Inquisition

by David Gibbins

  “You and I are still set up to meet tomorrow morning in my office at the campus,” Jack said. “We’re going to brainstorm everything we’ve got.”

  Macalister peered at the chart on the table. “Before you arrived, Andrew was telling us about his identification of the gun. Taking that into account, and now the coin as well, it looks as if we have the missing part of the wreck. I’m guessing that you won’t have time to get in any excavation there this season, but we can at least do a magnetometer survey.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Jack said. “That should show us whether there are any other cannon buried in the sand, and if so, pinpoint the spot when we’re able to put the water dredges onto it. We have to assume from the empty treasure chest that there are more coins to be found, at least in the hundreds given the size of the box. Our coin could represent a considerable scatter blown up into the cleft during the storm that wrecked the ship, but the main deposit could be on the seabed near that cannon. The mother lode.”

  Rebecca eyed him. “Wow, Dad. Mother lode. You really can talk the talk. That’s treasure-hunter speak. Never thought I’d hear the day.”

  Jack grinned. “Well, archaeology has its perks, but spend long enough recording potsherds and you see the light eventually. And there’s a little boy in me, before the PhD and all that serious stuff, who would just love to find a treasure trove of Spanish pieces of eight.”

  “Amen to that.” Costas came lurching through the entrance carrying a large black box that he dumped unceremoniously at Macalister’s feet. “There you go. One magnetometer transceiver, fully serviced and tuned.”

  “Have you two been talking about this already?” Jack said.

  “As soon as I got out of that cleft, I radioed James to let him know that we were on target,” Costas replied. “I thought it would help; give him time to drive the boat round and get everything prepped. While he was doing that and you were having your post-discovery moment alone on the cliff, I nipped back to the campus to pick up the magnetometer and my newly modified metal detector. I designed the detector precisely thinking that we might want to use it to explore fissures and crevices in the cliff face, so it’s got a specially adapted head that you can poke into cracks. While James drives up and down offshore with the mag, I’m going to get down on the rocks again on either side of that gully and see what I can find.”

  “It’ll have to be today,” Jack said. “We’ve got Force 8 westerlies forecast for tomorrow, and a likely ten-foot swell.”

  “Roger that.”

  The tablet that Costas had been carrying in his shoulder bag suddenly sprang to life, talking and flashing color. He took it out and propped it on the table. “Oh my God,” Rebecca said. “It’s Lanowski, from the IMU campus. It’s like he’s become the computer. He’s finally gone full cyber.”

  A disheveled face appeared on the screen, came too close and then moved back, trying to look into the camera. Jacob Lanowski’s long, lank hair was strangely disheveled, and his little round glasses were askew. He was holding something small and dark close to his chest and was having trouble controlling it. He looked like someone who had been handed a baby and had no idea what to do with it. “Costas,” he said, his voice edged with panic. “I need your help. And I need it now.”

  Costas sighed. “What is it, Jacob? I hope you haven’t upset Little Joey.”

  “Little Joey?” Jeremy said. “I thought that was the robot you lost in the volcano.”

  “Not lost,” Costas said. “Sacrificed for the cause of archaeology. And this is Little Joey 4. A miniature sub-bottom excavator. A kind of underwater mole that burrows under the sediment, records everything in 3-D, then extracts artifacts and hands them to you.”

  Lanowski became more agitated. The object he was holding began jumping and whirring, as if it were trying to get out of his hands. “Costas, this is serious. I can’t control him. I finished that adjustment to the control wiring, and he suddenly sprang to life. I realized I had no idea how to switch him off.”

  “He?” Cunningham said, puzzled. “Is it alive?”

  “In some minds, yes,” Jeremy murmured.

  Costas picked up the tablet with both hands, as if he were holding Lanowski by the shoulders, steadying him. “It’s like one of those talking toys, Jacob. Squeeze its belly.”

  “What?” Little Joey leaped out of Lanowski’s hands and began spinning around in the air. He caught it just in time, fell backward out of sight, then lurched toward the screen again, leaning over and fumbling. Suddenly the commotion stopped, and all they could hear was panting. Lanowski stood back, holding the robot in his hands. “Okay. Phew. Thanks.”

  “Crisis over?” Jack said.

  Lanowski carefully put Little Joey out of sight, stepping away warily as if he thought it was about to spring back at him, and turned to the screen. He cleared his throat, swept back his hair and adjusted his glasses, then laughed nervously. “Crisis over. Sorry about that. Back to the nanotechnology lab.”

  “Just let Little Joey sleep,” Costas said. “He’s like a new puppy, remember. Not really house-trained yet. We can take him for a burrow this evening.” He tapped the screen, and Lanowski disappeared. “Apologies for that.”

  “A burrow?” Jeremy said.

  “A dig,” Costas replied. “He really likes to dig. It’s his job, after all. And then when he’s finished, he goes round and round in circles like a dog making a cozy nest. Something Lanowski programmed into him, I don’t know why. I think that’s what Little Joey was trying to do just now.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “You guys need to get out more often.”

  “That’s the plan,” Costas said enthusiastically. “Next time Jack has an excavation. We were going to let Little Joey loose on the wreck here, but now it looks as if the weather is closing in.”

  “Speaking of which,” Macalister said, tapping the magnetometer. “Costas, are you coming?”

  “You bet.”

  The two men lifted the box and struggled with it out of the tent, disappearing in the direction of the IMU truck parked in the lane outside. Rebecca handed the coin back to Jack and smiled at him. “You’re all just boys with toys, aren’t you?”

  “James is an old sea dog and gets restless when he’s not on the bridge of Seaquest. Putting him in charge of a Zodiac boat with a useful job to do means he’ll be right back in his element. Costas, well, you know Costas as well as I do. Give him equipment to test and he’s as happy as a six-year-old with a box of LEGOs.”

  “Speaking of Costas, I think I’d better go and give him a hand,” Rebecca said. “I know he’s as sure-footed as a mountain goat, but I don’t like to think of him tottering along the cliff edge with more equipment than he can really carry.”

  “What you’re actually saying is that you’d like to find a coin too.”

  “The thought did cross my mind.”

  “Be careful on the rocks. Piece of eight, okay?”

  “You’re on.”

  Rebecca picked up her hiking boots and phone and walked toward the entrance of the tent, Jeremy and Cunningham following. Jack suddenly remembered something. “Before you go, Rebecca. While Costas and I were, ah, in that cleft and passing the time, he said something about a book you guys are planning, a kind of unauthorized biography. Anything you want to tell me about?”

  The truck revved up and began to trundle over the potholes down the lane. Rebecca looked back, her face expressionless. “A book? Another one? Really? Got to go, Dad. Appreciate it if you’d look at my draft layout for the information board. Talk later.”

  Jack started to reply, but then thought better of it. He picked up the coin from where Rebecca had left it on the table, put it in a clear plastic finds bag, and then placed the bag in a tray labeled for immediate conservation. He went to the cool box, took out a bottle of water and drank from it, then walked over to the easel where Rebecca had been mocking up a public information board on the excavation to complement the one on the Phoenician wreck that was now p
ermanently erected near the coastal footpath. In the center of the board, between photos of divers on the site, she had pinned a facsimile of a letter dated 7 April 1684 from a local official to Lord Dartmouth, Admiral of the Fleet, about how the ship’s captain had allowed his vessel to be driven ashore thinking he was on the coast of France, and how the justices and gentlemen of the county were extremely civil and saved what they could, and were “very kind to the poor people.”

  He read through the rest of Rebecca’s text, scribbling a few comments on the board, then looked out of the open tent flap to the wreck site several hundred meters away across the cove, seeing two divers on the surface about to begin their shift. He thought about what Andrew Cunningham had said about her ordnance, about the “Great Guns” that were the most prominent feature of the site. The fact that most of those guns were not ship’s armament but cargo, packed muzzle to breech in two rows along the bottom of the hold, was one of many extraordinary aspects of the ship’s story. She was called the Schiedam, and was part of Lord Dartmouth’s fleet carrying ordnance, tools, horses, and people back from Tangier, the port in present-day Morocco which had been acquired by the English king Charles II as part of his dowry when he married the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, but which was abandoned in 1684 in the face of Moorish threat.

  The Schiedam was originally a Dutch merchantman that had been captured by Barbary pirates a few months earlier and was then captured again by a daring young Royal Navy captain, Cloudesley Shovel—who years later, as an admiral, was lost with his fleet in the Scilly Isles due to a navigational error, a catastrophe that precipitated the race to find a better way to establish longitude. Captain Shovel, in the James Galley, had escorted the Schiedam to Tangier, where she was entered into the books as a transport vessel. On her fateful return voyage she carried not only cannon and tools, some of them the private consignments of Tangier merchants, but also the workmen who had been employed to destroy the great mole in the harbor, the huge breakwater that had been laboriously constructed by the English to make Tangier a more viable port. The men had been paid off handsomely and dispatched home along with their wives and children and everything of value they could salvage from Tangier.

  All of this meant that as an archaeological site the wreck was extraordinarily rich, a veritable porthole into life in the English colony at that time, manifest in artifacts ranging from the ordnance and small arms of the garrison to the personal items that people had been able to rescue in the face of the Moorish onslaught.

  As if that history were not remarkable enough, no less a person than the diarist Samuel Pepys now entered the picture; as an Admiralty official he was one of Lord Dartmouth’s staff at Tangier, and much of his correspondence relating to the wreck of the Schiedam survived in the National Archives, where Jeremy had been working his way through it over the past couple of weeks. For Jack, the wreck gave a unique insight into an extraordinary and largely forgotten episode in British history, at a time when the direction of imperial expansion lay in the balance and the decision to abandon the North African colony saw greater focus on the “Enterprise of the Indies,” the drive to control India that was to dominate British maritime trade over the next two centuries.

  He finished the water and put the bottle on the table. Later that day, before returning to the IMU campus he would draft a press release on the project, using Rebecca’s text as the basis. The wreck was already a protected archaeological site under British law, and had attracted a great deal of attention in the media, both locally and nationally. Then he needed to ensure that the team dismantled and removed all the equipment currently underwater before the storm waves rolled in. But before that, he was due to carry out one last dive on the site, and he wanted to make the most of it. He glanced at his watch, his excitement mounting. It was time to kit up.

  3

  Half an hour later, Jack sat in his dive gear on the low stone wall that lined the path down to the beach, pulling at the D-rings on his shoulder straps to tighten his buoyancy compensator and scuba rig. He was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm in his drysuit, but with the water having cooled down after the summer he knew that a wetsuit would have left him cold by the end of his dive. He reached down for his hoses and pulled the pressure gauge for his tank around one side and his backup regulator around the other, clipping them to the bottom of his BC, then attached the inflator hose to the valve on the front of his drysuit and the other one to his BC hose. He jiggled sideways to make sure that his weight belt was in position on his hips below his harness, then strapped his dive computer and compass to his wrists. The final piece of equipment to attach was his camera, a compact, robust model in a plastic housing, which served him well for record shots and video underwater. He activated it to check the screen, then clipped the extendable leads on either side to the D-rings on his shoulders and tucked the camera under the BC strap across his chest. He shut his eyes and relaxed for a moment, enjoying the cool breeze. He was getting seriously hot now, and was looking forward to the first splash of seawater on his face.

  “All right, Jack?” A diver already kitted up came down the path from the van parked in the lane at the top of the slope. Mike Trethowan had an extensive knowledge of wrecks along the coast of Cornwall, and a passion for discovery that matched Jack’s own. The two men were about the same age, both had daughters, and they had hit it off as soon as they had met during a chance encounter diving off the same beach fifteen years before, when IMU was only on the planning table. Mike still ran the dive shop and training center that he had operated then, but he was also IMU’s chief diving officer and head of diver training. Many of the local divers who had trained with him were now stalwart members of the IMU team, complementing the students and academics who volunteered to join his projects from all over the world.

  Mike leaned over Jack, untwisting one of his shoulder straps, and looked at his contents gauge, double-checking that his tank had the full 230-bar fill. Jack did the same for him, and then pulled on his thin neoprene gloves and pushed himself up, leaning over and pulling again at his harness straps for a final tightening. He picked up his fins, mask and snorkel and hood, and peered at Mike. “Good to go?”

  “I thought you only said that to Costas, Jack. I’m honored.”

  “Speaking of Costas, did you see the coin we found?”

  “I just saw it in the finds tray. Brilliant. I knew there’d be something in that cleft.”

  “Did you get a chance to show Andrew Cunningham your photos of that cylindrical iron object you found on the wreck?”

  “He’s very excited by it. He thinks it’s either a really big mortar, with the breech section unscrewed and missing, or a segment from a bombard.”

  “You mean like a medieval cannon?”

  “Well, it’s of wrought-iron construction, banded with loops of iron. That’s where the word ‘barrel’ comes from, as in gun barrel. The earliest big guns were built that way, with lengths of iron-like barrel staves held in place with iron loops. He thinks that because of that early technique, it could be an obsolete cannon being brought back to England as scrap, something that might have been part of the defenses of Tangier way back before the English arrived, even as early as the fifteenth century.”

  “Very cool,” Jack said. “Obsolete for them maybe, but historical treasure for us.”

  “Exactly. While you’re doing your excavation, I’m going to be just out of sight from you, digging out the bottom part of the cylinder from the sand so we can get a full profile view.”

  “I’ll have a break and come over and take a look. Give you a hand if you need it.”

  “Cheers, Jack, but you need to get as much done in your sector as you can. I’m sure you’ve seen the weather forecast from tomorrow on. Today is probably our last day on site this season, and who knows how much sand there might be covering that reef next year. Anyway, John and Nadine from the previous dive shift are still out there, and if we get going, I should be able to use the remaining half-hour or
so of their bottom time to have them dredging with me.”

  “They’ve been great. Everyone has. A real team effort.”

  “We owe a lot to Rebecca. She’s been an excellent dive manager.”

  “And to the girls in the café for the continuous supply of tea.”

  “Essential.”

  They walked down the ramp over the shingle to the beach, passing the line of kelp and debris left by the spring high tide a few days before. The cove was some five hundred meters wide, between the church headland and the cliffs to the north, but unlike the cove to the south, the sand here was crossed by irregular spines of rock that extended out from the shore, some of them carrying on as underwater reefs that separated wide sandy gullies. The shallow depth, the reefs, and the exposure to westerlies meant that any ship driven in here during a storm would quickly have been ripped apart, but the excavation had shown that the sandy gullies were deep and contained undisturbed layers full of well-preserved artifacts. The weather that had played such a part in the wrecking and the dispersal of material was also an inhibiting factor in planning a dive operation, but Jack relished working on a site where there was such good preservation in shallow water, and where divers could go in for an hour and a half twice a day with minimal risk of nitrogen sickness.

  He felt the sweat drip off his forehead and down his nose. They reached the surf line, ripples of water sparkling in the early-afternoon sun, the water beautifully clear as it extended off to the small Zodiac anchored as a safety tender above the site a hundred meters away. He dropped his fins and hood on the sand and walked out into the waves, swilling his mask and splashing water on his face, and then returned to finish kitting up. Mike turned to him, a familiar gleam in his eye. “I meant to say, Jack. I think I might have found a very interesting new lead for us.”