Testament

by David Gibbins

  At the cape his crew had begun to die from a mysterious ailment that had swept through them after they had stopped for water at the mouth of a river a week before. He had taken on two of the native men to bolster the remaining crew, and to help forage ashore. He knew there was every chance that he and his precious cargo might disappear without a trace, and he had decided to leave evidence of their passing. If they succeeded in delivering the Ark, the two Lembana would be released from their bond and told to make their own way back to the cape, taking the memory of what they had seen with them. On the plaque, beneath the message in Phoenician, he had used a chisel to punch in the crude shape of a hieroglyph that Ezekiel had showed him, one that would leave little doubt to any hunting him that they were on the right trail, that he had at least made it that far. To do this had not been to break the pact of secrecy with Ezekiel. The only ones ever likely to follow him would be those sent to recover the Ark, and the hieroglyph was one that only they would understand.

  After many weeks of sailing they had veered northeast, around a great promontory that the local fishermen called the Horn, past desolate rocky islands and then northwest through a bay that narrowed to a strait before opening out again. Hanno knew they must have passed into the southern reaches of the Erythraean Sea, with the desert expanses of Arabia on their right and the southern border of Egypt not far ahead. By the time they had reached the beginning of the salt flats, only two of his crew remained alive, barely enough to steer the ship and brail the big square sail. Hanno had pressed on despite their dwindling rations, knowing that if he stopped to forage, he would almost certainly be unable to induce his men to return to the ship, to yet more misery and pain. Every day as they sailed further north he had anxiously observed the sun with his wooden backstaff, waiting for it to reach the highest point in the sky. And then at dawn on this day he had seen it, a ripple of light reflecting off the mountains just as Ezekiel had described it, a burning chariot racing across the western horizon: the Chariot of Fire.

  He had steered the ship ashore, and prepared to abandon her. He knew that they had reached a point not far south of the land the Egyptians called Punt, near the entrance to the Erythraean Sea. He had been there years before, on an expedition down the Nile with Himilco to find the finest elephant ivory, and he knew that if they were lucky, he and the two surviving sailors might find a caravan route and strike out across the desert toward North Africa and their homeland. The two sailors and the Lembana had heaved the Ark off the ship, strapping the gorillae hides tightly around it and departing ahead of Hanno, who had stayed back to fill the sack with anything they could consume. Parched with thirst, the sailors had underestimated the challenge of crossing the salt rind in the scorching heat. Without the two Lembana, who had shifted the sailors out of the way and taken on the burden themselves, they would have made no more than a few hundred paces, not much farther than Hanno had reached now.

  He caught a glimpse of something on the salt flats to the north, and stopped struggling forward, swaying to and fro, staring. It was something glistening, something flashing, a wavering in the haze. For a split second he thought he saw horses, perhaps camels. He closed his eyes, and then looked again, blinking hard. It was still there. His heart began to pound even faster than it was already, and he was jarred into action. Riders from the north might bring succor, might bring food and water, might be their salvation. But this was a brutal land, a land where men showed no mercy to interlopers, and more likely they would bring death. He stared back at the mountains, trying to judge the distance. He might be lucky. The riders might still be a long way off, the specter foreshortened by mirage. By marshalling all of his remaining energy he might just make the foothills in time. The others were nearly there already with their burden, barely visible against the mountain backdrop. They could conceal themselves among the ridges and canyons of the foothills, where pursuers would only be able to follow on foot and might quickly give up. Once there, he and his men might find game to hunt, and they would surely find water. They could still make it.

  He had sailed farther around Africa from the Pillars of Hercules than any explorer had done before. He had been entrusted with a mission, a cargo to discharge, and as a Phoenician, he could never default on that trust. But he had another covenant, too. It was a covenant with his brother, a pact to return and gaze together once again over the great expanse of the ocean, to tell stories of what they had seen and where they had gone, to exult in their adventures. Himilco, he knew, might reach as far as Ultima Thule, a place where the sky itself was said to be frozen, rippling with blue like the sea ice; in return, he would expect no less of Hanno than the circumnavigation of Africa. They were traders, to be sure, but they were also explorers, driven by the quest to see what lay just beyond the horizon. Hanno would summon up every last drop of energy to push himself forward, to live for the day when he would see his brother again. His was a covenant with survival.

  He began to hear a distant beating, like the drums on the walls of Carthage before a sacrifice. He was unsure whether it was coming from the riders or was the sound of the blood pounding in his own ears. Out of the haze from the direction of the riders a camel lurched past, its burden hunched forward, blood pulsing from a gaping wound that had stained his robe a vivid red. Hanno stared at him as he carried on south, watching the spray of salt dust each time the camel’s hooves pounded through the crust, then turned again to look at the man’s pursuers. One of them, with long dark hair, brandished a whip, and the others had blades that flashed in the sun, their robes billowing behind them like one continuous sheet of white rippling along the seashore. For a moment he was caught between two intersecting worlds: one that would surely see his lifeblood spilled here beside his ship, the other that might offer hope, that might mean a chance of survival.

  He dropped his sack and began to run.

  Part 1

  1

  The Atlantic Ocean off Sierra Leone, present day

  Marine archaeologist Jack Howard stared down into the abyss, hearing nothing but the hiss of his oxygen rebreather as he floated in the deep ocean swell. Somewhere down there, somewhere in the inky blackness below, lay a prize beyond the dreams of most deep-sea salvors, a king’s ransom in gold resting unclaimed in international waters. But at the moment, Jack was far less concerned about the gold than about the diver who had just preceded him. Costas had plummeted in his usual fashion, like a sack of lead, weighed down by the array of tools on his belt. As their rebreathers produced no bubbles, he had disappeared almost without a trace, barely leaving a quiver in the shot line that anchored them to the wreck. After more than twenty years of diving together, Jack had seen his friend disappear down more black holes than he cared to remember, but this time, more than fifty miles from shore in the forbidding waters of the South Atlantic, it had been particularly unnerving. They had the experience to confront virtually anything the oceans had to offer, but Jack knew that what sailors used to call divine providence would always have the final say. Not for the first time over the last few years, he shut his eyes and mouthed the words he always did before a perilous dive into the unknown: Lucky Jack.

  He opened his eyes and checked the LED display inside his helmet. He remembered the last time he had watched Costas disappear into the abyss, in the Mediterranean five months earlier during their hunt for a pharaoh’s lost sarcophagus. Costas had been trapped inside a submersible that had lost its tether and was falling to the ocean floor, and Jack had made a split-second decision to freedive after it, a one-way ticket to oblivion had he failed to reach it in time. Then, there had been no time for reflection, no time for fear. But this time the few minutes he had spent on the surface after watching Costas go had been enough for his heart rate to increase, for his mouth to go dry. His computer had flashed up a yellow warning just as they were about to descend together, too late for him to signal Costas to abort. The diagnostic in his helmet display had shown the reappearance of a glitch in the first-stage rebreather manifold, something
that Costas had tried to fix in the support vessel’s repair shop before the dive, a fraught few hours during which Jack had been locked in an argument with the captain about the need to keep the shot-line anchor out of the wreckage in order to avoid damaging the sunken hull even before they had begun to explore it.

  All he could do now was wait for his computer to complete the diagnostic and hope that it could repair itself. Their communication system was down too, meaning he could no longer talk to Costas, a problem not with their own equipment but with the link to the ship’s control room. That and the lack of specialized tools in the repair shop had been just two of the small irritations since they had been winched down by helicopter with their equipment onto Deep Explorer the day before.

  He rolled sideways, seeing the unfamiliar hull a few meters beyond the shot-line buoy. Instead of Seaquest, instead of the support divers from the International Maritime University and the submersible that would normally accompany a dive of this nature, they were operating from a commercial salvage vessel without any of the usual IMU safety backup. They were here because a landmark change in legislation had finally seen British merchant vessel wrecks of the Second World War designated as war graves. They were also here because a researcher for the salvage company had found a secret cargo manifest showing that the ship below them, the SS Clan Macpherson, sunk by a U-boat in 1943, had been carrying a consignment of two tons of gold. Without that gold, the salvors would have had no interest in the wreck. With it, they were prepared to destroy the wreck to get at the cargo.

  This had been the first case since the legislation had been passed, and Jack had agreed to spearhead the UN monitoring program, knowing that his clout as archaeological director of IMU would ensure that the wreck would be front-page news if things went awry. The salvage company knew that too, and apart from this morning’s spat over the anchor chain, relations had been businesslike. They may have thought they were on an easy ride, with two of the world’s foremost maritime archaeologists here to verify the wreck and provide guidelines for the salvage, a token requirement that they could make a great show of following while they went ahead and ripped the wreck apart to get at the gold, something the world’s press were hardly going to see more than a hundred meters below the sea. Jack was determined to do anything he could to prevent that from happening.

  He heard the roar of an outboard engine, and moments later saw a Zodiac swing out from the stern of the vessel with several crew on board and head toward him. He motioned for them to come between him and the ship, a safer option in the mounting swell than being trapped in a narrow space between the two vessels. The crewman at the tiller throttled down and put the engine in neutral as he came alongside. Jack grabbed the rope around the edge of the inflatable and hung on as the project logistics director, a former oil-rig foreman named Macinnes, leaned over. “What’s the problem?” he shouted.

  Jack was wearing a full-face mask as part of his IMU e-suit, an all-environment drysuit with integrated buoyancy system that Costas had perfected over the years. He was not willing to raise the mask while he was in the water, but he clicked open a one-way valve beside his mouthpiece that would allow him to be heard without letting water in. “Same problem as before with the regulator manifold,” he said, bracing himself to stop the swell pulling him under the boat. “My computer’s running a diagnostic.”

  “I thought Kazantzakis had fixed it,” Macinnes shouted, staring imperiously at Jack.

  “He did the best he could with the available tools.”

  “Don’t blame us. Our remit was to host you, not to provide logistical backup. That’s your call.”

  Jack gritted his teeth, trying to keep his cool. Floating here with a faulty regulator and his friend on the seabed more than a hundred meters below was not the time or place to bicker with these people. He strained his head back upward. “Costas programmed the computer to self-repair if it happened again, so I’m just waiting for it to finish.”

  The man jerked his head toward the empty ocean beyond the shot-line buoy. “Does he always go off alone like that? Not the best buddy.”

  Jack ignored the comment. Macinnes and Costas had barely been on speaking terms since they had arrived. Macinnes had made a big show of bowing to Jack’s superior archaeological knowledge, but had decided that he knew more about submersibles and remote-operated vehicles than Dr. Costas Kazantzakis, a big mistake. The fact that he had been unable to put down an ROV to do the preliminary recon or to accompany the dive would seem to have proved Costas’s case. Jack swung sideways in the swell, holding on with two hands. “What’s the story with the comms?”

  “It’s the same story. You brought your own equipment, it didn’t match ours. Not our responsibility.”

  “Is anyone on to it? I can’t communicate with Costas.”

  “It’s irrelevant, with the weather getting worse. The forecast has upped from Force 4 to Force 8 in the next few hours. The last thing we need is a botched inspection and a fatality to cloud our press reports. We’ve come to pick you up.”

  “Negative. I’m not leaving Costas to do the dive on his own.”

  “Looks like he was quite happy to leave without you.”

  Jack tried to restrain his anger. The last thing he needed before a deep dive was aggravation like this. He clicked the valve shut and pushed off from the boat, making a circular motion with his hand and pointing away as he finned back to the shot-line buoy. The crewman at the tiller looked at Macinnes, who raised his hands theatrically and shrugged. He sat back down and the crewman flipped the engine into forward, driving it in a wide arc around Jack and back toward the entry platform at the stern of the ship.

  Jack reached the buoy, holding himself against the current, and looked up to see a line of crewmen wearing Deep Explorer caps along the foredeck rail. Dealing with these people over the last twenty-four hours had taught him one thing. He had seen more dull eyes and lassitude among this team than he had ever seen on a project before. He was fortunate that IMU had been a purely scientific endeavor from the outset, funded through an endowment from a billionaire software tycoon who also happened to be one of Jack’s oldest diving friends. Being here, and witnessing every discussion fall back on the hard floor of profitability, he had seen how the quest for financial gain ultimately drew the fire out of people. What drove Jack on was the urge for adventure and discovery that had pushed humans to explore since earliest prehistory, and a passion for revealing the truth about the past that could make the lowliest potsherd more valuable than any amount of gold that these people might rip out of wrecks like the one below him now.

  He glanced up at the railing again, spotting a muscular figure in jeans and a checkered shirt with close-cropped graying hair, leaning on a stick. Anatoly Landor was Jack’s oldest dive buddy, the one who had been there beside him when he had taken his first breath from a diving tank in a pool while they had been at boarding school together. At first they had been inseparable, joined by their shared passion for diving, but then they had drifted apart, Jack into archaeology and Landor into treasure hunting. Landor had been an outsider at school, the son of an emigré Russian aristocrat’s daughter and a shady British businessman, and that had set the pattern for his future. Early on, before IMU had been founded, he had tried to enlist Jack into his projects, but their differences had been irreconcilable. For the past three years he had been operations director for Deep Explorer Incorporated, the investment consortium that owned the ship. The walking stick was because of a severe bend that had kept him out of the water for almost two years now.

  Jack looked at him, remembering the raised arm with an okay signal that would have been there in the past, but knowing that this time there would be nothing. Landor had been a changed man since his accident, still with the upper body strength he had honed at school but with severely weakened legs, and a warning from the doctors that any further exposure to nitrogen buildup in his bloodstream—even a dive to swimming pool depth—would almost certainly result in a spinal be
nd and permanent paralysis. But it was not so much the physical change that Jack noticed as the hardening of his soul. Landor’s knowledge that he would have made this dive himself before his accident only increased the distance between them, fueling a resentment toward Jack that had been bubbling under the surface over the years, and was now plain to see.

  His monitor was still only halfway through running the diagnostic, and he looked down into the depths again. The sea here was a strange color, green more than blue, an ominous shade, as if an ugly run-off from the war-torn countries of Africa had spilled out over the continental shelf. It could not have been a greater contrast to the azure waters of Cornwall, off southwest England, where he had been diving only three days before. When the call had come through that Deep Explorer had pinpointed the wreck of Clan Macpherson, he had just spent an hour in the shallows off the western Lizard peninsula near the IMU campus, excavating a perfectly preserved elephant’s tusk that he was convinced was part of a Phoenician cargo. He had been very reluctant to leave the site, and had spent the flight down to Sierra Leone reading The Periplus of Hanno, the account of a sixth-century BC Carthaginian explorer who had sailed these very waters off West Africa. It had reminded him of the extent of Phoenician exploration on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, stoking his excitement over what he had been excavating and the new story of the earliest explorers that it would allow him to tell.

  The Phoenician wreck off Cornwall had been his first big project since returning from Egypt the previous year, and he was gripped by it. But a few hours in Freetown waiting for the helicopter out to Deep Explorer, seeing the state of Sierra Leone and its people, had made him realize that his priority for now had to be here. Channeled through the right humanitarian organization, the two tons of gold alleged to be on the wreck below them could make a substantial difference. The wreck was beyond territorial limits, but the IMU lawyers had suggested that a claim of ownership could be made on the grounds that Freetown was the destination of the wartime convoy and there was no documentation to show that the gold was to be transported further. It was a shaky case, but it could buy them time. At the very least, it would garner negative publicity for the salvage company and might deter investors. Nobody would want to be linked to a company that sought personal profit rather than donating a discovery of questionable ownership to one of the poorest and most war-torn countries in the world, a discovery that could provide enough to feed thousands and save countless lives.