Atlantis

CHAPTER 11

The sun was setting over the shoreline to the west as the group reassembled in the chart room. For three hours Mustafa had been hunched over a cluster of computer screens in an annexe and only ten minutes before had called to announce he was ready. They were joined by Malcolm Macleod, who had scheduled a press conference to announce the Neolithic village discovery when the Navy FAC boat was in position over the site the following morning.

Costas was the first to pull up a chair. The others clustered round as he eagerly scanned the console.

“What’ve you got?”

Mustafa replied without taking his eyes off the central screen. “A few glitches in the navigation software which I had to iron out, but the whole thing comes together very nicely.”

They had first collaborated with Mustafa when he was a lieutenant-commander in charge of the Computer-Aided Navigation Research and Development unit at the Izmir NATO base. After leaving the Turkish Navy and completing an archaeology PhD he had specialized in the application of CAN technology to scientific use. Over the past year he had worked with Costas on an innovative software package for calculating the effect of wind and current on navigation in antiquity. Regarded as one of the finest minds in the field, he was also a formidable station chief who had more than proved his worth when IMU had operated in Turkish waters before.

He tapped the keyboard and the image of a boat appeared on the central screen. “This is what Jack and I came up with.”

“It’s based on Neolithic timbers dug up last year at the mouth of the Danube,” Jack explained. “Ours is an open boat, about twenty-five metres long and three metres in beam. Rowing only became widespread at the end of the Bronze Age, so it’s got fifteen paddlers on either side. It could take two oxen, as we’ve depicted here, several pairs of smaller animals such as pigs and deer, about two dozen women and children and a relief crew of paddlers.”

“You’re sure they had no sails?” Macleod asked.

Jack nodded. “Sailing was an early Bronze Age invention on the Nile, where boats could float to the delta and then sail back upstream with the prevailing northerly wind. The Egyptians may in fact have introduced sailing to the Aegean, where paddling was actually a better way of getting round the islands.”

“The program indicates the vessel would make six knots in dead calm,” Mustafa said. “That’s six nautical miles per hour, about seven statute miles.”

“They would have needed daylight to beach their vessel, tend to their animals and set up camp,” Jack said. “And the reverse in the mornings.”

“We now know the exodus took place in late spring or early summer,” Macleod revealed. “We ran our high-resolution sub-bottom profiler over an area of one square kilometre next to the Neolithic village. The silt concealed a perfectly preserved field system complete with plough furrows and irrigation ditches. The palaeoenvironmental lab has just completed their analysis of core samples we took from the ROV. They show the crop was grain. Einkorn wheat, Triticum monococcum to be precise, sown about two months prior to the inundation.”

“Grain is usually sown in these latitudes in April or May,” Jack remarked.

“Correct. We’re talking June or July, around two months after the Bosporus was breached.”

“Six knots means forty-eight nautical miles over an eight-hour run,” Mustafa continued. “That assumes a relief crew as well as water and provisions and a working day of eight hours. In placid seas our boat would have made it along the southern shore in a little over eleven days.” He tapped a key eleven times, advancing the miniature representation of the boat along an isometric map of the Black Sea. “This is where the CAN program really comes into play.”

He tapped again and the simulation subtly transformed. The sea became ruffled, and the level dropped to show the Bosporus as a waterfall.

“Here we are in the summer of 5545 BC, about two months after the flood began.”

He repositioned the boat near the Bosporus.

“The first variable is wind. The prevailing summer winds are from the north. Ships sailing west might only have made serious headway once they reached Sinope, midway along the southern shore where the coast begins to trend west-south-west. Before that, coming up the coast west-north-west, they would have needed oars.”

“How different was the climate?” Katya asked.

“The main fluctuations today are caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation,” Mustafa replied. “In a warm phase, low atmospheric pressure over the North Pole causes strong westerlies which keep Arctic air in the north, meaning the Mediterranean and Black Sea are hot and dry. In a cold phase, Arctic air flows south, including the northerlies over the Black Sea. Basically it’s windier and wetter.”

“And in antiquity?”

“We think the early Holocene, the first few thousand years after the great melt, would have corresponded more closely to a cold phase. It was less arid than today with a good deal more precipitation. The southern Black Sea would have been an optimal place for the development of agriculture.”

“And the effect on navigation?” Jack asked.

“Stronger northerlies and westerlies by twenty to thirty per cent. I’ve fed these in and come up with a best-fit prediction for each fifty nautical mile sector of the coast two months into the flood, including the effect of wind on water movement.”

“Your second variable must be the flood itself.”

“We’re looking at ten cubic miles of seawater pouring in every day for eighteen months, then a gradual fall-off over the next six months until equilibrium is reached. The exodus took place during the period of maximum inflow.”

He tapped the keyboard and a sequence of figures appeared on the right-hand screen.

“This shows the speed of the current east from the Bosporus. It diminishes from twelve knots at the waterfall to just under two knots in the most easterly sector, more than five hundred miles away.”

Costas joined in. “If they were only making six knots, our Neolithic farmers, they would never have reached the Bosporus.”

Mustafa nodded. “I can even predict where they made final landfall, thirty miles east where the current became too strong. From here they would have portaged up the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus to the Dardanelles. The current through the straits would also have been very strong, so I doubt whether they would have re-embarked before reaching the Aegean.”

“That would have been a hell of a portage,” said Macleod. “Almost two hundred nautical miles.”

“They probably disassembled the hulls and used yoked oxen to pull the timbers on sledges,” Jack replied. “Most early planked boats were joined by sewing the timbers together with cord, allowing the hulls to be easily dismantled.”

“Perhaps those who went east really did leave their vessels at Mount Ararat,” Katya mused. “They could have disassembled the timbers and hauled them to the point where it was clear they weren’t going to need them again, unlike the western group who were probably always within sight of the sea during their portage.”

Costas was peering at the Dardanelles. “They could even have set off from the hill of Hissarlik. Some of our farmers may have stayed on to become the first Trojans.”

Costas’ words brought home again the enormity of their discovery, and for a moment they were overwhelmed by a sense of awe. Carefully, methodically they had been piecing together a jigsaw which had confounded scholars for generations, uncovering a framework which was no longer in the realm of speculation. They were not simply building up one corner of the puzzle but had begun to rewrite history on a grand scale. Yet the source was so embedded in fantasy it still seemed a fable, a revelation whose truth they could hardly bring themselves to acknowledge.

Jack turned to Mustafa. “How far is twenty dromoi in these conditions?”

Mustafa pointed to the right-hand screen. “We work backwards from the point of disembarkation near the Bosporus. In the final day they only made half a knot against the current and wind, meaning a run of no more than four miles.” He tapped a key and the boat moved slightly east.

“Then the distances are progressively greater, until we reach the run past Sinope where they covered thirty miles.” He tapped twelve times and the boat hopped halfway back along the Black Sea coast. “Then it becomes slightly more arduous for a few days as they head north-west against the prevailing wind.”

“That’s fifteen runs,” said Jack. “Where do the final five take us?”

Mustafa tapped five more times and the boat ended up in the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea, exactly on the predicted contour of the coast before the flood.

“Bingo,” Jack said.

After printing out the CAN data Mustafa led the others into a partitioned area adjacent to the chart room. He dimmed the lights and arranged several chairs around a central console the size of a kitchen table. He flipped a switch and the surface lit up.

“A holographic light table,” Mustafa explained. “The latest in bathymetric representation. It can model a three-dimensional image of any area of seabed for which we have survey data, from entire ocean floors to sectors only a couple of metres across. Archaeological sites, for example.”

He tapped a command and the table erupted in colour. It was an underwater excavation, brilliantly clear with every detail sharply delineated. A mass of sediment had been cleared away to reveal rows of pottery vats and metal ingots lying across a keel, with timbers projecting on either side. The hull was cradled in a gully above a precipitous slope, great tongues of rock disappearing down either side where lava had once flowed.

“The Minoan wreck as it looked ten minutes ago. Jack asked me to have it relayed through so he could monitor progress. Once we have this equipment fully online we’ll truly enter the age of remote fieldwork, able to direct excavations without ever getting wet.”

In the old days huge efforts were required to plan underwater sites, the measurements being taken painstakingly by hand. Now all this was eliminated by the use of digital photogrammetry, a sophisticated mapping package which utilized a remote operated vehicle to take images wired directly to Seaquest. In a ten-minute sweep over the wreck that morning the ROV had collected more data than an entire excavation in the past. As well as the hologram, the data were fed into a laser projector which constructed a latex model of the site in Seaquest’s conference room, modifications continuously being made as the excavators stripped off artefacts and sediment. The innovative system was another reason to be thankful to Efram Jacobovich, IMU’s founding benefactor, who had put the expertise of his giant software company entirely at their disposal.

Jack had spent several hours scrutinizing the hologram that afternoon during a teleconference with the excavation team. But for the others it was a breathtaking sight, as if they had suddenly been transported to the seabed of the Aegean eight hundred nautical miles away. It showed the remarkable progress made in the twenty-four hours since they had flown off by helicopter. The team had removed most of the overburden and sent another trove of artefacts to the safety of the Carthage museum. Under a layer of pottery amphoras filled with ritual incense was a hull far better preserved than Jack had dared imagine, its mortise-and-tenon joints as crisp and clear as if they had been chiselled yesterday.

Mustafa tapped again. “And now the Black Sea.”

The wreck disintegrated into a kaleidoscope of colours from which a model of the Black Sea took shape. In the centre was the abyssal plain, the toxic netherworld almost 2,200 metres deep. Around the edge were the coastal shallows which sloped off more gently than most parts of the Mediterranean.

He tapped another key to highlight the line of the coast before the flood.

“Our target area.”

A pinprick of light appeared in the far south-eastern corner.

“Forty-two degrees north latitude, forty-two degrees east longitude. That’s as precise as we can get with our distance calculation from the Bosporus.”

“That’s a pretty big area,” Costas cautioned. “A nautical mile is one minute of latitude, a degree sixty minutes. That’s three hundred and sixty square miles.”

“Remember we’re looking for a coastal site,” Jack said. “If we follow the ancient coastline on the landward side we should eventually reach our target.”

“The closer we can pinpoint it now, the better,” Mustafa said. “According to the bathymetry the ancient coastline in this sector is at least thirty miles offshore, well beyond territorial waters. It’ll become pretty obvious we’re searching along a particular contour. There are going to be prying eyes about.”

There was a murmur from the others as the implications became depressingly apparent. The map showed how dangerously close they would be to the far shore of the Black Sea, a modern-day Barbary Coast where east met west in a new and sinister fashion.

“I’m intrigued by this feature.” Macleod pointed to an irregularity in the sea floor, a ridge about five kilometres long, parallel to the ancient shoreline. On the seaward side was a narrow chasm which dropped below five hundred metres, an anomaly where the average gradient did not reach this depth for another thirty miles offshore. “It’s the only upstanding feature for miles around. If I was going to build a citadel I’d want a commanding position. This is an obvious place.”

“But the final passage from the papyrus talks about salt lakes,” Costas said.

Katya took her cue and read from the palm computer.

“Then you reach the citadel. And there below lies a vast golden plain, the deep basins, the salt lakes, as far as the eye can see.”

“That’s the image I have of the Mediterranean during the Messinian salinity crisis,” Costas commented. “Stagnant brine lakes, like the southern Dead Sea today.”

“I think I have an explanation.” Mustafa tapped the keyboard and the hologram transformed to a close-up of the south-eastern sector. “With the sea level lowered one hundred and fifty metres, much of the area inland from that ridge was only just dry, a metre or two above the ancient shoreline. Large areas were actually a few metres below sea level. As the level dropped to its lowest, towards the end of the Pleistocene, it would have left salt lakes in those depressions. They were shallow and would have evaporated quickly, leaving immense salt pans. They’d have been visible from an elevated position some distance away as they wouldn’t have supported any vegetation.”

“And let’s remember how important salt was,” Jack said. “It was a vital preservative, a major trade commodity in its own right. The early Romans flourished because they controlled the salt pans at the mouth of the Tiber, and we may be looking at a similar story here thousands of years earlier.”

Costas spoke thoughtfully. “Golden plain could mean fields of wheat and barley, a rich prairie of cultivated grain with the mountains of Anatolia in the background. It was the ‘mountain-girt plain’ of Plato’s account.”

“You’ve got it,” said Mustafa.

“Am I right in thinking part of the ridge is above water today?” Costas was peering at the geomorphology on the hologram.

“It’s the top of a small volcano. The ridge is part of the zone of seismic disturbance along the Asiatic plate that extends west to the north Anatolian fault. The volcano’s not entirely dormant but hasn’t erupted in recorded history. The caldera is about a kilometre in diameter and rises three hundred metres above sea level.”

“What’s its name?”

“Doesn’t have one,” Macleod answered. “It’s been disputed territory ever since the Crimean War of 1853 to ’56 between Ottoman Turkey and Tsarist Russia. It’s in international waters but lies almost exactly off the border between Turkey and Georgia.”

“The area’s been a no-go zone for a long time,” Mustafa continued. “Just months before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 a nuclear sub went down somewhere near here in mysterious circumstances.” The others were intrigued, and Mustafa carried on cautiously. “It was never found, but the search operation led to shots being exchanged between Turkish and Soviet warships. It was a potential global flashpoint, given Turkey’s NATO affiliations. Both sides agreed to back off and the confrontation was hushed up, but as a result there’s been hardly any hydrographic research in this area.”

“Sounds like we’re on our own again,” Costas said glumly. “Friendly countries on either side but powerless to intervene.”

“We’re doing what we can,” Mustafa said. “The 1992 Black Sea economic cooperation agreement led to the establishment of Blackseafor, the Black Sea naval cooperation task group. It’s still more gesture than substance, and most Turkish maritime interdiction has continued to be unilateral. But at least the basis for intervention exists. There’s also a glimmer of hope on the scientific side. The Turkish National Oceanographic Commission is considering an offer from the Georgian Academy of Sciences to collaborate on a survey that would include that island.”

“But no hope of a protection force,” Costas said.

“Nothing pre-emptive. The situation’s way too delicate. The ball’s in our court.”

The sun had set and the forested slopes behind the lights of Trabzon were shrouded in darkness. Jack and Katya were walking slowly along the pebbly beach, the crunch of their footsteps joining the sound of the waves as they gently lapped the shore.

Earlier they had attended a gathering at the residence of the vice-admiral in command of Blackseafor, and the lingering scent of pine needles from the outdoor reception followed them into the night. They had left the eastern jetty far behind. Jack was still wearing his dinner jacket but had loosened his collar and removed his tie, pocketing it along with the Distinguished Service Cross he had reluctantly worn for the occasion.

Katya was wearing a shimmering black gown. She had loosened her hair and removed her shoes to walk barefoot in the surf.

“You look stunning.”

“You don’t look so bad yourself.” Katya gazed up at Jack and smiled, gently touching his arm. “I think we’ve come far enough now.”

They walked up the beach and sat together on a slab of rock overlooking the sea. The rising moon cast a sparkling light on the water, the waves dancing and shimmering in front of them. Above the northern horizon was a band of pitch-darkness, a storm front rolling down from the Russian steppes. A chill breeze brought early intimation of an unseasonal change that would alter the face of the sea over the coming days.

Jack drew up his legs and folded his arms over his knees, his eyes fixed on the horizon. “This is always the most intensive time, when you know a great discovery is within your grasp. Any delay is frustrating.”

Katya smiled at him again. “You’ve done all you can.”

They had been discussing arrangements for joining Seaquest the next day. Before the reception Jack had spoken to Tom York on the IMU secure channel. By now Seaquest would be making her way at top speed towards the Bosporus, having left the wreck excavation in the safe hands of the support vessel. By the time of their projected rendezvous by helicopter the next morning, Seaquest would be in the Black Sea. They were anxious to join her as soon as possible to ensure the equipment was fully prepared.

Katya was facing away from him and seemed preoccupied.

“You don’t share my excitement.”

When she replied her words confirmed Jack’s sense that something was troubling her.

“To you in the west people like Aslan are faceless, like the enemies of the Cold War,” she said. “But to me they’re real people, real flesh and blood. Monsters who have made my home an uncharted wasteland of violence and greed. To know it you must live there, a world of terror and anarchy the west hasn’t seen since the Middle Ages. The years of suppression have fuelled a feeding frenzy where the only pretence at control is provided by gangsters and warlords.” Her voice was filled with emotion as she looked out to sea. “And these are my people. I am one of them.”

“One with the will and strength to fight it.” Jack was drawn irresistibly to her dark silhouette as she sat framed against the lowering horizon.

“It’s my world we’re about to enter, and I don’t know if I can protect you.” She turned to face him, her eyes fathomless as she stared into his. “But of course I share your incredible excitement.”

They drew together and kissed, at first gently and then long and passionately. Jack was suddenly overwhelmed by desire as he felt her body against his. He eased the gown off her shoulders and pulled her closer.