David Gibbins - The Last Gospel

‘So two thousand years of Biblical scholarship is wrong, and Jack Howard has a hunch and is right?’

‘Careful reasoning based on an accumulation of evidence, pointing …’

‘Pointing unswervingly to one conclusion,’ Costas finished. ‘Yeah, yeah. A hunch.’ He grinned at Jack, then spoke with mock resignation. ‘Okay. You’ve sold me. And now that I look at it, that cleft in the cliff face beside us, your marker for the wreck site. Have you noticed how it also looks like the Greek letter chi? Like a cross?’ Costas grinned. ‘While we’re on the subject of leaps of faith, don’t tell me you’re above a little sign from on high.’

Jack squinted at the rock, then grinned. ‘Okay. I’ll go with that. Twenty years on, you see things with different eyes.’ He leaned back on his elbows, and shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to put all these pieces together.’

‘You’ve had a few other projects on your mind.’

‘Yes, but this could be the biggest of them all.’ Jack sat up and leaned towards Costas, his face ablaze with excitement. ‘Anything, anything at all, that identifies this shipwreck with St Paul would make it a treasure trove like we’ve never seen before. Nobody has ever found anything so intimately linked with the lives of the evangelists, with the reality behind the Gospels. We’re looking at a time when a few people truly believed in a kingdom of heaven on earth, a dream that pagan religion didn’t offer the common people. A time before churches, before priests, before guilt and confession and inquisitions and holy wars. Strip away all that and you go back to the essence of what Jesus had to say, what drew so many to him.’

‘I never knew you were so passionate about it.’

‘It’s the idea that individuals can take charge of their own destiny and seek beauty and joy on earth. That seems to be about as uplifting as you can get. If we can find something that will draw people back to that, take them back to the essence of the idea and make them reflect on it, then we’ll have done humanity a service.’

‘Holy cow, Jack. I thought we were just treasure-hunters.’

Jack grinned. ‘Archaeology isn’t just about filling up museums.’

‘I know. It’s about the hard facts.’

‘A shipwreck could be a time capsule of the period like Pompeii and Herculaneum, only with a direct connection to the most potent figures in western history. It would capture the imagination of the world.’

Costas shifted and stretched. ‘We still have to find it yet. And speaking of excitement, we’ve got company.’ He jerked his head towards the cascade of bubbles now erupting on the surface, and they watched as the two divers came into view a few metres below them. They surfaced simultaneously and both gave the okay signal. Jack noted down the time in the log and then glanced at Costas. ‘This place was a fulcrum of history,’ he continued. ‘Whatever we find, we’d be adding to a story that’s already pretty fantastic. In 415 BC the Athenians landed at this spot to attack Syracuse, a key event in the war with Sparta which almost destroyed Greek civilization. Fast-forward to another world war, July 1943, Operation Husky. My grandfather was here, chief officer of the armed merchant ship Empire Elaine, just inshore from the monitor HMS Erebus as she bombarded the enemy positions above us with fifteen-inch shells.’

‘This place must be in your blood,’ Costas said. ‘Seems like a Howard was present at just about every famous naval engagement in British history.’

‘If many English families knew their background, they’d be able to say the same.’

‘Anything left to see?’

‘The Special Raiding Squadron, an offshoot of the SAS, parachuted on to the cliff above us and forced the Italian coastal defence battery to surrender, throwing their arms into the sea. When we first dived here the site was strewn with ammunition.’

Costas rubbed his hands. ‘That’s what I like. Real archaeology. Beats bits of old pot any day.’

‘Let’s keep our eyes on the prize. You can play bomb disposal later.’

Costas grinned, and held up the feed hose from his rebreather. ‘Lock and load.’ He clicked it home, then watched Jack do the same.

‘Done.’ Jack angled his neck down to check his equipment, then eyed Costas. ‘You up for it?’ he said. ‘I mean, going deep?’

Costas raised his eyes, then gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Let me see. Our last dive was in an underground passageway beneath the jungles of the Yucatan, being swept towards some kind of Mayan hell. And before that it was inside a rolling iceberg. Oh, and before that, an erupting volcano.’

‘You saying you’ve had enough, or can manage one more?’

Costas gave his version of the thousand-yard stare, then gave a haggard grin and began pulling up his diving suit. ‘You just say the words.’

‘Time to kit up.’

Maurice Hiebermeyer leaned back against the wall of the passageway, panted heavily a few times and eyed the ragged hole ahead of him. He would not be defeated. If the Bourbon King Charles of Naples could do it, an ample girth if there ever was one, then so could he. Once again he heaved himself up on his hands and knees, aimed his headlamp at the hole and threw himself bodily forward, his hard hat clattering against the ceiling and the jagged protrusions tearing at his overalls. Once again he ground to a halt, stuck like a cork in a bottle. It was no good. He looked through the filthy sheen on his glasses at the dust cloud he had created in the tunnel beyond. He could hardly believe it. The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, the greatest unexcavated treasure in Italy. Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, rediscovered by the Bourbon kings of Naples in the eighteenth century, hardly excavated since. And then an earthquake, a rushed international response, and here he was, first archaeologist ever to reach this far into the villa, stopped dead by his own girth. He felt like weeping. They would have to get in a pneumatic drill, widen the hole. It would mean more delays, more frustration. Already they were two weeks behind schedule, days spent pacing and sweating in the superintendency lobby while the bureaucracy inched towards releasing their permit. Precious time he could ill afford to lose, with his new excavation in full swing in the eastern desert beside the Red Sea.

Then he saw it.

He gasped, and whispered in his native German. ‘ Mein Gott. No, it can’t be.’ He reached out, and felt the smooth surface. A snout. ‘Yes, it is.’ He let his hand drop, and stared in amazement.

The guardian god of the dead.

A few feet ahead the grey mottled wall of the eighteenth-century tunnel had fallen away to form a shallow cavity, no more than a foot in depth. In the centre was a head, peering out, black and shrouded with dust but unmistakable, the ears pointing high up and the snout jutting out defiantly. He who walked through the shadows and lurked in dark places, guardian of the veil of death. Hiebermeyer stared at the sightless eyes, surrounded by the thick black line of kohl, then shut his own eyes tight and silently mouthed the name. Here, at the threshold of the unknown, at a place of unimaginable terror and death, where those who last lived truly saw the fires of hell. Anubis. He opened his eyes again, and saw three vertical lines of hieroglyphs running down the chest of the statue, the text instantly recognizable. A man remains over after death, and his deeds are placed beside him in heaps. Existence yonder is for eternity, and for him who reaches it without wrongdoing, he shall exist yonder like a god. Hiebermeyer stared past the statue into the empty blackness of the tunnel beyond. For a brief, bizarre moment he pitied all of them, the ancients who placed such store in the world beyond, whose crumbled dreams of the afterlife had become his own kingdom of the dead. Not for the first time he felt he was on a mission, that his true calling as an archaeologist was to bring those in limbo some semblance of the immortality they had so craved.