The Tiger Warrior Read online

  They were tusks.

  “I’m waiting, Jack. Explain your way out of this one.”

  Jack swallowed hard. His heart was pounding with excitement. He spoke quietly, trying to keep his voice under control. “It’s an elephantegos”

  “A what?”

  “An elephantegos.”

  “Right. An elephant. A statue of an elephant.”

  “No. An elephantegos”

  “Okay, Jack. What’s the difference?”

  “There’s an amazing papyrus letter, found in the Egyptian desert,” Jack said. “Maurice Hiebermeyer emailed it to me on Seaquest II as we were sailing here. I asked him for anything in the papyrus records that might refer to a shipwreck. It’s almost as if he had an instinct we’d find something like this.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Costas said. “He’s an oddball, but I’ve got to hand it to him.”

  Jack’s mind was racing. He reached out and touched the tip of the nearest tusk. It was silky-smooth, but powdery, like chalk. “The letter mentions a shipwreck. It’s one of very few ancient documents to mention a shipwreck in the Red Sea. Maurice knew we were planning to dive here, on our way up to his excavation at Berenikê.”

  “I’m listening, Jack.”

  “It tells how a ship dispatched from the port at Berenikê had sunk. The letter was meant to reach a place called Ptolemais Thêrôn, Ptolemais of the Hunts. That was an outpost somewhere to the south of here on the coast of Eritrea. It was where the Egyptians procured their wild animals. Because of the shipwreck, the men in the outpost hadn’t received their grain. The letter assures them that another elephantegos was under construction at Berenikê, and would soon be on its way with all the supplies they needed.”

  “Elephantegos,” Costas murmured. “You mean…”

  “Elephant-transporter. Elephant-ship.”

  “Jack, I’m getting that funny feeling again. The one I always get when I dive with you. It’s called disbelief.”

  “Have you looked beyond? There are two more coral heads. Exactly the same size. Three of them, in a row. Just the number you’d expect. Chained and roped down just as they would have been in a hull.”

  “You’re telling me this thing in front of me is an elephant. A real elephant. Not a statue.”

  “We know ivory can survive burial underwater, right? We’ve found tusks and hippo teeth in the Mediterranean. And the coral around here grows pretty fast, quicker than it would take for an elephant skeleton to crumble. There may be no bones left inside there now, but the coral preserves the shape.”

  “I need a moment, Jack. Remember, I’m just an engineer. I need to stare this thing in the face. This could be the one archaeological discovery that finally does it for me, Jack. I think I might cry.”

  “You can handle it.” Jack floated back and stared at the ghostly apparition that loomed in front of them, one of the most amazing things he had ever seen underwater. He switched on his headlamp again. “Those tusks aren’t going to survive long. We need to get them reburied. But before that we need a film team down here, pronto. This is headline stuff.”

  “Leave it to me, Jack. I’ve got a channel open to Seaquest II.”

  Jack glanced at his wrist computer. “Seven minutes left. I want to have a look at those amphoras in the sand. I’ll be within visual range.”

  “I think I’ve had enough excitement for one dive.”

  “I’ll meet you halfway for the ascent.”

  “Roger that.”

  Jack drifted back toward the sandy plateau, letting the current take him. It had picked up slightly during their dive, raising a pall of fine silt that hung a meter or so over the seabed, briefly obscuring the amphoras from view. Ahead of him a school of glassfish hung in the water like a diaphanous veil, parting to reveal a reef shark swimming languidly along the slope. He heard the muffled roar of the Zodiac boat on the surface gunning its outboards, circling to keep position. A banging from the boat marked their five-minute warning. He glanced back at Costas, now some twenty meters away, then dropped down into the suspended sediment. Costas might not be able to see him, but Jack’s exhaust bubbles would be clearly visible. He stared ahead, concentrating on his objective, his arms held out in front of him with his hands together, his legs slowly kicking a frog stroke. He was in perfect control of his buoyancy. Suddenly he saw them, a row of four amphoras, intact and leaning in the sand, another row poking up beyond. He exhaled hard, emptying his lungs, knowing his life depended on his equipment delivering that next breath, the edge of danger that made diving his passion. He dropped down, then inhaled just above the seafloor, regaining neutral buoyancy. The amphoras were covered with fine sediment, sparkling with the sunlight that streamed through the water from the surface forty-five meters overhead.

  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, tha
t 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.

  “We’re locked on,” Jack said into the intercom. “Good to go.”

  Costas pointed at the horizon. “Engage.”

  Jack grinned, pushed the cyclic stick forward to dip the nose again, then flipped on the autopilot. As they gathered speed he glanced at the bridge wing and saw Scott Macalister, a former Canadian coast guard captain who was Seaquest II’s master. Beside him stood a tall, slender girl, her long dark hair blowing in the breeze, shielding her eyes against the glare and waving at them.

  “Rebecca seems to be doing nicely,” Costas said.

  “For her first expedition, I can’t believe how well she fits in,” Jack replied. “She’s almost running the show. Pretty impressive for a sixteen-year-old.”

  “It must be in the blood, Jack.”

  They could see the reef now, the dark blue of the abyss rising through shades of turquoise until the coral heads at the top of the slope were visible, some of them nearly breaking the surface. They passed over the wavering yellow forms of two Aquapod submersibles, just about to dive on the ancient ships’ graveyard fifty meters below. Within hours the Aquapods would have completed a full photogrammetric and laser survey of the site, something that would have taken weeks of dives and painstaking hand measurements in Jack’s early days. After surfacing from their dive and returning to Seaquest II he had gone straight into an intensive video conference with the Egyptian Antiquities Authorities, the Egyptian Navy, and the staff of his friend Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria. With Seaquest II committed months before to a voyage into the Pacific, another IMU vessel would take over the excavation, and an Egyptian navy frigate would be on station for the duration. The excavation would complete a hat trick of ancient wreck investigations by IMU over the past few years: a Bronze Age Minoan shipwreck in the Aegean, St. Paul’s shipwreck off Sicily and now this. Jack fervently hoped he would be back in time to work on the site himself, but for now he was thrilled to have set the wheels in motion. He relaxed back in his seat, breathing out the excess nitrogen in his bloodstream and feeling his body recoup its strength after the dive. He was exhausted, but elated. He was itching to reach their destination, to discover what Hiebermeyer had been badgering him to see for months now in his excavation in the Egyptian desert.

  “Check out that island.” Costas gestured at a barren, rugged outcrop in the sea below them, about two kilometers across and rising to a peak several hundred meters high, the rock scorched white and seemingly devoid of vegetation. It looked like a place of extremes, unable to support life.

  “That’s Zabargad, known as St. John’s Island,” Jack said. “The ancient Greeks called it Topazios, the Island of Topaz.”

  “I can see rock tailings, old mine workings, around the edge of the mountain,” Costas said.

  “It was the only ancient source of peridot, the translucent green gem also called olivine,” Jack said. “The island’s a minerologist’s dream, an upthrusting of the earth’s crust. The Chinese revered peridot because it’s like jade, a sacred stone. They thought it had healing qualities. The best gems were the treasures of emperors.”

  “Was it mined by convicts?” Costas asked.

  “You’ve got it. The mother of all penal colonies,” Jack said. “To most of the prisoners here, this was the end of the earth.”

  Costas took a deep breath. “It reminds me of Alcatraz.”

  “A longer swim here than San Francisco Bay, and a few more sharks.”

  “Did anyone ever escape?”

  “Before I try to answer that, look at this.” Jack reached into his front pocket and took out a small envelope. He passed it to Costas, who tipped out the object inside onto his palm. It was the gold coin Jack had picked up on the seabed, glistening and perfect, as if it had
come straight from the mint.

  “Jack…”

  “I borrowed it. A sample. I had to have something to show Maurice. Ever since we were schoolboys he’s been telling me that nothing equals the treasure from Egyptian tombs.”

  “Dr. Jack Howard, the world’s premier maritime archaeologist, loots his own site. What will the Egyptian authorities say when I tell them?”

  “The authorities? You mean Herr Professor Dr. Maurice Hiebermeyer, the greatest living Egyptologist? He’ll probably give me a pitying look and show me a jewel-encrusted mummy.”

  “I thought you guys only liked bits of broken pot.” Costas grinned, and held the coin up carefully between two fingers. “Okay, so why show me this now?”

  “The portrait on the obverse is Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Now check out the reverse.”

  Costas turned the coin over. Jack saw a shield in the middle, a standard on either side. The standard on the right was topped by an orb, signifying Rome’s domination over the world. The one on the left had an aquila, the sacred eagle that legionaries would fight to the death to protect. They were the signa militaria, the Roman legionary standards. Jack pointed to the inscription in the middle. “Right. Now read out the words.”

  Costas squinted. “Signis Receptis.”

  “That means ‘Standards returned.’ This coin was one of Augustus’ prized issues, about 19 BC, only a few years after he became emperor. Augustus was consolidating the empire, following decades of civil war. His son Tiberius had just concluded a peace treaty with the Parthians, who ruled the area of Iran and Iraq. They agreed to return the standards that had been taken from defeated Roman legions years before. Augustus treated the return as a personal triumph, and had them paraded through Rome. It was a huge propaganda score for him, though too late to help the men who had fought under those standards and been unlucky enough not to die on the battlefield.”