Crusader Gold Read Online Free PDF Page B

Hiebermeyer asked haltingly.
    Jack remained silent.
    “My God.” Hiebermeyer’s German accent grew more pronounced, and his voice wavered. “The Jewish treasures of the Tabernacle. Vespasian had them consigned to the Temple of Peace, never to be paraded again. They passed into legend.” His voice became a whisper. “Could they have been secretly shipped to Constantinople before Rome fell?”
    “The thought had occurred to me,” Jack replied quietly.
    Hiebermeyer took off his little round glasses and mopped his forehead. “The sacred vessels of the inner sanctum. The golden table. The menorah.” The last word was a hoarse gasp. “Do you have any idea what we could be getting into?”
    “Yes,” said Jack.
    “We’re not just talking fabulous treasures here. We’re talking major present-day ramifications. The menorah is the symbol of the modern state of Israel. Any hint that we’re on to the lost treasure of the Jewish Temple and the result could be explosive. Literally.”
    “It doesn’t go beyond these four walls,” Jack said firmly.
    At that moment there was a whoop and a joyful string of expletives from the other console. Jack and Hiebermeyer quickly returned to their positions behind Costas, and the ship’s second officer appeared beside them. Jack glanced curiously at the man and then reverted to the screen. They could immediately see why Costas was jubilant. The screen had transformed into a fantastic multicoloured image, the lines and contours of the scan as sharp as a 3-D
    computer drawing. In the centre were unmistakable signs of human agency, a dark twisted mass embedded in the sediment of the sea floor. It was an immense metal link, at least a metre long, a figure-eight shape crudely welded at the waist. A second link was looped through it and extended off-screen to the right, but the loop to the left was scarred and buckled where the adjoining link had sheared off.
    “Fantastic!” Jack clapped Costas on the back. He was overjoyed, his mind already racing forward to the next stage of the search, but his eyes remained glued on the screen as the camera panned forward to the edge of the exposed metal. Wedged into the final loop was a fragmentary mass of wood, evidently ship’s timbers, a section of overlapping hull strakes with lines of regularly spaced dark protrusions where the iron rivets had been preserved for more than eight hundred years in the anaerobic ooze. Jack and Hiebermeyer both gasped as they realised what was woven through the link, a mass of white that looked like denuded branches from a tree. It was a crushed human skeleton, its arms pinned at grotesque angles through the metal, the skull distorted and barely recognisable but still covered with a rusty brown stain where there had once been a close-fitting conical helmet with a nose-guard.
    “There’s your chain, and one of its casualties,” Costas said. “Now it’s time to get out of here.”
    Costas activated a control to cast off the ferret’s umbilical just as the ship’s engines began to throb. Jack left Hiebermeyer with him and followed the Estonian officer out of the navigation room to join York on the bridge. He would broadcast the news of the discovery to the crew during the hour that Sea Venture would have off-site before the shipping lane was accessible to them again. He looked out of the window beyond the ore-carrier waiting to traverse the passage and to the low arches of the Galata Bridge, its road bustling with morning traffic and its balustrades lined with hopeful fishermen, oblivious to the true treasures that might lie beneath them. The choppy waters once plied by the pleasure barges of emperors and sultans now shone again, the result of a massive cleanup operation in the past decade. As Jack looked beyond the bridge to the radiant skyline, he felt again the allure that had drawn him and Katya to seek out Istanbul’s deepest secrets. For all its chaos and dark history, this city had come to symbolise hope;