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  Petrov felt a vague anxiety rise up in his gut.

  ‘May I ask, general, what our comrades were doing operating inside Egypt?’

  The was a long moment during which Sergie stared silently at him while remaining utterly motionless. Petrov had the sense that he was being assessed in some way, but the scrutiny went on so long that for a moment he wondered if the older man had fallen into a state of torpor.

  ‘Our world has changed in so many ways,’ Olatov finally replied. ‘The political alliances forged by our leaders now present us with new allies in powerful places within the American administration that we could not possibly have envisioned even months ago. Once again, an American leader believes that we have their best interests at heart and we are determined not to let this opportunity pass for it cannot last long.’

  Like most Russians Petrov had witnessed the rise of populist but dangerous leaders around the globe as the people of countries in both the east and the west used their democratic power to oust an elite they blamed for their ills. The fact that in America the people had rejected the old guard leadership, the billionaires and the Wall Street investors, and instead voted for a misogynistic billionaire who had installed many other billionaires into cabinet positions they were unqualified for was a source of amusement for many Moscovites.

  ‘The populist uprising is a dangerous game,’ Petrov agreed. ‘The Arab Spring and its consequences in Syria are a clear example of how the house of cards can fall fast, despite the best intentions of the people involved.’

  ‘It will not last,’ Olatov went on. ‘The people will realize their error sooner or later, but that is not the point. Right now their voices are being heard across the world. A message has been sent to the elite, to those who rule from behind the scenes in their corporations. The people will not stand idly by any longer, and their resistance is something that needs to be stamped out as soon as possible.’

  Petrov’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  Olatov gestured to a folder that he produced from a draw in his desk and laid between them.

  ‘Can you imagine what would happen if the people had any true power? What they would do with that power? If they suddenly knew about everything we did, about everything our governments have learned over the past decades, the past centuries? Power must remain centralized and in the hands of those who know how best to use it. The new American president is not such a man, and the American people are not such a people.’

  Petrov stared at the folder as though it was alive as the general went on.

  ‘The American president is just about crazy enough that he might send in military forces to any country in order to finally achieve what we have sought for so long. He might believe in the unbelievable, whereas most other presidents have scoffed. But if we are right, then we risk handing the greatest discoveries of modern times to a demagogue who would use them like a club to subdue the rest of the world, Russia included.’

  Petrov found himself wondering what on earth could possibly be of such importance that it could drive the GRU to contemplate biting the hand now apparently feeding them from Washington DC, but protocol prevented him from just reaching out and opening the file.

  ‘Mat’ Zemlya, or Mother Earth, is the unit to which you have been assigned,’ the general went on. ‘It is a counterpart to the American Defense Intelligence Agency’s ARIES program, a highly secretive unit tasked with investigating anomalous phenomena.’

  ‘Anomalous?’

  ‘Your unit will investigate events and locations believed by others to be impossible, the work of legends and myths,’ the general explained. ‘Before you fear that this assignment is some form of punishment, let me put your mind at rest. You were selected for this role because of your record and your loyalty to the Motherland, but also your ability to get results without drawing attention to yourself. Your work in both Chechnya and Syria was much admired by Moscow. They, and I, felt that you would be well suited to this role.’

  Petrov inclined his head and feigned a brief smile of gratitude, but inside he was in turmoil. Given the secrecy of the mission, his lack of family and dependents and the apparent importance of whatever was in the folder before him, Petrov suspected that he had been chosen because he was expendable.

  ‘May I?’ he asked finally as he looked at the folder.

  The general nodded and sat back in his seat as Petrov picked up the folder and opened it.

  ‘This is what we have been searching for,’ Olatov added.

  Petrov stared at the images in the folder and for a moment he wasn’t sure what to say. He kept his eyes on the pages to buy himself more time to absorb them and concoct a response of suitable gravitas but instead just one thing kept popping into his mind: insanity.

  He looked up at Olatov over the folder’s pages, having seen also images of people assigned to the DIA’s ARIES unit.

  ‘The agents we have targeted: they too are searching for this?’

  ‘We believe so,’ Olatov replied. ‘The former president is believed to have shut down the ARIES program and destroyed any evidence of it in order to prevent the material falling into the hands of his successor. The last time the agents were seen was in Egypt, and they may have escaped with vital evidence we need to continue our search. Your task, Konstantin, is to find them and reacquire that which they have taken.’

  ‘Ethan Warner and Nicola Lopez are civilian contractors and they have been missing for months. They have a long headstart on us.’

  ‘Indeed, but they left behind weaknesses, detailed in the reports we gave you.’

  Petrov nodded, reading the contents of the file. Ethan Warner had parents and a sister, Nicola Lopez had family in Guanajunato, Mexico, and Douglas Jarvis had a daughter somewhere in Chicago.

  ‘I see,’ Petrov replied, squirming slightly in his seat, ‘and I understand what is required.’

  ‘There is more,’ the general added. ‘We understand from a number of Russian billionaires who had dealings with a cabal of American industrialists known as Majestic Twelve that the billions of dollars recovered by the United States Government from the cabal after its collapse was only a fraction of its actual worth. We cannot be sure, but it would appear that the members of the DIA you have been briefed about absconded with the bulk of the money and that the DIA is understandably keen to recover such vast sums.’ The general leaned forward on his desk. ‘I too would be keen to see that money recovered for the benefit of the Motherland, along with the artefacts in question. Any officer who achieved such a goal for the GRU would be highly rewarded.’

  For the first time since entering the room, Petrov smiled. The old general truly was one of the old guard and willing to bend a rule or two for his own gain rather than see a fortune go entirely to waste in the Kremlin’s coffers.

  ‘And the agents of the DIA, Warner and Lopez? They may be willing to fight for their own mission and may have gathered support from other sources.’

  ‘They are irrelevent,’ the general replied, ‘abandoned and hunted by their government and an irritation to our own. If you find them, follow them until you have extracted all that you can about their mission. Then, kill them.’

  Petrov stood and saluted the general briskly before he turned and marched from the office. He closed the door outside and let out a long breath as he stared at the folder in his hand. The Kremlin was keen to point out privately that they considered the new American president to be a buffoon, but the images in the folder he had been given suggested that the Politboro had long since lost their minds also.

  He opened the folder once again and stared at an artist’s impression of a city, constructed inside a large bay. Three concentric rings formed the city’s structure, ringed with ports, while the central island was dominated by elaborate buildings and towering spires that made it look like a cross between Buckingham Palace and Disneyland.

  Petrov closed the folder and promptly forgot about the image as he focussed instead on the genera
l’s promise: I too would be keen to see that money recovered for the benefit of the Motherland, along with the artefact. Any officer who achieved such a goal for the GRU would be rewarded.

  Petrov doubted that the corrupt old man would share anything recovered with a lowly GRU officer. But then, if not every one of the lost billions made it back to Moscow, perhaps Petrov wouldn’t need to come back either…

  ***

  III

  Sortland,

  Norway

  A frigid wind blustered in off a vast fjord that was entirely encrusted in sea ice, the jagged mountains a deep blue in the fading light and their icy peaks consumed by wreaths and ribbons of turbulent, bruised cloud.

  ‘I can see something.’

  Doctor Lucy Morgan turned from gazing at the distant lights of Sortland, known as the Blue Town by the local people after the decision some decades earlier to paint every building blue. The handful of street lights twinkled like lonely stars in the growing darkness as Lucy saw her companion crouched knee–deep in freezing mud and ice before her.

  ‘Can you identify it?’ she asked.

  The man before her cast her a glance that suggested he was anything but happy about being where he was.

  ‘I can barely see what I’m doing, let alone identify it. Bring the lights down here.’

  Lucy switched on four site lamps and lowered them down into the excavation that they had been working on for the last two weeks, laboring quietly and out of sight of the settlers. The muddy, icy hollow in which they stood was six feet deep and around ten feet square and faced out toward the fjord, the icy shores nearby creaking and groaning as the ice froze. Soon the entire area would be enveloped by the ferocious grip of the Norwegian winter, the ground frozen as hard as rock, and another few months would be lost as they awaited the following years’ spring thaw.

  ‘It’s probably nothing more than mammoth bones,’ Professor Charles Wright complained as he worked with a shovel and a kerosene blow torch, melting chunks of permafrost and then shovelling them out of the way. ‘If I never see another tusk in my life it’ll be too damned soon.’

  The bleak spit of land on which they stood was a quarter of a mile from the nearest settlement, a clutch of tiny homes crouched against the bitter gales that swept in from the Arctic Circle. To the north there was nothing but the mountains and fjords of northern Norway and then beyond the bleak wastes of the Norwegian and Barents Seas. There was no way that any museum or university would have funded Lucy’s expedition up here, because none of them would have believed for an instant that what she sought was there, or even possible. Most would have dismissed her quest as nothing more than the ramblings of a luncatic, a fringe scientist. Hell, it wouldn’t have been the first time…

  ‘Good lord.’

  Lucy’s reverie broke and she looked down at Wright. ‘What?’

  The professor, clad in waders and Arctic clothing to protect him from the elements, backed out of an excavation he had completed and gestured to it with a small shovel in his hand.

  ‘That’s not a mammoth tusk,’ he uttered, appearing quite shaken in the ghostly light from the lamps.

  Lucy stepped forward and got down onto her knees, the thick waders she had bought from a local trader protecting her from the mud and the ice as she moved up against a wall of frozen black sediment that was encrusted with ice, like diamond chips lodged in a seam of coal.

  Entombed within the sediment she could see the remains of something that took her breath away, something so far out of place that it seemed impossible that it could ever have surfaced where it had.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ Professor Wright uttered as he looked over her shoulder. ‘It just shouldn’t be here.’

  Lucy smiled as she stared at the artefact lodged in the sediment before her.

  ‘It’s only impossible if you’re not willing to believe in what the evidence tells you.’

  Before them both was a length of wood that had been formed perfectly by human hands many thousands of years before. The shape of the artefact was clear, revealed by the seams of ice that were threaded through the sediment like windows into an ancient past. The wood was a tiny section of a great oar, tens of feet long that stretched through the ice in the excavation and vanished into the ancient earth to either side.

  Lucy knew that the level of the sediment they were observing would have been laid down more than three thousand years ago, but only actual carbon dating of the artefact would provide an accurate age range for the piece. Right now, however, the age of the artefact did not interest Lucy.

  ‘We need to find the rest of it.’

  Professor Wright baulked as he looked up at the turbulent, darkening sky above them.

  ‘Lucy, this is one of the most exciting historical discoveries of the modern age but I have to insist that we come back tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t do waiting,’ Lucy replied as she climbed out of the excavation and began erecting a canvas sheet to protect their discovery from sleet and snow.

  ‘This artefact has survived for the past few thousand years,’ Wright pointed out. ‘It’s not going to get up and run away overnight.’

  Lucy smiled as she drove aluminium stakes into the hard ground and began stretching the cover over them.

  ‘It’s not the oar I’m interested in.’

  ‘It’s not?’ Wright echoed, shocked. ‘Lucy, this could change the history books, re–write everything we know about how civilization rose and how we became the dominant species on this planet! You do understand what we have here, don’t you? This is the remains of an oar from a Greek trireme, two thousand or more years old, buried in the ice in Norway!’

  Lucy nodded in agreement as she worked, hauling the sheet over the site and pulling it taut so that it closed them in.

  ‘I know, but finding this is a means to an end.’

  ‘Good lord, what end? I’ve risked my career joining you on this wild goose chase from England. Everybody told me to avoid it, that you were a loose cannon obsessed with fringe archaeology and pseudo–science.’

  Lucy barely acknowledged the criticisms, as she had heard them many times before now and refused to let them deter her from her work.

  ‘I don’t do small talk either,’ she replied simply. ‘Do you think this oar is the result of pseudo–science and fringe archaeology?’

  Professor Wright’s bluster failed him and his shoulders sank as he shook his head.

  ‘No, Lucy, I do not. However, I have travelled a long way and risked the ridicule of my peers at Oxford merely because I shall soon be retiring and therefore I am not in risk of losing my job. Were I twenty years younger I can assure you I wouldn’t be here. I don’t know how you manage to get funding for these kinds of expeditions.’

  ‘I have wealthy friends with an interest in these sorts of finds.’

  ‘Then you owe me at least some kind of explanation,’ Wright said, and folded his arms. ‘You told me that we were excavating here in search of evidence of sunken Elizabethan trade ships and instead you unearth a Greek trireme. What’s really behind all of this?’

  Lucy stopped her work and sighed. Professor Wright was an expert in ancient maritime trade and thus had been the perfect companion for her on this covert expedition. He had initially refused, but the money she had been able to pay him had virtually doubled his forthcoming pension and he had been unable to refuse despite the consternation of his colleagues at Oxford. Now, in his late sixties and shivering from the cold, she figured that he was right – money wasn’t all that he was here for.

  ‘You’re going to have a hard time believing me,’ she warned him.

  ‘I had a feeling you were going to say something like that.’

  Lucy pulled from a nearby bag of her belongings a laptop computer that she opened, the glow from the screen illuminating the interior of the tent and providing a feeble sense of warmth as Wright moved alongside her and she spoke a single word.

  ‘Pytheas.’

  Wright’s eyes widen
ed and he gasped. ‘No, it cannot be! Pytheas returned to Greece from his voyages. This cannot be a vessel of his!’

  Pytheas had been one of ancient Greece’s legendary mariners and explorers. Sent beyond the Pillars of Hercules to find out where the country’s imports were actually coming from, Pytheas had sailed north along the coast of Portugal and then beyond, up and around the British Isles and toward the Baltic nations in search of a legendary isle known to the ancient Greeks as “Thule”.

  ‘The ancient Greeks spoke of a foreign nation of great technological prowess that lived on an island known as Thule,’ Lucy said, ‘and Pytheas believed that he found such a place at the northern–most extremes of his travels. Maps drawn afterward based on Pytheas’s writings marked the northern isles as Thule.’

  ‘Yes,’ Wright agreed, ‘but those notions have long since been proven wrong. There was little up here in those times, and Pytheas wrote only of seas filled with ice neither solid nor water, upon which one could neither walk nor sail.’

  ‘Pancake ice,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘For a Greek to have witnessed such things, they must have travelled at least as far north as Scandinavia.’

  ‘I agree, but the travels of Pytheas are well documented. What is not possible is that we should find the remains of another ship of the type that he used in this region. This vessel should not be here.’

  Lucy gestured to the laptop as she replied.

  ‘Pytheas came this far north in search of a mysterious island, and in doing so he encountered groups of people living in the wilds of Britain. He is the first person to document the existence of the Picts and other societies including Germanic barbarians. It’s those encounters that interest me the most.’

  ‘Why?’ Wright asked.

  ‘Because they and many other ancient peoples all claim that they were descended from people of great wisdom who came from across the sea,’ she replied. ‘Who brought them great knowledge and helped them form new societies. They all claim that they originated from elsewhere.’