The Hunt For Atlantis

NINETEEN

The Gulf of Cádiz

There she is!” said Kari, pointing ahead through the helicopter’s windscreen.

The deep blue of the Gulf of Cádiz stretched out before them, sunlight glinting off its surface. They were ninety miles from the Portuguese coast, a hundred from Gibraltar, and their destination was itself in motion, making a steady twelve knots into the Atlantic. The RV Evenor stood out against the endless blue as a slice of gleaming white, a 260-foot oceanographic survey vessel representing the state of the art in undersea exploration. As with all his other concerns, Kristian Frost had not cut any corners.

“Ah, finally!” said Castille. The Belgian had been extremely nervous throughout the flight, to the amusement of the other passengers. “I can’t wait to get my feet back on solid ground.” He considered this. “Solid deck. Rocking deck. Ah, so long as it’s not a helicopter, I don’t care!”

“You got any idea how hard it is to land a helicopter on a moving ship?” Chase asked mischievously. Castille gave him a sour look, then took a green apple from a pocket and crunched deeply into it.

“That won’t be a problem, sir,” the pilot assured him as the Bell 407 began its descent. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”

“It’s number hundred and one I’m worried about,” Castille muttered through a mouthful of apple. Even Philby joined in the jovial mockery that followed.

Nina looked over Kari’s shoulder as they approached the Evenor. The research vessel had an ultramodern and, to her admittedly inexperienced eyes, somewhat odd design. The hull was normal enough, but the superstructure seemed almost top-heavy, a tall, tapered block squeezed into the midsection of the ship with a radar mast towering above it.

The reason for the unusual design became obvious as they got closer. At the stern, protruding out above the propellers on a fantail, was a helicopter pad, while most of the deck area at the bow was devoted to heavy cranes and winches to support the Evenor’s two submersibles. The people had to fit in the space between their machines.

“Only a year old,” Kari said as they approached. “Three thousand two hundred metric tons, with five officers, nineteen crew and able to support up to thirty scientists for two months. My father’s pride and joy.”

“After you, I hope,” said Nina.

“Mmm… sometimes I wonder,” joked Kari.

As the pilot had promised, the landing was performed quickly and safely. Castille practically leapt from the cabin as crewmen secured the aircraft to the deck. “Safe at last!” he proclaimed.

“Just don’t throw up your hands in joy,” Nina told him, indicating the still-spinning rotor blades above him. “Remember what happened to Ajar!”

“Least you’ll be safe from choppers down there,” said Chase, looking overboard. The sea was calm, the gentle waves the perfect disguise for what lay beneath.

Kari led the group into the superstructure and up to the pilot house on level four, where they were met by the Evenor’s commander, Captain Leo Matthews, a tall Canadian in a spotless white uniform. Once the introductions were made, he updated them on the situation. “We’ll reach the target area in about three hours. Are you sure you want to send both subs down on the first descent, ma’am?” he asked Kari. “It might be better just to send the Atragon to inspect the seabed first.”

Kari shook her head. “I’m afraid time is a factor. Qobras already has a ship at sea-it’s looking in the wrong place, but he must know by now that we’ve set sail. Sooner or later he’s going to investigate, and I suspect it will be sooner.”

“Are you worried about an attack?”

“Wouldn’t be the first one,” Chase pointed out.

Matthews smiled. “Well, the Evenor might not be a warship, but… let’s just say we can look after ourselves.” He turned to Kari. “Your father sent some, ah, special equipment. We’ll be ready for any trouble, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

Matthews ordered one of his crew to show the team to their staterooms. Despite offering it to Nina, on the grounds that she deserved the title, Kari had the chief scientist’s stateroom below the pilothouse, while Nina took a cabin next to Chase a deck beneath.

“Excellent,” he cackled, popping his head around Nina’s door. “Got a room to myself. No sharing with Hugo on this boat.”

“Does he snore?”

“He does much, much worse than that.” To Nina’s relief, he didn’t elaborate. “It’s not as posh as the Nereid, but it should be a lot harder to blow up.”

“Please, don’t even joke about that.”

“I wasn’t joking.” Chase came fully into the room. “Like Kari said, Qobras has got to know we’re out here. I know she thinks the crew’s loyal, but wave enough money around and anybody can be bought.”

“You think Qobras has a spy aboard?” Nina sat on the bed, worried.

“I’d put money on it. For that matter…” He trailed off.

“What?”

He sat next to her, lowering his voice. “Back in Brazil, Starkman found us way too fast. Those choppers couldn’t have just shadowed us as we went upriver, we were moving too slow. They would have run out of fuel. Which meant when they set off, they already knew where we were. Either there was a homing device on the boat, which is possible… or somebody aboard told them our position.”

Despite the warmth of the cabin, Nina shivered. “Who?”

“Couldn’t have been that idiot tree-hugger; nobody told him why we were really going there. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Captain Perez and Julio are on my list.”

“But they were killed when the Nereid was blown up. You saw the bodies.”

“Could be that Starkman killed them so there wouldn’t be any loose ends. So they’re still a possibility. On the other hand, I’m fairly sure Kari’s not trying to sell out her own dad…” He grinned at the understatement. “And you, well. Beyond reproach.”

Nina smiled. “I’m glad you think so.”

“Problem is, that doesn’t leave many suspects. There’s Agnaldo, the Prof… and, well, me and Hugo.”

“It can’t have been Jonathan,” Nina said immediately. “I’ve known him for years. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”

“Okay then,” said Chase, raising an eyebrow, “I trust Agnaldo, and hell, I trust Hugo with my life. Which leaves… aw, buggeration and fuckery. It was me all along, wasn’t it? Bollocks.”

Nina giggled. “I think we can rule you out.”

“Hope so. I’d hate to have to beat the shit out of myself.” He smiled again, then shook his head wearily. “I dunno. Anybody on the Nereid could have had a sat-phone hidden in their personal kit-I only checked through the stuff we took aboard in Tefé. And as for this boat…” He sighed. “All we can do is just keep an eye out, look for anything funny.”

“What are you going to do if you find someone?” asked Nina.

Chase stood. “Make the bastard walk the plank.” She could tell he wasn’t joking.

Nina spent a while familiarizing herself with the layout of the Evenor, eventually making her way to the foredeck to check out the two submersibles. Kari was already there, talking to a pair of young men whose scruffy shorts and garish unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts went far beyond “beach casual” into actual “beach bum” territory.

“Nina,” said Kari, “these are our submersible pilots. And designers, in fact.”

“Jim Baillard,” said the taller of the two men, like Matthews a Canadian, only with a considerably more languid turn of speech. Nina shook his hand, his wristband of little seashells rattling. “So you think you found Atlantis, eh? Awesome.”

“You want it dug up? We’ll get it done,” said the shorter, more tubby of the pair, a deeply tanned Australian with bleached spiky hair. “Matt Trulli. If it’s underwater, we can dry it off for you.”

“Nice to meet you,” said Nina. She looked at the submersibles. “So these are your subs? They don’t look like I expected.” They resembled earthmovers or other industrial machinery more than submarines.

“You thought they’d have the big bubble on the front, right?” Trulli said enthusiastically. “Jesus, you don’t want that! One crack, and splatto! Well, maybe you want one if all you’re doing is taking snapshots of weird fish or poncing about on the Titanic, but these beauts, we built them to work. Tough as hell.”

“The last thing you want to do with a pressure hull is make a big hole in it,” added Baillard, continuing his partner’s train of thought as smoothly as if they were the same person. He pointed at the large white and orange metal sphere at the front of the smaller sub, the name Atragon painted on it in an elegant script. “Keep it in one piece and it’s a lot stronger-and you can go much deeper.”

“How do you see out?” Nina could see a porthole in the sphere’s side, but it was only a few inches across.

“We use a LIDAR virtual imaging system instead of a viewing bubble-like radar, but using blue-green lasers. The U.S. Navy designed them as a communications system, to contact their missile subs. They work on a wavelength that isn’t blocked by seawater.”

“Two lasers,” Trulli jumped in, “one for each eye. Proper stereoscopics! The lasers sweep in front of the sub twenty times a second, and any light that gets reflected back, we see on the big screen inside the pod in 3-D. No need to suck your batteries dry with a load of spotlights that do squat more than twenty feet away. We can see for a mile!”

“And because we have a much wider field of view than we would through a bubble, we can work a lot faster with the arms,” Baillard said, reaching up and patting one of the imposing steel manipulators. “It’s a revolutionary design.”

“You said it!” Trulli high-fived his partner. “Too revolutionary. Nobody else even wanted to risk giving us development money. Kari’s dad, though? Bam! Soon as he saw what we had in mind, we were in business.”

“And now, not only do you get to prove your design,” said Kari, “but you get to do so as part of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.”

“Like I said,” nodded Baillard, “awesome.”

“Too right,” agreed Trulli. Nina smiled as they high-fived each other again.

“So what do they do?” she asked. “I mean, I guess the Atragon’s like a regular sub, but that one?” She indicated the larger submersible, a bright yellow behemoth with what looked almost like the mouth of a giant vacuum cleaner beneath its crew sphere. A broad pipe led back from the nozzle into the main body of the vessel; at its rear a second pipe, a flexible concertina arrangement that looked as though it could extend for some length, ran into a second compartment that Nina realized could be detached from the submersible’s spine. Yet another length of extending pipe hung down from the module’s stern almost like a tail. The words “Big Jobs!” were spray-painted, graffiti-style, on the side of the sphere.

“That?” said Trulli proudly. “That is the Sharkdozer. You know, like a bulldozer, only ’cause there’s no bulls underwater, we named it after a shark instead?”

Nina grinned. “I think I get the idea.”

“It’s a self-contained underwater excavator,” Baillard told her, pointing at its two heavy-duty arms. Rather than the claws on the smaller sub, these ended in buckets like those of an earthmover. “The arms move larger rock deposits, and the vacuum pump,” he indicated the maw of the pipe beneath the sphere, “removes silt and sediment-”

“And because the main pump module’s detachable,” Trulli cut in, pointing at the “trailer” section of the vessel, “we can park it away from the site so all the crap we clear doesn’t hang around and wipe out visibility.”

Nina was impressed. “How quickly will it be able to clear the silt over the site?”

“Five meters?” said Baillard. “No time at all; at least enough to see that there’s something underneath it.”

“Actually dredging out enough to see what it is, though…” Trulli shrugged. “Depends how big a hole you want to dig. It’s, what, two hundred feet wide? If it’s nothing but silt covering it, we could suck one end clear in a couple of hours.”

“Then if there’s anything there, we can either use the Atragon’s manipulator arms to pick it up, or send in Mighty Jack.”

“Who?” Nina asked.

Baillard pointed out a small cage attached to the Atragon, inside which was a bright blue boxy object that turned out to be a tiny vessel in its own right. “Mighty Jack’s our ROV, Remotely Operated Vehicle. He’s a robot, basically, a Cameron Systems BB-101. He’s connected to the Atragon by a fiber-optic cable, and we’ve fitted him with a stereoscopic camera so I can operate him right from the pod. Even got his own little arm as well.”

Nina smiled at Baillard’s anthropomorphization of the robot. “And this’ll be the first time you’ve used them?”

“We’ve tested them, but yeah, this is the first full-on real operation,” said Trulli. “Can’t wait to see what we find!”

“Nor can I.” Kari looked at the horizon ahead. “We should be in position in about two hours. How soon will you be ready to launch?”

“We can do all the prelaunch prep in transit. Everything else… about an hour,” Baillard said.

“We’ve got repeater monitors already set up in the main lab,” Trulli told Nina. “You’ll be able to see everything we see, as we see it-in 3-D, as well! Pretty smart, eh?”

“Sounds great.” Nina felt a thrill of anticipation, a sense of impending discovery-but also of stress and tension. If there turned out to be nothing down there…

Kari picked up on her unease. “Are you okay?”

“I just haven’t got my sea legs yet,” Nina fibbed. “I think I’ll go and lie down for a while. You’ll let me know when we arrive?”

Kari adopted a deadpan expression. “No, I thought I’d let you miss the moment when we discover Atlantis.”

“Don’t you start,” Nina chided as Kari cracked a smile. “I can’t cope with having two sarcastic friends!”

Nina returned to her cabin and lay on her bed for a while, trying not to think about the enormous amount of money and labor the Frosts were putting behind her deductions. When she eventually realized this was a fruitless hope, the thought of “sarcastic friends” prompted her to get up and knock on Chase’s door. On being invited in, she was mildly surprised to see him on his bed reading a book-and more surprised when she saw the cover.

“Plato’s dialogues?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Chase, sitting up. “Don’t look so shocked! I read. Thrillers mostly, but… Anyway, I thought that seeing as you’ve been going on about them so much, I ought to actually read the things. You know, the bloke doesn’t spend all that much time actually talking about Atlantis.”

Nina sat next to him. “No, not really.”

“I mean, in Timaeus there’s, what, three paragraphs on Atlantis? All the rest of it’s like some stoned student talking bollocks about the meaning of the universe.”

Nina laughed. “That’s not the usual academic description… but yes, you’re right.”

“And the other one, Critias, he doesn’t even start talking about Atlantis for about five pages. And when he does… it’s interesting.” There was a thoughtful tone to his words that caught Nina’s attention.

“In what way?”

“I don’t just mean about the description of the place, and how spot-on he was about the temple. I mean about the people, the rulers. It doesn’t really add up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, in the notes here, some scholars think that Critias was Plato’s blueprint of a perfect society, right? But it’s not. You read what he actually says, and the Atlanteans are a pretty nasty lot. They’re conquerors who invade other countries and enslave their people, they’re a completely militarized society, the kings have absolute power of life and death over the citizens with no democracy…” Chase leafed through the pages. “And then you get to the end, just before the bit that he never finished. ‘The human nature got the upper hand. They then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased.’ So Zeus calls up all the gods to punish them. Glug glug. Doesn’t sound like they were that great to me. In fact, seems like the world was better off without them.”

“I’m impressed,” said Nina. “That was quite a good analysis.”

“I was crap at maths and history-but I did all right at English.” He put the book down, shifting closer to her. “Not wanting to sound funny or anything, but reading this did kind of make me wonder why you’re so keen to find these people.”

Nina felt oddly uncomfortable, almost as if she were being accused of something. Had Kari told Chase about the Atlantean DNA markers? It seemed unlikely. She shook off the feeling, replying, “It’s something I’ve been fascinated by my entire life. So were my parents, actually. I went all around the world with them trying to find anything that might reveal where Atlantis was.” She pulled her pendant out from beneath her T-shirt, holding it up to the light from the porthole. “The irony is, I had something all along and never realized it.”

“Did your parents ever find anything else?”

She let the pendant drop back against her chest. “That’s… I don’t know, I really don’t. They thought they did, but I never saw what it was. The year they, uh, died…” Her voice caught.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Chase began.

She shook her head. “It’s okay. I just don’t often talk about it. They were on an expedition in Tibet while I was taking my university entrance exams…”

“ Tibet?” asked Chase. “That’s a hell of a long way from the Atlantic.”

“It’s been connected to the Atlantis legend for a long time. The Nazis sent several expeditions there, even during the war.”

“Nazis again, eh?” mused Chase. “The bastards get around. So they found the temple in Brazil and nicked the sextant piece from it-but they must have found something else as well, something that made them go to Tibet.”

“There could have been something on the map or in the inscriptions-there were definitely signs that the Atlanteans had visited Asia. I didn’t have enough time to check.”

“Why did your parents go there?”

“Again, I don’t know. They found something, but they didn’t tell me what it was.” She frowned. “Which was weird in itself, because normally I was a part of everything.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to distract you from your exams.”

“Maybe.” Nina’s frown didn’t go away. “But the last thing I ever heard from them was by postcard, believe it or not. From Tibet. I still have it, actually.”

“What did it say?”

“Not much, just that they were about to set off from a Himalayan village called Xulaodang. They were expecting to be gone for a week, but…”

Chase put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “Hey. We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s funny, though. I hadn’t even considered the Nazi connection until now. And my father did go to Germany the year before… Maybe that’s what they had, something from the Ahnenerbe expeditions. Something that led them to Tibet. But why wouldn’t they tell me?”

“ ’Cause they didn’t want you to know they were using something from the Nazis?” Chase suggested.

“I suppose.” She sat up with a sad sigh. “Not that it mattered. They were caught in an avalanche somewhere south of Xulaodang, and almost the entire expedition was killed. The bodies were never found, so whatever they had with them was lost.”

Chase raised an eyebrow. “Almost everyone? Who survived?”

“Jonathan.”

“Jonathan? What, you mean Philby? The Prof?”

“Yes, of course. I thought you knew. He was on the expedition with them. That’s why we’re so close-even though I’m sure there wasn’t anything he could have done, he said he felt responsible for not being able to save them. He’s been looking out for me ever since.”

Chase leaned back on the bed. “Philby, huh?”

“What?”

He looked away. “Nothing. Just never knew that was how you knew each other.”

“He worked with my parents for years, they were friends.”

“Hmm.” Something seemed to be on Chase’s mind, but before she could ask him about it, she heard knocking from outside. Not on Chase’s door, but from her own cabin. “In here!”

Kari cautiously leaned through the door. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

Chase snorted mockingly. “I wish!”

“I wanted to let you know that we’re almost at the coordinates. Captain Matthews is going to use the ship’s thrusters to hold position rather than drop anchor-we don’t want to risk damaging anything down there-and then we’re going to lower the subs. I thought you might want to watch.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Nina, standing up. “Eddie, are you coming?”

“Give me a couple of minutes,” said Chase. “You’ll be on the sub deck, right?”

The design of the Evenor meant there were few places where anyone could stand outside the superstructure without being in plain sight of the fore or aft decks. But after considerable exploration, Jonathan Philby found a short gangway on the second level that was open to the sea on one side.

He looked around nervously. Forward, he could see the extremities of the crane lifting the larger of the two submersibles into position. For his GPS receiver to work, its antenna needed to have unobstructed line of sight to at least half the sky-but leaning over the side of the ship to get coverage put him at risk of being seen.

There was no choice. He had to make the call.

The compact satellite phone had been a constant companion ever since he had informed Qobras that the Frosts had contacted him. Simply removing it from concealment inside his belongings sent him into a state of anxiety; if any of his companions saw it, even Nina, suspicions would immediately be raised, and it would all be over. Finding an opportunity in Gibraltar to give the Evenor’s approximate destination had been relatively stress-free, but trying to pass on the Nereid’s final position in Brazil without being discovered had almost given him a panic attack.

This was little better. The doors at each end of the gangway had no windows. At any moment, somebody could walk through them. He waited anxiously for the connection to be made…

“Yes?” said a voice. Starkman.

“It’s Philby. I don’t have much time. We’re almost at our destination-here are my current coordinates.” He relayed the figures from his GPS unit. “The Evenor’s final position will be a few miles west of there.”

“The Evenor’s final position will be eight hundred feet down from there,” said Starkman. “We’re already on our way. Good work, Jack. You’ll be rewarded.”

“The only reward I want is to get out of this.” Philby wiped sweat from his brow. “It’ll all be over, right?”

“Oh yes.” Starkman’s voice was firm. “The hunt for Atlantis ends here.”

The two submersibles were lowered into the ocean, one on each side of the Evenor. Their pilots were already inside; the “cowboys,” crewmen in wetsuits standing on top of the vessels, checked that their systems were in order and the communications umbilicals properly connected before releasing them from the cranes. Once free, the submersibles dropped without ceremony beneath the waves. The cowboys were picked up by a Zodiac, which returned them to a dock at the fantail.

With only eight hundred feet of water to penetrate, the descent took less than ten minutes. Nina had pride of place in the lab before the various monitor screens, Kari sitting next to her. Philby, Chase and Castille watched over their shoulders, as did a handful of the Evenor’s crew.

Nina found the whole experience disorienting. Each of the two large screens in front of her displayed exactly what the pilots were seeing inside their pressure spheres, using an autostereoscopic LCD display that gave a 3-D image without needing special glasses. For most of the descent the illusion of depth was barely apparent, but every so often a fish would pass in front of the submersibles’ scanning lasers and leap out of the screen in a flash of ghostly night-vision green.

“Seven-fifty feet,” said Trulli over the communications link. “We’re in the pipe, five by five. Slowing descent.”

“Evenor, please confirm bearing to target,” Baillard said.

“Atragon, turn to two-zero-zero degrees,” Kari said into her headset. “You’re less than three hundred meters away. Sharkdozer, hold position until contact is confirmed.”

“We should be able to see it by now,” Trulli complained. The seabed swung into sharp dimensional relief in front of Nina as he turned his vessel, dropping the nose slightly to point the lasers downwards. The resolution was high enough for her to pick out crabs scuttling over the rippled sediment.

She turned her attention to the view from Baillard’s submersible, which was now advancing at walking pace, hanging about twenty feet above the seabed. A smaller screen showed the spotlit view from a standard video camera, but the LIDAR image extended much farther.

The sea floor rose ahead.

“Evenor, I have something here,” Baillard reported. “Getting a very strong sonar return… it’s not silt. Something solid coming up, and it’s big. Could be a shipwreck…”

“It’s no shipwreck,” Nina whispered as the object came into view on the 3-D screen. She recognized the shape instantly. It was the same as the replica of the Temple of Poseidon in the Brazilian jungle.

And unlike that now ruined structure, this one was intact.

“Bloody hell,” muttered Chase, leaning closer over her shoulder.

“Jesus. Evenor, do you see this?” asked Baillard.

“We see it,” Kari confirmed, handing Nina a headset. “Nina, you’re in charge.”

“Me? But I don’t know anything about submarines!”

“You don’t have to. Just tell him what you want to look at, and he’ll do it.”

“Okay…” Nina said nervously, suddenly terrified at the idea of accidentally causing the submersible to crash. She donned the headset, fiddling with the microphone. “Jim, this is Nina. Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” replied the Canadian. “I’m about a hundred and fifty meters away. Can you see it clearly?”

“Oh yes.” The lower parts of the temple walls were buried beneath a sloping mound of sediment, but the top of its curved roof rose a good thirty feet above the ocean floor. Reflected laser light shone back brightly in places where the sheath of precious metals over the stone had remained intact even through the deluge. “I can’t believe it’s still standing.”

Philby leaned closer, apparently having trouble with the stereoscopic effect and dealing with it by simply closing one eye. “The design must have been incredibly precise, so all the blocks would support their own weight. When the island sank, it held together even when everything else collapsed. Amazing!”

“What’s the current like?” Kari asked.

Trulli gave a reading. “I’m getting about half a knot of drift, heading northeast.”

“No wonder it’s not completely buried,” said Baillard. “If that’s the prevailing current, then it’ll sweep a lot of the sediment towards the Spanish coast.”

“Is there anything else above the surface?” Nina asked.

The 3-D image jolted disconcertingly; the Atragon hadn’t changed course, but the laser scanners had been redirected to look off to one side. “I can see a few bumps where there might be things under the surface, but nothing actually standing out. How tall is this thing?”

“If it’s the size we think it is, it should be about sixty feet tall. Eighteen meters.”

“If that’s the case, then it’s maybe half exposed. There’s a lot of silt piled up around it.” The image shifted back to the temple.

“Sharkdozer, move in closer,” Kari ordered. “Head to the north end, keep clear of the Atragon.”

“Gotcha,” said Trulli. The second 3-D display showed his advance.

“Jim?” Nina asked. “Can you circle the building, please? I want to see what it looks like from the other side.”

Baillard complied. The maneuver took a couple of minutes, revealing a view much the same as their first sight of the temple. Its curved back, partly buried by sediment, reminded Nina of a turtle’s shell.

“Hey, Evenor,” said Trulli excitedly, “the north end here, the sediment’s lower. It must have been cleared away by the current. I can see more of the wall.”

Nina quickly switched her attention to the Sharkdozer’s screen. There was a smooth, almost bowl-like depression at the northern end of the temple, as though someone had used a giant scoop to clear the silt away. “Can you get in closer?”

“No worries. Hold on a tick.”

It took rather longer than the promised tick, but a few minutes later Trulli brought the hefty submersible to a hover a short distance from the temple wall. “I’m going to take a sonar reading,” he announced. “Hang on.”

One of the monitors flashed up a jagged graph. Nina couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but to the submersible pilot it was as clear as a photograph. “There’s something under the sediment-or rather, there’s something not under the sediment. Could be a hole in the wall.”

“Room to get Mighty Jack through?” asked Baillard.

“Maybe. Evenor, do I have permission to clear the sediment?”

Kari looked at Nina, who nodded in excitement. There was a way into the temple! “Go ahead, Sharkdozer.”

The operation that followed was frustratingly slow. Nina forced herself not to rap her nails on the desktop as Trulli moved his sub away from the temple. He carefully lowered the pump module to the surface about a hundred meters off to the northeast, extending its “tail” in the direction of the current, then returned to the temple. The Atragon’s LIDAR display showed the connecting tube stretching between the pump module and its mother ship as the Sharkdozer returned to position, taking up station above the base of the northern wall. The whole process took over twenty minutes.

“Ready to go, Evenor,” Trulli said at last. “Just give the word.”

“Go for it!” Nina cried, to everyone’s amusement.

The pump started.

Like the world’s largest vacuum cleaner, the Sharkdozer began to suck the accumulated silt into its gaping maw. The pressure difference created by the pump wasn’t huge, but it was more than enough to draw the layers of sediment into the pipe and through the detached module to spew out of the waste pipe one hundred meters away. The prevailing current gently swept the expanding cloud of suspended particles away from the temple. The value of a technique that had initially struck Nina as overcomplicated now became clear; simply digging up the silt would have wiped out visibility within seconds.

Another ten minutes passed with agonizing slowness, the Atragon providing a ringside view as the Sharkdozer slid from side to side over the foot of the wall, on each pass clearing away another layer. Then…

“I think I’ve got something here!” exclaimed the Australian. He directed his video camera at the spot. Drifting silt clouded the image, but not enough to stop Nina’s heart from thumping at the sight. “Looks like a way in.”

On the screen, a passageway disappeared into darkness. It was hard to judge scale, but if the temple had been constructed the same way as its counterpart in Brazil, the opening was roughly four feet across.

“I’ll use the secondary vac to dredge it out,” said Trulli. “Give me a few minutes.” One of the Sharkdozer’s arms extended, but instead of using the large bucket at the end to clear the obstruction, a narrow metal pipe extended from beneath it, probing the opening and sucking away the deposits inside.

Chase leaned over Nina’s shoulder to examine the 3-D display, his cheek almost touching hers. “You know… if this temple has the same layout as the one in Brazil, that passage might lead right into the altar room. There was a shaft at the back, but it had been filled in with rocks.”

Nina gave him an accusing glance. “There was? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t have time! You know, with the whole imminent death thing.”

“A priest hole,” said Kari thoughtfully. “A secret exit.”

Trulli worked for several more minutes before retracting the arm. “I’ve cleared out as much as I can. Jimbo, warm up Mighty Jack!”

While Trulli backed the Sharkdozer away, Baillard brought his own submersible closer, parking it at the edge of the expanded depression around the north wall. Once in position, he announced, “Evenor, I’m releasing the ROV… now.”

All eyes went to the Atragon’s 3-D display, which switched from the ghostly monochrome of the LIDAR system to a full-color video image as Mighty Jack left its cage and headed for the temple. The little robot didn’t have the laser imaging system of its parent vessel, but it still had stereoscopic cameras. As it entered the opening, the tight confines of the passage beyond gave a vertiginous sensation of speed. “God, it’s like attacking the Death Star,” Chase observed.

Mighty Jack proceeded down the passage. There were still clumps of sediment along its floor, but Trulli had cleared enough for the ROV to pass. The tension in the control room rose as the robot advanced, to find…

A blank wall.

“No!” Nina gasped, disappointed. “It’s a dead end!”

The ROV turned left, then right, its spotlights finding nothing but solid stone. “What do you want me to do?” asked Baillard.

Nina was about to tell him to bring the robot back out when Chase interrupted, leaning close to speak into her headset’s mike. “Jim, this is Eddie. Can that thing go straight up?”

“Yes, sure. But-”

“Do it.”

After a moment of hesitation, the ROV rose cautiously towards the ceiling…

And kept going.

“Whoa!” said Baillard, rotating Mighty Jack to examine the side walls as the robot ascended. “How did you know that was there?”

“Just a hunch,” said Chase, grinning at Nina. “Watch out, though. There might be traps on the way up.”

She gently swatted him away from her headset. “Eddie, somehow I doubt there’s been anybody maintaining this temple for the past eleven thousand years.”

“I dunno, those mermaids are tricky bitches…”

Nina smiled, then turned her attention back to the screen. Baillard angled the camera upwards as much as he could, the shaft taking on perspective.

“I see something,” he announced. A dark line on the wall of the shaft came up fast, a shimmering distortion…

The image suddenly rolled, tipping back to the horizontal. One of the stone walls filled the screen. “Jim!” Nina called. “What happened? Did you hit something?”

“Just a second…” The robot slowly turned, the image still shaking queasily. Nothing was visible except the walls. “Okay. I guess that’s as far as Mighty Jack can go.”

“What do you mean?” Kari demanded. “Is it stuck on something? Have we lost the ROV?”

Baillard almost laughed. “Not at all. It’s just that… well, Mighty Jack’s only designed for use in the water. So you’ll need some other way to explore from this point on.”

“Why?” asked Nina.

“Because we’ve run out of water. Mighty Jack’s floating on the surface. There’s air inside that temple.”