Fifteen minutes later they were strapped into the Aquapods, with the Plexiglas domes closed over them, running through the electronics and cross-checking with each other. The Aquapods were hanging from davits on either side of the ship’s internal docking bay, facing towards the stern, and were lashed down to stop them swaying dangerously with the roll and pitch of the ship. Even so, Jack was feeling distinctly uncomfortable, a combination of queasiness and his dislike of being cooped up inside submersibles, especially ones that only just accommodated his tall frame. He knew it would all change once they were in the water, when the small size of the Aquapods made them feel almost like a diving suit. He saw Costas glance over at him, and heard a crackle in the intercom. ‘Hold on, Jack. Only a couple of minutes until the ship’s under way, once the control team have told the bridge we’re secure.’
The Aquapods swayed close together and Jack forgot himself for a moment, as he saw Costas in his full glory. He laughed out loud.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ Jack shook his head. ‘Nothing at all.’
Costas was still wearing his white overalls, but it was the huge sombrero hat that made him look so garish, sitting in a state-of-the-art submersible about to go a hundred metres to the sea floor, dressed like a gaucho on the range in a very bad Western.
Costas glared at him through his dome. ‘You’ll wish you had one if we have to bob about on the surface in the blazing sun.’
‘Nobody’s going to catch me bobbing about on the surface,’ Jack replied firmly, swallowing hard as the swell made the ship roll again. ‘If Seaquest II misses us, I’ll be waiting on the sea floor. On solid ground.’
The ship’s screws churned under them and the deck began to vibrate. ‘Thank God for that,’ Jack murmured, as the ship stabilized. ‘How long have we got?’
‘The current running from the Dardanelles has strengthened a fraction since Macalister briefed us. It’s between fifty and ninety metres’ depth, like an underwater river. Lanowski’s modelled it, and done a best-fit for where Seaquest II should drop us. When we go, we go down like lead, full ballast. Macalister’s just told me we’ve got about twenty minutes till we’re green-lighted. So relax and enjoy the ride. You think about the treasure we’re going to find. I’m thinking about another one of those excellent cocktails the Turkish cook made me at the excavation house at Troy last night. What I came on holiday for.’
‘I meant to tell you,’ Jack said. ‘I was on the phone to James while the mine was being cleared. You remember Hugh, of course, don’t you?’
‘Great guy. I helped him have a go at diving in the IMU test pool. You were away with Maria somewhere. We got on together like a house on fire. You’d think we were chalk and cheese.’
‘A bit like you and Jeremy.’
‘So what’s the score?’
‘Hugh has opened up quite a bit about the Second World War. Very emotional. A bad experience in a concentration camp. James said he kept his cool when Hugh was talking, stiff upper lip and all that, but when he was speaking to me James had a real tremor in his voice, had to stop for a moment. Never heard him like that before. I think it really hit him, all those years he’d spent with Hugh as a boy, not knowing what Hugh was struggling with every minute of every day.’
‘I don’t know how those guys who were there could handle it,’ Costas replied quietly. ‘My uncle, the Monuments Man, said there was quite a lot of killing of SS at those camps after liberation, American and British soldiers encountering guards. Can you blame them? Some of the worst guards were women. Whenever I see those pictures of Belsen and Buchenwald, it makes me wish I could have pulled a trigger. When I was a kid in New York, we used to go up to Canada for holidays, to a forest wilderness where there were some older Germans, ex PoWs who’d gone there to work as loggers after being released by the Soviets in the fifties. A couple of them were unreconstructed Nazis, Waffen SS who’d disguised themselves as Wehrmacht for the Soviets. Looking back on it, I don’t see why they should still have been allowed to live.’
‘If they hadn’t been, you wouldn’t have met them. Seen that they were real human beings. Seen how that could happen.’
‘So did Hugh open up about this treasure story?’
‘James was letting him tell it in his own way, in his own time.’ Jack replied. ‘He’s worried about Hugh’s health. Thinks he’s putting on a brave face for Rebecca but is much frailer than last time. He’s calling me again after the dive for an update. I did tell him what Maurice found this morning.’
‘Huh?’
‘You didn’t hear?’
‘Up to my neck in the innards of an Aquapod all morning, I’m afraid.’
‘Another statue. Opposite the one Jeremy and Rebecca found.’
‘ Two statues.’
‘Almost like gate guardians,’ Jack said. ‘And he’s been in another tunnel. Just can’t keep him out of them. This time it’s the one the Austrians working at Troy a few years ago found leading from the citadel out to a spring beyond the walls. He got almost a hundred yards into it. Says he thinks it may lead to the chamber he believes is at the end of the passageway with the statues. He had one of our halogen dive torches with him and said he could see a long way ahead, well under the citadel. He got stuck.’
‘Well, that makes a change.’
‘Said it needs a more lithe, athletic form.’
‘Sounds right up my street.’
‘Thought we might nip over there after the dive for a little recce.’
‘You’re on.’
Jack heard a crackle in his headphone, and turned it down. ‘That was Macalister,’ Costas said. ‘Ten minutes to go.’
‘Roger that.’
‘While we wait. Run me through the Shield of Achilles again. What we’re looking for. The decoration.’
‘Best guess? Wooden-backed, about a metre across, covered in beaten gold. The decoration? Maybe bands of black niello, red carnelian, though whether that survives underwater for three thousand years, who knows. The scenes might show a kind of cosmography, a bit like a medieval mappa mundi. It’s for a hero, for display and swagger and appearance, but like most prestige weapons it’s made as if for real combat, using the best techniques of the smith. So the five layers described by Homer were probably built up one on top of the other, leaving a progressively smaller outer ring visible for the decorative scenes, and the thickest part of the shield in the centre, at the boss. That’s exactly how you’d make a real working shield, strengthening the centre where you fend off the blows, minimizing the weight around the edge. I think Homer had seen a shield like that being made, as he knew what he was talking about. The scenes he describes are plausible, everyday scenes of the world of heroes, the world before the apocalypse, scenes of hunting, contests between champions, the countryside, town life, the unending cycle of life in the Age of Heroes.’
‘And what if the world had moved beyond?’ Costas said. ‘Remember Auden? The thin-lipped armourer, Hephaestos, hobbles away, and Thetis “cried out in dismay at what the god had wrought”. We know the armour won’t protect her son Achilles from death, and maybe Homer’s audience knew that the shield as a metaphor wouldn’t protect history from the rise of Agamemnon, from the destruction of Troy, from total war.’
‘That’s good. Very good. Actually, thinking of Hugh has made me ponder all that too. What he must have seen, at the end of the Second World War. What Auden saw, in the bombed cities of Germany. A kind of truth that no artistry can mask, where no metaphor or simile or symbol can stand in for stark reality. Auden even talks about it, doesn’t he? “Of barbed wire, of weed-choked fields, of rape, of casual murder.” ’
‘The age of heroes, the age of controlled violence, is gone. The age of men has come.’
‘The history of our times. Maybe it all begins at Troy.’
The churning of the screws ended, and was replaced by the whirring noise of the ship’s water-jet stabilizers coming on line. A green light flashed above the entrance to the dock. ‘Okay. We’re on,’ Costas said. He gave a thumbs-up to the controller standing on the deck beside him. She raised one arm and pressed her headset against her ear to listen to instructions from the bridge, and then stood back and gave an emphatic thumbs-down. Costas repeated the sign to her and turned to Jack. ‘Good to go?’
