Testament
Page 5
“TX 2.”
“That’s what I’d guessed. It’s Torpex, fifty percent more powerful than TNT by mass, using powdered aluminum to make the explosive pulse last longer. These were real killer torpedoes, the most powerful of the war. Whoever ordered this one to be used against Clan Macpherson really wanted the ship sunk. Now I know the fuse must be a compensation coil rod contact pistol, Mark 3A. That’s all I need.”
“You don’t actually have to defuse it, do you?”
“I’m making it safe so you can see what lies below.”
“Where do you mean?”
“Directly below the warhead, in the cargo hold. Take a look.”
Jack switched to full beam, and stared down. For a moment all he saw was twisted metal on all sides and a dazzling light in the center, as if he were looking at a reflection of himself in a mirror. He dimmed the light, and gasped with astonishment. The reflection had not been off a mirror but off gold, hundreds of tightly stacked bars on pallets, filling the bottom of the hold. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “So it was true.”
“You need to go down and take a closer look.”
“I can see enough from here.”
“The torpedo blew the tops off the crates and dislodged the bars inside the one directly below us. Trust me, Jack, you need to go down there. You need to see what’s inside.”
Jack glanced up at Costas, who was still straddling the warhead. “How are you getting on?”
“Almost done. Make sure your video is on. Just watch you don’t hit that girder.”
Jack carefully backed off, eased his way through a gap beneath the girder and sank slowly toward the gleaming piles of gold. He dropped down until his knees were resting on the bars in the nearest crate, all clearly stamped SA, for South Africa. He glanced up, seeing the silhouette of the torpedo some five meters above him, backlit by Costas’s beam, then edged over to the next crate. He could see what Costas had meant. The stack of bars had been blown apart, exposing a metal box beneath with its lid also blown off. Something lay inside, nestled in a brown material, some kind of cushioning. Jack dropped head-first as far as he could into the hole, making sure his camera was angled to catch the view. He stared, at first uncomprehending, and then he forced himself to forget the surroundings, to forget the wreck, and just focus on what was in front of his eyes.
It was a thin metal plaque about half a meter square, free of corrosion but not gold, so made of bronze or another copper alloy. It was slightly curved, as if it had once been attached to a column or a post, and had holes in each corner. The metal was beaten, not machine-made, and looked very old, far older than anything else he had seen on the wreck. The most astonishing sight was the four lines of symbols stamped into the metal. For a moment Jack wondered whether he were seeing things, conjuring up phantom images from the shipwreck off Cornwall he had been excavating only a few days before, seeing in a Second World War wreck an artifact that defied all logic or reason.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he muttered, almost to himself. “But those are early alphabetic symbols, Phoenician letters of the seventh or sixth century BC.”
“I thought I recognized them,” Costas replied. “I found similar symbols inscribed on a potsherd in the Cornwall wreck on my first day excavating.”
Jack reached into the hole, trying to get at the plaque. It was no use; it was a good half a meter too deep. The only way of retrieving it would have been to remove the gold bars, but with less than five minutes left on his readout, there was no time to try. He stared at the plaque, trying to absorb everything he could see. He could just make out a strange symbol at the end of the inscription, a hieroglyph or pictogram, two stick figures with a box-like shape between them. It was something that the Phoenician who composed this had no words for, perhaps. He reached down again, heaving aside one of the bars to make sure his camera got a clear view. As he did so, there was a shrieking and grinding sound from above, and the water seemed to shake. Costas’s breathing suddenly became audible through the intercom, and when he spoke, his voice sounded distant, strained. “Jack, we’ve got a problem.”
Jack looked up, and gasped with horror. Instead of lying horizontally above him, the torpedo was now nearly vertical, nose-down. The warhead had closed back down on the main body of the torpedo, giving it the semblance of integrity, but Jack knew that it was attached by only a thin carapace of metal on one side. What was stopping the torpedo from falling further was not obvious, as the girder was nearly broken away. Costas was still straddling it, as if riding it down toward him. For a horrified moment they stared at each other, the warhead only a couple of meters from Jack’s head, hanging directly above him.
He cleared his throat. “So that’s called making it safe?”
“Jack, you need to get out of there. I can’t move, because my extra weight might be what’s giving the torpedo its grip on the remains of that girder. I need you to get to my tool belt, take out the length of black nylon line and tie off the torpedo somewhere above me, from the tail assembly.”
“Are you telling me that line has at least a two-ton weight rating?”
“One ton. But it might buy us time.”
Jack injected a small blast of air into his compensator and rose slowly out of the crate to the level of Costas’s belt. His readout began flashing amber, a warning that he had only two minutes of bottom time left. He knew where the line was kept; he opened the pouch and extracted it, then ascended past the girder to the torpedo’s tail fin assembly. He looped the rope twice around the cylindrical propeller guard and up over two massive girders above him, then repeated the loop with the remainder of the rope, tying it off at the torpedo. His computer began flashing red. “Done,” he said. “If this holds, the torpedo should hang free. But even if it does hold, I can’t see it lasting long.”
“I’m letting go now. Then we’re out of here.” Costas let go with one hand, injected air into his compensator, and then released the torpedo completely, floating free above it. There was a sickening screech as the torpedo slipped another half-meter down the rusted girder, pulling the line taut. One of the loops snapped, whipping and coiling in the water. Jack turned away and powered toward the opening in the side of the ship, followed close behind by Costas. As they cleared the hull, there was another ominous creaking sound and a shimmer in the water. Jack watched his warning light revert from red to amber as they ascended the rocky ridge outside to the level of the continental shelf. “At least you managed to defuse it,” he said, watching Costas come alongside. “Not much chance of that thing blowing without a fuse, I would have thought. Still, good to be cautious.”
Costas cleared his throat. “Well, it didn’t go exactly as planned.”
“What do you mean?”
“The threads were really rusty. You would have thought they might have coated them with zinc, too. Wartime British expediency, I guess.”
“You’re saying you didn’t defuse it.”
“Not exactly.”
“Even so, there’s not much to worry about, is there? It didn’t go off in 1943, so it probably won’t go off now. It was a dud.”
“Well, when I said not exactly, I meant I didn’t defuse it, but I did make some progress. I did manage to arm it.”
Jack’s heart sank. “You what?”
“It wasn’t a dud. The torpedo mechanic who was meant to arm it didn’t screw the fuse in far enough. It was a new type in 1943, and he was probably not that familiar with it. I tried it, just to see, and it went active. Problem was, I couldn’t screw it back out again.”
“Great,” Jack said. “So we’ve managed to leave eight hundred and five pounds of high explosive hanging by a piece of string from a rotting girder, armed with a live impact fuse.”
“We’re due for our first ten-minute decompression stop now, at ninety meters. I suggest we get behind this rocky ridge, where we should be protected from the shock wave. Stopping in the middle of the water like we are now is probably not such a grea
t idea.”
“Can’t be too safe, can we?” Jack muttered, leading them behind the ridge. At that moment there was a huge rending sound, like a deep groaning, and then silence.
“That would be the girder. Next will be the rope. Hold me, Jack.”
“Finally lost your nerve?”
“Less chance of one of us being blown through the water. Might be a good idea to activate our ear defenders now.”
Jack quickly pressed the sides of his helmet, muffling the sounds from outside, and then clung face-to-face with Costas as low as they could go against the seabed, huddled together behind a rocky pinnacle. A moment later he seemed to be lifted bodily from the seabed, and the water shook violently around them. The sound of a huge detonation followed, a massive muted boom that seemed to course through him. A large fragment of rock tumbled down from the top of the pinnacle and landed beside them, followed by an avalanche of smaller fragments. There was a strange silence for a few moments, followed by an indescribable cacophony, a creaking, screeching and groaning noise as if an orchestra of industrial machinery were tuning up. Then, with a lingering, fading shriek, it was gone, leaving an eerie silence.
“That would be the ship,” Jack said quietly after a few moments. “Falling five thousand meters into the abyss.”
Costas gazed at him through his visor, wide-eyed. “Whoops.”
Jack stared back at him, the water still shimmering between them. “Whoops. Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“So that’s what it’s like to be underwater when a torpedo goes off,” Costas continued, his eyes glazed in wonder. “Cool.”
Jack watched his computer readout flicker, and then stabilize. “The explosion doesn’t seem to have restarted my manifold glitch, thankfully. Not sure I can say the same about my nerves.”
“Did you feel that shock wave?”
“It’s a good thing we were behind this ridge, otherwise it would have killed us.”
“We’d have been dead anyway,” Costas said. “There was enough force in that blast to have ripped our arms and legs off.”
“Why does something like this always happen when I dive with you and there are explosives involved?”
“It’s called science. What IMU is supposed to be all about,” Costas said. “Hypothesis, experiment, observation. Anyway, it solves the problem of who gets the gold, doesn’t it? The floor of that canyon is well over a mile down, with who knows how much depth of sediment lying on the bottom. The chances of our Deep Explorer friends finding even one of those gold bars again would be pretty close to zero.”
“They’ll have registered the shock wave on the surface,” Jack said. “We’ll tell them the wreck contained a consignment of ammunition. There was no record of that, but then there was no record of the gold, either. There were lots of secrets in the Second World War, and this is what happens when you mess with them. I’ll radio the Ministry of Defense in London and our UN representative to say that we saw enough to identify the wreck as a war grave, but that they have nothing to worry about, as there’s no way the salvage company can now get at her.”
“You won’t mention the torpedo?”
“That it was British? That’s between you and me, for now. There was something strange going on here, something that might have involved the gold and that plaque, and I want to try to get to the bottom of that first.”
“We didn’t exactly not interfere with a war grave, did we?”
“The torpedo should have gone off in 1943. It was going to fall through those rusting girders anyway, and the wreck wasn’t going to last long on that ridge. It’s all part of the natural process. All we did was help it on its way.”
“And nobody’s lifted anything from the wreck. Davy Jones’s Locker remains sealed.”
“Amen to that.” Jack looked up, seeing the distant smudge of light from the surface, the shot line bowing above them in the current. His computer flashed green, and he followed Costas up to their next decompression stop, looking down as he ascended and seeing the gloom envelop the seabed. The only evidence of a wreck once having been there was a storm of silt spiraling up from the drop-off, like a huge twister in the sea.
Costas hung on the line, turning to Jack. “What else do we tell our friends on Deep Explorer?”
“What else is there to tell? Did you see any gold?”
“Not a glint.”
“And your camera malfunctioned.”
“Yours too. Faulty IMU equipment. They’re used to that.”
“Pity about your plan to get the gold to Sierra Leone, though.”
“There might still be something good out of this. The guy I went to have lunch with in Freetown while you were sorting out our equipment was an old friend, a former army officer who works for a relief agency. After Rebecca did her stint with UNICEF in Ethiopia last year, I began to think about how I might contribute.”
“Taking the cue from your eighteen-year-old daughter? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way round?”
“You know Rebecca as well as I do,” Jack said. “She’s been plowing her own furrow for quite some time now. Anyway, it’s about logistics, organization, the kind of thing I can do well, driving a project forward. I even mentioned the combat medic course I had to do in the Royal Navy when I went into the Special Boat Section. A bit rusty now, but I could update.”
“You telling me you’re going to volunteer for a relief agency?”
“I was just sounding him out. It would only be a couple of weeks a year, between projects.”
“Have you spoken to Ephraim about this?” Costas asked. “I have to remind myself that he’s not only IMU’s main benefactor but also runs one of the largest charitable foundations in the world. After providing IMU with its endowment, he gave away ninety percent of his remaining assets to charity. It’s the kind of thing a software tycoon can do and still remain seriously wealthy. When he’s not diving with us, he’s pretty well full-time with his foundation.”
“I talked it through with him when Rebecca first showed an interest. He said the best thing that people like us can do is to provide motivational and leadership skills, to enthuse and inspire. That’s something money can’t buy.”
“Rebecca would be proud of her dad.”
“She’s too busy even to think about what I’m up to.”
“Let’s see,” Costas said. “Before Ethiopia, she was exploring the hidden libraries of the Mount Athos monasteries in Greece with Katya, after working with her on the ancient petroglyphs site in Kyrgyzstan. How is your old girlfriend, by the way? Ever think of giving her a call?”
“We haven’t got external comms down here, remember. Just you and me.”
“I don’t mean now. I mean topside, with that phone you usually keep in your pocket.”
“Katya keeps me in the loop. When Rebecca’s with her.”
“Huh. Anyway, Rebecca hardly paused for breath after Ethiopia before joining the dig at Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and then flying out to Seaquest in the Mediterranean to help Maurice and Aysha sort out the material they’d managed to rescue from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria prior to the extremist takeover in Egypt.”
“My turn to be proud of her,” Jack said. “Maurice is really her honorary uncle, just like you. Egyptology was his life and he was devastated when they had to leave Egypt, really unable to cope. Rebecca being there meant that Aysha could return to London to look after their son. Rebecca was the one who diverted his attention to Carthage, to the old idea he had when he and I were at school together, that it was not the Phoenicians but the Egyptians who had gone west and founded the first colony there. I still don’t think he’s right, but Rebecca and I encouraged him to check it out on the ground because it gave him a new focus. He’s been digging in Tunisia for over a month now, and Aysha’s been able to join him again.”
“Lanowski’s even torn himself away from his computers and gone out there.”
“He’s been a good friend too. Everyone’s rallied round.”
“She’s like I was at her age. Doing as much as she can. It’s great drawing off that zest for life, for new experiences.”
“Are you going to discuss your plan with her?”
“Once we know we can finance it. Until then, the fewer people who know, the better. But we do often have a bit of time between projects, don’t we?”
“Speak for yourself. In the engineering department it’s 24/7, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
“Ephraim thinks you could use a break too.”
“I’ll think about it. Yeah, I could do that too. You’d need someone to watch your back, for a start. Some of those places are pretty dodgy. But right now, we’ve got to make sure we’re not swept away into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Time for the next deco stop.”
“Roger that.”
Jack made his way hand over hand up the line behind Costas. At thirty meters he looked down one last time, seeing the billowing silt cloud where they had been exploring only a few minutes previously. Costas had been right. That truly was Davy Jones’s Locker, a place where nobody living belonged. He looked up, seeing Costas hanging on the line above him, a glint of sunlight reflecting off his helmet, and above that the dark silhouette of Deep Explorer rolling and pitching in the swell. He remembered the plaque, and felt a sudden rush of excitement. The wreck might be gone, but their discovery had left indelible questions in his mind. What was a Phoenician antiquity doing concealed in a secret consignment of gold on board a Second World War British cargo ship? What was a British torpedo that could only have been fired from a British submarine doing inside the wreck?
Twenty minutes later, Costas tapped his wrist, and gave a thumbs-up. “Deco’s over, Jack. We’re clear for the surface. You good to go?”
Jack checked his display. “Good to go.” He followed Costas slowly up the line, his body dragged nearly horizontal by the current, feeling the pull of the buoy as it bobbed in the swell. It was going to be a tricky egress into the Zodiac, and there might be an ugly confrontation with Landor and the salvage team over what had happened to the wreck. But he was already racing ahead to the next few days, to what he would do when he got back to IMU headquarters. He prayed that the images from their cameras would be clear enough for analysis. He needed to get the footage to his colleagues Jeremy Haverstock and Maria de Montijo at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. He would take them himself, and combine them with a study of Phoenician artifacts in the Ashmolean Museum. And he would go to the National Archives at Kew to dig up anything more he could find out about Clan Macpherson and convoy TS-37: any further cargo and crew manifests, secret directives from the Admiralty, German U-boat orders that might have been intercepted and decrypted at Bletchley Park and sent on to the convoy commodore, anything that might help to solve the mystery of the wreck and its cargo.