Testament

by David Gibbins

  “Huh. First I’ve heard of it.”

  “Maybe it’s a surprise.”

  “That is so not Jeremy.”

  “Everything all right between you two?”

  “It’s kind of hard conducting a relationship when you always seem to be at least three thousand miles apart.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jack said. “Story of my life.”

  “Katya spoke yesterday to Costas, who spilled the beans about your dive on Clan Macpherson. She was worried about you.”

  “Katya? You must be joking. She’s a Kazakh warlord’s daughter. Nothing worries her.”

  “Be serious, Dad. Just text her. Do it now.”

  “I promise.”

  “I’ll send the Zodiac to pick you up.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll kit up here and swim out myself. I could do with it.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back in the water too. Got to go now. Out.”

  Jack pocketed the receiver and squinted out to sea, spotting Rebecca leaving the cabin and helping a figure on the aft ladder of Seafire coming up from their dive. Seafire was much smaller than IMU’s two deep-ocean research vessels, Seaquest and Sea Venture, but had been designed specifically with inshore operations like this in mind, her shallow draft allowing her to anchor comfortably in these depths and her twin Vosper diesels giving her the power of a naval patrol boat should she need to egress quickly in deteriorating weather. Seafire was special to Rebecca, as she had been launched just after Rebecca had come back into Jack’s life after her mother had died, and she had been allowed to christen her. About a year ago she had quietly taken over a cabin and maintained it as her own, just as Jack did on Seaquest, another reason why he took her claim to be an environmentalist rather than an archaeologist with a pinch of salt.

  He peered over the cliffs at the shore some ten meters below, seeing the sandy bottom and the dark shadows of rocks that extended underwater from the edge of the promontory. Farther out, more than halfway to Seafire, he could just make out the boiler of a steamship that had sunk upright in the cove more than a hundred years before. It was the first wreck he had ever dived on as a boy, and since then he had come here often searching the cove for other wrecks, swimming out over the boiler and sometimes seeing other parts of the hull poking through the sand on either side. The last time he had seen the wreck fully exposed had been the previous summer, snorkeling here with Rebecca, and it had given him renewed hope that the winter storms might one day reveal other treasures in the sands beyond the steamship, a site such as the one they were diving on today.

  He shaded his eyes and scanned the coast, spotting familiar landmarks. For miles on either side, the reefs and sands of this shoreline were littered with wrecks, some of ships blown in from the Atlantic, others that had sought shelter along this coast and been caught by a change in the wind. Off this headland alone there were known to be at least a dozen, one of them a fabled treasure galleon yet to be found, others merchantmen and warships armed with cannon that Jack had discovered over the years concreted to reefs and half buried in the sands. But what he had really hoped for, what he had yearned to find since reading of the ancient navigators as a boy, was another kind of treasure, a wreck from the earliest period of Phoenician exploration, when traders from the Mediterranean had first made contact with the prehistoric peoples of the British Isles.

  Looking to the west over the bay he could make out St. Michael’s Mount, the island where the Phoenicians were thought to have made landfall in the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles, in their quest for the precious ingredient they needed to make bronze. As a boy, Jack had pored over the nautical charts, plotting the likely location of wrecks. He knew that any ancient ship entering Mount’s Bay had faced the same risk of being caught by a westerly and wrecked against this shore as the hundreds of later ships known to have come to grief here. He had convinced himself that finding an ancient wreck would simply be a matter of time and perseverance, waiting for that one storm that would shift sand as it had never been shifted before, revealing seabed that might have been buried for centuries. All he had ever hoped for was a few shattered sherds on the shingle and concreted to the seabed, enough to show that the Phoenicians truly had sailed here, and to prove his theory correct.

  And then it had happened. Three months ago, after the high seas of winter had abated, he had put on his wetsuit and snorkeled out at this very spot. He had steeled himself for disappointment, seeing that the storms had buried the steamship wreck again up to the boiler. But he had stuck with it, had refused to give up, and had swum out further than he ever had before. He had soon seen encouraging signs. The sand beyond the steamship had given way to shingle, suggesting that the sand that was normally there had been pushed into the cove and piled over the wreck, leaving the seabed further offshore less deeply silted. He swam over a cannon that he had never seen before, concreted to a rocky outcrop. And then he had seen something extraordinary. At first he had thought they were more cannon, dozens of them, but even as he dived down, he knew what he had discovered. They were amphoras, ancient cylindrical jars for wine and olive oil, exactly the type that he and Maurice had seen in the museum at Carthage when they had visited Tunisia earlier that winter. They were at least two and a half thousand years old, from the time before the rise of Rome when Carthage and her traders had vied with the Greeks for domination of the western Mediterranean, when Carthaginian seafarers were pushing the boundaries of maritime knowledge far out into the Atlantic to the north and the south.

  For the first time since they had been forced out of Egypt by the extremist takeover the year before, Jack had felt truly elated. He had found far more than just a few potsherds. Many of the amphoras were intact, showing that the wreck had been quickly buried in the sand and protected from the ravages of storm and wind over the centuries. He knew that he had little time to lose if they were not to be buried in meters of sand again, or wrenched from the seabed by storm waters and destroyed. He had immediately put in for an emergency protection order from the government to keep salvors from looting the site, and had secured a license to excavate. Within days an IMU team had arrived, and the shore encampment was established. With the campus only half an hour away, all the artifacts could be taken back immediately for conservation in state-of-the-art facilities.

  For Jack it was a dream excavation, as long as the weather held. There were no extremists trying to gun them down, no warlords trying to muscle in on their finds, no treasure hunters pillaging the site at night. At less than ten meters’ depth they had little need to worry about decompression sickness. Within two weeks they had stripped away the upper layer of amphoras and revealed gray anaerobic sediment beneath, promising conditions for the preservation of hull remains and other organic artifacts. Suddenly they had found not just amphoras but a site that might be of huge international significance, a wreck to put alongside the best that Jack had ever discovered. For it to be in his own backyard, where he had first learned to dive, made it seem a personal triumph too, as if his career were coming full circle, back to the place where his passion for the past had really first taken hold.

  He swept his eyes once more along the coast. So often these waters seemed an impenetrable veil of secrets; one storm might reveal a tantalizing hint of a wreck, and then another conceal it for years. Waymarkers underwater that had seemed so obvious—reefs, cannon, pieces of wreckage—could disappear beneath the sand with the next tide, meaning that exploration constantly had to start over again from scratch. But this time they had a wreck firmly pinned down, one of the best he had ever found, and he was determined to see it through. The weather forecast for the summer ahead was good. He turned to go, running through a mental checklist of the equipment he had brought, suddenly feeling that every moment here was precious. He needed to get in the water.

  8

  A little over an hour later, Jack walked fully equipped down the beach beside the headland, shading his eyes as he stared out toward Seafire. Nestled in the lee of the promontory to his
right was the ancient Church of the Mariners, the burial site for many who had washed up on this beach over the centuries: some from wrecks that remained imprinted in local memory, others from ships that had disappeared without a trace. Six months earlier, after returning from Egypt, Jack had stood on the promontory during one of the worst winter storms in recent years, lashed by wind and spray, watching the gigantic swells crash and rumble up the sand and nearly inundate the church. Today, with barely a ripple on the sea, such a scene seemed almost inconceivable; then, it had been impossible to imagine how anyone could have survived being wrecked in this place, with the sea sucking in and out over the jagged rocks and the waves erupting to a height of thirty meters or more against the seaward cliffs, a scene of near-certain death for anyone swept off a ship in such conditions.

  He put the image from his mind and concentrated on enjoying the moment. He reached the sea where it gently lapped the shoreline, dipped his mask in the water, and put it on over his hood, running a finger under the edge of the neoprene to make sure the mask was sealed to his face. Unlike his dive on Clan Macpherson five days earlier, he was wearing only a wetsuit and conventional scuba gear, all he needed on a warm summer day off Cornwall with a maximum depth of less than ten meters. It was diving as he had first experienced it as a boy and as he had learned to relish it again, free from the stress and danger of deep exploration, from the constant nagging fear of nitrogen sickness that was the ticking time bomb behind so many wreck excavations. Here, with a safe bottom time of more than two hours, he could excavate almost as if he were on land, and yet enjoy the physical sensation of being underwater that always seemed to heighten his awareness and keep the adrenalin coursing through him.

  He waded out, pulled on his fins and collapsed into the water, injecting air into his stabilizer jacket and putting his snorkel in his mouth, ready for the long surface swim out to the wreck. He kicked hard with his fins to get over a small hump of sand by the shore, and then the bottom gradually dropped away in swimming-pool-like visibility, the sun shimmering off the ripples in the sand below him. As he swam on, the spurs of rock that jutted out from the promontory, smoothed and denuded near shore, appeared more overgrown, covered with the more tenacious forms of marine accretion that were able to withstand the battering of waves and swell. Several of the larger outcrops had scour pits on the seaward side, and in one he saw a small crab scurry for cover.

  He passed beyond the rocks and floated motionless for a few moments, the water gently rocking him, letting his breathing and heart rate slow, almost in a state of meditation. Some physiologists argued that humans were ill-adapted to water, that survival when immersed was a constant and unnatural struggle; to Jack the reverse was the case, and the fact of being unable to breathe like a fish seemed secondary to the supreme relaxation he felt underwater, to a bodily and psychological contentment that he rarely experienced to the same degree on land.

  Five minutes later he stopped, swiveled around, and checked his surface position, seeing that he had almost reached a midway point in the cove, equidistant between the seaward end of the promontory with the church and the tip of the headland to the south. He had seen little except sand since leaving the rocks, but had begun to swim over patches of shingle where the winter storms had stripped away the seabed almost to bedrock. He set off again, and moments later saw the first signs of the steamship wreck that spanned the entrance to the cove, twisted plates of metal that had been wrenched from the hull by successive storms. The wreck was only 120 years old, but seeing it still gave Jack a frisson of excitement. For almost two decades the hull had been completely buried in sand, only the top of the boiler visible, but the winter storms had washed away almost five meters’ depth of sand and the wreck was visible in its entirety, sitting on the shingle and bedrock. She was a barometer of seabed exposure elsewhere in the cove, though a fickle one. Three months ago she had been buried when Jack had decided to carry on with his exploration further out to sea, hoping against hope that his dream of finding a much earlier wreck in these waters would finally be realized.

  He looked toward Seafire, now less than two hundred meters distant, and raised his left arm as a signal, knowing that the dive marshal would have been keeping an eye on his progress since leaving the beach. He remembered the last time he had been in the water approaching a dive boat, five days ago with Deep Explorer. Despite all his entreaties, the ship’s captain had refused to raise anchor and stand off, and he and Costas had been forced to struggle into the Zodiac in mountainous seas with the ship’s hull only meters away. His old friend Landor had watched it all from the railing, seemingly indifferent, but Jack’s ire with him once they were aboard had served the useful purpose of allowing him to stonewall any attempt by Landor to wheedle out of them what they had actually seen on Clan Macpherson, and within an hour they had been taken off in the Lynx helicopter that had come for them from the British Army base in Freetown.

  He tried to put Deep Explorer from his mind. He hoped never to see her again, and he did not want brooding about Landor to sully this day. Seafire was a reassuring presence, with people on board whose priority was to look after divers, and that was what mattered. He saw the dive marshal watching, and gave him a thumbs-down to show that he was descending. He could have continued swimming on the surface to the excavation site, but he preferred to go down on the steamship wreck and follow the line that had been attached on the seabed from there.

  He removed his snorkel, put his regulator in his mouth, and vented air from the inflation tube on his buoyancy compensator, dropping beneath the surface and pinching his nose to clear his ears as he fell to the seabed. Just before reaching it, he injected a blast of air into his BC to regain neutral buoyancy, and for a few moments he hung there, a meter above the sand. Even after thousands of dives he had never lost the thrill he had felt when he first breathed from a tank, and he savored it now, drawing on his regulator and listening to the rush of bubbles from the exhaust. He turned over on his back, took out his regulator and blew rings, watching them expand and explode in a silvery shower against the surface. It felt incredibly good, as it always did.

  He turned over and swam toward the steamship wreck, kicking his fins in a languid breaststroke. Within the hull amidships he saw the dark form of the boiler, its top only a few meters below the surface at low tide, as it was now. He turned left toward the stern, marveling at the timbers, which had remained in pristine condition under the sand. At the stern, the screw and rudder pintle were shrouded with old fishing nets and a crab pot from the last time the hull had been exposed, many years before. He rounded it and swam along the ship’s port side, on the way spotting the small porbeagle shark that had taken up residence in the shadowy recess of the scour pit, preying on the many fish that had appeared as if from nowhere since the wreck had been exposed. From there it was a short swim to the mass of exposed copper piping beside the boiler that acted as an anchor for the guideline to the ancient wreck.

  He followed the line out a short distance, leaving the main bulk of the steamship behind, and then dropped down to a section of deck planking he had not seen before, newly revealed in the last few days. He put one hand palm downward on the wood, feeling how smooth it was. If they could find wood like this on the Phoenician wreck, buried not for a century but for two and a half millennia, they truly would have made a great discovery, one of the outstanding wreck finds ever made in British waters.

  He turned back to the guideline and swam further out across the shingle. A giant box jellyfish came by, rhythmically pulsing, making its way with seeming determination to some unknown place. Jack left the line to follow it, swimming beneath its meter-wide body so that he could see the sunlight shine through, marveling at its beauty. Once, seeing a school of these jellyfish over the wreck of a ship-of-the-line further up the coast, a place of terrible loss of life, he had thought that they were like the souls of long-dead mariners, fated forever to remain at sea on an endless voyage.

  He watched the jellyfish m
ove on, and returned to the line. He was now in the shadow of Seafire, and he saw the dive ladder extended into the water at the stern and the anchor cable beyond that. A diver was ascending the ladder with another in the water behind, evidently a shift returning from the excavation, and a snorkeler was on the surface above him. He rolled over and blew a succession of bubble rings toward her. He could hardly have imagined all those years before that his daughter would one day be freediving in the waters that he had snorkeled in as a boy, but now the slender form in the distinctive blue-and-black wetsuit was almost as familiar to him underwater as Costas. She spiraled down, clearing her ears as she did so, and put a hand on his. She pointed toward the end of the guideline and gave him an okay sign. He did the same in return, and followed her as she swam ahead like a seal, using the fin stroke that he had taught her when they had first swum together in this cove when she was barely into her teens.

  As she angled back up toward the surface, Jack saw the ancient wreck spread out before him beyond the staked end of the guideline. There were pottery amphoras in rows on either side, newly revealed as the excavators had dug deeper into the shingle and sand over the past few days. For the first time he sensed the shape of a ship, perhaps eighteen or twenty meters long, six or seven meters in beam. It was incredibly exciting. Everything pointed to this not being the result of a ship capsizing and dumping its contents, but a site that could hold hull timbers as well. If timbers survived in a deeper pocket in the sand, then they must be close to them now, as he could already see outcrops of gray-green bedrock protruding through the shingle.

  His mind shifted automatically to the next stage of the project. The discovery of hull timbers would change the tempo completely. Amphoras and small finds could be raised easily enough to Seafire, but timbers would require more time to record in situ, as well as heavy lifting equipment and onboard fresh-water storage tanks for immediate conservation. Seafire was a superb vessel, purpose-built for archaeology, but she was not much bigger than a large dive charter boat, designed for day trips from their Falmouth base and primarily for shallow-water work. Seaquest and Sea Venture were ocean-going ships, too big to bring this close inshore, and both anyway were committed to projects on the other side of the world, Sea Venture to a geological survey in the Hawaiian archipelago and Seaquest to deep-water exploration off Sri Lanka. IMU in Falmouth had a barge with lifting equipment that could be towed over the site, but it was an unwieldy vessel, vulnerable to swell and wind.