David Gibbins - The Crusader's gold

Jack nodded. “Fourteen fifty-three, to be precise. Almost two hundred and fifty years too late. We’re looking for something way before guns were used at sea. It’s a terrific find and I didn’t want to deflate the crew, but we’ve got a long way to go before we reach the Crusades.”

Jack gazed pensively towards the shore, his view momentarily obscured by an overcrowded ferry that passed perilously close to the excavation. In the shimmer of phosphoresence left in the boat’s wake the city seemed to be floating on a cloud, like a heavenly apparition. It was one of the supreme images of history, a palimpsest of the greatest civilisations the world had ever known. To Jack’s eye it was like a cross-section through an archaeological site, only instead of layer built upon layer, here everything was jumbled, the threads of history all interwoven and nothing clear-cut. At the lowest level were the cracked and fissured remnants of the walls of Constantinople, first planned by the emperor Constantine the Great when he moved his capital here in the fourth century AD and abandoned Rome to decline and ruin. Above the walls rose the slopes of the much older Greek acropolis of Byzantium, a name which survived as the term for the Christian empire of the Middle Ages which was based in Constantinople and traced its roots back to Rome. Above that rose the sprawling splendour of the Topkapi Palace, hub of the city the Ottoman Turks renamed Istanbul after they defeated the Byzantines in 1453 and shining heart of the most powerful state in the medieval world. Higher still, above the few remaining wooden houses of old Istanbul, rose the minarets and cascading domes of Hagia Sofia, once the greatest of all Christian cathedrals in the East but after 1453 a holy site of Islam. And somewhere, Jack knew, it was possible, just possible, that the sprawling mass of the city concealed evidence of a migration at the very dawn of history, of settlers from a precocious civilisation who had fled their citadel of Atlantis as it was inundated by floodwaters far to the east in the Black Sea.

He could hardly believe it was six months since he and Katya had lost themselves in the labyrinthine back ways of the city. It had been a time of supreme exhilaration, basking in the discovery of a lifetime, but a time also of emptiness and loss. For Katya it had been the devastating truth about her father’s evil empire, a revelation which weighed heavily on her despite all Jack’s efforts and led her to return to Russia to spearhead a renewed effort against the illegal antiquities trade. For Jack the sense of personal loss had been more acute, and he still felt it now. He had been with Katya when the search for Peter Howe had finally been called off. Howe had been a friend since boyhood and Jack was reminded of him every time he saw Tom York, his limp a legacy of the same gun battle. Jack had insisted on staying with Sea Venture over Atlantis until the search had finally been called off. For many days afterwards he felt that his ambitions had become entombed in the Black Sea with the wreck of Seaquest, that he had no right to risk the lives of others in his search for adventure. It was Katya who had nursed back his confidence as they became absorbed in the history of Byzantium during their long days together exploring Istanbul. She had persuaded him to reawaken a schoolboy dream he had cherished with Peter Howe, a dream of a fabulous lost treasure which had become all-consuming after Jack and Katya had parted ways at the airport, a dream which had led Jack back to where he was now.

“I’ve done it!”

Jack snapped out of his trance and hurried over to the source of the noise in the navigation room behind the bridge. In the darkened interior he could see where the radar and position-fixing consoles had been stacked on either side to make way for a complex array of electronic gadgetry surrounding an outsize computer screen. In the midst of it all, oblivious to his presence, sat a swarthy, dark-haired man with a rugby player’s physique, his eyes glued to the screen and his head clamped in earphones festooned with antennae.

“Good thing you finally lost some weight,” Jack said. “Otherwise we’d be excavating you out of this.”

“What?” Costas Kazantzakis shot him an impatient glance and reverted to the screen. Jack shouted the words at him again.

“Okay, okay.” Costas lifted off the headset and leaned back in what little space he had. “Yeah, well, it was scraping my way through that underwater tunnel that did it. I’ve still got the scars. If anything good came out of that project it was the gods of Atlantis warning me to pull back on the calories.”

Costas craned his neck around and took in Jack’s mud-spattered sweater. “Been playing again?”

“Siege gun. Venetian. Fourteen fifty-three.”

Costas grunted then suddenly snapped the headset back on as the screen erupted in a kaleidoscope of colours. Jack looked on fondly as his friend became absorbed again in his task. Costas was a brilliantly inventive engineer, with a PhD in submersibles technology from MIT, and had accompanied Jack on many of his adventures since the foundation of IMU over a decade ago. His hard science was a perfect foil to Jack’s archaeology. Not for Costas the complex interwoven threads of history and the uncertainties of interpretation. For him the only significant problems were those that could be solved by science, and the only complexity was when things failed to work.

“What’s going on?”

Maurice Hiebermeyer squeezed through the doorway beside Jack. His frame was definitely on the bulky side; Hiebermeyer seemed to be in a permanent sheen of sweat, despite his baggy shorts and open shirt.

Jack nodded in greeting. “I think Costas has finally got this thing to work.”

Jack knew what was coming next. Hiebermeyer had flown in by helicopter the night before from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, like a bird of prey pouncing on its target, hoping that Jack would be looking ahead to the next project, having found the problems of excavating in Istanbul’s harbour insurmountable. They had last spoken on the deck of Sea Venture six months ago when Hiebermeyer had mentioned another extraordinary find of ancient writing from the necropolis of mummies that had produced the Atlantis papyrus, and since then he had been bombarding IMU with phone messages and emails.

He fumbled with a folder he was carrying. “Jack, we need to…”

“It will have to wait.” Jack flashed a good-natured smile at the portly Egyptologist. “We’re on a knife-edge here and I have to concentrate. Sorry, Maurice. Just hang on till this is over.” He turned back to the screen and Hiebermeyer went silent.

“Yes!”

The screen rippled with colour, and the two men moved up behind Costas for a better view. They were looking at a video image, a floodlit grey mass with a mechanical pincer arm extending into the middle.

“We’re now almost fifty feet below the sea floor, one hundred and sixty-eight feet absolute depth from our present position.” Costas removed the headset and leaned back as he spoke. “In a few seconds the imaging will automatically revert to sonar and the ferret should be back on line.”

“Ferret?”

Costas glanced apologetically at Hiebermeyer and handed over a plastic model he had been holding like a talisman, an odd cylindrical shape that bore a passing resemblance to the remote-operated vehicle they had used to explore the Neolithic village in the Black Sea. “A combination remote-operated vehicle, underwater vacuum cleaner and sub-bottom sonar,” he enthused. “It’s controlled from here via an umbilical and can burrow through sediment with pinpoint precision, sending back images as crisp as an MRI scan. At the moment it’s digging through terragenous sediment, land runoff, tons of it. We’re at the edge of the channel swept by the Bosporus, but even so there’s vast quantities of sediment, several metres per century. We need to go deep if we’re to stand any chance of finding what we want. The weight of that chain is going to bury it further still.”