Coxeman #07: Last Licks by Troy Conway

Author:Troy Conway [CONWAY, TROY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC005000
ISBN: 9780446540490
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The island of Thraxos was a purple swell in the Greek dawn as the tender moved toward it.Legend said that Helen of Troy had stopped here with Menelaus of Sparta, her husband, on their way home from Troy. There was an ancient roadside shrine high in its hills that gossip claimed she herself had built to the goddess Aphrodite in gratitude for her rescue from the Trojans.

For more than a thousand years after that, Thraxos had lain in a little back-eddy of Time. Not until the Knights of protect it against the attacks of the Saracens, did it again enter the main stream of give way to overwhelming numbers. They sailed away and never came back.

Today Thraxos dozes in the sun, almost forgotten by the world. It possesses three towns, the largest being Pelagayos. It is inhabited by fishermen and their families, as are the two smaller towns on the north side of the isle.smacks and a ketch Or two.

The tender slid into the harbor between two stone moles projecting. Several rows of houses, white against the darker bulk of the small mountain behind them, with red-tilled roofs, were a pleasant sight in the rising sunlight The thought touched me that the harbor and the houses made a disguising façade for whatever S.E.L.L. was doing on Thraxos.

Two small buses were waiting for the Fortescus and their guests. We moved by ones and twos out of the tender onto worn stone steps half sunken in the harbor water. Angelique would not leave me, she clung to my hand, her troubled face turned up to mine.

The buses chugged along a dusty road, curving onto the mountainside and bypassing the white stone houses. Here and there a man or a woman paused to stare at us, hands across their foreheads to shield their eyes from the sun. One woman, seated atop a jackass, laden with goods for market, waved a hand and grinned a toothless smile at us.

Over the mountaintop we went—past the weathered stones of a wayside shrine, possibly the one Helen of Troy had caused to be raised—and down the other side. We could see the dark olive trees in their groves, the fields of white and yellow wildflowers, an occasional farmhouse with its goat corrals. It was a pleasant sight in these early morning hours. I could have enjoyed a vacation here, say, with little Angelique as my companion.

The sun rose higher in the sky. We were approaching the western shore of the sky. We were approaching the western shore of the island, where a natural bowl had been formed with one side flat and open to the, sea perhaps in some long-forgotten time when Thraxos had been a volcano. A compound of modern buildings loomed ahead of us, tastefully fitted into a background of gnarled olive trees and ever-present flowers; to the west, the vast blue Aegean glittered in the sunlight.

This was S.E.L.L. headquarters, its laboratories and dormitories, on Thraxos. A wire fence ran all around it, except where it faced the sea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.