DEAR HEART.
She was a pretty little sailboat, a masthead sloop with her mainsail and jib going to the top of the mast. Twenty-six feet in length with a nine-foot beam, her draft was only a few inches over four feet. She had three hundred and thirty-one square feet of sail area and a small ten-horsepower auxiliary diesel engine. Her cabin comfortably slept two with a head, shower and a small galley. As Moreau had promised, a Fisher metal detector and a Klein subbottom profiler were mounted and ready for operation in the cockpit. Dirk dropped down a ladder to the deck and caught the bags as they were dropped by Moreau, before carrying them down to the cabin.
"A safe voyage," said Moreau to Summer. "I shall keep my cell phone on my person at all times. Please call if you encounter trouble."
"We shall," said Summer confidently. Then she slipped lithely down the ladder and joined Dirk as he started the little diesel. At his signal, Moreau cast off the lines and stood on the dock, an expression of dire concern on his face as the little boat's diesel engine knocked across the lagoon and out into the sea.
Once they cleared the last buoy, Dirk ran the mainsail and jib up the mast, with Summer at the wheel. The canvas was crimson red against the blue sky. It flapped back and forth until set by the wind. The sail puffed out and the boat began to slip smartly across the growing swells rolling from offshore. Dirk looked along the deck. Everything was scrubbed and bright. Dear Heart looked to be less than a year old, her brass work and chrome gleamed under the sun, and her deck looked well-scrubbed.
She was a sleek and smart sailer, slipping through the water and taking the swells like a cat running across a lawn. A random gust from a passing squall chopped the blue water and flecked the crests of the waves with foam. Then they were out of it and into smooth seas and dry air again. Beyond her bowsprit the sea stretched like a giant carpet.
"How far to Branwyn?" asked Summer, deftly heeling Dear Heart over on her beam to gain another knot in speed as the water seethed past her lee rail.
"About twenty-three miles," replied Dirk. "Put her on a heading due south. No need for a detailed course. The island has a distinctive light tower on the eastern end."
Dirk removed his shirt and trimmed the sail in his shorts. Summer had slipped off her dress and changed into a green bikini with floral designs. Her hands were poised and steady on the wheel and she steered the boat over the crests and troughs of the waves with a deft touch, keeping one eye on the islands looming on the horizon and the other on the compass.
Her flowing red hair blew free behind her head and she had the look of a sailor who was going on a day trip from Newport Beach to Catalina Island. After an hour, she lifted a pair of binoculars to her eyes with one hand and stared into the distance. "I think I see the light tower," she said, pointing.
Dirk followed her extended arm and finger. He could not quite make out the tower, but a smudge across the horizon line soon became the low shape of an island. "That will be Branwyn. Steer straight toward it. The harbor lies on her south shore."
A school of flying fish burst from the water in front of the bow and flashed away in all directions. Some leaped alongside the boat as if hoping for food to be thrown over. Then they were replaced by five dolphins, who cavorted around the boat like clowns who wanted applause.
Now the island showed distinctly only three miles distant. The light tower was clearly visible, as was the three-story house on the nearest beach. Dirk picked up the binoculars and peered at the house. No human was visible and the windows looked shuttered. There was a dock running from a sandy beach, but no boat was moored alongside.
They changed places. Dirk took the wheel while Summer went up to the bow, hung on to the rigging and gazed at the island. It was ugly, as islands went. No thick underbrush filled with tropical flowers, no palm trees arched over the beach. Most islands have their own smell. The aroma of moldy vegetation, tropical plants and the scent of its people and their cooking, the pungent smell of smoke from burned fields mixed with that of copra and coconut oil. This island had an essence of death about it, as if it reeked of evil. Her ears picked up the distant rumble of surf as it struck a reef surrounding a lagoon in front of the house. Now she could see a low building on the end of a long runway that must have served as a hangar. But like Dirk, she saw no sign of life. Branwyn was like an abandoned graveyard.
Dirk kept well off the reef while keeping a wary eye over the side at the water that was as clear as water in a bathroom sink. The bottom came into view, a smooth sandy bottom clear of coral. He glanced at the echo sounder every few seconds to make sure the seabed didn't take a sudden rise toward the keel. With a firm hand on the wheel, he steered around the island until he came up on the southern end. He consulted his chart and made a slight course change before he turned and entered the channel as determined by the echo sounder. The rolling waves of the sea turned choppy here, as he sailed through a hundred-yard gap in the outer reef.
It was a tricky entrance. The current was pushing him to port. He thought that Odysseus and his crews must have found entering the harbor duck soup for mariners who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Their advantage in navigating unruly waters was that they could throw out their oars and row. Dirk could have started the engine, but like a pilot with an aircraft that could land by autopilot, he preferred to use his own skills and take her in himself.
Once through the straits, the water calmed and he watched the bottom slowly pass under the keel. He turned the wheel back over to Summer and dropped the sails. Then he started the little diesel and began inspecting the interior of the harbor.
It was small, no more than half a mile in length and half again as much in width. While Summer leaned over the side and inspected the bottom for any unusual anomalies, he leisurely cruised back and forth across the harbor, trying to get a feel for the current and imagining himself on the deck of one of Odysseus' ships, trying to predict where the ancient mariners might have anchored so many centuries ago.
Finally, he settled in an area that was sheltered from the prevailing winds by a rise on the island, a sandy mound that rose nearly a hundred feet above the shoreline. He shut off the engine and dropped the bow anchor by flicking a switch in the cockpit that lowered it by a winch.
"This looks about as good a place as any to go over the side and inspect the bottom."
"It looks flat as a dining room floor," said Summer. "I saw no humps or contours. It stands to reason that wood from a Celtic shipwreck would have rotted away thousands of years ago. Any pieces that survived have to be buried."
"Let's dive. I'll test the consistency of the sand and silt. You swim around and do a visual inspection."
After they put on their dive gear, Dirk checked the anchor to be sure it was snug on the bottom and wouldn't break loose and allow the boat to drift away. Not that it would go far in the harbor. Without the need for wet suits to protect their bodies from cold water temperatures or sharp coral, they went over the side in ten feet of water in only their bathing suits. The water was almost as clear as glass. Visibility was nearly two hundred feet, the temperature warm in the middle eighties, perfect diving conditions.
Forty minutes later, Dirk climbed up the boarding ladder to the deck and removed his air tank and weight belt. He had run a metal probe beneath the surface of the sand, checking for a harder clay layer beneath but found fifteen feet of soft sand before striking bedrock. He sat there for a few minutes, watching Summer's air bubbles travel around the boat. Soon, she was climbing aboard and paused on the boarding ladder to carefully set a coral-encrusted object on the deck. Then she stood with water trickling down her body onto the teak deck as she slipped out of her dive gear.
"What have you got?" asked Dirk.
"I don't know, but it feels too heavy for a rock. I found it a hundred yards offshore, protruding out of the sand."
Dirk scanned the shoreline, still seemingly deserted. He had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if they were being watched.
He picked up the
object and gently chipped away the encrustation with his dive knife. Soon the object took on the look of a bird with outstretched wings.
"Looks like an eagle or swan," he said. Then the tip of his knife cut a small scratch that showed silver. "The reason it's heavy is because it's cast out of lead."
Summer took it in her hands and stared at the wings and the beaked head that was turned to the right. "Could it be ancient Celt?"
"The fact that it's sculpted out of lead is a good sign. Dr. Chisholm told me that, besides tin, one of the main attractions of Cornwall was its lead mines. Did you mark the site where you found it?"
She nodded. "I left my probe in the sand with a little orange flag on it."
"How far out?"
"About fifty feet in that direction," she said, pointing.
"Okay, before we dredge or probe with the water jet, we'll run over your site with the metal detector. The side-scan sonar won't be of much use if all the ship wreckage is buried."
"Maybe we should have had Rudi send a magnetometer."
Dirk smiled. "A magnetometer detects the magnetic field of iron or steel. Odysseus sailed long before the Iron Age appeared. A metal detector will read iron besides most other metals, including gold and bronze."
Summer turned on the Fisher Pulse 10 detector as Dirk connected the cable from the meter and audio readouts to the tow fish encasing the sensor. Then he lowered the tow fish over the side, leaving just enough cable so that it wouldn't drag on the bottom at slow surveying speed. His final task was to raise the anchor.
"Ready?" he asked.
"All set," answered Summer.
Turning over the diesel engine, Dirk began making closely spaced survey lines over the target area, mowing the lawn until they struck an anomaly. After only fifteen minutes, the needle on the meter began to zig and zag in unison with an increased buzzing sound over Summer's earphones.
"We're coming up on something," she announced.
Then came a slight zip in sound and a brief swing of the needle as they passed over Summer's metal probe that was sticking out of the bottom.
"Get a good reading?" asked Dirk.
Summer was about to answer in the negative when the needle began wildly sweeping back and forth, indicating a metallic object or objects passing under the keel. "We have a pretty good mass down there. What direction are we running?"
"East to west," replied Dirk, marking the target coordinates from his global positioning instrument.
"Run over the site again, but this time from north to south."
Dirk did as he was told, passing beyond the target for a hundred yards before swinging Dear Heart on a ninety-degree turn heading north to south. Again the meter and audio sound went wild. Summer penciled the meter readings in a notebook and looked up at Dirk standing at the wheel.
"The target is linear, about fifty feet in length with a broad dipolar signature. It looks to have a minimal but dispersed mass, similar to what you'd expect from a broken-up sailing vessel."
"It seems to be in the expected range of an old wreck. We'd better check it out."
"How deep is the water?"
"Only ten feet."
Dirk eased the boat around again, shut down the engine and let the Dear Heart drift with the current. When the GPS numbers began to match those of the anomaly, he dropped the anchor. Then he fired up the compressor.
They put on their dive gear and dropped into the water from opposite sides of the boat. Dirk turned the valve for the water jet and pushed it into the sand in the manner of kids pushing the nozzle of a hose into the ground to make a hole. After five attempts and feeling nothing solid, he suddenly felt the tip of the probe strike a hard object three feet beneath the surface of the sandy bottom. Several more probes later and he had laid out a grid, with Summer's metal shaft sticking up on an outside corner.
"Something down there, all right," he said, spitting out his mouthpiece as they surfaced. "About the right size for an ancient ship."
"Could be anything," said Summer sensibly, "from the wreck of an old fishing boat to trash dumped off a barge."
"We'll know as soon as we dig a hole with the induction dredge."
They swam back to the boat, attached the hose to the dredge and dropped it into the water. Dirk volunteered for the dirty job of excavation while Summer stayed aboard to watch the compressor.
He pulled the hose after him that was attached to a metal pipe that sucked the sand from the bottom and shot it out of a second hose that he laid several feet away to scatter the muck. The dredge acted like a vacuum cleaner as it burrowed into the bottom. The sand was soft, and in less than twenty minutes he had dug a crater four feet across and three feet deep. Then at slightly less than four feet he uncovered a round object, which he identified as an ancient terra-cotta oil jug, like one Dr. Boyd showed in photos during the conference at NUMA. He very carefully sucked the sand away from it until he could lift and set it outside the crater. Then he returned to his work.
Next came a terra-cotta drinking cup. Then two more. These were followed by the hilt and badly eroded blade of a sword. He was about to quit and bring his trove to the surface, when he removed the overburden from a round object in the shape of a dome, with two protrusions sprouting from it. As soon as he'd uncovered fifty percent of it, his heartbeat abruptly increased from sixty beats to a hundred. He recognized what Homer had described in his works as a Bronze Age helmet with horns.
Dirk finished removing the ancient artifact from its resting place of over three thousand years and gently laid it in the yellow sand beside the other discoveries. Standing in the crater amid the swirling sand and working the dredge was tiring work. He had been down nearly fifty minutes and found what he came for, evidence that Odysseus' fleet had come to grief in the West Indies and not the Mediterranean. His air was about gone, and though he could have sucked the air tank dry and easily reached the surface only ten feet away by exhaling a single breath, it was time to take a break. The next step was to bring the artifacts safely aboard Dear Heart. Holding the helmet as though it was a newborn baby, he ascended.
Summer was waiting at the boarding ladder to take his weight belt and air tank. He lifted the helmet out of the water and carefully handed it to her. "Take it," he said. "But treat it gently. It's badly eroded." Then, before she could comment, he jackknifed and dove to retrieve the other artifacts.
As he climbed on the boat, Summer had emptied their ice chest of drinks and was immersing the artifacts in salt water to preserve them. "Cool," she repeated three times. "I can't believe what I'm seeing. A helmet, an honest-to-goodness ancient bronze helmet."
"We were exceedingly lucky," said Dirk, "to find them so early in the game."
"Then these are from Odysseus' fleet."
"We won't know for sure until experts like Dr. Boyd and Dr. Chisholm can make an identification. Fortunately, they were buried in the silt, which preserved them all these years."
After a light lunch and relaxing for another hour, while Summer gently cleaned some of the outer layers of marine concretion without damaging the artifacts, Dirk went back down to operate the dredge.
This trip he found four copper ingots and one ingot of tin. They were oddly shaped with concave edges, a fair indication that they came from the Bronze Age. Next he uncovered a stone hammer. At four and a half feet, he struck fragmentary wooden planks and beams. One section of beam measured two feet long by five inches thick. Maybe, just maybe, Dirk thought, a dendrochronology lab would be able to date the growth rings from the tree it was cut from. By the time he carried the artifacts to the surface and hauled in the dredge, it was late in the afternoon.
He found Summer gazing at a magnificent sunset with clouds painted red-orange from the enlarged ball of the sun as it fell toward the horizon. She helped him off with his gear. "I'll fix dinner if you'll open a bottle of wine."
"How about a little cocktail to celebrate?" Dirk said, smiling. "I bought a bottle of good Guadeloupe rum at the hotel. We have ginger ale
, I'll make rum collinses."
"They'll have to be room temperature. I threw out the ice from the chest when you brought aboard the first artifacts so I could use it as a preservation tank."
"Now that we have a productive site with artifacts," said Dirk, "I think that tomorrow we'll search and survey for the other ships in Odysseus' fleet."
Summer looked wistfully at the water that was turning to a dark blue as the sun vanished into the sea. "I wonder how much treasure is down there."
"There may not be any."
She saw the doubt in his eyes. "What makes you say that?"
"I can't be certain, but I believe the site I worked had been disturbed."