Joey looked back at the slab, then at the submersible, then back at the slab again. He suddenly jetted forward, settling again on the seabed just in front of the slab.
“Good boy,” Costas murmured. “Good boy.”
Stabilizing legs drove down from each corner of the carapace into the sediment. The second manipulator arm came into play, and Joey hooked both hands under the exposed edge of the slab. He heaved upward, shuddering, a fine sheen of sediment rising with each vibration. The slab slowly rose to vertical, and then Joey retracted one arm, pulled out the vacuum pipe, and sucked away the sediment from it. They saw the flash of a camera, and then Joey gently lowered the slab back to the seabed, released it in a puff of silt, and jetted back toward the submersible. He came to a halt, raised both hands as if in a gesture of uncertainty, and pointed with one of them at the screen below. It showed the surface of the slab, dazzling white with the flash, at first sight devoid of any features of interest.
Jack stared, his heart suddenly racing. “That’s it,” he exclaimed, pointing. The ROV moved closer, and the image came more sharply into view. A line furrowed into the rock extended from the fracture to the center of the slab, where it joined another, wider line extending to either side roughly at right angles, creating something akin to a T shape. “The first line is the extension of the radiate line from the Aten symbol. The second line is the River Nile. I believe the first line shows the course of a man-made tunnel, and this map reveals where it intersects with the Nile.”
“You think that’s a way in?”
“I’ve got to get this to Lanowski. He can try to match it to modern coordinates. This is fantastic. It might be the best break we’ve had.”
Joey’s screen flashed with another message, and Costas pressed his face again the viewing port to read it. He gave Joey a diver’s okay sign and then turned to Jack. “Everything’s now fixed topside, and they’re going to begin lifting us in about two minutes. The plan for raising the sarcophagus is still on schedule. Joey’s going to rig up the sarcophagus for raising, and the media can get live-stream video from his camera. Once we’re topside, they’ll drop the cable and Joey can hook it on. Macalister says that our little glitch served a useful purpose in ironing out a problem with the derrick winch. Assuming our ascent is successful, the engineers now have complete confidence in using it to raise the sarcophagus.”
“Glad to know our little jaunt has been of some use.”
Costas punched a finger at the viewing port. “That’s where it’s been of use. Getting Joey to perform exactly the kind of task I envisaged for him. He’s the one who should have come down here to do this job in the first place.”
Jack waved the piece of notepaper with a sketch he had made of the depiction on the plaque fragment. “Nothing beats the Mark One human eyeball. Joey might never have found this without us to guide him.”
Costas was barely listening as he watched Joey uncoil the hawser strap from a basket beneath the ROV that he would feed beneath the sarcophagus. “You think Joey’s impressive, you should see Little Joey. Almost thinks intuitively.”
“I remember his predecessor. Got stuck inside a volcano.”
Costas looked suddenly crestfallen. “Don’t remind me. But all his technology has gone into the new one, and more. He’s truly pocket-sized.”
They strapped themselves back into the seats of the submersible, and Jack gazed one last time at the sarcophagus in situ, Joey alongside. “That’s how I want to remember it,” he said. “I’m glad I won’t be here to see it being raised. Do you remember seeing the Egyptian sculptures raised from the harbor of Alexandria, where they’d fallen when the ancient lighthouse collapsed? They seem diminished on land, like rusty old cannon raised from shipwrecks. Some artifacts are just better left on the seabed, where they have much more power and meaning. If I had my way, the sarcophagus would go to the British Museum just as Colonel Vyse intended, only in a way he could never have envisaged, not as an actual artifact but as a virtual exhibit. The HD multi-beam sonar scan and terrain mapper could produce a CG model of the wreck in incredible detail, and we’ve got enough imagery to simulate a real-time submersible dive to the site. Leaving the actual sarcophagus here on the seabed would mean that you retain the power and mystique of an object in the darkness of the abyss, in a place where no human could survive. That’s what would really fire up people’s imaginations, not being able to inspect the finer points of Old Kingdom architectonic sculpture close-up.”
“We’re caught in a political game, Jack. Ownership is always going to be an issue with an artifact like this, and where there are conflicting claims of ownership, the winner is always going to want to trumpet their prize. And now there’s the added factor of the leverage it might give us in Egypt with the antiquities people.”
“That’s the one plus for me. But I still feel uncomfortable playing the media game and seeing archaeology used as a pawn like this.”
“Chances are you won’t even see it being raised. The instant we’re on deck, you’ll be whisked off to the sick bay for a complete checkup, and then you’ll probably have a spell in the recompression chamber. After that my guess is you’ll be out of here as soon as the medicos allow you to fly, if not sooner. Heading toward the Holy Land.”
Jack stared for a moment at the sarcophagus, his mind back on the Cairo Geniza and the Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, on the extraordinary letter that he and Maria had read only the evening before in Cairo. Heading toward the Holy Land. Halevi too had travelled from Spain to the land of the Old Testament, certain that after a lifetime of searching, the answers to his questions lay there, that revelation for him could come only in the land of the Israelites. Jack had begun to feel the same too, now even more strongly with the discovery of the missing fragment of the plaque, that he was being driven back to the only place where he could find his own personal redemption, the resolution to a quest that had come close to costing him everything.
Costas nudged him. “By the way, thanks.”
Jack stared at him, his mind already focused on Jerusalem, on seeing Rebecca again. “Huh?”
“For the rescue. Thanks.”
“Oh, yeah. No problem. You would have done the same for me.”
Costas tapped the casing. “Yeah. Probably. Wouldn’t have been able to live with myself afterward. Would have hated to lose a good submersible like this.”
He grinned at Jack, and then made a whirling motion at Joey and gave a thumbs-up. The eye peered closely at them and cocked sideways, and then the manipulator arm pivoted upward on its elbow and the hand extended palm outward toward them, as if blowing them a kiss.
“Now that was weird,” Jack said.
The submersible shuddered, and they both lay back and braced themselves. They felt it rise and swing sideways, free of the seabed. After a few seconds hanging motionless, Jack saw the depth readout slowly but surely begin to reduce, meter by meter. As they rose above the cloud of silt created by their departure, he looked out the viewing port beside him and saw Joey bustling around the sarcophagus, feeding the hawser beneath it and then jetting over to the other side to pull it through. A pool of light in the darkness became smaller and smaller until it was no more than a smudge of yellow, and then it was gone entirely. All Jack could see was blackness, the utter void of the abyss, as if the wreck of the Beatrice and their extraordinary discovery had been no more than a phantasm of the night, as quickly dispelled as it had been conjured up.