“I’m impressed,” said Nina. “That was quite a good analysis.”
“I was crap at maths and history—but I did all right at English.” He put the book down, shifting closer to her. “Not wanting to sound funny or anything, but reading this did kind of make me wonder why you’re so keen to find these people.”
Nina felt oddly uncomfortable, almost as if she were being accused of something. Had Kari told Chase about the Atlantean DNA markers? It seemed unlikely. She shook off the feeling, replying, “It’s something I’ve been fascinated by my entire life. So were my parents, actually. I went all around the world with them trying to find anything that might reveal where Atlantis was.” She pulled her pendant out from beneath her T-shirt, holding it up to the light from the porthole. “The irony is, I had something all along and never realized it.”
“Did your parents ever find anything else?”
She let the pendant drop back against her chest. “That’s … I don’t know, I really don’t. They thought they did, but I never saw what it was. The year they, uh, died …” Her voice caught.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to …” Chase began.
She shook her head. “It’s okay. I just don’t often talk about it. They were on an expedition in Tibet while I was taking my university entrance exams …”
“Tibet?” asked Chase. “That’s a hell of a long way from the Atlantic.”
“It’s been connected to the Atlantis legend for a long time. The Nazis sent several expeditions there, even during the war.”
“Nazis again, eh?” mused Chase. “The bastards get around. So they found the temple in Brazil and nicked the sextant piece from it—but they must have found something else as well, something that made them go to Tibet.”
“There could have been something on the map or in the inscriptions—there were definitely signs that the Atlanteans had visited Asia. I didn’t have enough time to check.”
“Why did your parents go there?”
“Again, I don’t know. They found something, but they didn’t tell me what it was.” She frowned. “Which was weird in itself, because normally I was a part of everything.”
“Maybe they didn’t want to distract you from your exams.”
“Maybe.” Nina’s frown didn’t go away. “But the last thing I ever heard from them was by postcard, believe it or not. From Tibet. I still have it, actually.”
“What did it say?”
“Not much, just that they were about to set off from a Himalayan village called Xulaodang. They were expecting to be gone for a week, but…”
Chase put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “Hey. We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s okay. It’s funny, though. I hadn’t even considered the Nazi connection until now. And my father did go to Germany the year before … Maybe that’s what they had, something from the Ahnenerbe expeditions. Something that led them to Tibet. But why wouldn’t they tell me?”
“ ’Cause they didn’t want you to know they were using something from the Nazis?” Chase suggested.
“I suppose.” She sat up with a sad sigh. “Not that it mattered. They were caught in an avalanche somewhere south of Xulaodang, and almost the entire expedition was killed. The bodies were never found, so whatever they had with them was lost.”
Chase raised an eyebrow. “Almost everyone? Who survived?”
“Jonathan.”
“Jonathan? What, you mean Philby? The Prof?”
“Yes, of course. I thought you knew. He was on the expedition with them. That’s why we’re so close—even though I’m sure there wasn’t anything he could have done, he said he felt responsible for not being able to save them. He’s been looking out for me ever since.”
Chase leaned back on the bed. “Philby, huh?”
“What?”
He looked away. “Nothing. Just never knew that was how you knew each other.”
“He worked with my parents for years, they were friends.”
“Hmm.” Something seemed to be on Chase’s mind, but before she could ask him about it, she heard knocking from outside. Not on Chase’s door, but from her own cabin. “In here!”
Kari cautiously leaned through the door. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
Chase snorted mockingly. “I wish!”
“I wanted to let you know that we’re almost at the coordinates. Captain Matthews is going to use the ship’s thrusters to hold position rather than drop anchor—we don’t want to risk damaging anything down there—and then we’re going to lower the subs. I thought you might want to watch.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Nina, standing up. “Eddie, are you coming?”
“Give me a couple of minutes,” said Chase. “You’ll be on the sub deck, right?”
The design of the Evenor meant there were few places where anyone could stand outside the superstructure without being in plain sight of the fore or aft decks. But after considerable exploration, Jonathan Philby found a short gangway on the second level that was open to the sea on one side.
He looked around nervously. Forward, he could see the extremities of the crane lifting the larger of the two submersibles into position. For his GPS receiver to work, its antenna needed to have unobstructed line of sight to at least half the sky—but leaning over the side of the ship to get coverage put him at risk of being seen.
There was no choice. He had to make the call.
The compact satellite phone had been a constant companion ever since he had informed Qobras that the Frosts had contacted him. Simply removing it from concealment inside his belongings sent him into a state of anxiety; if any of his companions saw it, even Nina, suspicions would immediately be raised, and it would all be over. Finding an opportunity in Gibraltar to give the Evenor’s approximate destination had been relatively stress-free, but trying to pass on the Nereid’s final position in Brazil without being discovered had almost given him a panic attack.
This was little better. The doors at each end of the gangway had no windows. At any moment, somebody could walk through them. He waited anxiously for the connection to be made …
“Yes?” said a voice. Starkman.
“It’s Philby. I don’t have much time. We’re almost at our destination—here are my current coordinates.” He relayed the figures from his GPS unit. “The Evenor’s final position will be a few miles west of there.”
“The Evenor’s final position will be eight hundred feet down from there,” said Starkman. “We’re already on our way. Good work, Jack. You’ll be rewarded.”
“The only reward I want is to get out of this.” Philby wiped sweat from his brow. “It’ll all be over, right?”
“Oh yes.” Starkman’s voice was firm. “The hunt for Atlantis ends here.”
The two submersibles were lowered into the ocean, one on each side of the Evenor. Their pilots were already inside; the “cowboys,” crewmen in wetsuits standing on top of the vessels, checked that their systems were in order and the communications umbilicals properly connected before releasing them from the cranes. Once free, the submersibles dropped without ceremony beneath the waves. The cowboys were picked up by a Zodiac, which returned them to a dock at the fantail.
With only eight hundred feet of water to penetrate, the descent took less than ten minutes. Nina had pride of place in the lab before the various monitor screens, Kari sitting next to her. Philby, Chase and Castille watched over their shoulders, as did a handful of the Evenor’s crew.
Nina found the whole experience disorienting. Each of the two large screens in front of her displayed exactly what the pilots were seeing inside their pressure spheres, using an autostereoscopic LCD display that gave a 3-D image without needing special glasses. For most of the descent the illusion of depth was barely apparent, but every so often a fish would pass in front of the submersibles’ scanning lasers and leap out of the screen in a flash of ghostly night-vision green.
“Seven-fifty feet,”
said Trulli over the communications link. “We’re in the pipe, five by five. Slowing descent.”
“Evenor, please confirm bearing to target,” Baillard said.
“Atragon, turn to two-zero-zero degrees,” Kari said into her headset. “You’re less than three hundred meters away. Sharkdozer, hold position until contact is confirmed.”
“We should be able to see it by now,” Trulli complained. The seabed swung into sharp dimensional relief in front of Nina as he turned his vessel, dropping the nose slightly to point the lasers downwards. The resolution was high enough for her to pick out crabs scuttling over the rippled sediment.
She turned her attention to the view from Baillard’s submersible, which was now advancing at walking pace, hanging about twenty feet above the seabed. A smaller screen showed the spotlit view from a standard video camera, but the LIDAR image extended much farther.
The sea floor rose ahead.
“Evenor, I have something here,” Baillard reported. “Getting a very strong sonar return… it’s not silt. Something solid coming up, and it’s big. Could be a shipwreck…”
“It’s no shipwreck,” Nina whispered as the object came into view on the 3-D screen. She recognized the shape instantly. It was the same as the replica of the Temple of Poseidon in the Brazilian jungle.
And unlike that now ruined structure, this one was intact.
“Bloody hell,” muttered Chase, leaning closer over her shoulder.
“Jesus. Evenor, do you see this?” asked Baillard.
“We see it,” Kari confirmed, handing Nina a headset. “Nina, you’re in charge.”
“Me? But I don’t know anything about submarines!”
“You don’t have to. Just tell him what you want to look at, and he’ll do it.”
“Okay …” Nina said nervously, suddenly terrified at the idea of accidentally causing the submersible to crash. She donned the headset, fiddling with the microphone. “Jim, this is Nina. Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” replied the Canadian. “I’m about a hundred and fifty meters away. Can you see it clearly?”
“Oh yes.” The lower parts of the temple walls were buried beneath a sloping mound of sediment, but the top of its curved roof rose a good thirty feet above the ocean floor. Reflected laser light shone back brightly in places where the sheath of precious metals over the stone had remained intact even through the deluge. “I can’t believe it’s still standing.”
Philby leaned closer, apparently having trouble with the stereoscopic effect and dealing with it by simply closing one eye. “The design must have been incredibly precise, so all the blocks would support their own weight. When the island sank, it held together even when everything else collapsed. Amazing!”
“What’s the current like?” Kari asked.
Trulli gave a reading. “I’m getting about half a knot of drift, heading northeast.”
“No wonder it’s not completely buried,” said Baillard. “If that’s the prevailing current, then it’ll sweep a lot of the sediment towards the Spanish coast.”
“Is there anything else above the surface?” Nina asked.
The 3-D image jolted disconcertingly; the Atragon hadn’t changed course, but the laser scanners had been redirected to look off to one side. “I can see a few bumps where there might be things under the surface, but nothing actually standing out. How tall is this thing?”
“If it’s the size we think it is, it should be about sixty feet tall. Eighteen meters.”
“If that’s the case, then it’s maybe half exposed. There’s a lot of silt piled up around it.” The image shifted back to the temple.
“Sharkdozer, move in closer,” Kari ordered. “Head to the north end, keep clear of the Atragon.”
“Gotcha,” said Trulli. The second 3-D display showed his advance.
“Jim?” Nina asked. “Can you circle the building, please? I want to see what it looks like from the other side.”
Baillard complied. The maneuver took a couple of minutes, revealing a view much the same as their first sight of the temple. Its curved back, partly buried by sediment, reminded Nina of a turtle’s shell.
“Hey, Evenor,” said Trulli excitedly, “the north end here, the sediment’s lower. It must have been cleared away by the current. I can see more of the wall.”
Nina quickly switched her attention to the Sharkdozer’s screen. There was a smooth, almost bowl-like depression at the northern end of the temple, as though someone had used a giant scoop to clear the silt away. “Can you get in closer?”
“No worries. Hold on a tick.”
It took rather longer than the promised tick, but a few minutes later Trulli brought the hefty submersible to a hover a short distance from the temple wall. “I’m going to take a sonar reading,” he announced. “Hang on.”
One of the monitors flashed up a jagged graph. Nina couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but to the submersible pilot it was as clear as a photograph. “There’s something under the sediment—or rather, there’s something not under the sediment. Could be a hole in the wall.”
“Room to get Mighty Jack through?” asked Baillard.
“Maybe. Evenor, do I have permission to clear the sediment?”
Kari looked at Nina, who nodded in excitement. There was a way into the temple! “Go ahead, Sharkdozer.”
The operation that followed was frustratingly slow. Nina forced herself not to rap her nails on the desktop as Trulli moved his sub away from the temple. He carefully lowered the pump module to the surface about a hundred meters off to the northeast, extending its “tail” in the direction of the current, then returned to the temple. The Atragon’s LIDAR display showed the connecting tube stretching between the pump module and its mother ship as the Sharkdozer returned to position, taking up station above the base of the northern wall. The whole process took over twenty minutes.
“Ready to go, Evenor,” Trulli said at last. “Just give the word.”
“Go for it!” Nina cried, to everyone’s amusement.
The pump started.
Like the world’s largest vacuum cleaner, the Sharkdozer began to suck the accumulated silt into its gaping maw. The pressure difference created by the pump wasn’t huge, but it was more than enough to draw the layers of sediment into the pipe and through the detached module to spew out of the waste pipe one hundred meters away. The prevailing current gently swept the expanding cloud of suspended particles away from the temple. The value of a technique that had initially struck Nina as overcomplicated now became clear; simply digging up the silt would have wiped out visibility within seconds.
Another ten minutes passed with agonizing slowness, the Atragon providing a ringside view as the Sharkdozer slid from side to side over the foot of the wall, on each pass clearing away another layer. Then …
“I think I’ve got something here!” exclaimed the Australian. He directed his video camera at the spot. Drifting silt clouded the image, but not enough to stop Nina’s heart from thumping at the sight. “Looks like a way in.”
On the screen, a passageway disappeared into darkness. It was hard to judge scale, but if the temple had been constructed the same way as its counterpart in Brazil, the opening was roughly four feet across.
“I’ll use the secondary vac to dredge it out,” said Trulli. “Give me a few minutes.” One of the Sharkdozer’s arms extended, but instead of using the large bucket at the end to clear the obstruction, a narrow metal pipe extended from beneath it, probing the opening and sucking away the deposits inside.
Chase leaned over Nina’s shoulder to examine the 3-D display, his cheek almost touching hers. “You know … if this temple has the same layout as the one in Brazil, that passage might lead right into the altar room. There was a shaft at the back, but it had been filled in with rocks.”
Nina gave him an accusing glance. “There was? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t have time! You know, with the whole imminent death thing.”
“A priest hole,” said Kari thoughtfully. “A secret exit.”
Trulli worked for several more minutes before retracting the arm. “I’ve cleared out as much as I can. Jimbo, warm up Mighty Jack!”
While Trulli backed the Sharkdozer away, Baillard brought his own submersible closer, parking it at the edge of the expanded depression around the north wall. Once in position, he announced, “Evenor, I’m releasing the ROV … now.”
All eyes went to the Atragon’s 3-D display, which switched from the ghostly monochrome of the LIDAR system to a full-color video image as Mighty Jack left its cage and headed for the temple. The little robot didn’t have the laser imaging system of its parent vessel, but it still had stereoscopic cameras. As it entered the opening, the tight confines of the passage beyond gave a vertiginous sensation of speed. “God, it’s like attacking the Death Star,” Chase observed.
Mighty Jack proceeded down the passage. There were still clumps of sediment along its floor, but Trulli had cleared enough for the ROV to pass. The tension in the control room rose as the robot advanced, to find …
A blank wall.
“No!” Nina gasped, disappointed. “It’s a dead end!”
The ROV turned left, then right, its spotlights finding nothing but solid stone. “What do you want me to do?” asked Baillard.
Nina was about to tell him to bring the robot back out when Chase interrupted, leaning close to speak into her headset’s mike. “Jim, this is Eddie. Can that thing go straight up?”
“Yes, sure. But—”
“Do it.”
After a moment of hesitation, the ROV rose cautiously towards the ceiling …
The Hunt for Atlantis_A Novel Page 28