‘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.’ Katya’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 e
ntertained, 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 like 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.’
‘Don’t give up just yet,’ Lanowski urged. ‘Take a look at that.’
The wobbling stopped and the image stabilized. The eye of the ROV had angled upwards to the top of the boulder, to a wider crack between its upper surface and the top of the tunnel. They all stared in stunned silence.
What they saw was a scene of horror. On top of the boulder were three human skulls lying at different angles, their lower jaws wide open. The skulls were covered in the same lime concretion as the bones of the sacrificial victims on the floor of the chamber, cementing them to the top of the boulder. But it was not the image of the skulls that was so horrifying. It was what lay behind and in front of them. The skulls were articulated with other human bones, ribcages caught in the crack behind, arm bones extending over the boulder as if some awful multi-legged creature had been trying to get out. One ribcage had collapsed and several of the arms were missing hands, but the rest of the bones were joined together, evidently cemented to the rock while the sinews were still in place.
Jack stared. As if some creature had been trying to get out. It was suddenly an image of shocking clarity. These people had been alive and struggling when the flood waters rose, their last screams caught in the contorted grimaces of their skulls. And this was no accident of fate. They had been forced inside that tunnel and sealed in with the boulder. He could barely imagine what lay in the darkness beyond.
What had gone on here? Human sacrifice, mass suicide, then the last of the shamans sealed inside, doomed to an agonizing and terrifying death. Had this been the final apocalypse, the end of the old order and the beginning of the new? He remembered those stark stone pillars standing in the chamber. Had they presided over this, those new gods, like statues half formed that now would be able to reveal themselves in their final shape, wherever those who had carried out this act were destined to find landfall and hold sway over men again?
Then Jack remembered Lanowski’s chalk drawing on the blackboard: the crooked cross, the swastika, a shape that seemed to form in Jack’s mind out of the swirling images of the deep past. Now he knew that the end of the old order had been a time of appalling violence. But he also knew that those who had vanquished the old, these new priests, these gods, had not come from somewhere else, like invaders sweeping in on a wave of destruction. They had come from within. He remembered Hiebermeyer’s call, where he was going now, to a time when that cross had been resurrected to serve a new breed of gods. Suddenly the image of fear and desperation in those skeletons from seven thousand years ago seemed terrifyingly immediate.
There was a sudden jolt, and a blur. The camera appeared to move forward, as if the ROV were riding something underneath. Then there was a white flash and the screen went blank. A moment later the ship’s klaxon sounded, and a red light went on above the control-room door. ‘We’re moving again,’ Costas said. ‘Macalister must have registered another seismic disturbance, and he’ll be taking us further offshore. My guess is that’s the archaeology gone for good. That chamber’s going to be entombed in lava, Little Joey too.’
Jack sniffed the air. He thought he caught a whiff of sulphur, whether some effulgence of the volcano drawn in by the ship’s ventilators or a residue on their own bodies from the dive was unclear. Smell was the one sense he had been deprived of that morning; the dive had come to seem more like a voyage of the mind than reality. But the hint of acrid smell jolted him. Instead of a phantasm, an image now lost forever to history, the vision of those people in their death throes now seemed shockingly real. He knew that where he had to go next, the smell of death was more than just a ghostly exhalation. He realized what had been troubling him for the last six months, what had led him to block off the world around him, to totter on the edge on the dive that morning. It was not only Atlantis that had come at a price, with the death of Peter Howe five years ago. Troy had come at a price too. Six months ago they had opened up another cave from the past, another chamber with a dark revelation. It was unresolved business, and he needed to confront it head-on now. He straightened up, clicked on his phone, nodded at Jeremy and Lanowski and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Next time we meet in this room, it will be on the trail of a shaman of Atlantis who may have survived all this, a seven-thousand-year-old seafarer who might just have been called Noah. Until then, sit tight. You’ll be hearing from me.’
10
Over Europe
Jack scanned the instrument panel in front of him, noting that the airspeed indicator and altimeter had shown near-constant figures since they had flown ov
er the northern shore of the Adriatic Sea fifteen minutes ago. He was strapped into the rear ejector seat of an RAF Tornado GR4, and since their exhilarating take-off from Incirlik airbase in Turkey he had managed to put aside thinking about his destination and let himself enjoy the thrill of flying in a fast jet. They had flown low over Troy, allowing him a fascinating view of the ancient site, as well as the Dardanelles Strait where any prehistoric exodus from the Black Sea to the west must have taken place. Now he peered sideways through the canopy over the swept-back starboard wing, looking past the silvery nacelle of the long-range drop tank and seeing the snowy peaks of the Alps some twenty thousand feet below. He turned back to face the upper part of the instrument panel, which blocked his view of the pilot’s seat in front, and spoke into the intercom. ‘That looks like Innsbruck in Austria below us, Paul. What’s our ETA?’
‘I’m dropping from six hundred to five hundred knots in fifteen minutes and then finding a lower altitude. All going according to plan, we should be flying over Hanover in Germany and coming in to land in about thirty-five minutes.’
‘Copy that.’
‘You okay? Lunch still inside you?’
‘I’m having the time of my life. I can’t see how this kind of flying could ever pale.’
‘That’s the problem. It’s a constant adrenalin kick. I’ve done thousands of hours in Tornados, including four big operational deployments – the Gulf War, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan. I’ve had enough of war, Jack, but I still love the flying. I can’t believe this is going to be my last official fast-jet flight.’
‘Congratulations on the Distinguished Service Order, by the way. Well deserved.’
‘Those things should go to the ground crews. They’re the ones who keep these birds flying. The unsung heroes.’
‘That’s the way I feel about my diving expeditions. It’s always a team effort.’ Jack cast his mind back more than two decades. Paul Llewelyn had been one of his close-knit group of friends at Cambridge University, where they had shared college rooms in their first year; he was a fellow diver and had gone along with Jack on his first expeditions to the Mediterranean. They had not seen each other for several years now, but Jack had spent an hour with Paul in the officers’ mess at Incirlik while the air-traffic controllers worked on clearance for a modified flight plan to his destination in Germany and the aircraft was fitted with long-range drop tanks. He had sworn Paul to secrecy and told him about their Atlantis dive, then briefed him about the excavation at the bunker site in Germany and about Maurice Hiebermeyer, another mutual friend from Cambridge. He had outlined the security and contamination risk at the bunker and why Paul would not be allowed out of the aircraft when they landed at the old NATO runway next to the excavation site. Beyond that he had let himself enjoy the experience of flying, and being with an old friend. He spoke into the intercom again. ‘Paul, do you remember the last time we flew together? In that rickety old Bulldog trainer in the University Air Squadron?’
The Gods of Atlantis Page 20