The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  Jack cast Hiebermeyer a concerned glance, then looked back at Heidi. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Really he seemed to want me to talk much as I have to you. To reveal something he thought I knew, about Himmler and his plan. Once I knew who the Ahnenerbe man was, that didn’t surprise me.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell the researcher anything.’

  ‘Of course not. All I told him was that I’d been a willing sex worker in the Lebensborn. That really I’d just been a prostitute. I’m quite capable of putting that act on again, you know. That shut him up.’

  ‘So who was the Ahnenerbe man?’

  She paused. ‘Ernst knew him from Heidelberg University before the war. He was much more of a scholar than Ernst, quite aloof. I got to know him because several times I had . . .’ she paused, ‘accommodated him at the Lebensborn farm. He was not at all the right Aryan type, tall and thin and Prussian, but Himmler often sent favourites down to us for entertainment, really using us as little more than a whorehouse. As I said, you always find out things in the bedroom that shouldn’t be said. He told me he had denounced to the Gestapo his and Ernst’s old professor, a reluctant Ahnenerbe recruit who had become a drunk and talked too much. Later, after he saw me in the audience of his lecture at Wewelsburg with Ernst, he forced me to visit him in secret for sex, saying he would tell Ernst the truth about me otherwise. A true Prussian gentleman. I’d been fascinated by that slide showing the underwater cavern and asked him where it was, but he himself had not been on the expedition and he hadn’t been told. But if anyone has clues, it’s him. His name was von Schoenberg.’

  Jack looked stunned. ‘Von Schoenberg? Professor von Schoenberg? The classical scholar?’

  ‘You know of him?’

  Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘While we were students at Cambridge, he came on sabbatical to work with James Dillen. Do you remember we went together to his seminar on Phoenician exploration in the Atlantic?’

  ‘Mein Gott. Yes. I argued with him that it wasn’t the Phoenicians, it was the Egyptians who first circumnavigated Africa.’

  ‘It’s an extraordinary coincidence,’ Jack said. ‘Dillen called me and said he returned from Troy to a barrage of emails and phone messages from Schoenberg saying he had something of great importance he wanted to tell. Dillen said that in the past, Schoenberg had always been trying to pin him down on matters of great importance, usually some tiny contentious detail in a translation. But the odd thing this time was that he specifically wanted to see me.’

  ‘Maybe not so odd after all,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘If we know about him, Saumerre might too and could have got to him first, somehow persuaded him to draw you in and reveal what you know.’

  Jack clicked on his iPhone, checking his directory. ‘Dillen’s sent me his address in British Columbia.’ He turned to Heidi. ‘Your second thing?’

  She grasped her stick and leaned forward, speaking in a low voice. ‘I know how to create a vaccine against the bacterium, which will make it far less dangerous as a potential weapon. We scientists knew that the bacterium would never be as deadly a threat as the virus.’

  Jack gasped. ‘Go on.’

  ‘That was my job just before I left the laboratory to join the Lebensborn. They were all worried about themselves, the scientists and their SS handlers, about getting infected. They couldn’t find a treatment for the flu virus, but they set me to work on the bacterium. I’d been a top biochemistry student before the war, you know, and had spent a postgraduate year at Oxford. That’s where I acquired my English. After the war for many years in England I carried out research for the Ministry of Defence, where my speciality was antidotes for biological weapons they thought the Russians might use. I never revealed anything about the Alexander bacterium, because I just wanted to forget all about that bunker and I was fearful that leading anyone to it would result in contamination and expose the world to a deadly plague. But I carefully recorded all of my research data so that I could resume the work some time in the future if necessary. There was only one component missing.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jack said.

  ‘The Alexander bacterium. One would need a fresh sample to prove that the vaccine works, and as far as I know only the one marker-sample was saved by Himmler’s people.’

  Jack thought hard. ‘Could you still do it now? Could you perfect it?’

  ‘I still have very close colleagues working in high security government labs who would relish the task. I would gladly tell them all I know. My science became my life after the war, and it’s still what keeps me going. And in answer to your next question, yes. I know where they found the bacterium. Schoenberg knows too, because he was there, part of the Ahnenerbe team who were supposedly looking for Atlantis but in reality were scouring the world for the bacterium mentioned in the ancient sources. They needed icy-cold freshwater places, where the water runs over limestone. They found it in Iceland.’

  ‘Iceland,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Do you know exactly where?’

  She reached into her pocket and handed him a slip of paper. ‘This is what my Hungarian told me. He was very proud of being a trained diver and had been on that expedition. It was very dangerous for them, with their primitive equipment.’

  Jack paused. There was one thing he needed to know, to be sure that all of this was true. ‘Your Hungarian,’ he said slowly. ‘When he woke up the next morning after telling you everything, he must have berated himself. He would have sworn secrecy to Himmler. If you’d told anyone else and he’d been fingered, that would have been the end for him. He was getting nothing out of you after you’d met Ernst. Why didn’t he concoct some reason to have you dealt with by the Gestapo?’

  Heidi gave Jack an unfathomable look. ‘Because I kept seeing him. I knew that if I didn’t, I was doomed. All the time I was with Ernst, the Hungarian was still my lover. I saw him while Ernst was on the Russian front, and while he was in Berlin. The Hungarian knew that Hans was his son. The last time I saw him was in that house at Plön on the second of May 1945, only a few hours before Ernst arrived on his way to the U-boat. I never saw either man again. Within days, weeks at the most, both were dead.’

  Jack glanced at the paper, reading the details, then carefully folded it and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Okay.’ He stood up ‘I have to ring Costas. And set up a flight to British Columbia. But before that, Maurice, I need you to ring your friend Major Penn. Heidi’s innocent act with that researcher may have put Saumerre off for the time being, but after Auxelle’s death, I suspect that everyone who knows anything about this will be eliminated as soon as they cease to be useful. I know Penn was desperate to do something after his sergeant was murdered, and I got the impression that he was frustrated not to be the one to take care of Auxelle. But providing round-the-clock protection for Frau Hoffman is as important as it gets.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be happy to oblige.’ Hiebermeyer took out his phone, then stood up, suddenly looking tired. ‘I’m going to take Tante Heidi home,’ he said. ‘Then I’ve got a pregnant wife to attend. Hope you don’t mind.’

  Jack put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You know what I think.’

  ‘Aysha,’ Heidi said, suddenly beaming. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’

  ‘Sevety-two hours,’ Jack said, looking at Hiebermeyer. ‘Then we’ll be planning that expedition to find Akhenaten’s treasure in Egypt.’

  ‘Promise?’

  Jack looked at his friend’s face, remembering what he had gone through in the bunker, something he had volunteered to do in Jack’s place. ‘You can count on it. But meanwhile, the clock’s ticking. I need to visit Professor Schoenberg. And I need to think about diving again.’

  17

  Near Tofino, Vancouver Island, British Columbia

  The de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver banked and swept low over the treetops, the roar of its single Pratt & Whitney 350 h.p. propeller engine intensifying as they dropped below the level of the surrounding hills. Jack was in the co-pilot’s seat, ha
ving just relinquished the controls to the woman beside him, a Canadian bush pilot who had considerably more experience than he did at landing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. He pressed the microphone on his headset. ‘Thanks for that. I haven’t flown a Beaver since I got my pilot’s licence when I was at school in Canada.’

  ‘Best plane ever made,’ she replied, flashing him a smile. ‘Built in 1946, and still going strong. Out here, the people living in these remote bays wouldn’t be able to function without us. The last road along this coast ended twenty kilometres back.’

  The aircraft levelled out for its approach. To the right, beyond the forest, Jack could see the distant peaks of the Coast Mountains of mainland British Columbia, and to the west the glistening expanse of the Pacific. It had been an exhilarating half-hour flight north from the fishing port of Tofino, complete with the spectacular sight of humpback whales breaching on their migration towards the waters off Alaska. Jack turned to Costas, who was sitting in the back gripping the pilot’s seat, looking like a wartime pilot in his headset and aviator sunglasses. ‘You good?’ he said.

  ‘Better now that you’re not flying. I always hated roller coasters.’

  ‘It’s called tactical flying.’

  ‘It’s called being rusty.’

  Jack gestured at a book with a swastika on the cover that Costas had been reading, and a pad where he had been jotting down notes. ‘You missed the whales.’

  ‘I was boning up on this guy we’re visiting. What he and his colleagues in the Nazi Ahnenerbe were up to in the late 1930s. It makes for pretty unsavoury reading.’

  The pilot interrupted them. ‘We’re landing now. Brace yourselves.’

  Jack sat back, checked his seat-belt harness and watched as the floats beneath the aircraft skimmed the water and then sent up a sheen of spray, completely obscuring the view. A tremendous vibration shook the plane, as if they were in a car with a tyre blowout, and then the aircraft slowed and settled in the water, rocking on the ocean swell. He could see a wooden jetty sticking out of the rocky shore ahead, leading to a floating dock with a Zodiac inflatable boat tied up alongside. The pilot throttled down and manoeuvred the aircraft close to the dock, then switched the engine off, opened the hatch and jumped out, swiftly uncoiling the ropes that were lying ready and tying them to each end of the starboard float. She gestured for Jack and Costas to follow, and they both unbuckled themselves and jumped on to the dock. Costas made a beeline for a wooden deckchair at the end, splaying himself out and closing his eyes. ‘I’d really like to soak in the rays for a while.’

  ‘Don’t be duped by the weather,’ the woman said. ‘This place is shrouded in sea mist and rain for a lot of the year.’

  ‘Sounds as if that’d suit the guy we’re visiting.’

  She shrugged. ‘We get a lot of recluses out here. We don’t ask questions.’ She pointed at the Zodiac. ‘You guys good with that? I guess so. It’s gassed up. His house is about two kilometres up the sound on this side. I usually deliver supplies for him every two weeks. Keep at least a hundred metres offshore to avoid the rocks, and then you’ll see the beach and a little jetty where you can pull up.’

  ‘How much time do we have?’ Jack asked.

  She looked at the sky, and then at the sea. ‘The wind’ll pick up by early afternoon. I want to be out of here by noon. If you plan to leave his place at eleven a.m., that gives you an hour and a half from now. Is that okay?’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got the radio. Call if you need us earlier.’

  She nodded, let her hair loose from under her cap and sat down on the deckchair where Costas had been slumped. ‘My turn. This is the first sun we’ve had for a week.’

  Jack jumped into the inflatable, squeezed the fuel pump on the 40 h.p. Mariner outboard and pulled the starter cord. It coughed to life, and he sat down beside it with his hand on the tiller. Costas untied the painter and leapt in, and then Jack put the engine into gear and swung out past the dock and into the centre of the channel, slowly opening the throttle. Costas slid back halfway down the opposite pontoon and raised his voice above the engine. ‘So you’ve never been here before?’

  ‘I came to Vancouver Island on holiday as a kid, but never this far out. I had no idea that Schoenberg lived here until Dillen told me. I knew he’d been a university professor in Ontario and then retired out west twenty-odd years ago, after his wife died. He must be in his early nineties now. His name was von Schoenberg, originally. His family was Prussian, fairly aristocratic. There were plenty of Nazis among the old Prussian elite, but many of them were contemptuous of Hitler and his cronies. My guess is he ditched the von when he was captured by the Russians.’

  ‘He was a prisoner of war in Russia?’

  ‘In the Gulag, in Siberia. He was one of the last batch to be released.’

  ‘I’ve just been reading that most of the surviving German prisoners not released by 1949 were judged by the Russians to be war criminals, and weren’t let go until after Stalin died in 1953.’

  ‘Dillen said Schoenberg tried to pass himself off as an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier, but he thinks the Soviets must have suspected him. Discovering he was one of Himmler’s select followers in the Ahnenerbe would have been enough to brand him a criminal. He would have been lucky to escape execution.’

  ‘So Dillen knows him from way back?’

  Jack nodded, swinging the boat to port to avoid a patch of kelp. ‘Schoenberg came to Cambridge on sabbatical just before his retirement, and they worked together on a translation of ancient Greek inscriptions from Athens. Schoenberg had been a classical scholar before the war, and eventually finished his doctorate in Canada. He was in Cambridge when I was a graduate student, and I attended a seminar he gave on the early Greek geographers, his speciality. We talked afterwards, and he was fascinated by my diving expeditions. He said his greatest exhilaration had been an expedition he undertook to Iceland as a young man to search for archaeological sites. I think that talking to me took him back to the heyday of his youth in the late 1930s.’

  ‘That expedition was with Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, the Nazi Department of Cultural Heritage. Already the Jews in Germany were being persecuted and the language of racism was everywhere. It would hardly have been a carefree jaunt.’

  ‘Schoenberg told Dillen that his involvement in the Ahnenerbe was purely scholarly, and that he joined the Nazi party only because refusal was impossible.’

  ‘Didn’t a lot of ex-Nazis come to Canada?’

  ‘Quite a few former prisoners of war were allowed to come here after they were released by the Soviets in the late forties and early fifties. Plenty of them made new lives for themselves and the last thing they wanted was to hark back to the war. But there were some, including former SS, who remained diehard Nazis. Unlike released prisoners who went back to Germany – who saw the devastation and then the years of reconstruction, who themselves were part of the creation of the new Germany – some of those who went abroad after their release still lived in a fantasy world and refused to accept what had happened. I knew former German soldiers in Canada who would still openly celebrate Hitler’s birthday.’

  ‘Schoenberg?’

  Jack paused. ‘It’s hard to imagine how anyone who let slip that their greatest exhilaration was during their time working for Himmler could not be nostalgic, whatever they may say about being coerced. You’ve just been reading about the real purpose of the Ahnenerbe: to provide Himmler with so-called evidence for racial superiority that he then used to justify the Final Solution. When you see that old man today, remember the pictures of the concentration camp at Belsen, and those terrible images Maurice saw in the forest bunker. That’s what the Ahnenerbe was really all about. But we have to try to keep our cool. We’re here because he wants to tell us something. We have to encourage him to talk, not to clam up.’

  ‘He’ll presumably expect some questions about his Nazi past,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve got some fresh in my mind from that book. It would be od
d if we didn’t ask him something. That might raise his suspicions.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Just don’t lay it on too thick.’

  ‘You could show annoyance with me for doing it. Might help to get you into his confidence, to open him up.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Whatever he says in response to queries about his Nazi past we have to take with a pinch of salt. But I doubt whether we’ll need to tease the truth of his convictions out of him. Those will come anyway, little words here and there, more openly if he thinks he’s in like-minded company. He’s very old and has been living as a recluse for more than twenty years, probably inhabiting that world of his past more and more in his mind. Anyway, I want to play him on something else. We have to find a way of bringing up the Brotherhood of the Tiger. I’ve expected Shang Yong to be on my tail ever since we took out most of his business assets two years ago, and the Brotherhood is just the kind of outfit Saumerre would contract after his disappointment with the Russian hitmen last year. Ben told me he thought he’d seen the tiger tattoo on a man in the airport concourse at JFK when he arrived there with Rebecca from Istanbul.’

  ‘You suspect Schoenberg is involved with Saumerre?’ Costas said.

  ‘It’s just a hunch. Frau Hoffman knew about him, and knew he was still alive. If they are the last survivors of those who may have been close to Himmler’s scheme, then we have to remember that Saumerre – and before that his father and his grandfather – have been on this trail for years. If we know about Schoenberg’s background and where he lives, then Saumerre almost certainly will too.’

  ‘You think Saumerre may have got to him and offered some kind of deal?’

  Jack throttled down and let the engine idle for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. ‘This is what I think. I think the fantasy world of the Nazis, all that nonsense at Wewelsburg Castle, disguised a terrible truth of ego and poisonous ambition in Heinrich Himmler. But I think that fantasy world was so embedded in the young men and women whose minds were warped by the Ahnenerbe that it will still be there in those few who survive today. Schoenberg may well have something genuinely exciting to tell us, as Dillen himself firmly believed, something about Atlantis that still burns within him because of the fervour for finding an Aryan proto-civilization that was kindled in his soul during his formative years. He could hardly have avoided being influenced by the Ahnenerbe, not only by the ideology but also by the compulsive, almost manic excitement that surrounded it, an infectious enthusiasm it would be hard for a young man to deny. For him, re-stoking that enthusiasm might be important now because he’s an old man harking back to his youth, and that’s something we can exploit. But there’s another, darker possibility: that the fantasy for a select few was also to be part of a terrifying vortex of escape and rebirth that Himmler had contructed for himself, one that required men like Ernst Hoffman to bring it to fruition.’