David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Jack tapped a key on the laptop, bringing up an aerial photograph on the screen. It showed an archaeological excavation under way, an open area of perhaps ten by twenty metres surrounded by dense rows of tomato plants. He pointed to the sole person visible, a desultory figure wearing a huge sombrero sitting on one side of the trench, clutching a water bottle and staring at a dark patch on the otherwise featureless sand in front of him. ‘Some of you may recognize our esteemed colleague Dr Kazantzakis. His first ever experience of archaeology.’

‘And so nearly my last,’ Costas piped up. There was a ripple of laughter.

‘We’re about a kilometre north-west of Troy, fifteen years ago,’ Jack continued. ‘Our first excavation together, on a shoestring budget. Before IMU. Before Seaquest. But what we found there kick-started it all.’ He clicked again, and the screen transformed to a 3-D CGI rendition of the Dardanelles and the plain of Troy. ‘A farmer had found some charred timbers while he was ploughing. We knew the river Scamander had silted up the plain, and our excavation proved that this spot had been the beach in the late Bronze Age. Amazingly, the timbers were from ships, war galleys that had burned on the seashore. We found only a few fragments, but enough for radiocarbon analysis, which gave a date of about 1200 BC, exactly the time of the destruction of Troy. And there was more. In the picture, Costas thinks he’s looking at nothing. But he’s wrong. That dark stain proved to be an open fire pit. It was filled with butchered bones, huge joints. The entire carcass of a bull. It was a feast fit for heroes. Where Costas was sitting, Achilles had once sat. Achilles was sulking too, but over a woman.’

‘If only,’ Costas said.

Everyone laughed again. Jack held up his hand. ‘I thought that discovery, that incredible connection with the past, was about as good as it gets. It was fantastically exciting. I felt like Heinrich Schliemann, on the trail of Agamemnon. And now we’re back there again. This time it’s not just charred fragments we’re after. This time it’s a full-on shipwreck. But the clue to that didn’t come from the beach excavation. It came from somewhere completely unexpected, from one of the most amazing places we’ve ever discovered, about a thousand miles due west from here.’

Everyone in the room was silent, riveted. Jack clicked again, and the image changed to a page of ancient manuscript, showing lines of precise writing, many of the letters recognizably Greek. ‘This was found three months ago in the lost library of the Roman emperor Claudius at Herculaneum, in Italy. Jeremy Haverstock’s been in charge of the restoration work. As each new text is unrolled and put through X-ray fluorescence, he’s sending the digital images to Professor Dillen at Cambridge for translation. This one had Dillen speechless. In his view it’s the most important new discovery of an ancient text ever, full stop. He thinks it’s a previously unknown verse by Homer, possibly containing eyewitness details of the end of Troy. That makes it a truly fantastic find for anyone interested in the Trojan War. He thinks it’s a lost part of the Trojan epic cycle called the Ilioupersis, meaning the destruction of Troy. And this particular image shows the lines of verse that really excited me.’ He pulled out a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and opened it. ‘Here’s Dillen’s translation.’ Look closely now: far out to sea

From the isle of Tenedos

The lion-prowed ship of the King of Mycenae

Mast raised, sail spread, wind-filled,

Dark wave singing loudly about the stern

Brings tidings of home-strife

To Agamemnon, unheeding, sole of purpose, back-turned, war-bent.

Too late. Already I feel it. The west wind sharpens.

Jack looked up. Everyone was staring at him, stunned. Costas raised his hand. ‘If that’s the ship we’re after, I thought galleys didn’t sink. No cargo, limited ballast. Wrecked galleys disperse as flotsam. That’s why we hardly ever find them.’

Jack nodded. ‘But this time it’s different. Wait for the next two lines, the lines that put the fire under me.’ He recited from memory: The ship, booty-laden, weighed down with gold,

Drives too hard down falling waves, and is no more.

There was a collective gasp. ‘ “ Weighed down with gold ”,’ one of the crewmen repeated, astonished. ‘What exactly does that mean? What are we looking for?’

Jack glanced at his watch. ‘First, Dr Lanowski.’

The crewman kept his hand up. ‘But what are our chances?’

Jack looked at the man, a new member of the submersibles team. He paused, then replied. ‘If you let your imagination lead you, then everything can lock together. You have to take a gamble, and believe in yourself. And this place, the Trojan War, a shipwreck of Agamemnon? Believing all that’s a big leap of faith, but it’s one I’ve taken. And I know that if I’m on the wrong track, one of you will let me know. Our chances? I think this is as good as it gets.’

‘With a small dose of luck,’ Costas murmured.

Jack tapped his watch. ‘And now for some hard science.’ He gestured to Lanowski, and then quickly walked over and sat beside Costas. ‘Here goes,’ Costas whispered to him.

Lanowski got up, dumped his overhead sheets on the table and turned round, his eyes feverish with excitement. He cleared his throat. ‘Detailed analysis of air-gun lithoseismic profiles in the north Aegean basin shows fault structures trending north-east to south-west, with the dominant structure apparently an extension of the North Anatolian fault. That’s the one across northern Turkey that causes all the earthquakes.’ He peered over his glasses at the audience, then wiped the sweat off his forehead. He gave a lopsided grin. ‘Y’all with me?’

‘So far so good,’ Costas whispered to Jack. ‘Didn’t understand a word of it.’

‘Wait for it,’ Jack whispered back.

‘ Y’all with me? What’s with that?’ Costas whispered.

‘My fault, I think,’ Jack whispered. ‘Told him to be jokey.’

Lanowski cleared his throat again, and aimed a laser pointer at the screen. ‘This is the tectonic map superimposed on the bathymetric map. As you can see, we’re over the continental platform, here.’ He aimed the pointer down. ‘The platform shows no significant internal deformation, but the slopes on the edge are shaped by marginal faults. As you can see, within the basin, higher vertical throws occur on marginal faults bordering the intermediate horst structure, with pronounced shear zones.’

Costas nudged Jack. ‘Oh-oh.’

Lanowski peered over his glasses again. He glared at Costas, then spoke deliberately slowly. ‘An angular unconformity occurs within the Plio-Pleistocene sequence linked to uplifted and tilted neotectonic blocks and anticlinal hinges.’

‘Here we go,’ Costas whispered.

Jack shot his hand up. ‘Jacob, that puts us in the picture brilliantly. What you’re saying is that we’re not above fault structures here, but just north-west of us is an active zone that might produce localized instability.’

Lanowski looked pleased. ‘You got it. You understood. The structural architecture shows a complex strike-slip zone, on a dextral north-east to south-west line.’

‘Exactly,’ Jack said, getting up quickly when he saw Lanowski picking up and shuffling his overhead transparency sheets. ‘Earthquakes. That’s what you mean. Earthquakes. And what we really want to know is, could that have happened here in 1200 BC? Enough to sink a ship?’

Lanowski held up a transparency sheet. ‘I’ve got a whole sequence here modelling the subduction and strike-slip zones. I had to draw them by hand. It was too complex for the computer.’