Crescent Dawn (21 page)

“Take his body offshore after dark and dump it into the sea,” he said to the Janissary. The guard nodded, then dragged the stiffening body out of the room.

The act of murder seemed to invigorate Celik, and he paced the room with nervous energy. The gold coin was back in his hand, fondled like a child’s toy.

“You should have never brought in these imbeciles to do our work,” he barked at Maria. “My Janissaries would have not failed at the task.”

“They have served us well in the past. Besides, as you have just shown, they are expendable.”

“We can’t have any mistakes going forward,” he lectured. “The stakes are too high.”

“I will personally lead the next operation. Speaking of which, are you certain you wish to proceed in Jerusalem? I’m not sure the benefits are worth the risk.”

“It has the potential to create a massive unifying impact. Beyond that, with a bit of inflated Zionist fright, it will be good for another twenty million euros from our Arab backers.” Celik stopped pacing for a moment then gazed at his sister. “I realize it is not without danger. Are you committed to the task?”

“Of course,” she replied without batting an eye. “My Hezbollah contact has already made arrangements with a top operator who will assist with the mission for the right price. And should there be any difficulties, they will offer the necessary culpability.”

“Hezbollah was not opposed to the nature of the mission?”

“I didn’t provide them all of the details,” Maria replied with a sly smile.

Celik walked over to his sister and gently stroked her cheek. “You have always proven to be the best partner a man could ask for.”

“We have a destiny,” she replied, echoing his earlier words. “When our great-grandfather was exiled by Atatürk in 1922, the first Ottoman Empire ended. Our grandfather and father spent their lives as outcasts, failing to fulfill the dream of restoration. But by the grace of Allah, a renewed empire is now within our fingertips. We have little choice but to act, for the honor of our father and all those before him.”

Celik stood silent as teardrops welled in his eyes, his hand squeezing the gold coin until his fist shuddered.

T
HE LEMON YELLOW SUBMERSIBLE SLIPPED BENEATH THE sloshing waters of the moon pool and rapidly disappeared from sight. The pilot descended quickly, not wishing to loiter about the mother ship while fierce currents matched wits with a Force 7 wind.

The frigid waters off the Orkney Islands northeast of the Scottish mainland were seldom mild. North Atlantic storm fronts routinely pounded the rocky islands with towering waves, while gale force winds seemed to blow without relief. But a hundred feet beneath the raging waters, the submersible’s three passengers quickly turned a blind eye to the violent surface weather.

“I was a bit afraid of the descent, but this is actually much calmer than that rolling ship,” stated Julie Goodyear from the rear seat. A research historian from Cambridge University on her first dive, she had been fighting the ill effects of seasickness since boarding the NUMA research vessel
Odin
in Scapa Flow three days earlier.

“Miss Goodyear, I guarantee that you are going to enjoy this flight so much, you’re not going to want to go back to that bouncing tub,” replied the pilot in a Texas drawl. A steely-eyed man with a horseshoe mustache, Jack Dahlgren toggled the diving controls with a surgeon’s deft touch as he eased their descent.

“I believe you may be correct. That is, unless the claustrophobia in here gets the better of me,” Julie replied. “I don’t know how you two manage the confinement in here on a regular basis.”

Though Julie was a tall woman, she still gave up a few inches to both Dahlgren and the woman seated in the copilot’s seat. Summer Pitt turned and flashed her a comforting smile.

“If you focus your vision on the world out there,” she said, motioning toward the submersible’s forward viewing port, “then you tend to forget how cramped it is in here.”

With long red hair and bright gray eyes, Summer posed a striking figure even in her grease-stained dive jumpsuit. Standing six feet tall in her bare feet, the daughter of NUMA’s Director, and the twin sibling to her brother, Dirk, she was well accustomed to tight quarters. Employed as an oceanographer for the underwater agency, she had spent many an hour studying the seafloor from the constricted confines of small submersibles.

“How about I shed a little light on the matter,” Dahlgren said, reaching up and flicking a pair of overhead toggle switches. Twin banks of external floodlights suddenly came on, illuminating the dark green sea surrounding them.

“That’s better,” Julie said, peering nearly forty feet into the depths. “I had no idea that we would be able to see so far.”

“The water is surprisingly clear,” Summer remarked. “It’s much better visibility than we had in Norway.” Summer and the crew of the
Odin
were returning from a three-week project off the Norwegian coast where they had monitored temperature changes in the sea and its impact on local marine life.

“Depth of one hundred seventy feet,” Dahlgren reported. “We should be nearing the bottom.”

He adjusted the submersible’s ballast tanks to neutral buoyancy as a sandy brown bottom appeared in the depths beneath them. Engaging the vessel’s electric motor, he applied forward thrust, making a slight course correction as he eyed a gyrocompass.

“We’re near high water, and the current is still ripping through here at about two knots,” he said, feeling the push against the submersible’s outer hull.

“Not a fun place to go free diving,” Summer replied.

They glided just a short distance before a large tubular object filled the view port.

“Mark one funnel,” Dahlgren said as they hovered over the huge tube.

“It’s so large,” Julie said excitedly. “I’m used to looking at the funnels in proportion to the ship on grainy old black-and-white photographs.”

“Looks like it came down pretty hard,” Summer remarked, noting one end of the thin rusting funnel was twisted and crushed flat.

“Eyewitness reports claim that the
Hampshire
stood on her bow and actually flipped over as she sank,” Julie said. “The funnels would have popped out at that point, if not earlier.”

Summer reached to a console and engaged a pair of high-definition video cameras.

“Cameras rolling. Jack, it looks like there’s the beginning of a debris field to our left.”

“I’m on it,” Dahlgren replied, guiding the submersible across the current.

A short distance beyond the funnel, a scattering of dark objects poked from the sand. They were mostly undecipherable debris long on corrosion that had fallen from the ship as it tilted and sank to the bottom.

Summer noted a brass shell casing and a ceramic plate mixed with unidentifiable bits and pieces as the concentration of objects intensified. Then a towering black figure slowly materialized in the water directly ahead of them. Inching closer, they saw it was the unmistakable form of a massive shipwreck.

A near century underwater had taken its toll on the World War I British cruiser. The vessel appeared as a tangled mass of rusted steel, sitting upright on the bottom with a heavy lean to starboard. Sections of the ship were nearly buried in sand, due to the effects of a scouring current. Summer could see that the superstructure had long since collapsed, while the teak decking had eroded away decades ago. Even sections of the hull plating had fallen in. The grand cruiser and survivor of Jutland was sadly just a shadow of her former self.

Dahlgren guided the submersible over the
Hampshire
’s stern, hovering above it like a helicopter. He then piloted it across the ship’s length until reaching the bow, which was partially buried in the sand, the ship having augured into the seabed by her prow. He turned and guided the submersible several more times across its length, a video camera capturing digital footage while a secondary still camera snapped images that would later be pieced into a mosaic photo of the entire wreck.

As they returned to the stern, Summer pointed to a jagged hole cut into the exposed deck plate near an aft hold. Beside the hole was an orderly pile of debris that stood several feet high.

“That’s an odd hole,” she remarked. “Doesn’t look like it had anything to do with the ship’s sinking.”

“The pile of debris alongside tells me that some salvors have been aboard,” Dahlgren said. “Did somebody get inside her before the government protected the wreck site?”

“Yes, the wreck was first discovered by Sir Basil Zaharoff in the nineteen thirties and partially salvaged,” Julie said. “They were after some gold rumored to have been aboard. Due to the treacherous currents, they reportedly didn’t salvage a great deal off the ship. Nobody seems to believe they found much gold, if any at all.”

Dahlgren guided them over the curved surface of the stern hull until he found a pair of empty drive shafts protruding from below.

“Somebody got her big bronze propellers, anyway,” Dahlgren noted.

“The British government didn’t secure the wreck site until 1973. No one has legally been allowed to dive on the wreck since. It took me three years to obtain approval simply to conduct a photographic survey, and that only happened because my uncle is an MP.”

“Never hurts to have family in high places,” Dahlgren remarked, giving Summer a wink.

“I’m just glad your agency offered the resources to help,” Julie said. “I’m not sure I could have obtained the grant money necessary to hire a commercial submersible and crew.”

“We had the help of a couple of Cambridge microbiologists on our Norway project,” Dahlgren replied. “Brought some Old Speckled Hen with them. Darn nice people, so we were only glad to reciprocate.”

“Old Speckled Hen?” Julie asked.

“An English beer,” Summer said with a slight roll of her eyes. “The fact of the matter is, once Jack heard there was a shipwreck involved, there was no way we weren’t going to help.”

Dahlgren just smiled as he powered the submersible along a few feet above the cruiser. “Let’s see if we can find out where they struck that mine,” he said finally.

“Was it a mine or a torpedo that sank the
Hampshire
?” Summer asked.

“Most historians believe she struck a mine. There was a fierce gale blowing the night she sank. The
Hampshire
attempted to sail with several escort destroyers, but they couldn’t keep pace in the rough seas so the cruiser continued on without them. An explosion occurred near the bow, which supports a collision with a mine. The German submarine U-75 was in the area and had reported releasing a number of mines farther up the coast.”

“It sounds as if it was a terrible tragedy,” Summer remarked.

“The ship sank in less than ten minutes. Only a handful of lifeboats were lowered, and they were either crushed against the ship or capsized in the heavy seas. Those men that were able to stay afloat were still doused by the frigid water. Most of the crew died of exposure long before reaching shore. Of the six hundred and fifty-five crewmen aboard, only twelve men survived.”

“Lord Kitchener not being one of them,” Summer said quietly. “Did they find his body?”

“No,” Julie replied. “The famed field marshal didn’t take to the lifeboats but went down with the ship.”

A reflective silence filled the submersible as the occupants pondered the sunken war grave visible just beneath them. Dahlgren steered along the port hull near the main deck, which had collapsed in some areas by several feet. As they neared the bow, Dahlgren detected some buckling along the hull plates. Then the underwater lights fell upon a gaping cavity near the waterline that stretched almost twenty feet across.

“No wonder she sank so fast,” Dahlgren remarked. “You could drive a pickup truck through that hole.”

He angled the submersible until its lights were pointed inside the blast hole, revealing a twisted mass of metallic carnage that spread over two decks. A large haddock emerged from the interior, staring curiously at the bright lights before disappearing into the darkness.

“Are the cameras still shooting?” Julie asked. “This will make for some great research footage.”

“Yes, we’re still rolling,” Summer replied. “Jack, can you move us a little closer to the impact?” she asked, staring intently out the view port.

Dahlgren tweaked the propulsion controls until they hovered just a foot or two from the gouged section of hull.

“Something in particular catch your eye?” Julie asked.

“Yes. Take a look at the blast edge.”

Julie scanned the jagged rust-covered steel without comprehension. In the pilot’s seat, Dahlgren’s eyes suddenly widened.

“I’ll be. The lip of that mangled steel looks to be shoved outward,” he said.

“Appears to be the case around the entire perimeter,” Summer said.