clues.’
‘You mean it’s more exciting, Jack. Plunging into the unknown. It keeps the adrenalin pumping. Which is when Jack Howard does his best thinking. Makes the connections. Joins the threads.’
Jack grinned, and nodded. ‘Okay. You know me too well. But if the sea conditions allow a twenty-minute sonar run during the briefing, we’ll do that too. It can work the other way round. The sonar data this morning meant we knew the wreck was Byzantine, so when we did the dive I was able to concentrate elsewhere, beyond the obvious. I might not have seen that shape.’
‘If it was a shape.’
‘I trust my instinct.’
Costas gestured over the channel towards the entrance to the Dardanelles. ‘There’s a lot of war debris down there, Jack. I knew about the carnage of the 1915 land campaign at Gallipoli, but not the scale of the naval losses. Macalister showed me the British Admiralty wreck map. The approaches to the Dardanelles are littered with them. Battleships, destroyers, submarines, gunboats; British, French, Turkish. Some of them were salvaged, but there’s plenty still down there.’
‘And debris from a previous war,’ Jack murmured. ‘A war more than three thousand years earlier.’
‘You wish.’
‘I know.’ Jack stared hard at Costas, his eyes intense, then his face creased into a smile. ‘You remember your first ever archaeological dig, fifteen years ago? Over there, on the plain of Troy?’
‘I remember three weeks sweltering in a dust bowl, wondering what on earth I was doing there,’ Costas replied. ‘Yeah, I remember. Like yesterday. I was a submersibles engineer with the US navy at the Izmir NATO base. You were some English guy fresh from a stint in your navy about to do an archaeology doctorate. You were a diver. A passionate diver. That’s where we clicked. You said there was a fabulous shipwreck waiting to be discovered, just up the coast. What you didn’t tell me was that it was on dry land.’
Jack grinned. ‘But we did find the ancient beach of Troy, and the remains of war galleys and an encampment. The first big leap forward since the days of Schliemann. Just the two of us, chasing a dream. It captured the imagination of the world. It got the funding we needed, and launched the International Maritime University. It got us where we are today.’
Costas grinned. ‘And if it hadn’t been for my guys doing the technology and the hard science, your dreams would never have got anywhere.’
Jack nodded. ‘A team effort. I mean it. Not just two of us now, but the entire IMU team.’ He stared out at the horizon again. ‘You remember that evening at the end of the excavation, when we sat over there above the ancient harbour of Troy, having a few beers? I said I’d make it up to you for all the dust and heat. I said one day we’d be back, with a state-of-the-art research ship, all the submersibles and gadgets you ever wanted, searching the sea bed here for a real shipwreck. An underwater shipwreck.’
Costas gripped Jack’s shoulder. ‘That’s why I’m still your dive buddy. Chasing that dream.’
‘A pretty awesome dream,’ Jack said.
‘What are you thinking?’ Costas asked.
‘I was wondering whether we could do it again,’ Jack murmured.
‘Sweltering in a dust bowl? No thanks.’
Jack shook his head. ‘I mean, whether we could do what Schliemann did. Chase the really big dream. He came out here with huge personal wealth, and was able to do pretty well what he wanted. For the first time since then, a team is here again with fantastic resources. We’re not bogged down by bureaucracy. We don’t have to answer to sceptical academics. We can ask the really big questions. Search for the really big answers.’
‘You mean find the really big gold.’ Costas grinned.
‘The priceless treasure. The truth.’
Costas paused, then nodded sagely and punched Jack on the shoulder, sending him reeling sideways. ‘Okay. I’ll go with that. To me, you’ve always been Lucky Jack. Nothing’s changed.’ He turned to walk back. ‘See you in the briefing room in twenty minutes?’
Jack righted himself, feeling his shoulder. ‘Thank God you’re my friend, not my enemy.’
‘See what I mean? I’ll look after you. At school in New York City, they called me Achilles.’
‘Say that again.’
‘Achilles. You know. The Trojan War. This place. Famous Greek hero.’
‘I know who Achilles was.’
Costas pulled up his pantaloons and looked up at him defiantly. Jack reached over and gently pushed Costas’ aviator sunglasses back up where they had slipped down his nose, and then straightened the absurd hat. ‘There we go,’ he said soothingly. ‘Achilles.’
‘Right on.’ Costas put his hand gingerly on Jack’s shoulder. ‘Twenty minutes?’
‘Roger that.’
Jack watched Costas go and then turned back to reel in his wooden target. He would wait out here on deck until the ship had stabilized. He looked to Gallipoli, and then to the shoreline of Troy, and thought of the two wars. He had visited the Gallipoli beaches a few days before, a bleak, beautiful place where the eroded ravines were still full of bleached bones and the rusted detritus of battle, where life seemed only tentatively to have taken hold again after almost a century. The plain of Troy must once have been like that too, and even after three thousand years it still seemed burdened by its place in history, as if the river Scamander still watered its shores with grief.
Jack had read the diaries and letters of young soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915, men who thrilled at being within sight of Troy, the plain where Hector and Achilles had fought before the fabled walls. Those young men had not been taught the truth of war, a truth that Homer surely knew but could barely bring himself to say, a truth those soldiers only learned in fleeting final moments as they rose above the parapet, bayonets fixed, on those shell-torn escarpments. Jack remembered the first lines he had ever learned of Homer, the ones Professor Dillen had insisted he memorize before all others. He whispered them into the wind now: Heroes sink to rise no more
Tides of blood drench Scamander’s shore
No rest, no respite, till the shades descend;
Till darkness, or till death, shall cover all:
Let the war bleed, and let the mighty fall.
He braced himself as the bow of Seaquest II swung eastward, towards Troy. The swell heaved under the ship and he felt as if he were riding the upwelling that had once pushed foam-flecked galleys towards those shores, towards fabled Ilion, bristling with spears and shields, rumbling with bellowing rage. For a moment he yearned again for that sword, the one in his dream, to raise it high, to lead war-bent men of Mycenae to their fate, to see what it was like to be their captain, to see what it was that drove the king of kings to trounce the rules of war and lead his warriors to do their worst. Jack thought of the present day, of those he knew and loved below the walls of Troy now, of his daughter Rebecca, and he felt a strange foreboding, as if his imagination were leading him too close to a dark reality, a reality that had frightened even Homer.
He pushed back from the railing and shook the thought from his mind. He was an archaeologist, not a warrior. The ship was stable at last, the lateral thrusters engaged. He remembered Rebecca’s text message, that single tantalising word: Paydirt. For years he had dreamed of taking up where Schliemann had left off, of revealing the truth of this place once and for all. And Costas had been right. It was a treasure hunt. He took a deep breath. Archaeology was a game of chance, but today, on this day, the odds might just be stacked in their favour. He slung the holster and walked determinedly across the foredeck towards the briefing room. He was coursing with excitement, remembering what Costas had called him, mouthing the words to himself as he always did. Lucky Jack.
2
P rofessor James Dillen shifted on the foam mat and stretched out his right arm, relieving the persistent ache that had been developing in his elbow all morning. He was thrilled to be here, but he was beginning to realize that archaeology came at a price. All those years he had spent in libraries and his study in Cambridge had given him the
