David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

He saw more rows of amphoras, then a scour channel with darkened timbers protruding below. He drew in his breath. “Well I’ll be damned.”

“Got something?” Costas’ voice crackled through.

“Just another ancient wreck.”

“Couldn’t beat an elephantegos,” Costas retorted. “My elephantegos.”

“Just some old pots,” Jack said.

“It’s never just old pots with you. I’ve seen you empty the gold inside to get at the pot. Typical archaeologist.”

“The pots are where the history lies,” Jack said.

“So you keep telling me. Personally, I’ll take a sack of doubloons over a pot any day. So what have you got?”

“Wine amphoras, about two centuries later than the Rhodian ones with the elephantegos. These date from the time of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. They come all the way from Italy.”

Jack finned toward the row of amphoras. His excitement mounted. “These are outward-bound, no doubt about it. They’ve still got the mortar seals over the lids, with the stamp of the Italian estates that made them. This is Falernian wine, vintage stuff Costas, I think we’ve just hit pay dirt.” He looked back. Costas had swum up from the coral head and was hanging in the water at the halfway point, already rising a few meters above the seafloor. “Time to go, Jack. Two minutes to our no-stop limit.”

“Roger that.” Jack’s eyes were darting around, taking in everything possible in the remaining moments before the alarm bell sounded. “Each of these wine amphoras was worth a slave. There are hundreds of them. This was a high-value cargo. A Roman East Indiaman.”

“You mean actually going to India?” Costas flicked on his headlamp, bringing out the colors in the seabed around Jack. “Doesn’t that mean bullion? Treasure?”

Jack touched one of the amphoras. He felt the thrill that coursed through him every time he touched an artifact that had lain beyond human hands since ancient times. And shipwrecks were the most exciting finds of all. Not the accumulated garbage of a civilization, castoffs and rubbish, but living organisms, lost in a moment of catastrophe, on the cusp of great adventure. Adventure that always came with risk, and this time the dice had fallen the wrong way. This had been a ship heading out into a perilous monsoon, for a voyage of thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean. Jack knew the draw of the east from his own ancestors who had sailed there in the time of the East India Company. They had called it The Enterprise of the Indies, the greatest adventure of all. Untold treasure. Untold danger. And for the ancients, the stakes were even higher. Somewhere out there lay the fiery edge of the world. Yet along its rim, as far as you could go, were to be found riches that would humble even a mighty emperor, and bring him face-to-face with the greatest secrets imaginable, with sacred elixirs, with alchemy, with immortality.

The alarm sounded, a harsh, insistent clanging that seemed to come from everywhere. Jack took a deep breath and rose a few meters above the amphoras, then began to fin toward Costas. They would excavate. So much of archaeology was below the radar of recorded history, about the mundane residue of day-to-day life, but here perhaps they had found something momentous. It was a shipwreck that might have been a turning point in history, that might have determined whether Rome would ever rule beyond the Indian Ocean. He looked at Costas, who was staring down into the pool of color in his headlight, reflecting off the sand. Jack checked his dive computer, then saw Costas still staring, transfixed. He followed his gaze, and looked down again.

Then he saw it. Yellow, glinting. Sand, but not just sand. A fantastic mirage. He blinked hard, then exhaled and sank down again until his knees were resting on the seabed. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing. Then he remembered. A Roman emperor’s lament, two thousand years ago. All our money drained off to the east, for the sake of spice and baubles.

He looked up at Costas. He looked down again.

The seabed was carpeted with gold.

He picked up a glittering piece, held it close. It was a gold coin, an aureus, mint, uncirculated. The head of a young man, strong, confident, a man who believed that Rome could rule the world. The emperor Augustus.

“Holy cow,” Costas said. “Tell me this is true.”

“I think,” Jack said, his voice sounding hoarse, “you’ve got your treasure.”

“We need to put this site in lockdown,” Costas replied, flicking a switch on the side of his helmet. “All outside radio communication off We don’t want anyone else picking up what we say. There’s enough gold here to fund a small jihad.”

“Roger that.” Jack flipped off his switch. He savored the moment, holding the gold coin, looking at the glittering spectacle in front of him, the rows of amphoras in the background. Costas was right. Jack was an archaeologist, not a treasure hunter, but in truth he had scoured the world for a discovery like this, good, old-fashioned treasure, an emperor’s ransom in gold. And it was Roman.

He looked up, saw the Zodiac far above, sensed the darker shadow of Seaquest II a few hundred meters offshore. He flashed an okay signal to Costas, and jerked his thumb upward. The two men began to ascend, side by side. Jack glanced back at the receding seafloor, the details now lost in the sand, the amphoras indistinguishable from rock and coral. He had dreamed of this for years, of finding a wreck that would take him back to the greatest adventure the ancient world had ever known, a quest for treasures of unimaginable value, treasures that were still beckoning explorers to this day. His whole spirit was suffused with excitement. This had been the dive of his life. They had found the first ever treasure wreck dating from ancient Roman times. He saw Costas looking at him through his face mask, his eyes creased in a smile. He whispered the words again. Lucky Jack.

Three 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.