Free The Last Gospel by David Gibbins Page A

exploration, but before committing others to follow in his wake he needed to be certain that the prize was worth it.
    Directly below, he saw where Pete and Andy had anchored the shotline in the gully where he had found the sounding lead, and from there he saw a wavering line encrusted with algae extending down the slope into the depths. He stared at it, suddenly feeling in a time warp. It was the line he had paid out on his final dive all those years ago, still lying exactly where he had left it, as if the site had been waiting for him, unfinished. Costas had seen it too, and somehow brought himself to a halt before augering into the sea bed. He waited for Jack to reach him, then together they finned slowly side by side over the line until they reached the last plateau, fifty metres deep, the furthest point where amphoras had tumbled from the Roman shipwreck. As they swam over the plateau, a bar-like shape appeared below them in the silt, about two metres long with a rectangular aperture just visible in the centre.
    ‘My old friend.’ Jack tweaked the control on the side of his helmet to get his voice to sound normal. ‘It’s the lead Roman anchor shank I saw on my final dive, and there should be another identical one about fifty metres ahead, on the edge of the plateau. It’s exactly what you’d expect to see from a ship using two anchors to hold offshore, one paid out behind the other. We can use them to take a compass bearing.’
    ‘Roger that.’
    They swam on over the line and soon saw the second shank just as Jack remembered it, wedged in a cleft above a dropoff. From there he could see the line tapering off, its end hanging over a ridge, the deepest he had dared to go on his final dive twenty years before. It was like the end of divers’ safety lines he had followed inside caves, haunting relics of extraordinary human endeavour that beckoned others to surpass them. Without pausing they passed beyond, and dropped down to the base of the rocky cliff where the sea bed became a featureless desert of sand. On the edge Jack saw a belt of corroded machine-gun cartridges, draped over a clip of larger cannon rounds from an anti-aircraft gun. He remembered seeing them before, relics of the Second World War. Costas slowed down, and reached for the dump valve on his buoyancy compensator.
    ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Jack said.
    ‘Just looking,’ Costas said hopefully, then finned away. Beyond them the sand seemed to extend to infinity, a blue-grey desert with no visible horizon. About fifty metres on they swam over a small outcrop of rock, then saw an undulation where the sand rose in a low dune. As they approached it looked more and more unnatural, like some sea creature lurking beneath the sediment, the undulation extending ten metres or more in either direction from a central hump with another ridge running at ninety degrees through it. Costas gave an audible intake of breath. ‘My God, Jack. It’s an aircraft!’
    ‘I was wondering if we’d see one of these,’ Jack murmured. ‘It’s an assault glider, a British Horsa. Look, you can see where the high wings have collapsed over the fuselage. That night in 1943 when the SAS dropped in on the Italians, the British also sent in an airlanding brigade. It was the only major glitch in the whole Sicily invasion, and it was a pretty horrific one. The gliders were released too far offshore against a headwind, and dozens of them never made it. Hundreds of guys drowned. There are going to be bodies in there.’
    ‘That’s one place I definitely don’t want to go,’ Costas said quietly.
    ‘Topside you’d sometimes believe old wars never happened,’ Jack said. ‘Everything’s cleaned up and sanitized, but underwater it’s all here, just below the surface. It’s haunting.’
    ‘Depth seventy-five metres.’ Costas was concentrating hard on his computer, as they finned over the last of the shadowy form in the sand. ‘Not looking too good on the time front,