The Mask of Troy

7

J ack floated motionless ten metres below the surface of the Aegean Sea, just outside the huge shadow created by the hull of Seaquest II. He and Costas had exited from the ship’s internal docking bay, so had avoided struggling in the choppy afternoon swell that Jack could see above him pulsing in the direction of the shoreline to the east, towards Troy. He looked up at the hull, and saw the wavering faces of the support team peering down through the calm water inside the docking bay. He raised his arm to Costas and held his thumb and forefinger together in the ‘okay’ sign, then watched Costas repeat the signal. He glanced again at Costas’ gear. They were wearing e-suits, Kevlar-reinforced dry suits with a computerized temperature and buoyancy control system, and full-face helmets that incorporated an intercom. They had toyed with using the Aquapods, the one-man submersibles that were Costas’ pride and joy, but had opted instead for SCUBA with oxygen rebreathers mounted on their backs in streamlined yellow cases. The rebreathers would give them twenty minutes at ninety metres’ depth, ample time for the job in hand, and diving would allow them close-up exploration impossible from the Aquapods. Jack disliked the constraints of a submersible and was always more happy diving. He felt supremely relaxed, perfectly in his element, but coursing with excitement at the prospect of what they might find in the inky depths below.

He finned over to Costas and gave his equipment a closer check, reading the tank pressure. Costas had grumbled at the decision not to use Aquapods, but then had brought out his tattered old boiler suit and was as happy as a child with a toy box. The suit was barely recognizable after years of use, a torn and faded grey layer that Costas wore over his e-suit, but the multiple pockets contained his precious collection of tools and gadgets ready for any eventuality. Jack glanced at his dive computer, and then up at the line on the surface that extended from the ship to a buoy, nearly above him now. It marked the spot where they had to descend to avoid the current from the Dardanelles sweeping them beyond the wreck. He made the ‘okay’ sign to Costas, then extended his arm with his thumb down. ‘Good to go?’

‘Good to go. Twenty minutes no-stop time, starting now.’

Costas flipped upside down and barrelled into the depths. Jack expelled air from his suit and dropped behind him, spreadeagled like a sky-diver. The water was sparklingly clear for the first thirty metres or so, but on the landward side it had a haze to it, red-tinged, an algae bloom perhaps, as if the Trojan shore were still seeping blood. Somewhere below them lay the ugly residue of conflict, the raw, unsanitized legacy of the sea bed, a legacy that always brought home more vividly to Jack the reality of war than immaculate cemeteries and carefully tended battlefields.

He remembered what they had seen in the operations room when Seaquest II had first pulled the sidescan sonar ‘fish’ over the site an hour before. The wind had been less severe than anticipated and Captain Macalister had decided there was time for a sonar sweep before the dive. As the fish moved beyond the Byzantine wreck, the screen had shown a featureless sea bed, the sand ruffled like waves where the current had swept over it. Then the room had erupted in excitement as they saw the unmistakable lines of another shipwreck, exactly where Jack had thought he had seen something during their earlier dive. The scour channels in the sand on either side of the new wreck accentuated the lines of the hull: thirty-five, maybe forty metres long, narrow of beam – perhaps seven metres wide – with parallel lines running athwartships that looked like frames. There were none of the telltale signs of an ancient wreck, the rows of amphoras and stone blocks they had seen on the Byzantine wreck, a much wider-beamed hull as befitted an ancient merchantman. But Jack had seen a shadowy globular shape in the centre of the hull and had become excited. Could it have been an ancient pithos, a huge pottery vat? The citadel of Troy was littered with fragments of pithoi; they were what Jack had always imagined ancient galleys must have held, to carry the large quantities of water needed for a crew of rowers. Could this be an ancient galley? Could it be a galley of the Bronze Age, the ship of the Trojan War mentioned in the poem? Could it be the ship of Agamemnon?

Jack had hoped against hope, but despite the initial euphoria, his final instinct was against it. He had stared at the image for fifteen minutes while the ship turned round for a high-resolution scan. The first lines of the more detailed sonar image clinched it. They showed the decayed remains of a metal vessel, a hundred years old, no more. The lines athwartships that had looked like wooden beams were the skeletal remains of a metal hull, left after the wooden deck planking had decayed. The globular form was still partly concealed, covered by a collapsed mass of metalwork, but seemed to be in the right position for a boiler, part of the engine machinery.

Jack had realized why his instinct told against it. The scour channels had clearly formed as the vessel had settled into the sea bed. This was not a wreck that had been buried, and then revealed by some shift in the current. An ancient wooden hull would never have survived as this wreck had, exposed to the current. The only remains of an ancient wreck might have been the lower part of a hull driven into the sea bed, and that would have been buried and invisible to the sonar. It was what worried Jack most about the search for a Trojan War wreck. The pottery and stone of the Byzantine wreck were visible because they were durable, materials that would survive exposed on the sea bed. But there was no certainty that any materials like that would have existed on board an ancient galley; pottery pithoi were just Jack’s conjecture. Nobody had ever found an intact war galley from the Bronze Age before.

And he had another fear: that the sediment might prove too mobile, too aerated, for the survival of even buried timbers. Lanowski’s appraisal of the sedimentology showed how easily wrecks could be buried, but also suggested a lot of instability and sediment movement. The undisturbed anaerobic layers might prove too deeply buried and too ancient for any chance of a Bronze Age discovery. Now that they knew the wreck below them was of limited interest, those scour channels were the main objective of the dive. They gave a chance to examine an exposed section of sediment to a depth of two metres or more into the sea bed. What they found could be the linchpin of the expedition. If it was grey anaerobic sediment, there was a chance that somewhere they might yet find a Bronze Age wreck. If not, then the cold logic of science told against it, seemed to stack the odds a mile high.

The cold logic of science. Jack thought about that as he descended, scanning the deep azure below for the first signs of the sea bed. The cold logic of science had counted against so many of the greatest discoveries in archaeology. It had counted against Howard Carter discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun. It had counted against Heinrich Schliemann discovering Troy and then the Mycenae of Agamemnon. Schliemann had been driven by a dream, and by powerful instinct. It was what drove Jack too. There was something about this site. Something he had felt the day before when he had looked across the sea bed and seen that shape. In truth, he was not undertaking this dive to collect sediment. Any one of the team could have done that. He was diving because of what he had felt the day before, when he stared out from the edge of the Byzantine wreck and saw something in the gloom. The sonar scan had shown what it was, the rusting hull somewhere beneath him now, a hull that could not conceivably be ancient. Yet there was something more, something that seemed to defy that cold logic of science. It might be no more than a ghostly presence, an imprint. But he had to go there, to see it for himself, to know whether his instinct had just been a fantasy, a yearning to see a truth that seemed forever beyond their grasp, like so much else about the Trojan War.

Costas’ voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Depth forty metres. Cross-check. Over.’

Jack looked at the LED screen inside his helmet, then down at Costas descending about ten metres below him. ‘Cross-checked. Over.’

‘So what do you think? A First World War minesweeper?’ Costas asked.

Jack touched the audio control on the side of his helmet to compensate for the high pitch in Costas’ voice, caused by the increased helium now streaming into their breathing mixture as they descended beyond safe air-diving depth. ‘That’s Scott Macalister’s best guess. The state of metal decay in this environment suggests we’re looking at a wreck maybe ninety, a hundred years old. That puts it bang on time for the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, the biggest single cause of shipwrecks in the Dardanelles in recent times.’

‘Macalister’s got a database, hasn’t he? I told you I saw his Admiralty wreck chart.’

‘He’s plotted all known wrecks from the campaign. But he says the records are sketchy for smaller vessels, especially from the Turkish side. There were gunboats, torpedo boats, balloon ships used for gunnery spotting, lighters, mini submarines, some of them used in covert missions to land men for sabotage. For all these vessels the approaches to the Dardanelles were suicide alley, running the gauntlet big-time. The Turks had no aircraft and the British only used theirs for reconnaissance, but there were big guns on either side, British battleships off the island of Tenedos, Turkish shore batteries on the mainland. The Turks had batteries at Besik Bay, the harbour of ancient Troy. They would have had the range of this spot where we are now.’

‘And there must have been mines.’

‘Mostly within the Dardanelles, where the Turkish minelayers could operate more safely, but some daring captain may have tried to lay mines this far out. The minelayer captains were heroes to the Turks, like U-boat commanders or fighter aces. Always pushing the boundary. That’s why Macalister thinks we may have a minelayer, or more probably a minesweeper. The British used converted trawlers as minesweepers, about this size. The civilian crews made the transition from trawling to sweeping easily enough, but the fishing boats had draughts that were deeper than was ideal for minesweeping, and there were plenty of accidents when they hit mines anchored just below the surface.’

‘Seventy metres. We’re nearly there.’ The water around them was now a dark indigo, becoming almost black below. Jack rolled over and looked up. He could just make out the hull of Seaquest II, but no longer the sparkle of sunlight on the surface. He rolled back, and suddenly could see the mottled sand of the sea bed some fifteen metres below. He switched on his headlamp, startling a school of bream that darted off out of sight ahead of him. ‘That’s a good sign,’ he said. ‘A school like that over a featureless sea bed usually means a reef or a wreck nearby.’

‘Bingo,’ Costas said. They were now less than ten metres above the sea bed, and Jack could see the ripples in the sand. He angled his beam up slightly, and there it was, a mass of decaying metal rising five or six metres above the sea bed, sitting in a deep scour channel that extended out of sight ahead of them. As their headlamps converged on the wreck, the dark blue transformed into vivid reds and yellows, a mass of encrusted anemones and other sea life that clung to the corroding metal; some of the rust lay exposed where the structure had recently collapsed. Jack was always amazed at the speed of decay of metal-hulled ships underwater; most of them would vanish long before the wooden hulls of antiquity that were preserved in anoxic sediments below the sea bed.

He paused to orientate. It was one thing seeing an entire wreck in one image on the sonar screen in the operations room, another trying to make sense of it underwater, from a different angle and in confusing light conditions. The view ahead was a tangle of structure and marine life, but he could see that they had come down behind the stern of the vessel; they were looking forward to where the deckhouse had collapsed, leaving only a few girders intact. The ship had evidently sunk upright but then heeled over to port, with the deepest scour channel running along the starboard side just ahead of Jack, where it angled into the current. As he panned his beam over the stern, he could see that the damage was more than just natural decay. ‘That’s a hell of a hole,’ he murmured. Costas followed the direction of his beam and swam forward, peering under the jagged metal of the deck, pointing up at the parallel struts running athwartships that they had seen on the sonar image. ‘Looks like her entire stern was blown off,’ he said. ‘That’s consistent with a minesweeper, snagging a mine and accidentally detonating it. On a vessel of this size, the shockwave from two or three hundred pounds of high explosive would probably have killed everyone on board instantly.’

Jack panned his beam to the right, along the exposed starboard side of the hull. The deepest part of the scour channel was in shadow, under the corroded remains of the keel. ‘I think I’ve found what we’re looking for. I’m dropping down into that scour channel to collect sediment.’ He glanced at the LED readout inside his helmet. ‘We’ve got twelve minutes, otherwise we spend the afternoon in the recompression chamber. Not my favourite place.’

‘Roger that. I’m going to take a quick recce inside the hull.’

‘Be careful. God knows how stable this is. Some of those girders are probably completely corroded, only held together by marine accretion. And remember, this has to count as a war grave. Go easy.’

‘Roger that. Eleven minutes.’

Jack swam up and over the surviving framework of the stern deck towards the scour channel, trying to decipher the jumble of structural elements that had fallen from the deckhouse and starboard railing. The vivid reds and yellows of marine life added further confusion, and he switched off his headlamp, reducing everything to a uniform dark blue. He was conscious of Costas swimming under the deck frames below him, towards the hull amidships where the remains of the engine room should lie. The beam from Costas’ headlamp flashed through jagged holes and fissures where the metalwork had corroded away. Jack sank down until he was inches above a thick metal girder that ran longitudinally along the deck for at least ten metres, from somewhere in the gloom below the deckhouse to a point behind him where it had been buckled upwards by the force of the explosion that had destroyed the stern. The girder was well-preserved, clearly a high-grade steel. He stopped, and stared. It seemed oddly out of place. It was a flat-bottomed rail from a train track, evidently used to support something on the deck. He reached out to it. Even a slight touch released a cloud of red oxide, and he withdrew his hand. He had seen this before.

He remembered where. Two days earlier, Macalister had taken him on a tour of the 1915 Gallipoli battlefields, and they had finished in Canakkale at the Turkish naval museum. The highlight was a replica of the celebrated Turkish minelayer Nusret, which had laid the mines that sank three Allied battleships in the Dardanelles. That was where he had seen it. T wo reused train rails, laid parallel on the stern deck. He finned two metres to the left, peering through the red oxide haze he had stirred up in the water, and then carefully felt the mass of rusted metal. Bingo. It was another rail, exactly the right distance apart. He pushed back, and then finned above the plume of rust where he had touched the metal. He looked along the line of the two rails, towards the collapsed mass of the deckhouse, and saw a dark form, oval-shaped, directly above the place where Costas’ headlamp beam was flickering. He stared at it, swimming closer. Then he froze. That shape, the shape on the sonar readout he had thought might be an ancient pithos, was not a boiler. It was something else.

‘Costas.’

‘Jack.’

‘You need to get out of there.’

‘Just a few moments longer.’

‘Costas, listen to me. This isn’t a minesweeper. I’ve just found the rails on the deck. It’s a minelayer. And there’s a mine still in the rack. That shape from the sonar I got all excited about. Directly above you.’

‘Relax.’

‘What do you mean, relax?’

‘I mean, I know. German Mark VI contact mine. Never seen one of those before. Underwater and live, that is. Macalister told me most of the mines laid by the Turks were supplied by the Germans, so that makes sense. Big question is, which type of detonator? I wish I could see it more clearly. So much stuff in the way.’

There was a dull clang, then another. Jack’s heart sank. ‘Costas, I hope to God you’re not doing what I think you’re doing.’

‘We’re in luck.’ Costas’ voice sounded slightly strangulated. ‘I’m upside down, but I’ve got my face right against one of the horns. You know, the protruberances that stick out of a contact mine?’

‘I know what they are,’ Jack said weakly. ‘That’s why they call it a contact mine. You hit the horn, and the mine blows up. Exactly how close are you?’

‘Oh, about four, six inches.’ There was another clang, and Jack’s heart seemed to stop. Costas made a straining noise, then spoke again. ‘Phew. You can really relax now.’

‘Relax?’

‘Yeah. Relax. Kind of. I’ve worked out which type. The early horn contained a glass phial filled with hydrogen peroxide, surrounded by potassium percholate and sugar. When the phial was broken, the acid ignited the sugar and the mine exploded. The advanced type leaked the acid into a lead-acid battery, energizing the battery and detonating the mine. I’m pretty sure that’s what we’ve got here. Lucky, because there’s not much you can do with the early type. But with the later type, if you can locate the position of the battery inside the mine, you can drill a hole through from the outside and flood it, neutralizing it.’

‘Or you can miss it and drill into high explosive. Good idea.’

A voice crackled through on the intercom. ‘This is Macalister. I’ve just dropped in on your little chat. Kazantzakis, get out of there. I’m pulling Seaquest II off position immediately. I repeat, get out of there. Do not touch that mine.’

The sea filled with the churning sound of the ship’s twin screws. Jack injected a small blast of air into his buoyancy compensator and rose a few metres above the wreck, until he could clearly see the jagged hole in the stern and the tangle of collapsed central superstructure where the deck housing and funnel had been.

‘Problem,’ Costas said.

Jack’s heart sank again. ‘What now?’

‘I’ve just off-gassed.’

‘Christ.’ Jack shut his eyes. A rush of exhaust bubble through corroded metal. That was the last thing they needed. Their rebreathers were semi-closed-circuit, meaning that every few minutes they automatically expelled accumulated carbon dioxide. An override allowed the waste gas to accumulate to a higher pressure before being expelled, but that had not been activated; the dive plan had not involved defusing a mine. Jack kept his headlamp trained on the superstructure, and watched the first bubbles percolate upwards. There was a sudden explosion of bubbles, wreathing the corroded metal. The worst was happening. The silvery shimmer gave way to red, as the bubbles blew through the corroded metal and released a cloud of rust. He braced himself. There was a lurch, and he watched in horror as the mine sank slightly into the metal that had been cradling it. He counted the seconds. How long before that battery energized? Five seconds? Ten? Any longer and the contact, the enemy vessel, might have moved off. That was how it was supposed to be. In 1915. When there was a war on. Not now. He shut his eyes. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. Thirty.

The intercom cracked. ‘Make that one inch away,’ Costas said. ‘Nearly knocked my helmet off.’

‘For God’s sake get out of there,’ Jack said hoarsely.

‘We’re in luck, again,’ Costas replied. ‘The mine’s come to rest on two steel girders. It’s wedged hard into the metal. I can see the shiny surface below the corrosion. It’s not going anywhere. And none of the horns made contact. We’re safe.’

‘ Safe,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Right.’

The ship-to-diver feed crackled again. ‘Macalister here. It sounds as if the buoyancy chambers in the mine are flooded. We’ll need to attach lifting bags and float it off, then remotely detonate it. I say again, detonate it, Kazantzakis. That’s a job for the Turkish navy underwater demolition team. They’ve done it often enough in the Dardanelles. And it’s just the kind of liaison we want. Might help to extend our permit. Not, I repeat, not a job for us. Do you read that loud and clear? Copy.’

‘Copy that,’ Jack said. ‘You hear, Costas? Not defuse. Detonate.’

‘Copy that.’ Jack saw movement, and Costas’ fins appeared through the ragged hole in the stern of the wreck, followed by his body. He came upright beside Jack, his boiler suit barely recognizable beneath the grime and rust. ‘Never defused a First World War German mine before. I was looking forward to putting one of those horns on my mantelpiece, beside my other relics.’

‘You wouldn’t have done it, would you?’

Costas reached into the thigh pocket of his suit, and pulled out a rubber-encased gadget the size of a Dremel tool. He tossed it upwards and it circled in slow motion in the water, coming back to his hand with a long titanium drill bit extended from the front. ‘Multiple function. Six different bit sizes.’

‘But then you would have thought of how nice it is to be alive. About how much I might want to stay alive. About Rebecca.’

Costas spun the tool again, retracted the bit and shoved it back in his boiler suit pocket. ‘Copy that.’ He tapped the side of his visor. ‘Six minutes to go. You got that sediment sample?’

‘Just going for it. Now that your little diversion is finished.’

‘Fun’s over.’ Costas rose a few metres, and hovered above Jack. ‘I’m watching your six. Nothing else.’

‘Roger that.’

Jack dropped below the starboard side of the hull. The sand was coarse-grained, the type Lanowski said had been swept down by the currents from the Dardanelles, perhaps even from the river Scamander and the plain of Troy itself. He aimed his headlamp at the base of the scour channel. A wooden beam was sticking out from under the metal hull. Jack suddenly forgot the mine. This was not right. He was looking at timber. It was blackened with pitch, forming a solid glossy surface where it had oozed out. He lay on his front in the sand, his visor inches from the wood. It showed minimal erosion, only a few pockmarks from wormholes near the top. It had clearly been buried until recently, until the scour channel had revealed it. He looked at the edge of the channel, at the surrounding sea bed. The top of the timber was at the same level. Whatever had protruded above that level must have eroded away, but there was a chance that more was buried, undisturbed. Buried some time before the minelayer had sunk. He stared at the timber. Buried a long time before. Jack realized he was already working on a fantastic assumption. He had found another wreck. A much older wreck.

He remembered the charred fragments of Bronze Age timbers he and Costas had discovered on the beach near Troy fifteen years before, a small section of planking with pieces of three frames still attached. He remembered the distance between the frames, about twenty centimetres. He put his left hand against the timber where it protruded from the sea floor, and put his right hand about that distance away. Where it touched the sediment he wafted, and seconds later the blackened end of another timber appeared. His pulse quickened. Two frames, the same distance apart as those he and Costas had found. He wafted between the frames, using both hands, kicking up a small storm of sediment that took a few moments to settle. He pushed his face into the suspended silt. Bingo. Not just frames, but planking . He reached over the upper edge of the nearest plank, then felt the join with the next plank. He moved his fingers along until he felt two bumps, one on each plank, an equal distance apart from the join. There was no doubt about it. They were treenails, hardwood tenons hammered through each plank. His heart was pounding with excitement. He had to control his breathing. He had found an ancient hull. The planks were edge-joined with mortise and tenon, a technique used by shipwrights from the Bronze Age. But how could he be sure these timbers were that old? Could he even think that they dated to the time of the Trojan War?

He looked up, and saw Costas ten metres or so above him, silhouetted against the smudge of light from the surface of the sea far above. He glanced at his computer. Only three minutes left. He rose a metre or so, and looked down again. His wafting had revealed something resting on the planking where the timbers protruded from under the rusting hull of the warship. He dropped down and wafted again, strong, quick strokes. This was no time for finesse. What he discovered in these moments could determine the future course of the excavation. He stopped to let the sediment clear, and there it was, intact, lying half embedded in the sea bed in front of him.

His heart pounded. It was unbelievable. It was an ancient pottery cup, beautifully preserved, a kylix, a distinctive Greek form, raised on a stem with a broad, wide bowl that tapered down, like a large champagne glass but with small vertical handles on either side of the bowl. Jack stared at it, his mind racing back to Troy, to the finds he had seen in the Canakkale archaeological museum that day with Macalister. This was Mycenaean. The shape, the details of the stem and the handles were absolutely distinctive. The part of the bowl he could see exposed above the sand was decorated with a marine pattern, a beautifully painted octopus that wrapped round the cup, the red paint still radiant. He knew the Mycenaean kylix dated to the late Bronze Age, between the fifteenth and the twelfth century BC. The style of decoration tightened the date even further, to the thirteenth, perhaps early twelfth century BC. He hardly dared believe it. The time of the Trojan War.

He needed to think fast. Mycenaean pottery had been found at Troy, but it was rare, probably highly prized. This cup could have been cargo, brought by a trader some time in the lead-up to the war, when Troy was a hub of commerce. But that must be wrong. These timbers were not those of a merchantman, but a galley. A war galley. The cup must have been the possession of someone on board. A crew member seemed unlikely, even the captain. They would have used bowls, ladles, to dip into the water vats, drinking their wine crudely, as sailors did. A cup like this would have been far too delicate for shipboard use. So it must have been a passenger. A Mycenaean noble, taking a galley to Troy? The Iliad showed that nobles, princes bent on war, took their prized possessions with them, the accoutrements for lavish feasting and wealth display. Princes bent on war. Jack knew where his thoughts were leading him, but he hardly dared go there. He wafted his hand over the bowl to reveal the rim, to see whether he could raise it in one piece. He waited for the sediment to settle.

Then he saw it.

First one letter, then another. A word, painted below the rim of the cup. A word in ancient Greek. He stared, transfixed, at the letter A toppled over on its side, the early Phoenician form of the letter, just as Dillen had shown him in the Ilioupersis. He could barely believe it. Letters in ancient Greek, on a Mycenaean cup from the thirteenth century BC. This proved it, beyond a shadow of a doubt. This showed that the Greeks of the late Bronze Age, of the age of heroes, had started to use the alphabet several centuries before anyone had previously thought, just as Dillen had argued. Jack’s mind was reeling. Dillen had been right about the Ilioupersis. It could have been written by a bard who actually witnessed the events of Troy. Jack was suddenly bursting to tell him. But there was more. As he deciphered the word, he gasped into his mouthpiece in astonishment. His mind raced back to all those hours spent with Dillen as a student. The Linear B syllabary – the script used by the Mycenaeans, the other script – had several words for leader, for king. One, basileus, the term used by Greeks of the classical period, was rarely encountered. Another, lawagetas, the most common term, meant chieftain, prince of one citadel, one city-state. In Homer’s Iliad, the men who led the contingent from their home territory, men like Achilles, Ajax, Nestor, would have been called that. But there was another word, a rarer one, the one staring Jack in the face now: wanax. That meant the ruler of many city-states, a paramount ruler, one elected in times of peril. The wanax was the biggest of them all, bigger than the greatest hero, a man whose power might rival that of the gods. A mighty wielder of the sceptre. A king of kings.

Jack reached down with his left hand and gently pushed his fingers into the sand around the stem of the cup, touching the pottery for the first time, feeling that wave of excitement that always coursed through him when he touched an artefact undisturbed by human hands for millennia. He remembered the sanctity of this place, the probability that the site was a war grave. A grave from two wars. But this cup deserved to be raised into the sunlight once again, to complete the voyage that was thwarted by catastrophe over three thousand years before, to be held aloft over the walls of Troy just as the great king would have done. Jack wanted to take it to where Dillen was excavating, to the highest bastion of the citadel overlooking the Plain of Ilion, so that they could share in the triumph of archaeology, revel in a find that not only gave Dillen proof that the Greek of the Ilioupersis was the Greek of Agamemnon, but also put them one huge step closer to the reality of the great king and his war to end all wars.

‘Jack.’ Costas’ voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Zero hour. Time to go home. Now.’

‘Roger that.’ Jack eased the ancient cup out of the sand and held it up, watching the sediment fall away in a silvery shower. It was intact, one of the most beautiful finds he had ever made. He blasted air into his buoyancy compensator and rose slowly above the sea bed, wreathed in a sheen of bubbles. His e-suit automatically bled air as the external pressure decreased, the computerized sensor maintaining his buoyancy just above neutral. He knew that the same was happening to the gas bubbles in his bloodstream, and he glanced at his wrist computer to double-check his ascent rate. He looked up at Costas, then back down at the wreck. The beam from his headlamp reflected off the particles stirred up where he had left the sea bed, and he switched it off, closing his eyes to help them adjust to the gloom. When he opened them a few moments later, he saw the clear outline of the minelayer, but now he imagined another wreck, the ancient ship underneath, twenty, maybe twenty-five metres in length, lying diagonally below the minelayer’s hull, its stern protruding through the smaller scour trench along the port side of the minelayer, its fore a few metres beyond where he had found the cup.

He stared at where he had been, straining his eyes. There was something else down there. Something was visible ahead of the spot where he had seen the planking, where he imagined the timbers tapering towards the galley’s bow. It would have been out of his line of vision from the scour trench, and on the sonar readout it would have looked like some broken-off structure from the minelayer. He pressed the buoyancy button on his suit to override the computer and manually expel air, and stopped dead in the water, staring downwards. There was no doubt about it. It was on exactly the right alignment, in exactly the right place, rising from the sand just beyond the outside edge of the scour trench. The prow of the ancient ship. It was a curved timber, but there was more shape to it than that. Was he seeing things? He was more than twenty metres above the sea bed now, and everything was receding. Suddenly he had a flashback to the famous stone gate of Mycenae, Agamemnon’s capital. Two lions, paws raised, facing a column. He stared again. Was that the shape? Was it the shape of a lion? A lion-prowed ship of Agamemnon? Or was his mind imprinting desire on to reality, playing the trick that had led so many before him up a blind alley in their search for the Trojan War?

‘Jack. You’re still at seventy metres. We’ll need to do a safety stop at thirty.’

Jack shut his eyes tightly, then opened them and reactivated the ascent programme. ‘Roger that. Just taking one last look.’

‘ Seaquest II ’s standing off, but Macalister’s sending a Zodiac. I can hear the outboard engines. I’m popping a buoy.’

‘Roger that.’ Jack watched the sea bed recede into dark blue, the jagged mass of the shipwreck disappearing into the gloom. He looked up, holding the cup now in both hands as a king might once have done, a great king toasting his heroes, Achilles and Ajax and Patroclus and the others. The shape of the cup was framed by a halo of light on the surface of the sea, just as Jack imagined it once being backlit by the sunshine of a brooding sky, etched in the eye of a king who was to lead a thousand ships to Troy. Could it really be? He felt a tremble go through him, and the cup suddenly seemed impossibly delicate, a phantasm from history, like a floating leaf that would disintegrate on touch. He remembered his dream, on the deck of Seaquest II that morning. Then, it had been a sword. But that was just a dream. Now he was no longer the archaeologist, but holding it as Agamemnon might have done. This was real. He saw Costas a few metres above him, staring, and pressed his intercom. ‘You’re not going to believe what I’ve found.’

‘Jack goes silent at the end of the first dive on a new wreck, and disappears into a hole in the sea bed? I guessed something was up. I can see what you’ve got. Looks pretty incredible.’

‘What if I told you we’re on the trail of the greatest treasure ever found underwater?’

‘You found gold?’

Jack came level with Costas and held the cup in front of him. ‘Not gold. Something more precious. A word. A word in an ancient language. One word. One word that opens the door on the reality of the Trojan War. On the reality of the wreck below us. Not one wreck, but two.’

‘The ship of Agamemnon? The wreck in Dillen’s text?’

Jack’s heart pounded with excitement. The lion-prowed ship of Agamemnon. ‘I saw timbers, Costas. Not just shapes in the darkness. Real timbers. I touched them. And this cup is Mycenaean.’

‘So we’re going back down there? To defuse mines? I mean, to hunt for the greatest treasure? For the Shield of Achilles?’

‘You bet.’

Costas punched the water. ‘ Yes.’