A lighthouse of sorts sat at the end of a long jetty that bowed out from the headland to enclose the harbor. A fire burned in a large brazier atop a stout tower to provide a beacon. It was more symbolic than anything else. Few sailors in this age sailed by night. No torches lined the jetty.
“There’s no sentry posted,” Lee said, scanning the jetty with a night vision scope.
“What’s in port?” Jimbo asked.
“I see masts. Tall ones. There’s a few big ships in there,” Lee said, shifting his gaze to glass the long waterfront. There was a forest of shorter masts swaying at one end of the harbor. “Looks like a fishing fleet. Maybe some merchant vessels.”
“We need a place to get our feet on land and hide the Zodiac. Do you see anything like that?” Boats asked.
“You’re the specialist here,” Lee said, handing off the NODs scope to the SEAL.
After a quick study Boats suggested they paddle into the harbor and scout for a place to hide the raft where they could find it again but no one else would be snooping. By unanimous agreement, the team got the paddles out again and rowed inland.
They drifted silently past the base of the lighthouse and around the jetty toward the wharves lining the harbor. The large masts that Lee spotted belonged to a pair of Roman warships that towered over the smacks and barques anchored up and down the pier. The masts on the Roman ships were clewed up tight to their cross spars. The decks were dark and the hulls lined with the openings for four rows of oars. The ships were quiet. The only movement was the shadows from the lines swaying in the wind. Otherwise, the men and woman on the Zodiac might be the only living things in the city.
“They must all be at the orgy,” Chaz whispered. Boats shifted the tiller and they veered to starboard, toward a place where an embarcadero followed the curve of the shoreline. There were broad archways in the face of the harbor wall between stout stone supports that seemed to grow from the water. The rowers lifted their oars, and the Zodiac drifted under one of the arches into a dark enclosure that ended in a wall forty feet within.
“Is this some kind of boathouse?” Chaz said.
In answer, Boats took a waterproof lantern and slipped over the wale into the black water. They watched over the sides as the glow of the lantern shifted back and forth beneath the Zodiac. The light died, and Boats resurfaced seconds later.
“It’s a good twenty feet deep here with an upward sloping floor,” he said. “We can hide the Zodiac here.”
“With a triangular structure of stone and iron?” Jimbo asked.
“Yeah. How’d you know that?” Boats said.
“I saw it on Wikipedia. These alcoves are where they stored the rams for their warships when they weren’t needed.”
“Then the Romans might be using them,” Lee said.
“This structure is too old to be Roman,” Jimbo reached out and ran a hand down the stones. “It was built before them. Phoenicians. This port was theirs once.”
“You did a shitload of research for this op,” Chaz said.
“I read up to prep for the last trip back. The one I had to bail on,” Jimbo said. “Got back into it when we started this one.”
“Ancient trivia for two hundred, Alex.” Bat grinned.
“We’ll offload the gear and Boats can hide the raft,” Lee said.
They paddled from the alcove and followed the wall to where it was joined by a broad set of stone steps rising from the water to the embarcadero. Forming a chain, they removed the oiled leather gear bags from the Zodiac and stacked them. Dark buildings lined the wide quayside. Nets were drying on racks. There were no sentries patrolling. A pair of turbaned drunks approached them with palms out. Chaz told them to fuck off in Arabic and they scuttled away muttering slurred curses.
Jimbo paddled, and Boats steered the raft to the eighth alcove along the sea wall and entered. They removed the outboards and wrapped them in heavy plastic and sealed the bags with duct tape. Any remaining gear was strapped down tight and Boats released the cocks to allow water into the air cells inside the rigid hull.
The raft sank lower in the water. The SEAL had modified the Zodiac for this purpose. He installed compressed air tanks so the hull could be re-inflated in minutes. Even with the hull flooded with water, the Zodiac’s closed-cell foam inserts kept it at neutral buoyancy.
Jimbo and Boats dropped into the water and swam below to run lines from the raft through encrusted iron rings set in the ram carriage. They braced their feet on the floor of the alcove and pulled on the lines. As the raft above them lost buoyancy, they pulled it under the water until it was suspended a few feet from the bottom.
Two minutes was all Jimbo could do underwater. He resurfaced three times to gasp in a lungful of air. Boats came up only once, the guy was part fish. Jimbo dog-paddled while Boats secured and tied off lines fore and aft as well as on either side. The Zodiac’s black hull was invisible against the dark floor of the alcove. They swam for the steps to rejoin the others.
The five travelers each hefted a seventy-pound gear bag and humped them into Caesarea and the land of the prophets.
20
Things Change
The only thing missing was Dwayne.
All Caroline had to do was rest and nurse little Stephen. The rotating nannies did the rest. And anything else she wished was a phone call away. The Villa Kummer Grand had a full spa, in-room massages, and a kitchen of top chefs capable of preparing anything from haute cuisine to New York-style pizza. There was a sixty-inch TV in a private media room that was part of the suite.
Caroline felt guilty as she thought of how much Dwayne would have liked that
