The Covenant of Genesis

before sinking to the sea floor.

‘What did I bloody tell you?’ Chase’s voice said in her ringing ears. ‘Don’t go off on your own!’

‘Jesus, Eddie!’ said Nina, caught somewhere between fear, relief and anger. ‘Are you trying to kill me? You almost blew out my eardrums!’

‘You’d rather that thing’d bitten a hole in your suit?’ He swam past her, the speargun in one hand. ‘Big bugger, though. Must be twelve feet long, easily. Although a power-head was probably overkill.’ He loaded another explosive-tipped spear, then tugged the severed tail end of the eel from the hole.

Nina breathed deeply in an attempt to calm herself. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting rid of this thing. Don’t want floating shark-bait right where you’re working.’ He clipped the gun to his suit’s belt, then picked up the moray’s other half. ‘Seen this?’ he asked, waggling its head in Nina’s face. ‘It’s got two sets of jaws, one inside the other. Like the Alien.’

‘Just get rid of it!’ said Nina, cringing in revulsion.

‘So much for the search for knowledge,’ Chase said, turning the eel to face him and moving its mouth like some awful ventriloquist’s dummy as he spoke. ‘And she calls herself a scientist!’ The two pieces of the moray trailing from his hands, he swam off into the gloom.

‘Are you okay, Nina?’ asked Gozzi as he arrived, Bobak behind him.

‘Super fine,’ Nina growled.

‘At least it was not a shark, yes?’ Bobak said hopefully.

‘Yes, thank God. Although I have a horrible feeling I’m going to have to put up with a load of stupid eel jokes when we get back to the ship.’

‘I’d never do that,’ Chase said from somewhere out of sight. ‘Besides, I’ve got a DVD I want to watch tonight.’

‘What is it?’ Nina sighed, bracing herself for the punchline.

‘An Eel-ing comedy!’

If Nina could have put a hand to her forehead, she would have. Instead, she groaned, then composed herself before turning back to the job in hand.

After she photographed the ruin, the team carefully lifted the fallen bricks. It was a slow process, Chase offering increasingly frequent reminders about the dwindling amount of daylight remaining.

But it paid off.

‘Look at that!’ Nina exclaimed. The collapsed roof removed and some of the sediment cleared away with the small vacuum pump, new treasures were revealed. ‘We’ve definitely struck gold.’

‘That’s not gold,’ said Chase. ‘Looks like copper to me.’

‘Metaphorical gold, I mean.’ She lifted the first object. It was a sheet of copper about ten inches long, almost as wide at one end but much narrower at the other. It had obviously been crushed when the roof fell, but she guessed it had originally been conical in shape. She turned it over. ‘It looks like a funnel.’

‘Wow, kitchen utensils? That’s even more exciting than a net,’ said Chase.

Nina snorted and handed it to him to put into a sample bag, then looked at the item Bobak was holding. ‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’ It was a clay cylinder - or rather part of one, one end roughly broken off. The other had a hole roughly the width of Nina’s little finger at its centre. The cylinder was marked with narrow, closely spaced grooves running round its length. Bobak poked at the little hole, tipping sand out of it. ‘To hold a candle?’

Gozzi guided the pump’s nozzle along what appeared to be a stout wooden pole. ‘Look here!’ he cried. More of the pole was exposed as he moved, revealing it to be six feet long, ten, twelve . . . ‘I think this is a mast!’

‘It can’t be,’ said Bobak. ‘The site is too old. Maybe the boat sank more recently.’

‘So how did it end up inside a building that’s been underwater for over a hundred thousand years?’ Nina asked. No suggestions were forthcoming. She ran her fingertips through the sediment, finding the flat face of a plank. Probing further, she felt its edge. She followed it, trying to work out the length of the buried vessel.

Something moved when she touched it.

‘Found something?’ Chase asked. ‘Not another eel, is it?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Nina pulled her new find free of the muck. It was a clay tablet, roughly the size of a slim hardback novel. One corner had been broken off, but apart from some chipping and blotches of microbial growths the rest of it was intact. Several lines of text had been inscribed into its surface, but the elegantly curved script was completely unknown to her. ‘Gregor, Marco, look at this. Do either of you recognise the language?’ Neither did.

‘Tick tock,’ said Chase, pointing towards the surface. The level of illumination had visibly fallen. ‘We need to get back upstairs.’

Reluctantly, Nina put the tablet into the sample bag. ‘Mark the spot,’ she told Gozzi. ‘We’re definitely coming back here tomorrow.’

Chase entered the lab. ‘You coming for dinner? It’s after eight, and I’m starving!’

‘Shush,’ said Nina, flapping a hand. ‘I’m on the phone.’

‘Is that Eddie?’ asked an Australian voice from the speakerphone on Nina’s workbench. ‘How are you, mate?’

‘Hey, Matt,’ Chase replied, recognising their friend and colleague Matt Trulli. ‘I’m fine. How about you? I thought you were going to the South Pole or something.’

‘Yeah, in a week. Just got a few last-minute glitches to fix on my new sub; I’m waiting for the spare parts to arrive. Good job I caught the problem now - it’d be a bugger to fix in the Antarctic!’

‘I thought I’d take advantage of our tame nautical expert,’ Nina explained to Chase. ‘I was just asking him about the boat we found.’

‘Well, I looked at that photo you sent, and it’s definitely a lateen rig,’ said Trulli. ‘Triangular sail, invented by the Arabs. Something like the sixth century.’

‘BC or AD?’ Nina asked.

‘AD. Why, how old’s the site where you found it?’

‘Older.’

Trulli made an appreciative noise. ‘Another world-shattering discovery by Dr Nina Wilde, is it?’

‘Could be,’ said Nina, smiling. ‘Thanks for your help, Matt - I appreciate it.’

‘No worries - I’ll look in on you in New York when I get back. Oh, and consider this my RSVP to the wedding, okay?’

‘Will do.’

‘See you,’ said Chase as Trulli disconnected. ‘So, dinner?’

‘In a minute,’ Nina said, returning to her work. She held the clay tablet under a large illuminated magnifying lens, using a metal pick to remove the algae that a wash in distilled water had failed to shift. One particularly recalcitrant piece resisted even the pick; she used a spray can of compressed air to blast it with a fine astringent powder before switching back to her original tool. This time, the offending lump came free. ‘What’re they cooking?’

‘Eels.’ Nina shot him a dirty look. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Pretty well. I’ve almost got it cleaned up.’ She indicated the expensive digital SLR camera beside the waterproof camera she had used on the dive, a cable connecting it to her laptop. ‘I already sent some underwater pictures back to New York by satellite, but I thought it’d be easier for someone to identify the language if it wasn’t covered with crap.’

‘So you really don’t know? Guess you’d better withdraw that application to be the full-time boss of the IHA.’

‘It might be easier if I did.’

‘Really?’ Chase put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Hey, I was only joking. I thought you wanted the job.’

‘I do. But there’s just been so much bureaucratic and political garbage, especially over the last couple of months. It’s like everybody’s decided to gang up on me at once. Assholes.’ She let out a sigh.

‘I know what you mean. Every time I go through US customs now, I get the third degree from the immigration officers. Doesn’t matter that I’ve got a Green Card and a UN work permit - they treat me like the bloody shoe bomber!’