Beyond the rotor downdraft, the sea was millpond calm, and it took an effort to imagine the storm winds on that December day in 1838 and the abyss that lay beneath. Since their find of the chariots in the Red Sea, and touching the manuscript fragments from the Geniza in Cairo, biblical phrases had been running through Jack’s mind, snatches of verse he had remembered from chapel at boarding school. And darkness lay on the face of the deep. Far below them, unimaginably deep, in the place that creation had forgotten, lay the wreck of Beatrice, the ancient sarcophagus in its hull standing stark above the silt like the tomb of a long-forgotten sea god. That was temptation enough for any archaeologist, but it was not just the sarcophagus itself that had brought Jack back here. It was what Colonel Vyse had packed inside, a surprise for the museum, perhaps a sweetener to persuade the trustees to continue to sponsor his excavations. It was something that he himself had not recorded and was lost to history until that dive when Jack and Costas had brought it back to light.
When Jack had swept the silt from the plaque, he had been astonished to see the sun symbol of Akhenaten, a pharaoh who had lived over a thousand years after the mummy of Menkaure had been sealed within the sarcophagus. It was only after they had found a second Akhenaten plaque in the desert, one with a depiction showing the pyramids, that Jack had made sense of it, realizing that Akhenaten had taken over the pyramid as a portal into the underground complex beneath the Giza plateau that he and Costas had glimpsed for a few precious moments three months ago far below the burial chamber. Inside that chamber, perhaps mounted above the portal, Colonel Vyse had unwittingly found a clue to what might have been the most extraordinary discovery ever made in Egyptology. His decision not to mention the plaque and its loss in the wreck — perhaps to avoid criticism for not having recorded it — was to keep the world in ignorance until now. Jack had been clutching at straws since them, desperately hoping for clues to another entrance into the complex, a discovery he might make before Egypt shut down on him entirely. Coming back to the wreck was part of that trail. The plaque had been missing a section from one side, and he was hoping against hope that the lost fragment would be buried in the silt nearby.
The pilot’s voice came through his headphones. “Jack, we’re holding off for another fifteen minutes or so while a helo ahead of us delivers a film crew. As soon as they’ve cleared the helipad, we’re good to go.”
“Roger that, Charlie,” Jack replied. “I’ll use the time to get up to speed on the site. I don’t think I’m going to get much chance for that once I’m on board. And our colleague could always use a little more beauty sleep.”
“Roger that,” the pilot said. “I’ll advise you.”
A noise like a snorting water buffalo came through the intercom, and Jack pushed Costas up again and wedged him beside the window. He took out his iPad, attached the keyboard, propped it on his knees, and opened a ghostly image of the sarcophagus as he and Costas had first seen it from the submersible three months before. There was no indication that any other antiquities had been on board the ship, and the decision had been made not to excavate the site any further than was required to clear a large enough space to feed the cushioned winch cables beneath the sarcophagus preparatory to lifting it. He touched the screen and opened up the image that had brought them to this spot in the first place, a previously unknown watercolor that had appeared in an auction a few months earlier showing Beatrice in the harbor of Smyrna in Turkey. On the back had been a pencilled note made years later by the captain of the ship — George Wichelo, a man thought to have died in the wreck — giving its location in this bay a few nautical miles north of Valencia, resolving a mystery that had led undersea explorers on numerous false trails over the years in the hunt for the fabled lost sarcophagus.
The artist had accurately shown Beatrice as a brig, with foremast and mainmast and the boom for a spanker over the stern. Despite being on the cusp of the Victorian era, only a generation away from the transformation to steam power, Beatrice was indistinguishable in appearance from her forbears of the Napoleonic Wars period. She still bore the checkerboard “Nelson pattern” of gunports that merchantmen in the Mediterranean retained against Barbary pirates from North Africa, still a threat in the early 1830s when the painting had been made. He tapped the screen again and brought up a three-dimensional visualization of the wreck that Lanowski had completed a few days before, based on weeks of survey using a high-precision multibeam sonar array mounted on a remote-operated vehicle flown a few meters above the seabed.
The program allowed a virtual fly-around of the site, and Jack swept his fingers across the screen to get as many angles as possible. The wreckage had been rendered in metallic gray to distinguish it from the sediment in which it had been partly buried. He could clearly see the lines of protruding frames and the regular mounds that were all that was left of her iron deck knees, the results of a refit that provided the only concession to modernity in a hull otherwise built in time-honored fashion using timbers and copper nails. The sarcophagus and the ship’s sixteen guns had been rendered in white, highlighting the elements with the greatest inert weight that might have affected the ship’s freeboard and stability. In a way that Jack had not appreciated on the seabed, the visualization showed how all the starboard guns had shifted to the port side and how the sarcophagus was also off center, as if straining on the cordage that must once have held it in place.
There was little doubt in Jack’s mind what had caused the wreck. Lanoswki’s simulation had shown that even with extra compensating ballast, she would have been dangerously unstable with the sarcophagus on deck, three tons of granite that would have unbalanced a ship of little more than 200 tons deadweight. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine the sea as it must have looked on that winter’s day when the ship had come to grief in the bay. Her last known ports of call had been Valetta in Malta and then Leghorn, modern Livorno, far up the Italian coast. At that time of year, Wichelo may have encountered strong northeasterlies all the way from Alexandria, and decided to claw his way up the western shore of Italy rather than attempting to sail due west from Malta with the risk of being blown into the North African shore and any awaiting corsairs. From Leghorn it would have been plain sailing with a northeasterly mistral behind him across the Gulf of Lyons, an exhilarating run when all went well, with the hope of rounding the southern coast of Spain into the Strait of Gibraltar. For some reason, perhaps because the wind became a gale, perhaps because the recent refit had given the vessel more leeway than the captain had been used to, perhaps because the lading of his cargo had made the ship less maneuverable — probably a combination of all these factors — his course and the coast of Spain converged just north of Valencia. Had they rounded the next headland, they might have made Valencia. As it was, the bay where they came to grief offered no shelter and only a jagged rocky shore dropping off to great depth, so there was little hope of grounding the ship or saving its cargo.