Pandora's Temple (32 page)

He could feel the pressure in his ears growing. Diving had never been his specialty, nor had water-born missions. Special-operations training back in his time had been a bit thin in that regard, though he might have preferred it to HALO drops from upwards of five miles up sucking air from a tank on the plunge downward.

McCracken felt Belamo slow the
Crab
and let it settle into a hover twenty feet from the seafloor. Belamo then switched on all the underwater cameras to portray the scene on the jagged seafloor now directly beneath them.

“We’ve arrived, boss. Showtime.”

“There’s nothing here,” McCracken said, running his eyes across the greenish-black world portrayed on the television monitors.

“Geophysical indicators say what Roy’s survey teams found is somewhere right around here.”

“Right around
where
?”

“Directly below us, boss.”

Belamo eased the
Crab
forward, rotating the cameras as he moved in search of some indication of the temple’s presence, anything to tell them it was, in fact, here. But all that lay before and beneath them was the empty seafloor awash in clouds of sand and sediment.

“Only it’s not,” Belamo resumed.

“Wait a minute,” McCracken said, “tell me what you see, Captain.”

Captain Seven interrupted his smoking of an imaginary joint to study the scene pictured on the television monitors. “Absolutely fucking nothing, MacNuts.”

“Sal, anything moving out there?”

“Nothing, boss, and the seismic sensors on this thing could pick up a goldfish.”

“So where are the blobfish?”

“Huh?” from Captain Seven.

“He’s right,” said Katie DeMarco. “The ocean floor is populated by bottom feeders that look somewhat like blobs. Because of the extreme pressure out there right now, these fish have this gelatinous texture of flesh with a density slightly less than seawater. They should be visible on camera right now. At this depth, there should be plenty of them in plain sight.”

“Sal,” began McCracken, “can you scan temperature readings in the waters ahead?”

“You bet, boss. Another toy for me to play with,” Belamo said, working the touch screen before him in search of the proper menu. “What am I looking for?”

“Variations. Look for a temperature spike.”

“Ding-ding, ding-ding!” Captain Seven chimed. “Man’s looking for a hydrothermal vent.”

“A what?” from Katie.

“A fissure in a planet’s surface from which geothermally heated water gets blown upward like the ocean’s farting,” the captain explained. “Most commonly found near volcanically active places, areas where tectonic plates are moving apart. And I believe that describes the Greek coastline perfectly. Anybody got a joint?”

“I got something,” Belamo said. “Temperature spike a couple hundred feet to our port side.”

“Steer toward it, Sal.”

“You know something I don’t, boss?”

“Just playing a hunch. What I’m thinking is if Pandora’s Temple is really down here, why hasn’t a single shred of evidence of its existence ever turned up before? Even if it’s been buried all this time, there should be an artifact, a relic,
something
.”

“Makes no sense I can see, Blainey,” Wareagle echoed.

“Exactly. And I think I know why.”

Belamo sliced the
Crab
through the currents, steering for the coordinates locked in on his nav screen. “Man, this baby handles like a dream. Cadillac of goddamn submarines. Here we go, boss. Coordinates are dead ahead. Check out the main screen.”

The largest monitor, located directly over the pilot’s seat and offering an enhanced look at the view directly ahead, filled with a huge black cloud churning outward in from beneath the seafloor.

“What now, boss?”

McCracken held his thought and then his breath briefly. “Steer into it, Sal,” he said less surely than he’d intended.

“Into
that
?”

“Into and through the vent. We make it through and we end up just where we need to be.”

“Fine, boss, but what if we don’t? Or what if it leads nowhere? Or narrows like a funnel and we end up getting our asses stuck?”

“You trust me, Sal?”

“You trust yourself on this one, boss?”

McCracken again regarded the plume on the monitors. “Close enough.”

Belamo steadied himself with a deep breath and drew the
Crab
closer to the vent, slowing when they were just outside the reaches of its plume. The pressure rattled the craft’s interior, feeling a bit like airplane turbulence.

“Last chance to change your mind, boss.”

“This is the only explanation for what the captain found five years ago and Roy’s survey teams found days ago,” he said, trying to convince himself as much as Belamo. “Only way survey equipment could home in on something that isn’t there.”

“In that case, fasten your seat belts, people,” said Belamo, angling the
Crab
downward into the vent.

It felt like an amusement park ride when they entered, a combination of a roller coaster and flume attraction. The
Crab
first seemed to stall as it battled the plume pouring outward from the vent. The world turned pitch-black save for the
Crab
’s interior lighting, which faded out only to return a moment later, the process repeating itself as the craft dipped and darted in sudden fits and starts.

Sal Belamo felt the craft’s controls bucking in protest as it shuddered and shook in the vent’s concentration of geothermal energy. Then, all at once, the plume was gone and Belamo leveled the
Crab
off, a new subsurface world around them—a world that was utterly black beyond the limited reach of the
Crab
’s lighting. McCracken had the sense of being trapped in a jar, the vent above them now serving as the lid. He was struck suddenly by the fear there was no air to breathe, feeling his lungs thirsting for it while feeling they were all floating outside the
Crab
like astronauts helpless into space after their spacewalk lifelines had been cut.

“Did I just do a hit of acid or what?” Captain Seven wondered, as if to echo McCracken’s thoughts, his face pressed against the nearest view window in search of something, anything. “Maybe that was a wormhole; maybe we are back in the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and pot plants the size of oak trees grew wild.”

“Try an underwater cavern,” said McCracken, as a thick school of the blobfish he noted were missing from the seafloor above swam by the front view windows, “likely the largest in the world, even bigger than Sac Actun in the Yucatán.”

“That one’s mostly just long. This baby’s deep too,” Captain Seven noted. “Plenty deep enough to hide what we come looking for, dudes. Man, that explains it,” he added, as if realizing something.

“Explains what?”

“Last time I was in these parts, before I got swallowed by the tsunami, instruments got a hit on the temple everybody else discounted because the depth gauge read five hundred feet
below
the seafloor. I should’ve figured this cavern shit out back then. See what not being under the influence does to me?”

The
Crab
continued to churn through the blackness broken only by the spill of its underwater floodlights pouring forward, scattering more blobfish from its path.

“Boss,” Sal Belamo said suddenly, “something big, really big, dead ahead.”

Spoken as he slowed the
Crab
to a crawl, Sal worked his touch screen to make the cameras go to ultraviolet to provide a clearer sense of what lay ahead of them. Silence took over the cabin, the recirculated air that had grown stale and rank only adding to the anxiety that showed itself in the uniformly tight expressions and quick, shallow breathing of the
Crab
’s occupants. Being on the verge of finding something lost to myth and unseen by man for four thousand years was dramatic in its own right; the fact that discovery had the potential to change, or destroy, the world ratcheted the apprehension up all the more.

“Maybe some things don’t want to be found.”

Captain Seven’s warning gained new resonance this deep and this close. In that respect the mythology of Pandora’s “box” and temple had made sure the possibility of its actual existence was never taken seriously. And perhaps that was the point, not coincidence at all.

McCracken realized he had been holding his breath, when the shape of a large structure, blurred and indistinct, appeared on the main view screen, not yet visible through the front view windows.

“Make that two hits of acid,” Captain Seven said, sucking on a fake joint.

“Holy shit,” echoed Sal Belamo, as the structure finally began to take shape before the naked eye as well.

“Pandora’s Temple,” McCracken muttered, not believing it himself.

“You wanna tell me gods designed this place, boss,” Sal Belamo managed, “right now I’m inclined to believe you.”

“Frigging amazing,” said Captain Seven, pressing out his imaginary joint. “Almost four thousand years and still standing. Well,” he added, as they drew closer and the picture on screen sharpened further, “mostly anyway.”

The temple’s façade had broken away, its majestic stairs and massive entry lost to the centuries, storms, and pressure of the deep sea. Otherwise, though, the structure looked incredibly intact, even untouched. It sat, buried to varying levels by sand and silt, on the cavern floor, looking to be angled sharply to the right with that side suffering from a significantly lower drop as if the left-most portion had settled on firmer ground.

At its highest point, the temple stood between fifty and sixty feet. Its marble frieze and majestic dome, myths like everything else about it until now, looked pristine and untouched, the
Crab
’s powerful floods reflecting off the patches of gold inlay. Even in the dark bleakness of this underwater world, true to its legend the temple appeared to be golden everywhere, a testament to the work of its builder, Pathos Verdes, and his efforts to make optimum use of the light of the day forty centuries before.

Based on the jagged chasm at the front, the missing entry doors must have indeed been at least twenty feet in height, which, of course, begged the question, Who exactly had they been designed to accommodate? While they’d been too heavy to be opened by any single man, they hadn’t proven strong enough to withstand the tumult of wind, storm, quake, and seawater. Beyond where they had once been, jutting out to the sides and layered atop beveled columns, were twin, multilevel appendages that looked like wings attached seamlessly to the dome.

“How many years later did the Romans build structures like this?” Katie DeMarco asked, realizing her mouth and lips were bone dry.

“Maybe fourteen hundred,” McCracken answered, “and they never built anything like this.”

“Wait,” Johnny Wareagle said, rising out of his seat slightly when something on the
Crab
’s view screens caught his attention. “Can you pan the cameras back?”

Belamo slowed the craft and worked the controls, spotting the shapes on the cavern floor that had drawn Wareagle’s attention. “Holy shit, tell me those aren’t—”

“Shipwrecks,” McCracken completed for him.

The submarine’s underside cameras caught the remains of any number of underwater crafts comparable to the
Crab
, both remote and manually operated, twisted and crushed on the cavern floor. Drawing closer, the cameras caught stray bones and skeletal remains as well, broken apart and splintered as if picked clean.

Wareagle was studying the screens so hard his forehead wrinkled. “Strategic points of their frames were crushed. And those ruptures look more like tears made from the outside in.” He looked toward McCracken. “They were attacked, Blainey. Something destroyed them.”

“Sea monster,” said Captain Seven. “Just like I told you.”

“Guess we know one of the reasons why nobody ever found the temple before,” McCracken managed, as the structure took shape before them.

Despite the damage wrought by the centuries, it remained a portrait in flawless construction. Save for the missing doors and façade and angle on which it listed, the structure likely exposed once more by the 2012 earthquake and Santorini volcano eruption looked as if it had been assembled right here, perhaps two thousand feet below the surface of the sea. Species of fish McCracken couldn’t identify swam in and out of the open front, giving the temple the appearance of a decorative object placed at the bottom of a massive aquarium.

“What now, boss?”

“We all bought our tickets, Sal. Let’s go get our money’s worth.”

The sub was moving at a crawl when Belamo eased it through the breech in the temple where the façade had stood. The darkness seemed even thicker here inside, an illusion fostered by the sense of claustrophobia within its vast walls and so far underwater to boot. Those walls were octagonal in design, and the lights shining down from the bottom of the
Crab
radiated off floors of marble flecked with bronze. A number of the pillars connecting the multitiered levels of the temple to the dome were splintered, likely lying somewhere on the temple floor yet reached by the
Crab
’s floods.

The interior walls and stairs, unlike the façade, looked remarkably intact, save for algae grown so thick in patches that it took on the shape of vast beings ready to be roused from their sleep. If legend was correct, the temple had spent the bulk of its existence in the wake of being pushed into the sea by the earthquake and massive tsunami that followed. In all likelihood, the chill of the waters this deep had acted as the ultimate preservative even for limestone, its finish only slightly dulled by the centuries.

Most impressive, and perhaps intimidating, to McCracken were the life-sized statues of what could only be renderings of the gods themselves fashioned from marble. The statues stood almost as high as the entry doors would have had they been intact. Pandora’s Temple, the largest structure ever built by mortal man at the time of its construction, had clearly been sized to accommodate occupants of far greater dimensions than mortal man.