“It’s the same story. You brought your own equipment, it didn’t match ours. Not our responsibility.”
“Is anyone on to it? I can’t communicate with Costas.”
“It’s irrelevant, with the weather getting worse. The forecast has upped from Force 4 to Force 8 in the next few hours. The last thing we need is a botched inspection and a fatality to cloud our press reports. We’ve come to pick you up.”
“Negative. I’m not leaving Costas to do the dive on his own.”
“Looks like he was quite happy to leave without you.”
Jack tried to restrain his anger. The last thing he needed before a deep dive was aggravation like this. He clicked the valve shut and pushed off from the boat, making a circular motion with his hand and pointing away as he finned back to the shot-line buoy. The crewman at the tiller looked at Macinnes, who raised his hands theatrically and shrugged. He sat back down and the crewman flipped the engine into forward, driving it in a wide arc around Jack and back toward the entry platform at the stern of the ship.
Jack reached the buoy, holding himself against the current, and looked up to see a line of crewmen wearing Deep Explorer caps along the foredeck rail. Dealing with these people over the last twenty-four hours had taught him one thing. He had seen more dull eyes and lassitude among this team than he had ever seen on a project before. He was fortunate that IMU had been a purely scientific endeavor from the outset, funded through an endowment from a billionaire software tycoon who also happened to be one of Jack’s oldest diving friends. Being here, and witnessing every discussion fall back on the hard floor of profitability, he had seen how the quest for financial gain ultimately drew the fire out of people. What drove Jack on was the urge for adventure and discovery that had pushed humans to explore since earliest prehistory, and a passion for revealing the truth about the past that could make the lowliest potsherd more valuable than any amount of gold that these people might rip out of wrecks like the one below him now.
He glanced up at the railing again, spotting a muscular figure in jeans and a checkered shirt with close-cropped graying hair, leaning on a stick. Anatoly Landor was Jack’s oldest dive buddy, the one who had been there beside him when he had taken his first breath from a diving tank in a pool while they had been at boarding school together. At first they had been inseparable, joined by their shared passion for diving, but then they had drifted apart, Jack into archaeology and Landor into treasure hunting. Landor had been an outsider at school, the son of an emigré Russian aristocrat’s daughter and a shady British businessman, and that had set the pattern for his future. Early on, before IMU had been founded, he had tried to enlist Jack into his projects, but their differences had been irreconcilable. For the past three years he had been operations director for Deep Explorer Incorporated, the investment consortium that owned the ship. The walking stick was because of a severe bend that had kept him out of the water for almost two years now.
Jack looked at him, remembering the raised arm with an okay signal that would have been there in the past, but knowing that this time there would be nothing. Landor had been a changed man since his accident, still with the upper body strength he had honed at school but with severely weakened legs, and a warning from the doctors that any further exposure to nitrogen buildup in his bloodstream — even a dive to swimming pool depth — would almost certainly result in a spinal bend and permanent paralysis. But it was not so much the physical change that Jack noticed as the hardening of his soul. Landor’s knowledge that he would have made this dive himself before his accident only increased the distance between them, fueling a resentment toward Jack that had been bubbling under the surface over the years, and was now plain to see.
His monitor was still only halfway through running the diagnostic, and he looked down into the depths again. The sea here was a strange color, green more than blue, an ominous shade, as if an ugly run-off from the war-torn countries of Africa had spilled out over the continental shelf. It could not have been a greater contrast to the azure waters of Cornwall, off southwest England, where he had been diving only three days before. When the call had come through that Deep Explorer had pinpointed the wreck of Clan Macpherson, he had just spent an hour in the shallows off the western Lizard peninsula near the IMU campus, excavating a perfectly preserved elephant’s tusk that he was convinced was part of a Phoenician cargo. He had been very reluctant to leave the site, and had spent the flight down to Sierra Leone reading The Periplus of Hanno, the account of a sixth-century BC Carthaginian explorer who had sailed these very waters off West Africa. It had reminded him of the extent of Phoenician exploration on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, stoking his excitement over what he had been excavating and the new story of the earliest explorers that it would allow him to tell.
The Phoenician wreck off Cornwall had been his first big project since returning from Egypt the previous year, and he was gripped by it. But a few hours in Freetown waiting for the helicopter out to Deep Explorer, seeing the state of Sierra Leone and its people, had made him realize that his priority for now had to be here. Channeled through the right humanitarian organization, the two tons of gold alleged to be on the wreck below them could make a substantial difference. The wreck was beyond territorial limits, but the IMU lawyers had suggested that a claim of ownership could be made on the grounds that Freetown was the destination of the wartime convoy and there was no documentation to show that the gold was to be transported further. It was a shaky case, but it could buy them time. At the very least, it would garner negative publicity for the salvage company and might deter investors. Nobody would want to be linked to a company that sought personal profit rather than donating a discovery of questionable ownership to one of the poorest and most war-torn countries in the world, a discovery that could provide enough to feed thousands and save countless lives.
He glanced again at his readout. Costas had been gone for ten minutes now, and still there were no comms. It would be at least another five minutes until the diagnostic was complete and he knew whether or not he could follow. He made himself focus on the objective of their dive, running through the details once more. Clan Macpherson had been a freighter of 9,940 tons’ burden owned by the Clan Line, one of the last of the great East Indies shipping companies. On her final voyage she’d had a crew of 140 men, made up of Indian Lascar ratings, British deck and engineer officers, and Royal Navy gunners to man her defensive armament. Her master, Captain Edward Gough, was a veteran of two previous sinkings, and had been decorated for his courage and seamanship. Her voyage halfway round the world from India to Liverpool was to have been a routine one, plied by thousands of ships during the war. After leaving Calcutta, she had sailed unescorted down the Bay of Bengal and across the Indian Ocean to Durban in South Africa. From there she had joined the first of a succession of convoys that were to take her up the coast of West Africa to Freetown, the staging port for ships heading across the Atlantic to the Americas or north to Gibraltar and home.
The final leg of that route, as part of convoy TS-37 between Takoradi in the Gold Coast and Freetown, should have been uneventful. The weather was fine, clear and overcast, and the 848-mile journey was expected to take five days at the convoy’s maximum speed of eight knots. The main focus of the U-boats was in the North Atlantic; it had been more than two years since a TS convoy had been struck. The escort for the nineteen merchantmen when they had left Takoradi on April 26 was little more than a token force — one corvette and three armed trawlers — and there was no air cover. Yet when the first ship was hit, when the first plume of water rose from a torpedo strike, the sight would have been sickeningly familiar to many of the seamen in the convoy. By that stage in the war the Clan Line had lost thirty-two ships — more than half its fleet — and more than 600 men, a rate repeated in the other shipping companies. Many of the seamen in TS-37 would have seen ships sunk in other convoys in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and would have endured the fear of not knowing whether they were to be next.