The Pharos Objective mi-1

  The Pharos Objective

  ( Morpheus Initiative - 1 )

  David Sakmyster

  David Sakmyster

  The Pharos Objective

  PROLOGUE

  Pharos Island, Alexandria, Egypt-861 A.D.

  One hundred sleek Arabian horses and their dark riders, carrying torches and armed with hammers, pikes and rusty axes, thundered across the wave-battered promontory toward the lighthouse. The riders roared past Dakhil, who stood upon the crumbling red granite stairs between two colossal statues with missing limbs and fractured torsos. In the shadow of the towering Pharos Lighthouse, Dakhil imagined that the sun had been anchored permanently behind the massive structure, unable to escape its dominion.

  He trembled as the riders headed straight into the arched doorway-the toothless, yawning mouth of the Pharos-and he shivered as the Mediterranean winds tugged at his black robes and snatched at his turban. The ancient lighthouse stood in silent indifference, and by a trick of light and shadow it appeared to be expanding, calmly breathing in the Muslim riders, inhaling men and horses alike.

  “I hope you have been true to me,” said a voice at his shoulder. Dakhil turned to face Barraq Najdeelen, caliph of Alexandria and commander of the military forces occupying the city.

  Alexandria had fallen to the Muslims two hundred years earlier with little resistance from the Christians. Once the jewel of the Roman-Egyptian era, an unparalleled center of wealth and knowledge, the gods had all but abandoned Alexandria; and now the once-proud cosmopolitan city was a mere strategic port, valued only for its access to the rich interior trade routes. And of course, for its military potential. This harbor, well-protected by jagged reefs and low-lying shoals, had seen fleet after fleet sail against Constantinople while enjoying the defense of the marvelous Pharos Lighthouse.

  Barraq knew his enemy would eventually seek to recapture the city. “The infidel King Michael despises the Pharos. It is a sign of our strength and a looming reminder of Christian impotence.” He breathed in the sea air, and his long, oily beard whipped over his shoulder.

  “I have spoken only the truth,” Dakhil said, nervously taking a step back. High above, the great mirror, a twenty-foot disc of reflective metal, scratched and clouded with age, winked at him, threatening to expose his lies.

  Barraq tilted his head back. “You have been in Constantinople two years, my friend. Perhaps they found you out as my spy, and in exchange for your life you offered to come back here with malicious rumors?”

  “No, My Lord. I am ever your loyal servant.”

  “We shall see.” Barraq let his fingers drop to his belt and carefully trace the hilt of his scimitar. “This treasure-you do not have further specifics?”

  “My Lord?” Dakhil trembled again, and wished he could step out of the shadow of the lighthouse. All the way up its precipitous walls, the crumbling statues of the ancient gods of Egypt, Greece and Rome pointed accusingly at him while the tower itself appeared to lean over for a closer look.

  “What is it exactly? The men speak of Alexander the Great’s lost hoard. Is it gold and silver? Jewels beyond compare…?”

  “More valuable still,” Dakhil said, and again offered a prayer to all the gods that were ever dreamed up by men, hoping the legends were true. The timing for this had to be perfect. He had inherited certain knowledge, information that was beyond the understanding of popes, kings or caliphs. Information, he had been told, that must remain hidden until directed otherwise.

  But Dakhil was not one for patience. The title of Keeper did not suit him. Life was short, and who knew if the world would continue to exist after his own breath expired? So he had decided to release just a hint of what he knew, disguised as a rumor from the enemy’s camp, hoping to excite the caliph’s men to do what he himself could not. Brute force would surely succeed where patience had failed.

  “What could be more valuable?” Barraq asked. Suspicion flashed in his eyes.

  Just then, a muffled cry reached their ears from above. A shout, then a horrifying scream. Barraq and Dakhil looked up and shrank back, although they were in no danger. The huge mirror had been wrenched free of its mounts in the zeal of the treasure-seekers and rolled out one of the porticos and over the edge hundreds of feet up. It took two men with it, rotating end over end as it plummeted from the top spire and slammed onto a ledge, crushing one man and dislodging a hail of stone and debris before it bounced off and plunged another two hundred feet. Finally, upon the limestone blocks of the courtyard, it shattered in an eruption of glass and metal, releasing a tortured cry-a lament for the end of its twelve-hundred-year existence.

  Dakhil cursed. “Why did they go up? That was not the way. The secret tunnels… the chambers are below the foundation!”

  Barraq waved away his protests. “I instructed my men to be thorough.”

  “Fools,” Dakhil whispered. He now began to fear that the caliph’s men were not up to the task.

  Barraq withdrew a stick of dried wheat from his saddlebag and chewed its tip. “Tell me, Dakhil, what reward would you ask if we find this treasure?”

  Still ruing the loss of such a mighty artifact, the great mirror that had reflected the sights of a millennium, Dakhil said, “I would ask, My Lord, for but one item.”

  “One only?”

  “Yes, if I may have first pick. A little thing, of no use to anyone.”

  Barraq studied him. “If no one else has use for it, why would you?”

  Dakhil shrugged. “To own something from a lost age… such a possession would be priceless.” He hoped his answer would satisfy the caliph. Of course, Dakhil knew exactly what he wanted: the most powerful item in the collection. He had done his research, he had memorized the catalog, he knew right where it was. The trick would be to find it and take it before the wrath of the soldiers and the caliph descended on him.

  However, if the legends were correct and the lighthouse defenses truly existed as rumored, his job might be easier. He felt the metal edge of his sword against his hip, and the two daggers in his boots chafed against his skin.

  I shall have to be quick.

  Barraq made a sound like a mocking laugh, but before he could speak, an ominous roar came from the lighthouse. This time, it was accompanied by a rumbling under the earth. The tower itself began to tremble and a great dust cloud burst from the doorway and hissed from the hundred windows and cracks in the lower section.

  Dakhil started to run toward the entrance with Barraq close behind. They climbed the flight of eroded stairs, raced past toppled statues and across an overgrown courtyard toward the door, where three men just now emerged, black-faced and covered with dust. Coughing, they dropped to their knees, one man holding up his hand. Blood oozed from his ears and his nose, one eye ruined.

  “Gone, gone!” he cried, even as his comrades fell, spitting up blood and then lying still.

  Barraq grabbed the survivor and shook him to his feet. “Speak, fool! What happened?”

  “A door-” He coughed out blood, speckling Barraq’s face. “-strange signs upon it… twisting serpents and a staff. We could not open it. We three returned to seek your advice, to call for the Magi. But the others… they would not wait.”

  Barraq shook him again, harder. “What happened?”

  “Hammers! I heard hammers striking the door, then”-he gasped and clawed at Barraq’s face-“they screamed, ‘Trap! It’s a trap!’ The walls shook, the floor gave way. Then the sound”-another coughing fit seized his body-“of a roaring wave.”

  Barraq slowly turned to Dakhil as he let the man drop to the ground. “A trap…” he echoed, just as other men began streaming out of the doorway.

  Dakhil reached for his sword, and they fell upon
him before it cleared the sheath.

  The seventeen men who survived had been higher up in the tower. The other eighty-three, including their horses, had, by some unknown device, been swept out into the harbor.

  Dakhil was led to the rocky shore east of the lighthouse and was forced to watch the bodies of those he had betrayed wash up against the stones, forced to stare at those he had sent to their deaths, their bloated, battered corpses a testament to his impatience.

  He looked on, attempting stoicism, even as Barraq’s men set about sawing off his hands at the wrists and his feet at the ankles. Amidst his screams, they cauterized the stumps with flames from an oil-soaked torch and then chained him to the rocks in the water at the base of the lighthouse, facing west, away from Mecca.

  At one point during the ensuing days of agony, as the gulls and the ravenous fish came to feast on his flesh, Dakhil recalled the old Greek legend of Prometheus. He had, after all, merely longed to bring light into the world, to present a powerful gift to mankind. Unlike Prometheus, he had failed; but like the Titan, he had nevertheless been ruthlessly punished.

  Barraq left him there after retrieving the dead and placing a team of six men at the summit to staff a continually burning pyre. They could not afford to lose any more ships in the treacherous harbor, and their vigilance against Constantinople must not cease. He rode off on the tenth day of Dakhil’s slow death, too soon to see the lone boat steal across the harbor through the moonless night.

  A man in a gray cloak stepped out onto the embankment and calmly traversed the rocks until he reached the dying man. “It seems,” he said after a moment of contemplation, “your father chose poorly.”

  Dakhil moaned. His chewed-out eye sockets, above the ragged flesh and protruding cheekbones, turned toward the sound. His lungs choked on seawater and congealed blood. “No…”

  “We are Keepers,” said the stranger. “ Keepers. A sacred trust we have held for centuries. I cannot forgive what you have done.”

  “Believed… it was time,” Dakhil muttered as the water crashed over his emaciated body and the cloaked form bent over him.

  “It is not for us to decide the time. Only to keep the secret until the world is ready.” The words, spoken deeply, powerfully, came from within the folds of his hood. “In the meantime, the Pharos protects itself. The Pharos has always protected itself.”

  Dakhil moaned.

  The cloaked stranger moved in closer. “While I cannot forgive, I can be merciful.”

  A thin blade cut through Dakhil’s throat with almost no resistance and produced very little blood. A soft gasp wheezed into the surf.

  The man stood up. He bowed his head toward the flickering beacon high above in a final sign of respect and a renewed commitment to its protection. Then, with a heavy sigh, he made his way back into his boat and sailed into the shadows.

  BOOK ONE

  THE LIGHTHOUSE

  Whoever wants to conquer Egypt has to conquer Alexandria, and whoever wants to conquer Alexandria has to conquer the Harbor.

  — Julius Caesar, The Alexandrian War

  1

  Alexandria-December

  Sixty feet under the harbor’s churning waves, his blue fins kicking just above the reef’s dangerous uppermost protrusions, Professor Caleb Crowe held the grapefruit-sized marble head in his bare hands, letting the colder currents wash off the sediment and muck. He turned the sculpture around, marveling at the late classical Egyptian artistry-the perfect symmetry, the deep-set, thoughtful eyes.

  Isis.

  The headdress and the Sothis star on her forehead placed this artifact in the Ptolemaic Dynasty-just about the right age. He reached for the camera hanging from his neck, considering how he might use this photo in a series of Ancient History lectures he was currently preparing for the spring semester at Columbia.

  In the shadowy depths, the reefs and amphorae intermingled with the huge rocks, immense pillars and chunks of masonry thrust between the long-forgotten shipwrecks. Caleb’s breathing quickened, echoing in his ears even as the Mediterranean’s pressure squeezed his head in its grip. The current tugged him sideways into a massive block of moss-coated basalt.

  He let go of the camera and reached out to steady himself. And as Isis looked on, the bare skin on his fingers touched the ancient slab — and something like an electric jolt ripped through his nervous system, starting at the base of his spine and spearing out in all directions. The water shimmered, the sea bottom shuddered, and a red-hot pain tore open the doors to his mind, barged inside and exploded in a blast of golden light like a swarm of maddened yellow jackets on fire, careening off the insides of his skull.

  Caleb hadn’t had a clairvoyant vision in more than four years, and to have it strike now, of all times, at the bottom of Alexandria’s harbor, with his air running out and his dive partner wandering off on his own somewhere beyond the dim shadows, was about as dangerous as it was startling. The vision ripped through him like a teasing jolt of pleasure, then just as quickly left him alone again in the cold water, with Isis’s eyes looking upon him with pity.

  There was a brief moment of confusion, then it returned with a vengeance. He doubled over, hyperventilating, burning through his oxygen, seeing…

  His mind reeled and his stomach twisted. An armada of bubbles surrounded his head like ravenous fish, nipping at his skin, shouting out alarms. But his eyes, wide open, no longer perceived what lay before him, for they strode with his mind…

  … to the tower… the lighthouse… the Pharos… there it is, rising before him, a three-stage construction, almost four hundred feet high, tapering to a glorious spire that seems to challenge the simmering Egyptian sun itself. The tower’s outer casing glitters on the western side, reflecting the sun with the light of a thousand stars, and all along its ascent hang statues of divinities and mythical guardians, peering down from their lofty perches.

  He tears his eyes away and blinks, bringing into focus the man standing on the steps, welcoming him. A man he instinctively knows as the architect of the Pharos: Sostratus of Cnidos.

  “Welcome, Demetrius,” he says. “Come, I have much to show you.”

  Seeing through Demetrius’s eyes, Caleb speaks as if following a well-rehearsed script. His voice cracks and the words spill like gravel off his parched tongue. “Sostratus, engineering wonder this may be, yet it has the imposing grandeur, aura and beauty of the divine. My friend, this lighthouse will be adored for ages.”

  Sostratus turns and looks up at his handiwork. “I hope you are right, and humbly, I trust in the gods that I have built it well enough to last.” He helps Demetrius up the final steps into the courtyard, where doves and sparrows coo in transplanted palm trees and fountains pour out fresh reservoir water at each of the cardinal points.

  “And it is not yet done.” Sostratus raises his hand to the distant, dwindling spire atop the converging stages; past the mammoth two-hundred-foot rectangular lower section, pierced with three hundred windows; beyond the octagonal second stage, rising a hundred feet more, to the last part ascending the final hundred feet. Tiny forms climb on ropes and chisel at sections on the spire, at the cupola and the pillars around the beacon, working like industrious ants.

  “I apologize that the masons have not yet removed the scaffolding. We are still hauling up stone for the outer casing and, of course, the great golden statue of Poseidon has yet to arrive by barge from Memphis. I have invited Euclid to pay me a visit and calculate how best to raise it to the apex.”

  Demetrius makes a grunting sound, then reaches over and clasps his friend. “By Jupiter, you have done it.”

  “Why so shocked, my friend? Surely you have watched my progress from your precious library across the harbor?”

  Demetrius stops and teeters as he cranes his neck and gazes up. “In the scroll rooms, there are few windows. We need to safeguard the world’s most important books, not expose them to the elements.”

  Sostratus chuckles. “Well said. And of course, in all your
courtyard festivals you never thought to lift your head over the wall and glance westward to admire my creation?”

  Demetrius looks down at his sandaled feet, taking strange comfort from such a common sight. “I have, my friend, I have. A remarkable achievement, your lighthouse has become an integral part of the landscape in the mere twelve years it has taken to build. Alexandrians may take it for granted, yet they speak of little else but its completion and the coming festivals Ptolemy has planned for its dedication day. Your lighthouse has, in fact, become synonymous with Alexandria. The thousands of daily visitors to our harbors are awestruck by its magnificence. Indeed, it is the first thing they see, well before the coast even appears.”

  Sostratus smiles. “I hear they are already calling it ‘The Pharos,’ after the island itself.”

  “True, Homer’s little epilogue in the Odyssey granted us fame enough.”

  “Even if he had it wrong. Egyptian settlers at Rhakotis told Menelaus the island belonged to Pharaoh, and out of ignorance, the name stuck. Pharos Island.”

  Demetrius nods, waving off the same boring discussion he’s endured uncounted times. “Believe me, I know the tale well. We have over ninety copies, translated into fourteen languages, with scholars working on the Iliad now.”

  “Wonderful ambitions you have,” Sostratus says, intending the complement to be genuine, however eliciting a wounded look from Demetrius. “Or is it our king’s ambition?”

  “A little of both. Although, from time to time I have to fuel our benefactor’s interests.” Sostratus nods in empathy. “Now, my friend, do I get the promised tour, or must I wait another twelve years?”

  “In just a moment. First I want you to look up, right there.” He points to a low-level scaffold, untended for the moment, above which a lengthy inscription is chiseled in Greek letters large enough to be seen by arriving ships in the Eastern Harbor.