by Rob Jones
“The Mexicans are dead and Kruger has the idol.”
“Grave news.”
The Oracle watched a line of whitecaps rise on the sea before crashing back down into the ocean in a frothy, milky white foam. “I’ve waited a long time for these idols, Davis. Many forces want to get their hands on them. I can’t let anyone take them from me. Not Kruger, and certainly not the damned ECHO team. You hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir. You know I will do anything for the cause.”
“Of course, and now you have an opportunity to show me just how committed you are.”
A long silence. “Anything, sir.”
“I’m told the ECHO team have a secret hideaway somewhere – a little island.”
Another silence, and the exhalation of cigar smoke. “Yes.”
“I presume you know its location.”
“Yes. It’s a former French naval facility in the Caribbean.”
“Good. I want it destroyed, and everyone on it is to be killed. Is that clear?”
“It could take some time to…”
“I’m not interested in details, Davis. You’re the head of the CIA. If you want to play with some hardware in the Caribbean Sea and use an unknown island for target practice then you can do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t be too hard on the infrastructure – I’ll add it to my portfolio once your pest control teams have done their work.”
“As you wish.”
This time it was the Oracle stretching the silence as he watched an ocean storm gathering strength to the north. “Don’t let me down, Davis. You of all people know what’s at stake.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Eden’s private Gulfstream cruised to Marrakech high above the Mediterranean Sea and not for the first time Joe Hawke realized he was thinking not only about how all of this was possible, but also about how long any of it could last. Beside him, Lea slept. He watched her eyelids fluttering as she dreamed, and gently swept her hair away from her face.
“How you doing, you old tosspot?”
He turned to see Scarlet Sloane hovering menacingly above him with an unlit cigarette hanging off her lip and a half a bottle of Stoli in her hand.
“You can’t light that thing in here, Cairo.”
“Who says I was going to light it?”
“That’s normally what you do with cigarettes.”
Then Ryan turned to face her. “With all the alcohol fumes around you I’m surprised you’ve never ignited yourself with that Zippo of yours.”
“Bugger off,” she said, and shrugged her shoulders. She slid the cigarette behind her ear. “Wee nip?” She held the bottle up and shook it.
“Not for me,” Hawke said, truly amazed by her tolerance for alcohol.
“Suit yourself.”
“I hear you and Camacho are sharing more than fighting tactics these days.”
Scarlet grinned, but quickly suppressed it. “What can I say? I am irresistible to men.” She chased the words down with a swig of the Russian vodka and sighed as it went down.
Across the aisle Ryan saw her and shook his head slowly.
“Problem, boy?” she said.
“I have no problem,” he said, glancing at the bottle.
She noticed his glance. “You have to run an engine on something.”
“First the man takes a drink,” he said smugly. “Then the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man – or in your case, the woman.”
“Oh great,” Scarlet said. “Now we have our very own pontificating prat to tell us how to live our lives.”
Ryan smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s an old proverb I thought you should know. That is all.”
Camacho stepped up. “Someone being mean to my babe?”
“You let him call you his babe?” Hawke said, a grin breaking out on his face.
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “I’m still in the process of training him, all right?”
“Did you say you’re still in the process of straining him?” Ryan asked, bobbing his head up once again from behind his seat. “What the hell goes on in your boudoir, Cairo?”
“Training him, I said, you pathetic little social outcast.”
“Hey!” Maria said. “He is not pathetic or little!”
“Ouch!” Lexi said.
“And what is that terrible noise?” Scarlet asked, leaning over Ryan’s seat to see what he was watching on the iPad.
“I was thinking about learning the pibgorn,” he said awkwardly.
“The what?”
“It’s an idioglot reed aerophone used in traditional Welsh folk music.”
Scarlet simply stared. “I… I just don’t… I don’t know where to start with you. I thought you were researching the mission and instead you’re listening to an idiotglot. Whatever it is, turn the bloody thing off, it sounds awful.”
“Cairo’s got a point, mate,” Hawke said. “It sounds a bit like someone’s choking a duck, and maybe your time might be better spent briefing us on what we need to know about Atlantis.”
Ryan turned the iPad off and turned in his seat. “We’ll start with Plato.”
“Why him?” Scarlet said. “I thought he was an old Greek duffer?”
“Yes, he was, but the reason we’ll start with him is because just about everything anyone knows about Atlantis starts and ends with Plato.”
“Really?”
He nodded and once again failed to conceal the grave disappointment he was feeling for his friends’ ignorance of the classical world. “You all know that Plato wrote the classic dialogues Timaeus and Critias, right?”
“Er, yeah,” Hawke said.
“Er, no,” said Maria, staring at Hawke. “Do please tell us what they are.”
“Critias is the important one because it’s in there he talks about Atlantis. Many claim it’s the first reference to the place but there are some older ones if you look hard enough. The important point is it’s in Plato’s Critias where we get just about everything we know of Atlantis. It’s pretty much where the entire story starts.”
“So he’s to blame!” Scarlet said.
“It’s in Critias that Plato describes Atlantis in size and even a few hints about location but no one has ever been able to use the text to track the place down, not least because if it ever existed we all know it doesn’t exist any more, at least not as a functioning civilization.”
“Right,” Camacho said. “If there was an island in the middle of the Atlantic supporting a sophisticated population I think our satellites might have found it by now.”
“Exactly,” Ryan said pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
Scarlet sighed. “God that’s so annoying when you do that.”
“What?”
“That thing you always do with your glasses. Can’t you get contact lenses like everyone else?”
“I never really thought about it.”
“Well, do.”
“Piss off, Cairo,” Lea said, stretching her arms as she woke up. ‘If you hadn’t noticed, Ryan is once again saving our arses.”
“Thanks, Lea.”
“Well get on with it then!”
“Ah, yes… sorry. Anyway, Critias is pretty 101 stuff but of more interest to us is where Plato got that information from. According to Herodotus, the Greeks learned everything they knew about many of their gods – including Poseidon…”
He stopped while a big groan went up all around the cabin until Hawke intervened “Go on, mate.”
“They derived their knowledge on Poseidon from the ancient Libyans who also used to worship him as their god of the sea. There are some theories that hypothesize that Poseidon was the God of Atlantis as well, while others claim it was Tanit, but either way, the knowledge from Libya is among some of the most ancient in the world. In fact that entire part of Africa has some of the oldest records of humanity, like the cave art of the Hoggar Mountains in Algeria for example.”
“You’re swerving off c
ourse again,” Scarlet said. “That’s even more annoying that the thing you do with your glasses.”
“It’s not off course,” Ryan said. “If Plato and the Greeks got their knowledge of Atlantis from the Libyans, then it stands to reason that the cultures of north Africa had that knowledge first, and that Atlantis was known to them before even the ancient Greeks got hold of it. Knowledge has to pass down from an older culture – it’s the only way we can progress. Usually we know where the knowledge comes from, and sometimes we don’t. Just take the Dogons.”
“No thanks,” Scarlet said. “I’ve already eaten.”
Ryan rolled his eyes and sighed. “The Dogon people,” he said with a glance at Scarlet, “live in Mali, just south of Morocco and other Berber lands. They have a legend going back thousands of years about the star Sirius and how it had a companion star that was invisible to us here on Earth, which is weird because it wasn’t until 1862 that astronomers actually discovered it for real. How did an African tribe know about Sirius B thousands of years before modern science?”
“They made a very good guess?” Scarlet said.
“Impossible odds. When you look at Sirius you see one star, but it’s an illusion – there are actually two stars there. It’s a binary system.”
“So how did they know?” Maria asked.
“The only way they could have known about Sirius B is if another more advanced people told them about it,” Ryan said.
“Like the Atlanteans, you mean?”
“Maybe,” Ryan said with a shrug. “No way to prove that at the moment though… and then that raises another question – if the Atlanteans were real and they knew about Sirius B, then who told them?”
“I give up.”
“I think we all give up,” Lea said, laughing.
“The Dogons claimed that ancestral spirits called the Nommo came to the Earth from the Sirius system.”
“Warning,” Lexi said. “Mind Melt Alert.”
Camacho and Reaper both laughed, but Scarlet scoffed. “Bullshit alert, more like.”
Ryan grinned. “I’m just saying that what we really do when we find these ancient relics is find information, and where it comes from, and if you ask me there is definitely a strong link between Plato, his writings on Atlantis and this part of north Africa. I’m guessing that whatever Kruger hopes to find in the Dadès Gorge is obviously something he hopes is going to lead him to Atlantis.”
“So it’s still on?” Scarlet asked, eyes finally widening with excitement.
Ryan nodded. “Is it on? It’s on like Donkey Kong in a thong!”
*
Hawke smiled, pushed back in his seat and closed his eyes. Despite the banter, he could sense a real feeling of tension in the air. Korać’s worldwide army of mercs was serious business, and Kruger’s obsession with archaeological loot would drive him to any lengths to locate the treasures to be found in a place like Atlantis. Throw in Kamchatka’s sniper skills and Luk’s psychopathic tendencies and this was the mission from hell. A mission, he suddenly thought, that they would be lucky to all walk away from.
Scarlet stepped to the galley to get a fresh glass and after tweaking Ryan’s nose on the way back to her seat she collapsed into the soft leather and sighed.
“Do you believe all that bollocks about Dogons and stars?” she asked Hawke.
He shrugged his shoulders. “These days, living my life is like hanging on to a raft so there’s no time for questions.”
She sighed and sipped her water. “You know, I’m thinking about making this my last mission.”
Hawke turned to her but didn’t know what to say.
“Does that surprise you?” she said.
“I never know with you, Cairo. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“It’s not sudden at all. I’ve been working for Rich for a long time now and since I started seeing Jack I’ve been questioning why I spend my life flying around the stratosphere fighting nutcases.”
“Troposphere,” Ryan called out from the back. “You’re not in a spy plane.”
“This is a private conversation, gomer.”
“Sorry, but I can’t help correcting ignorance.”
“Leave it, Cairo,” Hawke said, gently pulling Scarlet back down into her seat. “You were saying?”
“It was nothing, really. Just rambling… Being with Jack has just made me start to see what I’ve been missing all these years.” She glanced over the headrest in front to where Camacho and Reaper were chatting to the pilots. “And don’t you bloody dare tell him any of this or I’ll kick your balls to Mount Olympus.”
Hawke shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “But you really think you could bail out of ECHO and leave all of this behind?”
She never answered – simply shrugged and walked away leaving him to his thoughts. He looked silently out of the window for a few moments and saw nothing but the ocean stretching to the horizon. He wondered just how far ahead Kruger and the others had gotten in their search. He visualized them crawling all over the Dadès Gorge desperately seeking the next clue that would lead them to Atlantis.
Maybe this time they were just too far behind, and now Scarlet was talking about bailing out as well. Things were going to start changing fast, he thought.
Maybe a little too fast.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They landed at Marrakech airport and walked across the apron toward a Royal Moroccan Air Force Eurocopter whose rotors were already whirring and ready to go. Between Alex and her father, the US Secretary of Defense Jack Brooke, they had organized a small back-up force of a dozen members of the Royal Moroccan Army who were now climbing in right behind them.
“So who are these men?” Sergent-chef Chabat asked.
“An assortment of international mercenaries and treasure hunters,” Lea said.
“But what do they want with the Dadès Gorge?” Chabat asked.
“We don’t know exactly,” Ryan said, “but it could have something to do with the search for…”
“That’s classified, Sergeant,” Camacho said firmly, giving Ryan a sideways glance. “We can’t talk about it. All you need to know is we’re looking at a force of around twenty heavily armed men, mostly Serbians but also some Russians, and they have considerable fighting experience. As such, they represent a serious terrorist threat to the vital national security of the United States and your country too so it’s our job to take them out, got it?”
“Of course,” Chabat said. “I’m certain my government knows what it has to know.”
The Eurocopter made short work of the flight east to the Dadès Gorge, and as they approached their destination, Hawke was able to get a dazzling tourist’s eye view of the Dadès River as it cut through the enormous desert canyon below. It was an incredible sight, like a ribbon of steel in the middle of the desert, held in place by the towering walls of the rocky gorge and shining brightly in the bright Moroccan sun. The town of Kalaat Mgoun slipped beneath them as they crossed the Valley of the Roses, named after the famous flowers grown here, but they zoomed over the top of as they made their way further east.
Ahead he saw a large mesa in the center of the river as the chopper flew over the tourists’ lookout point. It spun around and flared its nose for landing on top of the western plateau of the mesa’s lower side. They didn’t need any help finding Kruger and his team – the western section of the meander was now home to three jet boats lashed to the trunks of some walnut trees with mooring rope.
The team climbed out of the chopper and were joined by Chabat and the rest of his soldiers. Without speaking they set off down the path which twisted its way down to the base of the mesa where Kruger’s team had left the boats. Summer was long gone, but the sun here was still fierce and burned hard in the vast Moroccan sky. The Dadès River was impressive, and flanked with countless wadis stretching off toward large ravines on both sides of the canyon. Reaper felt it on his neck as he picked his way down the rocky track.
“At least you won’t need to
top up your tan this year, Reap,” Scarlet said.
“But maybe you should work on yours, no?” came the immediate reply. “You have the English pastiness.”
“Hey!”
As they descended toward the Dadès River and carved their way deeper into the canyon, the desert floor began to tower above them. Reaper had never been here before and was inwardly amazed by the place. The feeling of vastness was almost overwhelming and the silence of the landscape was eerie. Nowhere on earth had ever made him feel more insignificant.
“This place is nearly one hundred miles long,” Ryan said from the back of the team. “They call it the Road of a Thousand Kasbahs.”
“I used to know a place like that when I was at uni in Oxford,” Lexi said.
“Really?” Ryan said, stopping in his tracks with amazement.
“Oh no – wait,” she said, pausing a beat for effect. “That was Road of a Thousand Kebabs.”
“Oh yes, very good!” Maria said. “I knew a road like that in Moscow.”
“It wasn’t very good at all,” Ryan said. “It was a terrible joke.”
“That was a joke?” Scarlet said.
They pressed on, banter flying between the ECHO team but Chabat’s soldiers mostly silent. The limestone rim of the canyon was now high above them, and Lea was staring up at it when she tripped on a loose rock and tumbled forward, crashing into the back of Hawke.
“Steady as she goes, Lea,” he said with a wink.
“Anyone see where they went yet?” Scarlet called out. Deep in the gorge now there was no longer any need to shield her eyes from the sun as she peered down the track at the jet boats.
“I think so,” Maria said. “The track from the boat dies out over there but not far beyond it is a split in the mesa.”
They tracked away from their path now and hiked north to the track Maria had found. It was turning into a tough slog now and their weapons began to weigh heavier with each step. They pushed on and were encouraged when they found broken branches on the bushes either side of the fissure in the western edge of the mesa’s rock face.