For the first time since they had been forced out of Egypt by the extremist takeover the year before, Jack had felt truly elated. He had found far more than just a few potsherds. Many of the amphoras were intact, showing that the wreck had been quickly buried in the sand and protected from the ravages of storm and wind over the centuries. He knew that he had little time to lose if they were not to be buried in meters of sand again, or wrenched from the seabed by storm waters and destroyed. He had immediately put in for an emergency protection order from the government to keep salvors from looting the site, and had secured a license to excavate. Within days an IMU team had arrived, and the shore encampment was established. With the campus only half an hour away, all the artifacts could be taken back immediately for conservation in state-of-the-art facilities.
For Jack it was a dream excavation, as long as the weather held. There were no extremists trying to gun them down, no warlords trying to muscle in on their finds, no treasure hunters pillaging the site at night. At less than ten meters’ depth they had little need to worry about decompression sickness. Within two weeks they had stripped away the upper layer of amphoras and revealed gray anaerobic sediment beneath, promising conditions for the preservation of hull remains and other organic artifacts. Suddenly they had found not just amphoras but a site that might be of huge international significance, a wreck to put alongside the best that Jack had ever discovered. For it to be in his own backyard, where he had first learned to dive, made it seem a personal triumph too, as if his career were coming full circle, back to the place where his passion for the past had really first taken hold.
He swept his eyes once more along the coast. So often these waters seemed an impenetrable veil of secrets; one storm might reveal a tantalizing hint of a wreck, and then another conceal it for years. Waymarkers underwater that had seemed so obvious — reefs, cannon, pieces of wreckage — could disappear beneath the sand with the next tide, meaning that exploration constantly had to start over again from scratch. But this time they had a wreck firmly pinned down, one of the best he had ever found, and he was determined to see it through. The weather forecast for the summer ahead was good. He turned to go, running through a mental checklist of the equipment he had brought, suddenly feeling that every moment here was precious. He needed to get in the water.
8
A little over an hour later, Jack walked fully equipped down the beach beside the headland, shading his eyes as he stared out toward Seafire. Nestled in the lee of the promontory to his right was the ancient Church of the Mariners, the burial site for many who had washed up on this beach over the centuries: some from wrecks that remained imprinted in local memory, others from ships that had disappeared without a trace. Six months earlier, after returning from Egypt, Jack had stood on the promontory during one of the worst winter storms in recent years, lashed by wind and spray, watching the gigantic swells crash and rumble up the sand and nearly inundate the church. Today, with barely a ripple on the sea, such a scene seemed almost inconceivable; then, it had been impossible to imagine how anyone could have survived being wrecked in this place, with the sea sucking in and out over the jagged rocks and the waves erupting to a height of thirty meters or more against the seaward cliffs, a scene of near-certain death for anyone swept off a ship in such conditions.
He put the image from his mind and concentrated on enjoying the moment. He reached the sea where it gently lapped the shoreline, dipped his mask in the water, and put it on over his hood, running a finger under the edge of the neoprene to make sure the mask was sealed to his face. Unlike his dive on Clan Macpherson five days earlier, he was wearing only a wetsuit and conventional scuba gear, all he needed on a warm summer day off Cornwall with a maximum depth of less than ten meters. It was diving as he had first experienced it as a boy and as he had learned to relish it again, free from the stress and danger of deep exploration, from the constant nagging fear of nitrogen sickness that was the ticking time bomb behind so many wreck excavations. Here, with a safe bottom time of more than two hours, he could excavate almost as if he were on land, and yet enjoy the physical sensation of being underwater that always seemed to heighten his awareness and keep the adrenalin coursing through him.
He waded out, pulled on his fins and collapsed into the water, injecting air into his stabilizer jacket and putting his snorkel in his mouth, ready for the long surface swim out to the wreck. He kicked hard with his fins to get over a small hump of sand by the shore, and then the bottom gradually dropped away in swimming-pool-like visibility, the sun shimmering off the ripples in the sand below him. As he swam on, the spurs of rock that jutted out from the promontory, smoothed and denuded near shore, appeared more overgrown, covered with the more tenacious forms of marine accretion that were able to withstand the battering of waves and swell. Several of the larger outcrops had scour pits on the seaward side, and in one he saw a small crab scurry for cover.
He passed beyond the rocks and floated motionless for a few moments, the water gently rocking him, letting his breathing and heart rate slow, almost in a state of meditation. Some physiologists argued that humans were ill-adapted to water, that survival when immersed was a constant and unnatural struggle; to Jack the reverse was the case, and the fact of being unable to breathe like a fish seemed secondary to the supreme relaxation he felt underwater, to a bodily and psychological contentment that he rarely experienced to the same degree on land.
Five minutes later he stopped, swiveled around, and checked his surface position, seeing that he had almost reached a midway point in the cove, equidistant between the seaward end of the promontory with the church and the tip of the headland to the south. He had seen little except sand since leaving the rocks, but had begun to swim over patches of shingle where the winter storms had stripped away the seabed almost to bedrock. He set off again, and moments later saw the first signs of the steamship wreck that spanned the entrance to the cove, twisted plates of metal that had been wrenched from the hull by successive storms. The wreck was only 120 years old, but seeing it still gave Jack a frisson of excitement. For almost two decades the hull had been completely buried in sand, only the top of the boiler visible, but the winter storms had washed away almost five meters’ depth of sand and the wreck was visible in its entirety, sitting on the shingle and bedrock. She was a barometer of seabed exposure elsewhere in the cove, though a fickle one. Three months ago she had been buried when Jack had decided to carry on with his exploration further out to sea, hoping against hope that his dream of finding a much earlier wreck in these waters would finally be realized.
He looked toward Seafire, now less than two hundred meters distant, and raised his left arm as a signal, knowing that the dive marshal would have been keeping an eye on his progress since leaving the beach. He remembered the last time he had been in the water approaching a dive boat, five days ago with Deep Explorer. Despite all his entreaties, the ship’s captain had refused to raise anchor and stand off, and he and Costas had been forced to struggle into the Zodiac in mountainous seas with the ship’s hull only meters away. His old friend Landor had watched it all from the railing, seemingly indifferent, but Jack’s ire with him once they were aboard had served the useful purpose of allowing him to stonewall any attempt by Landor to wheedle out of them what they had actually seen on Clan Macpherson, and within an hour they had been taken off in the Lynx helicopter that had come for them from the British Army base in Freetown.