The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  He pressed the icon to email the image of the papyrus to Lanowski, put the iPad on the trestle table in front of him and then fed his hands into the arms of the suit, pushing them through the wrist seals into the attached gloves and pressing his head through the neck seal, finishing by zipping up the front of the suit until it completely encased him. He was inside a tent at the back of the Portakabin that served as a kitting-up room for those entering the bunker, with suits like the one he had been struggling into hanging in a row along one side. He stretched his neck to left and right, feeling the discomfort of the rubber latex seal against his Adam’s apple. ‘It’s a little tight, but I suppose that’s necessary,’ he grumbled.

  The British Royal Engineers sergeant who had helped him into the suit finished wiping off the chalk powder he had used to ease Hiebermeyer’s head through the neck seal, and then yanked the chest zip to make sure it was closed. He spoke with a strong Welsh accent. ‘It has to be that way, sir. This is the latest-generation chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear suit. We used to call them NBC suits – nuclear, biological and chemical – but they added radiological because of the terrorist threat from dirty bombs. The CBRN suits are more like astronaut suits than the old NBC gear.’

  ‘What happens if I need to relieve myself?’

  ‘That’s why we asked you not to drink for two hours and to use the toilet just now. There’s a one-hour limit for each shift inside the bunker. If you feel claustrophobic, tell Major Penn and he’ll get you out. We’ve done a few of these old Nazi bunkers before, and they can be pretty grim. There’s a diaper with a urine bag if you need it.’

  ‘Sergeant Jones, I am not wearing a diaper,’ Hiebermeyer said firmly. ‘This suit is bad enough as it is.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jones slapped his back. ‘You’re good to go. I’ll do the helmet once Major Penn has briefed you.’ He handed Hiebermeyer his glasses, then picked up a towel from the table. ‘How bad’s your eyesight?’

  ‘Gets blurry beyond about two metres, but I don’t need them for reading.’

  ‘Then I recommend you don’t wear them inside. The helmets can get a little warm, and if you sweat from the face, spectacles can fog up. It’s a small glitch in the air circulation system we’re working on.’

  ‘There always seem to be glitches with equipment,’ Hiebermeyer grumbled. ‘My diver colleagues at IMU are forever burning the midnight oil in the engineering department trying to fix things.’ He stretched his neck again, grimacing. ‘Myself, I’m just an old-fashioned dirt archaeologist. All I need is a trowel, my desert boots, my trusty shorts and a decent hat.’

  ‘I’ve seen you on TV,’ Jones enthused. ‘I’ve watched you with my kids. They think you’re the star of the show. Those old khaki shorts flying at half-mast, somehow staying up? Pretty hard to forget, if you don’t mind me saying so. It was a programme about Atlantis, and you were in Egypt unwrapping a mummy to show how you’d revealed an ancient papyrus. There was an Egyptian woman with you, really good at explaining it all. I couldn’t work out which of you was in charge.’

  ‘That would be Aysha,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘In answer to your question, I was, but now she is. We got married about a year after that film, and now she’s six months pregnant.’

  ‘Congratulations. Your first?’

  Hiebermeyer gave him a doleful look. ‘It wasn’t part of my plan.’

  ‘You’ll love it. It’ll change your life. I’ve got three, myself.’ He nodded towards a bag on the table. ‘Sure you don’t want to try the diaper? Could be good training.’

  Hiebermeyer glared at him. ‘Don’t push your luck.’

  The sergeant grinned, and then swivelled him towards a full-length mirror leaning against the side of the tent. ‘The final part of the drill is to do a complete visual inspection yourself. I’ve got to nip out, but Major Penn will be here soon. He’ll be pleased to see you to talk some history. We’ve got a European Union Health and Safety official here in an hour, due to go into the bunker with me on the next rotation. The man’s been before and I’ve watched Penn having to restrain himself while he was treated like a schoolboy. That’s what makes a good officer. I’d have been at the guy’s throat.’

  Hiebermeyer took the proffered towel, wiped his face and the balding top of his head and put on his glasses. He had heated up already with the exertion of getting the suit on. He stared at the image of himself in the mirror. The suit looked similar to the new thermal-resistant diving oversuits that Costas had shown him at IMU headquarters a few months ago, the ones that Costas and Jack would have worn on their dive into the volcano today. He glanced up at the clock hanging on the tent wall. It was 12.30 p.m., one hour behind Turkey. They should have finished the dive by now, but he knew Jack would not want to hear from him until there was some news from this end. The excavation of a Second World War bunker was not like the other times, not like uncovering the mummy in Egypt or breaking into the lost Roman library in Herculaneum, when Jack would have felt just as Hiebermeyer did now about the return to Atlantis, itching to hear what they had found. This time it was as if the pall from those terrible days in 1945 were still here, something they all desperately hoped that the excavation of the bunker today would dispel.

  Hiebermeyer had insisted on coming here in Jack’s place to evaluate any antiquities that might be among the looted treasures found inside. He had grown up with the legacy of Germany under the Nazis, and had used that to persuade Jack that he should be the one to go into the bunker. To Hiebermeyer’s eye as an archaeologist, every Nazi site revealed – every bunker, every sunken U-boat – added clarity to the events of that time; keeping the artefacts of the period visible was the best way of ensuring that people did not forget. He hoped fervently that the possibility that this place might contain a dark secret – something more than stolen art – would prove wrong, but they would not know for sure until every inch of the bunker had been exhumed. But his line with Jack had another purpose, something he had discussed with Costas. They had seen the effect on Jack six months earlier of searching for Heinrich Schliemann’s lost treasures from Troy, a search that had brought them face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust. The future of IMU operations depended on the charisma and driving force that came from the top, and both he and Costas had been concerned that Rebecca’s kidnapping and the events of her rescue – twenty-four hours that had propelled Jack from a desperate underwater fight in a mineshaft to the final showdown beneath Troy, where he and Costas had rescued Rebecca from Saumerre’s men – may have taken a toll on Jack that he had not fully acknowledged.

  Hiebermeyer thought of Jack and Costas again, diving into the side of an underwater volcano. A brief shadow of doubt crossed his mind. He hoped that keeping Jack away from this place would not have the opposite effect, leading him to make reckless decisions, overcompensating as a way of dealing with an issue he could not confront head-on. But then Hiebermeyer hardly knew of a project where Jack and Costas had not stretched the envelope about as far as it would go. He thought back to when he and Jack had been at boarding school together, carving out the undiscovered treasures of the world between them, his on land and Jack’s underwater. Hiebermeyer had sworn he would never dive, and he had stuck to it. Like Jack, he had an almost superstitious belief in his own ability to ferret out archaeological finds, and part of that certainty involved sticking to a ritual. He had been down plenty of dark tunnels and squeezed into plenty of lost tombs in his time, but never wearing more than his trusty khakis. He had told Jack that the mere idea of diving equipment clouded his thinking. He held up his arms, flexing his fingers in the white gloves. This was the nearest he had ever got, and it was stretching his own envelope. He picked up the towel and wiped his forehead. And it was making him unpleasantly hot.

  ‘Dr Hiebermeyer? David Penn. Royal Engineers.’ A small, fit-looking man in his early thirties came into the room, wearing a camouflage smock with a major’s star on his epaulettes.

  Hiebermeyer held out his gloved hand. ‘Mauri
ce.’

  Sergeant Jones returned and quickly went over to the CBRN suits on the racks, selecting one and checking it over. Penn took off his beret and boots and Jones helped him into the suit as he talked. ‘I understand that Jack Howard won’t be here?’

  ‘He’s diving, in the Black Sea. But he’s on standby to join us, depending on what we find. I’m planning to call him after I’ve seen inside.’

  ‘I spoke to him on the phone at length last week when my team arrived here. I understand you have a personal connection with this place?’

  ‘Not this place exactly, but my father’s family home was about twenty kilometres north-west of here. My grandfather was a merchant seaman and then a naval officer, a U-boat captain lost with his vessel in 1940, and my grandmother and father and his two younger sisters remained here for the rest of the war. In April 1945 they were among the civilians taken by British troops into Belsen to see the horrors there. My father was only nine years old but was very badly affected. They were made to stand beside a truck while former SS guards loaded corpses. For the rest of his life my father couldn’t stand the smell of raw meat or rotting garbage. The British officer who conducted them into the camp said that what they were about to see was such a disgrace to the German people that their name must be erased from the list of civilized nations. He said it could only be restored when they had reared a new generation amongst whom it was impossible to find people prepared to commit such crimes. My father was a very responsible nine-year-old who saw himself as head of the family after his father had been killed, and he took those words to heart and interpreted them literally. He believed the officer was saying that he, a child, was forever guilty, because he had been born before the war. Even after my father had grown up and realized that the officer had not meant that, he told me that because he had spent his childhood and teenage years after the war believing in his own guilt, it would never escape him. He said that the only hope lay in my generation and beyond. So I grew up with this legacy too.’

  Penn picked up a pointer and tapped a plan of the airfield pinned to the wall. ‘Then you’ll know that there was a labour camp here, an Arbeitslager, a satellite of Belsen. Its remains lie mostly under the northern end of the airfield. We’ve done one excavation there I’ll need to explain to you, but let’s leave that until we’ve been into the bunker. Did your father know anything about this place?’

  ‘He said his father and uncles used to hunt in the forest before the war. My father remembered the night when this sector of the forest was destroyed, a massive orange glow on the horizon.’

  Penn nodded. ‘The twenty-fifth of April 1945, only hours after the camp was evacuated. A five-hundred-bomber Lancaster raid was diverted from Bremen to destroy the forest. The British 21st Army Group had been concerned that pockets of SS would stage a fanatical resistance there and hold up the Allied advance. The bombing obliterated the camp and buried the bunker under tons of earth and felled trees, which is why it remained unrecorded when the NATO airfield was built over the site after the war.’

  ‘Nobody in 21st Army Group knew about it?’

  Penn shook his head. ‘Few of the SS camp guards survived. The British SAS who liberated the camp shot a number of them, and others who fled into the forest were hunted down by the more able-bodied inmates. I’ve seen the file with all the information that Jack and his daughter amassed last year from interviewing Captain Frazer, the British officer who was in the camp. So we know that his friend Major Mayne and an American officer, a Colonel Stein, had been here looking for stolen Nazi treasures, but that the two men disappeared. My assumption is that they went into the forest looking for the bunker and got caught out in the bombing raid, or fell foul of guards still stationed here. There’s no evidence for them in the bunker yet, but we’ve only cleared half of it. No word of its existence got back to 21st Army Group headquarters.’

  ‘How did it survive the bombing raid?’

  ‘It’s a remarkable piece of engineering,’ Penn enthused. ‘I’ll brief you as we go in. Construction was my speciality at the School of Military Engineering, but because there’s not much call for this kind of thing these days, I volunteered for the NBS clearance unit, now CBRN, which would at least give me a chance to examine these places. There’s a lot of redevelopment and construction work going on in Germany now, and a lot more underground sites are being found. I read that article you wrote last year about the archaeology of the Nazi period in Der Spiegel, and I completely agree with you about making these places scheduled monuments like any other archaeological site. It’s going to become a big political issue in Berlin, because major pipeline and utility works are planned in the centre around the Tiergarten, and there must be an enormous amount to be discovered there.’

  ‘An old friend of mine is a stalwart of the Berlin Second World War archaeology group, a voluntary organization that has been lobbying for more resources to do proper excavations there,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘There are also major refurbishments planned at the Berlin Zoo on the edge of the Tiergarten, on the site of the huge flak tower that was once there. That’s where the Schliemann treasures from the Berlin prehistory museum were stored, where the Russians found them. My friend believes there are tunnels from there to the site of Gestapo headquarters and the Reichstag. They’re actually doing some more exploring this week, and I’m hoping to go there after this for a quick visit.’

  Penn looked at him intently. ‘Fascinating. I’d like to collaborate. There are a couple of sites in Berlin that need our expertise, possible chemical and biological production sites. It’s frightening how little is known about these places and what went on inside them. Many were deliberately hushed up, part of Allied policy. We cleared a newly discovered part of the Sarin II nerve-gas production bunker at Falkenhagen near Berlin a few months ago, a really grim place that looked as if it had been abandoned only days before.’

  ‘It must feel as if you’re still fighting the Second World War.’

  Penn’s head briefly disappeared from view as he ducked into his suit and pushed through the rubber neck seal. He struggled out, shaking his head in a cloud of chalk powder, and then stretched his arms out to pull the flaps tight over his chest for the zipper to be shut. ‘Sergeant Jones here calls us bunker-busters.’ He staggered backwards as Jones yanked the zipper. ‘But we do real war too. We’re due to fly out to the Panjshir valley in Afghanistan in two weeks. We get called out every time they find a cave complex with weapons caches that might include the bad stuff. I mentioned it to Jack during our phone call, and was amazed to hear he’d been up the valley two years ago, at the site of the old lapis lazuli mines. Something about a shady Chinese mafia group who were after the same thing as he was. It must be more of a free-for-all in northern Afghanistan than we realize. Jack told me he’d been on the trail of a Royal Engineers ancestor of his, a colonel who died up there during the time of the Raj. Who’d have thought British sappers would be back there in the twenty-first century.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘It was a big thing for Jack, finding that place. Unfortunately that mafia organization is still ticking over. You can emasculate them, but they grow back.’ Hiebermeyer remembered Saumerre, Rebecca’s kidnapping last year, the eyes that would be somewhere on them now, watching for any hint of a discovery that might bring the worst of those groups back to haunt not just IMU but the entire world. He glanced at Penn. ‘The security here is pretty tight? I don’t mean the biological containment, but security against infiltration?’

  Penn pulled sideways as the sergeant secured his zipper. ‘My sapper guard detachment go through special forces training. You saw the Bundeswehr military police outside, and there’s another cordon around the airfield perimeter. This place is well and truly locked down.’ He picked up his helmet, and Jones took Hiebermeyer’s. ‘You ready? We don our oxygen kit in the next room, immediately abutting the bunker wall. Then we wait for the previous pair to signal that they’re ready to come out, about ten minutes from now. There’s an overlap so
four are inside at any one time. We run the shifts with military precision. We don’t want too many in there at once in case there’s a contamination incident.’

  Penn walked through a hanging plastic partition and Hiebermeyer followed, with Jones behind. They were inside a polyurethane tunnel between the Portakabin and the bunker structure, a grey mass of concrete that had been partly dug out of the earth in front of them. Above it Hiebermeyer could see the dome of the bubble that encased the site, a strange, disconcerting scene, as if he were walking in a see-through tunnel through an aquarium, watching shapes appear and disappear in the polyurethane as the air movement inside the bubble flexed the plastic, creating a muted drumming noise as if someone were banging to get in from outside.

  Immediately in front of them was a structure about the size of a portable toilet, sealed to the concrete surrounding the entrance to the bunker. ‘That’s the airlock,’ Penn said. ‘Beyond that we have no contact with the exterior atmosphere.’ Sergeant Jones picked up a compact backpack that Hiebermeyer recognized as an oxygen rebreather, with a cylinder protruding from the top and a hose on either side. Penn took another one, and glanced at Hiebermeyer. ‘You’ll be familiar with these from Jack’s kit. We use rebreathers because they’re completely self-contained, with no chance of contamination through an exhaust valve.’ Hiebermeyer felt the sweat on his brow, and took a deep breath. He felt hemmed in and suddenly wanted to be outside. He closed his eyes and took another couple of deep breaths, wiping his brow with his hands.