Treasure (Dirk Pitt 9)

"Take a few meters of tape and get out," said Giordino. "You've accomplished enough."

"What about Commander Knight?"

"Hold tight, I'll put him on."

Knight's voice came over the earphones. "Dirk?"

"Go ahead, Byron."

"Are you one hundred percent certain we've got a thousand-year-old relic in pristine condition?"

"All indications look solid."

"I'll need something tangible if I'm to convince Atlantic Command to keep us on station another forty-eight hours."

"Stand by and I'll seal it with a kiss."

"An identifiable antiquity will suffice," Knight said dourly.

Pitt threw a wave and faded from view.

He did not enter the wreck immediately. How long he floated motionless outside the jagged opening he couldn't be sure. Probably about one minute, certainly no longer then two. Why he hesitated, he didn't know.

Maybe he was waiting for an invitation from a skeletal hand beckoning from within, maybe he was afraid of finding nothing more than debris from an eighty-year-old Icelandic fishing schooner, or maybe he was just leery of entering what might be a tomb.

Finally he lowered his head, tightened his shoulders and cautiously kicked his fins.

The black unknown opened up and he swam in.

Once Pitt squeezed inside, he paused and hung motionless, slowly settling on his knees, listening to his pounding heart and his breath escaping from the exhaust valve, waiting until his eyes eventually became accustomed to the fluid gloom.

He didn't know what he'd expected to find: what he found was an array of terra-cotta jars, pitchers, cups and plates neatly stacked in shelves set in the bulkheads. One was a large copper pot he had touched when groping through the hull; its walls had turned a deep patina green.

At first he thought his knees were resting on the hard surface of the deck. He felt about with his hands and discovered he was kneeling on the tiled surface of a hearth. He glanced up and saw his bubbles rise up and spread in a wavering cover. He stood and surfaced into clear air, his head and shoulders having risen above the water level of the fjord,

"I'm inside the ship's galley," he notified the spellbound party on the ice. "The upper half is dry. Camera is rolling."

"Acknowledged," Giordino said briefly. Pitt used the next few minutes to video-record the galley's interior above and below the water level, while keeping a running dialogue on the inventory. He found an open cupboard stocked with several elegant glass vessels, He lifted one and peered inside. It held coins. He picked one out, rubbed away the algae with his gloved fingers, and shot tape with one hand. The coin's surface revealed a golden color.

A sense of awe and apprehension flooded over Pitt. He looked quickly around as if expecting a ghostly crew, or at least their skeletal apparitions, to come bursting through the hatchway to accuse him of theft. Only there was no crew. He was alone and touching objects that belonged to men who had walked the same deck, prepared food and eaten here-men who had been dead for sixteen centuries.

He began to wonder what had happened to them. How had they come to be in the frozen north when there were no records of such a historic voyage? They must have died of exposure, but where did their bodies lie?

"You'd better come up," said Giordino. "You've been down almost thirty minutes."

"Not yet," replied Pitt. Thirty minutes, he thought. It seemed more like five. Time was slipping away from him. The cold was beginning to affect his brain. He dropped the coin back in the glass vessel and continued his inspection.

The galley's ceiling rose half a meter above the main deck overhead, and small arched windows that normally allowed ventilation were battened down on the upper side of the forward bulkhead. Pitt pried one partially open only to confront a solid wall of ice.

He made a rough measurement and found the water level was deeper toward the aft end of the galley, Pitt took this to indicate that the bow and central section of the hull were aground on the raised slope of the ice-buried shoreline.

"Come up with anything else?" Giordino inquired with burning curiosity.

"Like what?"

"Remains of the crew?"

"Sorry, no bones to be seen." Pitt ducked under the water and scanned the deck to make certain. It was free and clean of litter.