The Pharaoh's Secret Read Online Free PDF Page B

collect the glory.”
    The other diver laughed. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Kurt Austin was a first in, last out type who would keep working on a doomed project out of sheer stubbornnessuntil it somehow came back to life or there was literally no option left to try.
    “Where’s Zavala?” Kurt asked.
    The other diver pointed to a spot farther out, almost in the darkness. “Insists that he’s got something important to show you. Probably found an old bottle of gin.”
    Kurt nodded, powered up and cruised over to where Joe Zavala was working with another diver named Michelle Woodson. They’d been excavating a section around the bow of the wreck and had placed stiff plastic shields in position to keep the sand and silt from filling in what they’d removed.
    Kurt saw Joe straighten slightly and then heard the happy-go-lucky tone of his friend’s voice over the intercom system.
    “Better look busy,” Joe said. “
El jefe
has come to pay us a visit.”
    Technically, that was true. Kurt was the Director of Special Assignments for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, a rather unique branch of the federal government that concerned itself with mysteries of the ocean, but Kurt didn’t manage like a typical boss. He preferred the team approach, at least until there were tough decisions to be made. Those he took on himself. That, in his mind, was the responsibility of a leader.
    As for Joe Zavala, he was more like Kurt’s partner in crime than an employee. The two had been getting in and out of one scrape after another for years. In the past year alone, they’d been involved in the discovery of the S.S.
Waratah
, a ship that vanished and was presumed to have sunk in 1909; found themselves trapped in an invasion tunnel under the DMZ between North and South Korea; and stopped a worldwide counterfeiting operation so sophisticated that it used only computers and not a single printing press.
    After that, both of them were ready for a vacation. An expedition to find relics on the floor of the Mediterranean sounded like just the tonic.
    “I heard you two were slacking off down here,” Kurt joked. “I’ve come to put a stop to it and dock your wages.”
    Joe laughed. “You wouldn’t fire a man who was about to pay up on a bet, would you?”
    “You? Pay up? That’ll be the day.”
    Joe pointed to the exposed ribs of the ancient ship. “What did you tell me when we first saw the ground-penetrating sonar scan?”
    “I said the wreck was a Carthaginian ship,” Kurt recalled. “And you put your money on it being a Roman galley—which, to my great consternation, has been proven correct by all the artifacts we’ve recovered.”
    “But what if I was only fifty percent right?”
    “Then I’d say you’re doing better than normal.”
    Joe laughed again and turned toward Michelle. “Show him what we’ve found.”
    She waved Kurt over and directed her lights down into the excavated section. There, a long, pointed spike that was the bow ram of the Roman galley was clearly entangled with another type of wood. Where she and Joe had excavated the sand, Kurt could see the broken hull of a second vessel.
    “What am I looking at?” Kurt asked.
    “That, my friend, is a
corvus,
” Joe said.
    The word meant
raven
, and the ancient iron spike looked enough like the sharp beak of a bird that Kurt could imagine where the name had come from.
    “In case you forgot your history,” Joe continued, “the Romans were poor sailors. Far outclassed by the Carthaginians. But they were better soldiers and they found a way to turn this to theiradvantage: by ramming their enemies, slamming this iron beak into the boat’s hull and using a swinging bridge to board their opponent’s vessels. With this tactic, they turned every confrontation at sea into a close-quarters battle of hand-to-hand combat.”
    “So there are two ships here?”
    Joe nodded. “A Roman trireme and a Carthaginian vessel, still held together by