Testament

by David Gibbins

  She gestured at the phone. “So what do you do now?”

  “Anything that comes out of Bletchley on this line is immediately acted upon. Those were the Prime Minister’s orders, and this is no exception. The rear admiral commanding the Operational Intelligence Center is another in our group, and as soon as he hears the code word we have agreed for this operation he will act on it, sending the order to our sub. To others at the OIC it will appear to be another Bletchley directive, unusual but in no way betraying what is actually being ordered. By leaving the route of TS-37 unchanged, we can predict that U-515 on its present course will make contact with the convoy at about 2300 GMT this evening. At that point our submarine will already be shadowing the convoy. Her orders will be to sink Clan Macpherson soon after the convoy is hit, to make it seem as if it is another U-boat attack.”

  “It has to be the ship?”

  Bermonsey nodded grimly. “We can’t afford to send our sub after the U-boat. That could be a game of cat-and-mouse that we might lose. We’ve thought of every other possible scenario, and there’s just too much that could go wrong. We could order the sub to wait until the U-boat surfaces beside Clan Macpherson, the only time it would be exposed and vulnerable, but by attempting to take it out that way, the chances are we’d put a torpedo into Clan Macpherson as well. If there were a fight and our sub were forced to the surface, then the whole game would be up, everything we have worked on to try to undermine the gold and uranium trade. The Germans would instantly realize that we’d been on to them, and change Enigma. You know how disastrous that would be. The sub simply cannot allow her presence to be known, either to the escort or to U-515. To Henke it must simply appear that another U-boat was in the vicinity, a maverick captain like himself who was keeping radio silence. The convoy commodore and the escorts will know nothing of any of this, and nobody outside our group here or in the OIC will know that my message was an order not for the convoy to be rerouted but for one of our own subs to sink one of our own merchant ships.”

  “What about our submarine captain? He’s going to be ordered to do the unthinkable.”

  “We vetted those crews for a reason. They know they’re a top-secret outfit, under the direct command of Churchill. For them, that will be enough. They’re hardened killers. They’ve all had to do what I’ve had to do, watched men screaming and burning in the water through the periscope, men you have put there. When you see that, they’re no longer the enemy, just men. I know he’ll do it because I know I would do it.”

  He stood up, straightened his uniform and went to the phone. Fan tried to focus, but her mind was in turmoil. The layers of secrecy suddenly seemed like a hall of mirrors, trapping her inside, leaving her uncertain whether she was looking at illusion or reality. In truth, she had little idea what all the others really did here, that silent shivering army who marched in every morning with her from the train, exchanging quick pleasantries over that first welcome mug of tea, then disappearing into huts all over Bletchley with sentries at the doors. For all she knew, her friend Louise could be part of some other top-secret enterprise. She could not even know how far Bermonsey had let her in, whether he had told her the full story. The need to prevent the Germans from getting gold that could pay for uranium was clear enough. But was that really enough justification for sinking a British ship? Was there something else going on, something on that ship other than the gold?

  She looked at him standing by the phone, counting down the seconds on his watch. His eyes had hardened again, and she knew that she was not going to get anything more out of him. He had told her what she needed to know to do her job, and that would be it. That was the way Bletchley worked.

  One minute to go. She forced herself to think of the Atlantic again, of the ships battling the spray and the swell. It would still be dark, the end of the dog watch. Exhausted men would be falling instantly asleep in their bunks, fully clothed in case they had to spring into lifeboats; bleary-eyed men would be replacing them, clutching cups of cocoa and staring at the dark smudge of the ship in the line ahead, men barely in control of the cold and the fear. Normally it was an image that gave her some comfort, knowing that one file had been kept open, one convoy given a chance. This time it was different. This time, she would be saving nobody.

  Bermonsey lifted the phone off the receiver. It was answered instantly. He turned away from her, speaking urgently. “This is Bletchley. Code name Ark. I repeat, Ark. Execute.”

  Part 2

  6

  The ancient site of Carthage, Tunisia, present day

  “Maurice, can you see anything? It’s too dangerous. You need to come out now.”

  Maurice Hiebermeyer watched a clump of mud slowly collapse a few inches from his nose, and listened to the pounding of the blood in his ears. Aysha’s voice seemed distant, as if coming from the end of a very long tunnel, and yet she was only a few meters behind him, standing in the excavation trench just above the level of the Bay of Tunis some fifty meters to the east. He had a sudden flashback to his first excavation with Jack, cheek by jowl down a rabbit hole they had widened in a wood near their boarding school in southern England, straining to reach the Roman pottery they had seen at the bottom of the hole and also keep themselves concealed from the teacher who had been sent to find them. A piece of mud slopped over his face, and he snapped back to present reality. It was only the constant scooping of the digger that had kept the water at bay, and with the machine shut down while he investigated the hole, the water was seeping in again, inexorably. He watched it trickle down the mud into the pool that was already lapping the top of his head, and he tasted the sea on his lips. Aysha was right. She was thinking of their two-year-old son Michael as much as him. Being upside-down in a flooding hole beneath several tons of mud did not present ideal conditions for his long-term survival.

  “Nothing structural,” he shouted back, his voice sounding hollow in the confined space. “But I can see mud from the ancient harbor entrance channel, about a meter below where you’re standing. I’m coming out now.”

  He peered around, confirming that there was nothing more to be seen, no masonry, no artifacts, just the gray-black ooze of the ancient channel below. He could feel his headlamp beginning to work its way off, lubricated by the sheen of mud that covered the strap. He tried everything to keep it on, angling his head forward, butting it against the side of the hole, but to no avail. “Scheisse,” he muttered as it dropped into the ooze, shining blindingly back at him. He shut his eyes tight and began to work his way out, crawling backward on his elbows and knees. Over the years he had honed self-extraction to a fine art, displaying an agility that belied his girth. At the last moment he quickly reached back in and grabbed the headlamp, and then he was out on his hands and knees in the glaring sunlight at the bottom of the trench, the bucket of the digger resting in the mud beside him and the anxious faces of the workmen peering down from the top of the trench above.

  He struggled to his feet and squinted up, the mud dripping off him. Aysha had evidently satisfied herself that he was all right and had climbed back up to the ledge they had cut in the side of the trench as a platform to oversee the excavation. “Rien, rien,” he shouted to the workmen, making a sideways chopping motion with his hand, the third time he had done so since they had begun work just after dawn that morning. Each time the digger had revealed an air space in the side of the trench, a crack or a fissure or a hole, he had gone down to investigate, hoping to find masonry structure that might reveal the shape of the harbor entrance. It was not really what he had come to Carthage hoping to find, but it would be a significant addition to the work Jack had done here years before with a student diving team, recording the foundations of the outer harbor wall that had been inundated by the sea-level rise since antiquity.

  The workmen finished their cigarettes, the digger driver got back into his cab, ready to start again, and Hiebermeyer made his way up the ladder to Aysha, who was waiting with a large bottle of water. “Thanks,” he said, dumping t
he water over his head, blinking and spluttering as his face emerged from its mask of mud. Too late he realized that his shorts were flying somewhere below half-mast, and he yanked them up again. They had been a present from Jack years ago at the outset of their careers, a pair of Second World War Afrika Korps shorts Jack had found in a bazaar in Cairo. The mud would harden in the sun and solidify them, keeping them from falling down again. Nothing would induce him to wear anything else, and Aysha had given up trying long ago.

  “I’m off,” she said, making as if to embrace him but then looking at the mud and stopping herself. “They’re only opening the museum conservation rooms during the mornings this week, and I’ve got to make the most of it. Call Jack, all right? You may not think that ooze is very exciting, but he’ll be very interested if you’ve hit the harbor entrance channel. It’s good for you to touch base with him anyway. Remember, he was the one who set this project up for us.”

  “He’s probably out of touch at the moment. He and Costas are diving off West Africa on a Second World War merchantman, monitoring a salvage company. I’m actually slightly worried about him. The operation’s run by Anatoly Landor.”

  “You mean your old school friend?”

  “Hardly a friend. If it hadn’t been for Jack’s intervention, Landor would have made mincemeat of me. He’s held a grudge against Jack ever since I arrived at the school and we started going off excavating together. Normally Rebecca keeps me up to date with what Jack’s up to, but she’s been a little off the grid herself in Kyrgyzstan.”

  “I’m sure Jack can look after himself. He’s got Costas with him. That always seems to work.”

  “I just want to find something a bit more exciting for him. He’s used to getting calls from me only when it’s the big time, right? I don’t want to disappoint.”

  “Nothing from you would ever disappoint Jack. He thinks very highly of you, you know. You may not be a diver, but you’re still his oldest friend.”

  “I feel as if I’ve got to prove myself all over again since we had to leave Egypt, as if I’ve got to start from scratch. I hardly know my way around this place.”

  “Remember what Rebecca told you when she came to us on Seaquest six months ago. It was the extremists who forced us out, not anything you did. And remember those of my own family still trapped in Cairo, my brother in the resistance. They’re the ones we should be thinking about.”

  “I know. I only wish I could do something.”

  “You are. You’re doing what you were born to do. Remember what Jack said, too. He said you were a bloody good archaeologist, the best. He wouldn’t have pulled strings to set you up on a site as important as this if he thought otherwise.”

  Hiebermeyer gave her a tired smile. “When are we Skyping Michael in London?”

  “Two P.M. My sister will have brought him in from nursery school. We’re doing it from the museum, so you’ll have to leave here half an hour before that at the latest to get there in time. Where’s our newly arrived IMU nanotechnology and computer simulation expert, by the way?”

  “Lanowski? At the Roman water cisterns. He’s become fascinated by the water supply system of the ancient city, thinks it hasn’t been properly understood. Typical of Jacob, finding something mathematical to solve. He really got the fieldwork bug during our final days in Egypt last year, applying his quirky genius to Akhenaten’s map of the City of Light. Jack is going to have a real problem keeping him glued to the screen from now on. Jacob thinks the established idea that Punic houses relied on rainwater cisterns and it was the Romans who put in the first aqueduct is wrong, that the Punic city also had some kind of communal supply. I think he could be right.”

  “Did he have guards with him? The cisterns are a bit off the beaten track.”

  “Two of them went with him in the van. We’ve got a bigger police presence here after the bombing in Tunis last night, mainly for the benefit of the government officials living in the compound, but it increases our security too. You’ve still got yours?”

  “Waiting in the car. Don’t go down any more holes without telling me. I only came to check up on you because something told me Jacob might not be here to watch over you. And Maurice, please don’t hang your hat on that thing. Sometimes I really do worry about you. See you later.”

  He waved, wiped his face on a towel, and put his spectacles on, but left his hat where it was, hanging from a protuberance in the exposed section of the trench, while he waited for his head to dry. He watched Aysha walk off across the overgrown tennis court toward the car waiting at the entrance to the compound, past the two soldiers with automatic rifles at the checkpoint. For a week prior to opening up this trench, he and Aysha had been digging only a few hundred meters away at the Tophet, the sanctuary filled with infant cremation burials where the Carthaginians had practiced child sacrifice. Many scholars had insisted that the Roman accounts must be exaggerated, but osteological analysis at the IMU lab had shown beyond doubt that the burials were of healthy infants, not stillbirths and natural infant deaths as had been imagined. The discovery had made him think of their own son, Michael, and how distant they were from a world in which parents would contemplate such an act.

  In the lowest layers, dating to the seventh and sixth centuries BC, they had found inscriptions scratched and painted on potsherds giving thanks to the god Ba’al Hammon for accepting the offerings. The inscriptions were similar in date and style to those being found by Jack’s team on the Phoenician shipwreck off Cornwall, and had meant that Aysha had been collaborating closely with their colleagues Jeremy Haverstock and Maria de Montijo at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford to develop a better lexicon for the Punic language at that date. It had been an exciting project for Aysha, and she had been working overtime to finish photographing the inscriptions before they were due to close down the excavation and return to England to be with Michael again at the end of the week.

  He wiped his face once more, and watched the guards close the gate behind Aysha’s car and resume their patrol of the perimeter. He remembered the mummy excavation in the Fayum oasis in Egypt almost ten years previously where he and Aysha had first met, after she had bombarded him with emails to get on his project. Her trauma at having to leave Egypt six months ago had been even greater than his, with members of her family still trapped there under the extremist regime, some of them joining the guerrilla army to fight back. Egypt was not the only place in the Arab world where archaeology had shut down. Tunisia was heading that way too, with extremist slogans already desecrating ancient sites and museum walls. Gone were the days when archaeologists had come to Carthage in droves under the banner of a UNESCO program that made the site one of the largest and most exciting excavations in the Mediterranean. It was only intensive negotiations by Jack that had made this project possible, under the stipulation from the IMU board of directors that the security arrangements would have to pass their own strict standards. It had helped that much of the suburb of Tunis that covered ancient Carthage was already a high-security military and diplomatic compound, but even so the police presence had been enhanced and extra vetting had been put in place for the local workmen they had employed to clear the spoil and operate the digger at the site.

  The sun was burning through the morning haze, and he felt the sweat trickle down his forehead. Soon it would be like a furnace, and the excavation would have to halt until the evening. He picked up his tool belt, a present from Costas before he had flown out. Costas had not been the only one offering to help; everyone had been very kind. He knew they were concerned about his state of mind after having to leave Egypt, but they need not have worried. Carthage had begun to grip him, despite the frustrations. For too long, perhaps, he had been used to the certainties of Egypt, where a tomb was a tomb and a pyramid a pyramid, where so much of the archaeology fell into a predictable framework. Here at Carthage, by comparison, the early history was elusive, disrupted by successive phases of destruction: by the Romans when they leveled the city in 146 BC, by Juli
us Caesar a hundred years later when he swept away the ruins and rebuilt Carthage as a Roman city, by the Vandals in the early fifth century and the Byzantines a century later, and finally by the Arabs in the seventh century when they built their new capital of Tunis nearby, using the ruins of Carthage as a quarry and never reoccupying it.

  At first he had despaired of finding any intact stratigraphy from the earliest Phoenician settlement at Carthage, where he had hoped to discover evidence of Egyptian influence; pottery from that period was more likely to be swept up in destruction debris or used by the Romans as a strengthener in concrete. But then he had begun to see the challenge of it, to see that being an archaeologist at a site like this was as much an act of imagination as of discovery, that his role in being here was to absorb everything he could about the place and then see where his flair for reconstructing the past would take him. After years of rivalry with Jack in which Hiebermeyer’s excavations in Egypt had so often produced the bigger artifacts, the show-stoppers and the headline-grabbers, he had begun to think like Jack, to see archaeology in terms of probabilities and hypotheses rather than the certainties that emptying tombs and digging up mummies had brought. And to his even greater disbelief, he had begun to enjoy it. At Carthage, he felt like a novelist trying to tease a story out of the past, using the disparate evidence to create a canvas that could be populated by the people who had made this one of the greatest cities of the ancient world.

  It was Jack who had brought Carthage alive for him, standing here on this patch of waste ground beside the tennis court six months ago when they had been negotiating for the excavation permit. Jack had agreed with him that before the founding of the city there may well have been a trade outpost here, one established by the Canaanite predecessors of the Phoenicians that might have included Mycenaean Greek and Egyptian merchants. That much fitted with what was known about international maritime trade in the late Bronze Age, at the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, of the Israelite exodus from Egypt. But Jack had steered him away from any hope of finding Bronze Age remains, and instead toward the later Punic city and its links with the eastern Mediterranean world, asking him to imagine the site as it had been in the nineteenth century, before Tunis began to encroach on the ruins, when the clearest evidence of the ancient city had been the landlocked harbors entered by the channel they were trying to find now.