Crusader Gold Read Online Free Page A

Katya when the search for Peter Howe had finally been called off. Howe had been a friend since boyhood and Jack was reminded of him every time he saw Tom York, his limp a legacy of the same gun battle. Jack had insisted on staying with Sea Venture over Atlantis until the search had finally been called off. For many days afterwards he felt that his ambitions had become entombed in the Black Sea with the wreck of Seaquest, that he had no right to risk the lives of others in his search for adventure. It was Katya who had nursed back his confidence as they became absorbed in the history of Byzantium during their long days together exploring Istanbul. She had persuaded him to reawaken a schoolboy dream he had cherished with Peter Howe, a dream of a fabulous lost treasure which had become all-consuming after Jack and Katya had parted ways at the airport, a dream which had led Jack back to where he was now.
    “I’ve done it!”
    Jack snapped out of his trance and hurried over to the source of the noise in the navigation room behind the bridge. In the darkened interior he could see where the radar and position-fixing consoles had been stacked on either side to make way for a complex array of electronic gadgetry surrounding an outsize computer screen. In the midst of it all, oblivious to his presence, sat a swarthy, dark-haired man with a rugby player’s physique, his eyes glued to the screen and his head clamped in earphones festooned with antennae.
    “Good thing you finally lost some weight,” Jack said. “Otherwise we’d be excavating you out of this.”
    “What?” Costas Kazantzakis shot him an impatient glance and reverted to the screen. Jack shouted the words at him again.
    “Okay, okay.” Costas lifted off the headset and leaned back in what little space he had. “Yeah, well, it was scraping my way through that underwater tunnel that did it. I’ve still got the scars. If anything good came out of that project it was the gods of Atlantis warning me to pull back on the calories.”
    Costas craned his neck around and took in Jack’s mud-spattered sweater. “Been playing again?”
    “Siege gun. Venetian. Fourteen fifty-three.”
    Costas grunted then suddenly snapped the headset back on as the screen erupted in a kaleidoscope of colours. Jack looked on fondly as his friend became absorbed again in his task. Costas was a brilliantly inventive engineer, with a PhD in submersibles technology from MIT, and had accompanied Jack on many of his adventures since the foundation of IMU over a decade ago. His hard science was a perfect foil to Jack’s archaeology. Not for Costas the complex interwoven threads of history and the uncertainties of interpretation. For him the only significant problems were those that could be solved by science, and the only complexity was when things failed to work.
    “What’s going on?”
    Maurice Hiebermeyer squeezed through the doorway beside Jack. His frame was definitely on the bulky side; Hiebermeyer seemed to be in a permanent sheen of sweat, despite his baggy shorts and open shirt.
    Jack nodded in greeting. “I think Costas has finally got this thing to work.”
    Jack knew what was coming next. Hiebermeyer had flown in by helicopter the night before from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, like a bird of prey pouncing on its target, hoping that Jack would be looking ahead to the next project, having found the problems of excavating in Istanbul’s harbour insurmountable. They had last spoken on the deck of Sea Venture six months ago when Hiebermeyer had mentioned another extraordinary find of ancient writing from the necropolis of mummies that had produced the Atlantis papyrus, and since then he had been bombarding IMU with phone messages and emails.
    He fumbled with a folder he was carrying. “Jack, we need to…”
    “It will have to wait.” Jack flashed a good-natured smile at the portly Egyptologist. “We’re on a knife-edge here and I have to concentrate. Sorry,