Something terrifying, from the distant past. Something that could be made into a wonder-weapon.’
Schoenberg stared at him, then narrowed his eyes.
‘I am a scholar, Jack. You know that. The Reichsführer may have had other dreams, but they were not mine.
These wild theories died on the funeral pyre of the Reich in 1945.’
‘Thank you for tel ing us what you know. We’l be in touch.’
Jack led Costas through the door and closed it.
They crossed the veranda and clattered down the wooden steps to the beach, then began to walk towards the jetty and the inflatable boat. The tide was coming in, pushing foaming sheets of water almost to their feet, backed by rol ing Pacific breakers that made a muffled roar. It was time to get back to the aircraft before the wind and the water rose any more.
Costas hurried up alongside Jack. ‘That was pushing it. Asking about Frau Hoffman and Himmler.’
‘I wanted him to be on edge. I want him to know that we know.’
‘It was revealing that he cal ed Himmler Reichsführer, a little respectful y I thought, after you did.’
‘That was intentional on my part.’
‘He was there in Iceland.’
Jack nodded. ‘He was there, though I’m not convinced he knew the real purpose. Anyone Himmler let in on his scheme was probably doomed to be liquidated. I don’t believe Saumerre wil have told him the truth either. My guess is that Schoenberg doesn’t know a lot more than he’s told us. He evidently was not one of the Ahnenerbe men who discovered the ancient site in the Caribbean, though he must have known it was an area where they’d been searching for Atlantis. Once Himmler had decided to use the site for his own purpose, those men were probably al removed from the equation early on. If Schoenberg knew the location, we wouldn’t be here now, and the world would be a much more dangerous place.’
‘There’s a lot of contradiction in Schoenberg,’
Costas said, jerking his head back towards the house. ‘A scholar who tears a page out of an ancient manuscript to prevent it being destroyed by the Nazis.
A senior Ahnenerbe man who was under the spel of Himmler, yet was perfectly aware that most of the stuff was nonsense and that many of his fel ow Ahnenerbe men were beneath contempt. A Prussian aristocrat who is scornful of Nazi thugs, and of peasants. A family man fearful of his children finding out out about his past. A racist who despises Poles and Chinese.
And if we’re to believe Frau Hoffman, a man capable of shopping his old professor to the Gestapo.’
‘I believe Frau Hoffman.’ Jack clicked on his phone, put it to his ear and made a cal . He hung back for a few moments behind Costas, and then caught up. ‘I was speaking to Ben. Frau Hoffman needs beefed-up protection. The first thing Schoenberg is going to do is cal Saumerre and tel us we’ve been talking to her.
We need her alive to be able to work on that antidote to the bacterium, and I’m sure Major Penn and his men wil be more than happy to have some of our IMU
security team along as wel .’
‘You buy Schoenberg’s story about the manuscript, what we’ve just seen?’
Jack nodded. ‘I’ve spent enough time with Maria and Jeremy looking at old vel um to know the real thing when I see it, and the imprint of the text was authentic. It’s not that I’m worried about. Schoenberg was playing us. He wants us to take this to its conclusion, to use al our skil s to find whatever lies at the end of this trail.’
‘That word, Jack. The word we’ve just seen in the ancient text.’
Jack took a deep breath and stopped walking, putting his hands on his hips and staring out to sea.
He turned to Costas. ‘ Atlantis.’
Costas slapped him on the back. ‘Pretty amazing. I thought that word was history for us, but here it is shining again like a big red neon light.’
‘It’s explosive,’ Jack said, his voice tight with emotion. ‘Absolutely explosive. If we can prove they went west, find where they went, then it looks as if we might be on the way to bending history again, as big a bend as you can imagine.’
‘Noah and Alkaios, Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh?
You think these are the same two men?’
‘I’m convinced of it. We already know from Katya’s interpretation of those symbols on the cave wal at Atlantis that Noah was Uta-napishtim, and Enlil was Gilgamesh: the shorter names were like nicknames, the longer ones more formal shaman names. But Alkaios makes complete sense to me as another name for Enlil-Gilgamesh. Alkaios was the hero of the West, the early version of Heracles. If Enlil-Gilgamesh returned from his huge ocean voyage, leaving Noah-Uta-napishtim in his new Atlantis, he may have acquired mythical stature among those people of the north African coast – the “Ladies of the West” as Pliny cal s them, maybe at Lixus itself – who may have equated him with their ancient god Alkaios. Over time he became Heracles, and it would have been natural for Pliny to use this familiar name for a god-hero already associated with the gateway to the Western Ocean, the Pil ars of Hercules.’
They reached the boat, and Costas untied the stern line and jumped in. Jack gestured at his phone again and climbed the rocky spur to get better reception. A few minutes later he pocketed the phone, and bunched his fist. ‘Yes.’ He clambered back down, untied the painter and hopped in beside Costas, resuming his position in the stern beside the engine.
‘Two very quick phone cal s clinched it.’
‘Spil it.’
‘The first one to Maria, who’s in Naples. She saw that marginal note in Claudius’ manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History yesterday morning, but assumed it was probably a reference to the Atlantis story in Plato.
She was looking at the infrared spectrographic images of the first part of Book 5 as I cal ed her, and she was able to read out the note. It was exactly the same as on Schoenberg’s sheet. Exactly the same.
That confirms it. It wasn’t made up by a medieval monk. It was copied from Pliny.’
‘And?’
Jack grinned. ‘The second cal was to Dil en. He was back in his office in Cambridge, having closed the excavation at Troy yesterday. It was something that’s been niggling me ever since we saw those Stone Age symbols at Atlantis. I knew I’d seen something like them before, and I don’t mean the symbols on Palaeolithic cave paintings, but somewhere unexpected, the reason why it didn’t click for me straight away. You remember I said that when I was a student I did a study tour of Phoenician sites in west Africa? When Schoenberg mentioned Lixus, I suddenly remembered. At the top of the acropolis I found a large hole, probably where masonry had been dug out centuries ago from the Roman site for reuse.
At the bottom was a much older stone, worn, apparently toppled sideways, with barely discernible symbols on it that I assumed were early Phoenician. I asked Dil en to dig out my study tour report from his shelves and take a look at my photograph. He said there were only three very worn symbols visible, but that they looked like a crescent, a V and three slashes. Those were the first three symbols from the Atlantis cave that Katya interpreted as the name Gilgamesh.’
Costas looked incredulous. ‘The pil ar mentioned by Pliny? You mean you found it more than twenty-five years ago?’
Jack grinned again. ‘Sometimes things stare you in the face for a long time. You just have to know what you’re looking at.’
‘That makes it real for me,’ Costas said. ‘An ancient exodus west across the Atlantic from Lixus fol owing the current would very probably land you in the Caribbean.’
Jack nodded. ‘When we were on Seaquest II in the Black Sea after our dive into the volcano, do you remember I brought up Thor Heyerdahl and his Ra expeditions? I guessed that an exodus west from Atlantis and the Mediterranean would have gone south with the current towards Cape Juby just as Heyerdahl did, and then west across the open ocean.
I knew after talking to Frau Hoffman that Himmler’s men must have chanced on the site of the Atlantean landfal in the Caribbean, and that was where he must have decided to establish his
secret hideaway. So I phoned Rebecca’s foster-father Mikhail and asked him to look into any evidence for unusual German activity in the Caribbean before the war, as wel as any U-boat sightings in May and June 1945. I told him to liaise with Lanowski to correlate anything he found with geological evidence for a likely underwater site.
Mikhail’s a military historian, and I knew from spending time with him last year that he’d recently written a book on the strategic significance of the Caribbean at the outset of the Cold War. A moment ago, when I spoke to Ben, he was on Mikhail’s farm in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, where he took Rebecca this morning for safety. Ben passed the phone to Mikhail, who’d just received a package of material from the US National Archives. I could sense his excitement. He thinks it’s exactly what we want.’
‘Any details?’
‘It involves one of the last combat missions against the Nazis. Three weeks after the German surrender. It sounds like something out of the annals of the Bermuda Triangle, but it’s much more real and much more horrifying than that. Mikhail’s stil working through the file, but he’s going to tel me the ful story when I get there.’
‘We’re going to the Adirondacks?’
‘ I’m going to the Adirondacks.’ Jack picked up the phone again, then paused. ‘The Embraer’s al fuel ed up at Tofino and it’s going to fly us to Syracuse in upstate New York, where I’m going to rent a car and drive into the mountains. I should arrive at Mikhail’s place before dawn tomorrow morning. You’re going on from Syracuse to Seaquest II off Bermuda. I need you in the operations room to kick up a brainstorm with your new best buddy Lanowski. As soon as we can pinpoint a location for the Nazi hideaway in the Caribbean, we need everything we can get on the geology and oceanography, and the predicted weather conditions over the next forty-eight hours.
That’s the time frame we’re looking at. The Embraer’s going to return from Bermuda to Syracuse and I’l aim to join you with Rebecca on Seaquest II tomorrow evening, after Mikhail’s told me what he’s found out.
Then al eyes south to the Caribbean.’
Costas jerked his head back to the bungalow above the beach. They could just make out Schoenberg’s straw hat in the window, and a cel phone clamped to his ear. ‘You gave that one away.
You told him that’s where we were heading.’
‘We’re al playing each other. Saumerre wil be playing Schoenberg just as Himmler once played his Ahnenerbe cronies, convincing them that the archaeology was the main prize, letting only a chosen few know his true intent and then disposing of them when they’d served their purpose. Schoenberg’s tel ing him that as soon as I’ve fol owed the lead I told him about, I’l get back to him to reveal where we’re heading. He believes I’l do that because he offered me more information about the Ahnenerbe, about other treasures waiting to be discovered. Part of Schoenberg, the scholar and adventurer, just won’t believe I’d pass up on a chance like that, that somehow he and I wil go off together on fantastic voyages of discovery. Another part of him, the Nazi, believes that what he revealed to us in that rant about Frau Hoffman wil come as a terrible shock and persuade us that everything she said about Himmler and his plan was a pack of lies. Schoenberg would like to think that we’re after the archaeology, not the deadly weapon that Saumerre wants. Remember what we saw at Wewelsburg Castle. That place poisoned everyone who came in contact with it, whether real scholars like Schoenberg or the academic failures and thugs who formed the core of the Ahnenerbe, the spies and sycophants whom Schoenberg despised. For Schoenberg, sitting there overlooking the sea dreaming of unresolved quests, the fantasy is reborn in his mind after al these decades, something that we’ve used to get information out of him, just as Saumerre has too.’
‘So you real y intend to tel him the probable location?’
‘As soon as Mikhail tel s me, and just before I board the plane to Bermuda. That way I’m in control. I want to push this to a confrontation. Saumerre may become impatient and events may move faster than we predicted. Ben’s convinced that Shang Yong’s hitmen wil know about the farm and wil have assumed that’s where Ben went with Rebecca when she left school this morning in Manhattan, where they’ve been shadowing her.’
Costas looked at his watch. ‘Better get going. Our pilot wil be waiting.’
Jack pul ed the starter cord and the Mariner coughed to life. He stared for a moment back at the figure in the bungalow, now with the phone down, watching them. ‘Part of me would stil like to think that he’s just another victim of that war.’
Costas shook his head. ‘Remember what you told me when we went to see him. What it was real y al about, the Ahnenerbe. Racist theory that resulted in the corpses and the living dead in the concentration camps, and on those gurneys in that bunker. Those were the victims.’
Jack nodded. He gunned the engine, driving the boat out into the channel, then throttled back for a moment and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Forty-eight hours to endgame.’
‘Roger that.’
19
Above the Bahamas, 3 June 1945
Squadron Leader Peter White gripped the control wheel of the B-24 Liberator and straightened his back, straining against the harness and feeling the blood return to places in his legs that had been pressed against the unfamiliar seat for more than three hours now. It was his first long-haul flight in the Liberator, and he was not yet attuned to the nuances and idiosyncrasies that made an aircraft seem like an extension of the pilot’s being. For more than eighteen months before the Nazi surrender he had flown a Lancaster bomber, the four-engine warhorse of the British air offensive over occupied Europe. The Lancaster was an instrument of death and destruction, but he had grown to love his aircraft, to trust in its ability to return him again and again through the flak and the night fighters while other bombers were fal ing out of the sky around him. His crew believed that it was he who had the luck, he who would see them through when two thirds of their fel ow-crews did not make it. They cal ed him Uncle, because he was an old man of twenty-nine; he knew they revered him. Their faith was so strong that he had volunteered for another tour to skipper the men who were only partway through theirs. But for him there was nobody to elevate to god-like status, nothing except the machine. The relationship of a bomber pilot to his aircraft was impossible to explain to anyone who had not endured night after night flying to the seat of Satan himself, to the place where the simmering evil below seemed only to be stoked by the rain of bombs, where airmen who were about to die saw hel not as a nightmarish final vision but as the reality below them as they plummeted towards the raging firestorms they themselves had helped to create.
White leaned forward to peer over the instrument panel at the shimmering expanse of the Caribbean Sea some three thousand feet below. He had loved his Lancaster, but he had not yet learned to love the Liberator. It was not just the poor forward visibility from the flight deck that was the problem. When he had arrived at the Operational Conversion Unit in the Bahamas two weeks ago, his instructor had cal ed the Liberator a cantankerous beast, lumbering and draughty, heavy on the controls. White had learned the ropes quickly enough doing circuits around the base at Nassau, but this flight was his first experience of wrestling with the controls over a long mission. The aircraft was a bugger to trim, and he was constantly having to horse it around to keep it on a straight line.
And the din when he lifted his earphones was indescribable. The Liberator was fat-bel ied by comparison with the Lancaster and the B-17 Flying Fortress, and the open ports for the waist-guns meant that the fuselage was like a musical soundbox that magnified the noise of the engines and the propel ers and the slipstream as it roared by, reverberating through the aircraft. He was glad they were flying at low level and not at ten thousand feet or more as they had done over Europe, where the cold in the B-24
would have been horrendous. But as each hour had passed this morning, he had grudgingly begun to see the sense of her. She was like a charging bul , bel owing and roaring through th
e sky, reeking and pawing the air. He realized it was the first time he had thought of the aircraft as she. That was always a good sign. And he could see why they had been made to fly the Liberator before converting to the upgraded version, the B-32 Defender, the purpose of their flight scheduled for tomorrow across the United States to the US base on the island of Guam in the Pacific. The B-32 was by al accounts a thing of luxury, with a pressurized cabin. But by training on the B-24, they would never forget the beast within, one they would soon be riding into the whirlwind of another war.
‘Skipper, we’re two minutes from a course change.’
A clipboard with a nautical chart appeared from behind, and White took it from the navigator, Flight Lieutenant Alan Cook, an Australian, who crouched down beside him and pointed at the ruled lines in red pencil across the map. ‘We’re just coming up to the northern tip of the island of San Salvador,’ Cook said.
‘From there we turn to compass bearing thirty-five degrees and drop to five hundred feet above sea level to begin our run in. At a speed of two hundred and twenty knots, dead reckoning puts us over our target in just under fifteen minutes.’
White stared at the clipboard, reminding himself of the features he had memorized during the mission briefing at Nassau, then handed it back. He increased the volume of the intercom microphone to try to exclude as much of the din as possible. ‘Bomb-aimer, did you hear that?’
‘Righto, Skip,’ a New Zealand drawl responded.
‘Eyes peeled ahead.’
White glanced at the co-pilot, who had been looking at him expectantly, and nodded at him.
‘Altering course now.’ He turned the wheel smoothly, pushing the control column forward and pressing the left rudder pedal. As the aircraft banked to port, he looked out and saw the northern tip of the island, and ahead of that the turquoise waters of the reefs that covered the outer banks of the Bahamas. He checked the mixture controls for each of the four engines to make sure they were on auto-rich, then level ed out at a compass bearing of thirty-five degress and pitched the plane forward into a shal ow dive. He pul ed the throttle levers back to reduce the airspeed, then let go of the levers and blew on his nose to equalize the pressure in his ears as they dropped in altitude. At eight hundred feet he began to level off, edging the throttle levers forward until the airspeed stabilized at two hundred and thirty knots at an altitude of five hundred feet. He trimmed the aircraft until she was slightly nose-heavy, then scanned the instruments: oil pressure, fuel pressure, oil temperature, cylinder head temperature, al good. He glanced again at the co-pilot. ‘Right. I’m taking a breather. She’s yours for five minutes.’
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