The Pharaoh's Secret (NUMA Files 13)

“Then I’d say you’re doing better than normal.”

Joe laughed again and turned toward Michelle. “Show him what we’ve found.”

She waved Kurt over and directed her lights down into the excavated section. There, a long, pointed spike that was the bow ram of the Roman galley was clearly entangled with another type of wood. Where she and Joe had excavated the sand, Kurt could see the broken hull of a second vessel.

“What am I looking at?” Kurt asked.

“That, my friend, is a corvus,” Joe said.

The word meant raven, and the ancient iron spike looked enough like the sharp beak of a bird that Kurt could imagine where the name had come from.

“In case you forgot your history,” Joe continued, “the Romans were poor sailors. Far outclassed by the Carthaginians. But they were better soldiers and they found a way to turn this to their advantage: by ramming their enemies, slamming this iron beak into the boat’s hull and using a swinging bridge to board their opponent’s vessels. With this tactic, they turned every confrontation at sea into a close-quarters battle of hand-to-hand combat.”

“So there are two ships here?”

Joe nodded. “A Roman trireme and a Carthaginian vessel, still held together by the corvus. This is a battle scene from two thousand years ago all but frozen in time.”

Kurt marveled at the discovery. “How did they sink like this?”

“The stress of the collision probably cracked their hulls,” Joe guessed. The Romans must have been unable to release the corvus as their ships foundered. They went down arm in arm, linked together for all eternity.”

“Which means we’re both right,” Kurt said. “Guess you won’t be paying me that dollar after all.”

“A dollar?” This came from Michelle. “You two have been going on and on about this bet for a month all over one measly dollar?”

“It’s really more about bragging rights,” Kurt said.

“Plus, he keeps docking my pay,” Joe said. “So that’s all I can afford to wager.”

“You’re both incorrigible,” she said.

Kurt would have agreed with that statement proudly, but he didn’t get the chance because a different voice came through the intercom system and interrupted him.

A readout on the helmet-mounted display confirmed the transmission was coming in from the Sea Dragon up on the surface. A little padlocked symbol with his name and Joe’s beside it told Kurt the call was being patched through to them only.

“Kurt, this is Gary,” the voice said. “You and Zavala reading me okay?”

Gary Reynolds was the Sea Dragon’s skipper.

“Loud and clear,” Kurt said. “I see you’ve got us on a private channel. Is something wrong?”

“Afraid so. We’ve picked up a distress call. And I’m not sure how to respond.”

“Why is that?” Kurt asked.

“Because the call isn’t coming from a vessel,” Reynolds said. “It’s coming from Lampedusa.”

“From the island?”

Lampedusa was a small island with a population of five thousand. It was Italian territory, but was actually closer to Libya than to the southern tip of Sicily. The Sea Dragon had docked there for one night each week, picking up supplies and refueling, before heading back out to hold station over the wreck site. Even now, there were five members of NUMA onshore, handling the logistics and cataloging the artifacts recovered from the dig.

Joe asked the obvious question: “Why would someone on an island feel the need to broadcast a distress call on a marine channel?”

“No idea,” Reynolds said. “The guys in the radio room were sharp enough to flip on the recorder when they realized what they were hearing. We’ve listened to it several times. It’s a little garbled, but it definitely came from Lampedusa.”

“Can you play it for us?”

“Thought you’d never ask,” Reynolds said. “Stand by.”