Costas followed Jack’s gaze through the porthole. ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ he murmured.
Jack glanced at him. ‘I was just thinking that. About the ancient statue of a pharaoh broken and half buried, just like that sarcophagus somewhere down there.’ He turned to Sofia. ‘It’s from Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”.’
She was quiet for a moment, and then recited: ‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’
Costas turned to her. ‘You read poetry?’
‘Always been a passion.’
Costas looked back at the porthole. ‘Me too.’
‘There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, Costas Kazantzakis.’
Jack grinned, staring back at Costas’ dishevelled hair and unshaven face. ‘There’s a lot that meets the eye.’
There was a final jolt, and then they were as one with the sea. Jack could sense it as if he himself had been released into the depths where he belonged, free at last from the sense of confinement. Costas looked at him, his hands on the controls. ‘We’re good to go.’
Jack pointed into the abyss. ‘Go for it.’
2
Almost an hour after the submersible had separated from the tethering cable, Costas feathered the controls and brought it down with a soft bump on the sandy seabed some eighty metres below the surface of the Mediterranean. Sofia had moved back from the porthole to the co-pilot’s seat, and had been sharing the controls with Costas as they followed the programmed course between the magnetic anomalies located by Seaquest II during her survey run a few hours earlier. Jack had remained glued to the porthole the entire time, his excitement rising and falling each time they had approached a rusty pile of metal and then been disappointed; one had been modern building debris dumped in the sea, another a small coastal freighter with a deck gun of First World War vintage, perhaps the victim of a U-boat attack. The fourth anomaly had seemed the most promising, with right-angled features in the magnetometer readout that could have been the iron knees added during the repairs to the Beatrice in the 1830s, but as they approached, they had seen that it was the remains of a ditched aircraft, a German Heinkel 111 perhaps downed during the Spanish Civil War. Jack stared out at it now as the silt settled around their landing site, and felt his heart sink. The decay in the metal showed how little might survive of the iron elements of a ship sunk a century earlier, and the deep sand that had covered half of the plane could have completely swallowed up the Beatrice’s guns and the sarcophagus, leaving nothing to see above the desolate seabed that stretched out around them and sloped down into the abyss.
‘What do you think, Jack? Is that the end of the road?’ Costas said.
Jack got up on all fours, crawled around and sat back in the narrow space between the two seats, staring up at the computer screen above the porthole that displayed the bathymetry around them. He pointed to an area in the outer part of the bay, beyond the line of the coast. ‘I think it’s out there,’ he said. ‘I think that’s where Beatrice was more likely to have been exposed to a sudden squall from the north-east. I think we’ve been looking too close inshore.’
Costas magnified the image. ‘That’s more than eight hundred metres deep,’ he exclaimed.
‘Is that a problem for the submersible?’
‘It’s stretching the envelope for her first sea trials.’
‘But it could be done.’
‘Sure. The real problem is the inky blackness at that depth. Seaquest II hasn’t yet done a magnetometer sweep or a sonar survey of the sector. We’d be blundering round in the dark.’
Jack clicked on the intercom and spoke to the submersible control room on Seaquest II, where the crew had been monitoring their progress. ‘Patch me through to Captain Macalister, please.’
A voice with a strong east-coast Canadian accent crackled through the speaker. ‘Macalister here. What’s your status?’
‘We’re waiting on you. There’s that final deep-water sector at the head of the bay. If you can do a magnetometer run over it, at least we can cross it off the list.’
‘We discussed that, Jack. You were going to check out the anomalies we’d found and leave the rest for next year.’
‘I agreed with you then, but down here, now that we’ve got the submersible fine tuned and running, I feel differently. You know what happens when we leave things for next year. Something else always comes up, another project, other priorities. And it’s been a couple of years since IMU hit it big-time. We could do with a major discovery, and this one would be front-page news. I’d love to see that happening now.’
‘All that concerns me is the safety of the ship and the submersible. You remember the weather prediction? Since you went underwater the south-easterly’s really picked up, and my meteorology officer thinks it’s going to reach at least force 6 overnight. It is the beginning of November, after all, the start of the bad time in the Mediterranean. I’m beginning to understand how the master of the Beatrice must have felt at this time of year. It’s a pretty jagged shoreline, and we’re less than a kilometre away.’
‘Understood,’ Jack said. ‘It’s your call.’
‘Give me a moment. Over.’
Jack held the handset, waiting. Suddenly everything seemed precarious. What had seemed a dead certainty when he had seen Captain Wichelo’s wreck co-ordinates and then the apparent magnetometer matches had now become a mathematical improbability. He had always told students working with IMU that a square-kilometre search area on the surface should be regarded as the equivalent of at least ten square kilometres underwater; distortions of perspective, variegated seabed topography and the difficulties of interpreting visual and remote survey data all made the apparently straightforward task of criss-crossing a given area that much more difficult when confronting the realities of the seabed. Perhaps he had been too cocky, too confident of his luck, and was having a dose of his own medicine. He found himself holding his breath, waiting for Macalister’s reply, and remembered what he had said to Costas about how it was all a house of cards. If they failed to come up with the goods here, then the entire trail that he and Hiebermeyer had been on, a trail still so elusive that it seemed to come in and out of focus like the anomalies on the seabed, might collapse and disappear. What had seemed like links in a chain of evidence would become isolated fragments of archaeological data, destined to be shelved or slotted into some other story.
He realised that he was drumming his fingers against the console, and stopped himself. He desperately wanted this to work out. He had promised Maurice that he would search every square inch of seabed within Wichelo’s co-ordinates for the Beatrice, and a promise like that between the two men was a matter of honour: they had never let each other down in all the years since they had first shared their passion for archaeology as boys.
The audio crackled. It was Macalister. ‘Okay, Jack. I’ve conferred with my officers and we can do it.’