“And nobody’s lifted anything from the wreck. Davy Jones’s Locker remains sealed.”
“Amen to that.” Jack looked up, seeing the distant smudge of light from the surface, the shot line bowing above them in the current. His computer flashed green, and he followed Costas up to their next decompression stop, looking down as he ascended and seeing the gloom envelop the seabed. The only evidence of a wreck once having been there was a storm of silt spiraling up from the drop-off, like a huge twister in the sea.
Costas hung on the line, turning to Jack. “What else do we tell our friends on Deep Explorer?”
“What else is there to tell? Did you see any gold?”
“Not a glint.”
“And your camera malfunctioned.”
“Yours too. Faulty IMU equipment. They’re used to that.”
“Pity about your plan to get the gold to Sierra Leone, though.”
“There might still be something good out of this. The guy I went to have lunch with in Freetown while you were sorting out our equipment was an old friend, a former army officer who works for a relief agency. After Rebecca did her stint with UNICEF in Ethiopia last year, I began to think about how I might contribute.”
“Taking the cue from your eighteen-year-old daughter? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round?”
“You know Rebecca as well as I do,” Jack said. “She’s been plowing her own furrow for quite some time now. Anyway, it’s about logistics, organization, the kind of thing I can do well, driving a project forward. I even mentioned the combat medic course I had to do in the Royal Navy when I went into the Special Boat Section. A bit rusty now, but I could update.”
“You telling me you’re going to volunteer for a relief agency?”
“I was just sounding him out. It would only be a couple of weeks a year, between projects.”
“Have you spoken to Ephraim about this?” Costas asked. “I have to remind myself that he’s not only IMU’s main benefactor but also runs one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. After providing IMU with its endowment, he gave away ninety percent of his remaining assets to charity. It’s the kind of thing a software tycoon can do and still remain seriously wealthy. When he’s not diving with us, he’s pretty well full-time with his foundation.”
“I talked it through with him when Rebecca first showed an interest. He said the best thing that people like us can do is to provide motivational and leadership skills, to enthuse and inspire. That’s something money can’t buy.”
“Rebecca would be proud of her dad.”
“She’s too busy even to think about what I’m up to.”
“Let’s see,” Costas said. “Before Ethiopia, she was exploring the hidden libraries of the Mount Athos monasteries in Greece with Katya, after working with her on the ancient petroglyphs site in Kyrgyzstan. How is your old girlfriend, by the way? Ever think of giving her a call?”
“We haven’t got external comms down here, remember. Just you and me.”
“I don’t mean now. I mean topside, with that phone you usually keep in your pocket.”
“Katya keeps me in the loop. When Rebecca’s with her.”
“Huh. Anyway, Rebecca hardly paused for breath after Ethiopia before joining the dig at Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and then flying out to Seaquest in the Mediterranean to help Maurice and Aysha sort out the material they’d managed to rescue from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria prior to the extremist takeover in Egypt.”
“My turn to be proud of her,” Jack said. “Maurice is really her honorary uncle, just like you. Egyptology was his life and he was devastated when they had to leave Egypt, really unable to cope. Rebecca being there meant that Aysha could return to London to look after their son. Rebecca was the one who diverted his attention to Carthage, to the old idea he had when he and I were at school together, that it was not the Phoenicians but the Egyptians who had gone west and founded the first colony there. I still don’t think he’s right, but Rebecca and I encouraged him to check it out on the ground because it gave him a new focus. He’s been digging in Tunisia for over a month now, and Aysha’s been able to join him again.”
“Lanowski’s even torn himself away from his computers and gone out there.”
“He’s been a good friend too. Everyone’s rallied round.”
“And now Rebecca’s been back with Katya in Kyrgyzstan for the final season there.”
“She’s like I was at her age. Doing as much as she can. It’s great drawing off that zest for life, for new experiences.”
“Are you going to discuss your plan with her?”
“Once we know we can finance it. Until then, the fewer people who know, the better. But we do often have a bit of time between projects, don’t we?”
“Speak for yourself. In the engineering department it’s 24/7, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
“Ephraim thinks you could use a break too.”
“I’ll think about it. Yeah, I could do that too. You’d need someone to watch your back, for a start. Some of those places are pretty dodgy. But right now, we’ve got to make sure we’re not swept away into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Time for the next deco stop.”
“Roger that.”
Jack made his way hand over hand up the line behind Costas. At thirty meters he looked down one last time, seeing the billowing silt cloud where they had been exploring only a few minutes previously. Costas had been right. That truly was Davy Jones’s Locker, a place where nobody living belonged. He looked up, seeing Costas hanging on the line above him, a glint of sunlight reflecting off his helmet, and above that the dark silhouette of Deep Explorer rolling and pitching in the swell. He remembered the plaque, and felt a sudden rush of excitement. The wreck might be gone, but their discovery had left indelible questions in his mind. What was a Phoenician antiquity doing concealed in a secret consignment of gold on board a Second World War British cargo ship? What was a British torpedo that could only have been fired from a British submarine doing inside the wreck?
Twenty minutes later, Costas tapped his wrist, and gave a thumbs-up. “Deco’s over, Jack. We’re clear for the surface. You good to go?”
Jack checked his display. “Good to go.” He followed Costas slowly up the line, his body dragged nearly horizontal by the current, feeling the pull of the buoy as it bobbed in the swell. It was going to be a tricky egress into the Zodiac, and there might be an ugly confrontation with Landor and the salvage team over what had happened to the wreck. But he was already racing ahead to the next few days, to what he would do when he got back to IMU headquarters. He prayed that the images from their cameras would be clear enough for analysis. He needed to get the footage to his colleagues Jeremy Haverstock and Maria de Montijo at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. He would take them himself, and combine them with a study of Phoenician artifacts in the Ashmolean Museum. And he would go to the National Archives at Kew to dig up anything more he could find out about Clan Macpherson and convoy TS-37: any further cargo and crew manifests, secret directives from the Admiralty, German U-boat orders that might have been intercepted and decrypted at Bletchley Park and sent on to the convoy commodore, anything that might help to solve the mystery of the wreck and its cargo.
They reached the chain that held the shot line to the buoy, and then clawed their way up until they broke surface. Jack grasped one of the rope loops around the buoy and glanced up at Deep Explorer, seeing the crewmen lining the foredeck looking down on them. He raised his free arm in the okay signal, and saw Costas do the same. The swell was pulling the buoy dangerously close to the hull, and he hoped the captain would have the sense to release his anchor line now that they had surfaced, and to stand off while the Zodiac attempted to pick them up. He glanced toward the stern of the vessel, seeing the Zodiac still raised on its davits. After sensing the detonation, they would have kept the inflatable out of the sea until they knew what was going on. They could hardly have expected them to return from the wreck alive.