He dropped his sack and began to run.
Part 1
1
Marine archaeologist Jack Howard stared down into the abyss, hearing nothing but the hiss of his oxygen rebreather as he floated in the deep ocean swell. Somewhere down there, somewhere in the inky blackness below, lay a prize beyond the dreams of most deep-sea salvors, a king’s ransom in gold resting unclaimed in international waters. But at the moment, Jack was far less concerned about the gold than about the diver who had just preceded him. Costas had plummeted in his usual fashion, like a sack of lead, weighed down by the array of tools on his belt. As their rebreathers produced no bubbles, he had disappeared almost without a trace, barely leaving a quiver in the shot line that anchored them to the wreck. After more than twenty years of diving together, Jack had seen his friend disappear down more black holes than he cared to remember, but this time, more than fifty miles from shore in the forbidding waters of the South Atlantic, it had been particularly unnerving. They had the experience to confront virtually anything the oceans had to offer, but Jack knew that what sailors used to call divine providence would always have the final say. Not for the first time over the last few years, he shut his eyes and mouthed the words he always did before a perilous dive into the unknown: Lucky Jack.
He opened his eyes and checked the LED display inside his helmet. He remembered the last time he had watched Costas disappear into the abyss, in the Mediterranean five months earlier during their hunt for a pharaoh’s lost sarcophagus. Costas had been trapped inside a submersible that had lost its tether and was falling to the ocean floor, and Jack had made a split-second decision to freedive after it, a one-way ticket to oblivion had he failed to reach it in time. Then, there had been no time for reflection, no time for fear. But this time the few minutes he had spent on the surface after watching Costas go had been enough for his heart rate to increase, for his mouth to go dry. His computer had flashed up a yellow warning just as they were about to descend together, too late for him to signal Costas to abort. The diagnostic in his helmet display had shown the reappearance of a glitch in the first-stage rebreather manifold, something that Costas had tried to fix in the support vessel’s repair shop before the dive, a fraught few hours during which Jack had been locked in an argument with the captain about the need to keep the shot-line anchor out of the wreckage in order to avoid damaging the sunken hull even before they had begun to explore it.
All he could do now was wait for his computer to complete the diagnostic and hope that it could repair itself. Their communication system was down too, meaning he could no longer talk to Costas, a problem not with their own equipment but with the link to the ship’s control room. That and the lack of specialized tools in the repair shop had been just two of the small irritations since they had been winched down by helicopter with their equipment onto Deep Explorer the day before.
He rolled sideways, seeing the unfamiliar hull a few meters beyond the shot-line buoy. Instead of Seaquest, instead of the support divers from the International Maritime University and the submersible that would normally accompany a dive of this nature, they were operating from a commercial salvage vessel without any of the usual IMU safety backup. They were here because a landmark change in legislation had finally seen British merchant vessel wrecks of the Second World War designated as war graves. They were also here because a researcher for the salvage company had found a secret cargo manifest showing that the ship below them, the SS Clan Macpherson, sunk by a U-boat in 1943, had been carrying a consignment of two tons of gold. Without that gold, the salvors would have had no interest in the wreck. With it, they were prepared to destroy the wreck to get at the cargo.
This had been the first case since the legislation had been passed, and Jack had agreed to spearhead the UN monitoring program, knowing that his clout as archaeological director of IMU would ensure that the wreck would be front-page news if things went awry. The salvage company knew that too, and apart from this morning’s spat over the anchor chain, relations had been businesslike. They may have thought they were on an easy ride, with two of the world’s foremost maritime archaeologists here to verify the wreck and provide guidelines for the salvage, a token requirement that they could make a great show of following while they went ahead and ripped the wreck apart to get at the gold, something the world’s press were hardly going to see more than a hundred meters below the sea. Jack was determined to do anything he could to prevent that from happening.
He heard the roar of an outboard engine, and moments later saw a Zodiac swing out from the stern of the vessel with several crew on board and head toward him. He motioned for them to come between him and the ship, a safer option in the mounting swell than being trapped in a narrow space between the two vessels. The crewman at the tiller throttled down and put the engine in neutral as he came alongside. Jack grabbed the rope around the edge of the inflatable and hung on as the project logistics director, a former oil-rig foreman named Macinnes, leaned over. “What’s the problem?” he shouted.
Jack was wearing a full-face mask as part of his IMU e-suit, an all-environment drysuit with integrated buoyancy system that Costas had perfected over the years. He was not willing to raise the mask while he was in the water, but he clicked open a one-way valve beside his mouthpiece that would allow him to be heard without letting water in. “Same problem as before with the regulator manifold,” he said, bracing himself to stop the swell pulling him under the boat. “My computer’s running a diagnostic.”
“I thought Kazantzakis had fixed it,” Macinnes shouted, staring imperiously at Jack.
“He did the best he could with the available tools.”
“Don’t blame us. Our remit was to host you, not to provide logistical backup. That’s your call.”
Jack gritted his teeth, trying to keep his cool. Floating here with a faulty regulator and his friend on the seabed more than a hundred meters below was not the time or place to bicker with these people. He strained his head back upward. “Costas programmed the computer to self-repair if it happened again, so I’m just waiting for it to finish.”
The man jerked his head toward the empty ocean beyond the shot-line buoy. “Does he always go off alone like that? Not the best buddy.”
Jack ignored the comment. Macinnes and Costas had barely been on speaking terms since they had arrived. Macinnes had made a big show of bowing to Jack’s superior archaeological knowledge, but had decided that he knew more about submersibles and remote-operated vehicles than Dr. Costas Kazantzakis, a big mistake. The fact that he had been unable to put down an ROV to do the preliminary recon or to accompany the dive would seem to have proved Costas’s case. Jack swung sideways in the swell, holding on with two hands. “What’s the story with the comms?”