The Eden Legacy

II

Knox arrived in the conference room for Holm’s presentation to find only Miles already there, his feet up on the conference table, scrunching up sheets of paper from his pad, trying to score three-pointers in the waste-paper basket, and not doing very well to judge from the mess he’d made of the floor. ‘Just us?’ he asked.

‘That’s how Ricky wants it,’ said Miles. ‘We’ll brief the others later.’

Knox nodded. The conservators had their hands full with the anchor; the crew with fixing the thrusters and checking hull damage from the anchor. And their MGS colleagues, while expert divers, were mostly veterans of the armed forces or the oil industry, with limited interest in the science or archaeology of the site. Besides, half of them were still on the afternoon dive, and would need to be briefed this evening anyway.

He took a chair, but found it difficult to keep still, so was soon up again, pacing the room. Their first job here had been to take scans and sediment samples. Dieter Holm and his team had been working round the clock to analyse this new data and build a three-dimensional profile of the wreck-mound from it, so that they’d have a better idea of how to go in. Tonight, therefore, was the start of the salvage proper, and Knox felt a peculiar kind of excitement he hadn’t felt in a good two years.

This room was where most of the press and TV interviews were given, so Ricky had hung the walls with props: portraits of Zheng He, artists’ impressions of his fleet, photographs of artefacts on the sea-bed and reproductions of medieval world maps. Knox stopped before one of these now. It was known, rather optimistically, as the Zheng He map, and it showed both hemispheres of the world, with Asia, Africa and Europe in one, America in the other. Though it dated from the eighteenth century, Ricky and many others were convinced it was a copy of an earlier map, made by Zheng He himself in around 1420; and that it therefore provided compelling evidence that the Chinese had found and mapped America. Knox might have been more open to this dating had it not been for the use of Mercator projections a hundred years before Mercator had even devised them, and the presence of the word ‘America’ thirty years before Amerigo Vespucci had been born.

‘Ron’s threatening us with another bloody curry tonight,’ said Miles, scrunching up a fresh sheet of paper.

‘Hell,’ said Knox. ‘I only just got my stomach back from last time.’ He moved along to a photograph of the wreck-mound. It was extraordinary the progress marine archaeology had made these past few decades, but it hadn’t all been good. The arrival of deep-sea technologies had enabled enterprising treasure hunters to track down and then plunder the richest wrecks, indifferent to their historic value. A backlash had started and international agreement had been reached, forcing modern salvagers to pay far more care and attention to the wrecks themselves, not just their cargoes. As a consequence, the basic processes of wreck-site formation were now pretty well understood. This wreck, for example: it was a fair bet that it had sustained a hull breach on the nearby reef. It would have had to have been severe, because the Chinese had used sophisticated watertight bulkheads to limit damage. Hull breaches typically sank ships in one of two ways. Either the weight of water would put such extra stress on the hull that the stern would simply snap off from the bow; or, more commonly, the water would wash from side to side, making the ship roll ever more violently on the waves, until finally it would reach its tipping point and so capsize. Artefacts would spill from its deck as it sank, leaving a scatter-pattern on the seabed, just like the one they’d found here; while the ship itself would be pinned to the bottom by its ballast, ironwork and cargo. Prevailing currents would push sediment up against it, like snowdrifts against a wall. They’d also ratchet up the stress on the hull’s caulked timbers until they snapped, exposing their unprotected innards. Barnacles, wood-boring molluscs, soft-rot fungi and cavitation bacteria would go to work. In seas this warm and fecund, the hull would quickly rot, as would any textiles, food, human and animal tissue and other organic material, leaving behind the merest traces of themselves. And, as the walls separating the internal holds and compartments rotted away, all the metal and stone artefacts would tumble together into one vast undifferentiated heap, like the grave goods of some warrior king buried beneath a great tumulus of sand, precisely like the one pictured right here, sixty metres beneath the sea.

The door opened abruptly and Dieter Holm strode in. He didn’t say a word, simply set down his cardboard box on the table, then turned on his laptop. He was short and slight, with gelled-back silver hair, gold-rimmed halfmoon spectacles and a sharply pointed white beard that suggested he rather fancied himself a bit of a devil. He had an outstanding reputation as a marine scientist, and Knox had been eager to meet him; but he’d barely arrived aboard the Maritsa before throwing a dreadful tantrum about his quarters and the constricted lab space. Knox didn’t altogether blame him, for Ricky had promised a state-of-the-art salvage ship, and the Maritsa was hardly that; but his reaction had still been pathetically over the top, leading his team straight back to Morombe, where they’d taken over a villa and set up shop.

The door opened again, and Ricky came in, followed by Maddow the Shadow. Knox couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been lurking outside, for he had a remarkable knack of being the last to arrive at any meeting. ‘Great,’ he said, taking a chair. ‘You’re all here. Then let’s get straight down to it.’

‘As you wish,’ said Holm. He took three comb-bound folders from his box, slid them across the polished tabletop. ‘These contain my analysis of the latest data,’ he said. ‘But essentially I can summarise the key finding in just three words.’

‘And?’ asked Ricky.

Holm’s smile grew thin yet somehow triumphant. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said.