Free Crusader Gold by David Gibbins Page A

other two a brief tour of the campus. They had reached the engineering complex just in time to see the door of the main loading bay roll open and a strange contraption appear on a flatbed truck.
    “My latest baby,” a voice yelled out. “Come over and let me show you.”
    They looked into the cavernous interior and saw Costas directing a team of workmen behind the truck, his overalls smeared with a fresh layer of oil and grime. He had excused himself from the meeting at the same time as O’Connor and was now fully engrossed in his work. The hangar was a fantastic jumble of technical projects, some on the drawing board and others clearly at the experimental stage. Through the flash of a welding torch Jack could make out the battered form of the ADSA, the Advanced Deep Sea Anthropod, which had saved him from the wreckage of Seaquest only six months before. Ranged on either side were the Aquapods, the one-man submersibles in which he and Costas had first seen the silt-shrouded walls of Atlantis, their metal carapaces still streaked yellow from the sulphurous waters of the Black Sea.
    “We’re nearly ready to roll,” Costas called out. “A final systems check and that’s it.”
    Jack and Maria wove their way towards him through piles of hardware and semi-finished projects, Jeremy bringing up the rear. Costas put up his hand to order a generator switched off and the unearthly din subsided. He beckoned them over to the contraption on the truck, his face beaming with excitement. “You may have seen something like this in our pictures from the Golden Horn,” he said to Maria and Jeremy. “The ferret, the sub-bottom borer we’re using to dig through the seabed to the medieval layers. I haven’t got a name for this one yet, but it does a similar job. Spot the difference?”
    “Let me take a look.” Jeremy craned forward, peering intently at the forward end of the contraption. He grunted, stooped down to look under the cradle and then straightened up, ignoring the streak of grease he had acquired on his tweed jacket. He pushed his glasses up and squinted at Costas. “It cuts through ice.”
    “Very good.” Costas raised his eyebrows and winked at Jack. “Go on.”
    “It has an electrical element around the rim,” Jeremy said. “I’d guess a superheated element using semiconductor materials, probably in a ceramic matrix. And that box behind looks like a high-energy laser device.”
    “I’m impressed. Pretty good for a medieval historian. You’re in the wrong line of work.”
    “When I applied for my Rhodes fellowship it was either engineering or Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. My school was very conservative.”
    “You drew the short end of the straw.”
    “I disagree,” Maria said. They all laughed and Jeremy looked ruefully at the contraption. Costas slapped an oily hand on Jeremy’s back and turned to Jack.
    “We’re air-freighting it out this evening,” he said, his demeanour now serious. “I had a call from James Macleod a few minutes ago and he said the ice conditions are perfect. Another day or two and the summer melt could make it too risky.
    I’m flying out to Greenland tomorrow morning to oversee the setup. And there’s something else. He mentioned a local, some old guy, who claimed to have seen some old ship’s timbers in the ice. Something to do with a European expedition way back, before the Second World War. Macleod was adamant that you should see the guy, and soon. Apparently he’s on his last legs. I know it’s a bit of a diversion on the trip back to Istanbul, but you might just want to tag along.”
    Back in the office, Jack clicked off his cellphone and swivelled his chair back to face the conference table. After a conversation with Maurice Hiebermeyer and Tom York on Sea Venture, he felt reassured that the excavation in the Golden Horn could carry on for another forty-eight hours without him. The greatest prize, he now knew, might lie elsewhere, in a place they could never have