Testament

6

“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 the 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 Julius 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.

Those harbors owed their design to Tire, the mother city of Carthage in ancient Phoenicia. Another link was child sacrifice, something that associated Carthage with the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament. Jack believed that sacrifices may have taken place on a ceremonial platform at the harbor entrance, a place where the terrifying bronze furnace described by the Romans could have been seen from far out at sea, its belching flames propitiating great voyages of discovery and trade. It was here, too, that those voyages would surely have been commemorated, by trophies and inscriptions set up by navigators such as Hanno and Himilco and others who followed them. An excavation at this spot might not only reveal the channel itself, literally the portal to those great voyages of discovery, but also find evidence of rituals that linked the Carthaginians back to the world from which they had come, to the peoples of Phoenicia and the Holy Land who had once been their kin and cousins.

Hiebermeyer picked up another water bottle from the table and took a deep swig from it. Aysha had been right: he really should call Jack. Having found the channel, he owed it to him. He stared at the mudbank where Jack believed the ceremonial platform to have been, and narrowed his eyes. He would give it another day, just one more. He reached over and took his battered straw hat from the protuberance in the wall, revealing it to be the partly exposed tibia of a human skeleton. They had found it on the first day of the dig, and had decided to leave it in situ, to be reburied once the excavation was over. The numerous healed slash wounds on the bones and a Castilian ring showed the skeleton to be that of a Spanish soldier who had probably died during a siege of Tunis in the sixteenth century. Hiebermeyer had christened him Miguel, and had taken to brushing the bones down and watering them every morning to keep them from drying. He had become increasingly concerned about Miguel, about the bleaching of the bones, over the many hours he had spent here alone, sweltering over the trench while Aysha was busy elsewhere and before Lanowski had arrived. He had asked the workmen to build a small awning and to lay on a hose, so that the skeleton could be kept under a constant fine spray, enough also to moisten the sprigs of bougainvillea that he had planted on either side.

He leaned toward the skull, looking around furtively. “Rien, rien,” he whispered, wagging his finger, repeating what he had said to the workmen, watching the splayed jaw as if for a response. He sat up, suddenly feeling self-conscious. Perhaps Miguel was not the only one who had become unhinged. He laughed at the pun, slapping his knee, wishing that Costas had been here. It was good German humor, something that Costas appreciated.

Seeing the digger operator watching him, he quickly got up, straightened his hat, and stared into the trench, seeing where the hole had disappeared under the mud. He made a whirling motion with his hand, still staring. Nothing happened, and he glanced at the digger operator, who was looking at him as if waiting for the next bout of odd behavior. Hiebermeyer repeated the gesture, in some agitation. The operator shrugged, tossed away his cigarette, and the machine roared to life. Hiebermeyer glanced back at Miguel, and then stopped himself. “He’s dead,” he whispered. “Miguel is dead.” He was suddenly looking forward to Lanowski returning, to the mathematical digressions, the floppy hair, the lopsided grin. That in itself was serious. He really did need someone to talk to.

Twenty minutes later, the excavation of the harbor channel was in full swing again, the backhoe of the digger steadily revealing more gray-black ooze and the workmen clearing the waste ground ahead so that the trench could be extended toward the modern seafront. Hiebermeyer watched the water seep in after each scoop and clumps of desiccated soil fall in from above, coloring the water light brown. Everything here was either extremely wet or extremely dry. The dryness at least was like digging in Egypt. Miguel still had clumps of hair attached to the back of his skull, and mummified skin around his pelvis. Hiebermeyer emptied most of his water bottle on the bones, and then poured the remainder over the back of his own neck. He looked up just as Lanowski dropped down the side of the cut and strode over, clapping him on the shoulder. “Congratulations, Maurice. I’ve just seen the gray mud, proving you’ve found the channel. That about wraps it up here?”

Hiebermeyer gestured at the opposite side of the trench. “I just want to test Jack’s hypothesis about the ceremonial platform. If we get nothing today, then I’ll assume it was destroyed by the Romans or robbed of its stone after the city was abandoned. It’s good to see you back. I was beginning to talk to myself. How were the cisterns?”

Lanowski beamed back at him, nodding. “Good. Very good.”

Hiebermeyer passed him another water bottle, and then reached into his shorts, remembering the sandwich Aysha had given him that morning. Or was it the morning before? He found it, pulled it out, took off the wrapping and handed half to Lanowski, who took the squashed offering gratefully and wolfed it down. The two had become close friends after Lanowski had revealed his passion for Egyptology the year before, a bond that had been further cemented when he had been instrumental in their escape from the Nile during the extremist takeover.

Hiebermeyer looked approvingly at the other man’s gear. Lanowski wore mountain boots, multi-pocketed hiking shorts, and a pair of old army-surplus khaki bags crossed over from each shoulder, like a camel. He had tied his long hair back and was covered from head to foot in dust, a thin film even coating his spectacles. Now he swallowed the last of the sandwich, reached into one of the bags and pulled out a linked belt of a dozen or so 20 mm rounds, the brass ends green with corrosion. “Found these. Pretty cool, eh?”

“Mein Gott. You’re as bad as Costas.”

“As good as Costas, you mean. The Roman cisterns were used as tank berms by the British Eighth Army at the end of the North African campaign in 1943, and the collapsed end of one of them contained an ammunition store. It looks as if the berm might have been destroyed by a bomb and then abandoned.”

“Leave it for the Tunisian army to deal with,” Hiebermeyer said. “I’ve lost enough people close to me in this place.”

Lanowski pushed up his glasses. “Of course. Your grandfather. Insensitive of me. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

Hiebermeyer put a muddy hand on Lanowski’s shoulder. “It’s part of the archaeology of this place. It can’t be ignored.” He had another motive for coming here, one that arose from a chapter in his family history more than seventy years ago. His grandfather, a schoolteacher before the war, had been an officer in the German Army engineers under Rommel and had been killed in the final days of the campaign in June 1943, the same month that one of his uncles had gone down with his U-boat in the North Atlantic. His grandfather had no known grave, but Jack had accompanied Maurice during their earlier visit to Carthage to the German memorial and ossuary to the south of Tunis. The juxtaposition of stark gray slabs set against the azure Mediterranean made it difficult to comprehend how somewhere so beautiful could also be a place of war and death that had devastated so many families.

Lanowski bagged the ammunition belt and pointed at the trench. “Got any good stratigraphy yet?”

Hiebermeyer snorted. “Are you kidding? This is Carthage. In Egypt, you can dig through the Ottoman stuff and the Roman stuff to find the real archaeology, everything in nice neat layers. The conquerors there didn’t flatten the pyramids and build their own things on top. Here,” he said, raising a finger as the analogy came to him, “here, it’s as if you’re in biology class at school dissecting a frog and some joker of a lab partner has scooped out the entrails and dumped them on the bench for you to sift through, with everything all jumbled up.”

“An experience you’ve had?” Lanowski said.

“That was my introduction to Jack Howard, the day after I arrived at our boarding school. He apologized when he saw that he’d upset me, and said he was only trying it on with the world’s most boring biology teacher, not with me. He made it up to me in detention afterward by promising to take me out that weekend to his secret excavation at a nearby Roman site. That nearly got us expelled, but I was hooked.”

“Amazing you both made it to Cambridge.”

“By then that biology teacher was the headmaster, and he wrote us both shining references. To study archaeology, that is, not biology.”

“And now you’re both star alumni of the school, highlighted on their website as if you were model pupils.”

“That’s always the way.”

Hiebermeyer heaved himself upward, nearly losing his shorts in the process and quickly grabbing them before they descended to his knees. He pulled them up and tightened his tool belt, checking that everything was there: his trusty trowel, one of the pair that he and Jack had bought with their pocket money at a local hardware shop while they were at school; a geological hammer and a headlamp; various brushes and chisels; and some oddments that Costas had added, items he had found indispensable underwater that he had thought Hiebermeyer might like to have, one of them looking suspiciously like a Costas-designed multi-tool for opening bottles and stirring drinks. He shifted the weight until it was comfortable and then put his hands on his hips, surveying the excavation like a general inspecting a battlefield.

A few moments later, there was a clunking noise from the digger, and the engine revved down. Hiebermeyer and Lanowski hurried to the edge of the trench and peered in. The backhoe had hit something hard, metallic-sounding rather than masonry, not in the trench walls but in the muddy ooze. At that location inside the channel it could not be foundations, but rather something that had fallen or been thrown in, conceivably part of the harbor-front platform that Jack had postulated for the opposite bank. Maurice waved at the digger operator to cut the engine, and felt his excitement rise. This could be it.

“My turn,” Lanowski said, unslinging the bags over his shoulders. “You promised I’d get the chance when I returned.”

“We’ll both go.”

Lanowski took the lead and Hiebermeyer followed him down the ladder into the trench, past the arm of the backhoe. There was only space for one of them at a time to squeeze between the bucket and the side of the trench, and Lanowski went first, his boots slurping in the ooze that was becoming more liquid as the trench slowly filled up. Whatever it was that had stopped the digger had fallen from the dry soil above, and was covered in clumps of it. Lanowski had made his way in front of the bucket and crouched down out of sight.

“Well?” Hiebermeyer said, forcing his girth through the narrow gap. “Metal or stone?”

Lanowski remained stock still, staring. “You’re not going to believe it.”

“I’m all ears.”

“On the flight here, I boned up on Punic Carthage, and I memorized that famous Roman account of child sacrifice. ‘There was in their city a bronze image of Ba’al Hammon, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.’”

“Diodorus Siculus,” Hiebermeyer said, straining forward. “Usually thought of as negative propaganda. Child sacrifice, yes, we know from the osteological analysis that it happened, but a giant bronze furnace shaped like a god?”

“Look what the digger just found.”

Lanowski moved as far as he could to one side, heaving his feet out of the ooze that was beginning to grip them like quicksand. Hiebermeyer pulled himself out beyond the bucket and lurched forward, falling on his knees where Lanowski had been standing and splattering them both with mud. He stared at the object in front of him. It was about two meters wide, circular in shape and slightly convex, and clearly made of copper alloy. At first he thought it was a great bronze cauldron, crumpled and misshapen. Then he saw what Lanowski had seen and staggered to his feet.

“Gott im Himmel,” he said, astonished. It was not a cauldron but the distorted face of a giant statue, more beast than man, broken off at the upper jaw where a line of jagged teeth, each as big as Hiebermeyer’s hand, extended in an arc from the mud. He slid down again, pulling the torch out of his tool belt and shining it inside. “It gets even better,” he exclaimed. “It’s blackened inside, charred. This was a furnace, no doubt about it.”

Lanowski was squatting beside him, staring. “Incredible. So it was true. Fathers like you and me gave up their infant children to be burned alive in this thing.”

Hiebermeyer carried on peering inside, flashing the torch beneath the bronze. “There’s something else in here. Help me get it out.”

Lanowski slumped down in the mud and reached under the bronze teeth beside Hiebermeyer. “The upper part feels dry, desiccated, but where it’s become soaked by the water it’s almost supple, like leather,” he said. “I swear it’s hairy.”

“It is hairy,” Hiebermeyer said, poking at it. “It’s a dead animal, a skin. It could be very old, if it’s been protected beneath the bronze and mummified.”

He put his torch between his teeth and they both heaved, pulling the mass out and flopping it on top of the bronze. Large sections of it appeared denuded and leathery, but elsewhere there were patches of dense black hair matted together. Hiebermeyer heaved at a football-sized clump attached to one end and slipped down with it into the mud, staring at one of the most extraordinary things he had ever uncovered in his archaeological career.

He struggled up on his elbows, the clump on his chest, and cleared his throat, seeing that Lanowski was looking in the other direction, still folding down the other sides of the skin. “You said you’d been reading up on Punic Carthage. For Jacob Lanowski, that means reading everything. In the original languages. What does your photographic memory have on Pliny and Hanno?” he said.

Lanowski stopped what he had been doing and stared into space. “Well, there are two passages in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. The first is the controversial one in which he implies that Hanno sailed from Gibraltar to Arabia, circumnavigating Africa.”

“I mean the other one. Book six.”

“Ah yes.” Lanowski pushed his spectacles up his nose, dropped the hide and slipped back against the side of the trench. “‘Duarumque Gorgadum cutes argumenti et miraculi gratia in Iunonis templo posuit, spectates usque ad Carthaginem captam.’ I think I’ve got that right. Pliny had clearly read the Greek translation of Hanno’s Periplus, where the creatures he translates as Gorgons are called gorillae. He says that after capturing these gorillae, Hanno brought two of the skins back to Carthage, where they were displayed in the temple of Chronos until the Romans captured the city. For Chronos read Ba’al Hammon, the nearest Punic equivalent.”

Hiebermeyer heaved the mass on his chest around until it was facing Lanowski. “Well, as our friend Costas would say, get a hold of this.”

Lanowski stared, raised his spectacles and squinted, and then gave a high-pitched laugh. “Yep. That would be it. That would be a gorilla. I don’t believe it.”

Hiebermeyer rolled the head off his chest and quickly extracted himself from the animal’s front limbs, which were threatening to wrap themselves around him and push him back into the ooze. Lanowski leaped up and heaved it back, in the process folding over part of the skin so that the interior was exposed. He stopped for a moment, peering, and then turned the rest of the skin over so that the flayed interior was fully revealed, the head lolling backward into the water. “Maurice, check this out.”

Hiebermeyer pulled himself forward in the ooze, and stared. In the center of the skin was a rectilinear outline in flecks of gold, with further lines extending out from each corner. He leaned in, peering closely. “Gold leaf or gilding, no doubt about it. I’d say this skin had once been used as a covering for a golden box, a fairly large one, about the size of the Anubis shrine in Tut’s tomb. Probably carried outdoors where it was very hot, causing the gold to melt slightly and adhere to the skin. Interesting. Pliny doesn’t say anything about that in his account.”

“Something Hanno brought back from his travels, perhaps?” Lanowski said.

Hiebermeyer felt the ooze creep up above his boots and toward his knees. “Time we got out of here. This is getting a bit too much like maritime archaeology.”

“Speaking of which, Aysha called and told me to remind you. Could be time you gave Jack a ring?”

Hiebermeyer wiped the back of his hand across his face, smearing on more mud. “Do you think we’ve found enough? I don’t want to let him down.”

“Um, given that we’re probably looking at the cover of the next National Geographic magazine, not to speak of front-page news around the world, I’d say a big yes. I think Jack would say you’ve earned your Carthage credentials.” Lanowski leaned over, and they shook muddy hands.

“You spotted it for what it was,” Hiebermeyer said.

“You stuck with the excavation. It was your perseverance that paid off.”

“All right.” Hiebermeyer cracked a broad grin, the first for a long time. “We’ve got to get the digger to raise this whole clump as one mass, and then get it to the conservation lab pronto. Before that, I want to take about a thousand photos.”

“Roger that.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, just something I’ve heard Costas say.”

Hiebermeyer grunted, heaved himself on to the edge of the bucket, and then sprang up to the top of the trench, grabbing it and pulling himself on to the platform, his shorts miraculously in place. He stomped across to the table, the mud splattering off his boots, and poured a bottle of water over his face. Then he took off his hat and tossed it on to the outstretched tibia, watching it spin as if Miguel were giving it a twirl. He nearly said something, but then stopped himself. It was time to leave Miguel to the past, and to start communicating again properly with the land of the living. He glanced back down at Lanowski and the skin, seeing the strange golden outline. It rang a distant bell, but he could not quite put his finger on it. He would see if it meant anything to Jack.

He picked up his phone, tapping the screen with a muddy finger. Aysha first, and then they would Skype their son Michael. After that, he would call Jack. The adrenalin was coursing through him, the thrill of discovery that had fueled his life since he and Jack had first peered down that rabbit hole, had first reached in and pulled out those ancient sherds. Suddenly he felt on top of the world again.

7

Jack ducked under the entrance to the tent and sat down on a folding chair, holding the mug of tea that he had just brewed up in the kitchen tent on the far side of the clearing. He took a sip and stared out at the shimmering sea visible through the tent flap, the surf at high tide lapping the foreshore only a stone’s throw away. Ahead of him, rising to a grassy knoll above the tents, was the promontory that split the bay into two coves and provided shelter from the prevailing westerlies that could blow to severe gale force even in summer. Today, though, the sea was almost dead calm, as near to flat as he had ever seen it, with only the hint of a swell from the Atlantic pulsing gently against the shoreline. It was Cornwall at its best, the sea warm enough to swim in without a wetsuit and the breeze that ruffled the grass on the edge of the clearing keeping the heat at bay.

He took a deep breath and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. After their perilous dive on the wreck of Clan Macpherson only five days before, he felt as if he had been given a reprieve, and he was still awash with the euphoria that came from survival, still buoyed by residual adrenalin. He knew that the questioning would come soon enough, the quiet discussions with Costas about what had gone wrong and what could have been done better, the occasional sleepless night. But for now he was still riding a wave of excitement over their discovery of the bronze plaque and the mystery it had opened up. The video from their helmet cameras had gone straight to their colleagues at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford for decipherment of the symbols. Meanwhile Jack had focused on Clan Macpherson herself, researching everything he could about the circumstances of her loss and how she might have come to be carrying such an extraordinary artifact.

The IMU campus was only half an hour away, off the Fal estuary on the other side of the peninsula; he had deliberately come across this morning with time to spare before his dive on the Phoenician wreck, his first since returning from West Africa. Apart from a conservator dealing with finds in one of the other tents, the rest of the team were either on the research vessel Seafire anchored beside the wreck or underwater working on the excavation. The coastal footpath that passed the camp was quiet, not yet filled with the hikers who thronged it during the summer months, and the beaches were empty. He was itching to get on the wreck, a swim in a pool compared to Clan Macpherson, but he had wanted some time to himself in order to run through what he had discovered in the archives over the past few days and to think about what might lie ahead.

He sipped his tea, crossed his legs, and opened the file he had brought with him from the campus that morning. He still could not get the image of Clan Macpherson out of his mind. It was not so much their close shave that preoccupied him as the knowledge that something about the sinking, something about the convoy action on that day in 1943, was not quite right. The presence of a British torpedo in the wreck — a torpedo that could only have been fired by a British submarine — was baffling, to say the least. He stared at the two photos clipped to the inside of the file, the upper one showing the ship in her smart peacetime livery on the Mersey, with Liverpool in the background, and the lower one in her drab wartime gray, with guns fore and aft and her lifeboats swung out on their derricks ready for immediate use. He remembered his own first image of the ship, the looming, rusted hull and the twisted metal where the torpedo had exploded, and thought of the last sight of her by the men in the lifeboats, the vessel that had been their home disappearing in a terrifying final plunge that had transformed her into the wreck that he and Costas had seen over a hundred meters deep on the edge of the continental shelf off Africa.

Yesterday he had gone to the National Archives at Kew and had seen the original convoy dossier, including documents that would have passed through the hands of naval intelligence over those fateful days, perhaps even the code breakers at Bletchley Park who evaluated the Ultra decrypts and decided which convoys to reroute on the basis of intercepted German U-boat movement reports. He had been to Bletchley with his daughter Rebecca for a school project a couple of years previously, and remembered sitting behind the desk in Alan Turing’s office, looking at the wartime convoy chart on the wall and then out into the main operations room where the deciphered German naval orders were analyzed and passed up the line for possible action. The file he had handled at Kew yesterday had smelled musty, like stale cigarette smoke, and brought home the reality of Bletchley more than seventy years ago in the darkest days of the war: not the sanitized, scrubbed huts of the modern reconstruction but places fugged with smoke and stale sweat, with the wispy rising steam of mugs of tea, where the intelligence work was not just a mathematical puzzle but a deadly calculus of ships and men caught up in the most savage and costly sea war in history.

He sifted through the dossier, scanned copies of the originals. The first part contained the convoy commodore’s report, a fold-out pro forma with the bare facts of the convoy’s progress penned in; clipped to that had been a sheaf of pink and white slips with decrypted radio messages between the Admiralty, the convoy commodore and the Royal Navy escort commander. All of that was standard fare for a convoy file; they showed that the convoy had made a few minor course deviations at the commodore’s own discretion, none of them as a result of a rerouting order from the Admiralty. Clearly, if an Ultra intercept at Bletchley had revealed U-boats in the area, the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Center had decided not to act on it, a decision that would have been based on a risk assessment that such action might reveal to the Germans that Ultra had been broken.

The second group of scans came not from Kew but from the Clan Line archive, a mass of documents that had survived the closure of the shipping company and been preserved as a historical record. The archivist had delved into material yet to be catalogued and had come up trumps, uncovering the report of the master, Captain Gough, after the sinking of Clan Macpherson, and an exchange between him and the director of the trade division at the Admiralty.

Jack reread the parts of the master’s report that he had highlighted after receiving the documents from the archivist the previous evening. It is now with very great regret that I report the loss of Chief Engineer Robertson, Second Engineer Marshall, Fourth Engineer MacMurtrie and fifth Engineer Cunningham, who went down with their vessel. Gough had described how, after the ship had been torpedoed, three of the deck officers and an apprentice had gone below in an attempt to shore up the breached hold, using sacks of groundnuts from the cargo like sandbags to build up a bulkhead. No praise is too high for the courageous spirit and dauntless devotion to duty that was shown by my officers, engineers and volunteer crew in their magnificent attempt to save their ship.

Jack looked up for a moment, squinting against the reflection of the sun on the sea, imagining the grim reality behind Captain Gough’s report — soaked and freezing men piling bags as the stricken ship groaned around them, and the engineers living out their worst nightmare, realizing too late that she was going under, desperately scrabbling for air space as the waters rose and the ship buckled and shrieked on its plummet to the abyssal darkness below.

He drained his tea, and then looked at the pages that had kept him awake after first reading them the evening before. Unusually for a merchant captain, Gough had been openly critical of the Admiralty. Jack could picture him as he sat down in Freetown to write his report, after seeing that the survivors from Clan Macpherson had been brought safely ashore and then hearing the terrible news that his ship was one of seven from the convoy to have been sunk that night. Even before the attack, there had been concern over the inadequate escort and the absence of air cover. A very strong feeling exists, Gough wrote, that many of these vessels, if not all, have been needlessly sacrificed. He pointed out that the armed trawlers in the escort could only do eight knots, slower even than the most sluggish of the merchantmen, and that the speed of the convoy was therefore gravely constrained. Jack read Gough’s two burning questions, sensing the ire behind the sober phrasing: whether, knowing there were submarines on the track of this convoy, it was not possible for destroyers to be sent out from Freetown to give the necessary protection; and whether the courses which the convoy was instructed to take were, in the circumstances, the right ones.

Next he turned to the reply from the director of the trade division at the Admiralty. Gough was told that armed trawlers had given good anti-submarine service elsewhere, and that the visibility had been too poor for air cover. I fully appreciate your distress at the loss of such a fine ship, which I can assure you is shared by all of us at the Admiralty. We are, as you can understand, bound to consider the U-boat war as a whole and view each incident in its right perspective. The U-boat threat, for instance, off the West African coast is but a fraction of that in the North Atlantic and we obviously must allocate our limited resources in escort vessels accordingly. Were it possible, there is nothing we would like better than to give every convoy a really strong escort. And finally: War invariably leads to blows and counter-blows, and it would be illogical not to expect the enemy occasionally to get in a nasty punch. I can only assure you that we are fully alive to all the risks that have to be run and are deploying our forces to the best of our ability to bring about the ultimate defeat of the U-boat.

Jack closed the file, and squinted out to sea again. The response from the director of the trade division was measured and decent, as compassionate as it could reasonably be. But it was precisely the nature of the response that had been niggling at him. It seemed odd that at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, during those critical weeks in May 1943 when everything hung in the balance, the Admiralty should have devoted so much care to the concerns of a single merchant captain from a convoy off Africa, far from the main focus of attention in the North Atlantic. Jack might have expected a curt response at best, even a disciplinary one. But instead the Admiralty had mandated their senior officer responsible for merchant shipping to give more thought to a response than had apparently been put into arranging adequate defense for the convoy.

Jack had looked up Captain Gough’s war record, and knew he was not a man to make criticism lightly. He had already been sunk twice, once when his ship Clan Ogilvy was torpedoed in 1941, and then again when the ship that had rescued the survivors had also been sunk. Gough had been decorated for his seamanship and courage on both occasions, rallying his men over many days spent in open boats and on the way rescuing the survivors from two other stricken ships. Most merchant captains, men like Gough, buckled down and did their job, expecting the navy and the air force to do their best but accepting that things sometimes went wrong, that ships and lives would be lost. They were tough men, men who knew well the fickle whims of war and fate, who asked questions only when they were truly compelled to do so.

Jack returned to his own part in this story, to a question that Gough himself could never have imagined possible: how could a British torpedo that could only have been launched from a British submarine have ended up inside the hull of Clan Macpherson?

He checked his watch, stood, and picked up the VHF radio receiver on the table, tapping the secure IMU channel used on the bridge of Seafire. A girl’s voice with an accent more American than British crackled in response. “Hello, Dad. Are you ready to come out now? Over.”

“Nearly ready. Really looking forward to it. Can you talk?”

“Just stripping off my wetsuit. Give me a moment.”

Jack smiled in anticipation. He had not spoken to Rebecca since he and Costas had returned from Africa, and seeing her was another reason why he had been excited about coming out to the site this morning. She had spent the last month working with Jack’s colleague Katya at her ancient petroglyphs site in Kyrgyzstan, and had only flown back to England two days before, while Jack had been in Oxford. She had scheduled a week to dive on the wreck before returning to her university summer school in the United States, and Jack was looking forward to spending time with her. He pressed the talk button as he walked out of the tent toward the promontory. “How are you doing? How’s the archaeology?”

“I’m studying to be an environmentalist, not an archaeologist, Dad.”

Jack scrambled over the old stone wall and onto the rough track that led up to the top of the promontory, enjoying the breeze on his face. “Yes, well, you say that, but archaeology is what you were doing with Katya, archaeology is what you do with Maurice and Aysha, and archaeology is what you’ve been doing with IMU since you were barely into your teens. It’s in your blood. You can’t deny it.”

“How do you know what I was doing with Katya? She’s given up waiting for you to call, by the way. How long ago was it that you two were an item? Anyway, as far as you know, we could have just been having an all-girls party.”

“With Katya, beside Lake Issyk-Gul in Kyrgyzstan? I doubt it. More likely learning how to shoot a Kalashnikov.”

“I did that last year with her. I didn’t tell you. The least accurate rifle I’ve ever shot. This year it was learning how to hunt with an eagle.”

“God help us,” Jack said. “You’re the daughter of Jack Howard, not Attila the Hun.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a tough old world out there, got to be prepared.”

“Tell me about the wreck.”

“It’s Phoenician, Dad. You were right, and everyone’s sure of it. There are loads of those distinctive Punic amphoras, and other diagnostic stuff. It’s what you’ve dreamed of finding for years. They’ve left your sector of the excavation untouched, as you requested, sandbagged over and awaiting your return.”

Jack reached the top of the promontory, strode through the thick coarse grass to the edge of the rocky cliff on the south side, and saw Seafire anchored some three hundred meters offshore. “That’s fantastic. I’ve seen the material in the conservation tent here from the past few days. Pretty early — late seventh or early sixth century BC. Not a Greek ship carrying Phoenician wares, but an actual Phoenician ship. It’s the first one ever found in these waters, and confirmation that they got to the British Isles at that date.”

“Any news on your plaque?”

“I was with Jeremy and Maria all day Tuesday at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. They’re convinced the symbols are Phoenician too.”

“Amazing,” she said. “A Phoenician wreck up here and another wreck off Africa carrying a Phoenician artifact, about equidistant from the Strait of Gibraltar.”

“That’s where the Phoenicians went,” Jack said. “West from Carthage through the Strait and out into the Atlantic, searching for tin and gold, exploring, settling. And you know my theory that they went a lot farther than that, at least circumnavigating the British Isles and reaching the southern tip of Africa, if not circumnavigating that too.”

“But you don’t know where the plaque came from.”

“I’m working on that. All we have to go on at the moment is that Clan Macpherson’s last major port of call was Durban, in South Africa. I think somehow it got on board there, along with the gold consignment.”

“Any progress with the translation?”

“They’re working on it, but it’s tricky because the imagery isn’t that great. We didn’t have much time before the wreck, um, blew up.”

“So I heard. And how deep were you? Costas told me about it when he was here yesterday. How many lives do you guys have?”

“That’s what I asked Costas afterward, and he said I still had lots. You remember The Lion King? Hakuna matata. It’s in the past. I look to the future.”

“You mean to another insanely dangerous dive.”

“To a lovely dive with you in less than ten meters’ depth on the Phoenician wreck. By the way, have you spoken to Aysha?”

“Just this morning. She left little Michael with her sister in London and went out to Carthage to join Maurice. She very nearly carried on back to Egypt, you know. It was Katya who put the kibosh on that during a long satellite call from Kyrgyzstan. She told Aysha that she had a responsibility now as a mother and to Maurice, and that there were plenty of others to carry on the fight against the extremists. It must be hard for Aysha, but Katya knows what she’s talking about, with her father having been a warlord and all that.

“As it turns out, Aysha’s really got stuck in at Carthage. She says it’s just like when they first worked together at the mummy necropolis in the Fayum, when she spotted the Atlantis papyrus. Maurice of course went to Carthage really only to find evidence for an early Egyptian settlement. Poor Uncle Hiemy. He can’t get over not being able to work in Egypt anymore. Anyway, what they’ve actually found is maybe even more interesting. While Maurice has been digging at the harbor entrance, their other dig at the Tophet sanctuary has produced some very old Punic inscriptions, scratched on potsherds. Some of the early alphabetic renderings might help Jeremy with his translation of the plaque.”

“Excellent. You can tell Jeremy yourself. He’s planning to drive down from Oxford today, to be here by mid-afternoon.”

“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 move 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.

Always at this place they would be working against the weather, even at the height of summer with the forecast showing calm seas for weeks ahead. At such a shallow depth, so close inshore, a blip in the forecast, a single day of westerlies strong enough to churn up the seabed in the cove, could have a disastrous effect on the excavation, disrupting the datum points and equipment left on site and sweeping away any artifacts left exposed. Shallow-water excavation had many benefits, but it came with increased risk of exposure to the elements, precisely the factors that had caused so many shallow wrecks in the first place and dispersed wreck material that had not become quickly buried in protective sediment.

Jack finned slowly over the edge of the site. Two of the four stone anchors they had discovered were still there, crude triangular slabs of igneous rock weighing an estimated quarter of a ton each, with holes in one corner for the rope and in the other two for double-ended sharpened stakes to hold the anchor to the seabed. The IMU geologists had taken a thin section and sourced the rock to the volcanic Lipari Islands to the north of Sicily, a region under Punic control where the Carthaginians were known to have quarried stone for their anchors. Seeing one of these anchors poking through the shingle on that first dive three months ago had been a huge excitement for Jack; they were a shape unchanged since the Bronze Age, and put the wreck well back in the first millenium BC, before Admiralty-style wooden anchors with lead stocks came into common use.

They had found one of those too, a lead bar a meter and a half long with a rectangular hole for the anchor shank in the center, the wood having perished long ago. That had tightened the date, and stoked Jack’s excitement even further. The earliest lead-stocked anchors from datable wrecks in the Mediterranean were from the first part of the sixth century BC, at the time when the western Phoenicians, the people the Romans called Punic, were the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Any Phoenician captain worth his salt would have wanted the latest anchor technology, and the presence of both types in the wreck suggested a date very soon after their inception.

For Jack this opened up an extraordinary historical possibility, a porthole into one of the most famous episodes in maritime exploration. The sixth century BC was the most likely date for the voyages of the Carthaginians Hanno and Himilco. That was the reason why he had been reading the surviving account of Hanno’s voyage down the west coast of Africa during his flight to Freetown the previous week. Himilco’s voyage was known only through a brief reference by the Roman historian Pliny more than five centuries later, but the possibility that he had gone north and reached the Cassiterides, the fabled Tin Isles, had tantalized historians ever since. Jack had hardly dared think that this might be a wreck from Himilco’s expedition, and he would let the archaeology speak for itself. Hanno and Himilco were explorers, to be sure, but they were also driven by the Phoenician passion for trade, and the discovery of a wreck filled with the kind of goods that the British in Cornwall might have traded for their tin made the possibility too compelling to put aside.

He saw the lead anchor stock now, cushioned between sandbags on the seabed, and sank down to look at the symbols cast on one side. They were a Phoenician letter B, an early type with an angular form, and a small bucranium, a shape like bull’s horns. Jack was certain that they were apotropaic, to ward off misfortune, a common function of symbols on later Greek and Roman anchors, in this case the B perhaps referring to the Phoenician god Ba’al Hammon and the bucranium to the sacred bull’s-horn shape seen in the mountain peak to the east of Carthage. If so, they had failed in their purpose, but seeing them did made Jack ponder the nature of the wrecking.

The anchors they had found were in the bow, facing the shore. He knew this because the other end of the wreck contained pottery and small finds, indicating the crew’s living area, a stern deckhouse where they would have cooked and taken shelter. The absence of anchors in the stern suggested that those must have been lost in an attempt to hold the ship against a westerly wind, the most likely cause of the wrecking. Unlike the steamship, therefore, which had been blown into the cove sideways and sunk beam-on, the Phoenician ship had gone down facing the shore. Jack had stood on the headland trying to put himself in the mind of the captain, imagining the sea as he had seen it during that winter storm. Laying out the anchors astern, knowing they would drag, might not have been an act of desperation but that of a skilled navigator, one who had sounded the seabed and knew there was no hope of holding in the sand but that he might at least prevent the ship from going in beam-on, allowing her the small chance of being thrown intact onto the beach.

What the captain could not have known about was what Jack saw during the storm, the sucking undertow down the beach that followed each huge wave as it crashed in, momentarily exposing the seabed at low tide almost as far out as the wreck site. In such extreme conditions, with the anchors still holding her bow-on to the shore, the ship might actually have been grounded rather than sunk, driven hard into the seabed while the next towering wave built up behind her. In that instant, with shore only a stone’s throw away, the captain must have known that they were doomed, that there would be no time to hack away the anchor ropes and hope for the best. The next wave would have inundated the ship, smashing away the mast and rigging and breaking the bodies of any men still aboard even before they were thrown on to the rocks.

It would have been a terrifying end, following hours of fear clinging to the ship as it was driven ashore, lashed by spray and lurching sickeningly in the swell as the anchors dragged remorselessly. But like those who had gone down in Clan Macpherson off West Africa, like so many who were buried along the clifftops and sand dunes of this coast, the Phoenicians were men of the sea who would have known the fate that might lie in store for them, that no manner of apotropaic sign or pleading to the gods was going to help them when the storm waters were raging and all hope was lost.

Rebecca dropped down again, pointing at the stern part of the wreck and swimming on her back toward it, looking at Jack. He gave an okay signal, and watched as she turned over and followed another huge jellyfish that had appeared overhead. He looked at where she had pointed, and felt a surge of anticipation. The project supervisor had seen his frustration the week before at having to leave his corner of the excavation incomplete when he had been called to Deep Explorer, and had left it sandbagged over for his return. He restrained himself from swimming straight for it, and continued to float slowly over the site, taking in everything that had been exposed while he had been away.

Instead of being covered with a latticework of grid squares, the only fixed structures on the site were twenty red-topped metal stakes that acted as datum points for the sonic high-accuracy ranging and positioning system they used to map the wreck. The system had been refined by Jacob Lanowski, IMU’s resident computer genius, and meant that with a click of a sonic gun an excavator could record the exact position of any new find. The data went straight into the master plan, and combined with photogrammetry and sonar mapping meant that a detailed 3D rendition of the site with up-to-date finds was available for anyone who could log on to the project website. Above all, it meant that the huge amount of time that used to be spent measuring and recording finds by hand was no longer required, a factor of supreme importance at a site exposed to vagaries of the weather where rapid excavation was of the essence.

Jack swam over the main area of the cargo hold, looking at the amphoras that had yet to be raised. The main type was for olive oil, a speciality product of the eastern coast of Tunisia to the south of Carthage; the few fish sauce and wine amphoras were probably for use by the crew. A number of the amphoras had been bound up by the excavators in protective wrap to cover inscriptions that had been found painted on the shoulders or bodies in pitch, most of them describing the contents or marking amphoras for export. One of the tents in the shore encampment was filled with buckets where broken sherds with inscriptions had been put to soak in fresh water prior to being taken to the conservation lab at IMU.

He saw the area of the excavation where Costas had been working the week previously, the lead weight with his name tag and a sand-filled gin bottle still there where he had staked out his territory. On the phone yesterday Jack had reminded him of his comment during their dive on Clan Macpherson about finding a sherd from the Cornwall wreck that might have had an unusual inscription, and Costas had promised to go fishing in the finds buckets in the conservation tent when he arrived this afternoon so that they could have a closer look.

Jack flashed through the other finds they had made, preparing himself for anything he might discover. One of the most amazing artifacts had been a small, thick-walled jar with a deep blue residue that the lab had quickly identified as dye from the murex shell, the famous “royal purple” from Tire that was a closely guarded Phoenician secret. It was a hint of the dyed textiles that the ship might also have been carrying, and a reminder of the close ties that the western Phoenicians retained with their Semitic homeland, with the peoples of the coast of ancient Canaan that extended from modern Syria and Lebanon to Israel. They had also found three distinctive Massaliot amphoras, made by the Greek settlers of modern Marseilles and containing high-grade wine, as well as a batch of beautiful black-glazed drinking cups from Corinth, showing that the Phoenicians were not above diversifying their cargos with goods acquired from their trade rivals.

As if that were not enough, beneath the amphoras they had found piles of crushed galena, the lead sulphide used in the cupellation process to extract tin from ore, a material that would have been of huge value to the ancient miners of Cornwall. And to cap it all, a copper box in the stern contained two bronze steelyards and multiple sets of balance-pan weights, bronze with lead cores, as well as some of the earliest coins ever made, stamped lumps of electrum from the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor from about 590 BC. To Jack, all of this indicated a merchant captain not only well stocked and prepared for every type of transaction, a Phoenician through and through, but also one who was speculative, plumbing new markets before the demand for certain products had become established, something that had made him think again of Himilco and Hanno and the very dawn of Phoenician contact with the late Bronze Age peoples of Britain.

He reached his own area of the excavation, about five meters along the port side from the stern of the ship, at a place from which all the amphoras had been removed. He released a small amount of air from his BC to make himself negatively buoyant, and carefully lifted away three small sandbags from where he had left them, covered with silt during the past days. To his right was one of the water dredges that served as their main excavation tool, powered by a pump on Seafire; the water was pumped down a hose into one end of a solid plastic tube two meters long that floated just above the seabed, creating a vacuum that sucked water and sediment in at that end and spewed it out at the other, beyond the edge of the excavation. He pulled it over, careful to keep the exhaust end pointing out of the site, and brought the nozzle close to the area of shingle that had been covered by the sandbags, wrapping his right arm around it and getting ready to waft with his left hand. He looked up, knowing that Rebecca would have been watching him, and made a whirling motion with his left hand. She made an okay signal, swam to the surface and signaled the boat. Seconds later, the dredge erupted into life, lurching and bucking until he got it under control. He glanced back, seeing the blur in the water at the exhaust end, and then turned back. It was as if he had never left, as if the past week and the dive on Clan Macpherson were a dream, part euphoric and part nightmare, something he had parceled in his mind along with all the other dives he and Costas had done over the years where they had pushed the envelope as far as it would go.

Seconds later he had exposed what he had started to uncover last time, tapering expanses of polished white, his excitement mounting as first one, then the other was revealed. They were the ends of huge elephant tusks, lying flat and extending under the sediment. They were an extraordinary find, unquestionably the premium trade item of this cargo. But what was more incredible was their origin, revealed in the analysis of a sample Jack had taken the week before. Many archaeologists had assumed that the elephant ivory traded by the western Phoenicians came from their outposts on the Atlantic shore of Africa, acquired from native middlemen from sources far inland south of the Sahara. But the analysis had pointed to an East African origin, to modern-day Somalia or Ethiopia, the place known as Punt, where the ancient Egyptians had obtained their ivory. And there was something else, something Jack had wondered whether he had really seen on that last dive, but here it was again, as clear as could be. Both of the tusks had been inscribed with the alphabetic symbols for the letter H, twice over. Ancient Phoenician merchants were assiduous markers of their own trade goods, so there was nothing exceptional in that. It was the letters themselves that made Jack’s mind race. HH: Hanno and Himilco. Could it be?

The tusks were one of the most sensational finds of the excavation, left in situ until his return and now ready for recovery and conservation. It was extraordinary for Jack to see them again, but what really set his pulse racing now was to imagine what might lie beneath. Elephant ivory, especially the prized East African variety, would have been enormously valuable, and would have been packed in dunnage in the safest place on the floor of the cargo hold, below the amphoras and immediately above the ship’s timbers. The tusks were resting on a gray-black layer, revealed now across the entire space beneath them as he wafted the sediment away. The color indicated anoxic conditions, suggesting that this layer had survived undisturbed below the cargo. If timbers existed on the site, this layer might be the first place to find them.

He wafted again, and the water turned black, staining his fingers. That was an excellent sign, evidence of metal oxidization, exactly what he would expect from decayed iron nails and rivets. He wafted once more, waiting for the dredge to clear the water, and then he saw it. About fifteen centimeters below the tusk was the surface of a wooden strake, with another beside it, running precisely where they should be, parallel to the likely location of the keel. Another waft revealed a frame. Peering closely at the side of the first strake, he saw a stamped letter A, the crossbar sloped in early Phoenician style, clearly a shipwright’s mark. He put his palm on the wood, just as he had done half an hour earlier at the steamship wreck, feeling the same surge of excitement, the thrill of watching the sea give up her secrets. He could suddenly see the ship in his mind’s eye, wide-bellied, sturdy, with close-set frames, her shaped timbers carpentered together with pegged mortice-and-tenon joints, so well preserved that he could imagine her released from the sands and surging forward, square sail billowing and helmsman at the steering oar, a brilliant image of human endeavor from the time when Carthage and her mariners ruled the waves.

He pushed back, easing the dredge out of the excavation, and looked up. Rebecca was there again, pointing excitedly into the hole, giving him the okay sign. He did the same, gave a thumbs-up to indicate that he was about to surface, and then made a whirling motion at the dredge again. She acknowledged his signal and rose to the surface, and seconds later the dredge stopped sucking. He had finished where he had left off a week before, done what he had needed to do; now it was the job of the excavation team to take up where he had left off. Jeremy and Costas would be at the camp by now, and he needed to be ready for what Jeremy had to say about the plaque from Clan Macpherson.

He tied off the dredge, rose above the seabed and then looked up, seeing Rebecca spread-eagled on the surface above him, silhouetted by the sun, wreathed by bubbles from his exhaust. He felt a supreme sense of contentment. This had been one of the best dives of his life.

9

Two hours later, Jack sat outside the beach café finishing his Cornish pasty and tea, feeding the last morsels to the black-and-white collie from the local farm who had been his companion on many visits to the cove over the years. He got up, waved at the farmer’s wife who ran the café, and gave the dog a final stroke, then strode across the lane to the dunes and along the track toward the church behind the headland. Just before the graveyard he veered right into the grassy compound behind the old dry-stone wall that served as the shore headquarters for the IMU project, protected from the prevailing westerlies by the steep rise of the promontory. Rebecca was at the entrance talking to several hikers on the coastal path who had stopped to look at the information board they had set up in the lane about the Phoenician wreck. He smiled at the walkers and nodded at her, knowing that she would join him as soon as she could.

He waved at the group of local divers who had parked their van in the lane and were beginning to kit up for their dive. They were friends he had known for years, stalwarts of his team, and had been responsible for many exciting wreck discoveries. Over lunch he had talked with them about the logistical challenge of raising timbers from the wreck, and together with the project supervisor they had sketched out a plan that would see the hull exposed and all the timbers raised and safely back in the IMU conservation facility within two weeks. He glanced up at the sky, feeling the early-afternoon breeze on his face and seeing the clouds beginning to accumulate. Everything depended on the weather; for that they were as much in the lap of the gods as the ancient mariners had been. But he had the best possible people on the job, and he knew he could rely on them to make the right decisions and take the project forward, whatever the forces of nature chose to throw at them.

He ducked under the flap of the operations tent and put his notebook on the trestle table in the center. A tall, tousle-haired young man with glasses was arranging his papers and laptop at the other end of the table, having brought them in from his car a few moments before. Jack smiled at him and shook hands. “I saw you arriving from the café, but thought you’d probably want to go and say hello to Rebecca first.”

He looked slightly flustered, and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Haven’t really had the chance yet. I wanted to get everything ready here first.”

“Are we going to see you in the water this time?”

“That’s the plan. What’s the temperature like?”

“Warm. Barely need a wetsuit.”

“That’s Jack Howard for ‘cold.’ You’re as bad as your daughter. She barely feels anything. I think I made a mistake in having Costas teach me to dive in the Red Sea. It’s completely spoiled me.”

Jack grinned at him. Jeremy Haverstock had become an integral part of the IMU team since he had first arrived from Stanford as a Rhodes Scholar almost eight years before, to work with Maria at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. Since then he had completed his doctorate, published the first volumes of material from their two greatest manuscript discoveries — the secret medieval library in Hereford Cathedral and the lost library of the Emperor Claudius in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum — and had recently become assistant director of the Institute. He had also become interestingly close to Rebecca, something that had slowly developed as Rebecca had grown into a woman and that Jack pretended to watch with bemused indifference.

The flap opened and Rebecca came in, finishing off an apple. She tossed the core into a bin and wiped her mouth. “Is Costas here yet?”

“Half an hour away,” Jack said. “He called to say he was caught in traffic.”

“Hello, by the way,” she said to Jeremy. “Nice of you to call.”

Jeremy coughed, glancing at Jack. “Surprise. Sorry. Been really busy with this translation.”

“Right. I only hope it’s good. We’ll talk later.” She turned to Jack. “We really need Costas here to find that inscribed sherd. There are more than two hundred buckets next door containing amphora sherds with painted inscriptions on them, and the conservation people have their hands full now with everything else that’s coming up.”

“He says he can find it straight away.”

“Costas is pretty important, isn’t he? He always seems to have the key to unlock things, even if he doesn’t realize it himself.”

“I’ve been coming to that conclusion myself.”

“I hadn’t realized it was Costas who actually discovered the plaque on Clan Macpherson last week. I’d say he counts as a fully fledged archaeologist by now.”

“Not sure if he’d be pleased to hear you say that. The tough-guy engineer, you know. The Greek immigrant brought up on the mean streets of New York. The practical man who leaves the ideas stuff to wishy-washy people like us.”

“I think he’d be pleased, even though he might not show it,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, getting a PhD from MIT does actually involve a few ideas. In fact he’s probably the smartest of all of us. And as for the tough-guy stuff, take it from me, he’s a softy underneath. It’s a toss-up whether Uncle Costas or Uncle Hiemy will be reduced to tears the quickest when small children are around.”

“Speaking of Uncle Hiemy, how’s he getting on?”

“I spoke to Aysha in Carthage again over lunch. She’s been pressing Maurice to call you. He’s found something interesting in the harbor excavation, but he’s decided not to disturb you until you’re settled back here following the Deep Explorer trip. She says it’s going to need your full attention.”

“I can’t wait,” Jack said. “Maurice only ever calls me when it’s good.”

“Leave it for him to get in touch with you. Remember, this is his comeback after Egypt, and he should be allowed to drive things at his own speed. When he’s ready, he’ll do it.”

“You’re probably right. You’ve spent more time with him recently than I have, so you know his state of mind.”

“They’ve been excavating at Carthage for almost a month now. It took a long time to pull him out of his frustration and shock after they had to leave Egypt last year. Everything that’s happened since then with the extremists makes it even less likely that he’ll ever be able to return.”

“Do you think he’s going to find evidence of Egyptians at Carthage?” Jeremy said, looking up from his laptop. “It was the Phoenicians who founded it, early ninth century BC, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what the Roman historians tell us, and the archaeology so far doesn’t contradict it,” said Jack. “If there was some kind of earlier Egyptian presence, it’s more likely to have been merchants or trade representatives in an outpost run by the Canaanites, proto-Phoenicians. They seem to have been the ones in charge of maritime trade in the late Bronze Age, just as their descendants were at the time of our wreck here. If Maurice does find Egyptian artifacts, it doesn’t necessarily signify an Egyptian settlement.”

“Aysha says that he’s like you: when he has a gut feeling, he won’t be happy until he’s dug a hole right down to bedrock,” Rebecca said.

“I remember it well from when we were at boarding school together, sneaking out at weekends to dig up part of the local Roman villa. We shouldn’t have done it, but we did record everything meticulously and eventually published it. Watching out for the landowner while Maurice’s rear end was sticking out of a hole in the ground is one of my abiding memories of those days. I called him the human mole.”

“He surely couldn’t have found anything Egyptian there,” Jeremy said.

“Oh yes, he did. It turned out that the villa had been built in the second century for a retired centurion who was a follower of the cult of Isis, a favorite among Roman soldiers. I can still remember the look of indescribable joy on his face when he emerged from his hole clutching a little faience statue of Anubis. That was how he caught the Egyptian bug. That summer he absconded using some money an aunt in Germany had left him and was next heard of in the Valley of the Kings, having been taken on by an American director who had never come across an eighteen-year-old with such an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Egypt. In fact, he was sixteen, not eighteen, and getting him home nearly caused an international incident. But after that, he never looked back.”

“The question with his idea about Egyptians at Carthage is whether it’s gut instinct or wishful thinking,” Jeremy said. “For a man designed to be down a hole, imagining you might have to spend the rest of your career studying artifacts in museums would be pretty devastating. I can see why he might want to find Egyptians everywhere he digs.”

“At least he’s got Jacob with him,” Rebecca said.

Jeremy peered at her. “Lanowski? You must be kidding. I thought he was at some big nanotechnology conference in California. Giving the keynote lecture, about pressure-resistant polymers used in diving suits or something. He and Costas were burning the midnight oil over it a few weeks ago.”

“He canceled that as soon as Aysha invited him out,” Rebecca said. “I think she thought he’d be good for Maurice. Ever since Maurice learned about Jacob’s passion for Egyptology, the two of them have got on like a house on fire. And they’re both recent fathers, so they can share the trials and tribulations of having small children.”

“Nothing like the trials of having an older child,” Jack said.

Rebecca narrowed her eyes at him, and he turned to Jeremy. “Speaking of the plaque, what have you got?”

Rebecca coughed, and put up a hand. “Before that, there’s something I want to show you. Something from my part of the excavation that came up yesterday. I’ve been saving it to tell you in person, Dad.”

Jack smiled at her. For a moment he saw her mother Elizabeth sitting in front of him, the dark eyes and hair, the olive skin of her Neapolitan background, taking him back to the time when he had last seen Elizabeth almost eight years earlier, at the ancient site of Herculaneum shortly before her murder by the Mafia. But he also saw in Rebecca’s eyes a steely determination that he knew was Howard through and through, a resolve to see things to the end whatever the odds, to follow a trail she was set on as far as she could, to never give up. He leaned forward, picked up a pencil, and tapped it on the table, nodding at her. “Okay. What have you got?”

She went to a rack behind her and carefully lifted a large finds tray with a cloth cover from one shelf, putting it on the table in front of her chair. “Those elephant tusks you found were cool, Dad, really cool. Congratulations, by the way. So I just thought you might be interested in what I found. I took this out of the fresh-water tank in the conservation tent just to show you, but it’ll be back in there pronto when we’re done.”

She lifted the cloth and picked up a bubble-wrapped object about half a meter long. Jack could see the end of a tusk poking out of one end. Her sector of the excavation was on the opposite side of the ship’s hold to his own, and this showed that there was even more ivory than he had imagined stowed beneath the amphoras, an incredibly valuable cargo. She unwrapped it, leaned over, and handed it to him, a long, straight tusk with a twist in it. “The tusk must have been broken during the wrecking,” she said. “The lower part’s still in situ. Altogether it’s more than two meters long, more than your height. And there’s another one on the site next to where I found this.”

Jack stared in astonishment. It was not quite what he had imagined. “Well I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “That’s not elephant ivory. It’s narwhal.”

“I sent pictures to the marine biology department at IMU, and they confirmed it. And they said that another broken fragment I found next to it was walrus.”

“Narwhal and walrus,” Jeremy said. “Not exactly African creatures, are they?”

“There’s something else.” She took back the tusk, carefully replaced it on the tray, and handed Jack a smaller bubble-wrapped package. “Open it.”

Jack did so, and gasped. Inside was a lump of translucent honey-colored material the size of his fist. He lifted it to the light, seeing the bodies of insects trapped within. “Amber,” he said, turning it slowly. “That’s one of the largest pieces I’ve ever seen. Amazing.”

“It’s from the Baltic, probably the eastern shore. There are other pieces, probably originally a basketful, and I sent a sample to the lab for analysis. There’s a lot of excitement over the potential of those mosquitoes for DNA analysis, especially if they contain the blood of extinct megafauna. But what was most fascinating to me was what these finds, narwhal and walrus and amber, might say about the voyage of our ship.”

“They could have been high-value trade goods, acquired by the Phoenician merchant in Cornwall and destined for the Mediterranean,” Jeremy said.

Jack’s mind was racing. “Undoubtedly there would have been a market for this kind of exotica in the Mediterranean, and it’s possible that these were trophies to take back to Carthage, proof that they had reached further north than anyone from the Mediterranean had ever gone before. But there may be another explanation. Think of the rest of the cargo; there’s nothing of British origin. We’re looking at a cargo ready to trade with the tin merchants, not the result of that trade. If she’d been outward-bound after trading then I might not even have spotted the wreck at all, as most of the goods we’ve found would have been traded and the only visible cargo might have been lumps of tin ore, real treasure to the Phoenicians but barely recognizable on the seabed.”

“These finds show that she hadn’t arrived here direct from the Mediterranean,” Rebecca said.

Jack weighed up the amber in his hand, staring at it. “I think this shows that the ship had sailed first to the Baltic and then somewhere far to the north, where they obtained the narwhal and walrus ivory. I think it shows that she circumnavigated the British Isles before putting into Mount’s Bay and coming to grief on her way to the tin traders. This ship was wrecked as she was heading into Mount’s Bay, to the shore marts where the British miners would have brought their tin ore, not as she was sailing away.”

“The ship not just of a merchant, but of an explorer,” Rebecca suggested.

“Yet with trade never far from his mind,” Jack added. “If I were a good Phoenician, still with my Mediterranean goods on board and looking for tin, I’d see the amber and tusks I was offered by sea peoples in the north as potential items for barter as well. Down here among the Britons of Cornwall, these goods from forbidding lands hundreds of miles away might have been as exotic as they were to people in the Mediterranean, and as desirable.”

“You always tell me that history is driven by powerful individuals, Dad, that prehistorians dealing with large expanses of time often lose sight of the effect that charismatic and motivated individuals can have on technological innovation, on colonization, on exploration. When I saw this ivory and thought about the fantastic voyage they must have undertaken, I thought immediately of Himilco and Hanno.”

Jack handed back the amber, and watched as she carefully wrapped it and then submerged the package in the tray with the ivory, replacing it on the rack. She sat down again and turned to Jeremy. “You’ve been quiet. What do you think?”

Jeremy spun his laptop round so the other two could see it. “I can only add my assessment of the literary evidence. You’ll recognize this page from Codex Palatinus Graecus 386 in Heidelberg University Library. It’s the oldest extant text of Hanno’s Periplus, bound together with the Periplus Maris Erythraei, the Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean of the first century AD. Some Byzantine monk in the tenth century AD decided to make a compendium of all ancient voyages of exploration that he’d come across, copying the bits that interested him from original manuscripts that are now lost. Hanno’s Periplus is usually dated to the sixth or fifth century BC, and in my estimation is within the earlier part of that range, the first half of the sixth century BC. It was originally written in Punic Phoenician, but the Heidelberg version is a Greek translation. Hanno’s voyage, and that of his brother Himilco to the north, is mentioned by Pliny in his Natural History of the first century AD and by several later authors, confirming that the Periplus was not just made up by a medieval monk. It purports to be a first-hand account of Hanno’s voyage down the west coast of Africa, but ends abruptly when he turns back before reaching the Cape.”

“It’s as if an editor has slashed a red line across a text without actually considering the flow of the narrative,” Jack said. “It doesn’t ring true.”

“Maybe there was a complete account, but it never made it into the official version,” Rebecca said.

“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.

“Trade secrets. If you’ve found something good and want to put people off discovering it themselves, you write an account that does just that.”

“Pliny mentions that Hanno made it round to Arabia,” Jack said. “He’s a pretty reliable source, and may himself have seen that fuller account.”

“And Himilco?” Rebecca asked.

“Much less clear,” Jeremy said. “The first mention of him is by Pliny, who says that when Hanno went around Africa, Himilco was dispatched north to explore the outer coasts of Europe. A number of historians have speculated that they were brothers. He crops up again in Avienus, a Roman author of the fourth century AD, who mentions him as having made a voyage to the Oestrumnides, the Western Isles, his term for a land known to the early Greek and Phoenician explorers as the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles. The voyage was fraught with dangers, full of sea monsters and fog. Avienus has us believe that his source is a lost account by Himilco himself, something also implied by Pliny. But there’s no indication of tablets with that account having been set up in Carthage as well, odd because circumnavigating the British Isles would have been just as noteworthy an achievement as Hanno’s.”

“Maybe the trade secret was too valuable for any of the voyage to be made widely known, with British tin being in such high demand,” Rebecca suggested.

“Or maybe Himilco never lived to trumpet his success,” Jack said. “A sparse account, maybe only half believed, may have come down through others in his fleet who did survive, assuming that his was not the only vessel to set out. But without the great man to sell his story, without the Columbus or the Cabot or the Vasco da Gama, even the most compelling claims of exploration could fall flat.”

“So it could be that Himilco perished in a shipwreck,” Rebecca said, eyeing Jack. “A shipwreck off Cornwall.”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

A familiar voice shouted greetings to the divers outside, and a few moments later Costas appeared at the tent flap, clutching a huge sandwich and wearing a battered straw sombrero, his signature Hawaiian shirt, and baggy technicolor shorts. He waved, took an enormous bite of the sandwich, and made his way round the table. He had the rolling gait that Jack had seen among his cousins on the Greek island where he had been born, bred into them over the generations from working on small boats as fishermen and sponge divers. He pulled up a plastic chair between Jeremy and Rebecca and sat down. He looked particularly grizzled today, Jack thought, with at least a week’s worth of stubble, but he had the contented look he always had after a few uninterrupted days in the engineering lab at IMU. He took another bite and inspected the oily stains on his forearms. “Sorry,” he said between mouthfuls. “Changed into my beach gear, but forgot to wash.”

“Nice sandwich,” Rebecca said. “New York deli in Cornwall. Always good to sample the local cuisine.”

“She always does them for me at the café,” he said, swallowing. “I call ahead the day before, she gets the stuff in. I spear her fresh fish from the steamship wreck as payment. It works.”

“Better watch out for the shark,” Jack said.

“He doesn’t like flatfish, I do. I leave him the rest. It’s called working with nature.”

“That something you learned on the mean streets of the Bronx?” Jeremy said.

Costas took another bite. “Spearfishing with my uncles as a boy when we went back home to Greece on vacation.”

“When you weren’t sipping gin and tonic by the pool on the deck of your father’s two-hundred-foot yacht?”

“That was a different kind of learning. Learning how to enjoy myself. Speaking of which, barbecue on the beach tonight?”

“Depends how we get on here,” Jack said. “Might have to head off this afternoon.”

Costas grunted, pushed the final part of the sandwich into his mouth and wiped his hands on his shorts, staring at Jeremy’s laptop showing the transcript of Hanno’s Periplus. He read it while he finished munching, and nearly choked. He stared again, swallowing hard. “Check this out,” he said, and read out a passage.

“‘In this gulf was an island, resembling the first, with a lagoon, within which was another island, full of savages. Most of them were women with hairy bodies, whom our interpreters called “gorillas.” Although we chased them, we could not catch any males; they all escaped, being good climbers who defended themselves with stones. However, we caught three women, who refused to follow those who carried them off, biting and clawing them. So we killed and flayed them and brought their skins back to Carthage. For we did not sail any further, because our provisions were running short.’”

He looked up, his expression deadpan. “Hairy women who bit and scratched? How long had these guys been at sea? They must have been desperate.”

“That was probably in the region of Senegal, so maybe several months after leaving the Strait of Gibraltar, longer if they’d stopped to trade and establish outposts as the text implies,” Jack said. “This is the Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian, sailing down the west coast of Africa.”

“Gorillas? Really?”

“That’s the actual word, in Greek,” Jeremy said. “In fact it’s one of the reasons for believing in the authenticity of this document. What we have here is a Greek translation of the original Phoenician inscription set up in Carthage by Hanno after his return, in the early sixth century BC. The Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC knew of Hanno’s Periplus, as he describes a method of bartering along the West African coast that closely mimics an earlier passage in the Periplus and for which he could have had no other source, as there had been no further exploration along that coast after Hanno. Perhaps a Greek traveler who had been in Carthage made a copy and showed him. The word ‘gorilla’ would have been otherwise unknown to the Greeks and must have been copied from the original Punic inscription. It’s a rendering of the Kikongo word ngo diida, meaning a powerful animal that beats itself violently, so Hanno must have got the word from the Africans he met.”

“Not so nice of him to kill and flay them,” Rebecca said.

“It’s fascinating, because it’s actually the first recorded instance we have of a natural history specimen being brought back from a voyage of discovery,” Jack said. “Men like Joseph Banks on HMS Endeavor and Charles Darwin on the Beagle would have approved. Pliny tells us that the gorilla hides were still on display in Carthage when the Romans sacked the city in 146 BC.”

Costas dug a can of Coke out of his shorts pocket and popped it noisily, taking a deep drink. “Okay, the gorilla story may be real, but I don’t believe that final sentence, about turning back.”

“We were just talking about that,” Jeremy said. “It doesn’t fit the narrative.”

“I don’t know about that,” Costas said. “But when I was in the US Navy we deployed along that coast, and I do know about wind and currents. The Phoenicians were supposed to be great navigators, right? Trying to battle back against the Canary current and the prevailing northwesterlies would have made no sense at all. Hanno would have carried on, rounded the Cape and gone up the east coast of Africa.”

“That’s what Pliny said he did, reaching the coast of Arabia,” Rebecca said.

“Speaking of circumnavigating Africa, take a look at this.” Costas typed something into the laptop, and swung it round so Jack could see. “Our favorite salvage ship Deep Explorer has left her position off Sierra Leone, and is now heading past the Cape of Good Hope. Lanowski forwarded this image.”

“Lanowski? From Carthage?”

“He’s a one-man mobile command and control center. Never goes anywhere without his Landsat link.”

“Anything more?”

“About an hour ago she turned north-northeast, making fifteen knots at twenty-five degrees, and she’s maintained that course some thirty nautical miles off the coast.”

“That means she’s heading to the northern Indian Ocean.”

“The Horn of Africa. Any idea why? That’s a pretty hot place, and I don’t just mean temperature. Pirates and Iranian missiles. Not sure I’d want to be there now.”

“I had a few moments alone in the chart room on Deep Explorer just before our dive,” Jack said. “I didn’t think much of it at the time, as all eyes were on Clan Macpherson and we assumed Deep Explorer would be there for weeks attempting a salvage operation. But judging by the charts that were lying around, that figures as their next destination.”

“Another Second World War wreck? That seems to be their speciality.”

“They’ve got an excellent researcher in London, Collingwood, the guy who put them on to Clan Macpherson. He was at the same college as me at Cambridge, doing a doctorate on Allied convoy operations in the war. He always struck me as a little weak and naïve and he never managed to secure an academic post, so he makes his money where he can. In fact I met him at the National Archives yesterday, when we were ordering the same box of declassified Admiralty files, and we had a guarded conversation in the café afterward. I was certain he was there yesterday as a result of the Clan Macpherson project going bust following our dive. I invited him to contribute any additional documentary evidence he had for my report to the government on the wreck, and then I plugged him with some innocent-seeming questions. It turned out that he’d just returned from the Deutsches U-Boot archive that morning, and he was quite excited about some kind of all-expenses-paid holiday to the Indian Ocean in a few days’ time. Seeing this Landsat image, I wouldn’t be surprised if that meant a trip out to Deep Explorer. I got the impression that he’d been mandated to find evidence of any lost cargo of value, especially U-boats.”

“They’re going to be desperate after the failure to recoup from Clan Macpherson,” Costas said. “A ship like Deep Explorer costs thousands to operate per day, and there are going to be some pretty noisy investors out there. He’s probably going to be looking for anything marketable, not just gold.”

“Landor’s always operated on a knife edge,” Jack said. “But if he’s heading up to the Horn of Africa, he might just have got himself in too deep this time.”

“Landor?” Rebecca said. “You mean the guy you and Maurice were at school with? I thought he was in prison somewhere in South America.”

“I didn’t have a chance to tell you about it before we were called out,” Jack replied. “He’s operations director for Deep Explorer Inc., his latest incarnation. He keeps bouncing back.”

“No wonder you had to grit your teeth to go out there and do that dive. He had a bend, didn’t he?”

“A bad one, in his spine,” Jack said. “It was on a First World War wreck off Scotland two years ago, hunting for a consignment of silver bars. He pushed the envelope too far, dropped too deep and took a gamble with his air.”

“Sounds familiar,” Rebecca said wryly.

“The hyperbaric specialist who dealt with him told me about it. He had the choice either of running out of air underwater and dying, or of surfacing too quickly, knowing he was going to take a hit. He was diving alone from a Zodiac without a support vessel, and by the time the boat driver got him to the recompression chamber at Oban, the damage was done. He can’t even do a ten-minute dive to ten meters without risking a fatal hit, and hasn’t dived since.”

“If his passion for diving was anything like yours, I can imagine what that might do to him.”

“It’s hardened him, made him bitter. I don’t recognize him any more.” Jack paused, thinking for a moment. “He and I were inseparable for about a year, both obsessed with diving. I did my first ever open-water dives with him, and I can still remember the excitement. But then Maurice arrived at the school and I found someone I could share my archaeology interests with too, and Landor and I drifted apart. He was charismatic but rebellious, always with a dark edge, self-destructive. He dropped out of school and drifted off to Africa, worked for an aid agency at first but then as some kind of mercenary, and then he got into treasure hunting. For a long time I felt bad about him, guilty that I’d let him down by turning away from him at school.

“He came to see me once when I was a student and I agreed to dive with him again, on a galleon he’d found off Colombia. Then the Gulf War intervened and I was called up from the naval reserve, and the next I knew he was languishing in a prison in Bogotá. But he’s always been good at pulling in credulous investors. He’s made fortunes, lost them, made them and lost them again. I’m godfather to his son, who lived with his mother after Landor left her; father and son have never spoken since. I kept my distance from him on Deep Explorer, but what I saw I didn’t like. Maybe agreeing to go out on Deep Explorer was part of my old guilt trip with him, and he knew it. But once I was out there, seeing him standing at the ship’s rail doing nothing while Costas and I battled to get into the Zodiac, I realized I didn’t owe him anything.”

“Did the researcher give you any more hints about what they might be after?” Costas said.

Jack took a deep breath, and shook his head. “Very secretive. But if we’re right and they are heading toward the Somali coast, we could do a bit of ferreting about and work out if there were any Allied vessels or U-boats in the vicinity with valuable cargos. And I might just have a word with a friend from navy days who’s currently commanding officer of Combined Task Force 150, the anti-piracy flotilla operating out of Bahrain. I can at least warn him about Landor and what might be going on.”

“I’ve got some spare time after diving while I wait for deliveries to the engineering lab,” Costas said. “I can do a search online.”

“Meanwhile, keep Lanowski on to it. I’d like to be updated on Deep Explorer’s progress. Get him to stream it through to my account as well.”

“He could probably hack into the CIA and order in a drone strike if you like.”

“Don’t tempt me,” Jack said. “So where are we, Jeremy?”

Jeremy picked up an A4-sized envelope and looked at him. “I think it’s time to tell you about the bronze plaque from Clan Macpherson.”

Costas finished his Coke, exhaling noisily and crushing the can under his foot. “And you haven’t seen my sherd with its inscription yet. I found the bucket before coming in here, and the conservator will bring it in as soon as I call her.”

Jack leaned forward, tense with anticipation. “All right. Show us what you’ve got. The plaque first.”

Jeremy slid the envelope toward him. “That contains a sharpened still from your helmet video inside Clan Macpherson, along with my translation. Remember what we were saying about Hanno the Carthaginian, whether or not he circumnavigated Africa? Prepare to be amazed.”

10

Jack stared in astonishment at the photograph that Jeremy had put in front of him, showing the bronze plaque from Clan Macpherson in the upper part and Jeremy’s translation below. “Are you certain about this?” he asked, rereading the text, hardly daring to believe what was before his eyes.

“Absolutely,” Jeremy replied. “It’s the early Punic alphabet, pretty well identical to Phoenician from the Levant, the text reading from right to left. You can see the early form of the Punic letter A, toppled over on one side. There’s no chance of this being some kind of forgery, because there are distinctive features of the letters bet, tet, and mem, the equivalent of the Greek beta, theta, and mu, that are only found elsewhere on the potsherd inscriptions from our Phoenician wreck, and we know from the Lydian coins and the datable Greek painted pottery in the cargo that our wreck sherds date to the early sixth century BC. We’ve run a thorough paleographic comparison between the early alphabetic letters on the plaque and those on the wreck inscriptions, and have concluded beyond doubt that they are contemporaneous. Both the plaque and the wreck date to the most likely time period of Hanno and Himilco’s voyages, about the 590s or 580s BC.”

Jack slowly read out Jeremy’s translation: “‘Hanno the Carthaginian affixed this at the southernmost point of the Libyan regions beyond the Pillars of Hercules, having commanded fifty ships and now only having one, before setting off up the far shore with his cargo to the appointed place at the mountain called the Chariot of Fire. To Ba’al Hammon he dedicates this plaque.’”

Jeremy leaned over and pointed at the photo. “And then there’s that symbol crudely stamped at the end, looking like an Egyptian hieroglyph of two stick-figure men carrying a box on poles between them. It’s a pictogram, certainly. I haven’t yet asked Maurice if he’s seen one like it in Egypt, but will do so now that his excavation at Carthage is coming to a close and he’ll have more time to check for comparisons.”

“That’s exactly what I found on my potsherd,” Costas said. “I think Jenny from the conservation tent has just left it outside.” He got up, hurried out of the tent and came back moments later carrying a bucket full of water. He reached in and pulled out an amphora sherd, carefully patting it on his shirt and placing it on the table between them. “You can see that the letters are scratched, not painted, so that’s one difference from the other amphora inscriptions. But if you look carefully, you can just make out that pictogram among the scratchings. You see?”

Jeremy pushed up his glasses, leaned forward and peered at it. He looked up, staring into the middle distance, and then looked down again. “My God,” he said quietly.

“Let’s deal with the plaque first,” Jack said, still focused on the photograph. “Have you got the text of the Periplus of Hanno to hand?”

Jeremy cleared his throat, still gazing at the sherd. “Yes, of course.” He turned to his laptop, tapped the screen and swiveled it toward Jack. “The Heidelberg manuscript.”

“It mentions a mountain called Chariot of the Gods, toward the end.”

Jeremy nodded. “Here it is: ‘And we sailed along with all speed, being stricken by fear. After a journey of four days, we saw the land at night covered with flames. And in the midst there was one lofty fire, greater than the rest, which seemed to touch the stars. By day this was seen to be a very high mountain, called Chariot of the Gods.’”

Jack looked at him. “Could Chariot of the Gods and Chariot of Fire be the same thing?”

“I’m certain of it. Remember, the Heidelberg text is a copy made more than fifteen hundred years after the event of a Greek translation that may itself have been copied from earlier translations, each time offering the possibility of mistakes and corruption. ‘Chariot of the Lord’ or ‘Chariot of God’ is most familiar as the translation from Hebrew into Greek of the conveyance in which the Israelite God appears in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. It’s possible that the monks in the scriptorium, steeped in the Bible, would have seen the Greek word for ‘chariot’ and inserted the familiar biblical phrase, restricting reference to fire to the other fiery images in that passage. But with the evidence of the plaque, in Phoenician and dating to the time of Hanno, we can be certain that the original phrase was the one that I translate as ‘Chariot of Fire.’”

“There is a geographical problem, though,” Jack said, thinking hard. “In the Heidelberg text, the chariot appears on the west coast of Africa, just before the land of the gorillas. The image of rivers of fire is usually equated with an active volcano that Hanno must have seen in the region of modern Senegal. And yet the text in the plaque indicates that it was set up hundreds of miles to the south, at the Cape of Good Hope, and that the chariot lay ahead of them, somewhere up the east coast of Africa.”

“That’s why the plaque is a game-changer,” Jeremy said, talking intently. “It suggests that the fiery passage in the Heidelberg text is a conflation, combining the Senegal volcano with something awesome to come, something that Hanno chose not to present accurately when he returned to Carthage and composed his Periplus.”

Jack nodded slowly. “And yet something he could use to embellish his description of the volcanic region, making it seem even more terrifying, even more as if anyone traveling there would be transgressing in the realm of the gods.”

“Exactly.” Jeremy turned to Rebecca. “Earlier you mentioned the idea of trade secrets, of the explorers extolling their achievements but being careful not to give away too much, to make sure they were not providing a route map for their rivals. Well, here I think we have evidence that the Heidelberg Periplus is a truncated version of the truth, one that Hanno himself connived in, making a decision not to tell the full story when he came to present it to the world on his return to Carthage.”

“How then do you account for Pliny’s assertion that he did reach Arabia?” Rebecca said.

Jeremy shrugged. “Perhaps several of his sailors survive with him, and they can’t keep their mouths shut. Perhaps Hanno himself lives to old age, when he no longer has anything to lose, and it becomes important for him to tell the truth of his achievement, to keep the names of Hanno and Himilco high in the annals of exploration. The tablets of the Periplus remain unaltered, sacrosanct in the temple of Ba’al Hammon, but rumor spreads, soon becoming a fixed truth among Carthaginian mariners, men who would have revered the memory of Hanno, just as later ones did Vasco da Gama or Captain Cook. When the Romans sack Carthage, the story is still there, surviving with enough authority for Pliny to present it as fact in his Natural History.”

Costas put up his hand. “But I see another problem. There’s nothing volcanic up the east coast of Africa that would fit the description.”

Rebecca shook her head. “You don’t have to look for volcanoes. When I was in Ethiopia two years ago with my school group working for the aid agency, we used to get up at dawn to see the first light of the sun on the mountain ridges of the plateau. During the dry season, when the wind whips up the dust, it creates a dramatic light effect, a kind of ripple on the western horizon as the sun lights up the mountaintops. The ripple can be seen most clearly at a certain place where there’s a line of ridges angled northwest, so the sun progressively lights up the ridge from south to north over a span of several seconds. On a clear day, where you can see the distant mountains over the plain from the sea, I guess to an ancient sailor that might look like a chariot racing across the sky — a Chariot of Fire.”

Jack stared at her. “Can you pinpoint the place?”

“Absolutely. It covers the ancient mountaintop plateau of Magdala, where the Ethiopian King Theodore had his last stand against the British when they invaded Abyssinia in 1868 to rescue those European hostages. You should know about that, Dad.”

“I certainly do. Our ancestor the Royal Engineers colonel inherited a box with some material relating to the campaign from a fellow officer in India. My father only told me about it just before he died, in a long list of other family documents he hadn’t had time to catalog. Apparently there’s a handwritten diary and some kind of fabric, a piece of tapestry or something brought back from the campaign. The archive’s been in disarray over the last few years, with the new building at the campus under construction, but maybe now’s the time for me to delve into it. My father always told me they weren’t just fighting a war, but were on the trail of biblical antiquities.”

“Another thing puzzles me, though,” Rebecca said. “I get why Hanno might have abbreviated his story when he got back to Carthage. He was probably under strict orders from the magistrates or whoever to keep quiet about his circumnavigation. Who knows what gold and other riches might lie in East Africa. But why then should he give the game away in a plaque he erects at the Cape, saying exactly where he’s going?”

“He would have been in a different mindset then,” Costas said. “That plaque reads almost like a last journal entry—‘We were fifty ships, now we’re one.’ I went round the Cape several times when I was in the navy, and I can tell you that the proposition in a simple square-rigged sailing ship would be little short of terrifying. He didn’t know whether he’d make it back. Revealing trade secrets was the last thing on his mind. At the Cape, faced with the fearful prospect ahead, all that mattered was to leave something that showed his achievement, and perhaps a waymarker for those who might have followed to find out what had happened to him.”

“What happened to his cargo, you mean,” Jack said. “‘The appointed place’ shows that whoever had entrusted him with this cargo had a fixed destination in mind, the mountain called the Chariot of Fire.”

“If that was in Ethiopia, it wasn’t entirely off the ancient map, was it?” Rebecca said. “The Egyptians knew of the Land of Punt to the south, and explorers seeking ivory and precious metals must have known about the rich wildlife and the gold to be found in the Ethiopian highlands. Perhaps someone had a treasure they wanted spirited away, to some hiding place at the edge of the known world but not beyond the bounds of recovery.”

“And important enough to send it on a voyage all the way around the continent of Africa to get there,” Costas said.

Jack gazed at the pictogram of the two men with the box. An idea was forming in his mind, something almost too incredible to contemplate. “The early sixth century was a very unsettled time in the Middle East, in the Holy Land,” he said. “Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had conquered the old Phoenician lands of Canaan, and Carthage had become the new capital of the Phoenician world. It’s exactly the time you would expect navigators like Hanno and Himilco to be sent on great voyages of exploration to the west, to assert Carthaginian dominance over a new world where they would not have to contend with the ancient powers of the Middle East, a region as intractable then as it is now.”

“And Nebuchadnezzar did something else, didn’t he, Dad?” Rebecca said quietly, eyeing him. “Remember, I worked at Temple Mount in Jerusalem last year, and we were digging through those layers. He destroyed the Temple, and forced the Jews into exile. Something went missing, didn’t it? A great treasure, the greatest, most sacred treasure of the Jews. So here’s what I’m thinking. With the Phoenicians fleeing their homeland for Carthage, who better for their kin in Judah to entrust their treasure to than the greatest navigators of the world, men like Hanno, who might take it safely away from the cauldron of the Middle East and on an extraordinary voyage to that appointed place, somewhere for it to remain concealed until the time was right for its recovery.”

Jack stared at the pictogram, his mind racing, and Jeremy looked at him. “I think we need to examine Costas’s sherd now.”

Costas leaned forward eagerly. “Can you read it?”

Jeremy picked it up and angled it into the light. “The inscription has been scratched into the outside of the sherd, hastily but decisively,” he said. “There’s no doubt the language is Phoenician, of the same time period as the painted sherds from the wreck and the plaque. It has the same toppled letter A, among other similarities.”

“Another reference to the contents of the amphoras, like the painted inscriptions?” Costas suggested.

Jeremy shook his head emphatically. “The markings on those amphoras had been put on where they were filled or at the wharfside. As a result, where we’ve got broken sherds with those markings, from amphoras that shattered during the wrecking, they’re like a jigsaw puzzle, with each sherd only containing part of an inscription. Your sherd is completely different, unique on the wreck so far. It’s a complete inscription, squeezed into the available space, scratched on a sherd that was already broken. It was made by someone who had picked up a broken sherd and used whatever he had to hand, a ring or a knife perhaps.”

Jack took the sherd from Jeremy, inspecting it. “The odd amphora might shatter in the normal course of a voyage, creating a mess that might be swept into the scuppers. But I don’t think that accounts for this sherd. On a voyage such as this one, with the cargo needing to be stowed as well as possible to avoid breakage, with everything needing to be battened down and shipshape, any breakages would have been cleared overboard. And with the presentation of the cargo being of prime importance for trade, the last thing they would want would be to invite merchants on board to see stinking, messy scuppers. So my money is on this sherd being from an amphora that shattered in the final lead-up to the wrecking.”

“That’s consistent with the poor quality of the incisions,” Jeremy replied, taking the sherd back and pointing at it. “They look as if they were scratched by someone being thrown violently about, who maybe knew they weren’t going to make it.”

“A message in a bottle,” Rebecca said.

Jeremy nodded. “That fits with what the inscription actually says.”

Jack leaned forward. “Go on.”

Jeremy placed the sherd in the center of the table, pointing as he spoke. “It contains ten words, in four lines. The first word is ‘Chimilkat,’ evidently the name of the writer. The second word means ‘made this,’ like the Latin fecit. So that first line reads ‘Chimilkat wrote this.’”

Jack stared, stunned. “You sure of that name?”

“You can read it for yourself.”

“Chimilkat is the Phoenician name that the Greeks rendered as Himilco.”

“Correct.”

Costas looked at them. “Himilco the Navigator?”

Jeremy pointed at the sherd again. “The second line also contains two words. The first means ‘go round,’ but in a specific nautical sense, ‘circumnavigate.’ The second is the Phoenician spelling of the word we know from Greek as Cassiterides, the British Isles. So that line means ‘circumnavigated the Cassiterides.’”

“‘Himilco, who wrote this, circumnavigated the British Isles,’” Costas said.

“That’s amazing enough,” Jeremy said. “But the third line says something truly astonishing. The same word for ‘circumnavigate’ appears, though with a suffix indicating a future sense, something that will happen. There are two other words you might recognize from the plaque, the word for Africa and, amazingly, the word for Chariot of Fire, the mountain. Then there’s a name, barely visible, and another word.”

Jack picked up the sherd and angled it again for a better view. “My God,” he said quietly. “It’s Hanno.”

“And the last word in the line signifies their relationship. They’re brothers.”

Costas translated again. “‘Himilco, who wrote this, circumnavigated the British Isles. Hanno, his brother, has gone to circumnavigate Africa, to the Chariot of Fire.’”

“And now to the pictogram at the end, and the two words below,” Jeremy said. “The pictogram is clear enough, but it must have been incised in his final moments. One slash becomes a gouge that trails off to the bottom of the sherd, as if it were done at the moment the ship struck.”

“It’s very moving,” Rebecca said. “Two brothers, half a world apart, sending the same message to the world, both under duress. Hanno punches that pictogram into a bronze plaque at the Cape of Good Hope, as if to make absolutely sure that any who might follow him would know his purpose. He may not have been facing the same immediate terror as Himilco, but he must have wondered whether he would survive. For Himilco that pictogram is the last thing he’ll ever inscribe, and he knows it. Leaving that message for posterity is the uppermost thing in his mind. Whatever it represents, it must have been something incredibly important. And he’s thinking of his brother in his final moments.”

Jeremy nodded and leaned forward intently, staring at Jack. “And now the final two words. Prepare yourself for one of the most extraordinary revelations of your archaeological career.”

11

Jack felt his pulse quicken as he peered at the ancient potsherd, watching Jeremy trace the faint remains of the inscription with his finger. He cleared his throat and looked up at Jack, his face flushed with excitement. “The two words below the pictogram are ‘Aron Habberit,’ the same in Phoenician as in Hebrew.”

“Aron Habberit,” Jack repeated, his voice taut with excitement. “The Ark of the Covenant, the Ark of the Testimony. Well I’ll be damned. That makes absolute sense of the pictogram.”

Costas leaned back, closed his eyes and began to recite. “‘And Bezalel made the ark of acacia wood; two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it: and he overlaid it with pure gold within and without, and made a crown of gold to it round about. And he cast for it four rings of gold, in the four feet thereof; even two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it. And he made staves of acacia wood, and overlaid them with gold. And he put the staves into the rings on the sides of the ark, to bear the ark.’”

“The Old Testament Book of Exodus, chapter 37, verses 1 to 5,” Jeremy said. “Well remembered.”

“The benefits of a strict Greek Orthodox upbringing,” Costas said. “The only things that really interested me were the stories of treasure, and I memorized them. I’d wanted to find the Ark of the Covenant way before I first met Jack. This is incredibly exciting.”

Jeremy tapped on his laptop, opening a black-and-white photo and swiveling it round so that they could all see. “Recognize that?”

“The treasury in the tomb of Tutankhamun, as it looked just after Howard Carter stepped inside in 1923,” Rebecca said. “That’s the so-called Anubis shrine, made of gilded acacia wood, the wood that the Israelites called shittim, with carrying poles almost three meters long. The shrine is corniced, decorated on the sides like a palace facade covered with hieroglyphic text, and on top there’s that frightening live-sized statue of Anubis, canine god of the dead and guardian of the burial chamber and the pharaoh’s canopic equipment. That’s what was found inside the shrine: sacred materials and equipment used in the mummification process. It was really a kind of portable treasury.”

“You really know your Egyptology,” Jeremy said.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with Maurice and Aysha. Being with Maurice is like living inside a virtual museum of ancient Egypt.”

Jeremy cleared his throat. “I’ve put this image up because the Anubis shrine is the closest we have archaeologically to the description of the Ark of the Covenant. There are a lot of obvious similarities, including the box-like shape, the gilded wooden construction and the carrying poles. They’re of very similar date as well, if we follow Maurice in believing that the Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is Akhenaten, the likely father of Tutankhamun.”

Costas looked at him quizzically. “So what you’re suggesting is that when the Israelites came to think of a sacred box for the tablet of the Commandments, they had an obvious model in the type of shrine they would have seen being carried around in processions in Egypt.”

“Precisely,” Jeremy said. “Many of the Israelites of the Exodus had probably been in Egypt for generations, and as slaves, their own material culture would have been very sparse. Even though they may have despised Egyptian religion and the pharaohs, when it came to conceiving of a receptacle, their imaginations would have been fueled by the treasures they had seen around them in Egypt.”

“There’s another factor, something that Maurice always talks about,” Rebecca added. “Look at how we use the words. When we call a box a shrine, we give it extra stature, extra strength, the power to protect what’s inside. In the case of the Anubis shrine, it was the sacred canopic equipment; in the case of the Ark, it was the two stone plaques inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The Egyptians were past masters at invoking everything they could to protect their sacred objects. Anubis was the black dog of everyone’s nightmares. In that photo you can still see the shroud that was found covering the dog’s body, probably one of several that would have covered the head as well. People knew what lay beneath, they feared it, but they were probably told that to remove the shroud would be to bring down the wrath of the god upon them. The figures on top of the Ark in the biblical account, the so-called cherubim, probably a pair of winged lion-bodied creatures like the sphinx, had much the same function, and the Ark was also meant to be covered with shrouds or skins in a way that sounds very similar.”

“The Book of Numbers, chapter 4,” Costas said. “The Ark was to be covered with skins and a blue cloth, and to touch it was to die.”

“Rebecca’s right,” Jack said. “Maurice and I often argue about the extent of Egyptian influence in the ancient Mediterranean, but in this case I agree with him. At the time when Egypt had its greatest involvement in ancient Mediterranean trade, during the New Kingdom in the late second millenium BC, the time of the Exodus, we should expect to see Egyptian artifacts being copied by other peoples. And remember how close Phoenicia was to Judah, geographically as well as culturally. The Phoenician god Ba’al Hammon had similarities with the early Judaean God, and we know that the concept of one overarching deity may be closely associated with the cult of the sun god Aten under Akhenaten. Even the western Phoenicians would have felt this influence. Hanno and Himilco would have been closely connected with the Phoenician homeland, and as we’ve seen from our wreck find of elephant ivory, they may even have traveled up the Nile themselves in search of trade goods. To me it’s no surprise that when they come to inscribe a pictogram of the Ark, it looks very like an Egyptian hieroglyph, partly because the Ark itself is an Egyptian form.”

Jeremy swiveled the computer back and tapped the keyboard. “There were two additional points of comparison that struck me when I was looking at the Egyptian material. The first was the association with mountains. We know that Moses was given the Commandments on a mountain, and we’re told that the hiding place of the Ark was to be in a mountaintop cave. Well, Anubis was also known as the mountain god, Tepy-dju-ef, ‘he who is upon his mountain.’ The second point concerns the animal skins. I remembered Pliny’s reference to the gorilla skins brought back by Hanno being hung up for display on his return to Carthage. Looking through the other artifacts found in Tut’s treasury, I saw those two strange gilded sculptures of decapitated animal skins hanging from poles, part of the imuit fetish. That too was associated with the cult of Anubis.”

“Are you suggesting a connection between Tut’s tomb and the gorilla skins?” Costas asked incredulously.

“It’s as Jack was saying, tendrils of influence that spread out from Egypt by way of the Near East, through Canaan and Judah, through the Phoenicians. The imuit fetish may have lost most of its meaning outside Egypt, but the imagery and symbolism could have remained, even a lingering memory of its power, a hint of the fear that Anubis instilled. And there may have been a more practical meaning. Perhaps Hanno had been instructed to set up the skins as a secret message that he had carried out his task, a message to the priests and prophets of Judah who may have retained a memory of Egyptian cult practices from the time of the Exodus.”

“Gorilla skins might not have been quite what they had in mind,” Costas said.

“It probably didn’t matter, so long as they could see them and know they’d been used as a covering for the Ark.”

“And the connection with Ethiopia, with the mountain called the Chariot of Fire?” Costas asked.

“I heard about the Ark when I was in Ethiopia, from the village elders in the mountains,” Rebecca said. “And the Lemba people of South Africa, the Mwenye, claimed that they had the Ark and carried it deep into the mountains, hiding it in a cave. The Lemba called it ngoma lungundu, ‘the voice of God.’”

“It sounds as if you were doing a bit more than relief work on your trip,” Costas said.

“Yep. I’m an archaeologist’s daughter.”

“I remember that story,” Jeremy said. “I went to a seminar in Oxford on the analysis of Lemba Y chromosomes that appeared to reveal a haplogroup similarity among samples from one clan with those of Semitic peoples of the Levant. There was a lot of talk of the lost tribes of Israel, and some pretty wild speculation. It could never have occurred to me at the time, of course, but Semitic DNA could mean Phoenician, not Jewish.”

“Maybe Hanno’s crew at the Cape made friends with the local women,” Costas said. “Might have made a nice change from gorillas. Probably easier to catch.”

“If our bronze plaque was set up in the Lemba homeland at the Cape, isn’t it most likely that they would have safeguarded it?” Rebecca said. “They might have seen Hanno setting it up and making offerings to Ba’al Hammon, something he might have done extravagantly to try to keep the locals from tampering with it.”

“And then they remove it and hide it away when they see it being threatened,” Costas said. “That could have happened two thousand years later, when the next navigators from the Mediterranean arrived at the Cape.”

“You mean Bartolomeu Dias in 1488,” Rebecca said.

“And then someone gets hold of it during the Second World War and conceals it among a consignment of gold on a British merchant ship in 1943,” Costas said.

“Who do we know who was snooping around looking for Jewish antiquities at that time?” Jack said, eyeing Costas.

Costas gave him a grim look. “I can think of one unsavory outfit we’ve come across before.”

Jack stared at the photograph on the screen, his mind still on the ancient past. “We shouldn’t discount a direct connection between Judah and Ethiopia as well,” he said. “Remember, the early Christian kingdom of Axum was founded in the region of Ethiopia, maybe with an earlier Jewish presence. Perhaps some Jews fled south following the conquest of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, seeking the Promised Land. It might have been too dangerous for them to take the Ark and the other sacred objects from the Temple, with the risk of being apprehended by the Babylonians as they went south through Egypt, or of being waylaid in the lawless desert to the south. Perhaps they were a small number of the hardiest people, tasked with finding a secure place to hide the treasures. And once they had done so, it’s possible that some of them returned and made arrangements for the transport of the Ark by sea, all the way round Africa. What fuels all this speculation is that phrase ‘the appointed place’ in the plaque inscription. It seems clear that the Chariot of Fire was an actual place, and that there might have been a reception party awaiting Hanno.”

“So how do you fit the Lemba people into this scenario?” Rebecca asked.

“Only with more speculation,” Jack replied. “But if Hanno arrived at the Cape with his fleet depleted to only one ship, then he may have had a problem with disease as well as with shipwreck. The Periplus shows that they were making forays inland on the way down the west coast of Africa, and every time they did that, they would have been exposed to potentially fatal new diseases against which they would have had little resistance. You only have to look at the miserable time with disease on board the ships of the early European explorers to imagine the scenario. If Hanno encounters people at the Cape who are tough, friendly, and persuaded that the Phoenicians are some kind of messengers from the gods, then he might have recruited some of them to join him for the final part of the voyage. He would have needed strong men to carry the Ark from the shore into the mountains, for a start. And then once their job was done, they may have left Hanno and his surviving crew to carry on overland to Carthage, and made their own way back south to their homeland.”

“Taking with them the story of having transported the Ark to a cave in the mountains,” Rebecca said.

“And also taking with them some of the Jewish customs that researchers have identified among their beliefs,” Jeremy said. “Perhaps the Jewish refugees who formed the reception at the Chariot of Fire tried to convert them, to keep them in awe of the sacred nature of their mission and to impress on them the need for secrecy.”

Costas leaned forward. “All of this is consistent with the idea of the Ark being in a church in Ethiopia, isn’t it? Search online and that seems to be one of the most common conjectures. Maybe its hiding place in the mountains was revealed at some point in recent history and it was secretly taken there by those who had been entrusted with its safety.”

“It’s exactly the kind of thing that King Theodore of Abyssinia might have done, the one who took on the British in 1868,” Jack said. “Maybe knowledge of the original mountaintop location of the Ark had somehow percolated out, and reached the ears of some of the adventurers in the British expedition against him. There were men like Stanley there, later of Livingstone fame. Maybe there was more to that expedition than meets the eye.”

“You might have the key to that in those nineteenth-century documents you have,” Rebecca said.

Jack stared at her, his mind racing. “That’s one direction I want to go in. The other is to find out what the hell was happening in 1943. There’s a crucial backstory to all this in what happened to Clan Macpherson, and I still need to get to the bottom of that.” He sat upright, checking his watch. “That’s fantastic work, Jeremy. And to Costas, for finding the sherd. Absolutely incredible.”

“Okay,” Costas said, standing up. “If we’re done here, it’s time to dive.”

Jeremy gave Jack a hesitant look. “Jack, can I borrow your drysuit? We’re about the same height.”

Jack shook his head. “Sorry, I only brought my wetsuit. You’re going to have to brave the icy North Atlantic.”

“Some of us don’t even need a wetsuit,” Rebecca said, giving Jeremy a challenging look. “Maybe you should go back to hot cocoa and a hot-water bottle at the Institute.”

“No way,” Jeremy said. “I want to see those carpenter’s marks on the timbers. I want to see every last inscription this site produces.”

“Well then,” Costas said, gesturing at the tent flap. “Are we good to go?”

“Good to go,” Rebecca replied firmly, watching Jeremy close his computer and stash his papers in his briefcase. “You still want us back here at four P.M., Dad?”

Jack nodded. “Before then, I’ve got some phone calls to make. When I was at Kew I met up with an Imperial War Museum friend who is an expert on the intelligence files. She says there’s someone still alive from Bletchley Park in 1943 who might be able to shed light on what was going on with our convoy. It’s probably a long shot, but worth a try. If I can set up a visit, I’d like all of us to go. It sounds as if she’s quite a character.”

“I’ve got to stay here, Dad. I’m taking over from the site director next week while he’s away.”

“It’ll have to be Costas and Jeremy, then. Apparently she’s quite fond of men.”

They all got up and went toward the tent entrance. Costas hesitated, and then turned back, pointing at the sherd. “Rebecca was right, Jack. It was a message in a bottle. That guy Himilco must have known that nobody in his lifetime would ever find that sherd, so he was looking to the future, to some distant time when others might pick up the trail. He was leaving it for us. For you.”

Jack was alone again, as he had been that morning after arriving at the site. He picked up the two objects, the photograph of the plaque and the inscribed potsherd. They were fragmentary messages from the past, made at the furthest extremities of the known world over two and a half thousand years ago. He thought of Hanno and Himilco: the one standing at the Cape as the waves lashed and the wind howled, and yet somehow surviving his voyage; the other pulling off an equal feat of navigation but falling foul of the weather just as landfall must have seemed certain. They were two men determined to bask in the glory of their achievements, undoubtedly, but whose main audience was perhaps each other, driving the one to survive his ordeal against the odds in the hope of meeting his brother again, and the other to devote his final moments to scratching a message that could only have been intended for people in the far-distant future — people who might tell the world what he too had done and erect a monument on the harbor front at Carthage, where he would expect there to be one honoring his brother as well, the two men equal in stature and achievement, forever celebrated side by side.

Jack held up the potsherd, imagining Himilco in those final moments. History from the age of sailing was full of dread images of mariners being driven inshore with full knowledge of what was likely to happen but refusing to believe it until the very end. He remembered the image of the ship he had conjured up when he had discovered those timbers on the wreck site. Somewhere over the promontory in front of him, in a raging sea with death all but inevitable, a man had scratched those words, words important enough to be his final message, to his brother, to the world, words that revealed an extraordinary secret that Hanno too had felt compelled to record for posterity on his own inscription set up at the very extremity of Africa more than seven thousand miles away.

Jack put down the photograph and the potsherd and pulled out his phone. Secrets were meant to be forever, but the passage of time so often weakened that resolve; it was the human propensity to break the pact, to leave something for the future, that had been the lynchpin of so many of his quests, and this one now needed a veil to be lifted, a veil that had concealed one of the most secretive enterprises in history. He remembered what Costas had said: one unsavory outfit we’ve come across before. It was not just the extraordinary enterprise of Allied intelligence and counter-intelligence that he needed to break into, but the operations of a Nazi organization, one that had recruited archaeologists, fantasists, and the most diehard fanatics into its fold, an organization that would have been farcical had its purpose not been to help justify and instigate the worst crime against humanity ever committed.

He took a deep breath, tapped a saved number, and listened while it rang. A woman with an accent straight out of the 1940s answered, and he spoke. “Hello, Miss Hunter-Jones. My name is Dr. Jack Howard, and I’m calling from the International Maritime University. I believe that our mutual friend Dr. Gordon from the Imperial War Museum may have contacted you and explained that I’m researching a merchant ship lost off West Africa during the war. I’ve listened to the recording you did for him about Bletchley Park for the museum project last month, and I was fascinated. To help me with my research, I’m very much hoping that you may be willing to talk about some aspects of your work at Bletchley during the early part of 1943. We have an archaeological mystery to solve, and I’m hoping you can be part of it.”