He nodded. “I know,” he calmly agreed. “Which is why I’d much prefer if you presented it to the world.”
Tess felt the blood drain from her face. She stared at him, taken aback by his suggestion. “Me…?”
“Of course. After all, it’s as much your discovery as it is mine, and, as you said, given that my recent behavior hasn’t been exactly”—he paused, searching for the most appropriate term—“praiseworthy…”
Before she could formulate an answer, she heard the big ship’s engines wind down and felt it suddenly slow to a crawl before turning into the breeze. She spotted Rassoulis emerging from the bridge and, in the swirling fog of her mind, she heard him calling out to them. Vance kept his eyes locked on her for a moment before turning to the captain, who was gesturing excitedly for them to join him and yelling what she thought sounded like, “We’ve got something.”
Chapter 73
Standing quietly at the rear of the bridge, Reilly watched as De Angelis and the Karadeniz’s skipper, a stocky man by the name of Karakas who had dense black hair and a bushy mustache, leaned over the patrol boat’s radar display and selected their next target.
There was no shortage of them. The dark screen was lit up with dozens of green blips. Some of them had small, digital alphanumeric codes tagged on, which indicated a ship with a modern transponder. Those were easier to identify and rule out, using Coast Guard and shipping databases, but they were few and far between. Overwhelmingly, the contacts on the screen were just anonymous blips coming from the hundreds of fishing boats and sailing craft that crowded this very popular strip of coastline. Figuring out which one of them was carrying Vance and Tess, Reilly knew, wouldn’t be easy.
This was his sixth day at sea, which, as far as Reilly was concerned, was already plenty. It had become quickly obvious to him that he wasn’t a sea dog, not by a long shot, but at least the sea had been reasonably well behaved since they’d started their search and, mercifully, the nights were spent on dry land. Each day, they would sail out of Marmaris at the break of dawn and work their way up and down the coastline from the Gulf of Hisaronu to the area south of the Twelve Islands. The Karadeniz, a SAR-33 class patrol boat, gleaming white with a wide, slanted red stripe on its hull next to the words Sahil Gvenlik in bold, unmissable letters—the Turkish Coast Guard’s official name—was lightning quick and reasonably comfortable and was able to cover a surprisingly large patch of sea over the course of a day. Other boats based at Fethiye and Antalya were scouring the waters further east. Agusta A-109 helicopters were also involved, performing visual sweeps at low altitude and alerting the speedboats to promising sightings.
The coordination between the various air, sea, and land components of the search was almost flawless; the Turkish Coast Guard had extensive experience in patrolling these busy waters. Relations between Greece and Turkey were always less than cordial, and the close proximity of the former’s Dodecanese islands was constantly a source of fishing and tourism disputes. In addition, the narrow strip of sea separating the two countries was favored by human traffickers of desperate migrants trying to reach Greece and the rest of the European Union from the still non-EU Turkey. Still, there was a lot of sea to cover, and, with most of the traffic consisting of innocuous pleasure craft without anyone on radio watch, sifting through them was proving to be a laborious, grueling endeavor.
As the radar operator pored over some charts next to his screen and the radioman compared notes with the crew of one of the helicopters, Reilly stepped away from the screen and looked out the windshield of the Karadeniz. He was surprised to see some nasty weather lying to the south. A billowing wall of dark clouds lay just above the horizon, separated by a thin strip of bright yellowish light. It looked somewhat unreal.
He could almost feel Tess’s presence, and, knowing that she was out there somewhere, frustratingly within reach and yet beyond it at the same time, grated at him. He wondered where she was, and what she was doing at that very moment. Had she and Vance found the Falcon Temple already? Were they already on their way to…where? What would they do with “it” if they found it? How would they announce their find to the world? He’d thought a lot about what he would tell her when he did catch up with her, but, surprisingly, the initial anger he had felt at being abandoned had long since abated. Tess had her reasons. He didn’t agree with them, but her ambition was an intrinsic part of her and helped make her what she was.
He looked across the cockpit and out the opposite side of the boat, and what he saw unsettled him. Far to the north of their position, the sky was also darkening ominously. The sea had taken on a gray, marbled look, and whitecaps littered the distant swell. He noticed the helmsman glance across to another man on the bridge, who Reilly assumed was the first officer, and indicate the phenomenon with a nod of the head. They seemed to be sandwiched between two opposite fronts of bad weather. The storms appeared to be moving in tandem, converging on them. Again, Reilly looked at the helmsman who now appeared a bit ruffled, as did the first officer, who approached Karakas and was clearly discussing it with him.
The skipper consulted the weather radar and the barometer and exchanged a few words with the two officers. Reilly glanced over at De Angelis, who picked up on it and translated for him.
“I think we might have to head back earlier than planned today. We seem to have not one, but two rather nasty weather fronts, both of them heading our way and fast.” The monsignor looked at Reilly uncertainly, then arched an eyebrow. “Sound familiar?”
Reilly had already made the association before De Angelis had mentioned it. It was uncomfortably close to what Aimard had described in his letter. He noticed that Plunkett, who was out smoking a cigarette on deck, was eyeing the gathering storm with some concern. Turning to the cockpit, he saw that the two officers he’d been watching were now intent on a batch of dials and monitors. This and their frequent glances toward the converging banks of dark clouds told Reilly that the storms were making both men uneasy. Just then, the radar operator called out to the skipper and uttered something in Turkish. Karakas stepped over to the console, as did De Angelis. Reilly tore his eyes away from the storm front and joined them.
According to the skipper’s clipped translation, the radar operator was walking them through a chart onto which he had plotted the movements of some vessels he had been tracking. He was particularly interested in one of the ships, which had a curious navigation pattern. It had spent a noticeable time sailing up and down a narrow corridor of sea. This, in itself, wasn’t unusual. It could easily be a fishing boat trawling an area favored by its captain. Several other blips behaved in the exact same way. But the radar operator noted that, whereas over the last couple of days a contact, which he believed could well be the same ship, would spend a couple of hours navigating up and down this particular patch of sea before heading off and trawling elsewhere, the vessel he was now watching had been stationary for the last two hours. Furthermore, of the four vessels in the area, three were now moving out, presumably because they’d spotted the approaching storms. The fourth—the contact in question—wasn’t budging.
Reilly leaned in for a closer look. He could see that the three other contacts on the screen had indeed altered course. Two of them were heading for the Turkish mainland, the third toward the Greek island of Rhodes.
De Angelis’s brow furrowed as he absorbed the information. “It’s them,” he said with chilling assurance as Plunkett came indoors. “And if they’re not moving, it’s because they’ve found what they’re looking for.” He turned to Karakas, his eyes hardening. “How far are they?”
Karakas scanned the screen with expert eyes. “About forty nautical miles. In this sea, I’d say two—two and a half hours away, maybe. But it’s going to get worse. We might have to turn back before we get to them. The barometer readings are falling very quickly, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
De Angelis didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t care. Send in a chopper to have a closer look and get us ove
r there as fast as you can.”
Chapter 74
The camera glided through the forbidding darkness, past streaming galaxies of plankton that lit up the screen before quickly sailing out of the glare of its spotlight.
The images from the ROV unfurled before a breathless audience in the control room of the Savarona, a cramped space situated behind the vessel’s bridge. Vance and Tess were standing, leaning over the shoulders of Rassoulis and two technicians who were seated before a small bank of monitors. To the left of the monitor showing the images from Dori’s camera, a smaller GPS positioning monitor displayed the current location of the ship as it circled and doubled back on its course, trying to hold its position against a surprisingly strong current. A smaller screen on the right showed a computerized representation of the sonar scan, a big circle with concentric bands of blue, green, and yellow; another, a pixeled compass, showed their heading as just off due south. But no one was giving those monitors more than a fleeting, occasional glance. Their eyes were all riveted onto the central monitor, the one showing the images from the ROV’s camera. They watched in rapt silence as the bottom came rushing up, the pixeled reading in the corner of the screen quickly closing in on the 173 meters that the depth sounder of the mother ship was showing.
At 168 meters, the starry flecks grew thicker. At 171 meters, a couple of jerking crayfish scurried out of the light, and then, at 173 meters, the screen was suddenly flooded by a silent burst of yellow light. The ROV had landed.
Dori’s highly protective guardian, a Corsican engineer by the name of Pierre Attal, was locked in concentration as he used a joystick and a small keyboard to manipulate his robotic ward. He reached for a small trackball at the edge of the keyboard and, responding to his fingers’ orders, the camera rotated on itself, panning across the seabed. Like the images from a Mars probe, the pictures showed an eerie, inviolate world. All around the robotic visitor was nothing but a flat expanse of sand that disappeared into a stygian darkness.
Tess’s skin was tingling with guarded anticipation. She couldn’t help but feel excited, although she knew they weren’t necessarily there yet, not by any means. The low-frequency, side-scan sonar only provided the rough position of any promising target; the ROV then had to be deployed, its high-frequency sonar allowing the eventual pinpointing and examination of those sites. She knew the ocean floor underneath the Savarona dropped as deep as 250 meters in places and was covered with scattered coral reefs, many the size they’d expect the Falcon Temple to be. The sonar scans weren’t enough to distinguish the wreck from these natural mounds, which was where the magnetometers came into play. Their readings would help detect the wreck’s residual iron, and, although they were carefully calibrated—Rassoulis and his team had calculated that after seven hundred years of saltwater corrosion, there would be, at most, a thousand pounds of iron left in the Falcon Temple’s remains—they still carried the risk of triggering false alarms due to natural pockets of geomagnetism or, more commonly, from more recent wrecks.
She watched as the procedure she had witnessed twice in recent days unfurled again. Using the most minute of tugs on the joystick, Attal confidently guided the ROV across the seafloor. Every minute or so, he would set it down in another cloudburst of sand. He would then hit a button that would cause its pinger to initiate a 360-degree sweep of its immediate surroundings. The team would carefully study the resulting scan before Attal would be back at the controls, firing the small robot’s hydraulic thrusters and propelling it forward on its silent quest.
Attal had repeated the exercise over half a dozen times before an inchoate patch appeared in the corner of the screen. Guiding the ROV to the spot, he initiated another sonar scan. The screen took a couple of seconds to record the results before Tess saw the patch coalesce into an oblong pinkish shape, beckoning to her from its blue surroundings.
Tess glanced at Vance, who met her eyes calmly.
Without looking up at them, Rassoulis said to Attal, “Let’s get a closer look.”
The ROV was on the move again, skimming the bottom of the seafloor like an undersea hovercraft as Attal guided it expertly to its target. At the next ping, the pink shape grew more distinct along its edges.
“What do you think?” Vance asked.
Rassoulis glanced up at Vance and at Tess. “The magnetometer reading’s a bit high, but…” He pointed a finger at the image on the scan. “You see how it’s squared off at this end and pinched in over here at the other end?” He raised a hopeful eyebrow. “It doesn’t look like a rock to me.”
The room fell silent as the ROV moved in. Tess’s eyes were locked on the screen as the camera floated over a cloud of sea plants that swayed almost imperceptibly in the desolate waters. As it dropped back down and hugged the sand again, Tess felt her pulse quicken. At the edge of the ROV’s beam, something was coming into view. Its edges were too angular, its curves too regular. It looked man-made.
Within seconds, the unmistakable remains of a ship became discernible. The robot banked over the site, revealing the skeleton of a ship, its wooden ribs hollowed out by teredo worms.
Tess thought she spotted something. She pointed excitedly at the corner of the screen. “What’s that? Can you get a tighter shot of that?”
Attal guided his robot as directed. Tess leaned in for a better look. In the bright glow of its spotlights, she could make out something rounded, barrel-like. It looked like it was made of rusted metal. It was hard to tell the relative scale of the objects on the screen, and, for a moment, she wondered if what she was seeing was a cannon. The thought triggered a sudden ripple of concern inside her—she knew a ship from the late Crusades wouldn’t have been carrying one. But as the ROV swung closer, the curved metallic shape appeared different. It looked flatter and wider. From the corner of her eye, Tess saw an unhappy grimace break across Rassoulis’s face.
“That’s steel plating,” he said, shrugging. She knew what he meant before he said it. “It’s not the Falcon.”
The ROV banked around it, showing it from another angle. Attal nodded in grim confirmation. “And look, over here. That’s paint.” He looked up at Tess and shook his head with dismay. As the robot nosed around the sunken vessel’s hull, it was pretty clear that what they had found were the remains of a far more recent ship.
“Mid-nineteenth century,” Rassoulis confirmed. “Sorry.” He shot a glance out the window. The sea was getting increasingly restless, and dark-bellied clouds were rolling in from two fronts with alarming speed. “We’d better get out of here and head back anyway. This doesn’t look good.” He turned to Attal. “Bring Dori up. We’re done here.”
Tess nodded slowly, heaving a dejected sigh. She was about to turn and leave the room when something at the edge of the screen caught her eye. She felt a sudden shiver of excitement and stared at it, wide-eyed, before jabbing a finger at the monitor’s left side. “What’s this? Right here? You see that?”
Rassoulis craned his neck in, staring intently at the screen while Attal maneuvered the robot toward the spot Tess had pointed out. Peering between the two men, Tess studied the screen intently. At the edge of the ROV’s frail light, a protrusion was coming into view. It looked like a leaning tree stump, rising out of a small mound. As the robot edged nearer, she could see that the mound was composed of what appeared to be spars, some of them trailing strands of seaweed, but which her imagination hoped were actually remnants of rigging. Some of the pieces were curved, like the ribs of an ancient carcass. Centuries of marine growth covered the ghostly remains.
Her heart was racing. It had to be a ship. Another one, an older one, partially obscured by the more recent wreck lying on top of it.
The ROV moved in closer, gliding over the disintegrating, coral-encrusted wreckage, its lights bathing the protrusion in their whitish glow.
Tess suddenly felt the air being sucked out of the room around her.
There, basking in the otherworldly glare of the spotlight and jutting out of the ocean floor i
n fierce defiance, stood the falcon figurehead.
Chapter 75
In the heaving wheelhouse, Rassoulis, Vance, and Tess stared out with growing concern at the approaching storm fronts. The wind had climbed to thirty knots, and the swell around the Savarona had grown into breaking waves, the churning water now matching the roiling black clouds in their threat.
Below the bridge, a small crane was settling the ROV down onto the main deck. Attal and two other crewmen stood there, braving the weather as they waited to fasten it down.
Tess pulled the windblown hair out of her face. “Shouldn’t we be heading back?” she asked Rassoulis.
Vance jumped in, unhesitant. “Nonsense. It’s not that bad. I’m sure we have time to send the ROV down for one more look,” he said, smiling assertively to Rassoulis. “Don’t you agree?”
Tess watched the captain as he studied the bruised, angry skies bearing down on them. To their south, lightning tore at the clouds, and, even from this distance, they could see that thick veils of rain were now sweeping across the sea. “I don’t like it. One front we can handle, but two…We can slip through them if we leave now.” He turned to Vance. “Don’t worry. Storms out here don’t last too long, and our GPS locator’s accurate to within a meter. We’ll come back once it’s passed, probably by morning.”
Vance scowled inwardly. “I’d really rather not leave here without something,” he said calmly. “The falcon figurehead, for instance. Surely, we have time to recover that before we have to get out of here, don’t we?” From Rassoulis’s concerned frown, it was clear he wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea. “I’m just worried that the storm will last longer than you expect,” Vance pressed on, “and then, what with your other charter already booked, it could be months before we can get back and who knows what can happen in the meantime.”