Atlantis

CHAPTER 6

Jack raised his binoculars and levelled them at the far-off speckle that was the only point of reference between sea and sky. Even though it was now dark he could make out every detail of the distant vessel, the optical enhancer intensifying the available light to give an image as clear as day. He could just read the Cyrillic letters below the bow.

Vultura. How very appropriate, he thought. She was exactly that, a hideous scavenger lurking around the kill zone until the time was right to pounce and devour the fruits of others’ labour.

Tom York stood beside him. “Project 911,” he said, following Jack’s gaze. “The Russians call them escort ships, the equivalent of corvettes and frigates in NATO code. This is the latest, produced after the events of 2001 for anti-terrorist patrolling. About the same as our Sea-class vessels but sleeker. The machinery’s in another league altogether. Two GT diesel gas turbines producing 52,000 hp for a cruising speed of 36 knots. Turbojet-boosters capable of hydrofoil speeds of 60 knots, almost as fast as a light aircraft. Vultura is one of half a dozen decommissioned when the Russian Navy went through its latest downsizing. The Oslo Treaty requires the Russian Federation to sell surplus warships only to governments recognized by the UN, so this one must have been picked up in some shady deal even before it left the shipyard.”

Jack trained his binoculars on the pods on either side of Vultura’s stern, then shifted slightly to take in the forward turret with its barrel trained directly at them.

York noticed his movement. “Tulamahzavod 130 mm automatic cannon. Computerized GPS ranging that makes adjustments instantaneously on impact. Capable of firing a uranium-depleted armour-piercing shell that would punch a hole through Seaquest’s command module at twenty miles.”

They were standing on Seaquest’s helipad, the cool breeze gently ruffling the IMU flag at the stern. They had watched anxiously as Katya, now dressed more appropriately in an IMU jumpsuit, drove one of Seaquest’s Zodiacs into the darkness, the twin 90 hp outboards powering her over to Vultura in a matter of minutes. Before she descended the ladder, Jack had quietly taken her aside, running one last time over the operation of the Zodiac and reiterating York and Howe’s briefing on her possible course of action if everything went badly wrong.

She had only been gone for twenty minutes and already the waiting seemed interminable. Costas decided to call a teleconference with Dillen and Hiebermeyer to occupy Jack’s mind more productively, and the two men went into the navigation room behind Seaquest’s bridge.

Costas tapped a command and the monitor in front of them came to life, revealing two figures as clearly as if they had been sitting on the opposite side of the table. Jack shifted closer to Costas so their image would be similarly projected. They would miss Katya’s expertise but a teleconference seemed the obvious way to conclude the proceedings. Dillen and Hiebermeyer had stayed on in Alexandria to await news from Seaquest, and Costas had already filled them in on the threat posed by Vultura.

“Professor. Maurice. Greetings.”

“Good to see you again, Jack,” Dillen said. “I’d like to start where we left off, with these symbols.”

At the touch of a key they could call up a set of images that had been scanned in earlier. In the lower right-hand corner of the monitor they were currently viewing Costas’ own triumphant discovery, the remarkable golden disc from the Minoan wreck. The strange symbols on the surface had been digitally enhanced so they could study them more closely.

Hiebermeyer leaned forward. “You said you’d seen that central device before, Jack.”

“Yes. And those symbols running round the edge, the little heads and paddles and so on. I suddenly realized where as we were flying out of Alexandria. The Phaistos discs.”

Costas looked on questioningly as Jack called up an image of two pottery discs, both seemingly identical and covered by a spiralling band of miniature symbols. One symbol looked remarkably like the device on the papyrus and the gold disc. The rest looked otherworldly, especially the little heads with hooked noses and Mohican haircuts.

“Aztec?” Costas hazarded.

“Nice try, but no,” Jack replied. “Much closer to home. Minoan Crete.”

“The disc on the left was found near the palace of Phaistos almost a hundred years ago.” Dillen clicked on the screen as he spoke, the projector flashing up a view of a wide stone forecourt overlooking a plain with snow-capped mountains in the background. After a moment the image reverted to the discs. “It’s clay, about sixteen centimetres across, and the symbols were impressed on both sides. Many are identical, stamped with the same die.”

Dillen enlarged the right-hand disc. “This one came up with the French excavations last year.”

“Date?” Hiebermeyer demanded.

“The palace was abandoned in the sixteenth century BC, following the eruption of Thera. Unlike Knossos, it was never reoccupied. So the discs may have been lost about the same time as your shipwreck.”

“But they could date earlier,” Jack suggested.

“Much earlier.” Dillen’s voice had a now-familiar edge of excitement. “Costas, what do you know about thermoluminescence dating?”

Costas looked perplexed but replied enthusiastically. “If you bury mineral crystals they gradually absorb radioactive isotopes from the surrounding material until they’re at the same level. If you then heat the mineral the trapped electrons are emitted as thermoluminescence.” Costas began to guess where the question was leading. “When you fire pottery it emits stored TL, setting its TL clock back to zero. Bury it and the pottery begins to reabsorb isotopes at a set rate. If you know this rate as well as the TL level of the surrounding sediment you can date the clay by heating it and measuring the TL emission.”

“How precisely?” Dillen asked.

“The latest refinements in optically stimulated luminescence allow us to go back half a million years,” Costas replied. “That’s the date for burnt hearth material from the earliest Neanderthal sites in Europe. For kiln-fired pottery, which first appears in the fifth millennium BC in the Near East, combined TL-OSL can date a sherd to within a few hundred years if the conditions are right.”

Costas had built up a formidable expertise in archaeological science since joining IMU, fuelled by his conviction that most of the questions Jack posed about the distant past would one day be resolved by hard science.

“The second disc, the one discovered last year, was fired.” Dillen picked up a sheet of paper as he spoke. “A fragment was sent to the Oxford Thermoluminescence Laboratory for analysis, using a new strontium technique which can fix the date of firing with even greater accuracy. I’ve just had the results.”

The others looked on expectantly.

“Give or take a hundred years, that disc was fired in 5500 BC.”

There was a collective gasp of astonishment.

“Impossible,” snorted Hiebermeyer.

“That’s a little earlier than our wreck,” Costas exclaimed.

“Just four thousand years earlier,” Jack said quietly.

“Two and a half millennia before the palace at Knossos.” Hiebermeyer was still shaking his head. “Only a few centuries after the first farmers arrived on Crete. And if that’s writing, then it’s the earliest known by two thousand years. Near Eastern cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics don’t appear until the late fourth millennium BC.”

“It seems incredible,” Dillen replied. “But you’ll soon see why I’m convinced it is true.”

Jack and Costas watched the screen intently as Dillen loaded a CD-ROM into his laptop and linked it to the multimedia projector. The picture of the pottery discs was replaced by the symbols arranged as a column, each one fronting groups clustered together like words. They could see he had been applying similar techniques of analysis to those he had used to study the Greek script on the papyrus.

Jack reactivated the teleconference module and they were once again face to face with Dillen and Hiebermeyer two hundred miles away in Alexandria.

“Those are the symbols from the Phaistos discs,” Jack said.

“Correct.” Dillen tapped a key and the two discs reappeared, this time in the lower left-hand corner. “The thing that has most baffled scholars is that the discs are virtually identical, except in one crucial respect.” He moved a cursor to highlight various features. “On one side, what I call the obverse, both discs have exactly one hundred and twenty-three symbols. Both are segmented into thirty-one groupings, each comprising anywhere from two to seven symbols. The menu, if you like, is the same, comprising forty-five different symbols. And the frequency is identical. So the Mohican head occurs thirteen times, the marching man six times, the flayed oxhide eleven times, and so on. It’s a similar story on the reverse, except with thirty words and one hundred and eighteen symbols.”

“But the order and groupings are different,” Jack pointed out.

“Precisely. Look at the first disc. Walking man plus tree, three times. Sun disc plus Mohican head, eight times. And twice the entire sequence of arrow, baton, paddle, boat, oxhide and human head. None of these groupings occur on the second disc.”

“Bizarre,” Costas murmured.

“I believe the discs were kept together as a pair, one legible and the other meaningless. Whoever did this was trying to suggest that the type, number and frequency of the symbols were what was important, not their associations. It was a ruse, a way of diverting attention from the grouping of the symbols, of dissuading the curious from seeking meaning in the sequence.”

“But surely there is meaning in this,” Costas cut in impatiently. He clicked on his mouse to highlight combinations on the first disc. “Boat beside paddle. Walking man. Mohican man always looking in the same direction. Sheaf of corn. The circular symbol, presumably the sun, in about half the groupings. It’s some kind of journey, maybe not a real one but a journey through the year, showing the cycle of the seasons.”

Dillen smiled. “Precisely the line taken by scholars who believe the first disc contains a message, that it was not just decorative. It does seem to offer more sense than the second disc, more logic in the sequence of images.”

“But?”

“But that may be part of the ruse. The creator of the first disc may have deliberately paired symbols which seem to belong together, like paddle and boat, in the hope that people would attempt to decipher the disc in just this way.”

“But surely paddle and boat do go together,” Costas protested.

“Only if you assume they’re pictograms, in which case paddle means paddle, boat means boat. Paddle and boat together mean going by water, seafaring, movement.”

“Pictograms were the first form of writing,” Hiebermeyer added. “But even the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs were not all pictograms.”

“A symbol can also be a phonogram, where the object represents a sound, not a thing or an action,” Dillen continued. “In English we might use a paddle to represent the letter P, or the syllable pa.”

Costas slowly nodded. “So you mean the symbols on the discs could be a kind of alphabet?”

“Yes, though not in the strict sense of the word. The earliest version of our alphabet was the north Semitic precursor of the Phoenician alphabet of the second millennium BC. The innovative feature was a different symbol for each of the main vowel and consonant sounds. Earlier systems tended to be syllabic, each symbol representing a vowel and a consonant. That’s how we interpret the Linear A writing of the Minoans and the Linear B of the Mycenaeans.” Dillen tapped a key and the screen reverted to the image of the golden disc. “Which brings us to your wreck find.”

He magnified the image to show the mysterious symbol deeply impressed in the centre of the gold disc. After a pause it was joined by another image, an irregular black slab covered with three separate bands of finely spaced writing.

“The Rosetta stone?” Hiebermeyer looked baffled.

“As you know, Napoleon’s army of conquest in Egypt in 1798 included a legion of scholars and draughtsmen. This was their most sensational discovery, found near ancient Saïs on the Rosetta branch of the Nile.” Dillen highlighted each section of text in turn, beginning at the top. “Egyptian hieroglyphics. Egyptian demotic. Hellenistic Greek. Twenty years later a philologist named Champollion realized these were translations of the same narrative, a trilingual decree issued by Ptolemy V in 196 BC when the Greeks controlled Egypt. Champollion used his knowledge of ancient Greek to translate the other two texts. The Rosetta Stone was the key to deciphering hieroglyphics.” Dillen tapped a key and the stone disappeared, the screen again reverting to the image of the golden disc.

“Ignore that device in the centre for the moment and concentrate on the symbols round the edge.” He highlighted each of the three bands in turn, from outer to inner. “Mycenaean Linear B. Minoan Linear A. The Phaistos symbols.”

Jack had already guessed as much, but the confirmation still made his heart pound with excitement.

“Gentlemen, we have our very own Rosetta stone.”

Over the next few minutes Dillen explained that the Mycenaeans who took over Crete following the eruption of Thera originally had no script of their own, and instead had borrowed Linear A symbols from Minoan seafarers who had traded with mainland Greece. Their script, Linear B, was brilliantly deciphered soon after the Second World War as an early version of Greek. But the language of the Minoans had remained a mystery until earlier that year, when the largest ever cache of Linear A tablets had been discovered at Knossos. By great good fortune several of the tablets proved to be bilingual with Linear B. Now the gold disc offered the extraordinary possibility of deciphering the symbols of the Phaistos discs as well.

“There are no Phaistos symbols from Knossos and there’s no bilingual text for them,” Dillen continued. “I’d assumed it would be a lost language, one quite distinct from Minoan or from Mycenaean Greek.”

The others listened without interruption as Dillen worked methodically through the Linear A and Linear B symbols on the gold disc, showing their consistency with other examples of writing from Bronze Age Crete. He had arranged all of the symbols in rows and columns to study the concordance.

“I began with the first of the Phaistos discs, the one found a hundred years ago,” Dillen said. “Like you I thought this one most likely to be intelligible.”

He tapped the keyboard and all thirty-one groups of symbols from the obverse appeared with the phonetic translation beneath them.

“Here it is, reading from the centre outward following the direction of the walking man and the face symbols, as logic would seem to dictate.”

Jack quickly scanned the lines. “I don’t recognize any Linear words or see any of the familiar combinations of syllables.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.” Dillen tapped the keys again and another thirty-one groupings appeared in the lower part of the screen. “Here it is back to front, spiralling from the edge to the centre. It’s the same story. Absolutely nothing.”

The screen went blank and there was a brief silence.

“And the second disc?” Jack asked.

Dillen’s expression gave little away, only the hint of a smile betraying his excitement. He tapped the keys and repeated the exercise.

“Here it is, spiralling outwards.”

Jack’s heart sank as he again saw nothing recognizable in the words. Then he began to see pairings that looked oddly familiar.

“There’s something here but it’s not quite right.”

Dillen allowed him a moment more to stare at the screen.

“Back to front,” he prompted.

Jack peered at the screen again and suddenly slammed his hand down on the table. “Of course!”

Dillen could contain himself no longer and smiled broadly as he tapped one final time and the sequence appeared in reverse order. There was a sharp intake of breath as Jack saw at once what they were looking at.

“Extraordinary,” he murmured. “That disc dates more than two thousand years before the Bronze Age even began. Yet it’s the language of Linear A, the language of Crete at the time of our shipwreck.” He could scarcely believe what he was saying. “It’s Minoan.”

At that moment the intercom crackled on Seaquest and broke the spell.

“Jack. Come on deck at once. There’s activity on Vultura.” There was no mistaking the urgency in Tom York’s tones.

Jack leapt to his feet without a word and bounded onto the bridge, Costas following close behind. Within seconds both men stood beside York and Howe, their gaze directed towards the distant glimmer of lights on the horizon.

In the sea ahead was a faint disturbance, a swirl of spray that quickly became recognizable as Seaquest’s Zodiac. Soon they could make out Katya at the wheel, her long hair flowing in the wind. Jack grasped the rail and momentarily shut his eyes, the anxieties of the last few hours suddenly replaced by a flood of relief. Thank God she was all right.

Costas looked at his friend with affection. He knew his friend too well, that Jack’s entire emotional being was fast becoming wrapped up in their quest.

As the boat drew alongside and the outboards powered down, the air was filled with a new sound, the muffled roar of distant diesels. Jack snatched up the night scope and trained it on the horizon. The grey shape of Vultura filled the image, its hull low and menacing. Suddenly a surge of white appeared at the stern, a billowing arc made brilliant by the phosphorescence stirred up by the engines. Slowly, lazily, like an awakening beast with nothing to fear, Vultura turned in a wide arc and roared off into the darkness, its wake lingering like a rocket’s exhaust long after the vessel had been swallowed up by the night.

Jack lowered the scope and looked at the figure who had just scrambled over the side. She smiled and gave a quick wave. Jack spoke under his breath, his words only audible to Costas beside him.

“Katya, you are an angel.”