full-on shipwreck. But the clue to that didn’t come from the beach excavation. It came from somewhere completely unexpected, from one of the most amazing places we’ve ever discovered, about a thousand miles due west from here.’
Everyone in the room was silent, riveted. Jack clicked again, and the image changed to a page of ancient manuscript, showing lines of precise writing, many of the letters recognizably Greek. ‘This was found three months ago in the lost library of the Roman emperor Claudius at Herculaneum, in Italy. Jeremy Haverstock’s been in charge of the restoration work. As each new text is unrolled and put through X-ray fluorescence, he’s sending the digital images to Professor Dillen at Cambridge for translation. This one had Dillen speechless. In his view it’s the most important new discovery of an ancient text ever, full stop. He thinks it’s a previously unknown verse by Homer, possibly containing eyewitness details of the end of Troy. That makes it a truly fantastic find for anyone interested in the Trojan War. He thinks it’s a lost part of the Trojan epic cycle called the Ilioupersis, meaning the destruction of Troy. And this particular image shows the lines of verse that really excited me.’ He pulled out a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and opened it. ‘Here’s Dillen’s translation.’ Look closely now: far out to sea
From the isle of Tenedos
The lion-prowed ship of the King of Mycenae
Mast raised, sail spread, wind-filled,
Dark wave singing loudly about the stern
Brings tidings of home-strife
To Agamemnon, unheeding, sole of purpose, back-turned, war-bent.
Too late. Already I feel it. The west wind sharpens.
Jack looked up. Everyone was staring at him, stunned. Costas raised his hand. ‘If that’s the ship we’re after, I thought galleys didn’t sink. No cargo, limited ballast. Wrecked galleys disperse as flotsam. That’s why we hardly ever find them.’
Jack nodded. ‘But this time it’s different. Wait for the next two lines, the lines that put the fire under me.’ He recited from memory: The ship, booty-laden, weighed down with gold,
Drives too hard down falling waves, and is no more.
There was a collective gasp. ‘ “ Weighed down with gold ”,’ one of the crewmen repeated, astonished. ‘What exactly does that mean? What are we looking for?’
Jack glanced at his watch. ‘First, Dr Lanowski.’
The crewman kept his hand up. ‘But what are our chances?’
Jack looked at the man, a new member of the submersibles team. He paused, then replied. ‘If you let your imagination lead you, then everything can lock together. You have to take a gamble, and believe in yourself. And this place, the Trojan War, a shipwreck of Agamemnon? Believing all that’s a big leap of faith, but it’s one I’ve taken. And I know that if I’m on the wrong track, one of you will let me know. Our chances? I think this is as good as it gets.’
‘With a small dose of luck,’ Costas murmured.
Jack tapped his watch. ‘And now for some hard science.’ He gestured to Lanowski, and then quickly walked over and sat beside Costas. ‘Here goes,’ Costas whispered to him.
Lanowski got up, dumped his overhead sheets on the table and turned round, his eyes feverish with excitement. He cleared his throat. ‘Detailed analysis of air-gun lithoseismic profiles in the north Aegean basin shows fault structures trending north-east to south-west, with the dominant structure apparently an extension of the North Anatolian fault. That’s the one across northern Turkey that causes all the earthquakes.’ He peered over his glasses at the audience, then wiped the sweat off his forehead. He gave a lopsided grin. ‘Y’all with me?’
‘So far so good,’ Costas whispered to Jack. ‘Didn’t understand a word of it.’
‘Wait for it,’ Jack whispered back.
‘ Y’all with me? What’s with that?’ Costas whispered.
‘My fault, I think,’ Jack whispered. ‘Told him to be jokey.’
Lanowski cleared his throat again, and aimed a laser pointer at the screen. ‘This is the tectonic map superimposed on the bathymetric map. As you can see, we’re over the continental platform, here.’ He aimed the pointer down. ‘The platform shows no significant internal deformation, but the slopes on the edge are shaped by marginal faults. As you can see, within the basin, higher vertical throws occur on marginal faults bordering the intermediate horst structure, with pronounced shear zones.’
Costas nudged Jack. ‘Oh-oh.’
Lanowski peered over his glasses again. He glared at Costas, then spoke deliberately slowly. ‘An angular unconformity occurs within the Plio-Pleistocene sequence linked to uplifted and tilted neotectonic blocks and anticlinal hinges.’
‘Here we go,’ Costas whispered.
Jack shot his hand up. ‘Jacob, that puts us in the picture brilliantly. What you’re saying is that we’re not above fault structures here, but just north-west of us is an active zone that might produce localized instability.’
Lanowski looked pleased. ‘You got it. You understood. The structural architecture shows a complex strike-slip zone, on a dextral north-east to south-west line.’
‘Exactly,’ Jack said, getting up quickly when he saw Lanowski picking up and shuffling his overhead transparency sheets. ‘Earthquakes. That’s what you mean. Earthquakes. And what we really want to know is, could that have happened here in 1200 BC? Enough to sink a ship?’
Lanowski held up a transparency sheet. ‘I’ve got a whole sequence here modelling the subduction and strike-slip zones. I had to draw them by hand. It was too complex for the computer.’
‘ Too complex for the computer,’ Costas whispered, putting his head in his hands.
Jack looked around. ‘Anyone wants to go down to Dr Lanowski’s lab afterwards for a full exposition, queue up at the end of the briefing. I won’t be far behind.’ He turned to Lanowski. ‘Right now, we’ve only got five minutes. I know you’re bursting to tell us. Your main discovery. What you were so excited about earlier.’
Lanowski looked defiant for a moment, holding his sheet covered with a mass of red scribbles, then he sighed, nodded and put it down. He clicked the laptop, changing the screen to a new map. ‘Okay. This is a bathymetric and topographical map showing the Troad, the peninsula of Troy. You can see the Dardanelles to the north bounded by the southern edge of the Gallipoli peninsula, and to the west the little island of Tenedos and our location. What I want you to focus on is the plain in front of Troy, to the north-west, what Homer called the plain of Ilion. It’s an alluvial plain, watered by the river the ancients called the Scamander. Here’s what we think it looked like three thousand years ago.’ He clicked again, and the image changed dramatically, showing the shoreline much closer to Troy, in the shape of a basin.
Jack aimed his own laser pointer at the shoreline close to the citadel. ‘The site of our excavation fifteen years ago.’
‘Right,’ Lanowski said. ‘You may think it looks like the ideal harbour, protected and close to the walls of the citadel, but you’d be wrong. The actual harbour of Troy was several kilometres to the west, on the Aegean coast south of the entrance to the Dardanelles, here.’ He pointed to it. ‘There were two reasons for this. One, the alluvial plain of the Scamander opens out on to the Dardanelles, not on to the Aegean Sea. Sailing ships coming up from Greece or Egypt would have had a hell of a time beating up against the current coming out of the Dardanelles. Two, the floodplain would have been shallow, only a couple of metres deep. Too shallow for a fully laden merchant ship.’
‘But deep enough for a rowed galley,’ Jack said.
‘And rowed galleys could easily have made their way around the headland into the Dardanelles,’ Lanowski added, stumbling over the words in his excitement.
‘You’re talking about the ships of the Greeks, the ships of Agamemnon?’ Costas asked.
‘Bingo,’ Lanowski said awkwardly, looking at Jack and then at Costas, letting out a nervous laugh. He was flushed with excitement, and his hands were shaking slightly as he shuffled his notes. ‘You asked me to give a rundown of the sedimentology. Here goes.’ He clicked the computer again, and the same map outline remained on the screen but with different colours and textures. He cleared his throat. ‘The sedimentary strata begin at the bottom with Eocene turbidites and limestones, continue upward with Oligocene-Lower Miocene detritial rocks and andesitic volcanoclastics, and end with loosely consolidated sandstones of the Upper Miocene-Pliocene. Each depositional sequence consists of a lower mainly parallel-stratified sub-unit, and an upper oblique to sigmoid-
