Next he turned to the reply from the director of the trade division at the Admiralty. Gough was told that armed trawlers had given good anti-submarine service elsewhere, and that the visibility had been too poor for air cover. I fully appreciate your distress at the loss of such a fine ship, which I can assure you is shared by all of us at the Admiralty. We are, as you can understand, bound to consider the U-boat war as a whole and view each incident in its right perspective. The U-boat threat, for instance, off the West African coast is but a fraction of that in the North Atlantic and we obviously must allocate our limited resources in escort vessels accordingly. Were it possible, there is nothing we would like better than to give every convoy a really strong escort. And finally: War invariably leads to blows and counter-blows, and it would be illogical not to expect the enemy occasionally to get in a nasty punch. I can only assure you that we are fully alive to all the risks that have to be run and are deploying our forces to the best of our ability to bring about the ultimate defeat of the U-boat.
Jack closed the file, and squinted out to sea again. The response from the director of the trade division was measured and decent, as compassionate as it could reasonably be. But it was precisely the nature of the response that had been niggling at him. It seemed odd that at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, during those critical weeks in May 1943 when everything hung in the balance, the Admiralty should have devoted so much care to the concerns of a single merchant captain from a convoy off Africa, far from the main focus of attention in the North Atlantic. Jack might have expected a curt response at best, even a disciplinary one. But instead the Admiralty had mandated their senior officer responsible for merchant shipping to give more thought to a response than had apparently been put into arranging adequate defense for the convoy.
Jack had looked up Captain Gough’s war record, and knew he was not a man to make criticism lightly. He had already been sunk twice, once when his ship Clan Ogilvy was torpedoed in 1941, and then again when the ship that had rescued the survivors had also been sunk. Gough had been decorated for his seamanship and courage on both occasions, rallying his men over many days spent in open boats and on the way rescuing the survivors from two other stricken ships. Most merchant captains, men like Gough, buckled down and did their job, expecting the navy and the air force to do their best but accepting that things sometimes went wrong, that ships and lives would be lost. They were tough men, men who knew well the fickle whims of war and fate, who asked questions only when they were truly compelled to do so.
Jack returned to his own part in this story, to a question that Gough himself could never have imagined possible: how could a British torpedo that could only have been launched from a British submarine have ended up inside the hull of Clan Macpherson?
He checked his watch, stood, and picked up the VHF radio receiver on the table, tapping the secure IMU channel used on the bridge of Seafire. A girl’s voice with an accent more American than British crackled in response. “Hello, Dad. Are you ready to come out now? Over.”
“Nearly ready. Really looking forward to it. Can you talk?”
“Just stripping off my wetsuit. Give me a moment.”
Jack smiled in anticipation. He had not spoken to Rebecca since he and Costas had returned from Africa, and seeing her was another reason why he had been excited about coming out to the site this morning. She had spent the last month working with Jack’s colleague Katya at her ancient petroglyphs site in Kyrgyzstan, and had only flown back to England two days before, while Jack had been in Oxford. She had scheduled a week to dive on the wreck before returning to her university summer school in the United States, and Jack was looking forward to spending time with her. He pressed the talk button as he walked out of the tent toward the promontory. “How are you doing? How’s the archaeology?”
“I’m studying to be an environmentalist, not an archaeologist, Dad.”
Jack scrambled over the old stone wall and onto the rough track that led up to the top of the promontory, enjoying the breeze on his face. “Yes, well, you say that, but archaeology is what you were doing with Katya, archaeology is what you do with Maurice and Aysha, and archaeology is what you’ve been doing with IMU since you were barely into your teens. It’s in your blood. You can’t deny it.”
“How do you know what I was doing with Katya? She’s given up waiting for you to call, by the way. How long ago was it that you two were an item? Anyway, as far as you know, we could have just been having an all-girls party.”
“With Katya, beside Lake Issyk-Gul in Kyrgyzstan? I doubt it. More likely learning how to shoot a Kalashnikov.”
“I did that last year with her. I didn’t tell you. The least accurate rifle I’ve ever shot. This year it was learning how to hunt with an eagle.”
“God help us,” Jack said. “You’re the daughter of Jack Howard, not Attila the Hun.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a tough old world out there, got to be prepared.”
“Tell me about the wreck.”
“It’s Phoenician, Dad. You were right, and everyone’s sure of it. There are loads of those distinctive Punic amphoras, and other diagnostic stuff. It’s what you’ve dreamed of finding for years. They’ve left your sector of the excavation untouched, as you requested, sandbagged over and awaiting your return.”
Jack reached the top of the promontory, strode through the thick coarse grass to the edge of the rocky cliff on the south side, and saw Seafire anchored some three hundred meters offshore. “That’s fantastic. I’ve seen the material in the conservation tent here from the past few days. Pretty early — late seventh or early sixth century BC. Not a Greek ship carrying Phoenician wares, but an actual Phoenician ship. It’s the first one ever found in these waters, and confirmation that they got to the British Isles at that date.”
“Any news on your plaque?”
“I was with Jeremy and Maria all day Tuesday at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. They’re convinced the symbols are Phoenician too.”
“Amazing,” she said. “A Phoenician wreck up here and another wreck off Africa carrying a Phoenician artifact, about equidistant from the Strait of Gibraltar.”
“That’s where the Phoenicians went,” Jack said. “West from Carthage through the Strait and out into the Atlantic, searching for tin and gold, exploring, settling. And you know my theory that they went a lot farther than that, at least circumnavigating the British Isles and reaching the southern tip of Africa, if not circumnavigating that too.”
“But you don’t know where the plaque came from.”
“I’m working on that. All we have to go on at the moment is that Clan Macpherson’s last major port of call was Durban, in South Africa. I think somehow it got on board there, along with the gold consignment.”