Authors: David Gibbins
T
HREE HOURS LATER JACK DIPPED THE NOSE OF THE
Lynx helicopter and swung it around in a wide arc from the helipad on
Seaquest II
, lingering for a moment to set the navigational computer for the Egyptian coast some thirty-five nautical miles to the northwest. They would fly low, to prevent the nitrogen in their bloodstreams from forming bubbles, risking the bends.
Jack glanced past Costas’ helmeted form in the copilot’s seat toward
Seaquest II
On the stern was the word
Truro
, the nearest port of registry to the campus of the International Maritime University in Cornwall, England, and fluttering above it was the IMU flag, a shield with a superimposed anchor derived from Jack’s family coat of arms. She was their premier research vessel, custom-built less than two years before to replace the first
Seaquest
, lost in the Black Sea. From a distance she looked like a naval support ship. On the foredeck Jack saw a team in white flash overalls beside the forty-millimeter Breda gun pod, raised from its concealed mount for live-fire practice. Several of the crew were former members of Britain’s elite Special Boat Service who Jack had known in the Royal Navy. They were near the coast of Somalia, where the threat of piracy was ever present; in a matter of days they were due off the war-torn island of Sri Lanka. But in all other respects
Seaquest II was
a state-of-the-art research vessel, bristling with the latest diving and excavation technology, with accommodation and lab facilities for a team of thirty. She was the result of decades of accumulated experience when they’d put their heads together and come up with a blueprint for the ideal vessel. Not for the first time Jack silently thanked their benefactor, Efram Jacobovich, a software tycoon and passionate diver, who had seen the potential in Jack’s vision and provided the endowment that funded their exploration around the world.
“We’re locked on,” Jack said into the intercom. “Good to go.”
Costas pointed at the horizon. “Engage.”
Jack grinned, pushed the cyclic stick forward to dip the nose again, then flipped on the autopilot. As they gathered speed he glanced at the bridge wing and saw Scott Macalister, a former Canadian coast guard captain who was
Seaquest II’s
master. Beside him stood a tall, slender girl, her long dark hair blowing in the breeze, shielding her eyes against the glare and waving at them.
“Rebecca seems to be doing nicely,” Costas said.
“For her first expedition, I can’t believe how well she fits in,” Jack replied. “She’s almost running the show. Pretty impressive for a sixteen-year-old.”
“It must be in the blood, Jack.”
They could see the reef now, the dark blue of the abyss rising through shades of turquoise until the coral heads at the top of the slope were visible, some of them nearly breaking the surface. They passed over the wavering yellow forms of two Aquapod submersibles, just about to dive on the ancient ships’ graveyard fifty meters below. Within hours the Aquapods would have completed a full photogrammetric and laser survey of the site, something that would have taken weeks of dives and painstaking hand measurements in Jack’s early days. After surfacing from their dive and returning to
Seaquest II
he had gone straight into an intensive video conference with the Egyptian Antiquities Authorities, the Egyptian Navy, and the staff of his friend Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria. With
Seaquest II
committed months before to a voyage into the Pacific, another IMU vessel would take over the excavation, and an Egyptian navy frigate would be on station for the duration. The excavation would complete a hat trick of ancient wreck investigations by IMU over the past few years: a Bronze Age Minoan shipwreck in the Aegean, St. Paul’s shipwreck off Sicily and now this. Jack fervently hoped he would be back in time to work on the site himself, but for now he was thrilled to have set the wheels in motion. He relaxed back in his seat, breathing out the excess nitrogen in his bloodstream and feeling his body recoup its strength after the dive. He was exhausted, but elated. He was itching to reach their destination, to discover what Hiebermeyer had been badgering him to see for months now in his excavation in the Egyptian desert.
“Check out that island.” Costas gestured at a barren, rugged outcrop in the sea below them, about two kilometers across and rising to a peak several hundred meters high, the rock scorched white and seemingly devoid of vegetation. It looked like a place of extremes, unable to support life.
“That’s Zabargad, known as St. John’s Island,” Jack said. “The ancient Greeks called it Topazios, the Island of Topaz.”
“I can see rock tailings, old mine workings, around the edge of the mountain,” Costas said.
“It was the only ancient source of peridot, the translucent green gem also called olivine,” Jack said. “The island’s a minerologist’s dream, an upthrusting of the earth’s crust. The Chinese revered peridot because it’s like jade, a sacred stone. They thought it had healing qualities. The best gems were the treasures of emperors.”
“Was it mined by convicts?” Costas asked.
“You’ve got it. The mother of all penal colonies,” Jack said. “To most of the prisoners here, this was the end of the earth.”
Costas took a deep breath. “It reminds me of Alcatraz.”
“A longer swim here than San Francisco Bay, and a few more sharks.”
“Did anyone ever escape?”
“Before I try to answer that, look at this.” Jack reached into his front pocket and took out a small envelope. He passed it to Costas, who tipped out the object inside onto his palm. It was the gold coin Jack had picked up on the seabed, glistening and perfect, as if it had come straight from the mint.
“Jack…”
“I borrowed it. A sample. I had to have something to show Maurice. Ever since we were schoolboys he’s been telling me that nothing equals the treasure from Egyptian tombs.”
“Dr. Jack Howard, the world’s premier maritime archaeologist, loots his own site. What will the Egyptian authorities say when I tell them?”
“The authorities? You mean Herr Professor Dr. Maurice Hiebermeyer, the greatest living Egyptologist? He’ll probably give me a pitying look and show me a jewel-encrusted mummy.”
“I thought you guys only liked bits of broken pot.” Costas grinned, and held the coin up carefully between two fingers. “Okay, so why show me this now?”
“The portrait on the obverse is Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Now check out the reverse.”
Costas turned the coin over. Jack saw a shield in the middle, a standard on either side. The standard on the right was topped by an orb, signifying Rome’s domination over the world. The one on the left had an
aquila
, the sacred eagle that legionaries would fight to the death to protect. They were the
signa militaria
, the Roman legionary standards. Jack pointed to the inscription in the middle. “Right. Now read out the words.”
Costas squinted.
“Signis Receptis.”
“That means ‘Standards returned.’ This coin was one of Augustus’ prized issues, about 19 BC, only a few years after he became emperor. Augustus was consolidating the empire, following decades of civil war. His son Tiberius had just concluded a peace treaty with the Parthians, who ruled the area of Iran and Iraq. They agreed to return the standards that had been taken from defeated Roman legions years before. Augustus treated the return as a personal triumph, and had them paraded through Rome. It was a huge propaganda score for him, though too late to help the men who had fought under those standards and been unlucky enough not to die on the battlefield.”
“What does this have to do with convicts?”
“Backtrack to 53 BC. Rome is still a republic, ruled by the triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. Already things are falling apart, with personal rivalries and ambitions that would lead to civil war. Military prestige is what matters. Pompey has his, having cleared the sea of pirates. Julius Caesar is getting his, campaigning in Gaul. Crassus is the odd one out. He decides to seek glory in the east, and to hunt for gold. The difference was Pompey and Caesar were both seasoned generals. Crassus was a banker.”
“I think I can guess what happened.”
“The Battle of Carrhae, near modern Harran in southern Turkey. One of the worst defeats ever suffered by a Roman army. Crassus was a useless general, but his legions fought for Rome, and for their own honor. They fought hard, but were overwhelmed by the Parthian cavalry. At least twenty thousand were slaughtered, and the wounded were all executed. Crassus was killed, but a Roman soldier was dressed up as him and forced to drink molten gold.”
“Fitting end for a banker.”
“At least ten thousand Roman soldiers were captured. Those who weren’t executed were sent to the Parthian citadel of Merv, and probably used as slave labor building the city walls. That’s the connection. Mines, quarries, slave labor. The lot of prisoners of war in antiquity. Merv wasn’t cut off by sea like St. John’s Island, but was marooned in the desert wastes of what’s now Turkmenistan. At that time hardly anyone knew what lay beyond the lands conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, beyond the Indus and Afghanistan.” Jack flipped open the computer screen between the two seats, and clicked the mouse until an image came up. It showed a scorched landscape of ruins and dusty tracks surrounded by a vast, decayed rampart, flattened in places to a rounded hillock. “That’s what’s left of Merv,” he said. “Those are the walls of ancient Margiana, the name of the city at the time of the Parthians.”
“They look like earthworks, not masonry.”
“They were made of mud-brick, over and over again, a new wall built on top of the eroded remains of the previous one. But at some point there may have been a failed experiment with mortar. We found a recently exposed section where one of the walls had collapsed, and it was filled with a whitish powdery substance. Almost like concrete that hadn’t set properly.”
“When were you there?”
“The Transoxiana Conference in April,” Jack said. “The Oxus was the ancient name for the great river that runs near here, from Afghanistan toward the Aral Sea. The ancient Greeks and Romans saw it as the limit of their world. The conference focused on contacts between the west and Central Asia.”
“You mean the Silk Road?”
“The time when Chinese and central Asian traders were first appearing in places like Merv, soon after Alexander the Great swept through there.”
Costas peered at the picture. “Hang on. Who’s that? I recognize that person.”
“Just there for scale.”
“Jack! That’s Katya!”
“She chaired my session of the conference. It’s right up her street. She’s been studying ancient inscriptions along the Silk Road. She invited me. We weren’t doing any diving in April, so I could hardly say no.”
“Jack. Well, well. You’ve been seeing Katya again. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Jack Howard, underwater archaeologist, flying off to a heap of dust in the middle of a desert. Turkmenistan, is it? That’s about as far away from a shipwreck as you could find.”
“Just keeping up with old colleagues.” Jack grinned, and closed the screen.
Costas grunted. “Anyway. These Romans. Prisoners of war. I asked whether any of them ever escaped.”
“From St. John’s Island, I doubt it. From Merv is another matter. Hardly any of Crassus’ legionaries could have survived to the time Augustus repatriated the standards, more than thirty years after the battle. But there were rumors in Rome for several generations after.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“The kind you hear about but can never source. Rumors about a band of escaped prisoners, legionaries who had been captured at Carrhae. Prisoners who didn’t go west, back to a world that had forsaken them, but instead went east.”
“You believe this?”
“If they’d survived all those years of toil in the Parthian citadel, they’d have been the toughest. And they were Roman legionaries. They knew how to route-march.”
“Let’s see. Heading east. That’s Afghanistan, central Asia?”
Jack paused. “Some of the rumors come from much farther east. From the ancient annals of the Chinese emperors. But it’ll have to wait. We’re almost there.” Jack pointed ahead to a great tongue of land that jutted out into the Red Sea. “That’s Ras Banas. It’s shaped like an elephant’s head. I thought you’d like that.”
“How could I forget?” Costas murmured. “My
elephantegos
. Never in a million years did I think I’d find ancient elephants underwater.”
“Dive with me, and anything’s possible.”
“Only if I provide the technology.”
“Touché.”
Jack lowered the collective and the helicopter began to descend. “I can see the excavation now. I can even see Maurice. Those shorts of his are like a signal flag. I’m going to put us down on a rocky patch just in from the shore to avoid making a dust storm. Hold fast.”
The scene that confronted them as they stepped out of the helicopter was one of desolation, enormous expanses of sunbaked ground with nothing but the sea glinting behind. Despite Jack’s best efforts they had raised a whirlwind of sand as they landed, and the view now was refracted through a film of red dust as if the air itself were glowing hot. Inland to the west Jack could just see the line of low mountains that marked the edge of the coastal desert, on the route to the Nile; to the east, the rugged peninsula of Ras Banas curved out into the sea. Tucked in at the head of the bay a few hundred meters away were the ramshackle huts of the Egyptian customs outpost, and beyond that lay a shallow lagoon about a kilometer across enclosed by a thin sandy spit on the seaward side. It seemed a place on the edge of human existence.
Costas stood beside Jack, wearing a straw hat and garish wraparound sunglasses, wiping the dust and sweat from his face. He pointed into the haze. “Here he comes.” A portly figure trundled out of the dust down the small hill beside them, his hand already outstretched. He was shorter than Jack, a little taller than Costas, but whereas Costas had the barrel chest and brawn of his Greek island ancestry, Hiebermeyer had never managed to shake off the impression that his entire being revolved around sausage and sauerkraut. It was an illusion, Jack knew, for a man who was continuously on the move and had the energy of a small army.