“That’s what Pliny said he did, reaching the coast of Arabia,” Rebecca said.
“Speaking of circumnavigating Africa, take a look at this.” Costas typed something into the laptop, and swung it round so Jack could see. “Our favorite salvage ship Deep Explorer has left her position off Sierra Leone, and is now heading past the Cape of Good Hope. Lanowski forwarded this image.”
“Lanowski? From Carthage?”
“He’s a one-man mobile command and control center. Never goes anywhere without his Landsat link.”
“Anything more?”
“About an hour ago she turned north-northeast, making fifteen knots at twenty-five degrees, and she’s maintained that course some thirty nautical miles off the coast.”
“That means she’s heading to the northern Indian Ocean.”
“The Horn of Africa. Any idea why? That’s a pretty hot place, and I don’t just mean temperature. Pirates and Iranian missiles. Not sure I’d want to be there now.”
“I had a few moments alone in the chart room on Deep Explorer just before our dive,” Jack said. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, as all eyes were on Clan Macpherson and we assumed Deep Explorer would be there for weeks attempting a salvage operation. But judging by the charts that were lying around, that figures as their next destination.”
“Another Second World War wreck? That seems to be their speciality.”
“They’ve got an excellent researcher in London, Collingwood, the guy who put them on to Clan Macpherson. He was at the same college as me at Cambridge, doing a doctorate on Allied convoy operations in the war. He always struck me as a little weak and naïve and he never managed to secure an academic post, so he makes his money where he can. In fact I met him at the National Archives yesterday, when we were ordering the same box of declassified Admiralty files, and we had a guarded conversation in the café afterward. I was certain he was there yesterday as a result of the Clan Macpherson project going bust following our dive. I invited him to contribute any additional documentary evidence he had for my report to the government on the wreck, and then I plugged him with some innocent-seeming questions. It turned out that he’d just returned from the Deutsches U-Boot archive that morning, and he was quite excited about some kind of all-expenses-paid holiday to the Indian Ocean in a few days’ time. Seeing this Landsat image, I wouldn’t be surprised if that meant a trip out to Deep Explorer. I got the impression that he’d been mandated to find evidence of any lost cargo of value, especially U-boats.”
“They’re going to be desperate after the failure to recoup from Clan Macpherson,” Costas said. “A ship like Deep Explorer costs thousands to operate per day, and there are going to be some pretty noisy investors out there. He’s probably going to be looking for anything marketable, not just gold.”
“Landor’s always operated on a knife edge,” Jack said. “But if he’s heading up to the Horn of Africa, he might just have got himself in too deep this time.”
“Landor?” Rebecca said. “You mean the guy you and Maurice were at school with? I thought he was in prison somewhere in South America.”
“I didn’t have a chance to tell you about it before we were called out,” Jack replied. “He’s operations director for Deep Explorer Inc., his latest incarnation. He keeps bouncing back.”
“No wonder you had to grit your teeth to go out there and do that dive. He had a bend, didn’t he?”
“A bad one, in his spine,” Jack said. “It was on a First World War wreck off Scotland two years ago, hunting for a consignment of silver bars. He pushed the envelope too far, dropped too deep and took a gamble with his air.”
“Sounds familiar,” Rebecca said wryly.
“The hyperbaric specialist who dealt with him told me about it. He had the choice either of running out of air underwater and dying, or of surfacing too quickly, knowing he was going to take a hit. He was diving alone from a Zodiac without a support vessel, and by the time the boat driver got him to the recompression chamber at Oban, the damage was done. He can’t even do a ten-minute dive to ten meters without risking a fatal hit, and hasn’t dived since.”
“If his passion for diving was anything like yours, I can imagine what that might do to him.”
“It’s hardened him, made him bitter. I don’t recognize him any more.” Jack paused, thinking for a moment. “He and I were inseparable for about a year, both obsessed with diving. I did my first ever open-water dives with him, and I can still remember the excitement. But then Maurice arrived at the school and I found someone I could share my archaeology interests with too, and Landor and I drifted apart. He was charismatic but rebellious, always with a dark edge, self-destructive. He dropped out of school and drifted off to Africa, worked for an aid agency at first but then as some kind of mercenary, and then he got into treasure hunting. For a long time I felt bad about him, guilty that I’d let him down by turning away from him at school.
“He came to see me once when I was a student and I agreed to dive with him again, on a galleon he’d found off Colombia. Then the Gulf War intervened and I was called up from the naval reserve, and the next I knew he was languishing in a prison in Bogotá. But he’s always been good at pulling in credulous investors. He’s made fortunes, lost them, made them and lost them again. I’m godfather to his son, who lived with his mother after Landor left her; father and son have never spoken since. I kept my distance from him on Deep Explorer, but what I saw I didn’t like. Maybe agreeing to go out on Deep Explorer was part of my old guilt trip with him, and he knew it. But once I was out there, seeing him standing at the ship’s rail doing nothing while Costas and I battled to get into the Zodiac, I realized I didn’t owe him anything.”
“Did the researcher give you any more hints about what they might be after?” Costas said.
Jack took a deep breath, and shook his head. “Very secretive. But if we’re right and they are heading toward the Somali coast, we could do a bit of ferreting about and work out if there were any Allied vessels or U-boats in the vicinity with valuable cargos. And I might just have a word with a friend from navy days who’s currently commanding officer of Combined Task Force 150, the anti-piracy flotilla operating out of Bahrain. I can at least warn him about Landor and what might be going on.”
“I’ve got some spare time after diving while I wait for deliveries to the engineering lab,” Costas said. “I can do a search online.”
“Meanwhile, keep Lanowski on to it. I’d like to be updated on Deep Explorer’s progress. Get him to stream it through to my account as well.”
“He could probably hack into the CIA and order in a drone strike if you like.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Jack said. “So where are we, Jeremy?”
Jeremy picked up an A4-sized envelope and looked at him. “I think it’s time to tell you about the bronze plaque from Clan Macpherson.”
Costas finished his Coke, exhaling noisily and crushing the can under his foot. “And you haven’t seen my sherd with its inscription yet. I found the bucket before coming in here, and the conservator will bring it in as soon as I call her.”
Jack leaned forward, tense with anticipation. “All right. Show us what you’ve got. The plaque first.”
Jeremy slid the envelope toward him. “That contains a sharpened still from your helmet video inside Clan Macpherson, along with my translation. Remember what we were saying about Hanno the Carthaginian, whether or not he circumnavigated Africa? Prepare to be amazed.”