He stared out at the shimmering expanse of the sea, his lifeblood since he had first donned a wetsuit more than thirty years before. He thought back to Rebecca’s mother, Elizabeth, to a relationship that had ended even before Rebecca was born, when they had both been graduate students. She too had been an archaeologist but had been forced by threats and intimidation back into the world of her Camorra background in Naples, to give archaeological legitimacy to their tomb robbing and antiquities dealing. When she found out she was pregnant, she decided not to tell Jack, not to allow her family to get their tentacles around him as well and destroy his dream, and she had struggled to bring Rebecca up alone and carve out a legitimate position for herself in the antiquities service. When Rebecca herself was threatened, used as a pawn to try to get Elizabeth back into the criminal fold, she sent her secretly to close friends in New York State to be brought up and educated, while she remained in Naples to do enough of what was asked of her to keep them from acting on their threats to hunt down Rebecca and bring her back into the family.
Jack had seen Elizabeth only once more when he had gone to Naples to explore the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and in their brief conversation she had broken down and told him everything, revealing the existence of their daughter and her wish that he take care of Rebecca if anything should happen. Elizabeth had witnessed one drug deal too many, had made some distant cousin jittery that she would go to the police, and a few days later her body was found by the seashore with a bullet through the back of her head. That had been more than five years ago, and Jack still felt the numbness, a heartache that he knew would always be behind everything that he and Rebecca did together, behind her own drive to make a mark on the world and show the same strength that her mother had in bringing her up against the odds.
Jack knew that his seeming ambivalence toward Maria and Katya was not a consequence of juggling between the two, or of a greater love in the past that he had been unable to shake off, or of the sense of responsibility that had channelled so much of his emotional reserve toward Rebecca after her mother’s death. Rebecca had told him that he was like the great sea captains of old, brilliant at sea but directionless on land, most at home navigating his life with the prize always just beyond the horizon and the voyage toward it at the mercy of the elements and chance. Perhaps his relationships with women had become an analog of that. Yet he knew it did not have to be so. He had seen it work with Hiebermeyer and Aysha. He remembered Maria’s parting words in Cairo, and resolved that this time, when it was all over, he would take that step that he so often balked at, and actually give her a call.
A rocky headland came into view, the limestone reduced to the jagged, sun-bleached form characteristic of the northern Mediterranean shore, and his heart leapt as he saw Seaquest in the bay beyond. He knew that the Lynx pilot would need to hold off before getting permission for landing, and he had been relishing the chance to inspect Seaquest properly from the air for the first time since her refit in Falmouth earlier that year. On the stern she was flying the Spanish flag, a courtesy to the country that had agreed to allow the search within their territorial waters, and below that the IMU flag bearing the anchor on a unicorn, the crest of Jack’s seafaring ancestors and a recognition of the donated land from the Howard estate that formed the main IMU base beside the Fal Estuary in Cornwall. She was the second IMU vessel to bear the name, the first having been lost almost ten years before to a battle with a warlord in the eastern Black Sea during their search for Atlantis. The second Seaquest and her sister ship, Sea Venture, were multirole scientific research vessels, in keeping with IMU’s expanded brief over the last decade not only to be at the forefront of archaeological exploration but also to spearhead other aspects of oceanographic research. Like the Royal Navy’s latest Echo-class vessels, she was equipped for full hydrographic survey, including multibeam echo sounders, a side-scan sonar, and a sub-bottom profiler, as well as an integrated navigation system of bow and azimuth thrusters and propellers within a swivelling pod that allowed her to hold a precise position over the seabed in all but the worst weather conditions. Her defensive capability was also closely based on the Echo-class vessels, with a retractable twin 20 mm Oerlikon pod set below her foredeck and two 7:62 mm general-purpose machine guns, an essential provision given the fate of her predecessor and namesake and the threat of piracy when she was conducting operations in unpoliced international waters.
In other respects Seaquest and Sea Venture formed a unique class with many features designed from the bottom up by Jack and his team. At a little over 6,000 tons and 120 meters in length, they were larger than her naval counterparts, with a top speed of 25 knots and a range of up to 12,000 nautical miles, which made them capable of extended deep-ocean voyages. Behind the bridge lay an extended accommodation block for up to thirty researchers and technicians, including state-of-the-art labs for the conservation and analysis of finds and below that an engineering facility custom-designed by Costas for the maintenance of the ship’s remote- and autonomous-operated vehicles and manned submersibles. The submersibles hangar opened out on to a unique internal docking facility on either side of the propeller shaft toward the stern, allowing divers and vehicles to enter and exit safely even in extreme weather conditions.
The Lynx banked low, its rotor kicking up a halo of spray as it held position some five hundred meters off the ship’s port side, allowing Jack to see her more closely. Behind the accommodation block lay the helipad and the aft operations deck, the focus of most activity when they were working on a site. Jack cast a critical eye over the equipment visible in the stern. The main purpose of the refit had been to install an upgraded derrick for raising and lowering Zodiacs and submersibles, and he could see it extended over the starboard side, the cradle they had made for the sarcophagus sitting on the deck beside it. The derrick had passed its sea trials off Cornwall with flying colors, but it was having its first proper outing here. Jack remembered years before watching the Tudor warship Mary Rose being raised from the Solent, and the terrifying moment as the hull surfaced and the cradle slipped. That had also been in the glare of the world’s media, and he knew that Captain Macalister would be putting the derrick through every possible safety check to try to ensure that there was no brush with disaster this time around.
Jack watched a group of technicians in IMU overalls and safety helmets begin to release the derrick from its deck restraints and roll out the winch. IMU’s greatest assets were not equipment but personnel, and he knew he had the best. Over the years he had assembled a crack team, a mix of old friends and fresh talent, many of them bridging the divide between commercial and military experience and the strong focus on scholarship and research that drove all Jack’s projects forward. Unlike those of treasure hunters, their jobs were not on the line every time they embarked on a new quest, counting the cost hour by hour, holding out for prize money that rarely came. IMU operations were financed entirely from an endowment that released Jack from ever having to raise funds or satisfy investors. It had been a dream of his from the time when he ran student expeditions from a battered old van and an ex-navy inflatable, a dream realized when one of his most stalwart expedition divers, Efram Jacobovich, had ridden the wave of the software boom that was making huge fortunes when they had been students. Fifteen years later he backed Jack’s budding institute with an operating budget far larger than that of any other oceanographic institute in the world. Jack still had to answer to a board of directors. But with their criteria being scientific merit and feasibility rather than financial profit, he was in a unique position among undersea explorers able to mount multimillion-dollar projects. Above all, he was freed from ever having to consider selling artifacts; all their finds went on museum display or were part of the cycle of travelling exhibits that had brought their discoveries to audiences around the world. It was one commitment that Jack shared with Colonel Vyse, the British officer who had extracted the sarcophagus from the pyramid and dispatched it on its ill-fated voyage to the British Museum in 1838. Jack was determined that it should go to the best possible place for display as well as for its own security, and if that meant reneging on their offer to return it to Egypt, then so be it.