David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

‘Learning to fly was just part of my toolkit. I wanted to get all the skills I could under my belt. I guessed I was going to have to fly at some time in the future, and I was right. But for you, flying and getting into the RAF was always your main passion, like diving was for me.’

‘It’s still there, Jack. All I ever wanted was to get inside one of these things. And here I am now, an RAF group captain, about to be booted up to one-star rank so I can fly a desk in the Ministry of Defence in London. I’ll be like one of those mothballed planes in the Arizona desert, waiting for a reactivation everyone knows is never going to happen. All fast-jet jocks say the same when they reach my stage. It’s as if we’ve gone beyond our sell-by date, but they can’t quite bring themselves to scrap us.’

‘Ever think of retirement?’

‘I’d retire from the air force, but only to fly again. You?’

‘Rebecca says I need more sabbaticals, and to stop taking all the best projects. She said IMU needs to get more expeditions going with other people leading them. People like herself.’

‘I can’t wait to meet her. Her mother’s death must have been a terrible blow, but it’s amazing how kids can weather storms. So Elizabeth disappeared back to Naples without telling you she was pregnant? I bet you can’t believe you’ve only known Rebecca for three years.’

‘Her kidnapping last year really brought it all home again.’

‘ Kidnapping? Jesus, Jack, what have you been getting into?’

‘It was only for forty-eight hours. That was close to a lifetime for me, though. I found out a few things about myself, I can tell you. About what protecting your own will make you do. All I can say is I’ve got more blood on my hands than the last time we met. It’s wrapped up with the bunker discovery, so the security issue is ongoing.’

‘But she’s all right?’

‘Back at school in New York City after working with us at Troy. You met Ben Kershaw when you visited Seaquest II a few years ago? He heads up the IMU security team and is looking after her. Round-the-clock surveillance. And Rebecca’s developing quite a few survival skills of her own. She’s about to get her glider pilot’s licence, you know. If she can fit it in with her advanced nitrox diving course. And her weekend co-op programme at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.’

‘Christ, Jack. Sounds like a chip off the old block.’

‘That’s why I could never retire. She needs management.’

‘Been there, done that. Remember, I have three teenage daughters. Trying to keep Rebecca under control is exactly what you don’t want to be doing.’

Jack laughed. ‘Advice taken. But back to retirement. My friend Costas jokes that there’s an inner philosopher in me ready to retreat to some remote cabin and grow a long white beard like Charles Darwin, cogitating for my remaining years before producing the definitive tome on human prehistory.’

‘You always were the thinking action man, but I really don’t see it.’

‘Nope.’

‘I haven’t met Costas yet, but I’ve seen him on the IMU films. Seems like a good guy.’

‘He and I first met during my short-term commission in the Navy; you remember? Between graduating and my doctorate, before I founded IMU. Costas had been at MIT before going to the US Navy research establishment to work on submersibles, his metier. We actually met in the naval base at Izmir in Turkey, where I discovered he was a diver and cajoled him into doing some shipwreck exploration with me. He’s in charge of the engineering department at IMU, but he’s a lot more than that. I couldn’t imagine doing an expedition without him. He keeps me on the straight and narrow. He’s a rock.’

‘Efram Jacobovich still pumps money into your foundation?’

‘We had some pretty amazing friends at Cambridge, don’t you think? I remember the first time I met Efram in the dining hall at college. He’d thought up the internet ten years before it was officially invented. He had software tycoon written all over him. I took him on a frigid dive in the English Channel that put him in bed shivering for a week, but something about the experience must have struck a chord for him to give IMU its endowment ten years later. He’s been a fantastic friend and supporter.’

‘And your father gave IMU your family estate in the Fal estuary? I remember my visits there when we dived off the south coast looking for that elusive Phoenician shipwreck. Perfect place for a maritime research campus.’

‘It just seemed right. My father’s family had been in Cornwall since Tudor times, when the estate was given to my ancestor Captain Jack Howard by King Henry VIII for services rendered against the Spanish. In Spanish history books he was a pirate, but in ours a glorious hero. Since then the family history has seen quite a bit more adventure on the high seas but also a gentle decline into aristocratic impoverishment. My own apparently exotic childhood moving around the world was actually as much about my father evading financial inconvenience as it was his bohemian life as a painter. Luckily there was a trust fund that paid for my boarding school, and another one that kept the Howard Gallery and its art collection from the debt collectors. My father was a great supporter of the idea of IMU, but it also came as something of a relief to him, because he could bequeath the estate to our foundation as a tax break.’

‘I remember reading the obituaries. What was it now, eight years ago? I’ve got very fond memories of him, and your mother. How’s she doing?’

‘Still lives there and runs the place, really, in between mountain trekking expeditions. She and Rebecca get on like a house on fire. Still has her huge garden and her dogs.’

‘So what about old Heimy? You should be seeing him within an hour.’

‘It’s funny – that’s what Rebecca calls him, too. Of course he got married last year, as you know.’

‘Maurice Hiebermeyer, married. It beggars belief. I got an invite, but I was on deployment in Afghanistan. Amazing he remembered me, but I always knew there was a thoughtful and loving human being inside the fanatical Egyptologist. Lucky he found a woman who spotted that too. Makes my head reel to think of it. Does he still have those awful khaki lederhosen?’

‘Still wears them at half-mast.’

‘You remember our little escapade in Egypt that summer after graduation? You illegally scaling the Great Pyramid at Giza to spend the night on the top waiting with a camera, me flying Maurice in a dilapidated old Tiger Moth biplane for some dawn aerobatics over the Sphinx. It was something to do with re-creating a National Geographic picture Maurice had seen from the 1920s showing RAF biplanes over the pyramids. We just had to have a go, otherwise we weren’t going to hear the end of it.’

Jack laughed. ‘It was also a shrewd publicity stunt. Maurice had spent weeks camped outside the Egyptian Antiquities Authority, trying to get them to take his discovery in the Fayum desert seriously. If you remember how he looked in those shorts, you could see what the problem was. But our stunt got us hauled in front of the director-general himself, and Maurice instantly won him over with his knowledge of all things Egyptian. I can still see the two of them on their knees on the office floor poring over Maurice’s sketch map of his discovery, the mummy necropolis that was to make his name. And now there he is, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Alexandria and arguably the world’s foremost Egyptologist.’

‘Seems a long way from that to unearthing a Nazi bunker in Germany.’

‘He volunteered to take my place. His family home was not far from there, and he said he felt a personal responsibility as a German to address the past.’