The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  It was over.

  Epilogue

  ‘Jack, correct me if I’m wrong, but are you and I sailing off into the sunset together?’

  Jack peered at Costas, then at the boat they were in, and then at the miles of empty ocean surrounding them, barely visible in the blinding sunlight. They were wedged opposite each other with hardly any space to move, but the old German inflatable seemed as strong as the day it had been packed on board the U-boat more than sixty-five years before, its CO2 bottle still pressurized enough to fill the pontoons. Jack had stripped down the upper half of his wetsuit to his T-shirt, but Costas was still wearing his tattered off-grey boilersuit bearing the scars and patches from their encounter with molten lava in another ocean a few days previously. Jack was holding the waterproof two-way radio that Costas had taken from a special pocket in his boilersuit that miraculously remained watertight. After surfacing and struggling into the boat, they had immediately sent out a VHF call to Paul, who was on his way back from Seaquest II in the Lynx and due to arrive in a matter of minutes.

  Costas reached into the waist of his boilersuit and pulled out a compressed bag. He unzipped it and extracted something that looked like a wedge of unleavened bread, with something colourful oozing out of the sides. He sniffed it, grunted, and took a bite. He looked at Jack as he munched away, then swallowed. ‘Not bad,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘Tuna and cucumber. Want one?’

  ‘You brought sandwiches. Sandwiches.’

  Costas raised his arms. ‘So what?’

  ‘As if we were going on a picnic?’

  Costas gestured with his sandwich at his boilersuit, speaking with his mouth full. ‘Empty pocket otherwise. May as well fill them.’

  Jack grinned, shaking his head, then reached into his own leg pocket and took out a small plastic water bottle, uncapping it and draining it completely. He took out another one from the other side, then leaned back, squinting at the sun and closing his eyes, enjoying the heat. He felt something hit his hand, opened his eyes and saw a baseball cap, then saw that Costas was wearing one as well.

  ‘Sun hats. One for me too. You blow me away.’

  ‘Be prepared. That’s my motto.’ Costas reached into another pocket and pulled out his old aviator sunglasses, putting them on at a skewed angle and looking at Jack, who was trying not to smile. Costas raised his arms again. ‘What?’

  ‘Got anything else in there?’

  ‘You want to know?’ Costas took a huge bite of his sandwich, and then began patting his boilersuit. The radio came to life, and Jack spoke into it for a few minutes. He put his hand over the receiver and spoke to Costas. ‘I’m just talking to Macalister on Seaquest II. There’s been an interesting development. Reuters is reporting a cruise missile strike in the heart of the Taklamakan Desert. Ben has been in touch with our MI6 contact, and they reckon the target was Shang Yong’s headquarters. MI6 have been expecting a crackdown on his operations by China, but not so soon. The evidence is pointing to an offshore US strike, and that can only have come about through intelligence on a high-category terrorist threat. Ben reckons they must have been closely monitoring Saumerre, and that Shang Yong has paid the price for agreeing to work for him.’

  ‘Rebecca will be happy,’ Costas said, munching. ‘That really closes the lid on the bad guys.’

  Jack nodded. He felt the box in his suit pocket containing the phial he had persuaded Saumerre to give him. Once that was deposited in a secure containment facility and destroyed, the lid would truly be closed. He put the radio back to his ear and spoke for a few more minutes. Then he put it down and laughed out loud, the first time he had done that in months. He grinned at Costas. ‘You remember a promise you made to a new friend a few days ago?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’re going to need a tuxedo.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘Lanowski’s getting married.’

  Costas dropped his sandwich. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘Nope.’ Jack offered him the radio. ‘Speak to Macalister if you want. It’s the biggest news since we found Atlantis.’

  Costas waved away the radio. ‘You mean they actually met?’

  ‘Yesterday, in Bermuda. It was love at first sight.’

  ‘I can’t believe I offered to be his best man. And that he accepted.’

  ‘You’re his new best buddy. You were the one who took him on that submersible ride over Atlantis.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ Costas pointed at the mess of tuna and cucumber on his wetsuit. ‘Me? In a tuxedo?’

  ‘Apparently they want the wedding to be in the submersible. It was that picture you took of him at the controls, the one he posted of himself on the dating website. That was what really did it for her. She’s crazy about him. But Macalister has a plan. As well as a PhD, she’s a Vogue model. We can sell the photo rights. It’ll be the eccentric celebrity wedding of the year. And you’ll be smack bang in the middle of it.’

  ‘My God,’ Costas moaned, putting his hands to his face. ‘If only I hadn’t opened my big mouth.’

  Jack pulled his hat down to cover his eyes, then lay back on the pontoon. ‘If you need any help with the best-man speech, just let me know. I did it for Maurice and Aysha.’

  Looking dejected, Costas attempted to recover the debris of his sandwich from his lap, stuffing a piece of bread and tuna into his mouth. Then he pointed up, gesturing, and Jack tipped back his hat and shaded his eyes. He could see the speck of a helicopter, getting bigger as it approached, the noise reverberating off the sea. A minute later it swept low past them, then turned around and came in to hover a few hundred feet away, only about twenty feet above the waves. Jack saw Paul wave from the cockpit, and he waved back. The side door slid open and a female wetsuited figure jumped out, falling like an arrow with ankles folded and arms held tight, disappearing with barely a splash into the rotorwash below the Lynx. Moments later the diver’s head appeared and a hand was raised giving the okay sign, then a mesh bag containing fins and a mask was dropped alongside. As the helicopter slowly turned to port and tilted forward, accelerating away over the waves, the diver put on the mask and fins and swam quickly towards them, dropping down underwater about twenty feet away and powering up the side of the boat until she was half inside, leaning on her elbows on the pontoon. She pulled off her mask and shook her long dark hair, tied up in a ponytail. ‘Hi, Dad. Uncle Costas.’

  ‘Rebecca.’ Jack smiled broadly. ‘I thought you might drop in.’

  ‘Jeremy’s in the helicopter,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Paul’s gone off for a perimeter sweep, just to make sure there aren’t any more bad guys lurking around.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s got anything to worry about,’ Costas said, looking at the empty pocket in his boiler suit where the grapple gun had been. ‘We’re well and truly alone.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  Jack took a swig from his water bottle. ‘It was fantastic. Symbols carved on a cave wall. I want you to see it with your own eyes. As soon as Seaquest II is on station this afternoon, we’ll go in there again. Just the three of us.’

  ‘And Jeremy,’ Rebecca said. ‘Costas qualified him in the sea off Troy a week ago.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jack smiled. ‘And Jeremy.’

  ‘Nice one with the palladion, by the way, Jack,’ Costas said, fishing for another sandwich. ‘Never did like that thing. Too many bad associations. And I like the idea that we’ve put something real at the bottom of the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe it’ll keep the pirates away from this place.’

  ‘You found it?’ Rebecca said. ‘Where is it?’

  Jack paused. ‘It got, um, entangled. With Saumerre. They’re somewhere down below us. About five thousand feet deep in the abyss. They probably haven’t even hit the bottom yet.’

  ‘And then there’s one of Lanowski’s megaturbitides,’ Costas said. ‘About another thousand feet of silt.’

  ‘And then boiling-hot magma,’ Jack added.

  ‘So Saumerre really is go
ne?’ Rebecca said quietly.

  Jack reached out and put his hand on hers. ‘It’s finished.’

  She looked away, closing her eyes, then looked back at him, blinking away the salt. ‘I didn’t want to say anything. But ever since I was kidnapped last year, it’s been really difficult. Knowing he was still out there, not knowing whether it was going to happen again.’

  ‘It’s all taken care of.’

  ‘Have a sandwich,’ Costas said, his mouth full, offering her the bag. ‘They’re a bit flattened, kind of like toasted sandwiches without being toasted, if you see what I mean, a little soggy but surprisingly good.’

  Rebecca smiled, wiping her eyes, then peered into the bag. ‘A kind of underwater picnic. Really cool idea, Costas, one of your best. Thanks. Maybe later.’

  Jack lay back again. ‘There’s a phrase from the Epic of Gilgamesh. “The dream was marvellous, but the terror was great. We must treasure the dream, whatever the terror.” I feel like that now: as if those few symbols on that cavern wall were like the shining light at the end of the tunnel, like the star of heaven that once fell on those people far back in prehistory and became their guiding light, as if the dream of this discovery has drawn us through the terror and we’re at the other end.’

  ‘Do you remember the Walter de la Mare poem, about the silence surging softly backwards?’ Costas said. ‘I know what you mean. It’s as if that great clamour from the past has gone, the cries of the shamans trapped in that chamber in Atlantis, the awful feeling Maurice had as he entered the bunker. He told me on the phone about his aunt Heidi, how she said for her it was as if the Nazi period had never ended, as if the tide of those terrible years had always seemed to sweep ahead of her.’

  ‘Maybe now it’s begun to turn,’ Rebecca said quietly.

  ‘So, Jack,’ Costas said, finding something in the bag that might once have been a banana. ‘What are we going to do with all that gold?’

  ‘Gold? ’ Rebecca exclaimed

  ‘Tons of it. In the U-boat.’

  ‘U-boat?’

  ‘Yep. There’s one of those down there too.’

  Jack looked at Costas. ‘You remember last year we took Hugh Frazer to that home outside Auschwitz where they looked after elderly survivors of the concentration camp? We saw the old lady with the harp, the girl Hugh had seen in the camp near Belsen all those years before. There are very few of those survivors left now. But Frau Hoffman said she’d worked as a volunteer at a children’s hospice near that place. I was thinking what a U-boat full of gold could do for a place like that. Nothing about atonement or restitution, nothing about the fact that a lot of that gold probably came from Jews and Poles, but simply to help bring happiness where there has been so little.’

  ‘Great plan,’ said Rebecca. ‘Can I be the one to talk to Frau Hoffman about it?’

  ‘I’m sure she’d love to talk to you,’ Jack said.

  ‘And about us. This quest. Where we go from here,’ Costas said. ‘You said when you saw those symbols in the cavern that you recognized the one that Katya thought meant “west”. That means into the Caribbean islands and towards the mainland, to Mexico. Are we following Noah Uta-napishtim?’

  Jack looked into the sea. He could see far down, two hundred feet or more, and could just make out the top of the reef wall that rose up almost a mile from the abyss. He half expected to see some dark form beneath them, some lurking malevolence of the underworld come to punish them for discarding the palladion, but instead all he saw were thin trails of bubbles rising from far down in the abyss. He shifted slightly and saw his own reflection in the water, no details, just the silhouette of a man framed by the sun staring down.It seemed a timeless image. He remembered the voyage of Noah and Gilgamesh. For the first time it seemed real, not myth, like watching Second World War footage in colour. Noah had been here, in a boat not much larger than this one, smelling the sea breeze, trailing his fingers in the sea, looking down at the bubbles and the phosphorescence. Somewhere near here, Noah the shaman had gone on, and Gilgamesh the hero, the man who would be a god, had turned back.

  Jack remembered the carnage and human sacrifice they had seen in the inner sanctum at Atlantis. That too had been real, as real as the horror of the Nazi bunker. He turned to Costas. ‘Do you remember, four years ago when we dived in the sacred cenotes of the Yucatán in Mexico, going to the site of Chichen Itza and seeing the appalling evidence of human sacrifice? You yourself said it was a society where something had gone terribly wrong, that had not developed normally, as if someone had come from over the sea and imposed a distorted memory of Egyptian and Near Eastern civilization. You said the Maya were like a cult brainwashed by a madman.’

  ‘You mean the madness of Noah-Uta-napishtim,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘Perhaps Noah was on his own voyage into insanity, pushed towards it by what he had seen and done in that chamber of horrors in Atlantis, then by the sun and starvation and exhaustion as he came to this place, and then by the desperation that drove him to leave and sail ever further west until he hit the mainland and met people who lived as he knew his ancestors had done, a way he admired. He taught them what he knew from Atlantis, how to build pyramids and how to sacrifice, something that came to an awful head thousands of years later in the orgy of bloodletting by the Maya and the Aztecs.’

  ‘Not a place we want to go,’ Rebecca said.

  Jack shook his head. ‘I think we turn back, just as Gilgamesh did. We go back to the world where men became gods, and where it was a short step from those faceless pillars of the Neolithic temples to the tyrannical god-kings of the Middle East and the worst megalomaniacs of our time, to Hitler and Himmler and the other monsters of Nazism. But that’s our legacy, and we know from what has happened today that we can transcend it. If we carry on west and follow Noah-Uta-napishtim to his heart of darkness, I’m not sure if there is any happy ending. There’s nothing for us there, no treasure at the end of the trail, just a horrifying vision of what human beings are capable of inflicting on each other.’

  ‘We’ve seen enough of that in the past few days,’ Costas muttered.

  ‘So what’s next?’ Rebecca said.

  Jack was dog-tired, but he felt that familiar adrenalin surging through him. ‘We were speaking of Maurice Hiebermeyer. I owe him.’

  ‘Egypt?’

  Jack grinned. ‘He and I have been planning it for years. It’s so big, we’ve never quite wanted to go for it, both of us waiting until the time was right.’

  ‘That statue with the inscription Maurice found at Troy?’

  ‘That was the clue he needed. If I tell you this could be bigger than the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, far bigger, you’ll see where I’m coming from. It’s about Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father, the most mysterious and terrifying of the pharaohs, about where he came from and where he went. About what happened to his treasure. About finding his tomb.’

  ‘Any diving?’ Costas mumbled, now half asleep.

  ‘Like you wouldn’t believe. The most astonishing find has been made in the Red Sea.’

  ‘No more deadly toxins? Doomsday weapons?’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘Erupting volcanoes?’

  ‘The dive site is beside a beach, one of those ones with parasols and reclining chairs and a little bar at the back serving cocktails.’

  Costas tipped his hat up and squinted at Jack. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Nope.’

  He leaned back again, sighing contentedly. ‘For the first time ever, you think of me.’

  ‘Only after you do your duty at Lanowski’s wedding.’

  Costas groaned and pulled his hat back over his face. Jack smiled at Rebecca, who raised her eyes and shook her head. He remembered the message he had written to her on the scrap of plastic when he thought he was going to die in the cavern below. He reached down to his buoyancy compensator pocket, felt for it, then discreetly took it out and dangled his hand over the pontoon, releasing the scrap into the sea and letti
ng the waves wash through his fingers. The message would be there for her forever, in the sea, Jack’s spirit world, though the words would be erased by sun and water and would only ever be known to him. He felt a dawning happiness, as if that act had been the final release he had needed to throw off the burden that had weighed on him since Rebecca had been drawn into the nightmare of kidnapping and violence that had dogged their quest.

  He lifted his hand from the water and shielded his eyes, looking up. The sound of the helicopter became louder, increasing to a roar as it took up position overhead. The downdraught kicked up a spray of water around the boat that sparkled as the sun shone through it, and for a moment it was as if they were in a vortex, one that would lift them to ever more fabulous places. Jack was suddenly coursing with excitement. He shaded his eyes and looked up, seeing Jeremy’s helmeted figure leaning out of the door. Costas reached up and caught the winch line, then looked at Jack and Rebecca, making a whirling motion with his free hand and pointing up. ‘Good to go?’ he yelled.

  Rebecca draped her arm over Jack’s shoulders. Jack beamed at Costas, then tilted his head towards Rebecca, waiting. She turned and looked at him expectantly. Then she understood. She shook her head again, grinning, and they both shouted together.

  ‘Good to go.’

  Background to the novel

  When my first novel Atlantis was published in 2005, it was against a backdrop of extraordinary real-life discoveries that were transforming our view of the rise of civilization. A century ago, most scholars would have put that formative period at the beginning of the Bronze Age, some five thousand years ago; now we know that many of the key developments – the first towns, with walls, towers and even temples – had appeared more than five thousand years before that, soon after the end of the Ice Age. Cambridge University, where I completed my PhD in archaeology in 1991, had long been a centre of expertise in this era, and by the time I left my academic teaching career ten years later to write full-time, it was clear that the Neolithic period was where the most exciting breakthroughs were being made in understanding the past. Not only were amazing new sites being excavated – mainly in modern Turkey, on the Anatolian plateau – but archaeologists were thinking in daring new ways, using finds to question long-held assumptions about the transformation from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. Most excitingly, they had begun to address the belief systems of our distant ancestors, to try to get inside their minds, something long thought beyond the scope of archaeology but where the new finds were shedding dazzling light. Was this a time of conflict, as the old beliefs of the hunter-gatherers were replaced by the new? Was it the birthplace of the gods? Much remains uncertain, but this sea change in archaeological thinking provides the backdrop to The Gods of Atlantis.