The Gods of Atlantis jh-6

by David Gibbins

  He took the memory stick from Lanowski, plugged it into his computer and took out his cell phone as he emailed the image. He found a saved number and then put it up to his ear, waiting. ‘During the summers, she’s out there with an international team, really well resourced after our board of directors agreed to fund the project,’ he said. ‘But out of season like now, it’s usually just her and Altamaty, like it was at the beginning.’ He suddenly looked away, putting his free hand over his other ear. ‘Hello? Altamaty? It’s Jack. I can barely hear you. It must be windy. I’ve got something for Katya.’ He strained to listen, and then took down the phone. ‘He’s digging out their laptop and getting the webcam up, and then he’ll go and find her.’

  Jack activated the webcam on his own computer and propped it behind the main console keyboard so they could all see. The webcam came on line, showing a shaky image and a pair of hands, evidently propping a laptop on a rock; then the image stabilized to reveal a bleak landscape of scrub and boulders with clouds racing overhead. A face appeared, a ruggedly handsome man with Mongolian features wearing a mountaineering jacket and a Kyrgyz woollen hat. After he had adjusted the position of the laptop again, they saw him lope off beside a tractor and wave, pointing back at the computer. A few moments later a woman appeared and walked towards them, taking off a pair of gloves. She was wearing hiking boots and jeans and a down jacket, and her long black hair was tied back behind her head. She came in front of the webcam, put down a trowel and brush, took a camera from around her neck, and then adjusted the screen. She had strong eastern features too, mixed with European, and dark eyes. ‘Hello, Jack. I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon. It’s cold and windy here, so let’s be quick.’ She had a deep voice and spoke with a slight American accent. She wiped her nose and rubbed her hands together, then smiled again at him. ‘I can see you’re on Seaquest II, in the operations room. Have you done the dive? I miss you.’

  ‘I’m here with Costas and Jeremy and Jacob Lanowski, all watching you just off screen,’ Jack replied. ‘We’ve done the dive, and we’ve just had an image from the ROV taken inside a cave we didn’t see five years ago. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Take a look at the attachment we’ve just sent you.’

  She looked down to the side of the screen, evidently opening another window. Her eyes lit up and she stared for a few moments, then took out a notebook and flipped through it, holding the pages down in the wind. She stared again, and then looked back at the webcam. ‘You probably recognize these symbols from the cave at Lascaux in France,’ she said, angling her face away from the wind. ‘I know you and Maurice went there as students, because he talked to me about it. The symbols date across the entire range of Palaeolithic rock art, from about thirty-five thousand to twelve thousand years ago. Finding these symbols in Atlantis is completely consistent with the animal cave paintings there. The symbols appear in various numbers and combinations in caves across Europe and in rock art elsewhere, as far away as Australia and South America. Some of my colleagues believe that outside the main area in southern Europe, the similarity of the relatively small number of symbols found is just coincidence, that they were mostly simple enough for people to have invented them independently. But I don’t buy that. People moved around a lot in the Palaeolithic, and their shamans may have moved the most. If humans reached Australia by fifty thousand years ago, then they could have got anywhere else by sea, literally anywhere. To the Americas, for example, from Europe.’

  ‘We’ve just been discussing that,’ Jack replied. ‘So what about the Atlantis symbol? It’s fascinating. It looks as if that rake-shaped symbol is some kind of precursor.’

  ‘It makes perfect sense that the Atlantis symbol should have derived from a Stone Age one. Interesting that someone seems to have been trying to erase them.’

  ‘The big question,’ Jack said. ‘Are we looking at some kind of script? A code?’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing here now, at Cholpon-Ata,’ Katya replied. ‘Looking for rock inscriptions that might go that far back in prehistory. If the Stone Age symbols are a form of script, then it takes the history of writing back tens of thousands of years. I do think they have symbolic meaning, that they’re ideograms that may somehow represent the rituals carried out in those caves. The big breakthrough would be to find clear patterns of association, repeated clusters of symbols in the same order. That’s when this image from Atlantis could get really exciting.’

  ‘What about the clustering?’ Jack persisted. ‘Words, names?’

  ‘Possibly, but more as general ideograms or even mnemonics,’ she said. ‘There’s an old shaman in Altamaty’s Kyrgyz tribe who scratches simple signs like this into the sand or on a rock before he goes into a trance. The symbols by themselves don’t mean a sound or a word, but in clusters they represent the name of an ancestor, the spirit the shaman is trying to reach. They tend to be descriptive of what that ancestor had done in life, and are regarded as spirit names: “She who held the torch”, “He who would be a great hunter”. They can become generic, so that one particular ancestor becomes representative of many, and the shaman only scratches out a few of these formulae before he sets to work. What’s the context of your symbols? You said they’re in a cave.’

  Jack nodded. ‘We saw animal paintings too, just out of sight. Mostly late Ice Age – leopards, bulls – rather than megafauna such as woolly mammoths, so my guess is a late-Palaeolithic origin, about twelve thousand years ago. It seems to have been some kind of open-air sanctuary with a cave backdrop.’

  ‘You might expect to find more of these symbols, more clusters, if it was a place for shamanistic rituals.’

  ‘On the screen here from the ROV we can see where other symbols, more deeply incised and clearly older, have been chiselled out and smoothed away on the surrounding rock. We think there was a religious transition going on, from shamanism to gods. It looks as if these two clusters of symbols you’re looking at were done hastily, scratched rather than carefully chiselled.’

  ‘Maybe as the flood waters rose,’ Katya suggested. ‘Some kind of desperate measure to evoke ancestors, perhaps. Shamans could have had those spirit names I was talking about while they were still alive, the names they were to be known by in death as their spirits were evoked. One can imagine the last shamans of Atlantis stuck in that place with the water rising and certain death ahead, knowing there would be no future shaman to call up their spirits and so scratching the symbols on that wall.’

  Costas coughed. ‘What about “Noah was here”?’

  ‘What did you say?’ Katya demanded.

  He craned his head close to Jack so the webcam caught him. ‘Noah was here. It’s just a name we’ve been bandying about. Noah and his Ark, thinking of the people who escaped from Atlantis.’

  ‘If Noah was a name back in the early Neolithic, it’s more likely to have been a proper name, even a nickname,’ Katya replied. ‘His real name – his spirit name – is more likely to have been something like Uta-napishtim, the name of the deluge hero in the Sumerian flood account in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The name Uta-napishtim is found in the earliest fragments of the flood story, dating from the dawn of Mesopotamian writing in the third millennium BC, as is the name Gilgamesh. Maybe Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh were spirit names derived from a Stone Age language now lost to us. My favourite spirit name is Sha naqba muru, meaning “He who has seen the deep”, the first line of the Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I think it’s what I’d call Jack if I were a shaman. The Mesopotamian scribes might not have known it, but the names of their heroes may have had similar spirit-name meanings in early prehistory.’

  ‘Wow, Katya, I wasn’t really being serious about Noah,’ Costas said.

  Katya smiled. ‘A long time ago, Jack told me always to listen to Costas, because, how did he put it, Costas is good at hitting the nail on the head.’

  ‘Hey, that’s just about the nicest thing he’s ever said about me.’

  ‘The wind’s really picking up.’ Ka
tya’s voice was nearly inaudible. ‘Jack, give me a day or so and I’ll check these symbols against my database.’

  ‘That would be fantastic,’ Jack said. ‘Email me whatever you get. We’re trying to piece something together here, where these people went. Not the priests, but the shamans. We want to know whether any of them might have survived to found a new Atlantis.’

  Katya leaned forward. They could see the wind ruffling her hair, and she put up a hand to protect her eyes from the blowing dust. To Jack she looked utterly at home, her features at one with the landscape and the wind, and he remembered her Kyrgyz ancestry on her father’s side. She raised her voice. ‘I have to go. There’s one of those winds howling in from the east. Speaking of shamans, that one from Altamaty’s tribe calls these winds Genghis Khan’s revenge. Altamaty says thank God you and Costas didn’t actually go into that tomb under the lake two years ago, otherwise we’d have been blown to the Black Sea by now. When it’s like this, you wonder if the shamans have a point. We haven’t even got the yurt up yet. Thank Jeremy for the pictures from Troy. Rebecca’s just emailed through the one showing her at the helicopter controls, actually flying it. Pretty cool. And my love to Costas. And to Jeremy and Jacob. See you.’ She leaned forward into the screen and her hair came loose, swirling round and blotting out the view, and then the screen went blank. Jack leaned back, staring at it pensively.

  ‘Phew,’ Costas said. ‘Love to you too, Katya.’

  ‘Internet girlfriends,’ Lanowski said abstractly, looking at Jack and then narrowing his eyes at Costas. ‘They’re the best.’

  ‘You weren’t going to show her what else you’d found?’ Jeremy asked.

  Jack shook his head. ‘Katya’s father died in that volcano five years ago, remember?’ He jerked his head back at the computer monitor with the image of the skulls. ‘He may have been a hated warlord and Katya may seem as tough as nails, but I wasn’t going to show her that.’

  ‘Good call,’ Lanowski said thoughtfully.

  ‘Rebecca’s her number-one fan,’ Jeremy said. ‘Especially after Katya taught her to shoot a Kalashnikov.’

  ‘She did what?’ Jack exclaimed.

  ‘Last summer, before we went to Troy, when Rebecca worked at Cholpon-Ata for a month. Katya and Altamaty took her hunting in the mountains. They forage for a lot of their food, you know. They think they saw a white tiger.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Jack muttered. ‘She didn’t say anything about that a few months later when Ben Kershaw very cautiously taught her to shoot a. 22 on the foredeck of the ship, with full hearing and eye protection and under my watchful gaze.’

  ‘She thought you’d be mad. But don’t worry. The kidnapping changed her a lot. I think she’ll tell you everything now. Katya really helped, too. She told Rebecca what it was like growing up as a woman in Russia around the kind of men her father dealt with, what you have to be prepared to do to hold your own. Rebecca really lapped it up. I think she’s got a role model in Katya.’

  ‘Who’s Altamaty, by the way?’ Lanowski said, looking at Jack with a hint of concern on his face.

  Jack stared at him. ‘What? Oh, he’s in charge of the petroglyph open-air museum. It’s a World Heritage Site now, a result of a little bit of extra lobbying from us. He’s really climbed up the ladder in the last two years. He’s also been doing some fascinating underwater work in the lake. He was a diver in Soviet special forces, and I made him a research associate of IMU. And yes, he and Katya are very good friends.’

  ‘And you’re not always around,’ Lanowski said cautiously.

  ‘Not always.’ Jack stared pointedly at the screen. ‘Now, where were we? I think we’re just about done.’ He picked up his phone and saw that the message indicator had been flashing. ‘I had this switched off while we were talking before I called Katya and someone’s left a message. Just let me listen to it and then I’m off to the helipad.’ He pushed the chair back and got up, stretching and feeling the aches from diving in his body again. He glanced back at the computer screen. It had been great to see Katya again. And secretly he was pleased to hear how much Rebecca adored her. Lanowski was right, too. His time management was out of hand. After this was over, he needed to sit on a mountainside somewhere and work out his priorities. Moving from one adrenalin-fuelled project to another was the life he was made for, but it was time to splice in some other kinds of excitement and make that a permanent fixture. It had been building up to this ever since Rebecca had appeared in his life. He needed to listen to his friends. He took a deep breath, then walked over to the other side of the room, one hand in his pocket, clicked the inbox and put the phone up to his ear. He stood still, listening intently, then slowly took the phone down, staring back at the other three. ‘That was Maurice Hiebermeyer.’ He felt numb, unable to move, as if he had just reached a tipping point. ‘He wants me to go to the bunker site in Germany right away.’

  ‘Any news?’ Costas said, staring at Jack.

  ‘He said he wasn’t going to tell me anything on the phone. And I can’t call him back, as he’s spending six hours in decontamination.’

  ‘Shit. That sounds bad.’

  ‘He said it was just routine. They all have to do it. He said now he knew what it felt like when we had to go into the recompression chamber. But I’ve never heard him sound like that before. I barely recognized his voice.’

  ‘It can’t have been a good experience, whatever he saw.’

  ‘I should never have let him take my place.’

  ‘You can’t be everywhere. Jack. And he insisted.’

  Jack glanced at his watch. 1450 hours. ‘Time I packed my bag.’

  ‘How are you going to get there?’ Costas asked. ‘Maurice used the Embraer to fly from Egypt to Germany, and it’s still at Frankfurt waiting for him.’

  Jack waved his phone. ‘I had a call last night from an old friend who’s just about to finish his flying career in the Royal Air Force, Paul Llewelyn. He’s spending the night at Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, and he knew I’d been excavating at Troy. He gave me a call on the off-chance that we might hook up.’

  ‘Didn’t he go on your first expeditions when you were undergraduates?’

  Jack nodded. ‘A battered van, a home-made inflatable boat, an ancient compressor and cobbled-together diving equipment. Peter Howe was another stalwart. I always dreamed of something like this, Seaquest II, IMU, but I never imagined that the adventures we planned would attract the dark clouds we seem to be under now. Back then we didn’t have the equipment to search for Atlantis, but those were days when the world seemed like our oyster.’

  ‘The excitement’s still there, Jack,’ Costas said, peering at him. ‘Bigger than ever. Don’t lose hold of that. And the best projects are still to come. You’ve got a daughter to keep entertained, remember?’

  Jeremy coughed. ‘I think she might see it the other way round.’

  ‘So what about Paul?’ Costas said.

  ‘He’s ferrying a Tornado GR4 back from Kandahar in Afghanistan to the UK. For years he’s been offering me a back-seat ride in a fast jet. The old NATO base next to the bunker site in Germany is still functional, and they’ve put in a skeleton ground team to deal with aircraft bringing in supplies for the excavation. The Lynx should be able to take me from here direct to Incirlik, and I’ll see whether Paul can make a small diversion on his way back to England.’

  ‘Sounds like fun,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘Fun’s probably not the right word for where Jack’s going,’ Costas murmured.

  Lanowski got up and put a hand awkwardly on Jack’s shoulder. ‘Take it easy, Jack.’ He pointed at the image of the papyrus on his screen. ‘I want you back here in this ship to find out where that’s leading us.’

  ‘Jacob’s right,’ Costas added. ‘And remember, Saumerre can’t make a move until he has the upper hand, and he’ll only have that if he’s got hold of the weapon he thinks lies in that Nazi bunker. There’s no chance of that now, is there? The place must be locked down l
ike Fort Knox. Once we find it and we’re certain Saumerre is neutered, then the matter is out of our hands and we can let MI6 blow his network wide open and take him down. Then we can get back to the archaeology. This has been eating away at you for months, Jack, at all of us. Let’s get it done.’ Costas turned back, looked at the ROV monitor and idly tapped the control handle. The screen lurched. He hit the handle. It lurched again. ‘Holy shit,’ he whispered.

  ‘What is it?’ Jack turned, followed by the others.

  Costas tapped the handle again. The image wobbled. ‘It’s not just the camera that’s still working,’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s Little Joey. He’s still alive.’

  Lanowski quickly sat down beside Costas, tapping the keyboard and working the mouse. He nudged Costas’ hand away and held the handle himself, gently tugging it in every direction. ‘Okay,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s only the eye that’s moving, the socket holding the camera, and we’ve only got movement in one direction, at about forty-five degrees on a three-sixty-degree compass, which will take us up the rock face to the right of those symbols. The computer says it’ll only go up to an arc of forty degrees or so, which means it’ll stop after about two metres up the rock face.’ He let go and sat aside, staring at the screen.

  Costas put his hand back on the handle and moved it slowly to the right. The image climbed away from the symbols, showing a smoothed section of rock wall, then a dark crack and a large protrusion with a crack on the other side. ‘It’s a boulder,’ he said. ‘Those cracks look like the edge of some kind of tunnel, and the boulder’s been wedged into it. I can’t push it any further to the right.’

  ‘Try going up,’ Lanowski suggested.

  Costas did as he suggested, moving the stick carefully. Nothing happened. He pushed it to its maximum angle. There was a sudden blur and the image wobbled, as if the eye of the ROV were on a spring. A shimmer of bubbles and a cloud of brown filaments surged up from below, and the water wavered and blurred like heat rising in air. ‘Something bad is happening,’ Costas murmured. ‘I think the lava has just entered the chamber and has pushed into the back of the ROV, and the water’s boiling up. In that confined space there’ll be a massive phreatic explosion. I think this really is the last gasp for Little Joey.’