pipe. Two black hoses, each about as wide across as one of Mohr’s slim thighs, extended along the bottom and up to the anchored boat, whose heavy pumps Mohr realized caused most of the growling he heard. A pair of divers used one of the hoses like a vacuum cleaner; Mohr could see it sucking things in — sand, silt, pebbles, and any small artifacts. Around them, in an indentation in the seafloor, were the fragmentary ribs of an ancient shipwreck. Nearby, other divers operated cameras in clear plastic cases, where intact and broken pottery jars lay jumbled in a heap atop round stones that had once been the ship’s ballast. They made notes on white plastic clipboards that held no paper, with what looked like regular pencils. Different divers were using the other hose to gently spray water, not suck. They shifted the hose back and forth systematically, raising a cloud of bottom material that was thrown against a mesh backstop so no valuable finds would be lost. They were clearing an additional area of its overburden of sand and silt, to expose more of the wreck and the debris field strewn around it centuries or even millennia ago.
Mohr closed his eyes for a few seconds while he made his legs continue to kick. He burned the images he’d seen into his brain. The whole team would be doing this. Felix had told them sternly, before they left the minisub, that their lives and their mission depended on a long series of such small details, to support big lies.
Felix and the others broke the surface near the support boat. He let Meltzer do the talking.
“Can you get us a ride to the beach?” Meltzer yelled.
The teenager looked at the group in the water. As rehearsed, all of them had their dive masks up on their foreheads, and breathed the open air as they trod water, to seem less furtive. The northerly current that paralleled the shore brought them slowly, relentlessly, down the length of the boat.
“Who are you? I don’t know you.”
Felix assumed the kid was helping on the underwater dig because he was too young for the army. But he wasn’t too young to be suspicious of intruders.
Meltzer gave a false name, then pointed toward another dive-support boat nearly a mile to the south, whose noises the minisub had homed in on by sonar. Someone was dumping buckets of waste silt, already sifted through screens that would catch any artifacts, over the up-current side of that boat.
“We’re from NYU!” New York University, whose archaeology department sponsored digs in the Middle East. Meltzer had been to their Manhattan campus often enough to fake it if grilled.
“I said I don’t know you!”
“We’re supposed to be working the other site. Got mixed up in the silt from the river, went the wrong way, couldn’t find the boat, and got caught by the current. Before we knew it, we were carried too far to swim back easily. So we drifted toward you, to stay clear of the minefield.”
A stretch of beach between the two underwater dig locations was cordoned off by barbed wire, and seeded with mines and posted with conspicuous warnings. Just south of the other boat was one of Israel’s few rivers that hadn’t run dry for the summer by May, the Crocodile. The river was muddy and also polluted. To become disoriented in the outflow near its mouth, underwater, was plausible — barely.
“Don’t you have compasses?” the kid shouted back. He seemed argumentative, skeptical by nature.
Meltzer shrugged while he kicked with his fins. “I screwed up. The other guy tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen.” Meltzer gestured at Salih.
“Who are
“Professional divers hired by the dig. We’re from Ashqelon.” A port far down the coast, dozens of miles past distant Tel Aviv.
“Turkish?”
“Me, yes. The others are Portuguese, guest workers, stuck.” By the war. “The bald guy is also from NYU.” Klaus Mohr had shaved his head, and dyed his eyelashes black with waterproof face camouflage Felix had given him, to appear less Germanic. Meltzer and Salih did the talking to divert initial attention from Mohr.
“Look,” Meltzer said, “we’re exhausted, we need fresh tanks, and we might need to make another dive before nightfall.
Meltzer was mirroring the kid’s argumentative attitude. He’d told Felix that Israelis often spoke this way as a matter of course. Seeming defensive could ruin everything.
As if to punctuate Felix’s worries, an Israeli Navy fast-patrol boat roared by, a thousand yards farther out in the Med.
The kid disappeared without answering Meltzer. The boat’s pump and vacuum engines, mounted amidships on deck, suddenly stopped. Felix heard snatches of Hebrew, and static from a radio. Two men in their early twenties took the teenager’s place at the rail. They wore green combat fatigues, and aimed assault rifles at the eight men clustered in the water. “You,” one of the soldiers shouted to Meltzer. “We called both beach camps. They say they never heard of you, or anybody from NYU.” His accent was more noticeable than the kid’s, with a singsong quality that would have been lyrical if it hadn’t been so venomous.
Felix’s team had come unarmed except for their dive knives: Archaeologists and hired-hand diving assistants would not carry guns. To flee would surely draw fire from these soldiers, and a quick call to the patrol boat would put an end to the matter. The soldier who wasn’t talking seemed too trigger happy to Felix as it was. Meltzer would have to bluff it out, as he’d been scripted to in advance.
“Come on!” Meltzer shouted back in his best Bronx accent and rough New York City style. “There’s a goof on the roster, all the admin’s like chaos here. This whole thing’s a mad rush, you know that better than I do! Why do you think we had to use Turks and Portuguese?”
Meltzer meant the site work was all a mad rush, to telescope most of a summer’s worth of excavating into just a few weeks, between the recent end of northern Israel’s rainy season and the start of a German offensive whose precise timing wouldn’t be known to civilian researchers. Extra volunteers and workers made the site areas hectic. The professors running the project needed good data to publish or perish and get tenure — or not — and the grad students needed to finish their dissertations, to earn their doctorates — or not. Meltzer was pretending to be such a grad student, flown in from the U.S.
“Why weren’t you drafted?” the soldier questioned Meltzer. The draft had been reinstated in America because of the war.
Felix tried not to cringe. They hadn’t thought of this in the hurried role-playing rehearsals. Meltzer, in his mid-twenties, physically fit and in reality on active duty, needed an excuse.
“I have Crohn’s disease.”
Felix was impressed. The soldiers might just fall for this.
“A chronic inflammation of the small intestine! Bad news!.. Relax! It’s genes! You won’t catch it!”
“So how can you dive?”
This soldier just wouldn’t quit. Felix saw for himself that Klaus Mohr wasn’t exaggerating when he said wartime Israelis were totally paranoid.
“I wear a diaper.”
Felix laughed, almost giddy with relief. Meltzer had come up with the perfect answer — with an assault rifle aimed at his face. The soldier thought Felix was snickering.
“We all do on long or deep dives,” Salih threw in, which was true for both recreational and professional divers.
“One at a time,” the soldier said. He gestured with his muzzle toward the ladder from the water at the stern of the boat. He pulled back the charging handle of his rifle and let it snap forward, chambering a round. “First hand up your sacks.”
The team swam to the stern. Their bags with Mohr’s cases were passed to one of the boat’s other crewmen, someone tanned bronze, in his mid-fifties, potbellied but surprisingly strong. He moved with a sailor’s ease. Felix assumed from his proprietary air that he was the vessel’s owner. Meltzer climbed the ladder, followed by Salih, then Mohr, then Felix.
