Pharaoh (Jack Howard 7)

by David Gibbins

  ‘So what do we know about the Beatrice?’ Costas asked.

  Jack clicked, and another image came up. ‘This is a facsimile page from Lloyd’s Register of 1838. The owner and captain was a man called Wichelo, and the ship was built in 1827 at Quebec in Lower Canada. You can see she’s described as a snow – a type of brig – and was bound from Liverpool for Alexandria in Egypt on the outward leg of her last ever voyage.’

  He tapped the keyboard again. The image changed to an old painting of a ship anchored close to shore, its sails furled but the British Red Ensign flying from its stern.

  ‘This is by Raffaello Corsini, a painter based in Ottoman Turkey, and shows Beatrice in 1832 in the Bay of Smyrna – modern Izmir in Turkey. At this point she’s a brig, meaning two square-rigged masts, fore and main, with a big fore-and-aft sail at the stern hanging from a boom stepped to the mainmast. Sometime between that date and 1838 she was converted to a snow, which meant that a small mast was stepped into the deck immediately abaft the mainmast as a more secure way of flying the fore-and-aft sail.’

  ‘She must have been a pretty good runner to merit the upgrade,’ Costas said.

  Jack nodded. ‘Those were the days when merchant ships were designed to outrun pirates and privateers. People look at an image like this painting and are surprised to be told it wasn’t a warship.’

  ‘Any guns?’

  ‘Good question. You can see the single row of eight gun ports along the side. They could be painted on, of course, but I think they’re real.’

  ‘Guns mean a greater chance of seeing the wreck on the seabed, right?’ Sofia asked.

  ‘Right,’ agreed Jack. ‘In the Mediterranean, any exposed hull timbers would have been eaten by the Teredo navalis shipworm, and without big metal artefacts like guns we might not see anything.’

  ‘What was her condition recorded in the 1838 Register?’ Costas asked.

  Jack reduced the image so they could see the register again. ‘First grade, second condition. The little asterisk means that she’d undergone repairs, in this case replacement of the wooden knees holding up her deck timbers with iron girders.’

  Costas pursed his lips. ‘Even large iron girders are unlikely to survive after almost two hundred years in seawater. Sofia’s right. We’re looking for guns.’

  ‘Not forgetting eight tons of sarcophagus,’ Jack said.

  ‘What about the wrecking?’ Sofia said. ‘How did you pin it down to this place?’

  Jack paused. This was the revelation that had brought them here, that had preoccupied him for weeks now. He looked at Sofia keenly. ‘I said that the departure of Beatrice from Malta was the last anyone ever heard of her. Well, we now know that’s no longer quite true. There have always been rumours that the ship went down off Cartagena, but they’ve never been substantiated. Then a couple of months ago IMU was contacted by a collector of antiquarian books on Egyptology who thought I might be interested in his copy of Vyse’s Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837. Here’s what Vyse says about the loss of the sarcophagus: “It was embarked at Alexandria in the autumn of 1838, on board a merchant ship, which was supposed to have been lost off Cartagena, as she was never heard of after her departure from Leghorn on the twelfth of October that year, and as some parts of the wreck were picked up near the former port.”

  ‘But that’s not all,’ he continued. ‘And that’s not why the man contacted me. It was because in his copy, on the page where Vyse mentions the loss of the Beatrice, was an interleaved sheet containing hand-written latitude and longitude co-ordinates and a couple of transit bearings from precisely the position we’re at now. They were taken by someone who knew what they were doing, a trained seafarer, from a boat over the spot. The sheet was unsigned, but the giveaway was the ex libris plate at the front of the book, with the name Wichelo.’

  ‘No kidding!’ Costas exclaimed. ‘The ship’s master, the one named in the Lloyd’s Register? So he survived the wrecking?’

  ‘So it seems. He must have come to this spot again to take transits, in a local boat. That’s perhaps where the rumours of the wreck originate. But there’s no record anywhere else of his survival. He seems to have disappeared from history.’

  ‘Maybe he knew there’d be an insurance claim, and he’d be found liable,’ Costas said.

  ‘How can we know that?’ Sofia asked.

  ‘Well, let’s think of what we’ve got here. Beatrice was a cargo ship, but not a specialised stone carrier. Looking at the details in the register, we see she’s got a fourteen-foot beam, fully laden. Where does the captain put the sarcophagus? On the deck, confident that those new iron knees will hold the weight.’

  Jack nodded. ‘So confident that he fails to calculate the instability of a ship of that size with an eight-ton stone sarcophagus laden so high above the keel.’

  ‘She’s a good runner, but not as manoeuvrable against the wind as other ships,’ Costas said thoughtfully. ‘She leaves Malta in mid October, the beginning of the winter season, a time when storms and squalls become more common. That was the captain’s first mistake. Add to that the uncharted reefs of a shoreline like this one, and a ship blown north-west off its intended route towards the Strait of Gibraltar is heading for disaster.’

  ‘Especially if she was so poorly laden,’ Jack said, tapping a key again. ‘Lanowski’s done a simulation. Take a look at this. You can see the ship sailing west from Malta, and all is well. The prevailing wind is from the north-east, and the captain decides to sail with the wind on his starboard beam, west-north-west, in order to avoid being blown into the north African shore. He turns with the wind towards Gibraltar when the Spanish coast hoves into view, but he’s come too close to the shore and has forgotten how sluggish the cargo makes the ship. He realises his mistake and tries to veer south back into the open sea with the wind now on his port aft quarter, but it’s too late. A sudden squall, a big inshore wave, and the sarcophagus slips, then the ship heels over and is gone, probably so fast that the crew would hardly have known what was happening.’

  Costas nodded. ‘So she sinks close to shore but in deep water, here where the bottom shelves off rapidly to abyssal depth. If she’d been in shallow water there would have been some attempt at salvage, and perhaps more survivors. But if she sank like a stone, at least we should have a fairly well-contained wreck site.’

  ‘Trickier to find, though, without a wide debris field.’

  ‘We’ve got the magnetic anomalies from Seaquest II’s run over the sector this morning,’ Costas said. ‘One of them will come up trumps.’

  ‘Fingers crossed,’ Jack said.

  ‘Lucky Jack,’ Costas replied, smiling at Sofia. ‘Jack’s luck is better than any science.’

  Jack closed the computer. ‘I keep thinking of the captain, Wichelo, perhaps the only survivor, a man afraid of creditors and claimants or overcome with shame, knowing he’d never be trusted again with a cargo, deciding to disappear and change his name and start a new life.’

  ‘But not too ashamed to record the location and put it in this book, perhaps many years later when he could use his original name again,’ Costas said. ‘Maybe an old man wanting to tie up loose ends, recording the location for someone to find.’

  Sofia turned and eyed Jack shrewdly. ‘Let me get this right. The idea that the Beatrice was wrecked somewhere off Spain has been floating around for years, but nobody’s ever been allowed to search for it inside Spanish territorial waters. Even the Egyptian Antiquities Service with all its wealthy international backers fails to get permission. But then Jack Howard finds some clue to the whereabouts of the wreck, picks up the phone and hey presto, green light.’

  Jack shrugged. ‘Our record speaks for itself.’

  ‘We’re archaeologists, not salvors,’ Costas said, still eyeing the control panel. ‘Everything we find in territorial waters goes to a local museum, and everything in international waters to our museum at Carthage or to the IMU campus in England. We fund the entire process of
conservation and display. Our commercial wing makes a healthy income from our films and from sales of equipment developed in our engineering facility, but we operate on an endowment, which means there’s no need to make a profit. We’ve got a hell of a benefactor.’

  ‘I read about him on the website,’ Sofia said. ‘Efram Jacobovich, the software tycoon.’

  ‘He’s also why we’re test-driving this submersible,’ Costas said. ‘One of his companies does deep-water mineral extraction, small quantities of rare minerals around hot-air vents, and they use the same robotic manipulator arms that we’ve developed for excavation. Their success makes Efram richer and he increases our endowment. So you see, everything’s linked.’ He stared again above him, a puzzled look on his face, his voice trailing off as he spoke. ‘A bit like the wiring in this control panel. All linked somehow. I wish I could work out how Lanowski got that right.’

  Jack smiled at Sofia. ‘That clear it up for you?’

  Costas coughed. ‘And in this case, there was the small matter of Jack’s girlfriend.’

  Jack narrowed his eyes at Costas. ‘Not girlfriend. Colleague.’

  ‘Right.’ Costas grinned at Sofia. ‘Her name’s Dr Maria de Montijo. She’s head of the Oxford Institute of Epigraphy and an adjunct professor of IMU. She’s been with us on a number of expeditions. Her mother also happens to be the Spanish Minister of Culture.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sofia said. ‘My boss. So, the old boys’ network.’

  ‘The old girls’ network.’

  ‘Problem is, Maria always comes up with the goods but Jack never commits in return. Too busy diving with his buddy Costas.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Jack said, ‘how are we coming along?’

  Costas peered at Sofia. ‘Now that I know you’re an engineer too, can I ask you to help?’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘We’ve got to manually disengage the cable tethering us to Seaquest II. The lever’s the red one labelled “tether” in the ceiling of the double-lock chamber. I need to be here with my hands on about four switches to allow it to unlock. You’ll need to shut the chamber door behind you to get at the lever. A red light will fire up beside it when I’m ready. It’ll be no more than a couple of minutes. Can you do it?’

  ‘Sure. No problem.’ She slid off the chair and disappeared back through the hatch, and they heard the clang of the chamber door shutting behind her. Costas quickly turned to Jack. ‘Okay. Spill it.’

  Jack stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come on, Jack. I know that look. What’s going on?’

  Jack cleared his throat. ‘We’re searching for one of the greatest archaeological treasures of all time. We’re doing our job.’

  ‘That’s just it. Doing our job. It’s not enough, is it? Okay, an Egyptian stone sarcophagus, covered with carvings. And not just any old sarcophagus. The sarcophagus of a pharaoh, from one of the pyramids at Giza. That’s big-time. I mean, really big-time. But to get you this fired up, there just has to be more.’

  ‘The sarcophagus would be one of the greatest Egyptian finds since King Tut’s tomb. Even including all of Maurice’s discoveries.’

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Costas exclaimed. ‘Maurice Hiebermeyer. He’s the missing link. Last year at Troy he found that Egyptian sculpture with the strange hieroglyphic inscriptions and the sculptor’s name he recognised. Before you could say golden mummy, he’d shot down to Akhenaten’s city at Amarna beside the Nile, digging around for something he’d seen before. And then quick as a flash he was in the Nubian desert, and then back in Egypt up to his neck in a pyramid. It’s not like Hiebermeyer to flit around like that. Once he’s got his nose stuck in a site, he stays there until it’s done. And not just any old pyramid. The pyramid of Menkaure at Giza, precisely the place where Vyse found the sarcophagus. You’re on a trail, aren’t you, Jack? What we’re doing today, whatever we find, this isn’t just about that sarcophagus. There’s a bigger prize.’

  Jack was silent for a moment, then he turned to Costas, his face an image of suppressed excitement. ‘Right at the moment it could all be a house of cards. We need one more crucial clue. And I don’t want to upset your plans for some R and R on the beach tomorrow at Cartagena.’

  ‘I knew that was never going to happen,’ Costas said resignedly. He shook his head, then jerked his thumb towards the porthole. ‘The clue you need. Is it out there? In the wreck?’

  Jack gave him a steely look. ‘Maybe. Just maybe.’

  Costas turned back to the panel and flipped the switches. A few seconds later there was a shudder and the submersible seemed to drop in the water, then it pitched and yawed like a boat bobbing in the waves. Costas quickly got up and sat in the pilot’s seat, one hand over the control stick and the other on the throttle. Sofia re-emerged and slid down in front of the Perspex screen beside Jack. They heard the whine of the electric motor, and then felt the submersible steadying itself in the water. Jack stared again into the blue. There might be nothing down there but bare rock and sand, but Costas was right about one thing. He had always been lucky when it came to archaeology, and he felt it now. He just knew there was something there that would change history for ever.

  Costas followed Jack’s gaze through the porthole. ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’ he murmured.

  Jack glanced at him. ‘I was just thinking that. About the ancient statue of a pharaoh broken and half buried, just like that sarcophagus somewhere down there.’ He turned to Sofia. ‘It’s from Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”.’

  She was quiet for a moment, and then recited: ‘Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.’

  Costas turned to her. ‘You read poetry?’

  ‘Always been a passion.’

  Costas looked back at the porthole. ‘Me too.’

  ‘There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, Costas Kazantzakis.’

  Jack grinned, staring back at Costas’ dishevelled hair and unshaven face. ‘There’s a lot that meets the eye.’

  There was a final jolt, and then they were as one with the sea. Jack could sense it as if he himself had been released into the depths where he belonged, free at last from the sense of confinement. Costas looked at him, his hands on the controls. ‘We’re good to go.’

  Jack pointed into the abyss. ‘Go for it.’

  2

  Almost an hour after the submersible had separated from the tethering cable, Costas feathered the controls and brought it down with a soft bump on the sandy seabed some eighty metres below the surface of the Mediterranean. Sofia had moved back from the porthole to the co-pilot’s seat, and had been sharing the controls with Costas as they followed the programmed course between the magnetic anomalies located by Seaquest II during her survey run a few hours earlier. Jack had remained glued to the porthole the entire time, his excitement rising and falling each time they had approached a rusty pile of metal and then been disappointed; one had been modern building debris dumped in the sea, another a small coastal freighter with a deck gun of First World War vintage, perhaps the victim of a U-boat attack. The fourth anomaly had seemed the most promising, with right-angled features in the magnetometer readout that could have been the iron knees added during the repairs to the Beatrice in the 1830s, but as they approached, they had seen that it was the remains of a ditched aircraft, a German Heinkel 111 perhaps downed during the Spanish Civil War. Jack stared out at it now as the silt settled around their landing site, and felt his heart sink. The decay in the metal showed how little might survive of the iron elements of a ship sunk a century earlier, and the deep sand that had covered half of the plane could have completely swallowed up the Beatrice’s guns and the sarcophagus, leaving nothing to see above the desolate seabed that stretched out around them and sloped down into the abyss.

  ‘What do you think, Jack? Is that the end of the road?’ Costas said.

  Jack got up on all fours, crawled around and sat back in th
e narrow space between the two seats, staring up at the computer screen above the porthole that displayed the bathymetry around them. He pointed to an area in the outer part of the bay, beyond the line of the coast. ‘I think it’s out there,’ he said. ‘I think that’s where Beatrice was more likely to have been exposed to a sudden squall from the north-east. I think we’ve been looking too close inshore.’

  Costas magnified the image. ‘That’s more than eight hundred metres deep,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Is that a problem for the submersible?’

  ‘It’s stretching the envelope for her first sea trials.’

  ‘But it could be done.’

  ‘Sure. The real problem is the inky blackness at that depth. Seaquest II hasn’t yet done a magnetometer sweep or a sonar survey of the sector. We’d be blundering round in the dark.’

  Jack clicked on the intercom and spoke to the submersible control room on Seaquest II, where the crew had been monitoring their progress. ‘Patch me through to Captain Macalister, please.’

  A voice with a strong east-coast Canadian accent crackled through the speaker. ‘Macalister here. What’s your status?’

  ‘We’re waiting on you. There’s that final deep-water sector at the head of the bay. If you can do a magnetometer run over it, at least we can cross it off the list.’

  ‘We discussed that, Jack. You were going to check out the anomalies we’d found and leave the rest for next year.’

  ‘I agreed with you then, but down here, now that we’ve got the submersible fine tuned and running, I feel differently. You know what happens when we leave things for next year. Something else always comes up, another project, other priorities. And it’s been a couple of years since IMU hit it big-time. We could do with a major discovery, and this one would be front-page news. I’d love to see that happening now.’

  ‘All that concerns me is the safety of the ship and the submersible. You remember the weather prediction? Since you went underwater the south-easterly’s really picked up, and my meteorology officer thinks it’s going to reach at least force 6 overnight. It is the beginning of November, after all, the start of the bad time in the Mediterranean. I’m beginning to understand how the master of the Beatrice must have felt at this time of year. It’s a pretty jagged shoreline, and we’re less than a kilometre away.’