Jack hastily withdrew his hands, self-consciously brushing off a few coins. “Remarkable find,” he murmured. “We need to get these cleaned and into plastic sleeves.”
“Not all pirates were bad, were they?” Costas continued. “I mean, Robin Hood was a kind of pirate, and he took from the rich and gave to the poor. And you can’t tell me that all your Howard nautical ancestors were goody-goody. There must have been the odd Blackbeard among them, right? You must have just a little bit of pirate in you.”
“I like the sound of giving to the poor. That’s where all those gold bars outside are going. As for this stuff, getting it into museums in the countries where it belongs is going to enrich far more lives than just my own.”
“You’re telling me that kneeling there up to your elbows in gold, you didn’t just slightly reach out to your inner pirate?”
Jack looked around at the room, at the treasures he had been holding, suddenly awash with excitement at what they had discovered, at the wonders he would soon be able to reveal to the world. He turned to Costas, his eyes glinting. “My inner pirate? What do you think?”
Costas slapped him on the back. “I think you’re a hopeless case.”
Jack put his arm around his friend, tired but elated. “You know me. I’m just an archaeologist.”
Epilogue
Three days later, Jack sat on the shore of the island, watching the waves lap the rocks and the evening sunlight cast a rosy hue on the surface of the sea. The last of the naval team who had been working in the U-boat pen had departed half an hour before, leaving one remaining Zodiac for him to drive out with the others when they were ready. Seaquest was holding position half a mile offshore, flanked by warships from the anti-piracy force, one a frigate of the Royal Canadian Navy, the other a US Navy destroyer. They were a reassuring presence, security against any unwanted incursion while the pen was being cleared. Once the uranium had been removed and the Ahnenerbe chamber emptied, the plan was for a naval demolition team to blow the entrance and collapse the cavern. The residual radiation levels in the U-boat were unlikely to pose a long-term hazard, but the site was a war grave, the last resting place of those who had died here in 1945. There was every prospect of the islands becoming the front line in a new war, not against pirates but against Iran and its terrorist affiliates, and the Yemeni and Somali governments had agreed that the archipelago should be a no-go zone until the situation improved.
Jack watched three figures make their way over the rocky ground from the helipad that had been cleared above the cavern entrance. Rebecca and Jeremy had arrived on Seaquest two days before to help with clearing the Ahnenerbe chamber, due to start tomorrow. The Lynx from Seaquest had dropped them on the island a few minutes ago, and had then clattered off back to the ship. Trailing behind them was a third figure in familiar Hawaiian beach gear, his left arm trussed up in a sling and carrying something on his back. Jack smiled when he saw them, and raised his hand in greeting. They came over and sat down around him, Costas dropping his sack on a flat rock beside the sea. “I had the catering people on Seaquest make me up one of those portable barbecues, with real charcoal. This place isn’t exactly a beach, but it’ll do.”
“What are we eating?” Jack said.
Costas reached into the sack, pulled out the foil barbecue tray, and then a wet bag. “Fish,” he said, spilling the contents onto the rock. “Red mullet, wrasse, sea bass. Jeremy speared them this afternoon.”
Rebecca stared at Jeremy in mock disbelief. “I didn’t know about that. No way. Jeremy couldn’t hit a tin can in front of his nose.”
“Yep,” Costas said, pulling out a box of matches and a stack of paper plates. “This afternoon while you and your dad were busy, I drove him around to the reef at the back of the island and showed him the fish identification chart, and an hour later we were on our way back with the cooler full.”
“What was it you said a few days ago?” Jeremy said, eyeing Rebecca. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”
“I still don’t believe it. I challenge you tomorrow. We’ll catch lunch for the entire team.”
“You’re on.”
Jack smiled and turned to Costas, inspecting his swollen eye and the cuts and bruises on his face. “You sure you’re okay being out of sick bay?”
Costas dropped a lit match into the tray, and stirred the charcoal with a stick. “I checked myself out. No way was I staying cooped up in there. How about you?”
“My back hurts from bouncing around in that Zodiac, and my right knee is playing up. Nothing that won’t be fixed as soon as I’m back in the water again.”
“Let’s face it, you two are getting a bit old for this kind of thing,” Rebecca said, taking another stick and poking at the fire. “No offense, but you know what I mean. Maybe it’s time you passed the baton to the younger generation.”
Jack turned and looked at Costas, and they both stared at Rebecca. “Maybe it’s time the younger generation went back and finished school,” Jack said.
“I didn’t mean the diving, I meant all the commando stuff,” Rebecca continued, looking at them deadpan. “You could delegate that to your up-and-coming protégés — Jeremy, for example.”
“Whoa,” Jeremy said. “Spearfishing is one thing, wielding a Kalashnikov is another. I’m an epigrapher, not Indiana Jones.”
“Long may it stay that way,” Jack said. “Without your expertise with the Phoenician inscriptions, we’d be telling a different story.”
Costas put the grill on the tray and sat beside it. “So, Jack. We found our gold after all. We made up for what we lost on Clan Macpherson.”
“What you lost, you mean. I didn’t try to defuse that torpedo.”
“You weren’t ever going to let it fall into the hands of Landor, were you?”
“It’s true. You made it easier for me.”
“So what’s the plan with this new haul?”
“There are some formalities to get through with the Yemeni and Somali authorities, but nobody’s going to claim ownership or stand in the way of the plan I’d envisaged for the Clan Macpherson gold. The South African government has agreed to take the bars and rebrand them under UN ownership, and our UN rep has already secured approval for a new agency specifically to disburse the funds. We’re looking at half going to West Africa, to alleviate child poverty and for disease prevention, and half going to the Horn of Africa, to the coastal communities of Somalia, for development aid. How does that sound?”
“Pretty amazing, Dad,” Rebecca said. “I’d like to be part of that.”
“That kind of aid in Somalia might help to wean young men away from piracy,” Costas said.
“Not just piracy, but the lure of the extremists,” Jack replied. “This coast is a prime recruiting ground, with so many young men unemployed and directionless. I had a long discussion about it with the naval force commander yesterday. It’ll be a challenge to get the balance right, but we envisage a combination of poverty alleviation, funding schools and educational programs, and seeding economic initiatives, especially those focused on rebooting traditional subsistence activities. None of it will work without effective policing of the offshore territorial zone to exclude the foreign trawlers that have nearly destroyed the local fish stocks, the main factor that has driven the men to piracy. We want to see the patrol boats policing against outsiders, not against the Somalis themselves. That gold will help to extinguish piracy along the coast.”