Crusader Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

dig through before we’re anywhere near the target layer. And we’ve only got twenty minutes before Sea Venture has to shift position.”
    Jack pursed his lips in shared concern. This project was like no other they had worked on, a constant game of cat and mouse in one of the most overcrowded waterways on the planet. They had a six-hour window each day authorised by the port authorities, but even so they had to shift repeatedly to let a ferry or cargo vessel past, some with draughts so deep their screws churned up the bottom sediment. Jack had every confidence in Tom York’s ability to troubleshoot the navigation, and Sea Venture’s dynamic positioning system meant that she could reacquire precise co-ordinates with ease. But there was no protection for the excavation on the seabed, nor, more important for Costas, any guarantee that his prize creation would not become enmired forever with all the other detritus of history.
    Hiebermeyer sensed the tension and persisted with Jack. “So what’s this childhood dream of yours?”
    Jack took a deep breath, nodded and beckoned Hiebermeyer over to a computer console on the far side of the room. It was a story he had told a hundred times before, to the crew, to the press, in his repeated attempts to gain backing for the project from the IMU board of directors and the Turkish authorities, but it never failed to send a shiver of excitement up his spine.
    “The Great Siege of 1453 was one of the defining moments in history,” Jack began. “The death knell of the biggest empire the world had ever seen, the event that gave Islam a permanent foothold in Europe. But for the city of Constantinople a far more calamitous event took place two and a half centuries earlier. Desecration and rape on a colossal scale, a horrendous atrocity even by medieval standards. And the perpetrators were not infidels but Christians, Crusaders of the Holy Cross, no less.”
    “The Crusades,” Hiebermeyer said. “Of course.”
    “The time they didn’t quite make it to the Holy Land.”
    “Remember what Professor Dillen drummed into us at Cambridge,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “That the greatest crimes against Christendom have always been caused by Christians themselves.” The two men had been contemporaries as undergraduates, and when Jack had returned to complete his doctorate after a stint in the Royal Navy they had studied early Christian and Jewish history together under their famous mentor.
    “The date was 1204,” Jack continued. “Pope Innocent III had called for a fourth Crusade, yet another doomed expedition to free Jerusalem from the infidel. How the noble knights of the Crusade came to be diverted from their cause to sack the greatest treasure-house of Eastern Christianity is one of the most appalling sagas in history.”
    The small screen in front of them suddenly flashed up an image recognisable the world over, four splendidly wrought horses in gilded copper standing together in front of an ornate architectural backdrop.
    “The Horses of St. Mark’s,” Hiebermeyer said.
    “A few tourists would drop their cameras if they knew the truth about how these sculptures reached Venice.” Jack was in full stride now, his words tinged with anger. “The leaders of the Crusade needed someone to ship the knights and their equipment across the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. And who better than the Venetians, the greatest maritime power of the day? But the Venetians had other ideas up their sleeves. The Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople had begun to encroach on territory near Venice in the Adriatic Sea, and the Venetians didn’t like it. Venetian merchants in Constantinople had been murdered. The Venetian doge Dandolo had been imprisoned and blinded by the Byzantines years before and was secretly bent on revenge. Then the Crusaders proved unable to come up with the cash for their passage after they had embarked, which virtually enslaved them to the Venetians. Add to that a claimant to