The Mask of Troy (11 page)

‘Bring back the age of pirates,’ Costas sighed, shaking his head. ‘Treasure like that could set me up for life.’

‘That’s exactly why I want this kept under wraps,’ Jack said. ‘If word slipped out, every treasure-hunter in the world would be hovering around us, the good, the bad and the ugly.’

‘The whereabouts of Schliemann’s stolen treasure has attracted some pretty rough customers. The Nazis were after it.’

‘What do you know about that?’

‘Dillen told me. It was when Rebecca was involved with returning that painting in the Howard Gallery, the one Göring had pilfered. Dillen was at the IMU campus at the time and we got to talking. A great-uncle of mine was a Monuments Man, with the US army, responsible for recovering art stolen from Jewish families in Greece. Dillen mentioned a schoolteacher of his who had some connection with the search for the lost treasures from Troy.’

‘That’d be Hugh Frazer,’ Jack murmured. ‘I knew Frazer had been in special forces during the war, but I didn’t know anything about that. Intriguing. I’ll have to plug Dillen on it.’

‘It was something he had just remembered. Something this guy, Frazer, knew about some other guy, a British officer friend of his, who went missing. Something to do with one of the death camps.’

‘It was a more hazardous job than you’d think. And there was a lethal subtext, that the places where treasures were hidden could also conceal other secrets, weapons ready for use to execute the so-called Nero Decree.’

‘I know about that. Hitler’s order to destroy the Reich.’

‘And take the world with it, if at all possible.’

Costas checked his watch. ‘So, the shield of Achilles. Mum’s the word on your dream find?’

‘Radio silence until we find out what’s actually down there.’

Costas nodded. ‘Okay. For now, soggy timbers it is. But between you and me?’

‘What?’

‘This really is a treasure hunt, isn’t it? I mean, you owe me. It’s why you convinced me to get into this game in the first place. You promised, fifteen years ago at Troy.’

‘I thought that was submersibles. Getting your own shed full of gadgets.’

‘Means to an end. It was seeing those pictures just now, the shield, the golden mask. I think I’ve finally got the fever.’

Jack sighed. ‘Okay. Just to keep my old dive buddy happy. Treasure it is.’

‘Right on.’

‘I want to give Dillen and Hiebermeyer a call. See how they’re getting on. I’m due to be choppered over there after the dive. And see Rebecca.’

‘Tell her Uncle Costas expects her to be able to strip a dive regulator the next time we meet.’

‘Uncle Costas,’ Jack muttered. ‘
Uncle
Costas.’ He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Speaking of regulators, time you went below to prep our gear.’

Costas broke into a huge smile. ‘Now you’re talking.’ He got up, collected his things and walked towards the door, rolling from side to side. Jack stood up to follow, glanced at the image of the shield of Achilles on the screen, then clicked it off and picked up the laptop. He remembered waking up on the deck little more than an hour ago, those images from his dream still fresh in his mind, the light shining dazzlingly through the depths, the greatest treasure always just beyond his grasp. He remembered the other treasure Dillen had dreamed of finding, the most sacred artefact of Troy, the palladion. Had Agamemnon, the king behind the golden mask, the bearer of the shield of Achilles, once held that aloft too, borne it away from burning Troy to his mountain fastness at Mycenae, snatched a prize won at the cost of darkness and death, of civilization torn asunder?
Had that prize been what Schliemann had sought?
He watched Costas disappear down the stairs towards the equipment bay, then took a deep breath. His heart was suddenly pounding with excitement, the huge adrenalin rush he always felt before diving on a new site, the possibility of making a discovery that might change history. And this time it was not a dream.
This time it was real
.

J
ack floated motionless ten metres below the surface of the Aegean Sea, just outside the huge shadow created by the hull of
Seaquest II
. He and Costas had exited from the ship’s internal docking bay, so had avoided struggling in the choppy afternoon swell that Jack could see above him pulsing in the direction of the shoreline to the east, towards Troy. He looked up at the hull, and saw the wavering faces of the support team peering down through the calm water inside the docking bay. He raised his arm to Costas and held his thumb and forefinger together in the ‘okay’ sign, then watched Costas repeat the signal. He glanced again at Costas’ gear. They were wearing e-suits, Kevlar-reinforced dry suits with a computerized temperature and buoyancy control system, and full-face helmets that incorporated an intercom. They had toyed with using the Aquapods, the one-man submersibles that were Costas’ pride and joy, but had opted instead for SCUBA with oxygen rebreathers mounted on their backs in streamlined yellow cases. The rebreathers would give them twenty minutes at ninety metres’ depth, ample time for the job in hand, and diving would allow them close-up exploration impossible from the Aquapods. Jack disliked the constraints of a submersible and was always more happy diving. He felt supremely relaxed, perfectly in his element, but coursing with excitement at the prospect of what they might find in the inky depths below.

He finned over to Costas and gave his equipment a closer check, reading the tank pressure. Costas had grumbled at the decision not to use Aquapods, but then had brought out his tattered old boiler suit and was as happy as a child with a toy box. The suit was barely recognizable after years of use, a torn and faded grey layer that Costas wore over his e-suit, but the multiple pockets contained his precious collection of tools and gadgets ready for any eventuality. Jack glanced at his dive computer, and then up at the line on the surface that extended from the ship to a buoy, nearly above him now. It marked the spot where they had to descend to avoid the current from the Dardanelles sweeping them beyond the wreck. He made the ‘okay’ sign to Costas, then extended his arm with his thumb down. ‘Good to go?’

‘Good to go. Twenty minutes no-stop time, starting now.’

Costas flipped upside down and barrelled into the depths. Jack expelled air from his suit and dropped behind him, spreadeagled like a sky-diver. The water was sparklingly clear for the first thirty metres or so, but on the landward side it had a haze to it, red-tinged, an algae bloom perhaps, as if the Trojan shore were still seeping blood. Somewhere below them lay the ugly residue of conflict, the raw, unsanitized legacy of the sea bed, a legacy that always brought home more vividly to Jack the reality of war than immaculate cemeteries and carefully tended battlefields.

He remembered what they had seen in the operations room when
Seaquest II
had first pulled the sidescan sonar ‘fish’ over the site an hour before. The wind had been less severe than anticipated and Captain Macalister had decided there was time for a sonar sweep before the dive. As the fish moved beyond the Byzantine wreck, the screen had shown a featureless sea bed, the sand ruffled like waves where the current had swept over it. Then the room had erupted in excitement as they saw the unmistakable lines of another shipwreck, exactly where Jack had thought he had seen something during their earlier dive. The scour channels in the sand on either side of the new wreck accentuated the lines of the hull: thirty-five, maybe forty metres long, narrow of beam - perhaps seven metres wide - with parallel lines running athwartships that looked like frames. There were none of the telltale signs of an ancient wreck, the rows of amphoras and stone blocks they had seen on the Byzantine wreck, a much wider-beamed hull as befitted an ancient merchantman. But Jack had seen a shadowy globular shape in the centre of the hull and had become excited. Could it have been an ancient
pithos
, a huge pottery vat? The citadel of Troy was littered with fragments of
pithoi
; they were what Jack had always imagined ancient galleys must have held, to carry the large quantities of water needed for a crew of rowers. Could this be an ancient galley? Could it be a galley of the Bronze Age, the ship of the Trojan War mentioned in the poem?
Could it be the ship of Agamemnon?

Jack had hoped against hope, but despite the initial euphoria, his final instinct was against it. He had stared at the image for fifteen minutes while the ship turned round for a high-resolution scan. The first lines of the more detailed sonar image clinched it. They showed the decayed remains of a metal vessel, a hundred years old, no more. The lines athwartships that had looked like wooden beams were the skeletal remains of a metal hull, left after the wooden deck planking had decayed. The globular form was still partly concealed, covered by a collapsed mass of metalwork, but seemed to be in the right position for a boiler, part of the engine machinery.

Jack had realized why his instinct told against it. The scour channels had clearly formed as the vessel had settled into the sea bed. This was not a wreck that had been buried, and then revealed by some shift in the current. An ancient wooden hull would never have survived as this wreck had, exposed to the current. The only remains of an ancient wreck might have been the lower part of a hull driven into the sea bed, and that would have been buried and invisible to the sonar. It was what worried Jack most about the search for a Trojan War wreck. The pottery and stone of the Byzantine wreck were visible because they were durable, materials that would survive exposed on the sea bed. But there was no certainty that any materials like that would have existed on board an ancient galley; pottery
pithoi
were just Jack’s conjecture. Nobody had ever found an intact war galley from the Bronze Age before.

And he had another fear: that the sediment might prove too mobile, too aerated, for the survival of even buried timbers. Lanowski’s appraisal of the sedimentology showed how easily wrecks could be buried, but also suggested a lot of instability and sediment movement. The undisturbed anaerobic layers might prove too deeply buried and too ancient for any chance of a Bronze Age discovery. Now that they knew the wreck below them was of limited interest, those scour channels were the main objective of the dive. They gave a chance to examine an exposed section of sediment to a depth of two metres or more into the sea bed. What they found could be the linchpin of the expedition. If it was grey anaerobic sediment, there was a chance that somewhere they might yet find a Bronze Age wreck. If not, then the cold logic of science told against it, seemed to stack the odds a mile high.

The cold logic of science
. Jack thought about that as he descended, scanning the deep azure below for the first signs of the sea bed. The cold logic of science had counted against so many of the greatest discoveries in archaeology. It had counted against Howard Carter discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun. It had counted against Heinrich Schliemann discovering Troy and then the Mycenae of Agamemnon. Schliemann had been driven by a dream, and by powerful instinct. It was what drove Jack too. There was something about this site. Something he had felt the day before when he had looked across the sea bed and seen that shape. In truth, he was not undertaking this dive to collect sediment. Any one of the team could have done that. He was diving because of what he had felt the day before, when he stared out from the edge of the Byzantine wreck and saw something in the gloom. The sonar scan had shown what it was, the rusting hull somewhere beneath him now, a hull that could not conceivably be ancient. Yet there was something more, something that seemed to defy that cold logic of science. It might be no more than a ghostly presence, an imprint. But he had to go there, to see it for himself, to know whether his instinct had just been a fantasy, a yearning to see a truth that seemed forever beyond their grasp, like so much else about the Trojan War.

Costas’ voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Depth forty metres. Cross-check. Over.’

Jack looked at the LED screen inside his helmet, then down at Costas descending about ten metres below him. ‘Cross-checked. Over.’

‘So what do you think? A First World War minesweeper?’ Costas asked.

Jack touched the audio control on the side of his helmet to compensate for the high pitch in Costas’ voice, caused by the increased helium now streaming into their breathing mixture as they descended beyond safe air-diving depth. ‘That’s Scott Macalister’s best guess. The state of metal decay in this environment suggests we’re looking at a wreck maybe ninety, a hundred years old. That puts it bang on time for the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, the biggest single cause of shipwrecks in the Dardanelles in recent times.’

‘Macalister’s got a database, hasn’t he? I told you I saw his Admiralty wreck chart.’

‘He’s plotted all known wrecks from the campaign. But he says the records are sketchy for smaller vessels, especially from the Turkish side. There were gunboats, torpedo boats, balloon ships used for gunnery spotting, lighters, mini submarines, some of them used in covert missions to land men for sabotage. For all these vessels the approaches to the Dardanelles were suicide alley, running the gauntlet big-time. The Turks had no aircraft and the British only used theirs for reconnaissance, but there were big guns on either side, British battleships off the island of Tenedos, Turkish shore batteries on the mainland. The Turks had batteries at Beşik Bay, the harbour of ancient Troy. They would have had the range of this spot where we are now.’

‘And there must have been mines.’

‘Mostly within the Dardanelles, where the Turkish minelayers could operate more safely, but some daring captain may have tried to lay mines this far out. The minelayer captains were heroes to the Turks, like U-boat commanders or fighter aces. Always pushing the boundary. That’s why Macalister thinks we may have a minelayer, or more probably a minesweeper. The British used converted trawlers as minesweepers, about this size. The civilian crews made the transition from trawling to sweeping easily enough, but the fishing boats had draughts that were deeper than was ideal for minesweeping, and there were plenty of accidents when they hit mines anchored just below the surface.’