Trojan Odyssey (Dirk Pitt 17)

"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."

"Disturbed?" she said skeptically. "Disturbed by whom?"

As Dirk spoke, he stared apprehensively at the buildings on the island. "It seemed to me the artifacts had been moved about by human hands rather than by tides and shifting sand. It was almost as if they had been stacked on top of one another in a pile that was foreign to nature."

"We'll worry about it tomorrow," Summer said, turning from the magnificent twilight. "I'm starved and thirsty. Get busy on those rum Collinses."

It was after dark when Summer finished heating conch soup and boiling a pair of lobsters that she had caught during her dive. For dessert she served bananas Foster. Then they lay on the deck, stared at the stars and talked until nearly midnight, listening to the water slap lightly against Dear Heart's hull.