By the time Simone had made it down to the very bowels of the ship, there was only one young, and very nervous, guard still dithering in front of the hold.
“Who are you?” he said, when Simone emerged from the dimly lit corridor.
“Your relief.”
“What relief?”
“I’m in charge of the cargo manifest now,” she said, rapping the bulging clipboard. “Every sailor is needed up top, in the wards.”
“I can leave?”
She held out her hand for the keys and said, in her most authoritative voice, “You’re to report to Jamison, the chief of surgery!”
When he couldn’t unclip the key ring fast enough, Simone barked, “Get going, Sailor!”
Plopping the ring into her outstretched hand, he ran for the stairs, holding on to his hat.
The ship was putting on speed and taking a zigzag course designed to elude the torpedoes. This far below deck the air was hot and heavy, and the roar of the engines, operating at maximum power, was deafening. Overhead lights, bare bulbs behind mesh screens, flickered on and off as she made her way into the hold. Pallets of medical supplies and boxes of canned goods were lashed down with thickly braided coils of rope and stacked to the low ceiling.
Simone knew that there was other game aboard, too. There were captured Nazi armaments for study and analysis, reams of official German correspondence that had been salvaged from one overrun outpost or another, and, of course, the ossuary that she and her father had retrieved from one of the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Sahara Desert. When the German tank divisions swept through northern Africa, they had pillaged Egypt’s artifacts and selected the choicest to be sent back to the Fatherland. The US Army had somehow intercepted the ossuary — for which she would be eternally grateful — but instead of keeping it safe for eventual restoration to its rightful place in the Cairo Museum, they had put it on this ship bound for New York Harbor.
That was what Simone did not understand. Could the Allies know its secret?
For fear of that, she had tracked the progress of the sarcophagus every step of the way. As an officer in the Egyptian Department of Cultural Affairs, she had access to all sorts of internal communiqués, transfer documents, and, most important of all, underpaid, midlevel functionaries at all of the artifact’s stops along the route — functionaries who could be persuaded to part with vital information for nominal sums, or for the promise (never fulfilled) of a romantic liaison with the fetching young woman so inexplicably obsessed with one ancient casket.
If they had understood what it was, if they had been able to guess its significance and its power, they might not have been so puzzled, but Simone was not about to tell them. It had been her father’s lifework to discover the ossuary. For all that these bureaucrats knew, it was just another old stone box destined to gather dust in some museum gallery.
There was just one thing she had not yet been able to ascertain: Where was the box supposed to go after its arrival in the United States? Rather than risk losing track of it altogether, she had contrived to book passage, for herself and her father, on board this ship. Now, if the ship didn’t sink in the next few minutes, she had her best chance yet of finding out.
The ship rolled to one side, buffeted by the turbulent seas. Or was the rocking caused, she wondered, by the repercussions of depth charges exploding underwater? Discarding the clipboard, she put out a hand to steady herself and moved down the narrow aisles of supplies and matériel, scouring the work orders and delivery instructions secured in waterproof, plastic pouches affixed to their sides. She had made it to one end of the hold and was on her way back again when she noticed a khaki tarp thrown over a recessed area next to the wall. She could see a box marked “Antiseptics: USN” poking out from under one end of the tarp and had almost passed it by when something told her to take a closer look. The ship started to change direction again, throwing her off-balance, but she managed to grasp hold of the tarp’s flap and fold it back. Why did it crackle with a thin film of ice?
Below the tarp, a rectangular wooden box, bigger than a steamer trunk, was chained atop a flat steel dolly, whose own wheels were anchored to the floor. The box was well secured, but unfortunately, displayed no shipping pouch. Was that deliberate? she wondered. Throwing the tarp back even farther, she scooted around the box and saw that there was a pouch, but that it was fastened to the side closest to the wall.
In the distance, she heard muffled concussions as the depth charges went off, and then, to her horror, a much louder blast that had to have been from a torpedo meeting its mark not far away. One of their escort destroyers had surely been hit.
But would the U-boats respect the Red Cross insignia the Seward was sailing under? For that matter, had they even seen it?
There was no time to lose. As soon as the ship had completed yet another juddering turn, Simone squeezed between the wall and the wooden box. Though she had seen plenty of cargo pouches in her career, even in the feeble light of the hold, she recognized that this one was different. This one bore the stamp of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC, along with a warning — in big red block letters — that the crate was of “Priority A-1” importance, and should be handled with “all caution, care, and deliberation.”
More problematic was the fact that the packet had been sealed, tacked, then duct-taped to the crate. If she planned to open it without anyone finding out, she would have to peel the tape back with her fingernails, then pray she could seal it up again perfectly. She was working at one end of the tape, and had already broken two nails in the process, when the ship suddenly bucked, as if a mighty fist had punched its hull, then listed to one side. Boxes that hadn’t been properly secured toppled over, the tinkle of glass beakers breaking inside.
Simone’s back was pressed between the wall and the heavy crate, which threatened to slip its moorings and crush her. The wall was cold, but the box, strangely enough, seemed even colder; she could see her breath fogging the air as it loomed above her, and she could hear the ominous sound of water — rushing water — entering the boat.
So much for the protection of the Red Cross markers.
Where, she wondered, had the torpedo hit? And could a ship like this survive it? Pinned between the wall and the crate, she could smell a salty tang in the air. As she tried to extricate herself, it felt almost as if the damn box were trying to seize her, and she tore her slicker on the corner of the crate, breaking free. Lurching to the steel gate of the hold, she heard the shouts of sailors clambering down to the engine rooms, and the rumble of giant pumps engaging. She locked the hold behind her, hooked the key ring to its handle, and as she ran toward the stairs to rescue her father, she noticed that she was splashing through a thin rivulet of water.
A rivulet that grew deeper with each step, until it was up to her ankles by the time she hit the stairs.
She struggled to make it back to the cabin, out of breath and soaked to the knees, only to find the door swinging open on its hinges.
And her father not inside.
He could only have gone up; otherwise, she’d have passed him on her way back from the hold.
She raced for the stairs, going up and around until she reached the hatchway, slid the door back, and took one small step out onto the deck.
The afternoon sun was hidden behind a bank of scudding dark clouds, and a pall of black smoke was drifting toward the Seward. Shielding her eyes, she could see that the smoke was emanating from the Van Buren, one of the escort destroyers, maybe half a mile off. An orange fire licked at one of its gun batteries. A slick of something glistened on the churning gray waves. The wind stank of burning oil.