Testament

by David Gibbins

  He picked up his phone, tapping the screen with a muddy finger. Aysha first, and then they would Skype their son Michael. After that, he would call Jack. The adrenalin was coursing through him, the thrill of discovery that had fueled his life since he and Jack had first peered down that rabbit hole, had first reached in and pulled out those ancient sherds. Suddenly he felt on top of the world again.

  7

  Off the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, present day

  Jack ducked under the entrance to the tent and sat down on a folding chair, holding the mug of tea that he had just brewed up in the kitchen tent on the far side of the clearing. He took a sip and stared out at the shimmering sea visible through the tent flap, the surf at high tide lapping the foreshore only a stone’s throw away. Ahead of him, rising to a grassy knoll above the tents, was the promontory that split the bay into two coves and provided shelter from the prevailing westerlies that could blow to severe gale force even in summer. Today, though, the sea was almost dead calm, as near to flat as he had ever seen it, with only the hint of a swell from the Atlantic pulsing gently against the shoreline. It was Cornwall at its best, the sea warm enough to swim in without a wetsuit and the breeze that ruffled the grass on the edge of the clearing keeping the heat at bay.

  He took a deep breath and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. After their perilous dive on the wreck of Clan Macpherson only five days before, he felt as if he had been given a reprieve, and he was still awash with the euphoria that came from survival, still buoyed by residual adrenalin. He knew that the questioning would come soon enough, the quiet discussions with Costas about what had gone wrong and what could have been done better, the occasional sleepless night. But for now he was still riding a wave of excitement over their discovery of the bronze plaque and the mystery it had opened up. The video from their helmet cameras had gone straight to their colleagues at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford for decipherment of the symbols. Meanwhile Jack had focused on Clan Macpherson herself, researching everything he could about the circumstances of her loss and how she might have come to be carrying such an extraordinary artifact.

  The IMU campus was only half an hour away, off the Fal estuary on the other side of the peninsula; he had deliberately come across this morning with time to spare before his dive on the Phoenician wreck, his first since returning from West Africa. Apart from a conservator dealing with finds in one of the other tents, the rest of the team were either on the research vessel Seafire anchored beside the wreck or underwater working on the excavation. The coastal footpath that passed the camp was quiet, not yet filled with the hikers who thronged it during the summer months, and the beaches were empty. He was itching to get on the wreck, a swim in a pool compared to Clan Macpherson, but he had wanted some time to himself in order to run through what he had discovered in the archives over the past few days and to think about what might lie ahead.

  He sipped his tea, crossed his legs, and opened the file he had brought with him from the campus that morning. He still could not get the image of Clan Macpherson out of his mind. It was not so much their close shave that preoccupied him as the knowledge that something about the sinking, something about the convoy action on that day in 1943, was not quite right. The presence of a British torpedo in the wreck—a torpedo that could only have been fired by a British submarine—was baffling, to say the least. He stared at the two photos clipped to the inside of the file, the upper one showing the ship in her smart peacetime livery on the Mersey, with Liverpool in the background, and the lower one in her drab wartime gray, with guns fore and aft and her lifeboats swung out on their derricks ready for immediate use. He remembered his own first image of the ship, the looming, rusted hull and the twisted metal where the torpedo had exploded, and thought of the last sight of her by the men in the lifeboats, the vessel that had been their home disappearing in a terrifying final plunge that had transformed her into the wreck that he and Costas had seen over a hundred meters deep on the edge of the continental shelf off Africa.

  Yesterday he had gone to the National Archives at Kew and had seen the original convoy dossier, including documents that would have passed through the hands of naval intelligence over those fateful days, perhaps even the code breakers at Bletchley Park who evaluated the Ultra decrypts and decided which convoys to reroute on the basis of intercepted German U-boat movement reports. He had been to Bletchley with his daughter Rebecca for a school project a couple of years previously, and remembered sitting behind the desk in Alan Turing’s office, looking at the wartime convoy chart on the wall and then out into the main operations room where the deciphered German naval orders were analyzed and passed up the line for possible action. The file he had handled at Kew yesterday had smelled musty, like stale cigarette smoke, and brought home the reality of Bletchley more than seventy years ago in the darkest days of the war: not the sanitized, scrubbed huts of the modern reconstruction but places fugged with smoke and stale sweat, with the wispy rising steam of mugs of tea, where the intelligence work was not just a mathematical puzzle but a deadly calculus of ships and men caught up in the most savage and costly sea war in history.

  He sifted through the dossier, scanned copies of the originals. The first part contained the convoy commodore’s report, a fold-out pro forma with the bare facts of the convoy’s progress penned in; clipped to that had been a sheaf of pink and white slips with decrypted radio messages between the Admiralty, the convoy commodore and the Royal Navy escort commander. All of that was standard fare for a convoy file; they showed that the convoy had made a few minor course deviations at the commodore’s own discretion, none of them as a result of a rerouting order from the Admiralty. Clearly, if an Ultra intercept at Bletchley had revealed U-boats in the area, the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Center had decided not to act on it, a decision that would have been based on a risk assessment that such action might reveal to the Germans that Ultra had been broken.

  The second group of scans came not from Kew but from the Clan Line archive, a mass of documents that had survived the closure of the shipping company and been preserved as a historical record. The archivist had delved into material yet to be catalogued and had come up trumps, uncovering the report of the master, Captain Gough, after the sinking of Clan Macpherson, and an exchange between him and the director of the trade division at the Admiralty.

  Jack reread the parts of the master’s report that he had highlighted after receiving the documents from the archivist the previous evening. It is now with very great regret that I report the loss of Chief Engineer Robertson, Second Engineer Marshall, Fourth Engineer MacMurtrie and fifth Engineer Cunningham, who went down with their vessel. Gough had described how, after the ship had been torpedoed, three of the deck officers and an apprentice had gone below in an attempt to shore up the breached hold, using sacks of groundnuts from the cargo like sandbags to build up a bulkhead. No praise is too high for the courageous spirit and dauntless devotion to duty that was shown by my officers, engineers and volunteer crew in their magnificent attempt to save their ship.

  Jack looked up for a moment, squinting against the reflection of the sun on the sea, imagining the grim reality behind Captain Gough’s report—soaked and freezing men piling bags as the stricken ship groaned around them, and the engineers living out their worst nightmare, realizing too late that she was going under, desperately scrabbling for air space as the waters rose and the ship buckled and shrieked on its plummet to the abyssal darkness below.

  He drained his tea, and then looked at the pages that had kept him awake after first reading them the evening before. Unusually for a merchant captain, Gough had been openly critical of the Admiralty. Jack could picture him as he sat down in Freetown to write his report, after seeing that the survivors from Clan Macpherson had been brought safely ashore and then hearing the terrible news that his ship was one of seven from the convoy to have been sunk that night. Even before the attack, there had been concern over the inadequate escort and the absence o
f air cover. A very strong feeling exists, Gough wrote, that many of these vessels, if not all, have been needlessly sacrificed. He pointed out that the armed trawlers in the escort could only do eight knots, slower even than the most sluggish of the merchantmen, and that the speed of the convoy was therefore gravely constrained. Jack read Gough’s two burning questions, sensing the ire behind the sober phrasing: whether, knowing there were submarines on the track of this convoy, it was not possible for destroyers to be sent out from Freetown to give the necessary protection; and whether the courses which the convoy was instructed to take were, in the circumstances, the right ones.

  Next he turned to the reply from the director of the trade division at the Admiralty. Gough was told that armed trawlers had given good anti-submarine service elsewhere, and that the visibility had been too poor for air cover. I fully appreciate your distress at the loss of such a fine ship, which I can assure you is shared by all of us at the Admiralty. We are, as you can understand, bound to consider the U-boat war as a whole and view each incident in its right perspective. The U-boat threat, for instance, off the West African coast is but a fraction of that in the North Atlantic and we obviously must allocate our limited resources in escort vessels accordingly. Were it possible, there is nothing we would like better than to give every convoy a really strong escort. And finally: War invariably leads to blows and counter-blows, and it would be illogical not to expect the enemy occasionally to get in a nasty punch. I can only assure you that we are fully alive to all the risks that have to be run and are deploying our forces to the best of our ability to bring about the ultimate defeat of the U-boat.

  Jack closed the file, and squinted out to sea again. The response from the director of the trade division was measured and decent, as compassionate as it could reasonably be. But it was precisely the nature of the response that had been niggling at him. It seemed odd that at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, during those critical weeks in May 1943 when everything hung in the balance, the Admiralty should have devoted so much care to the concerns of a single merchant captain from a convoy off Africa, far from the main focus of attention in the North Atlantic. Jack might have expected a curt response at best, even a disciplinary one. But instead the Admiralty had mandated their senior officer responsible for merchant shipping to give more thought to a response than had apparently been put into arranging adequate defense for the convoy.

  Jack had looked up Captain Gough’s war record, and knew he was not a man to make criticism lightly. He had already been sunk twice, once when his ship Clan Ogilvy was torpedoed in 1941, and then again when the ship that had rescued the survivors had also been sunk. Gough had been decorated for his seamanship and courage on both occasions, rallying his men over many days spent in open boats and on the way rescuing the survivors from two other stricken ships. Most merchant captains, men like Gough, buckled down and did their job, expecting the navy and the air force to do their best but accepting that things sometimes went wrong, that ships and lives would be lost. They were tough men, men who knew well the fickle whims of war and fate, who asked questions only when they were truly compelled to do so.

  Jack returned to his own part in this story, to a question that Gough himself could never have imagined possible: how could a British torpedo that could only have been launched from a British submarine have ended up inside the hull of Clan Macpherson?

  He checked his watch, stood, and picked up the VHF radio receiver on the table, tapping the secure IMU channel used on the bridge of Seafire. A girl’s voice with an accent more American than British crackled in response. “Hello, Dad. Are you ready to come out now? Over.”

  “Nearly ready. Really looking forward to it. Can you talk?”

  “Just stripping off my wetsuit. Give me a moment.”

  Jack smiled in anticipation. He had not spoken to Rebecca since he and Costas had returned from Africa, and seeing her was another reason why he had been excited about coming out to the site this morning. She had spent the last month working with Jack’s colleague Katya at her ancient petroglyphs site in Kyrgyzstan, and had only flown back to England two days before, while Jack had been in Oxford. She had scheduled a week to dive on the wreck before returning to her university summer school in the United States, and Jack was looking forward to spending time with her. He pressed the talk button as he walked out of the tent toward the promontory. “How are you doing? How’s the archaeology?”

  “I’m studying to be an environmentalist, not an archaeologist, Dad.”

  Jack scrambled over the old stone wall and onto the rough track that led up to the top of the promontory, enjoying the breeze on his face. “Yes, well, you say that, but archaeology is what you were doing with Katya, archaeology is what you do with Maurice and Aysha, and archaeology is what you’ve been doing with IMU since you were barely into your teens. It’s in your blood. You can’t deny it.”

  “How do you know what I was doing with Katya? She’s given up waiting for you to call, by the way. How long ago was it that you two were an item? Anyway, as far as you know, we could have just been having an all-girls party.”

  “With Katya, beside Lake Issyk-Gul in Kyrgyzstan? I doubt it. More likely learning how to shoot a Kalashnikov.”

  “I did that last year with her. I didn’t tell you. The least accurate rifle I’ve ever shot. This year it was learning how to hunt with an eagle.”

  “God help us,” Jack said. “You’re the daughter of Jack Howard, not Attila the Hun.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a tough old world out there, got to be prepared.”

  “Tell me about the wreck.”

  “It’s Phoenician, Dad. You were right, and everyone’s sure of it. There are loads of those distinctive Punic amphoras, and other diagnostic stuff. It’s what you’ve dreamed of finding for years. They’ve left your sector of the excavation untouched, as you requested, sandbagged over and awaiting your return.”

  Jack reached the top of the promontory, strode through the thick coarse grass to the edge of the rocky cliff on the south side, and saw Seafire anchored some three hundred meters offshore. “That’s fantastic. I’ve seen the material in the conservation tent here from the past few days. Pretty early—late seventh or early sixth century BC. Not a Greek ship carrying Phoenician wares, but an actual Phoenician ship. It’s the first one ever found in these waters, and confirmation that they got to the British Isles at that date.”

  “Any news on your plaque?”

  “I was with Jeremy and Maria all day Tuesday at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. They’re convinced the symbols are Phoenician too.”

  “Amazing,” she said. “A Phoenician wreck up here and another wreck off Africa carrying a Phoenician artifact, about equidistant from the Strait of Gibraltar.”

  “That’s where the Phoenicians went,” Jack said. “West from Carthage through the Strait and out into the Atlantic, searching for tin and gold, exploring, settling. And you know my theory that they went a lot farther than that, at least circumnavigating the British Isles and reaching the southern tip of Africa, if not circumnavigating that too.”

  “But you don’t know where the plaque came from.”

  “I’m working on that. All we have to go on at the moment is that Clan Macpherson’s last major port of call was Durban, in South Africa. I think somehow it got on board there, along with the gold consignment.”

  “Any progress with the translation?”

  “They’re working on it, but it’s tricky because the imagery isn’t that great. We didn’t have much time before the wreck, um, blew up.”

  “So I heard. And how deep were you? Costas told me about it when he was here yesterday. How many lives do you guys have?”

  “That’s what I asked Costas afterward, and he said I still had lots. You remember The Lion King? Hakuna matata. It’s in the past. I look to the future.”

  “You mean to another insanely dangerous dive.”

  “To a lovely dive with you in less than ten meters’ de
pth on the Phoenician wreck. By the way, have you spoken to Aysha?”

  “Just this morning. She left little Michael with her sister in London and went out to Carthage to join Maurice. She very nearly carried on back to Egypt, you know. It was Katya who put the kibosh on that during a long satellite call from Kyrgyzstan. She told Aysha that she had a responsibility now as a mother and to Maurice, and that there were plenty of others to carry on the fight against the extremists. It must be hard for Aysha, but Katya knows what she’s talking about, with her father having been a warlord and all that.

  “As it turns out, Aysha’s really got stuck in at Carthage. She says it’s just like when they first worked together at the mummy necropolis in the Fayum, when she spotted the Atlantis papyrus. Maurice of course went to Carthage really only to find evidence for an early Egyptian settlement. Poor Uncle Hiemy. He can’t get over not being able to work in Egypt anymore. Anyway, what they’ve actually found is maybe even more interesting. While Maurice has been digging at the harbor entrance, their other dig at the Tophet sanctuary has produced some very old Punic inscriptions, scratched on potsherds. Some of the early alphabetic renderings might help Jeremy with his translation of the plaque.”

  “Excellent. You can tell Jeremy yourself. He’s planning to drive down from Oxford today, to be here by mid-afternoon.”