The Spear of Atlantis (Wilde/Chase 14)

by Andy McDermott

  ‘There are regions of the Sahara that would have been superior in terms of sunlight hours,’ Lobato replied. ‘But the logistical difficulties of construction in remote desert would have made it uneconomic. And there were also political considerations; the nations of north Africa are not stable.’

  ‘I’m sure the Emir of Dhajan putting up most of the money didn’t hurt,’ said Nina. ‘And he let you play with . . . other toys.’ She caught herself before mentioning antimatter, not wanting to let Rahji know what they were facing.

  Lobato not only failed to catch her hidden meaning, but took her words literally. ‘My electric cars are not “toys”, Dr Wilde,’ he sniffed. ‘They are the future; the only one possible if we are to avoid environmental apocalypse.’

  ‘So long as we don’t get any other kind first,’ Eddie rumbled.

  ‘Cars that do not use oil,’ said Rahji, shaking his head in amusement. ‘That is why you are not popular with my country’s rulers. You will put them out of business!’

  ‘There are many other uses for oil,’ Lobato replied. ‘The need for plastics will only become greater over time. But I have also invested heavily in companies working to make them fully biodegradable—’

  ‘We are almost at the border,’ the Saudi cut in as they crested a low rise. There was not much to see ahead; the highway continued in a great sweep along the coastline towards the unimaginatively named Dhajan City several miles distant. A small cluster of low buildings, a customs post, marked the boundary itself.

  ‘I thought it was an open border,’ said Nina, eyeing the waiting vehicles.

  ‘For Saudis and Dhajanis, yes, but passports are still checked – which is why your husband called me,’ Rahji added. ‘I can get you across without any official record, so the Dhajani authorities will not know you are in the country. Once we are clear of the border, I will leave you. If that is what you wish.’ He looked back at Eddie. ‘Are you sure you do not want to tell me more? The Saudi government may be able to intervene.’

  ‘Intervening might make things worse,’ said Nina. ‘If we can neutralise the threat, we will. If we can’t . . . we’ll do all we can to minimise it.’

  The Saudi gave his passengers a harder look. ‘If something happens that affects my country, and it could have been stopped had you warned us, you will be to blame.’

  ‘We’ll do everything possible to make sure that doesn’t happen,’ Nina assured him. ‘You said when we first met that I’d saved the world; I hope you can trust me enough to do it again.’

  Rahji did not seem convinced, but the Toyota reached the checkpoint before he could reply. Rather than joining the queue, he pulled over to one side. That immediately caught the border guards’ attention, two men starting towards them. ‘I will take care of this,’ he said, getting out.

  He met the guards, presenting his identification. A rapid exchange, then all three went into a building. ‘Should we tell him?’ said Nina. ‘If the spearhead blows up, the blast could hit Saudi Arabia as well.’

  ‘There’s nowt they can do to stop it,’ Eddie pointed out. ‘Besides, Saudi “intervention” usually involves bombing the shit out of everything, like in Yemen. And even if we stop the thing from blowing up, I don’t want the Saudis to get hold of the spearhead. We stopped them from buying nukes from North Korea a few years back, so I definitely don’t want them adding an antimatter bomb to their arsenal.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed unhappily. ‘It’s kind of a bad situation all round, isn’t it? Unless we come up with a way of permanently stabilising the spearhead and making it useless as a weapon, or it blows up somewhere it can’t hurt anyone.’

  ‘The solar facility may be the best option in the latter case,’ said Lobato.

  ‘How far is it from Dhajan City?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘Twenty-three kilometres.’

  ‘Is that out of the blast range?’

  ‘I do not know,’ the billionaire admitted. ‘We do not know how much antimatter the spearhead contains. One-point-two kilograms of antimatter would exceed the destructive force of the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated.’

  ‘Be good if it was only one-point-two milligrams, but I’m not counting on it,’ Eddie said. He saw movement outside. ‘Ay up. Rahji’s coming back.’

  The Saudi was returning to the SUV. As well as the two border guards, a uniformed officer had also exited the hut and was walking to another building beyond the barriers. Rahji climbed back in. ‘Everything is taken care of,’ he announced. ‘We have certain arrangements with the Dhajani border guards. We will be allowed through without showing our passports.’

  A short wait, then the officer reappeared and waved to Rahji. ‘Okay,’ he said, starting the car, ‘we can go.’

  Nina nervously regarded the men on the other side of the checkpoint. ‘They’re definitely not going to stop us?’

  ‘No. Just look straight ahead, and there will be no problem.’

  She took his advice, but could not help giving the Dhajanis a worried sidelong glance as the Land Cruiser crawled through the checkpoint. If the Emir and his agents even suspected they might try to enter the country, the border guards would surely have been given their photographs and descriptions.

  A long, tense moment . . . then the vehicle cleared the checkpoint. Eddie looked back. The guards hadn’t moved. ‘Think we made it.’

  ‘I told you there would be no problem,’ said the Saudi, accelerating down the highway. ‘Now, I will wait for you so I can take you back across the border, but you will be on your own in Dhajan.’

  They crested a rise. Dhajan City shimmered in the heat haze ahead. The vast white slabs of what Nina realised were the Atlantia and its sister ship the Pacifia stood out clearly in the harbour, but she was more interested in the landscape outside the capital. ‘The solar plant’s in those mountains?’ she asked Lobato.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘We will turn off this road to reach it soon.’

  ‘They are hardly mountains,’ Rahji chuckled. ‘We have taller dunes in Saudi!’

  ‘There is no internationally agreed definition of what constitutes a mountain,’ said Lobato. ‘The Dhajanis named them as such, so . . .’ He registered that his companions were giving him mocking looks. ‘But that is not important, apparently.’

  ‘You’re getting the hang of this whole not-acting-like-a-robot thing,’ Nina said, amused.

  After another mile, Rahji pulled off on to a side road. Another SUV waited beyond the intersection. ‘This is where I leave you,’ he said, stopping beside the other vehicle. ‘Eddie, there are guns in the trunk compartment if you need them.’

  ‘I hope we don’t,’ said Nina.

  ‘So do I. But it is good to be prepared, don’t you think?’

  Eddie nodded. ‘It is. Thanks.’

  ‘Good luck. Allah yusallmak!’ He got out. Eddie took his place in the driver’s seat as the Saudi climbed into the other SUV.

  ‘All right,’ said the Yorkshireman, ‘let’s go. This way, right?’ The line of black tarmac stretched through the desert towards the rising rocky hills.

  Lobato nodded. ‘It is impossible to get lost; it is the only road.’

  ‘I like it when I don’t have to worry about directions.’ They set off down the new road, leaving Rahji’s vehicle behind.

  The route was totally straight for the first few miles, but began to curve as it rose into the foothills. Nina looked ahead. As Rahji had noted, the mountains were hardly on the same scale as the Himalayas, but the bare, sun-scoured rock meant they deserved the name for their appearance, if not their altitude.

  There was something up there other than barren stone, though. As Eddie brought the SUV around another ascending bend, Nina caught a flash of reflected sunlight from between the peaks. ‘Is that the solar plant?’ she asked Lobato.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘One of the solar furnaces. The facility has three, as well as a large photovoltaic—’

  ‘Your solar energy plant,’ Nina interrupted as a th
ought came to her. ‘Your antimatter facility’s at the same site – why did you pick that location?’

  ‘It was the only suitable location in Dhajan. It is a small country, and the Emir was not willing to sacrifice any land with farming potential, which ruled out the coastal areas. The solar array also required an area of relatively flat, unshadowed land. The only place meeting all the requirements was in the south-eastern mountains.’

  ‘So you chose the location out of necessity, right? And I’m guessing you put your antimatter lab there because the solar plant gave you effectively unlimited power.’

  ‘Only in the daytime, though,’ Eddie joked.

  Lobato shook his head. ‘At all times. That is the purpose of the power storage units – the world’s largest lithium-ion battery banks. They can store almost five hundred megawatts, enough to power the whole of Dhajan through the night.’

  ‘I don’t care about some oversized laptop battery,’ Nina said impatiently. ‘The point is, without the vault and a source of earth energy, I don’t see how you could stabilise the spearhead, no matter what gadgets you’ve built there.’

  ‘The theories behind the containment systems are all scientifically sound,’ the billionaire insisted.

  ‘Did any of them take earth energy into account?’

  That question brought an uncharacteristic uncertainty to his face. ‘They . . . did not. But I am sure—’

  ‘Levitating crystals? Weird purple stones that only people with Atlantean DNA can affect?’

  ‘Again, no. I am beginning to see what you mean.’

  ‘Good. Because I just realised something. I said in Turkey that it would be a damn big coincidence if there was an earth energy confluence point at your solar plant. But it’s also a damn big coincidence that there must be confluence points where the Atlanteans hid their vaults in Turkey, Krakatoa and Santorini. They put them in the same relative positions to their targets, so either they were spectacularly lucky that they happened to be places where they could channel earth energy to stabilise the spearhead, or . . .’

  ‘Or?’ Eddie prompted after a moment.

  ‘Or,’ Nina continued, still deep in thought, ‘they had some way to use it even without being at a confluence. Those other crystals in the vault’s walls – I’ve never seen anything like that before at any Atlantean site. They’re something new.’

  ‘Crystals? Sounds a bit hippy-dippy to me.’

  ‘Er, you did see the big-ass floating one full of sparkling antimatter, right? And the Midas Crucibles before that. And when we were underground in northern Canada, the cave with the pool of eitr was also full of crystals. There’s obviously a lot more to them than cleansing your chakras. It seems the Atlanteans knew that – and took advantage of it.’

  Lobato was also sceptical. ‘I cannot deny the spearhead has characteristics yet to be explained,’ he said. ‘But attributing an entire alternate path of science and technology to the Atlanteans? That pushes the bounds of plausibility.’

  ‘Most people thought that about my theory on the spearheads,’ Nina retorted sharply. ‘But you believed it enough to get us all into this mess.’ She took out her phone and flicked through pictures she had taken of the inscriptions inside the vault before leaving Turkey. ‘The Atlantean texts said something about “those who came before” – as if the Atlanteans used earlier knowledge to create the spearheads and the vault. That’s something else I’ve never seen before, a reference to a civilisation preceding them. One they held in great reverence, which is unusual. The rulers of Atlantis believed they were the world’s apex culture – they didn’t like to admit anyone else might have done something first, or better.’

  ‘So they were like Americans,’ Eddie said with a grin.

  ‘Ha ha. But the only earlier civilisation more advanced than Atlantis was the Veteres, and they were wiped out over a hundred thousand years before. I can’t see how they would be the same people.’

  ‘The Veteres?’ said Lobato. ‘I have never heard of them.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have,’ Eddie told him. ‘Some very powerful people went to a lot of trouble to make sure every trace of ’em was wiped out.’ He glanced back at Nina. ‘I still reckon they were aliens.’

  ‘They weren’t aliens,’ Nina said, sighing. ‘And keep your eyes on the road!’

  They were now high enough for deep canyons to have opened up, the route winding along the edge of one. Eddie brought the car around a tight bend. ‘All under control, love.’

  ‘When the laws are changed to allow my cars to operate in fully autonomous mode, you will not need to worry even on roads like this,’ said Lobato. ‘They can drive better than any human.’

  ‘Plenty of people’ll argue with you about that,’ replied Eddie. ‘Like every single Italian.’

  ‘The proof will speak for itself.’

  ‘I’m not planning on getting into some robot car,’ said Nina. ‘Right now, I’m more worried about your antimatter lab. We’re assuming al-Asim took the spearhead there like he said, but we don’t know if he did. Or even if he was telling the truth.’

  ‘He intended to kill us,’ Lobato observed. ‘He had no reason to lie.’

  Nina smiled. ‘Let’s hope the Blofeld fallacy holds true, then.’

  He seemed puzzled. ‘I am not familiar with that.’

  She put on a deep, oddly accented voice. ‘Since I’m going to keel you anyway, I may as well tell you all the details of my eeevil plan. Muwah-hah-hah!’

  Eddie gave her a look. ‘Was that meant to be Blofeld? Sounded more like Skeletor.’

  ‘Well, I can’t do accents,’ she huffed. ‘And nor can you, before you say anything!’ He laughed and drove on.

  The road twisted through the mountains for a few miles before finally straightening out and dropping into a vast, bowl-like plateau. ‘Bloody hell!’ complained Eddie, squinting as light flooded into the cabin – from below rather than the sky. ‘You could’ve warned me I’d need shades.’

  ‘Still, look on the bright side . . .’ said Nina.

  ‘Oi! I’ll do the crap jokes, thanks.’

  Lobato had also narrowed his eyes, but his expression was still proud. ‘Welcome to my solar power facility.’

  The landscape before them had been transformed from empty rocky desert to a high-tech wonderland. At its centre were three tall, widely spaced towers surrounded by sweeping arcs of large mirrors, all angled to direct reflected sunlight at the white pillars topping each structure; the spill from those in line with the sun was what was dazzling the onlookers. Around them in turn were endless banks of solar panels.

  ‘The towers,’ Lobato continued, ‘house concentrated solar thermal generators. Sunlight from the ten thousand four hundred and sixty-two heliostats—’

  ‘The whats?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘—the mirrors is focused on them, heating a steam turbine to produce electricity. The system uses molten salt as a storage medium rather than water, so it can retain heat and produce power even after the sun has set. Look,’ he added, ‘you can see the heliostats moving. They reorient themselves for maximum efficiency as the sun changes position.’

  The mirrors were indeed shifting, a subtle Mexican wave passing through them as the heliostats panned and tilted to refocus the beam. ‘So they can generate electricity all day?’ Nina asked.

  ‘Precisely. And unlike some similar plants, it does not need to burn fossil fuels to preheat the generators before sunrise. The stored energy in the battery banks does that.’ He indicated the huge fields of solar panels beyond the mirrors. ‘There are also over five million photovoltaic solar arrays. Between them, the plant can generate an average of two thousand and fifty-six megawatts of power. That is more than the solar energy output of the entire United States, from a single facility.’

  ‘I think we need to get our butts in gear and fix that,’ said Nina.

  ‘I have tried,’ Lobato told her, with a faint sigh. ‘Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry is entrenched in Washington, an
d opposes anything that threatens its profits. But this facility will show that it will inevitably become as extinct as the dinosaurs from which its fuels are derived.’

  ‘Good intentions. You might need to make your slogan snappier, though.’

  ‘I leave the humour to my advertising agency,’ he said. Nina wasn’t sure if that in itself was a joke. ‘The white blocks,’ he indicated long, squat structures dispersed around the facility, ‘are the power storage units.’

  ‘The batteries?’

  ‘Yes. As you rather disparagingly said, they indeed use the same technology as laptop batteries. They are on a much larger scale, however.’

  ‘I’d noticed. This whole place must be over two miles across.’ She diverted her squinting gaze to the facility’s perimeter, seeing what at first glance she thought was an access road running around it, before noticing its seemingly gratuitous twists and turns. Several hangars sat beside it to the south. ‘You’ve got a racetrack here as well?’

  ‘A test track for my electric cars,’ Lobato told her. ‘They have an unlimited supply of power, and its isolation deters most corporate spies. The Emir also enjoys driving fast cars, and this allows him to do so away from public roads . . .’ He trailed off at the reminder of his partner’s betrayal.

  ‘What’s the security like?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘There is a small contingent of guards, but the majority of the security is electronic. Dhajan has a very low crime rate.’

  ‘Except at the very top, I guess,’ snarked Nina.

  ‘Most of the security measures exist to keep people out for their own safety. The beams from the heliostats produce a temperature of well over one thousand degrees Celsius. Anyone entering the beam would be instantly incinerated.’

  Eddie pretended to write a note. ‘Adding that to my list of safety tips, thanks.’

  ‘What about the antimatter facility?’ Nina asked.

  Lobato pointed. North of the three solar generators was a cluster of buildings, an observation tower standing above the largest. ‘It is adjacent to the plant’s operations centre.’

  ‘So . . . we’re just going to drive in there?’