David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

He never could have imagined being back here again in these circumstances, sighting the best approach route to confront the kidnappers who had taken his daughter. He put down the scope, took a deep drink from his water bottle, zipped up his fleece and slid down close to the river course where he could stand up without being seen from the mound. He had to keep moving. He had not slept while he and Costas had been on the Embraer from Krakow airport in Poland, cooped up for half the flight in the recompression chamber after their dive in the mine. His only thoughts had been of Rebecca. He knew she was out there. He had spoken to her on the cell phone the night before. And it might only be a matter of time before whoever was behind this determined that the palladion had not been in the mine after all, and that what Jack was doing now was a charade. If that happened, all bargaining chips were lost. Rebecca might became irrelevant to the kidnappers, yet too much of a liability to return alive.

He slithered along the mud bank to where Ben and Costas were waiting, just visible in the moonlight. He glanced at his watch. It was five a.m., and the time stipulated by the kidnapper was an hour from now. They had got here as fast as they could, with barely time to get their plan into action. Ben beckoned him over, and Jack and Costas hunched down, listening. ‘I’ve got to get my team in position now,’ Ben said. ‘Here’s the score. The kidnappers have come here because this is our turf. They know we’ve got carte blanche here from the authorities. We can clear the place, which we’ve done. There’s nobody else anywhere near the site tonight. All our personnel, Hiebermeyer, everyone, are back on Seaquest II. And the kidnappers are using us for the getaway. The Lynx is going to land in the car park at 0530. They’re going to leave in it, with Rebecca, once the exchange is made, and go directly to a vessel waiting for them beyond the twelve-mile territorial limit. Except they’re not going to do that. Because Jack doesn’t have what they want, only an empty box. So the only way they’re getting out of here is in a body bag or in cuffs. Am I right?’

‘Roger that,’ Costas muttered.

‘Costas has an iPhone. When he calls, my team goes in. Until then, you’re on your own. Jack, Costas has what I promised you. All clear?’

‘Copy that,’ Costas said. Ben disappeared into the darkness. Costas reached in his bag and took out Macalister’s Webley revolver. ‘Ben said he’s tested the loads. The accuracy’s phenomenal, but aim low and to the right because there’s an almighty kick. Something about a manstopper.’

Jack picked up the heavy revolver, weighing it in his hands, seeing that the chambers were loaded. He opened his khaki bag, took out the black box with the swastika emblem on the lid and put the revolver inside, in the space that had once held the Trojan palladion, with the impressed pocket in the shape of the reverse swastika removed to make space for the pistol. ‘That would be the flat-nosed bullet designed for maximum damage on impact.’

‘Sounds about right.’ Costas pulled out his own Beretta pistol from a shoulder holster and snapped the slide, checking that a round was chambered, then holstered it again. ‘Good to go?’

Jack closed the lid and put the box in his khaki bag, folding the flap over. ‘Good to go.’

Ten minutes later they were at the entrance to the underground watercourse some two hundred metres south-west of the mound. It was a low dell, surrounded by trees and dense undergrowth, where a muddy trickle came through a narrow tunnel that went underground towards Troy. It had been found by the Austrian excavators several years before, and was part of a water supply system that allowed the ancient Trojans to tap into a spring beyond the city walls. Jack followed Costas to the iron grid door, shut but with the lock hanging to one side. He gave a silent prayer of thanks to Hiebermeyer for having left it that way. The two men had spoken on the phone from the Embraer on the way to Istanbul airport. Maurice had come down to this spot the previous morning, while the excavation was still ongoing and before Rebecca had been kidnapped, and had managed to make his way through the tunnel as far as a low portal blocked up with rubble. He had cleared that single-handedly and got into the underground chamber he had reached previously by its other entrance, the passageway Jack would be following shortly. And if Maurice could get through this smaller tunnel, then Costas could make it too.

Jack ducked his head away from the wasps that were swarming around the entrance. He flicked on Costas’ headlamp and gave him a Maglite for back-up. They heard the helicopter approaching, clattering loudly over the citadel mound towards the far side, where it landed and powered down. ‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘That’s the cue. It’s 0535. I’m due to be in there at 0600. According to the time it took Maurice, you should be in position by then. Your entrance to the chamber will be on my right as I enter from the main passageway, and I’ll be looking for you. I’ll leave my bag outside and then return for it once I’ve made contact with the kidnappers. When you see me come back in and put the black box down, you might be taking a shot. I’ll try to make eye contact with Rebecca, warn her something is about to happen. We’ll have to play this as it comes.’

‘I’m moving now. Good luck, Jack.’

‘Good luck.’ Jack watched Costas slosh down the tunnel and disappear around a corner, then turned and made his way back towards the mound, walking openly once he had reached the main path, where anyone watching might have assumed he had come from the helicopter. He entered the deep trench where Hiebermeyer had been excavating, where they now knew Schliemann had worked as well. He passed the two gate guardians, the statues of ancient kings of Troy, and then went into the tunnel through the rubble, enlarged to over his height and shored up now with timber. He found a place to hide his bag. Maurice had told him on the phone what they had found, but nothing could have prepared him for it. There was a great bronze door, half ajar. He remembered how Gladstone had argued that the Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae once had a beaten bronze door. And there in the middle was the symbol, the impression of the reverse swastika in a roundel, exactly as Dillen had told him, from the story recounted by the old foreman to Hugh and Peter. There were columns of green stone on either side, with meander pattern decoration, again exactly as in the Treasury of Atreus. He stepped through into a cavernous chamber, and switched on his diving torch, flashing it round. There was no noise, only a slight hollow echo, but he knew he was not alone.

‘Rebecca?’ he said. ‘Are you there?’

Still nothing. He could only wait. He looked around. It was an astonishing sight. Just as in the Treasury of Atreus, the chamber rose in a beehive shape, with corbelled masonry, but it was what was on the floor in front of him that was so astonishing. It was a circle of stone seats, set halfway to the centre of the chamber, a dozen of them, all identical. They were like seats he had seen in Bronze Age palaces before, in Knossos on Crete, in Egypt, in the citadels of the Near East. The thrones of kings. He panned his light over them. Each chair had an inscription on the back. He saw hieroglyphs on one, cuneiform on another, Hittite, Linear B. A council chamber of kings. He glimpsed something lustrous behind the seats, around the base of the chamber, as if the lower courses of masonry had been gilded. He panned his light sideways, to the wall nearest him, and stared in amazement.

Ingots. Metal ingots. There were hundreds of them, stacked to his height and higher, row upon row, surrounding the entire circular wall of the chamber. They were copper, dull green in his torchlight. And there were ingots of tin, absolutely distinctive, their silvery surface covered in a fine white corrosion dust. Each ingot was about a metre long, with arms at the corners like flayed oxhides, just as he had seen them on shipwrecks of the Bronze Age. Ingots being brought to the great palaces of the Aegean, copper from Cyprus, from the Levant, from the west. He stared at a tin ingot on top of the stack beside him. It had a stamp that he recognized. A stamp of the Cornovii, the prehistoric tribe inhabiting south-west Cornwall. So it was true. The Trojans were importing tin from the Cassiterides, the British Isles.