"Explain this to me, Briars," I said.
"About paying for the expedition, you mean, or getting down to work? I just meant that we're a little underfunded, and so your offer of a salary for a couple of weeks helped us out here with our expenses quite a bit. I knew Hedi would fill in for me admirably. Your tour may keep us going for another month."
"You know that's not what I meant. I thought you were digging away on some ancient city site around here somewhere," I said. "You did say you had a project on the Gulf of Hammamet, didn't you? You meant on the gulf literally, I suppose."
He smiled. "Perhaps I should have said in, rather than on, the gulf. I didn't mean to mislead you. I guess I'm so deep into this project that it never occurred to me there was more than one possible interpretation of that phrase. We're looking for a shipwreck," he said.
"What kind of shipwreck?" I asked. "A Spanish galleon or something?"
"We're not entirely sure, but I hope much older than that," he replied. "We're looking for a ship that dates back at least two thousand years."
"Is that possible?" I exclaimed. "Wouldn't the ship have rotted away?"
"The ship itself might have, yes. But not necessarily the cargo. Not only is it possible to find it, we are going to find it. First, I might add." The others clapped and whistled.
"You're nuts," I said.
He laughed. "You're not the first woman to tell me that. My soon to be ex-wife, for example, was quite convinced of it. When are Sandy and Gus due up?" he asked Hedi.
Hedi looked at his watch. "About nine minutes," he said. I looked over the side to see two trails of bubbles from below. Khmais and Ron started pulling on their gear, checking and rechecking their tanks.
"You asked me the other day--was it only yesterday?--what I meant by sabotage," Briars said quietly to me as the others moved out of range. "Come over here for a minute."
I looked into the wheelhouse: There were maps and papers all over the place. "I think maybe you could use a little help with the housekeeping," I said.
"You should have seen it yesterday. We keep all our charts and records here. Someone got in: We lock up, but someone broke the padlock. The place was a shambles. Chart drawers open, and everything dumped on the floor, the scanning equipment wrecked. The fish--that's the piece of equipment that trails behind the boat when we're scanning and gives us the pictures--was severely damaged, maybe even permanently."
"Anything taken?"
"Hard to tell. The place was, and still is, a mess. But I don't think this was theft. As I keep saying, it was sabotage, designed to scare us off, or slow us down. After all, we leave the ship out at anchor so we don't have to pay marina fees, and whoever it was would have to get out to it. It wouldn't be a casual, spur-of-the-moment kind of smash and grab. I'll bet I'm not making any sense, am I? Why don't I start at the beginning."
"Please do," I said.
"Good. Back to the beginning. I first got interested in this part of the world in my university days. I came over under the auspices of UNESCO to work at Carthage in the early seventies, along with a boyhood friend of mine named Peter Groves. Peter and I had been chums since we were about seven. I think it's because we were both wimpy guys, lousy at sports, and good at school, the kind of lads the other kids despise. I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was taking a general arts course at the university and had taken a course in archaeology, but nothing much had piqued my interest. I'd say Peter was about the same. I can't even remember how we got the job. I think Peter's father knew somebody who knew somebody; that kind of thing. So while our friends at school were spending their summer cleaning pools or flipping burgers, Peter and I headed for Carthage. Revenge of the nerds, they'd call it now.
"In any event, a whole new world opened up for Peter and me. I loved the job. I was a dig assistant, and worked for some very good people, and I found I had a real feel for it. Peter didn't like it nearly as much as I did: He thought it was boring, actually, while I found it endlessly fascinating. What we did agree on were the weekends. It was paradise. We sailed, swam, learned to scuba dive, met European and Arab girls.
"There was an old Arab who was working on the project as a laborer, and he kind of adopted Peter and me. He was awfully good to us--took us to meet his daughter and her family, made sure we ate properly, which considering our student status, was something. As with most kids, I'm not sure we appreciated him at the time. But oh, what stories that man had to tell! He claimed that in his younger days he'd been a sponge diver, and that he'd once seen the most marvelous sight: He said he'd found a graveyard of amphorae guarded by the god of the sea, who, as it turns out, was made of gold. We thought he was just kidding us, but the old man insisted that the story he was telling us was true, that the amphorae and the god himself were still down there in the depths.
"We asked around, and found that the old man--his name was Zoubeeir--had indeed been a sponge diver in his youth. At first we put the tale about the golden god and the graveyard of amphorae down to the Martini Law. Do you know what that is?"
"No, but I could probably guess the general idea," I replied.
"The Martini Law says that every ten meters you go down--that's about thirty-two, thirty-three feet--has the same effect as a double martini. You'll understand that when you're working at, say, a hundred and twenty feet, the Martini Law has significant impact. The more technical term is nitrogen narcosis, what they call the rapture of the deep, staying down too deep for too long. Bit of a nutter was how Peter put it at first.
"But the story seemed to worm its way into Peter's soul. "˜What if there really is a golden statue down there?' he kept saying to me. "˜It's possible, isn't it? Gold is essentially inert. It would stand up under water virtually forever. And the graveyard of amphorae? Doesn't that sound like a shipwreck to you? The wooden ship might be gone, but the amphorae that held the cargo would last for a very, very long time. Maybe we should go and look for it.' Or "˜I've looked into this, and more shipwrecks have been found based on this kind of anecdotal information than on all the fancy technology in the world,' he would say. And there is a certain amount of truth in that. The Mahdia wreck, which was found toward the south end of the gulf here, was originally discovered by sponge divers. So was the Uluburun wreck off Turkey. Ready for another mineral water?
"That summer was a defining experience for both of us. I went home, changed courses to get into archaeology and eventually got my doctorate--my thesis was on Carthaginian shipping and trade--found myself a teaching job at UCLA, got married, and had a couple of kids. Peter dropped out of the university, got married, too, had a daughter, and went into business for himself, manufacturing plastic bottles, I think. Made lots of money at it, much more than I did as a professor of archaeology, that's for sure. We kind of lost touch. Just Christmas cards and things like that as contact. Then one day, he packed it all in, the company, the marriage, the works. He became--and he and I might quibble about the terminology--a treasure hunter. He'd say a marine salvage expert. He started looking for sunken treasure. He had some success right away, found a Spanish ship in the Caribbean, loaded with gold. Trouble was, he ended up in endless litigation over ownership of it. So he hired himself a fancy lawyer, and went on looking for shipwrecks. His initial success, regardless of all the legal problems, ensured that he was always able to get investors. His passion was sunken treasure, any sunken treasure, but I think there was a special place in his heart for Zoubeeir's amphorae graveyard and the statue of gold. He tracked down Zoubeeir, who was now blind, and essentially senile, and his daughter and son-in-law, and found out that Zoubeeir used to dive in the Gulf of Hammamet.