2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

L aura

“Bring up another load, Rowdy! We’re burning daylight here.” Garrison’s booming voice echoes across the water as he paces along the shore, his eyes fixed on the divers.

Aware that Garrison won’t let a single coin escape his watchful eye and eager to investigate our discovery, I seize the opportunity while he’s distracted by the divers. As they return for another load, I sift through the gold and discreetly pocket one of each denomination.

Not just golden aurei from Rome, but staters from several Greek city-states and darics from Persia. I stuff them in my pockets to examine later in my room in the compound.

As I lean against a craggy rock, my impatience grows with each minute that ticks by. The divers have been hauling up gold for hours, making multiple trips with necessary decompression stops during each dive. While the sight of the gleaming coins spilling from their bags is certainly impressive, my mind keeps wandering back to the anomaly frozen in the ice.

I glance at the drone’s feedback on my tablet, zooming in on the human-shaped silhouette. The more I study it, the more convinced I become that it’s a person—perfectly preserved. This is someone who lived and breathed almost two thousand years ago. In the column of ice that flickers as the sun makes its way through the churning waves, I can just make out the shape of shoulders, a tilted face perhaps, and… maybe even outstretched hands?

“How much longer? The tide is coming in, and if the current shifts, the divers will have to fight against it,” I call out to Garrison, my fingers gripping the tablet’s edge, panic churning in my gut.

He shoots me a grin, his eyes glinting with the same excitement I saw when we first discovered the gold. “Just a few more trips, Turner. We’re going to be rich beyond our wildest dreams.”

I force a smile, but my heart isn’t in it. The thrill of the treasure pales in comparison to the potential historical significance of the frozen figure.

As the air turns colder and the sky darkens, signaling a storm, the divers emerge from the water, their bags bulging with the last of the gold. Garrison lets out a whoop of joy, clapping them on the back as they drag the heavy bags onto the shore, letting Tony load them into plastic bins and onto the skid we have waiting.

“All right, boys,” I say, stepping forward. “Time to investigate that anomaly. Remember, if it looks like my hunch is correct, chip it out of the ice carefully, leaving a wide margin. We don’t want to damage it.”

Rick and Rowdy exchange a patronizing glance, then nod, grabbing their tools and diving back into the frigid water. I watch them through the drone’s camera, my heart pounding as they approach the icy abyss. I wish it were me fighting the current and exploring this find, but Garrison doesn’t trust me with his equipment. He’s probably right. Although I got dive certified in anticipation of this expedition, I don’t have a lot of experience.

The divers work methodically, their movements precise as they chip away at the ice surrounding the figure. With each chunk that breaks free, more details emerge—the outline of a muscular arm, the curve of a strong jaw, and the sheer power of his thighs that look as though they could still run a marathon after all these years .

“It’s a man,” I breathe, my eyes widening. “An ancient man, preserved in ice.”

Garrison leans over my shoulder, squinting at the screen. “Holy shit. That’s incredible.”

To keep my mind busy as the divers descend, I do the math.

How ancient Romans lifted a chest that heavy is a testament to their engineering. Tony divided the coins into durable plastic bins, each ready to transport to the Endurance.

The coins made in that time are 95% pure gold. At today’s prices, that’s around twenty-six million dollars. My nine percent will still be over two million. As I do the rough math in my head, the sudden wealth still pales in comparison to the excitement of discovering the man in the ice.

As the sky turns darker, casting the world in bleak shades of blue and gray, the divers finally break the figure free from its icy prison. My mind races as I watch them attach cables around the block of ice and Garrison hooks them to a hydraulic winch to pull it up.

The divers accompany their morbid find up through the water, stopping to decompress just as they did when they were loaded with gold. The icy tomb is loaded onto the skid while it’s still submerged, then onto shore.

Questions swirl through my thoughts. How did he end up on this ship, so far from the Roman Empire? What was his life like? What secrets might his body reveal about the ancient world?

I step closer, my gaze roaming over the figure trapped within the ice. Despite the layers of frost obscuring his features, I can make out the broad planes of his face, the proud tilt of his chin. I find him both fascinating and unsettling, a relic from a bygone era suddenly thrust into our modern world. Open caskets have always freaked me out. Although this is gripping, it’s also eerie to look at a corpse, no matter how well-preserved it is .

“We need to get him back to the camp,” I say, my voice trembling with anticipation. “He’ll need to be kept at a constant temperature or the body will rapidly decay.”

At a conference a few years back, I went to a talk by a cryobiologist about preserving tissue. I don’t remember much, but as I recall, this body should be housed at -20°C or colder to prevent cellular degradation.

The temperatures have dropped to unseasonably cold levels, though they’ve remained a few degrees above freezing, even during the night. That’s not nearly enough to keep his body from decaying. I have to get him out of here and to a research facility—fast.

“As much as I’d like to study him, this is far from my area of expertise. I’ll have to find a proper cryogenic facility to contain him until medical experts can determine the best way to thaw and examine the remains without causing damage. The best we can do now is to keep that ice from melting until we contact a local with a helicopter to extract him.”

Garrison nods, his brow furrowed. “That’s going to cost a fortune. Do you think he’s worth anything… other than as a lab specimen?”

I don’t deign to answer him. He’s not the type of person who understands that not everything is about money.

As the team begins the delicate process of moving the frozen man, I can’t tear my eyes away from his face. Even in death, frozen in time, he looks fierce and proud.

My mind spins with the possibilities of what we might learn from him, the secrets he could unlock about the past. Could his hands have hefted the sword we found weeks ago?

As the wind picks up, carrying whispers of ancient secrets, I can’t help but feel we’ve disturbed a ghost that was never meant to be found.