‘Mutual distrust, I get that, it’s always been there. But they’re not about to go to war, are they?’
Mitchell pressed the tickets into her hand.
‘Not if we can help it,’ he replied. ‘This country’s government is now running the country as though it is a business, and all businesses must make a profit to survive. The Russian government is even more corrupt now than it was in the Cold War and shows no sign of developing into a true democracy. Both of our leaders are obsessed with controlling the media and expanding an already bloated military. They say it’s for defense, but in truth it’s to ensure that thirty billion dollars of lost and untraceable money can’t cross the borders into or out of Russia or Europe. They’re each covering their own and that means only one thing.’
‘They’re both in it for the money.’
Mitchell nodded. ‘Our president was never about this country, he’s about making money. The Russian president is a dictator and is also interested in ensuring his fortune when the time finally comes for him to step down, not to mention restoring Communism and an eastern bloc alliance sufficient to challenge US global supremacy. Each leader is sufficiently self–interested and paranoid enough that they are willing to deploy their military to ensure that neither one can double–cross the other, and each of their countries sufficiently paranoid about the other that the people and the governments openly support the moves. Knowing the personalities involved, what do you think the chances are that they’ll honor this agreement of theirs and not try to ensure a greater slice of Majestic Twelve’s ill–gotten gains for themselves?’
‘I don’t have a cameraman, no way to record or document any of this except for what I can carry myself.’
‘That’s precisely what we want,’ Mitchell assured her. ‘There’s only one way that you’ll get to blow this story wide open, and that’s to get right in the middle of it. Nobody will believe a word of it unless you can witness it and record it yourself, do you understand?’
Allison stood her ground and then shook her head.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she insisted. ‘So far this little escapade of yours has cost me my job and I’m done with it. I don’t know who you are, but I do know that you’re not to be trusted by anybody. You’re so sure that all of this can be done, then go do it yourself.’
Allison turned and walked away, and Mitchell’s voice rumbled after her.
‘I can give you Keyes.’
Allison stopped, closed her eyes and replied without looking back. ‘How?’
‘There is footage of him talking to known Russian computer hackers, three months before the elections.’
Allison turned. ‘Thanks, I’ll take it now.’
‘I don’t have it on me,’ Mitchell said, ‘but I know where it is. You’ll need to go alone, and when you’ve got it we can talk again.’
‘Where?’
Mitchell turned away and replied as he left.
‘I will arrange the meeting and call you as soon as they’re ready.’
***
XIV
Gulf of Khambat,
India
The engine of the boat upon which Ethan stood clattered and spilled puffs of oily smoke onto the brisk wind as he balanced against the rolling swells rocking the boat from side to side. He turned to one side to see Lopez leaning against a rusty railing encircling the deck, her usually perfect skin ashen and her eyes hooded with nausea.
‘At least we don’t have very far to go,’ he offered.
Lopez nodded but didn’t look at Ethan as he turned to Raz.
‘What do you know about these submerged ruins?’
Raz shrugged as though it were obvious.
‘These ruins are rumored to be from an ancient Indian culture, but Lucy was searching for Atlantis, not a city well known to historians unlike ancient Dwarka’
‘This place has been known about for a long time?’ Ethan asked as he scanned the distant coastline, one eye now always on the lookout for their Russian antagonists.
‘A few years,’ Raz confirmed. ‘The current city of Dwarka is the reconstructed site of the old city after the original was swallowed by the waves many thousands of years ago. Historians know that it was real as it was referenced often in history, but they didn’t know where it was located. What you have to understand is that the world is littered with submerged cities that were swallowed by the oceans.’
‘It is?’ Lopez groaned as she peered at them from the railings. ‘They must’ve forgotten to mention that in school.’
‘The world’s oceans have been rising for many centuries, for many thousands of years even,’ Raz explained. ‘This is because of the end of the last Ice Age, when so much water was locked up in the ice caps and the sea levels around the world were far lower than they are today. When the glaciers began to melt so the sea levels rose and the cities that mankind had built on coasts and river estuaries were consumed by the oceans. Twenty thousand years ago, the Arabian Sea was a hundred meters lower than it is today.’
The site they were headed to was concealed fully thirty meters below the waves. It didn’t take Ethan very long to do the math.
‘That would make the site around seven thousand years old.’
‘And that’s why you don’t hear much about such sites from mainstream archaeologists,’ Raz explained. ‘The dawn of human civilization is estimated to have occurred in the fertile crescent of Asia some five thousand years ago and was limited to small scale agriculture. To have a major city buried beneath the waves predating any known civilization by two thousand years would completely change our perception of human history and likely end a few careers in the process.’
‘You think that this place could be a sort of Atlantis itself?’ Lopez asked as she mastered her nausea and pulled on her diving suit.
‘Explorations conducted in similar waters revealed sandstone walls, a grid of streets and evidence of a sea port. If this location turns out to be the true ancient site of Dwarka, then it was also the dwelling place of Krishna and old enough that every history book in the world will have to be re–written.’
‘We’ve seen a few places like that,’ Ethan replied as the boat crashed through the waves toward their destination. ‘What do we know about this place?’
‘I managed to find some limited reports from diving expeditions conducted in great secrecy in this area some years ago,’ Raz replied. ‘A large number of stone structures were detected, geometric in form and clearly not natural in their formation, and they’re scattered over a vast area of several kilometres. Stone anchors have been found along with pottery shards, indicating that the settlement would have been a major port at one time or another.’
‘The time being the operative factor,’ Ethan said.
‘Precisely. Fragments recovered in this area during marine archaeological expeditions were carbon dated by the National Geophysical Research Institute in Hyderabad and the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany in Lucknow, and returned dates of between nine and ten thousand years’ old, far exceeding any other civilization currently known to man. Those same measurements were repeated on fresh fragments of microliths, wattle and daub remains and such like by laboratories at none other than Oxford University. The carbon dating again confirmed an age of between nine and ten thousand years, but the research was suppressed in all but the minor journals and so word did not get out about the discoveries. Funding was stripped and that was the end of the expedition. Nobody has been out here since except Lucy, who was brought here by Ranjit and his son just a couple of weeks ago.’
The boat’s engine coughed and died down as the boat reached the area where Lucy had presumably dived. Raz called to the boat owner, Ranjit, in Hindu and the old man replied around the husk of a cigarette smoldering in his mouth and nodded as he pointed toward the sea below them.
‘This is the spot,’ Raz confirmed as he peered over the edge of the boat. ‘This is where Lucy dove for almost an hour.’
The boat rocked on the wave
s and Lopez hurriedly hauled on her tanks and staggered across to the side of the boat. Ethan watched as she yanked her mask down over her face and opened his mouth to speak.
‘Wait a second, I’m almost ready to…’ Lopez tipped herself backwards over the side of the boat and vanished in a crash of sparkling water. ‘.., follow.’
‘I don’t think she likes being on boats so much,’ Raz observed as Lopez’s position drifted away from the boat, betrayed only by a swathe of bubbles breaking the surface nearby. ‘Be careful, the site is known for treacherous currents that can tear you away toward the deeper water beyond, it’s why it’s so rarely visited.’
Ethan perched on the side of the boat and gave Raz a thumbs–up before he pulled his mask down and pitched himself backwards off the boat and into the water.
The bright blue sky was replaced with the shimmering depths of the Arabian Sea as clouds of silvery bubbles rippled past Ethan, heading toward the surface. Ethan quickly got his bearings and saw the boat’s anchor chain nearby and Lopez heading past it as she dove for the mossy seabed below.
What he saw there was surprising in its clarity.
Ethan could see instantly that the seabed was scattered with uniform shapes too regular to have been formed by natural processes. Although some volcanic and erosive environmental processes could carve quite geometric shapes from the landscape they tended to be localized and rare, whereas here he could see long, straight walls of uniform height and direction stretching away from them in all directions. Chunks of stone lay at awkward angles on the seabed, but the chunks were square or rectangular and often piled in groups in a way that suggested structures had collapsed in situ.
Ethan spun in a circle as he hung suspended above the city and he quickly spotted a larger structure to the north of their position that Lopez was already swimming towards. Ethan kicked off in pursuit and they descended down and away from the rippling surface into gloomier water, deep blue in color but filled with a jetsam of debris that drifted with the strong currents.
Ethan noted a movement in the distance to his right and turned to see the ghostly form of a tiger shark drift like a marine phantom through the endless abyss. It seemed to watch him for a long moment with one cruel black eye, and then its tail flicked and it accelerated out of sight.
Ethan kept moving and saw the impressive site of a low temple emerge from the depths ahead, its sandstone walls still standing thousands of years after it had been built thanks to the dense layer of dark green sea moss clinging like a blanket to its surface. The moss protected the stone that otherwise would have been eroded away by currents over the millennia it had been submerged. Ethan could see arches concealed by the dense foliage, small clouds of fish zipping this way and that in perfect formation past the walls, other larger fish cruising casually and only giving cursory attention to Ethan and Lopez as they swam past. Ethan figured that was another indicator that people rarely dived here, the local wildlife unafraid of humans.
Lopez looked back at him and pointed ahead, and Ethan nodded as he saw what looked like an entrance into another temple structure that was larger but set lower than the one they were swimming past now. The seabed rose up around the temple as though it had been consumed by silt, the location and height suggesting that it was one of the older constructions on the site.
Ethan checked his depth and his watch as he followed Lopez around the perimeter of the temple, and as they rounded the south side so they both saw a dark, rectangular entrance that descended into the mysterious building. Lopez didn’t hesitate, activating her head–mounted flashlight and descending toward it.
Ethan followed, switching on his own flashlight and noticing around the entrance evidence of recent excavations, dislodged rocks and pyramidal mounds of sand that might have been caused by a diver using a machine to suck sand away from the entrance and spit it out a few yards away.
The darkness swallowed them both, their flashlight beams cutting through the blackness with harsh white light that illuminated a passageway of stone. The walls to Ethan’s side were inscribed with images, carvings of Hindu gods and what looked almost like Egyptian heiroglyphics. The water was thick with silt kicked up by the moving currents and their own passage, but Ethan could see enough to pull from his belt a life line that he wedged into a slim cavity in the wall. The line would unreel behind him, showing them the way out of the structure.
Lopez’s flashlight beam suddenly burst out into a larger, even darker space and Ethan followed her out of the narrow passage and into what might have been some kind of gathering place. He could see a couple of pillars and part of the temple wall nearby but everything else was shrouded in darkness.
Ethan reached down to his utility belt and pulled from a pouch a pair of luminous glow sticks. He cracked them one after the other to provoke the chemical reaction that caused the glow and then dropped them near what he assumed was the center of the space. Lopez mirrored his actions, dropping her glow sticks further into the cavity than he had done.
The sticks began to glow and their combined light increased as Ethan hung back from them and looked around as the glow filled the chamber around them and revealed a temple that had not been seen by human eyes for thousands of years.
The walls of the temple were built from cut sandstone blocks, into which were embedded rows of pillars that Ethan guessed would number a total of seventy–two. The ceiling was made from horizontal blocks of sandstone braced with what might have been iron work but the metal was too encased in moss to be sure. The blocks must have weighed tons apiece but somehow these ancient people had managed to cut and place them in a temple that stood at least twenty feet high.
Ethan could see a shrine or raised area at the front of the temple, and although the shrine was empty he was about to head toward it when he looked down at the ancient stone flags beneath them and realized that the floor of the temple was filled with a vast symbol cut directly into the stones themselves.
Three concentric circles, the largest almost reaching the walls of the temple, surrounded a blazing sun icon, and inside the icon was an engraving of the Krishna himself. Ethan noted the winged appearance of the god, looking very much like the angels of the biblical tradition but portrayed here in a much older society, much like the Babylonians and others, and clear evidence of how modern religions had merely copied the myths, caricatures and legends of their pagan predecessors.
Then, quite suddenly, he realized that the Krishna in the engraving was pointing out of the center of the star and looking in the same direction. As Ethan looked at the temple around them, he saw patterns carved into the ceiling and he realized that it was an image of the stars, the belt of Orion easily recognizable even to him many thousands of years later.
He saw Lopez pointing up and down at the various icons and he nodded vigorously. The temple was what Lucy Morgan had been looking for because the temple itself was a map, a map that Ethan realized might point to Atlantis itself.
***
XV
Raz stood on the fishing boat’s transom and waited for Ethan and Nicola to resurface. He knew that the area they were in was dangerous for more than just its currents and the frequent storms that rushed in across the vast expanses of the Arabian Sea. The waters of the gulf were patrolled by pirates who thought nothing of attacking private vessels and looting them of their contents, even stealing the vessels themselves and leaving their hapless owners stranded on remote spits of land or, worse, floating dead upon the endless waves.
He glanced up at Ranjit and his son, who were now lounging near the wheel, smoking and regarding him with silent gazes. Even as he watched them he realized that it had been after her dive here that Lucy had gone off the radar and vanished before sending the video of the stele that had started the whole search. He had assumed that Lucy had been spooked upon her return to the shore, but slowly it dawned on Raz that maybe it had been out here that Lucy had become concerned for her safety and had decided to flee without warning…
‘How l
ong did Doctor Morgan dive here for?’ he asked the fishermen.
Ranjit shrugged non–comittally, but his son replied without concern.
‘For two days,’ he said. ‘She said that it took her some time to find the entrance.’
Raz frowned. That meant that the fishermen would have had time to return to shore and be questioned by anybody who might have been interested in what Lucy was doing. He looked at the men’s fishing nets and noted that they were folded and neatly stowed. He walked toward them on the deck and he could see that they were bone dry, the nets not having been deployed for some time.
Raz noted Ranjit’s threadbare clothes and sun–weathered skin. Both were men of the sea and both were poor, and yet their nets had not been cast in days. A premonition of doom overwhelmed Raz and he was about to turn and run out of sight when Ranjit reached down and slipped an old pistol from beneath his shirt, a faint smile on his old lips as he pointed the weapon at Raz.
‘You’re not fishermen,’ Raz said as he looked at the two men.
Ranjit smiled without warmth and the younger chuckled as he shook his head. ‘You’re not either.’
‘What are you going to do with my friends?’ Raz asked.
‘Us?’ the younger man asked as he stepped down, a thick plastic cable tie in his hands that he used to bind Raz’s wrists together. ‘Nothing. But those guys?’
The young man nodded toward the horizon, and Raz looked up to see in the distance across the endless waves a pair of fast–moving boats rushing toward them, each packed with armed men. The young man yanked the cable tie tight on Raz’s wrists.
‘Let’s just say that your friends will be staying out here longer than they planned.’
The Atlantis Codex Page 10