Sam moved it again. This time he noticed that the marking on the sphere, when it reached the blue glow at the base, turned to a glowing red. He turned the sphere again, and the same small marking remained bright red, as though it was glowing with fire.
Continuing the process, another four marks became engulfed in a flame red glow, while more than forty others which he’d tried remained unchanged.
“Okay Sam, I’m here to find Billie, but you’re the expert in ancient mythology – what the hell is this?”
“If I had a guess, I’d say that it’s some sort of ancient counting device, like a computer.”
“The Atlanteans had computers eleven thousand years ago?”
“Not quite, but I’d say this is a pretty complex abacus. The more I look at it, the more I can’t help but feel like I’m triggering a code to something, but what I don’t know.”
“You mean, the code to Atlantis?” Tom said.
“Yeah, something like that. Where did you get that idea from?”
“Because, when Billie called me a few weeks ago, she told me that she’d reached it, but now had to find the code to Atlantis, before it was too late!”
A cold shiver ran down Sam’s spine. A sixth sense that he was close to achieving something or destroying something. “Too late for what?”
Tom stopped him turning the sphere again. “I think I know what happened to the scientists who came here in 1908.”
“Well don’t leave me in suspense. What happened to them?”
“They activated that sphere.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Sam moved back from the sphere.
A total of eight markings glowed red. He looked at the device as he would a modern day computer, searching for a delete button or backspace. Surely whatever purpose the device had, the ancient people of Atlantis must have had a means of activating it or deactivating it.
“We need to find something else. There must be another device around here that will help me clear it. Come on, I cringe to think I’ve inadvertently triggered the next cycle of human life or lack thereof, on this planet.”
“Already on it,” Tom said while turning over bits of debris within the temple.
Thirty minutes later, Sam found something on the sphere itself. He was so focused on the sphere that it took a while to notice it was now projecting a small red light on the ceiling. “I’ve got something, Tom.”
Tom came back and stared at the glow above the sphere. “I’m sure that wasn’t there before.”
“No, so am I.”
“I’ve seen those markings inside the Mayan pyramid, too.” Tom paused for a moment and then said, “I think Billie said they were ancient Egyptian measurements of time.”
Sam looked at the projection again. “You’re right! They are images of time, but I’ll need my tablet to compute the exact time.”
Sam placed locked his machine in gear, as he would when parking a car, and then climbed down, inside his massive ADS machine. There was enough room there to eat, drink, and store basic necessities. In Sam’s case, that meant his high powered computer tablet and its several terabytes worth of information.
He quickly scrolled through his ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics page until he reached the section regarding the recording of time.
“Oh, that’s not good!” Sam said, when his initial worst fear came to an even more apocalyptic fruition.
“What now?”
“What other devices do you know display the time when they’re activated?”
“A bomb!”
“And didn’t the Secretary of Defense say something about the scientists at the time calculating the force to level 10 million pine trees at around 50 megatons, or the equivalent of about a thousand nuclear bombs? It might be a kinda good idea to find out just how much time we have.”
“All right, I’m working on it.” Inside the ADS machine, Sam quickly opened his advanced linguistics program on his tablet, designed for cracking these types of problems.
“The first line is years, months, days, hours…”
“The image just changed.”
“Christ, it’s counting down!”
“Okay I have it!”
“How much time have we got?” Tom asked hurriedly.
“Two years, twenty weeks, five hours and ten minutes.”
Tom stared at the projection on the wall again. “But that doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Because the last image changes every second.”
“Which means…” Sam looked up and counted the lines of images. There were four. That meant, if the first line represented seconds, the second must represent minutes, the third hours, and the fourth, weeks. “Holy shit, we have just over two weeks!”
“Sam, we didn’t just activate this – it was already running, we just brought up the display counter!”
“How can you be so certain?”
“Because the Secretary of Defense told you that everything from the Tunguska event was sealed, only to be reopened in just over two weeks from now, when none of it would matter! Damn it Sam, we’ve got to get out of here.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
“We’re not leaving until we find whatever the hell it was that Billie sent us here to find,” Sam said. “She told me that she’d only just come back from Atlantis, and that it was important that she find something in Amsterdam to help her with her discovery. Now, there’s no way she dived to this sort of depth on her own, so that means to me, that there’s another Atlantis.”
“You mean this isn’t Atlantis?”
Sam started to realize the truth. “No, this isn’t Atlantis. It was created by the ancient Atlantean people, but it doesn’t match up in any way with Plato’s description of its size or grandeur. Okay, if the Atlantean Archive we found in Tibet was created as a library of the events in Atlantis, like an almanac, then could it be possible that the other survivors attempted to rebuild Atlantis, here?”
“It’s possible. But why go to all the trouble of building a place like this if it served no purpose?”
“No, it wasn’t just a shrine to Atlantis. This was replacing it completely. Atlantis wasn’t just a place in ancient times. Atlantis was a machine that connected mortals with the stars. How or why, I have no idea. But it has the ability to yield immense power, as the American expedition discovered in 1908, when they too accidentally activated it.”
“But what good is that to us, if we can’t stop this bomb?” Tom asked.
“Nothing, unless we can find out what Billie knew about this place. There must be something that we can use to help her.”
Sam continued to search the room.
At its center, where Poseidon’s golden statue had most likely been removed, a series of strange shapes covered an area several feet wide. Placed precisely equidistant to the towering dome, it was impossible to believe that they were simply shapes.
“It looks like something important was here… or at least it was important once upon a time?” Sam said.
“Yeah, whatever it was – it’s easy to believe that it was long ago destroyed – most likely by whatever caused the Tunguska event.”
“Meaning we’ve lost whatever it was that Billie wanted us to find?”
“That was Billie’s writing in Nepal. She must have wanted us to come here for something,” Sam said.
“Or she specifically wanted us off their tail?” Tom pointed out.
“She intentionally sent us on a wild goose chase, and made us dive in frigid waters?”
“Possibly.”
Sam looked up at the ceiling again. The place had been stripped of all its orichalcum by the Russians years ago. Any writings on the wall were long destroyed. “What if it wasn’t such a case of wanting to send us here, but instead, a case of wanting to send someone else away from her?”
“You mean, her captives told her to write this GPS location?”
“No, she could have easily made up whatever she wanted. Only a handful of pe
ople in the world can interpret the ancient language of the Master Builders. Whatever reason she had to send us here, it was her decision to write it.”
“Which can mean only one thing.”
Tom looked at him expectantly.
“That she’s even more afraid that someone else will beat her to Atlantis.”
“And that someone must be on to us? Of course! No wonder she was trying to send us away. Someone else wants the coordinates of Atlantis.”
“Of course, Andrew Brandt! The man the mob leader from Nice warned us about. Originally I assumed that he was one and the same as Billie’s captor, but after the events in Nepal, I’m not so sure. Her captor could have sent a separate army in to kill us on Kangchenjunga, but if that was the case, she wouldn’t have sent us to the wrong place.”
“Which means…” Tom said.
“We’d better get out of here, while we still can.”
Sam was about to step into the water which covered the third challenge and leave the dry dome of Poseidon, when he felt the slightest of tremors under his feet.
Followed by the sound of a loud jet screaming through the water above.
“That can’t be good,” Tom said.
“No, if my ears don’t deceive me, I’d say someone’s just launched a torpedo.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
The tone of the seemingly innocent whirl of the torpedo’s electric motor increased sharply. Sam scanned the room for something structurally strong enough to resist whatever was about to rain down upon them. A single archway at the entrance to the room was the best he could come up with in the short time they had.
“Over there Tom, at the entrance. It’s our best chance of survival.”
“I see it!”
The two men began moving toward it as fast as they could – their ADS machines at a pace no faster than a walk.
The dome of Poseidon held true to its strength and resisted the destruction by the torpedo. But the ground below them shook violently.
At a depth of nearly five hundred feet of water, little had touched the ancient site since the Russians had rendered it worthless in 1908 during the Tunguska event.
Tom was the first to step into the water again. He returned before Sam had set foot into the second level of the temple.
“There’s no way out. The roof has collapsed and about a million tons of rubble is now blocking our way.”
Sam casually looked at the counter on his mechanical wrist. “So, we have around 36 hours to find another way out, before our life support runs out of juice.”
“I don’t know what your plan is Sam, but we already walked around the dome of Poseidon. There’s only one way in and one way out. And that way out is now blocked.”
A smile came over Sam’s face. “I have an idea there’s another way out – assuming it too hasn’t been blocked.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because this was built as a sister temple to whatever Atlantis Billie went to.”
“So what?”
“So there’s always a second way out when it comes to Atlantis.”
“Of course, but I don’t see any.”
“Remember how we found the remains of three challenges. Test of strength, wisdom, and sacrifice? With a fourth name being wealth?”
“Yes, and the fourth being the wealth of Poseidon, which our predecessors appear to have stolen.”
“What if the wealth of Poseidon was just a ruse -- a final step to dissuade any intruders from looking further inside the temple?”
“To what?”
“The true wealth of Atlantis – the code. If our processors got it wrong, and the device sunk Atlantis nearly five hundred feet below the surface of the earth and wiped out hundreds of miles of tree lines, what power do you think the actual code itself might possess?”
“I have no idea, what?”
“Neither do I, but I intend to find out. And in doing so, we’re going to get out of here, and more importantly, we’re going to find the code to Atlantis before the timer reaches zero.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Sam looked around the large temple of Poseidon. The place somehow appeared smaller since the cave-in to the entrance. It was psychological, of course -- the temple was still enormous. Somehow the sheer knowledge that their exit had been removed introduced a sensation of claustrophobia Sam hadn’t experienced since he was a boy.
His older brother, Danny, had taken him cave diving for the first time. He was only ten years old, but his entire family had been mad keen divers, and he’d been diving all around the world since he was six. Sam laughed when he thought about it – child protection services would have had a field day if they knew what risks his father’s adventurous spirit had brought him.
Being the youngest in the family, he was always the most motivated to keep up and prove his ability. It was that inspiration that made him beat his brother, who was nearly three years older than him, at a freediving competition in the Blue Hole, Belize. His brother was so mad that later that day Danny asked him to go for a dive to the most amazing cave – that was, if he wasn’t too scared to swim through a few tunnels first? Eager to please, and knowing a challenge when it was being set, Sam had been quick to accept.
They had gone on the dive, and his brother had led in through a series of underwater caverns and tunnels. Presumably Danny had made the dive a number of times with his father, and confidently knew that there was only one way in and one out. But despite the appearance of multiple directions, it was fundamentally a very simple cave dive. To Sam, however, it was the scariest thing on earth.
By the second tunnel, the place became quite dark, and by the third, only their hand held flashlights provided them with any light. And even that was extremely inadequate for the conditions. Then, feeling only just on top of his nerves, Sam watched in horror when Danny turned off his own light and began swimming at full speed. Sam tried to follow, but couldn’t keep up and soon lost him. To this day, he could still remember the sensation of panic as it built up in him – he was forty feet below the surface of the water, lost in a labyrinth of caverns and tunnels, his light barely showed what was three feet in front of him, and now, his brother had disappeared.
He began to hyperventilate – the gravest of diving mistake, because it’s the surest way to waste all of your valuable air. And then he stopped. What am I afraid of? If Danny can navigate through here, so can I. Almost as suddenly as the fear overtook him, Sam forced himself to slow his breathing. Work the problem, not make it worse. Soon, the terror of claustrophobia turned to euphoria as he empowered himself to take control of the situation.
Soon, he turned around and slowly navigated his way back to where he started. He looked at his dive watch – only five minutes had passed since his brother had intentionally lost him in the tunnel. An act tantamount to killing him if he hadn’t maintained control.
Sam was about to swim to the surface, when he had an idea. He swam to the side of the cave’s entrance, and found a sinkhole – the entrance to a tunnel that disappeared deep below the rock wall. He dived deeper until he was resting a several feet inside and then switched off his flashlight.
After ten minutes Danny came swimming out the original tunnel’s entrance, swimming faster than Sam had ever seen him go. He watched as his brother swam to the surface, and then returned to the tunnel in a panic.
Sam recalled that feeling so well. He had bested his big brother, who thought he’d got the best of him by trying to scare him.
He waited at the entrance to the cave system, laughing, like the ten-year-old child that he was. And then he looked at the air supply. There was less than 50 BAR remaining. His brother was now risking his life to save him from the being trapped. Sam’s laughter turned to fear as he realized that he might now have killed his brother.
Looking at the remaining 50 BAR Sam quickly swam into the tunnel again.
He shined his flashlight on his brother who immediately turned to swim toward him. The two turn
ed and swam back to the entrance fast. Danny, who’d been exerting the most effort attempting to find him, reached Sam holding his dive gauge – and gave it to him.
The gauge was empty.
Danny made the signal indicating he was out of air. Sam handed Danny his own 2nd emergency regulator, and the two began buddy breathing, as they slowly ascended to five feet.
Sam looked at his own gauge – 20 BAR. It wasn’t much. Especially when two people were breathing it. Maybe three to four minutes. No more.
The surface was just above them, but both had already overstayed their No Decompress Time, which meant that they would have to spend time decompressing. Sam might get away with it, but Danny had already swum to the surface and back again looking for him – an event akin to shaking up a coke bottle. He needed to remain underwater for at least another ten minutes.
Sam wrote on his dive slate – Dad’s emergency air tank!
Danny nodded, and began swimming toward the boat. Their dad, although a risk taker, had always insisted on leaving a full tank of air, on a line, at the five-foot mark below his boat when they were diving. They had been here for nearly a week, but his father never brought it in.
Sam followed his brother in awe as Danny managed to expertly navigate to their father’s boat four hundred feet away. To an expert diver who’d been paying attention it was simple, but to 10-year-old Sam Reilly, Danny’s ability paralleled mythical wonder.
Their air tank gave out thirty-odd feet away.
And the two continued to paddle their fins with slow, strong movements until they reached the tank. Each of them immediately grabbed the tank’s regulator, and began taking giant breaths of fresh air in turn.
Danny smiled at him.
And Sam watched him mouth the words, “Thank you.”
In front of him, Danny held up his diving slate with the words, “I’m sorry.” Sam took it, and wrote something else, “It was an accident.”
Both boys knew it was a lie. Sam had proven himself to his older brother, and more importantly, he’d proven his ability to himself. The two boys became men, and neither ever spoke about that incident while Danny was alive. But his older brother always knew the truth, and until the day he died, he respected Sam and did everything he could to look after him.
Atlantis Stolen (Sam Reilly Book 3) Page 19