familiar rattle of gunfire as the men aboard opened up once again. The shots went wide and high, the speedboat too far away for accurate shooting and its motion through the waves spoiling their aim.
Michael threw the throttles wide open as he aimed for the rocks jutting from the ocean surface as Ethan fired two or three shots in the general direction of the speedboat and then tossed the rifle down and ran to the wheel house.
‘Don’t turn until I tell you!’ Ethan shouted above the wind.
‘We’ll hit the rocks, and they’re closing on us!’
‘Stay on course!’ Ethan roared as he looked back and saw the speedboat rushing toward them. ‘Come right, five degrees!’
Michael responded immediately, drawing the speedboat in toward Jest’s port hull, the speedboat pilot aiming for a close pass as he accelerated toward them. Ethan looked over his shoulder and saw the rocks looming large before them.
‘We’ll breach our hull!’ Michael shouted.
‘Stay on course!’
The speedboat thundered toward them, the gunmen aboard struggling to shoot their automatic rifles as the boat thumped and bounced on the waves. Ethan saw the reefs ahead, white water smashing into the ancient rocks, and then he saw the gunmen take aim as the speedboat roared alongside them.
‘Now!’ Ethan yelled as he reached past Michael and hauled the throttle closed.
The boat heaved in the waves as the thrust from its engine vanished and it heeled violently to starboard as Michael spun the wheel and ducked down as a rattle of gunfire crackled out above the roar of the speedboat’s engines.
The speedboat thundered by and hurled a wall of spray up against Jest as the gunshots flew wildly past the decks, barely a single round impacting the boat. Ethan watched as the sleek vessel crashed past them and then smashed into the reefs with a crash of shattered fibreglass and rending metal.
The hull shattered with a grinding metallic roar that Ethan could hear even above the labouring engines. The crew were hurled into the waves as the pilot’s face smashed into the windscreen with a dull thump and a puff of windswept blood. The speedboat’s hull stripped away as it careered over the rocks and its engines were ripped from their mounts. Ethan saw a thick cloud of black smoke billow from both of the speedboat’s engines as limp bodies toppled over the taff-rail into the ocean in a tangle of flailing limbs. The speedboat tumbled off the far side of the reef and began turning in lazy circles on the surface of the water, spitting flames that began to burn their way along the hull until it slowly began to sink beneath the waves.
‘That’ll do,’ Ethan smiled grimly as he lowered the rifle and stood up.
In the churning water, Ethan saw more hammerheads circling the bloodied stain where the speedboat had sunk.
Ishira began guiding the boat to shore as Lucy, clearly shaken by the encounter, moved to Ethan’s side.
‘Who are they? What do they want with us?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ethan admitted. ‘You get what you needed?’
Lucy nodded. ‘That icon we found engraved in the rocks proves that we’re on the right tracks, but this monument is simply a natural rock foundation that people later modified and built upon. Any artefacts that may have been nearby would almost certainly have decayed or been washed away.’
Ethan rubbed his temples. ‘Well I hope you have a good Plan B, because there’s no way we can stay here. They’re on to us now and we need to disappear as fast as we can.’
‘I’m all in favour of that,’ Michael muttered from the wheelhouse.
‘I’ll book a flight as soon as we get to our hotel,’ Lucy said.
‘We’re not going to the hotel,’ Ethan insisted. ‘If they found us out out here they’ll probably be waiting for us at the hotel. Where is it that you need to go next?’
Lucy sat down and pulled a laminated map from her kit that she opened out on the deck at her feet.
‘I don’t know for sure,’ she admitted, ‘but all we can do is try another site of a similar age. The icon on Yonaguni’s altar was facing east, but the altar itself was facing south-west, and the direction of sacred altars and images was important to ancient cultures.’ Lucy took a pen and sketched a line roughly heading south west from Yonaguni and out across the Malay. ‘The oldest known ruins that I can be sure rival Yonaguni in age are to be found here.’ She pointed at a spot on the map to their south west. ‘The icon at Yonaguni points out over the Pacific Ocean to nowhere, but the altar points toward this site.’
‘Mahendraparvata, Cambodia,’ Ethan read from the map. ‘What’s there?’
‘An ancient city, much older than the more famous Angkor Wat. It was only found a few years ago and I’m pretty certain that if we found that sun icon here, we’ll find it there. If we don’t, then the trail’s already gone cold.’
Ethan surveyed the coastline for a few moments before he made a decision.
‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We need to find a way to get to Indonesia, and from there I can find us a passage to Cambodia that won’t involve passports.’
‘How on earth are you going to do that?’
‘I do have friends too, y’know.’
XV
Agent Aaron Devlin strode toward an elevator bank on the third floor of the defense intelligence agency DIAC building. Ever since the events of 9/11 security had been tight, with all elevators guarded at all times and repeated security checkpoints ensuring that not only could nobody get into the building without proper authorisation, but that it was also impossible to move through the building without obtaining the necessary clearances.
Nowhere, however, was security tighter than on the fifth floor.
New protocols initiated the previous year, and policies implemented by Congress and by the president himself had resulted in crushing blows against security for many of the most powerful agencies, including the CIA, NSA and DIA. Human rights lawyers had attempted to strip them of their powers, to peel back layers of security due to supposed breaches of human rights during surveillance and other data gathering programs. Powerful members of the agencies, concerned about the potential for loss of data and gathering ability, had ensured that an old branch of the intelligence services had been resurrected, and access to this new branch was both highly classified and restricted. Although the intelligence agencies of the United States government were overseen by an Intelligence Director, the role itself created in the wake of the war on terror, there remained segments of the intelligence community that it was felt operated best autonomously. The cabal, little known outside of the community itself, was now located on the DIA building’s fifth floor. Aaron knew its members only by their code names, for each individual member of the group was both unknown to both those outside the group and to those within the group as well. The cabal’s name was enough to provoke whispers among those who dared speak it.