Atlantis

CHAPTER 11

Holding steady on three-one-fiver degrees. Depth sixty-five metres, ascent rate one metre per second. We should be seeing the surface soon.”

Jack peered through the Plexiglas dome to his left. Despite the gloom he could just make out Costas beneath an identical dome some fifteen metres away, his head seemingly disembodied in the eerie glow cast by the instrument panels. As they rose higher the submersible came into clearer view. The dome capped a yellow man-sized pod, the casing angled forward so the pilot could sit comfortably. Below were pontoon-like ballast tanks, and behind was the housing for the battery which powered a dozen vectored water jets positioned around an external frame. Two pincer-like robotic arms gave the submersible the appearance of a giant scarab beetle.

“There she is now.”

Jack looked up and saw the silhouette of Seaquest twenty metres above. He adjusted the water ballast discharge to slow his ascent and looked again at Costas, who was manoeuvring alongside in preparation for surfacing.

Costas beamed at his friend. “Mission accomplished.”

Costas had every reason to be pleased with himself. They had just concluded the sea trials of Aquapod IV, the latest one-man submersible his team had designed for IMU. It had a maximum operational depth of fifteen hundred metres, almost twice the previous marque. The hypercharged lithium-anode battery had a life of fifty hours at an optimal cruising speed of three knots. Their one-hour dive that morning to the bottom of the Black Sea had shown the equipment was well up to the task ahead, an exploration along the line of the ancient coast further east than they had ever gone before.

“Seaquest, this is Aquapod Alpha. We are coming in safe and sound. Over.”

They could already see the four divers waiting just below the surface to guide them in. With ten metres to go they stopped to lock the Aquapods together, a standard procedure to prevent them crashing into each other in rough seas. While Jack remained stationary, Costas gingerly manoeuvred until the locking pinions aligned. With the flick of a switch he fired four metal rods through the cleats on the outer frame.

“Locking secured. Haul us in.”

The divers quickly descended and attached the lifting harness. Jack and Costas switched to standby and disengaged the balance adjustors which kept them horizontal. As the divers swam away to safety positions the winch operator smoothly drew the submersibles up into the hull.

They broke surface inside a floodlit chamber the size of a small aircraft hangar. Seaquest was equipped with a fully internalized docking berth, a useful feature when the weather was too rough for operations from deck or they wished to remain concealed. The hull had opened up like the bomb doors on a giant aircraft. As the two sections closed, Jack and Costas unlocked the domes which also served as entry canopies. A platform slid under them and rose like the elevator on an aircraft carrier, locking tight once the last of the water had drained off.

Tom York was on hand to greet the two men as they clambered out.

“Successful trial, I trust?”

Jack was the first to drop on deck. He spoke quickly as he stripped off his survival suit.

“No problems to report. We’ll use the Aquapods for our reconnaissance this afternoon. The robotic arms will need to be replaced by the digital videocamera and floodlight pods.”

“It’s being done as we speak.”

Jack glanced round and saw the maintenance crew already hard at work on the submersibles. Costas was hunched over the battery recharging unit deep in conversation with one of the technicians. Jack smiled to himself as he saw that his friend had neglected to remove his headset in his enthusiasm to discuss the submersible’s performance with his engineering team.

Jack spoke to York as he strode forward and stowed his suit in one of the lockers that lined the chamber.

“We have an hour before Seaquest is in position. It’s a chance to review our options one last time. I’d like all personnel in the bridge console at eleven hundred hours.”

Twenty minutes later they stood in front of a semicircle of men and women inside Seaquest’s command module. York had engaged the automated navigation and surveillance system, activating the virtual bridge which allowed the ship to be operated from the console beside Jack. The hemispherical screen above them displayed a panoramic view of the sea, its choppy grey surface an ominous portent of the storm which had been brewing in the north over the past twenty-four hours.

Jack folded his arms and addressed the group.

“We’re a skeleton crew, and our job is going to be that much more demanding. I’m not going to beat about the bush. We face a real risk, probably a greater one than we have ever faced before.”

After joining Seaquest by helicopter the day before, Jack had decided to reduce the complement to the minimum. The entire crew had volunteered, but he had refused to endanger the lives of scientists whose job would only really begin once they had made a discovery. In addition to the deck and engineering officers, he had selected the most experienced weapons technicians, including several ex — Special Forces men Jack had known since the Navy.

“What can we expect in the way of outside backing?”

The question came from Katya, who was standing among the crew wearing a standard-issue blue jumpsuit with the IMU shoulder flash. Jack had tried to persuade her to leave with the others when Sea Venture came out to meet them as they passed Trabzon, but she had insisted her linguistic expertise would be vital for any inscriptions they might find. In truth Jack knew from their long hours together the night before that she would not leave him now, that they had a bond that could not be broken and she shared his sense of responsibility for Seaquest and her crew as they sailed ever further into the danger zone.

“I’ll let our security chief answer that one.”

Peter Howe stepped out and took Jack’s place.

“The bad news is we’ll be in international waters, beyond the twelve-mile limit agreed in a 1973 protocol between the USSR and Turkey. The good news is Georgia and Turkey signed a Coast Security Cooperative Agreement in 1998 and have agreed to provide back-up in the event of a major discovery. The pretext would be the memorandum of understanding they’ve just signed with UN ratification to carry out collaborative geological research on that volcanic island. They would be acting under the provisions of international law.”

He stepped back and looked up at the Admiralty Chart of the eastern Black Sea above the console.

“The problem is they’ll only help if Russian suspicions can be allayed about that submarine last heard of somewhere near here in 1991. Any hint of other nations involved in a search and they’ll go ballistic. Literally. And there are other concerns. Since the early nineties the Russians have actively participated in the Abkhazian civil war, ostensibly as a stabilization force but in reality to draw the region back to Moscow. Their main interest is oil. In 1999 their monopoly on Caspian Sea output was threatened by the first pipeline to bypass Russia, from Baku in Azerbaijan to Supsa on the Georgian coast near Abkhazia. The Russians would do anything to prevent further western investment even if it means anarchy and civil war.” Howe turned to face the assembled group.

“We’ve told the Russian embassy we’re carrying out a hydrographic survey under joint contract to the Turkish and Georgian governments. They seem to have bought it. But if they saw warships converging on the spot, they’d assume we were onto the sub. The Russian bear may have lost most of her claws but she still has the biggest fleet in the region. Relations between Ankara and Moscow are already at rock bottom because of the narcotics trade. There would be an ugly international incident at least, very possibly a shooting war which could quickly escalate to engulf this part of the world.”

“A small point of interest,” Costas interjected. “I didn’t think Georgia had a navy.”

“That’s another problem,” York replied glumly. “The Georgians inherited virtually nothing of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. They have a Ukrainian-built Project 206MP fast attack craft and a decommissioned US Coast Guard cutter transferred through the US Excess Defense Articles Program. But don’t get your hopes up. The FAC has no missiles because there are no storage and testing facilities. And the cutter has a single fifty-calibre machine gun.”

“That’s not the real Georgian Navy.”

They all turned towards Katya.

“The real Georgian Navy is hidden away along the coast to the north,” she said. “It is the navy of the warlords, men from central Asia who use Abkhazia to access the rich pickings of the Black Sea and Mediterranean. These are the ones to fear, my friends, not the Russians. I speak from personal experience.”

Katya was listened to with great respect by the crew. Her stature in their eyes was unassailable, since she had single-handedly defused the stand-off in the Aegean two days before.

“And the Turkish Navy?” Costas looked hopefully towards Mustafa, who had come on board from Sea Venture the previous day.

“We have a strong Black Sea presence,” the Turk replied. “But we’re badly overstretched in the war against smuggling. To support Seaquest the Turkish Navy would need to transfer units up from the Aegean. We cannot redeploy in advance because any change in our Black Sea fleet would excite immediate suspicion from the Russians. My government will only take the risk if a major discovery is confirmed.”

“So we’re on our own.”

“I fear so.”

In the brief lull that followed, York despatched two of the crew topside, the rising wind threatening gear that needed lashing to the deck. Jack quickly interjected to focus discussion on the matter to hand, the urgency of his tone reflecting the short time now available until Seaquest arrived on site.

“We must be sure we hit the right spot first time. You can be certain we’re under satellite surveillance right now, under the eyes of people who will not buy the story of hydrographic research for long.”

One of the ex-Navy men put up a hand. “Excuse me, sir, but what exactly is it we’re after?”

Jack moved aside to let the crew see the computer screen in the front of the console. “Mustafa, I’ll let you explain how we got here.”

Mustafa called up the isometric image of the Black Sea and swiftly ran through their interpretation of the papyrus text, advancing the boat along the shoreline until it reached the south-eastern sector. Now they had left their final port of call, Jack had decided to take the crew of Seaquest fully into his confidence. Those who had not yet heard the details stood mesmerized; even the veterans were transfixed by the immensity of a find that seemed to loom so fabulously out of the mists of legend.

“We reach target point by following the 150-metre depth contour, the shoreline before the flood. It swings out to sea as we move east from Trabzon. At present Seaquest is just over twelve nautical miles offshore but we’ll gradually head further out as we go east.”

He tapped a key and the image transformed to a close-up map.

“This is our best-fit scenario for Atlantis. It’s an area of seabed twenty nautical miles long by five miles wide. The 150-metre depth contour runs along the north side, so what we’re looking at here was all dry land. If we lower the sea level to that contour, we get some idea of its appearance before the flood.”

The image transformed to show an inland plain leading to a ridge along the coast several kilometres long. Beyond it was the volcano.

“There’s not much detail because there’s so little bathymetric data for this area. But we’re convinced the site must be either the ridge or the volcano. The ridge rises a hundred metres above the ancient shoreline. The trouble is, there’s no acropolis, no outcrop for a citadel. The papyrus is difficult to understand without it.”

“The volcano is the outstanding landmark,” Howe observed. “The north-west side forms a series of terraced platforms before it reaches a cliff. A citadel at this point would have been impressively situated, with views for miles on either side. You can imagine a town spreading along the lower slopes beside the seashore.”

“Defence was probably a factor, though not an overriding one if there were no other nearby city states,” Jack asserted. “The only threat might have been marauding bands of hunter-gatherers, a last residue from the Ice Age, but they would have been few in number. Finding high ground was mainly about avoiding floodplains and marshland.”

“What about volcanic activity?” York asked.

“No significant eruption for well over a million years,” Mustafa replied. “What you see today is occasional vental activity, geysers of gas and steam that spew out as pressure inside the core periodically builds up.”

They looked up at the virtual-reality screen where they could now just make out the island on the horizon. It was the peak of the volcano that had remained above water after the inundation. The wisps of steam rising from its summit seemed to join the grey and lowering sky, the leading edge of the storm that was rolling in from the north with alarming speed.

Jack spoke again. “In antiquity seismic events were almost invariably viewed as signs from the gods. A volcano with low-key activity could have become a focus for ritual observance, perhaps one of the original motivations for settling at this spot. In such a fertile region I’d expect both the volcano and the ridge to be occupied. But we must choose between the two. We may not have the chance to stake a second claim before unwelcome visitors arrive. We’ve got twenty minutes before Seaquest is over that ridge. I welcome any suggestions.”

There was another brief hiatus while Jack conferred with York. They made several adjustments on the navigational console and scrolled through the radar surveillance images. As the two men turned back towards the assembled crew, Katya produced her palm computer and tapped in a sequence of commands.

“Either place would fit the text,” she said. “Both the ridge and the volcano overlooked a wide valley to the south with distant mountains and salt lakes in between.”

“Does the papyrus tell us anything more that might help?” one of the crew asked.

“Not really.” Katya peered at the text again and shook her head. “The final fragments of writing seem to refer to the interior of the citadel.”

“There is something else.”

They all looked at Costas, who had been staring intently at the image of the island as it became larger and more clearly defined. He drew his gaze away and turned to Katya.

“Give us that first phrase after reaching Atlantis.”

Katya tapped a command and read from the screen.

“Under the sign of the bull.”

They all looked questioningly at Costas.

“You’re familiar with the rooftop bar in the Maritime Museum at Carthage.”

There was a general murmur of assent.

“The view across the Bay of Tunis to the east, the evening sun splashing its rosy light on the sea, the twin mountain peaks of Ba’al Qarnain piercing the sky in the background.”

They all nodded.

“Well, perhaps fewer of you will be so familiar with the view first thing in the morning. The midsummer sun rises directly over the saddle between the peaks. To the Phoenicians this was a holy mountain, sacred to the sky god. Ba’al Qarnain means Two-Horned Lord.” He turned to Jack. “I believe sign of the bull refers to the profile of that island.”

They all looked up at the looming landmass on the screen.

“I’m puzzled,” Howe cut in. “From where we are the island doesn’t look anything like that.”

“Try another direction,” Costas said. “We’re looking south-east. What about the view from the shoreline, from below the volcano where a settlement would have been?”

Mustafa quickly tapped the keyboard to reorientate the view from the north-east, increasing the magnification as he did so to bring the viewpoint down to the ancient shoreline beneath the volcano.

There was a gasp of astonishment as the image locked into place. Above them loomed two peaks separated by a deep saddle.

Costas looked at the screen triumphantly. “There, ladies and gentlemen, are our bull’s horns.”

Jack grinned broadly at his friend. “I knew you’d do something useful eventually.” He turned to York.

“I think we have our answer. Lay in a course for that island at maximum speed.”