The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘And you will have what they find?’

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

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

  Shang Yong tapped the table again. ‘Tell 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 Allah.’

  Shang Yong looked at him shrewdly. ‘The Brotherhood of the Tiger does not heed that call. 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 million 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 will cut you in on half of a ransom I will demand of the world, a ransom they will have no choice but to pay and which will make your fee look like small change. But if you are unwilling to do business, then I will leave now.’

  ‘You will 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 will cause a little red light to flash in the Pentagon in Washington. A top-secret protocol will be activated regarding verified and actionable information on known terrorist hideaways. The file that will open under my authority as a European commissioner will 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 will contain GPS co-ordinates for this chamber we are standing in now. By 1000 hours an executive decision will have been taken in the White House, and by 1015 a massive cruise missile strike will 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 will be obliterated, whether I am still 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 will 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 swivelled 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 collected 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 allowed us to escape, we’d still 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 colleagues 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 still 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 tell them we tried to use an ROV, and that would explain Costas’ presence. Everyone knows that IMU does not send a state-of-the-art ROV anywhere in the world without Costas Kazantzakis attached to it by an umbilical cord. That’ll 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 still down there in the volcano?’

  Costas looked crestfallen. ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘As for Dr Howard, who officially 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 all 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 pulled 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 forcefully. ‘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 swivelled his chair back to the monitor. ‘That reminded me of my first term in the Royal Naval College 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 really designed to take orders.’

  ‘I’ve noticed,’ Costas said.

  ‘It was lucky the special forces guy at the college spotte
d 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’ll 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 tell 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 all part of the tapestry you’ve woven for yourself, Jack. What was it Othello said? “There’s magic in the web of it.”’

  Jack gave a wry smile. ‘Well then I just need to keep that web from unravelling. 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 still working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from their dive. His body was willing him to go up to his cabin and lie down, but he knew that the adrenalin that was still 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 pillar 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 still 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 called up on his monitor before Macalister had come in. It was a still 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 pulled up for comparison. The image from the morning was raw, unrefined, the foreground still 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 still caught in the amazement of that moment when he had first entered the chamber. It showed the pillars standing like sentinels, three-metre-tall monoliths carved out of volcanic tufa, each one rising to a T-shape a metre or more wide. He could see animals carved in shallow relief on the pillars – lions, wild boar, scorpions and spiders, leopards and bulls. On the back wall of the cave he spotted something he had not seen on the dive: a bull’s skull 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 pillars but also the carvings on them seemed to have been freshly chiselled, 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 all the human capacity for cruelty and greed in the mythologies of Mesopotamia and the Near East. Jack stared at the pillars. Was this where it had all 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 all: the plastered human skulls that seemed to be emerging from the ground in the same way that the bull’s skull was emerging from the rock wall. He scrolled over the other skulls, the ones without plaster, some of them fallen alongside the three stone basins he could now see, each about half a metre high and carved out of the living rock. The scattered skulls 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 pillars like rough-formed bodies standing in the background, towering over the toppled skulls. 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 fallout had buried the ruins of the ancient city five years ago, in a terrifying eruption that had nearly cost them their lives.

  ‘I’ll 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 well 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, all he saw now was a great slick like a frozen mudslide, completely burying the original rocky substrate and all 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.’

  ‘Well, prepare to be amazed.’

  Costas tapped a
key and the image transformed. The wide beds of lava constricted to narrow flows down the side of the volcano, like frozen rivers. In between Jack saw ghostly rectilinear outlines covering the slope. Costas pointed at the upper part of the screen. ‘You’re right, the lava would have destroyed all the mud-brick structures in their path. Where we dived this morning was through one of the solidified flows from five years ago, and the only structure that survived was that stone pillar with the golden Atlantis symbol. But the lava flows are much narrower than we thought. When we were boring the tunnel yesterday, I used the submersible to take some core samples further down the slope, and I’ve just had a look at the results. Most of it is not lava but pyroclastic flow, solidified mud and ash. It looks as if the volcanic ash hardened with lime into a kind of hydraulic concrete, like the stuff we know the people of Atlantis used to make waterproof walls. Where the flow was pyroclastic, it didn’t destroy Atlantis. It actually preserved it.’

  He tapped again, and the image sharpened further. Jack let out a low whistle. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. It was as if the flow had been peeled away to reveal intact structures beneath, a vast complex of flat-roofed buildings that seemed to have been built organically, reaching three or four storeys high and spreading up the slope of the volcano. Jack stared, shaking his head. ‘It’s fantastic. It’s like jumping back five years to when we first saw Atlantis from our Aquapods. I never thought I’d see that again.’

  ‘Well, we won’t be excavating it in a hurry. Even if the volcano goes quiet and we can get down there again, it’d be like mining on the moon. Roman Herculaneum was covered by pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius, and they’ve only excavated one fifth of the site in two hundred and fifty years. And Herculaneum’s not under a hundred metres of water poisoned by sulphur dioxide.’