Trojan Odyssey

He pulled the hose after him that was attached to a metal pipe that sucked the sand from the bottom and shot it out of a second hose that he laid several feet away to scatter the muck. The dredge acted like a vacuum cleaner as it burrowed into the bottom. The sand was soft, and in less than twenty minutes he had dug a crater four feet across and three feet deep. Then at slightly less than four feet he uncovered a round object, which he identified as an ancient terra-cotta oil jug, like one Dr. Boyd showed in photos during the conference at NUMA. He very carefully sucked the sand away from it until he could lift and set it outside the crater. Then he returned to his work.

Next came a terra-cotta drinking cup. Then two more. These were followed by the hilt and badly eroded blade of a sword. He was about to quit and bring his trove to the surface, when he removed the overburden from a round object in the shape of a dome, with two protrusions sprouting from it. As soon as he'd uncovered fifty percent of it, his heartbeat abruptly increased from sixty beats to a hundred. He recognized what Homer had described in his works as a Bronze Age helmet with horns.

Dirk finished removing the ancient artifact from its resting place of over three thousand years and gently laid it in the yellow sand beside the other discoveries. Standing in the crater amid the swirling sand and working the dredge was tiring work. He had been down nearly fifty minutes and found what he came for, evidence that Odysseus' fleet had come to grief in the West Indies and not the Mediterranean. His air was about gone, and though he could have sucked the air tank dry and easily reached the surface only ten feet away by exhaling a single breath, it was time to take a break. The next step was to bring the artifacts safely aboard Dear Heart. Holding the helmet as though it was a newborn baby, he ascended.

Summer was waiting at the boarding ladder to take his weight belt and air tank. He lifted the helmet out of the water and carefully handed it to her. "Take it," he said. "But treat it gently. It's badly eroded." Then, before she could comment, he jackknifed and dove to retrieve the other artifacts.

As he climbed on the boat, Summer had emptied their ice chest of drinks and was immersing the artifacts in salt water to preserve them. "Cool," she repeated three times. "I can't believe what I'm seeing. A helmet, an honest-to-goodness ancient bronze helmet."

"We were exceedingly lucky," said Dirk, "to find them so early in the game."

"Then these are from Odysseus' fleet."

"We won't know for sure until experts like Dr. Boyd and Dr. Chisholm can make an identification. Fortunately, they were buried in the silt, which preserved them all these years."

After a light lunch and relaxing for another hour, while Summer gently cleaned some of the outer layers of marine concretion without damaging the artifacts, Dirk went back down to operate the dredge.

This trip he found four copper ingots and one ingot of tin. They were oddly shaped with concave edges, a fair indication that they came from the Bronze Age. Next he uncovered a stone hammer. At four and a half feet, he struck fragmentary wooden planks and beams. One section of beam measured two feet long by five inches thick. Maybe, just maybe, Dirk thought, a dendrochronology lab would be able to date the growth rings from the tree it was cut from. By the time he carried the artifacts to the surface and hauled in the dredge, it was late in the afternoon.

He found Summer gazing at a magnificent sunset with clouds painted red-orange from the enlarged ball of the sun as it fell toward the horizon. She helped him off with his gear. "I'll fix di

"How about a little cocktail to celebrate?" Dirk said, smiling. "I bought a bottle of good Guadeloupe rum at the hotel. We have ginger ale, I'll make rum collinses."

"They'll have to be room temperature. I threw out the ice from the chest when you brought aboard the first artifacts so I could use it as a preservation tank."

"Now that we have a productive site with artifacts," said Dirk, "I think that tomorrow we'll search and survey for the other ships in Odysseus' fleet."

Summer looked wistfully at the water that was turning to a dark blue as the sun vanished into the sea. "I wonder how much treasure is down there."

"There may not be any."

She saw the doubt in his eyes. "What makes you say that?"

"I can't be certain, but I believe the site I worked had been disturbed."

"Disturbed?" she said skeptically. "Disturbed by whom?"

As Dirk spoke, he stared apprehensively at the buildings on the island. "It seemed to me the artifacts had been moved about by human hands rather than by tides and shifting sand. It was almost as if they had been stacked on top of one another in a pile that was foreign to nature."

"We'll worry about it tomorrow," Summer said, turning from the magnificent twilight. "I'm starved and thirsty. Get busy on those rum Collinses."

It was after dark when Summer finished heating conch soup and boiling a pair of lobsters that she had caught during her dive. For dessert she served bananas Foster. Then they lay on the deck, stared at the stars and talked until nearly midnight, listening to the water slap lightly against Dear Heart's hull.

As twin brother and sister, Dirk and Summer were very close, yet, unlike identical twins, they went their separate ways when not on the job. Summer was dating a young career diplomat with the State Department to whom her grandfather, the senator, had introduced her. Dirk pretty much played the field, not forming any close attachment and preferring a variety of girls as different in looks as they were in personality and taste. Though cut from the same cloth as his father, Dirk didn't share all the same interests. True, they both loved old cars and aircraft and had a passion for the sea, but there any similarity ended. Dirk liked to race motorcycles cross-country and enter in powerboat races. He was driven to compete on his own skills. On the other hand, his father was rarely competitive in a solitary sense, choosing to take part in sports that called for a team effort. Where young Dirk entered individual competition in track-and-field events at the University of Hawaii, Dirk the elder played football, becoming a star quarterback at the Air Force Academy.

Finally, after exhausting all conversation on Odysseus and his voyage, they decided it was time to turn in. Summer went below and slept in one of the berths while Dirk elected to sleep up on deck on the cushions in the cockpit under the open sky.

At four in the morning, the sea was black as obsidian. A light rain came that blotted out the stars. One could have walked off the deck into the water and never known it until he felt the splash. Dirk pulled an oilcloth over him and contentedly returned to dreamland.

He did not come awake at the sound of a boat engine, because there was no boat and no engine. They came from the water, silently, like ghosts flying around tombstones on Halloween night. There were four of them, three men and one woman. Dirk did not hear the gentle touch of feet on the boarding ladder that he had neglected to pull up. Without realizing it, he made it easy for them to creep on board. Some people wakened in the night by intruders react in different ways. Dirk had no time to react. Unlike his father, he had yet to learn not to trust in luck or fate and always to follow the old Boy Scout motto: Be prepared. Before he knew strangers were on Dear Heart, the oilcloth was pulled up around his head, and a club or a baseball bat or a truncheon, he never knew, came down on the back of his head and sent him far beyond dreamland, falling into a deep black pit that never seemed to end.