Gods of Atlantis

by David J. L. Gibbins

  Saumerre paused. ‘For years I have been on the trail of something my grandfather knew about, a lost ancient treasure excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in Greece in the nineteenth century, hidden by him and then rediscovered and hidden away again by the Nazis. It is cal ed the pal adion, and my grandfather knew it would unlock untold Nazi secrets. Six months ago, Jack Howard and his team began excavations at the site of Troy, scene of another of Schliemann’s triumphs, and got wind of my quest. I found it expedient to have Howard’s daughter detained to try to force him to give me the pal adion when I thought he had found it. I used a Russian organization my family has employed before, but they let me down.

  They did not have the quality of the Brotherhood of the Tiger.’

  Shang Yong slammed his fist on the table. ‘We are the best.’

  ‘That is why I am here.’

  ‘The Russians failed, where my men would have succeeded.’

  ‘Howard’s security people uncovered what I have told you about my family past. If he had exposed me, I would not be here now. But he suspected that I knew more, that through my grandfather I could have knowledge of secret Nazi weapons that might fal into the wrong hands, that to expose me might persuade me to trigger a course of events that could lead to a terrorist attack or start a war. Howard and I have a stand-off. Any hint of my taking retribution against him or his people would lead to instant exposure of my criminal activities. So you see, this is personal for me too.’

  ‘Why do you choose to act now?’

  ‘His security people, and I am sure their contacts in the British secret service, have been waiting for a chink to appear in my armour, for something to prove that Howard’s suspicions were correct. I have been waiting for what I knew was only a matter of time. They have begun to excavate a site that was uncovered last year, a Nazi bunker near the latest concentration camp where my grandfather was imprisoned. I no longer have need of the pal adion to open what my grandfather knew was there. Howard and his team wil do the job for me. I have people in my pay who wil see that I get what I want.’

  ‘And you wil have what they find?’

  ‘As you said. In Europe, I am a god. The bunker is in Europe. I wil find a way.’

  Shang Yong bunched his fist. ‘Howard can be kil ed now.’ Saumerre shook his head. ‘To do that would lead to instant exposure. I wil wait until he has discovered what I want. He wil then be irrelevant to my plans. Other forces wil have been set in motion, and my charade in Brussels wil no longer be of consequence. Eliminating Howard wil simply be a matter of personal satisfaction for me and for you.’

  Shang Yong tapped the table again. ‘Tel me something, Saumerre. Your mother was Algerian. You are a practising Muslim, yes?’

  ‘You have read my profile. As a politician I have huge support among the Muslim community in France, and I can always count on backing from the Middle East and Gulf states. I am the only European politician of my stature who is perceived to be a Muslim, and it has helped my rise immeasurably. The utopian fools in Brussels think that the solution to Islamic fundamentalism is to encourage more Muslims into positions of high political power, and I am seen as the trailblazer.’

  ‘You say they are fools. So you think the path of the fundamentalists is an irrevocable one?’

  ‘I think there are many paths to the glory of Al ah.’

  Shang Yong looked at him shrewdly. ‘The Brotherhood of the Tiger does not heed that cal . If you are set on that path, then you have come knocking on the wrong door. I can get my revenge against Jack Howard another way.’

  Saumerre paused, tapped the envelope on his knee to drop the sheet back inside, then pushed it back into his overcoat, stopping halfway. ‘So be it.

  But you are missing an opportunity. I am offering you a flat fee of five hundred mil ion euros, half wired to your account now, half when I have Howard’s head on a platter. And if I discover the prize I am after, then I wil cut you in on half of a ransom I wil demand of the world, a ransom they wil have no choice but to pay and which wil make your fee look like smal change.

  But if you are unwil ing to do business, then I wil leave now.’

  ‘You wil not get past the door.’

  Saumerre looked at his watch. ‘If I am not back at my desk in Brussels by 0930 tomorrow morning, an automated sequence wil cause a little red light to flash in the Pentagon in Washington. A top-secret protocol wil be activated regarding verified and actionable information on known terrorist hideaways.

  The file that wil open under my authority as a European commissioner wil show that Shang Yong and his Brotherhood have financed fundamentalist terrorist attacks on Western targets as a way of furthering their own business interests. You see, you may speculate about my activities, but I know about yours. The file wil contain GPS co-ordinates for this chamber we are standing in now. By 1000 hours an executive decision wil have been taken in the White House, and by 1015 a massive cruise missile strike wil have been lauched from the carrier battle group presently in the Sea of Japan, with the secret connivance of those members of the Chinese government who would also like to see your operations destroyed. By 1215 everything here wil be obliterated, whether I am stil present or not. The countdown to this scenario only stops if I deactivate the sequence. It can be reactivated at any time.’

  Shang Yong was silent, his face set in stone.

  Suddenly he got up, clapped his hands together and walked over to Saumerre, his face beaming. ‘We are cut from the same mould. I think the play-acting is over, yes? Of course we can do business.’ He switched up the light, dimming the fantasy world around them, put a hand on Saumerre’s shoulder and gestured towards the computer monitor behind his desk. ‘You can make the wire transaction here. You have a wish list? It wil take me two days to prepare a team. Come with me. I want to know what it is they are searching for in that bunker. And I want to plan the execution of Jack Howard.’

  5

  South-eastern Black Sea, off Turkey

  ‘So what went wrong?’

  Scott Macalister strode into the operations room on Seaquest II and shut the door behind him. Jack swivel ed his chair from the computer monitor on the central table to face him, and Costas looked up from his tablet computer beside Jack. Macalister was immaculately turned out in his reserve naval officer’s uniform, the four gold bands of a captain on his sleeves and a row of ribbons on his jacket from his years of service in the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard before joining IMU. He stood square in the centre of the room, his white officer’s cap tucked under one arm and the other arm behind his back.

  ‘What went right,’ Costas replied, ‘is that we col ected more data on the volcano than we could ever have got using remote sensing. You’ve seen some of the images already, and the lab guys are processing the rest now. My immediate assessment of the danger level went straight to Lanowski to put in his report for the Turkish authorities as soon as I’d finished it in the recompression chamber about an hour ago.’

  Jack leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and looked up at Macalister pensively. ‘What went wrong was that we took a big gamble, and escaped by the skin of our teeth. If it hadn’t been for the crack in the rock that al owed us to escape, we’d stil be down there now. You’d be having to explain our disappearance and what I was doing here. My presence would be seen by our col eagues on the international monitoring committee as a direct contravention of the agreement not to dive on the site for archaeological purposes. I know you’ve done everything you can to be shipshape for the monitoring team and they’re due here any time. I’m sorry to have put you through this.’

  Macalister stood stil for a moment, then relaxed his arms and tugged his beard. ‘The important thing is that Costas is right. The data on the lava flow are exceptional. The Turkish geologists already know we’ve bored a tunnel and sent down a submersible with sensing equipment. I can tel them we tried to use an ROV, and that would explain Costas’ presence.

  Everyone knows that IMU does not send a state-of-the-a
rt ROV anywhere in the world without Costas Kazantzakis attached to it by an umbilical cord. That’l also explain the departure of the Lynx this evening, carrying Costas back to the underwater excavation at Troy where Jack Howard urgently needs his help to raise the Shield of Agamemnon.’ He turned to Costas. ‘I take it the ROV is stil down there in the volcano?’

  Costas looked crestfal en. ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘As for Dr Howard, who official y isn’t here, he needs to be spirited away on the helicopter before then. We need the helipad to be clear by mid-afternoon for the arrival of the inspection team, and we need al available space to accommodate them.’

  He eyed Jack sternly. ‘You okay with Mustafa Alkozen taking your cabin?’

  Jack nodded. ‘We’ve done it before. He and I rotated bunk space for a month in a submarine during a joint exercise in the Mediterranean, when he was the boat’s weapons officer and I was a seconded diver from the Royal Navy. And he is IMU’s Turkish representative, so he should have the best bunk.’

  ‘Okay.’ Macalister pul ed on his cap, turned to go and then tapped his watch. ‘Fifteen hundred hours on the helipad, right?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Roger that.’

  Macalister stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and gave a wry smile. ‘A wing and a prayer, Jack.’

  Jack took a deep breath, then exhaled forceful y. ‘A wing and a prayer.’

  ‘I saw some of the images. Those rock carvings.

  Pretty fantastic stuff. You can show me the rest when this is over.’ Macalister walked through the doorway and was gone, leaving them listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the whir of the computer fans.

  ‘Phew,’ Costas said.

  Jack swivel ed his chair back to the monitor. ‘That reminded me of my first term in the Royal Naval Col ege at Dartmouth, after Cambridge,’ he said. ‘I was always getting into trouble for stepping out of line.

  For taking too much initiative, I told them. My Howard seafaring ancestors were always mavericks. We’re not real y designed to take orders.’

  ‘I’ve noticed,’ Costas said.

  ‘It was lucky the special forces guy at the col ege spotted me, otherwise I’d have been politely told to pack my bags.’

  ‘Macalister has got a point,’ Costas said.

  Jack took another deep breath, and nodded. ‘Of course he has a point. And he’s the best damn captain we’ve ever had. I intend never to put him in that position again.’

  ‘You know what they say, Jack. Once you’ve taken that extra step beyond the boundary, you’l only want to do it again.’

  ‘Then it’d be time for me to stand down. I can’t let my personal ambitions impede IMU’s other projects, not least ones with a major scientific and humanitarian outcome like this one. If Macalister hadn’t told us just now that our data on the volcano had made it worthwhile, I’d seriously be considering vacating my cabin for good.’

  ‘Don’t tel Rebecca that.’ Costas grinned. ‘She’s waiting on the sidelines ready to jump in.’

  ‘That’s the other factor. Every time I have a near-death experience underwater, I think of Rebecca.

  She’s already lost her mother.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t be the same person for her if you didn’t take the risks. It’s al part of the tapestry you’ve woven for yourself, Jack. What was it Othel o said?

  “There’s magic in the web of it.”’

  Jack gave a wry smile. ‘Wel then I just need to keep that web from unravel ing. We need to stay on the edge, not stray over it. Copy that?’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘My buddy.’ He slapped Costas on the shoulder.

  ‘And by the way, thanks for saving my life.’

  Costas waved his hand. ‘I thought it was the other way round.’

  ‘Let’s get back to our images from this morning. I want as much of this wrapped up as possible before I have to leave.’ Jack turned to the computer screen, arched his back and stretched his arms. He seemed to feel every sinew and muscle in his body, and stretching released a sensation that coursed through him like a drug. He and Costas had just emerged from four hours in the recompression chamber breathing pure oxygen, but even so his system was stil working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from their dive. His body was wil ing him to go up to his cabin and lie down, but he knew that the adrenalin that was stil coursing through him would keep him alert. And he knew that if he did try to rest, his mind would only return to that moment when he and Costas could have safely returned after having discovered the pil ar with the golden Atlantis symbol. What was it that had driven him on, driven him to risk everything? He put the thought from his mind, and refocused on the screen. The important thing was that they had less than two hours now to process the imagery from their dive, and if they let that opportunity slip, it might be weeks before they were together again on Seaquest II or at the IMU campus in England. Jack had seen astonishing things today, as astonishing as anything he had seen in his archaeological career, and he wanted those images to be in the forefront of his mind as the excavation at Troy wound down. He had gone back to Atlantis with questions, and they were stil burning. Who were these people? Where had they gone? Who were their gods?

  ‘Jack, this is incredible. Lanowski’s just finishing his 3-D CGI map of the site. The final version should be streaming online in a few minutes.’

  Costas turned back to his screen, and Jack continued staring at the image he had cal ed up on his monitor before Macalister had come in. It was a stil from the video he had taken with his helmet camera inside the volcano that morning; below it he had arranged a line of thumbnails of other Neolithic sites in the Near East that he had pul ed up for comparison.

  The image from the morning was raw, unrefined, the foreground stil specked with white where the light from his headlamp had reflected off particles in the water. But seeing it like that made it more vivid, as if he were stil caught in the amazement of that moment when he had first entered the chamber. It showed the pil ars standing like sentinels, three-metre-tal monoliths carved out of volcanic tufa, each one rising to a T-shape a metre or more wide. He could see animals carved in shal ow relief on the pil ars – lions, wild boar, scorpions and spiders, leopards and bul s.

  On the back wal of the cave he spotted something he had not seen on the dive: a bul ’s skul fixed into a hole in the rock, half in and half out, the bone plastered over and the horns painted red. Above it was a painting of vultures swooping down on a headless human body, shaped crudely in outline; beside that were the spectral remains of painted animals, visible where they had not been hacked away and smoothed out. Not only the pil ars but also the carvings on them seemed to have been freshly chisel ed, sharply delineated. Out with the old, in with the new.

  Archaeologists had begun to talk about the Neolithic as a time of religious transition, a time when humans first conceived of gods with human characteristics, gods who were to play out al the human capacity for cruelty and greed in the mythologies of Mesopotamia and the Near East. Jack stared at the pil ars. Was this where it had al begun? Was Atlantis the birthplace of the gods?

  He held the mouse and dragged the image up to see the floor of the chamber. The lab analysis of the sample he had taken had just come through, showing that the stone floor had been covered in layers of terrazzo, burnt lime. Embedded within the lime was the most extraordinary sight of al : the plastered human skul s that seemed to be emerging from the ground in the same way that the bul ’s skul was emerging from the rock wal . He scrol ed over the other skul s, the ones without plaster, some of them fal en alongside the three stone basins he could now see, each about half a metre high and carved out of the living rock. The scattered skul s and the basins were partly covered with the calcite accretion that had settled over the floor since the inundation. It was a haunting, ghostly scene, with the pil ars like rough-formed bodies standing in the background, towering over the toppled skul s. Jack tried to retain a professional detachment, but it made the
hairs stand up on the back of his neck. What had been going on here?

  Costas slid his chair alongside, minimized the image and tapped a key. A three-dimensional lattice appeared on the screen, angled as if they were viewing it from the upper right-hand corner. The terrain mapper had been designed to project a holographic image on to the miniature screens inside their e-suit helmets, to help them navigate over seabed features in poor light conditions, using GPS, sonar, photogrammetric and other data previously fed into the computer, but here it was being used to build up a flat-screen isometric image of the site. As they watched, the grid lattice disappeared below a contoured image of the Black Sea bathymetry, zooming down to the abyssal plain in the centre of the sea and then rising up the slope towards the Turkish shore and their present position some fifteen nautical miles off the border with the Republic of Georgia.

  Jack saw the twin peaks of the volcano just below the surface of the sea, and then the slope where the flow of lava and other volcanic fal out had buried the ruins of the ancient city five years ago, in a terrifying eruption that had nearly cost them their lives.

  ‘I’l pause it here,’ Costas said, tapping a key. ‘You remember when we left this place five years ago we thought the eruption would have destroyed pretty wel everything of the lower town?’

  Jack nodded. ‘You said you’d need a sub-bottom profiler that could see through lava to find out what was left. A powerful low-frequency echo sounder. The stuff you’ve been tinkering with in the engineering workshop at IMU for the last five years.’

  ‘Not tinkering, Jack. Perfecting.’

  ‘Okay. Perfecting.’

  The image sharpened, showing details of rock outcrops and fissures on the slopes. It was like looking at an aerial view of Mount St Helens in Washington State after the 1980 eruption, a scene of utter devastation. Along the seaward slope, where Jack remembered five years before seeing dense pueblo-style buildings, al he saw now was a great slick like a frozen mudslide, completely burying the original rocky substrate and al of the ancient structures. His heart sank as he saw the scale of the destruction. ‘It’s much worse than I feared. Those were mud-brick buildings. The lava must have destroyed everything.’