Testament

by David Gibbins

  “It’s a woven woolen tapestry. We were able to get a radiocarbon date in the IMU lab for a sample from one corner of the fourth century AD, the time of the Kingdom of Axum. But the image of the man with the braided beard looks much older, Sassanid perhaps, something that would fit more comfortably in Mesopotamian art of the early to mid-first millenium BC. And that doesn’t take into account the image of the two large black men ahead of him, and what they’re carrying. According to everything I now believe, that means that this image is drawn from an actual historical event of the early sixth century BC.”

  “A memory of this tapestry has been passed down through the Church, but I hardly dared imagine that it might still exist,” the Patriarch said. “According to tradition, the man with the braided beard was Phoenician, and had brought the Ark by ship.”

  Jack reached over and pointed at a cluster of riders shown behind the man, one of them clearly a woman, with long dark hair and swirling a whip. “Do you know who these people are?”

  “They look as if they’re chasing him, but they’re not. They’re actually protecting him from the brigands of the coast, riding to his rescue. According to tradition, the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel had mandated a Judaic warlord of the coast to protect the Phoenician and escort him to the mountain cave with his cargo. She was Yusuk As’ar, meaning ‘she who takes vengeance.’ There were other Jewish female warriors like her throughout history—the mother of Dhu Nuwas of Yemen in the sixth century AD, the Berber Jewish Queen Dihya in North Africa a century later—but Yusuk As’ar may have been the fiercest of them all, a scourge of the Babylonians and the marauders of this coast.”

  Zaheed nodded in agreement. “A colleague of mine who is an expert on these traditions thinks she might even be the model for the stories of Makeda, the legendary queen who married King Solomon of Judah. The traditions may contain a conflation of historical reality from those centuries.”

  Jack passed the tapestry back to Zaheed, and leaned forward intently. “The looting that took place after the death of Theodore is well known. I’m also interested in another period when Ethiopia was desecrated by outsiders. Do you have any knowledge of the Nazi Ahnenerbe coming here on the hunt for artifacts?”

  The Patriarch pursed his lips. “The period of fascist rule from 1936 to 1941 was a dark time for us. Some of the looting was brazen, such as the ancient obelisk from Axum that still stands in Rome. My predecessors did their best to conceal the treasures of the Ethiopian Church. You’ve seen the Chapel of the Tablet, so you see we have some experience in that regard. But many lesser items went missing.”

  “Not just from the churches and monasteries, but also from the museums,” Zaheed added. “We attempted an inventory a few years ago. Much of the material never resurfaced, so we think it must have been cached somewhere and never recovered, perhaps because it hadn’t been removed before Mussolini’s soldiers were driven out of the country in 1941. By then it would have been difficult to get anything back to Italy or Germany.”

  “You say Germany. So the Ahnenerbe were here?”

  The Patriarch was quiet for a moment, and then nodded gravely. “I have never told anyone else this. But they were here, in this village on this plateau. The priest here now was a boy at the time and remembers it, but is still so stricken by what happened that I fear he would not talk to you. Three Germans came, two of them claiming to be archaeologists and the other some kind of thug from the SS, the sort Ethiopians had become used to under the fascist regime. They spent many days here, measuring, digging, going from hut to hut, interrogating. The priest, the boy, had been trained in his vocation by a German in Addis Ababa, so understood some of what they were saying. They appeared to be looking for anything that might have been left over when the British left in 1868. They had high hopes of treasure. They too were after the Ark of the Covenant.”

  “Did they find anything?”

  The Patriarch pointed to the floor of the church. “There used to be a cavern under here, now filled in. For centuries it had been used to store the valuables of the church. When the British soldiers broke in, they ransacked it, taking that tapestry among many other items, but they failed to notice a sealed chamber at the back. Unfortunately, the Germans were very thorough and tested all of the walls, eventually discovering a hollow space. In it was the only great treasure we lost to the Nazis, a treasure that we had kept secret for centuries and a loss that we have not spoken of until now.”

  He turned and spoke to his assistant, who reached into an old wooden chest embedded in the floor behind the Patriarch’s seat and pulled out a worn leather folio volume. He put it on the Patriarch’s lap and opened it up, the parchment crackling as he turned the leaves. After about a dozen pages the Patriarch put out his hand, and the man stopped turning and stood back. The Patriarch swiveled the folio on his lap so that it was facing Jack, and looked at him. “This is an old illustration of it, made in the sixteenth century. That is what they stole.”

  Jack stood up for a better view and stared at the image, a faded painting of an inscription picked out in gold with the letters in black. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating, and he sat back down again, stunned, needing a few moments to marshal his thoughts.

  “As you can see, the artifact was a bronze plaque with ancient lettering,” the Patriarch said. “It was brought to us in the early sixteenth century by the Lemba people of southern Africa, who had safeguarded it for many centuries before that. They took it from their own safe place because of the arrival of the Portuguese, and the fear that this and other treasures might be discovered and taken away. They brought it all the way to us because in their tradition it had been they who carried the Ark up the mountains to this place, to the cavern in the rock; they could think of no better place of safety for their plaque than here. Their tradition was that the plaque had been set up at the southern cape by the mariner who had brought the Ark from the north, who took them on board to help him with his task.”

  “The Phoenician, the man with the braided beard in the tapestry,” Jack said, coursing with excitement. “His name was Hanno. Without looking again at that illustration, I can tell you that there’s a crude pictogram at the end showing two men carrying a chest on poles between them, surely a representation of the Ark. I know this because a little over a week ago, I was staring at that actual plaque, closer to it than I am to you now.”

  “Where could you possibly have seen it?”

  “About a hundred and twenty meters deep, inside a Second World War shipwreck off the west coast of Africa. Seeing that plaque was what set me on this trail to begin with. We found it embedded among a consignment of gold bars from South Africa, and had reason to believe that it had been Ahnenerbe loot. But now we know where they found it, everything is suddenly falling into place.”

  “Can we see it?”

  “You’ll see the images soon enough, splashed around the world, along with some incredible finds that our colleague Maurice Hiebermeyer has just told me about from his excavations at Carthage. One of them, amazingly, is a gorilla skin, just as Hanno described in his Periplus as having taken back to Carthage. What’s most astonishing is that it was flecked on the inside with gold in the shape of a box. I think it can only have been a cover for the Ark, removed on this mountaintop after the Ark had been taken away and concealed, perhaps inside the cavern in this very church.”

  “Perhaps,” the Patriarch said, closing the folio. “Perhaps that story one day too will be told, of how a treasure that had been here for all those centuries, for a full two millennia before the plaque was placed inside with it, was taken out in secret and brought to its present place of waiting.”

  Jack nodded. “Perhaps it will. But for now we’ve nearly come full circle on our journey, just as we now know Hanno must have done, circumnavigating Africa, coming here, taking the skins back to Carthage, fulfilling a bargain he had made with those who had entrusted him with their sacred cargo.”

  The Patriarch put the folio on the table bes
ide him. “Before you go, I have something I want to give you.” He gestured behind him, and his assistant gave him a package. He unwrapped it, taking out an object about six inches square inside a blue covering, and passed it over, putting his hands around Jack’s and the object as he spoke. “You will know not to open this. It’s made of acacia, what the Israelites called shittim wood. Many Ethiopians have one of these. We call it a tabot, a tablet of the Commandments. This is our Ark, and now it’s yours.”

  He withdrew his hands, and Jack got up, carefully placing the tabot in his bag. “I’m very grateful to you. Thank you for seeing us today. You’ve filled gaps in an incredible story, one of the most amazing I’ve ever been involved with.”

  “The tapestry will be a prize exhibit in the National Museum in Addis Ababa,” Zaheed said. “It will join other artifacts from the 1868 looting that are being returned. We’ll take it back with us in the helicopter.”

  “Where are you going now?” the Patriarch said. “Zaheed tells me there might be trouble brewing off the Horn of Africa. You need to be very careful if you’re going to Somalia.”

  Jack gave him a steely look. “Being on the trail of the Ark has set us on another trail, one involving a particularly insalubrious treasure hunter and the possibility of a cache of loot from seventy years ago that might include some lethal weapons material.”

  “Is that Jack Howard the archaeologist speaking, or Jack Howard the former naval commando? Zaheed filled me in a little on your background.”

  Jack held out his hand. “Both. I’ve enjoyed talking with you.”

  “Perhaps, if you’re on the trail of those Nazis, you’ll come across some of those other lost artifacts from our museums and churches and be able to return them to us?”

  “That would be my very great pleasure.”

  Part 5

  19

  Somalia, the Horn of Africa, present day

  Almost exactly twenty-four hours later, Zaheed pulled up at a fenced compound on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the flat scrubland of the coastal plain on one side and the azure expanse of the northern Indian Ocean on the other. Jack was sitting in the jeep beside him and Costas was in the rear, having been picked up at the airport after his flight from England two hours previously. The compound was surrounded by rolls of razor wire and patrolled by pairs of Somali marines with Kalashnikovs, two of them having already approached the vehicle with their rifles at the ready.

  “This is the new Somali navy operational command center,” Zaheed said, switching off the engine and unclipping his seat belt. “It’s used as a base for training marines, but you can see a couple of patrol boats in the harbor. Security’s tight because they’ve recently had to fend off an attack by the Al-Shabaab extremists, a drive-by shooting, and then a drive-in suicide bombing. Stay here while I do the formalities.”

  He opened the car door, raised his hands to show the marines they were empty, and then got out, allowing them to surround the vehicle and frisk him. They gestured for Jack and Costas to do the same. An officer took Zaheed’s papers and Jack and Costas’s passports, scrutinizing them on the bonnet of the jeep. He spoke into a radio and asked Zaheed to follow him, and the two of them disappeared into the guardhouse at the entrance to the compound. A few minutes later they reappeared, Zaheed looking more relaxed, and the officer gestured for Jack and Costas to enter the compound. Zaheed spoke quickly to them on his way back to the jeep. “I’m leaving you two here while I go off to attend to some business. You’ll be seeing the base commander, Captain Ibrahim, the second in command of the Somali navy. He’s a good guy, one of the best. Where we go next really depends on what transpires here. Call me when you’re finished.”

  Jack nodded, and they stood back from the dust as the jeep roared off. Two of the marines escorted them past the guardhouse and toward a complex of buildings that abutted the wharf. “Amazing,” Costas said, gesturing at the patrol boat they could now clearly see in front of them. “That’s an old Soviet-era Osa II missile-armed fast attack craft. Last time I saw one of those, it was hurtling toward my ship off Kuwait during the Gulf War.”

  “I remember them well,” Jack said, following the marine to the entrance of one of the buildings. “While you were in the engine room of your destroyer, I was up the Shatt al-Arab laying charges under three of those boats with my team.”

  “To think we were so close, but we didn’t even know each other then.”

  “It was a different world. There may have been a war on, but at least back then you could sail past the Horn of Africa without being attacked by pirates.”

  They entered a conference room with British Admiralty charts pinned around the walls and a table in the center. “Sit here,” the marine said curtly, pointing at the chairs on the opposite side of the table.

  “That’s sit here, sir,” said a Somali officer who had followed them in. “This is Captain Howard, Royal Naval Reserve, and Commander Kazantzakis, United States Navy Reserve.”

  “I am very sorry,” the marine said, flustered, looking at Jack. “It is my poor English. I meant no disrespect, sir.”

  “No problem,” Jack said, smiling at the marine and then leaning across and shaking hands with the officer. “Captain Ibrahim? Thanks for meeting with us at such short notice.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” He shook hands with Costas and they sat down. Two other officers had followed him in and took chairs on either side.

  Ibrahim was a slender, fit-looking man with a neatly trimmed gray-flecked beard and two rows of medal ribbons on his shirt. Jack looked at them, intrigued. “UK Operational Service Medal and Distinguished Service Cross?”

  Ibrahim nodded. “After school in England and Dartmouth Naval College, I spent twelve years in the Royal Navy before transferring here. My father was a Somali diplomat in London and my mother’s English. I was in Afghanistan with the SBS.”

  “Huh,” Costas said. “Jack’s unit. We were just talking about old times.”

  “My experience was nothing like Afghanistan,” Jack said, waving his hand dismissively. “I was only on the active list for a year.”

  “You say that, but we knew all about you,” Ibrahim said. “One of the chief petty officer instructors with the SBS had been with you during the Gulf War. They still use your operation up the Shatt al-Arab as a model for how to insert an underwater demolition team at night from an inflatable.”

  “That was a long time ago.” Jack gestured at the window, where three patrol boats were visible. “What’s the state of the Somali navy today?”

  Ibrahim gave him a rueful look. “You’ve just seen it. Altogether we’ve got five of those patrol craft and two search-and-rescue boats. You’ll recognize the Osa-class missile boat, obviously. It’s the same craft you were up against in the Gulf War, with a few modifications. The P-15 Termit anti-ship missile is a bit of a Cold War relic, but it’s still reliable. There’s always a large amount of unexpended fuel in the nose tank of those missiles even after a long-distance flight, and that acts as an incendiary to complement the hollow-charge warhead, meaning you get something like an old-fashioned sixteen-inch battleship shell combined with napalm. Put that into a pirate trawler and it’s curtains for them.”

  “Infrared as well as active radar homing?” Costas asked.

  “Correct. We’ve just finished the upgrade. It increases the missile range to more than ten nautical miles.”

  “Any interdictions yet?”

  Ibrahim shook his head. “We’re only on the cusp of becoming properly operational again. The navy didn’t even exist a few years ago, having been disbanded more than twenty years back when the country went into meltdown. That’s how the problem with piracy really took hold. Even now we’re barely effective as a coast guard, with three thousand kilometers to patrol.”

  “What’s the range of your vessels?” Costas asked.

  “Eighteen hundred nautical miles at fourteen knots,” he replied. “The two boats that aren’t here are based further up the Horn of Africa, so we
can reach anywhere in the Economic Exclusion Zone within twelve hours. It’s not enough boats to give us the response time to a call of distress from a merchant ship that we’d like, but it’s better than nothing. From the northern base we’ve operated joint patrols with the Yemeni navy into the Red Sea and around the island of Socotra.”

  “What’s their armament other than missiles?” Costas said.

  “Two AK-230 twin thirty-millimeter guns, two thousand rounds apiece. It’s yet more ex-Soviet equipment, but we look after it well and it works.”

  “What is the situation with piracy at present?” Jack asked. “The current commander of Combined Task Force 150 in Bahrain is an old friend of mine, but I’ve left contacting him until liaising with you first.”

  Ibrahim leaned back. “CTF 150 have kept things at bay over recent years and the number of incidents has dramatically decreased. But with the new US administration reconfiguring its role in the war on terrorism, the increased focus on tension with Iran, and the need for a greater Mediterranean naval presence to counter terrorism there, the naval assets off the Horn of Africa are no longer what they once were. We’ve learned the hard way that once a problem appears to be resolved and others take the limelight, the political will of supporting nations to continue their commitment dries up.”

  “There’s just too much else going on,” Jack said.

  Ibrahim nodded. “The continuing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, the war in the Middle East sucking in more and more players, the conflict with the terrorists in Libya, our own battle against Al-Shabaab in the south of the country. Meanwhile, the fishing economies of the Somali coastal villages have collapsed again, as the foreign factory ships have returned to transgress in our territorial waters, something we’re virtually powerless against with a few patrol boats. As a result, our fishermen have become desperate and are open once again to offers of money to go out and prey on foreign merchant ships, and the problem with piracy has reignited. Over the last six months alone there have been eight attacks, with millions paid in ransoms. Of course, hardly any of it goes to the men who actually do the dirty work.”