He tried to put Deep Explorer from his mind. He hoped never to see her again, and he did not want brooding about Landor to sully this day. Seafire was a reassuring presence, with people on board whose priority was to look after divers, and that was what mattered. He saw the dive marshal watching, and gave him a thumbs-down to show that he was descending. He could have continued swimming on the surface to the excavation site, but he preferred to go down on the steamship wreck and follow the line that had been attached on the seabed from there.
He removed his snorkel, put his regulator in his mouth, and vented air from the inflation tube on his buoyancy compensator, dropping beneath the surface and pinching his nose to clear his ears as he fell to the seabed. Just before reaching it, he injected a blast of air into his BC to regain neutral buoyancy, and for a few moments he hung there, a meter above the sand. Even after thousands of dives he had never lost the thrill he had felt when he first breathed from a tank, and he savored it now, drawing on his regulator and listening to the rush of bubbles from the exhaust. He turned over on his back, took out his regulator and blew rings, watching them expand and explode in a silvery shower against the surface. It felt incredibly good, as it always did.
He turned over and swam toward the steamship wreck, kicking his fins in a languid breaststroke. Within the hull amidships he saw the dark form of the boiler, its top only a few meters below the surface at low tide, as it was now. He turned left toward the stern, marveling at the timbers, which had remained in pristine condition under the sand. At the stern, the screw and rudder pintle were shrouded with old fishing nets and a crab pot from the last time the hull had been exposed, many years before. He rounded it and swam along the ship’s port side, on the way spotting the small porbeagle shark that had taken up residence in the shadowy recess of the scour pit, preying on the many fish that had appeared as if from nowhere since the wreck had been exposed. From there it was a short swim to the mass of exposed copper piping beside the boiler that acted as an anchor for the guideline to the ancient wreck.
He followed the line out a short distance, leaving the main bulk of the steamship behind, and then dropped down to a section of deck planking he had not seen before, newly revealed in the last few days. He put one hand palm downward on the wood, feeling how smooth it was. If they could find wood like this on the Phoenician wreck, buried not for a century but for two and a half millennia, they truly would have made a great discovery, one of the outstanding wreck finds ever made in British waters.
He turned back to the guideline and swam further out across the shingle. A giant box jellyfish came by, rhythmically pulsing, making its way with seeming determination to some unknown place. Jack left the line to follow it, swimming beneath its meter-wide body so that he could see the sunlight shine through, marveling at its beauty. Once, seeing a school of these jellyfish over the wreck of a ship-of-the-line further up the coast, a place of terrible loss of life, he had thought that they were like the souls of long-dead mariners, fated forever to remain at sea on an endless voyage.
He watched the jellyfish move on, and returned to the line. He was now in the shadow of Seafire, and he saw the dive ladder extended into the water at the stern and the anchor cable beyond that. A diver was ascending the ladder with another in the water behind, evidently a shift returning from the excavation, and a snorkeler was on the surface above him. He rolled over and blew a succession of bubble rings toward her. He could hardly have imagined all those years before that his daughter would one day be freediving in the waters that he had snorkeled in as a boy, but now the slender form in the distinctive blue-and-black wetsuit was almost as familiar to him underwater as Costas. She spiraled down, clearing her ears as she did so, and put a hand on his. She pointed toward the end of the guideline and gave him an okay sign. He did the same in return, and followed her as she swam ahead like a seal, using the fin stroke that he had taught her when they had first swum together in this cove when she was barely into her teens.
As she angled back up toward the surface, Jack saw the ancient wreck spread out before him beyond the staked end of the guideline. There were pottery amphoras in rows on either side, newly revealed as the excavators had dug deeper into the shingle and sand over the past few days. For the first time he sensed the shape of a ship, perhaps eighteen or twenty meters long, six or seven meters in beam. It was incredibly exciting. Everything pointed to this not being the result of a ship capsizing and dumping its contents, but a site that could hold hull timbers as well. If timbers survived in a deeper pocket in the sand, then they must be close to them now, as he could already see outcrops of gray-green bedrock protruding through the shingle.
His mind shifted automatically to the next stage of the project. The discovery of hull timbers would change the tempo completely. Amphoras and small finds could be raised easily enough to Seafire, but timbers would require more time to record in situ, as well as heavy lifting equipment and onboard fresh-water storage tanks for immediate conservation. Seafire was a superb vessel, purpose-built for archaeology, but she was not much bigger than a large dive charter boat, designed for day trips from their Falmouth base and primarily for shallow-water work. Seaquest and Sea Venture were ocean-going ships, too big to bring this close inshore, and both anyway were committed to projects on the other side of the world, Sea Venture to a geological survey in the Hawaiian archipelago and Seaquest to deep-water exploration off Sri Lanka. IMU in Falmouth had a barge with lifting equipment that could be towed over the site, but it was an unwieldy vessel, vulnerable to swell and wind.
Always at this place they would be working against the weather, even at the height of summer with the forecast showing calm seas for weeks ahead. At such a shallow depth, so close inshore, a blip in the forecast, a single day of westerlies strong enough to churn up the seabed in the cove, could have a disastrous effect on the excavation, disrupting the datum points and equipment left on site and sweeping away any artifacts left exposed. Shallow-water excavation had many benefits, but it came with increased risk of exposure to the elements, precisely the factors that had caused so many shallow wrecks in the first place and dispersed wreck material that had not become quickly buried in protective sediment.
Jack finned slowly over the edge of the site. Two of the four stone anchors they had discovered were still there, crude triangular slabs of igneous rock weighing an estimated quarter of a ton each, with holes in one corner for the rope and in the other two for double-ended sharpened stakes to hold the anchor to the seabed. The IMU geologists had taken a thin section and sourced the rock to the volcanic Lipari Islands to the north of Sicily, a region under Punic control where the Carthaginians were known to have quarried stone for their anchors. Seeing one of these anchors poking through the shingle on that first dive three months ago had been a huge excitement for Jack; they were a shape unchanged since the Bronze Age, and put the wreck well back in the first millenium BC, before Admiralty-style wooden anchors with lead stocks came into common use.
They had found one of those too, a lead bar a meter and a half long with a rectangular hole for the anchor shank in the center, the wood having perished long ago. That had tightened the date, and stoked Jack’s excitement even further. The earliest lead-stocked anchors from datable wrecks in the Mediterranean were from the first part of the sixth century BC, at the time when the western Phoenicians, the people the Romans called Punic, were the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Any Phoenician captain worth his salt would have wanted the latest anchor technology, and the presence of both types in the wreck suggested a date very soon after their inception.