The Mask of Troy jh-5

by David Gibbins

  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 Besik 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.’

  ‘Seventy metres. We’re nearly there.’ The water around them was now a dark indigo, becoming almost black below. Jack rolled over and looked up. He could just make out the hull of Seaquest II, but no longer the sparkle of sunlight on the surface. He rolled back, and suddenly could see the mottled sand of the sea bed some fifteen metres below. He switched on his headlamp, startling a school of bream that darted off out of sight ahead of him. ‘That’s a good sign,’ he said. ‘A school like that over a featureless sea bed usually means a reef or a wreck nearby.’

  ‘Bingo,’ Costas said. They were now less than ten metres above the sea bed, and Jack could see the ripples in the sand. He angled his beam up slightly, and there it was, a mass of decaying metal rising five or six metres above the sea bed, sitting in a deep scour channel that extended out of sight ahead of them. As their headlamps converged on the wreck, the dark blue transformed into vivid reds and yellows, a mass of encrusted anemones and other sea life that clung to the corroding metal; some of the rust lay exposed where the structure had recently collapsed. Jack was always amazed at the speed of decay of metal-hulled ships underwater; most of them would vanish long before the wooden hulls of antiquity that were preserved in anoxic sediments below the sea bed.

  He paused to orientate. It was one thing seeing an entire wreck in one image on the sonar screen in the operations room, another trying to make sense of it underwater, from a different angle and in confusing light conditions. The view ahead was a tangle of structure and marine life, but he could see that they had come down behind the stern of the vessel; they were looking forward to where the deckhouse had collapsed, leaving only a few girders intact. The ship had evidently sunk upright but then heeled over to port, with the deepest scour channel running along the starboard side just ahead of Jack, where it angled into the current. As he panned his beam over the stern, he could see that the damage was more than just natural decay. ‘That’s a hell of a hole,’ he murmured. Costas followed the direction of his beam and swam forward, peering under the jagged metal of the deck, pointing up at the parallel struts running athwartships that they had seen on the sonar image. ‘Looks like her entire stern was blown off,’ he said. ‘That’s consistent with a minesweeper, snagging a mine and accidentally detonating it. On a vessel of this size, the shockwave from two or three hundred pounds of high explosive would probably have killed everyone on board instantly.’

  Jack panned his beam to the right, along the exposed starboard side of the hull. The deepest part of the scour channel was in shadow, under the corroded remains of the keel. ‘I think I’ve found what we’re looking for. I’m dropping down into that scour channel to collect sediment.’ He glanced at the LED readout inside his helmet. ‘We’ve got twelve minutes, otherwise we spend the afternoon in the recompression chamber. Not my favourite place.’

  ‘Roger that. I’m going to take
a quick recce inside the hull.’

  ‘Be careful. God knows how stable this is. Some of those girders are probably completely corroded, only held together by marine accretion. And remember, this has to count as a war grave. Go easy.’

  ‘Roger that. Eleven minutes.’

  Jack swam up and over the surviving framework of the stern deck towards the scour channel, trying to decipher the jumble of structural elements that had fallen from the deckhouse and starboard railing. The vivid reds and yellows of marine life added further confusion, and he switched off his headlamp, reducing everything to a uniform dark blue. He was conscious of Costas swimming under the deck frames below him, towards the hull amidships where the remains of the engine room should lie. The beam from Costas’ headlamp flashed through jagged holes and fissures where the metalwork had corroded away. Jack sank down until he was inches above a thick metal girder that ran longitudinally along the deck for at least ten metres, from somewhere in the gloom below the deckhouse to a point behind him where it had been buckled upwards by the force of the explosion that had destroyed the stern. The girder was well-preserved, clearly a high-grade steel. He stopped, and stared. It seemed oddly out of place. It was a flat-bottomed rail from a train track, evidently used to support something on the deck. He reached out to it. Even a slight touch released a cloud of red oxide, and he withdrew his hand. He had seen this before.

  He remembered where. Two days earlier, Macalister had taken him on a tour of the 1915 Gallipoli battlefields, and they had finished in Canakkale at the Turkish naval museum. The highlight was a replica of the celebrated Turkish minelayer Nusret, which had laid the mines that sank three Allied battleships in the Dardanelles. That was where he had seen it. T wo reused train rails, laid parallel on the stern deck. He finned two metres to the left, peering through the red oxide haze he had stirred up in the water, and then carefully felt the mass of rusted metal. Bingo. It was another rail, exactly the right distance apart. He pushed back, and then finned above the plume of rust where he had touched the metal. He looked along the line of the two rails, towards the collapsed mass of the deckhouse, and saw a dark form, oval-shaped, directly above the place where Costas’ headlamp beam was flickering. He stared at it, swimming closer. Then he froze. That shape, the shape on the sonar readout he had thought might be an ancient pithos, was not a boiler. It was something else.

  ‘Costas.’

  ‘Jack.’

  ‘You need to get out of there.’

  ‘Just a few moments longer.’

  ‘Costas, listen to me. This isn’t a minesweeper. I’ve just found the rails on the deck. It’s a minelayer. And there’s a mine still in the rack. That shape from the sonar I got all excited about. Directly above you.’

  ‘Relax.’

  ‘What do you mean, relax?’

  ‘I mean, I know. German Mark VI contact mine. Never seen one of those before. Underwater and live, that is. Macalister told me most of the mines laid by the Turks were supplied by the Germans, so that makes sense. Big question is, which type of detonator? I wish I could see it more clearly. So much stuff in the way.’

  There was a dull clang, then another. Jack’s heart sank. ‘Costas, I hope to God you’re not doing what I think you’re doing.’

  ‘We’re in luck.’ Costas’ voice sounded slightly strangulated. ‘I’m upside down, but I’ve got my face right against one of the horns. You know, the protruberances that stick out of a contact mine?’

  ‘I know what they are,’ Jack said weakly. ‘That’s why they call it a contact mine. You hit the horn, and the mine blows up. Exactly how close are you?’

  ‘Oh, about four, six inches.’ There was another clang, and Jack’s heart seemed to stop. Costas made a straining noise, then spoke again. ‘Phew. You can really relax now.’

  ‘Relax?’

  ‘Yeah. Relax. Kind of. I’ve worked out which type. The early horn contained a glass phial filled with hydrogen peroxide, surrounded by potassium percholate and sugar. When the phial was broken, the acid ignited the sugar and the mine exploded. The advanced type leaked the acid into a lead-acid battery, energizing the battery and detonating the mine. I’m pretty sure that’s what we’ve got here. Lucky, because there’s not much you can do with the early type. But with the later type, if you can locate the position of the battery inside the mine, you can drill a hole through from the outside and flood it, neutralizing it.’

  ‘Or you can miss it and drill into high explosive. Good idea.’

  A voice crackled through on the intercom. ‘This is Macalister. I’ve just dropped in on your little chat. Kazantzakis, get out of there. I’m pulling Seaquest II off position immediately. I repeat, get out of there. Do not touch that mine.’

  The sea filled with the churning sound of the ship’s twin screws. Jack injected a small blast of air into his buoyancy compensator and rose a few metres above the wreck, until he could clearly see the jagged hole in the stern and the tangle of collapsed central superstructure where the deck housing and funnel had been.

  ‘Problem,’ Costas said.

  Jack’s heart sank again. ‘What now?’

  ‘I’ve just off-gassed.’

  ‘Christ.’ Jack shut his eyes. A rush of exhaust bubble through corroded metal. That was the last thing they needed. Their rebreathers were semi-closed-circuit, meaning that every few minutes they automatically expelled accumulated carbon dioxide. An override allowed the waste gas to accumulate to a higher pressure before being expelled, but that had not been activated; the dive plan had not involved defusing a mine. Jack kept his headlamp trained on the superstructure, and watched the first bubbles percolate upwards. There was a sudden explosion of bubbles, wreathing the corroded metal. The worst was happening. The silvery shimmer gave way to red, as the bubbles blew through the corroded metal and released a cloud of rust. He braced himself. There was a lurch, and he watched in horror as the mine sank slightly into the metal that had been cradling it. He counted the seconds. How long before that battery energized? Five seconds? Ten? Any longer and the contact, the enemy vessel, might have moved off. That was how it was supposed to be. In 1915. When there was a war on. Not now. He shut his eyes. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. Thirty.

  The intercom cracked. ‘Make that one inch away,’ Costas said. ‘Nearly knocked my helmet off.’

  ‘For God’s sake get out of there,’ Jack said hoarsely.

  ‘We’re in luck, again,’ Costas replied. ‘The mine’s come to rest on two steel girders. It’s wedged hard into the metal. I can see the shiny surface below the corrosion. It’s not going anywhere. And none of the horns made contact. We’re safe.’

  ‘ Safe,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Right.’

  The ship-to-diver feed crackled again. ‘Macalister here. It sounds as if the buoyancy chambers in the mine are flooded. We’ll need to attach lifting bags and float it off, then remotely detonate it. I say again, detonate it, Kazantzakis. That’s a job for the Turkish navy underwater demolition team. They’ve done it often enough in the Dardanelles. And it’s just the kind of liaison we want. Might help to extend our permit. Not, I repeat, not a job for us. Do you read that loud and clear? Copy.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Jack said. ‘You hear, Costas? Not defuse. Detonate.’

  ‘Copy that.’ Jack saw movement, and Costas’ fins appeared through the ragged hole in the stern of the wreck, followed by his body. He came upright beside Jack, his boiler suit barely recognizable beneath the grime and rust. ‘Never defused a First World War German mine before. I was looking forward to putting one of those horns on my mantelpiece, beside my other relics.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have done it, would you?’

  Costas reached into the thigh pocket of his suit, and pulled out a rubber-encased gadget the size of a Dremel tool. He tossed it upwards and it circled in slow motion in the water, coming back to his hand with a long titanium drill bit extended from the front. ‘Multiple function. Six different bit sizes.’

  ‘But then you would have thought o
f how nice it is to be alive. About how much I might want to stay alive. About Rebecca.’

  Costas spun the tool again, retracted the bit and shoved it back in his boiler suit pocket. ‘Copy that.’ He tapped the side of his visor. ‘Six minutes to go. You got that sediment sample?’

  ‘Just going for it. Now that your little diversion is finished.’

  ‘Fun’s over.’ Costas rose a few metres, and hovered above Jack. ‘I’m watching your six. Nothing else.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  Jack dropped below the starboard side of the hull. The sand was coarse-grained, the type Lanowski said had been swept down by the currents from the Dardanelles, perhaps even from the river Scamander and the plain of Troy itself. He aimed his headlamp at the base of the scour channel. A wooden beam was sticking out from under the metal hull. Jack suddenly forgot the mine. This was not right. He was looking at timber. It was blackened with pitch, forming a solid glossy surface where it had oozed out. He lay on his front in the sand, his visor inches from the wood. It showed minimal erosion, only a few pockmarks from wormholes near the top. It had clearly been buried until recently, until the scour channel had revealed it. He looked at the edge of the channel, at the surrounding sea bed. The top of the timber was at the same level. Whatever had protruded above that level must have eroded away, but there was a chance that more was buried, undisturbed. Buried some time before the minelayer had sunk. He stared at the timber. Buried a long time before. Jack realized he was already working on a fantastic assumption. He had found another wreck. A much older wreck.

  He remembered the charred fragments of Bronze Age timbers he and Costas had discovered on the beach near Troy fifteen years before, a small section of planking with pieces of three frames still attached. He remembered the distance between the frames, about twenty centimetres. He put his left hand against the timber where it protruded from the sea floor, and put his right hand about that distance away. Where it touched the sediment he wafted, and seconds later the blackened end of another timber appeared. His pulse quickened. Two frames, the same distance apart as those he and Costas had found. He wafted between the frames, using both hands, kicking up a small storm of sediment that took a few moments to settle. He pushed his face into the suspended silt. Bingo. Not just frames, but planking . He reached over the upper edge of the nearest plank, then felt the join with the next plank. He moved his fingers along until he felt two bumps, one on each plank, an equal distance apart from the join. There was no doubt about it. They were treenails, hardwood tenons hammered through each plank. His heart was pounding with excitement. He had to control his breathing. He had found an ancient hull. The planks were edge-joined with mortise and tenon, a technique used by shipwrights from the Bronze Age. But how could he be sure these timbers were that old? Could he even think that they dated to the time of the Trojan War?