The sandy bottom rose up, cluttered with debris.
Gray adjusted his buoyancy to keep him drifting just above the seabed. He searched right and left. The others settled into similar postures.
“Can everyone see each other?” he asked.
Nods and affirmatives all around.
“Monk, how’s the underwater video camera working?”
“You look like a bunch of ghosts. Visibility is crap. I’ll lose you once you head out.”
“Keep in radio contact. Any problems, you raise the alarm and haul ass over to us.” Gray was pretty confident that they had the jump on the Dragon Court, but he was not taking any chances with Raoul. He didn’t know how much of a head start they had gained. But there were plenty of other boats about. It was broad daylight.
Still, they needed to act quickly.
Gray pointed an arm. “Okay, we’ll head to shore, keep no greater distance than fifteen feet apart. Visual contact with each other at all times.”
The four of them could sweep a swath of about twenty-five yards across. Once at shore, if nothing was detected, they would shift down the coastline another twenty-five yards and swim back toward the waiting boat. Back and forth, quadrant by quadrant, they would comb the entire coastline around the fort.
Gray set out. He had a dive knife attached to a sheath on the back of his wrist and a flashlight on the other. With the sun directly overhead and the water only forty feet deep, there was no need for the extra illumination, but it would come in handy to explore nooks and crannies. He had no doubt that the passage they sought would not be plain or it would have already been discovered.
It was another riddle to solve.
As he swam, he pondered what they had missed. There must have been more of a clue to the map drawn on the stone than merely pointing to Alexandria. It must have also held some clue embedded about the location here. Had they missed something? Had Raoul stolen a clue out of the cave below Saint Peter’s tomb? Did the Dragon Court already have the answer?
Unconsciously he had begun to swim faster. He lost sight of Kat on his right. He was last in line on this side. He slowed and she reappeared. Satisfied, he moved onward. A shape appeared ahead, jutting from the sandy bottom. A rock? A ridge of reef?
He kicked forward.
Out of the silty gloom, it appeared.
What the hell…?
The stone face stared back at him, human, worn by the sea and time, but its features were surprisingly clear, the expression stoic. Its upper torso rode atop the squat form of a lion.
Kat had noted his attention and swept slightly closer. “A sphinx?”
“Another one over here,” Vigor announced. “Broken, on its side. Divers have reported dozens of them littered around the seabed in the shadow of the fort. Some of the decorations from the original lighthouse.”
Despite the urgency, Gray stared at the statue, amazed. He studied the face, sculpted by hands two thousand years old. He reached one arm out and touched it, sensing the immense breadth of time between himself and that sculptor.
Vigor spoke out of nowhere. “Fitting that these masters of riddles should be guarding this mystery.”
Gray pulled back his hand. “What do you mean?”
A chuckle. “Don’t you know the story of the Sphinx? The monster terrorized the people of Thebe, eating them if they couldn’t solve its riddle. ‘What has one voice, and is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?’”
“And the answer?” Gray asked.
“Mankind,” Kat said next to him. “We crawl on all fours as babes, then upright on two feet as adults, and lean upon a staff in old age.”
Vigor continued. “Oedipus solved the riddle and the Sphinx threw herself off a cliff and died.”
“Toppling from a height,” Gray said. “Like these sphinxes.”
He pushed away from the stone statue and swam onward. They had their own riddle to solve. After another ten minutes of silent searching, they reached the rocky coastline. Gray had come across a tumble of giant blocks, but no passage, no opening, no clues.
“Back again,” he said.
They shifted down the coast and set out again, swimming away from the shoreline toward the boat.
“Everything quiet up there, Monk?” Gray asked.
“Getting a nice suntan.”
“Make sure you use SPF 30. We’ll be down here a while.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
Gray continued for another forty minutes, sweeping to the boat, then back again. He came across a sunken husk of a rusted ship, more chunks of stone blocks, a broken pillar, even an inscribed chunk of obelisk. Fish in a rainbow of hues danced away.
He checked his air gauge. He was breathing conservatively. He still had half a tank left. “How’s everyone’s air holding up?”
After comparing, it was decided to go topside in twenty minutes. They’d take a half-hour break, then back into the water.
As he swam, he went back to his original pondering. He kept sensing they had missed something critical. What if the Dragon Court had taken some object from the cave, a second clue? He kicked harder. He had to let that fear go. He had to proceed as though he had the same intel as the Court, an equal playing field.
The silence of the deep pressed on him. “This just doesn’t seem right,” he mumbled.
The radio transmitted his voice.
“Did you find something?” Kat asked. Her shadowy form drifted closer.
“No. That’s just it. The longer I’m down here, the more I’m convinced we’re doing this wrong.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel said from out of nowhere, sounding hopeless. “I probably put too much emphasis—”
“No.” Gray remembered her worry topside. He kicked himself for rekindling it. “Rachel, I think you’ve targeted the correct place to search. The problem is my plan. This whole searching quadrant by quadrant. It just doesn’t feel right.”
“What do you mean, Commander?” Kat asked. “It may take some time, but we’ll get the area covered.”
That was just it. Kat had clarified it for him. He wasn’t one for systematic, dogged methodology. While some problems were best solved that way, this mystery wasn’t one of them.
“We’ve missed a clue,” he said. “I know it. We recognized the map in the tomb, realized it pointed to Alexander’s tomb, then flew here. We searched records, books, and files, trying to solve a riddle that has baffled historians for more than a millennium. Who are we to solve it in one day?”