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  “That’s when you shifted position.” Seaquest now lay off the far side of the atoll two nautical miles from the wreck.

  “Not before we bubble-mined the site,” York replied.

  Katya looked questioningly at Jack.

  “An IMU innovation,” he explained. “Miniature contact mines the size of Ping-Pong balls joined together by monofilaments like a screen of bubbles. They’re triggered by photoelectric sensors which can distinguish the movement of divers and submersibles.”

  Costas shifted his gaze to York. “What are our options?”

  “Whatever we do now may be pointless.” York’s voice was bleak and emotionless. “We’ve been issued an ultimatum.” He handed Jack a sheet of paper which had just come through by email. Jack quickly scanned the text, his face betraying nothing of the turmoil he felt inside.

  “Seaquest, this is Vultura. Depart by eighteen hundred hours or be annihilated.”

  Costas peered over at the paper. “Doesn’t mess around, does he?”

  As if on cue, there was an immense rushing sound like a low-flying jet followed by a thunderous crash off the starboard bow. Tom York spun round to the nearest porthole just as a towering column of white water lashed the windowpane with spray. The shell had only narrowly missed them.

  “You bastards.” York spoke through clenched teeth with the rage of a professional naval officer who was powerless to respond in kind.

  At that moment the two-way radio began to crackle, and York angrily punched the intercom so they all could hear.

  “This is Seaquest.” York’s voice was barely controlled, almost a snarl. “Make your intentions clear. Over.”

  After a few moments a voice came over the intercom, its drawling, guttural tones unmistakably Russian.

  “Good afternoon, Captain York. Major Howe. And Dr. Howard, I presume? Our felicitations. This is Vultura.” There was a pause. “You have been warned.”

  York switched off the receiver in disgust and flipped open a lid beside him. Before he pulled down the lever inside, he looked up at Jack, his voice now coldly composed.

  “We’re going to battle stations.”

  Within minutes of the klaxon sounding, Seaquest had transformed from a research vessel into a ship of war. The diving equipment which usually cluttered the deck had been stowed as soon as Vultura appeared on the scene. Now, in the hold forward of the deckhouse, a group of technicians in white anti-flash overalls were arming Seaquest’s weapons pod, a Breda twin 40 mm L70 modified to IMU specifications. The successor of the renowned Bofors anti-aircraft gun of the Second World War, the “Fast Forty” had a dual-feed mechanism which fired high-explosive and armour-piercing shells at a rate of 900 rounds per minute. The pod was concealed in a retracted shaft which was elevated moments before use.

  In the hold all non-essential personnel were assembling beside Seaquest’s escape submersible Neptune II. The submersible would quickly reach Greek territorial waters and rendezvous with a Hellenic Navy frigate which would set sail from Crete within the hour. It would also take away the bull’s head rhyton and other artefacts which had come up too late for the final helicopter shuttle to Carthage.

  York quickly led the group down a lift to a point well below the waterline, the door opening to reveal a curved metal bulkhead that looked as if a flying saucer was wedged inside the hull.

  York looked at Katya. “The command module.” He tapped the shiny surface. “Twenty-centimetre-thick titanium-reinforced steel. The entire pod can blow itself away from Seaquest and make off undetected, thanks to the same stealth technology we used for the escape sub.”

  “I think of it as a giant ejection seat.” Costas beamed. “Like the command module on the old Saturn moon rockets.”

  “Just as long as it doesn’t send us into space,” Katya said.

  York spoke into an intercom and the circular hatch swung open. A subdued red light from the battery of control panels on the far side cast an eerie glow over the interior. They ducked through and he pulled the hatch shut behind them, spinning the central wheel until the locking arms were fully engaged.

  Immediately in front, several crew were busily preparing small-arms ammunition, pressing rounds into magazines and assembling weapons. Katya walked over and picked up a rifle and magazine, expertly loading it and cocking the bolt.

  “Enfield SA80 Mark 2,” she announced. “British Army personal weapon. Thirty-round magazine, 5.56 millimetre. Bullpup design, handle in front of the magazine, versatile for confined spaces.” She peered over the sights. “The infrared four-times scope is a nice feature, but give me the new Kalashnikov AK102 any day.” She removed the clip and checked the chamber was clear before replacing the weapon in the rack.

  She looked rather incongruous still in the elegant black dress she wore to the conference, Jack mused, but clearly she had more than adequate skills to hold her own in a fight.

  “You’re some lady,” he said. “First a world expert on ancient Greek scripts, now a military small-arms instructor.”

  “Where I come from,” Katya responded, “it’s the second qualification that counts.”

  As they made their way past the armoury, York glanced at Jack. “We must decide our course of action now.”

  Jack nodded.

  York led them up a short flight of steps to a platform about five metres across. He motioned towards a semicircle of swivel chairs which faced a battery of workstations along one side.

  “The bridge console,” he said to Katya. “It serves as command centre and a virtual-reality bridge, allowing us to navigate Seaquest using the surveillance and imaging systems topside.”

  Above them a concave screen displayed a panoramic digital reproduction of the view from Seaquest’s bridge. The cameras were equipped with infrared and thermal imaging sensors, so even though it was dusk they could still make out the low shape of Vultura and the fading heat signature of its forward gun turret.

  “Peter will review our security options.” York turned to Howe.

  Peter Howe looked at the others ruefully. “I won’t beat about the bush. It’s bad, really bad. We’re up against a purpose-built warship armed to the teeth with the latest weaponry, able to outgun and outrun virtually any naval or coastguard vessel assigned to deal with this kind of menace.”

  Jack turned to Katya. “IMU policy is to rely on friendly nations in this kind of situation. The presence of warships and aircraft is often sufficiently intimidating even if they are outside territorial waters and legally unable to intervene.”

  Howe tapped a key and the screen above them showed the Admiralty Chart of the Aegean.

  “The Greeks can’t arrest Vultura, or chase her off. Even among the Greek islands to the north she can find a route more than six nautical miles offshore, and the straits into the Black Sea are designated international waters. The Russians made sure of that. She has a clear run back to her home port in Abkhazia.”

  He aimed a light pointer at their current position on the lower part of the map.

  “By this evening the Hellenic Navy should have frigates positioned here, here and here.” He shone to the north and west of the submerged volcano. “The nearest is just under six nautical miles south-east of Thera, almost within visual range of Seaquest. But they won’t come any closer.”

  “Why not?” Katya asked.

  “A wonderful thing called politics.” Howe swivelled round to face them. “We’re in disputed waters. A few miles east are a group of uninhabited islets claimed by both the Greeks and the Turks. The dispute has led them to the brink of war. We’ve informed the Turks about Vultura but politics dictates that their focus be on the Greeks, not some renegade Kazakh. The presence of Greek warships near the zone is enough to put the Turkish Maritime Defence Command on high alert. An hour ago four Turkish Air Force F16s flew a perimeter sweep five miles to the east. The Greeks and Turks have always been friends of IMU, but now they’re powerless to intervene.” Howe switched off the image and the screen reverted to the view ou
tside Seaquest.

  York stood up and paced between the seats, his hands clenched tightly behind his back. “We could never take on Vultura and hope to win. We can’t rely on outside help. Our only option is to accede to their demands, to leave immediately and relinquish the wreck. As captain I must put the safety of my crew first.”

  “We could try negotiating,” Costas offered.

  “Out of the question!” York slammed his hand down on the console, the strain of the last few hours suddenly showing. “These people will only negotiate face to face and on their own ground. Whoever went to Vultura would instantly become a hostage. I will not risk the life of a single member of my crew in the hands of these thugs.”

  “Let me try.”

  They all stared at Katya, her face set impassively.

  “I’m your only option,” she said quietly. “I’m a neutral party. Aslan would have nothing to gain from taking me hostage and everything to lose in his dealings with the Russian government.” She paused, her voice stronger. “Women are respected among his people. And my family has influence. I can mention a few names that will be of great interest to him.”

  There was a long silence while the others digested her words. Jack tried not to let his emotions get in the way as he turned over all the possibilities. He shrank from putting her in danger, but he knew she was right. A look at her expression confirmed he had little choice.

  “All right.” He stood up. “I invited Katya along, so this is my call. Open a secure channel and patch me through to Vultura.”

  JACK RAISED HIS BINOCULARS AND LEVELLED them at the far-off speckle that was the only point of reference between sea and sky. Even though it was now dark he could make out every detail of the distant vessel, the optical enhancer intensifying the available light to give an image as clear as day. He could just read the Cyrillic letters below the bow.

  Vultura. How very appropriate, he thought. She was exactly that, a hideous scavenger lurking around the kill zone until the time was right to pounce and devour the fruits of others’ labour.

  Tom York stood beside him. “Project 911,” he said, following Jack’s gaze. “The Russians call them escort ships, the equivalent of corvettes and frigates in NATO code. This is the latest, produced after the events of 2001 for anti-terrorist patrolling. About the same as our Sea-class vessels but sleeker. The machinery’s in another league altogether. Two GT diesel gas turbines producing 52,000 hp for a cruising speed of 36 knots. Turbojet-boosters capable of hydrofoil speeds of 60 knots, almost as fast as a light aircraft. Vultura is one of half a dozen decommissioned when the Russian Navy went through its latest downsizing. The Oslo Treaty requires the Russian Federation to sell surplus warships only to governments recognized by the UN, so this one must have been picked up in some shady deal even before it left the shipyard.”

  Jack trained his binoculars on the pods on either side of Vultura’s stern, then shifted slightly to take in the forward turret with its barrel trained directly at them.

  York noticed his movement. “Tulamahzavod 130 mm automatic cannon. Computerized GPS ranging that makes adjustments instantaneously on impact. Capable of firing a uranium-depleted armour-piercing shell that would punch a hole through Seaquest’s command module at twenty miles.”

  They were standing on Seaquest’s helipad, the cool breeze gently ruffling the IMU flag at the stern. They had watched anxiously as Katya, now dressed more appropriately in an IMU jumpsuit, drove one of Seaquest’s Zodiacs into the darkness, the twin 90 hp outboards powering her over to Vultura in a matter of minutes. Before she descended the ladder, Jack had quietly taken her aside, running one last time over the operation of the Zodiac and reiterating York and Howe’s briefing on her possible course of action if everything went badly wrong.

  She had only been gone for twenty minutes and already the waiting seemed interminable. Costas decided to call a teleconference with Dillen and Hiebermeyer to occupy Jack’s mind more productively, and the two men went into the navigation room behind Seaquest’s bridge.

  Costas tapped a command and the monitor in front of them came to life, revealing two figures as clearly as if they had been sitting on the opposite side of the table. Jack shifted closer to Costas so their image would be similarly projected. They would miss Katya’s expertise but a teleconference seemed the obvious way to conclude the proceedings. Dillen and Hiebermeyer had stayed on in Alexandria to await news from Seaquest, and Costas had already filled them in on the threat posed by Vultura.

  “Professor. Maurice. Greetings.”

  “Good to see you again, Jack,” Dillen said. “I’d like to start where we left off, with these symbols.”

  At the touch of a key they could call up a set of images that had been scanned in earlier. In the lower right-hand corner of the monitor they were currently viewing Costas’ own triumphant discovery, the remarkable golden disc from the Minoan wreck. The strange symbols on the surface had been digitally enhanced so they could study them more closely.

  Hiebermeyer leaned forward. “You said you’d seen that central device before, Jack.”

  “Yes. And those symbols running round the edge, the little heads and paddles and so on. I suddenly realized where as we were flying out of Alexandria. The Phaistos discs.”

  Costas looked on questioningly as Jack called up an image of two pottery discs, both seemingly identical and covered by a spiralling band of miniature symbols. One symbol looked remarkably like the device on the papyrus and the gold disc. The rest looked otherworldly, especially the little heads with hooked noses and Mohican haircuts.

  “Aztec?” Costas hazarded.

  “Nice try, but no,” Jack replied. “Much closer to home. Minoan Crete.”

  “The disc on the left was found near the palace of Phaistos almost a hundred years ago.” Dillen clicked on the screen as he spoke, the projector flashing up a view of a wide stone forecourt overlooking a plain with snow-capped mountains in the background. After a moment the image reverted to the discs. “It’s clay, about sixteen centimetres across, and the symbols were impressed on both sides. Many are identical, stamped with the same die.”

  Dillen enlarged the right-hand disc. “This one came up with the French excavations last year.”

  “Date?” Hiebermeyer demanded.

  “The palace was abandoned in the sixteenth century BC, following the eruption of Thera. Unlike Knossos, it was never reoccupied. So the discs may have been lost about the same time as your shipwreck.”

  “But they could date earlier,” Jack suggested.

  “Much earlier.” Dillen’s voice had a now-familiar edge of excitement. “Costas, what do you know about thermoluminescence dating?”

  Costas looked perplexed but replied enthusiastically. “If you bury mineral crystals they gradually absorb radioactive isotopes from the surrounding material until they’re at the same level. If you then heat the mineral the trapped electrons are emitted as thermoluminescence.” Costas began to guess where the question was leading. “When you fire pottery it emits stored TL, setting its TL clock back to zero. Bury it and the pottery begins to reabsorb isotopes at a set rate. If you know this rate as well as the TL level of the surrounding sediment you can date the clay by heating it and measuring the TL emission.”

  “How precisely?” Dillen asked.

  “The latest refinements in optically stimulated luminescence allow us to go back half a million years,” Costas replied. “That’s the date for burnt hearth material from the earliest Neanderthal sites in Europe. For kiln-fired pottery, which first appears in the fifth millennium BC in the Near East, combined TL-OSL can date a sherd to within a few hundred years if the conditions are right.”

  Costas had built up a formidable expertise in archaeological science since joining IMU, fuelled by his conviction that most of the questions Jack posed about the distant past would one day be resolved by hard science.

  “The second disc, the one discovered last year, was fired.” Dillen picked up a sheet of paper as he spoke.
“A fragment was sent to the Oxford Thermoluminescence Laboratory for analysis, using a new strontium technique which can fix the date of firing with even greater accuracy. I’ve just had the results.”

  The others looked on expectantly.

  “Give or take a hundred years, that disc was fired in 5500 BC.”

  There was a collective gasp of astonishment.

  “Impossible,” snorted Hiebermeyer.

  “That’s a little earlier than our wreck,” Costas exclaimed.

  “Just four thousand years earlier,” Jack said quietly.

  “Two and a half millennia before the palace at Knossos.” Hiebermeyer was still shaking his head. “Only a few centuries after the first farmers arrived on Crete. And if that’s writing, then it’s the earliest known by two thousand years. Near Eastern cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics don’t appear until the late fourth millennium BC.”

  “It seems incredible,” Dillen replied. “But you’ll soon see why I’m convinced it is true.”

  Jack and Costas watched the screen intently as Dillen loaded a CD-ROM into his laptop and linked it to the multimedia projector. The picture of the pottery discs was replaced by the symbols arranged as a column, each one fronting groups clustered together like words. They could see he had been applying similar techniques of analysis to those he had used to study the Greek script on the papyrus.

  Jack reactivated the teleconference module and they were once again face to face with Dillen and Hiebermeyer two hundred miles away in Alexandria.

  “Those are the symbols from the Phaistos discs,” Jack said.

  “Correct.” Dillen tapped a key and the two discs reappeared, this time in the lower left-hand corner. “The thing that has most baffled scholars is that the discs are virtually identical, except in one crucial respect.” He moved a cursor to highlight various features. “On one side, what I call the obverse, both discs have exactly one hundred and twenty-three symbols. Both are segmented into thirty-one groupings, each comprising anywhere from two to seven symbols. The menu, if you like, is the same, comprising forty-five different symbols. And the frequency is identical. So the Mohican head occurs thirteen times, the marching man six times, the flayed oxhide eleven times, and so on. It’s a similar story on the reverse, except with thirty words and one hundred and eighteen symbols.”