“I know what you’re thinking,” Costas said. “This must have been the second torpedo of a salvo, penetrating the hole in the hull created by the explosion of the first torpedo but then failing to detonate.”
“The odds against that are high, but it’s possible,” Jack said. “What doesn’t seem possible is that a British submarine sank this ship.”
“Right now, the origin of this torpedo is academic. We’ve got a more pressing technical issue.”
Jack glanced at his readout. “Twelve minutes bottom time left.”
“Okay. I need you to come up on my right side, carefully. We don’t want to dislodge this thing.”
Jack swam below a fallen girder and slowly finned forward, keeping his breathing shallow in order to maintain precise buoyancy. “Defusing Second World War ordnance is not exactly my speciality. You should know that.”
“They didn’t teach you this at Cambridge? At MIT, we got the full gamut.”
“I was researching for a doctorate in archaeology, remember? You were at MIT on a US Navy secondment to study submersibles technology. There’s a small difference.”
“You also spent two years before that as a Royal Navy diver and in the Special Boat Service. You’d have thought,” Costas continued, wrenching something and grunting, “that some basic ordnance disposal training would have been in order.”
“You’ll have to take that up with their lordships of the Admiralty. ‘By Strength and Guile,’ that was our motto. We left the technical stuff to the engineers.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you’ve got one here now.”
Jack reached a point where his head was nearly level with Costas’s chest. The zinc-coated warhead of the torpedo, the forward meter or so, had nearly separated from the main body, presumably as a result of the impact that should have detonated it. The warhead was angled upward, and Costas had wedged himself into a space above it, holding himself against a girder with one hand and trying to force a wrench around the nose cap with the other. Jack tried to edge closer, but was blocked by a mass of wreckage. “What’s stopping the torpedo from falling into the hull?”
“That girder below you,” Costas said.
“You mean the rusty one that’s nearly sheared off at one end?”
“That’s the one.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I should be able to make it safe,” Costas said, his voice sounding strained as he leaned against the wrench. “Providing the chemicals haven’t leaked and the threads aren’t too rusted. I just need to be sure of the fuse type. I need you to get down under the rear of the warhead and read out the specs on the base.”
Jack looked down, seeing where Costas had meant. He switched his buoyancy to manual and released a few bubbles of air from his compensator, descending half a meter until he was floating just above the rusted girder. He slowly turned his head, barely breathing, until he could read the lettering under the base. “Okay,” he said. “There’s a red band across the center, which I know means it’s filled with explosive. Above the band it says ‘21-inch Mark VIIIC.’ That confirms it’s a British torpedo. Below the band, it says ‘Explosive weight 805 pounds zero ounces, gross weight 1,894 pounds 9 ounces. Date of filling, February 1943,’ two months before the sinking. That at least makes sense.”
“The explosive weight means it’s a heavy fill, more than three times the TNT fill of a standard warhead,” Costas said. “Now I need you to read out the letters immediately above the red line, below the type designation.”
“TX 2.”
“That’s what I’d guessed. It’s Torpex, fifty percent more powerful than TNT by mass, using powdered aluminum to make the explosive pulse last longer. These were real killer torpedoes, the most powerful of the war. Whoever ordered this one to be used against Clan Macpherson really wanted the ship sunk. Now I know the fuse must be a compensation coil rod contact pistol, Mark 3A. That’s all I need.”
“You don’t actually have to defuse it, do you?”
“I’m making it safe so you can see what lies below.”
“Where do you mean?”
“Directly below the warhead, in the cargo hold. Take a look.”
Jack switched to full beam, and stared down. For a moment all he saw was twisted metal on all sides and a dazzling light in the center, as if he were looking at a reflection of himself in a mirror. He dimmed the light, and gasped with astonishment. The reflection had not been off a mirror but off gold, hundreds of tightly stacked bars on pallets, filling the bottom of the hold. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “So it was true.”
“You need to go down and take a closer look.”
“I can see enough from here.”
“The torpedo blew the tops off the crates and dislodged the bars inside the one directly below us. Trust me, Jack, you need to go down there. You need to see what’s inside.”
Jack glanced up at Costas, who was still straddling the warhead. “How are you getting on?”
“Almost done. Make sure your video is on. Just watch you don’t hit that girder.”
Jack carefully backed off, eased his way through a gap beneath the girder and sank slowly toward the gleaming piles of gold. He dropped down until his knees were resting on the bars in the nearest crate, all clearly stamped SA, for South Africa. He glanced up, seeing the silhouette of the torpedo some five meters above him, backlit by Costas’s beam, then edged over to the next crate. He could see what Costas had meant. The stack of bars had been blown apart, exposing a metal box beneath with its lid also blown off. Something lay inside, nestled in a brown material, some kind of cushioning. Jack dropped head-first as far as he could into the hole, making sure his camera was angled to catch the view. He stared, at first uncomprehending, and then he forced himself to forget the surroundings, to forget the wreck, and just focus on what was in front of his eyes.
It was a thin metal plaque about half a meter square, free of corrosion but not gold, so made of bronze or another copper alloy. It was slightly curved, as if it had once been attached to a column or a post, and had holes in each corner. The metal was beaten, not machine-made, and looked very old, far older than anything else he had seen on the wreck. The most astonishing sight was the four lines of symbols stamped into the metal. For a moment Jack wondered whether he were seeing things, conjuring up phantom images from the shipwreck off Cornwall he had been excavating only a few days before, seeing in a Second World War wreck an artifact that defied all logic or reason.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he muttered, almost to himself. “But those are early alphabetic symbols, Phoenician letters of the seventh or sixth century BC.”
“I thought I recognized them,” Costas replied. “I found similar symbols inscribed on a potsherd in the Cornwall wreck on my first day excavating.”
Jack reached into the hole, trying to get at the plaque. It was no use; it was a good half a meter too deep. The only way of retrieving it would have been to remove the gold bars, but with less than five minutes left on his readout, there was no time to try. He stared at the plaque, trying to absorb everything he could see. He could just make out a strange symbol at the end of the inscription, a hieroglyph or pictogram, two stick figures with a box-like shape between them. It was something that the Phoenician who composed this had no words for, perhaps. He reached down again, heaving aside one of the bars to make sure his camera got a clear view. As he did so, there was a shrieking and grinding sound from above, and the water seemed to shake. Costas’s breathing suddenly became audible through the intercom, and when he spoke, his voice sounded distant, strained. “Jack, we’ve got a problem.”