Atlantis

CHAPTER 15

At the entrance to the Weapons Bay Costas extracted another gadget from his belt, a yellow box the size of a cellphone. He flipped open the lid to reveal a small LCD screen which glowed dull green.

“Global positioning system,” he announced. “This should do the trick.”

“How can it work here?” Katya asked.

A series of figures flashed on the screen.

“That box is our speciality, a combined underwater acoustic GPS receiver and navigation computer,” Jack said. “Inside the sub we can’t send out acoustic waves so we have no access to GPS. Instead we downloaded the specs for this class of sub from the IMU database and mated it with a series of GPS fixes we took via surface buoys outside the submarine on our Aquapod recce this morning. The computer should allow us to navigate inside as if we were using GPS.”

“Got it,” Costas announced. “In the Aquapod I took a fix where the stairway disappeared under the submarine. It’s on the port side of the torpedo room. Bearing two hundred and forty-one degrees from our present position, seven point six metres ahead and two metres down. That puts us beyond the weapons racks just ahead of the port-side ballast tank.”

As Costas began to look for a way through the crowded racks, Katya reached out and held his arm.

“Before we go there’s something you should see.”

She pointed towards the central aisle in the weapons bay just beyond the spot where they had lain in mortal fear only minutes before.

“That aisle should be unobstructed to allow the gantry to sling the weapons off the racks and ferry them to the tubes. But it’s blocked.”

It should have been glaringly obvious, but they had been so focused on the booby trap they had failed to take in the rest of the room.

“It’s a pair of stacked crates.” Costas eased himself into the narrow space on the left-hand side between the crates and the weapons racks, his head just protruding over the uppermost box.

“There are two more behind. And another two beyond that.” Costas’ voice was muffled as he slid further along. “Six altogether, each about four metres long by one and a half metres across. They must have been hoisted down the chute and jigged into place using the torpedo harness.”

“Are they weapons crates?” Jack asked.

Costas re-emerged and shook off the white precipitate clinging to him. “They’re too short for a torpedo or missile and too wide to be tube-launched. We’d need to open one up, but we don’t have the equipment or the time.”

“There are some markings.” Katya was squatting down in front of the lower crate and rubbing vigorously at the encrustation. It fell away to reveal a metallic surface with impressed figures in two separate clusters. “Soviet Defence Ministry encodings.” She pointed at the uppermost group of symbols. “These are weapons all right.”

Her hand moved to the other group which she inspected more closely.

“Electro…” She faltered. “Electrochimpribor.”

They were beginning to think the unthinkable.

“Combine Electrochimpribor,” Katya said quietly. “Otherwise known as Plant 418, the main Soviet thermonuclear weapons assembly site.”

Costas slumped heavily against the torpedo rack. “Holy Mother of God. These are nukes. Each of these crates is just about the right size for an SLBM warhead.”

“Type SS-N-20 Sturgeon, to be precise.” Katya stood up and faced the two men. “Each one is five times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. There are six crates, ten warheads in each.” She paused and stared at the crates. “The authorities went to elaborate lengths to keep the loss of this submarine a secret. Afterwards there were a number of perplexing disappearances, especially from Kazbek’s home port of Sevastopol. I now believe they were victims of an old-fashioned Stalinist purge. The executions went unnoticed in the momentous events of that year.”

“Are you suggesting these nukes were stolen?” Costas asked incredulously.

“The Soviet military was deeply disillusioned after the Afghan war in the 1980s. The navy had begun to disintegrate with ships laid up and crews idle. Pay was dismal or non-existent. More intelligence was sold to the West during the final few years of the Soviet Union than during the height of the Cold War.”

“How does Antonov fit in?” Costas asked.

“He was a man who could be harnessed to good effect but was dangerous when the reins were loosened. He hated glasnost and perestroika and came to despise the regime for its collusion with the West. This looks like his ultimate act of defiance.”

“If the regime could no longer hit at the West, then he could,” Costas murmured.

“And his crew would follow him anywhere, especially with the lure of prize money.”

“Where would he be taking these?”

“Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Taliban in Afghanistan. Hezbollah in Syria. The North Koreans. This was 1991, remember.”

“There must have been a middleman,” Jack said.

“The vultures were already circling, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Katya replied bleakly.

“I underestimated our friend the political officer,” Costas said quietly. “He may have been a fanatic, but he may also have saved humanity from its worst catastrophe.”

“It’s not over yet.” Jack straightened. “Somewhere out there is a dissatisfied customer, someone who has been watching and waiting over the years. And his potential clients now are far worse than ever before; they’re terrorists driven only by hate.”

The blue glow from the submarine’s emergency lighting barely penetrated the gloom at the forward end of the torpedo room. Costas switched his headlamp to full beam before leading the way through the maze of weapons racks towards the co-ordinates indicated by his transceiver. Jack and Katya followed close behind, their survival suits taking on an increasingly spectral hue as they brushed against the white encrustation which clung to every surface of the submarine’s interior. After squeezing through a final passage they crouched in single file on a narrow walkway flush with the hull casing.

Costas braced himself with his back against the casing. He hooked his fingers through one of the metre-long floor grates.

“Here goes.”

He rocked forward and heaved with all his strength. Seconds later the grate relented with a metallic shriek and a shower of precipitate. Jack crawled forward to help shift it aside, leaving Costas space to swing his legs over and peer into the darkness below. He lowered himself until only his helmet was visible below the walkway.

“I’m on the floor above the bilges,” he announced. “This is as far down as you can go without wading in toxic soup.” He took the GPS unit from his pocket.

Jack stepped over the hole to let Katya move up to the edge. All three headlamps now shone at the flickering green display.

“Bingo.” Costas looked up from the screen and stared at the casing less than an arm’s length away. “I’m five metres above the point where the steps disappeared under the submarine. We’re bang on target.”

“How does the casing look?” Jack asked.

“We’re in luck. For most of its length Kazbek has a double skin, an inner pressure casing and an outer hydrodynamic hull separated by twenty centimetres of rubber. It provides better acoustic insulation and space for a ballast tank. But just before the nose cone it reverts to single thickness to allow more internal space as the casing tapers.”

Katya leaned forward. “There’s something I don’t fully understand.”

“Fire away.”

“Between us and that rock face lies a twenty-centimetre-thick wall of metal. How do we get through?”

Costas craned his neck up to look at Katya. He had left his visor open since defusing the warheads and the mixture of sweat-streaked grime and white precipitate looked like some bizarre war paint.

“Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.”

Katya paused. “Laser?”

“You got it.”

At that moment there was a metallic clatter behind them. Before leaving the weapons bay Costas had radioed Ben and Andy in the DSRV with instructions on how to reach the torpedo room. The two men had taken the perimeter walkway and now appeared fully kitted up in E-suits and festooned with gearbags.

“We’ll need a bigger opening,” Costas said to the men. “Then come down and join me.”

Jack and Katya prised out two more grates so the men could lower themselves to the bilge floor. As soon as they had settled in the confined space, they unzipped the bags and began assembling the apparatus inside.

Costas chalked a circle about a metre in diameter on the hull casing, using a tape measure as a crude compass. He moved aside as the two crewmen lifted the apparatus into place. It looked like a scaled-down lunar module, a cluster of articulated legs extending from a polyhedral central unit the size of a desktop PC. Ben held the unit in front of the GPS fix while Andy positioned the legs round the chalked circle. After a quick inspection he flipped a switch and the suction pads sealed against the hull. At the same time a cluster of rods sprang through each joint to lock the apparatus into one unyielding mass.

Ben extended a telescopic tube from both sides of the unit, one end to the centre of the chalked circle and the other to the dark recess below the metal grating of the floor. To the left of the unit was an open-topped three-sided box about half a metre across. Above the tube was a sighting device and below it a handle and trigger.

After a quick check Ben plugged in a cable they had trailed from the DSRV. The LCD screen behind the unit came to life and booted through a series of readouts before settling on a blank display peppered with program icons.

“Good work, guys,” Costas said. “Now let’s get this baby into action.”

He tapped in a series of commands, his eyes darting between keyboard and screen. After the program finalized, he leaned forward and pressed his right eye against the viewfinder, making small adjustments to the tube alignment using a pair of joysticks on either side.

Less than five minutes after the power had been connected he rocked back and looked up at Jack.

“We’re ready.”

“Fire away.”

Costas grasped the handle with the trigger. As he pulled it a cathode-ray tube above the keyboard began to flash amber.

“T minus sixty seconds.”

The light transformed to continuous green.

“Good to go,” Costas announced.

“Time frame?” Jack demanded.

“Two minutes. We could slice through the casing like butter but the drain on the DSRV’s batteries would be intolerable. Even what we’re doing will stretch our safety margins if we’re planning to use the DSRV to return to Seaquest.” Costas looked up at Katya, his face a picture of suppressed excitement.

“What you’re looking at is a far-infrared sealed gas semiconductor laser,” he explained. “Hook this baby up to the DSRV’s two seven hundred amp silver-zinc batteries and you have a ten kilowatt ten point six micron beam. That’s enough to give the Klingons pause for thought.”

Jack grunted impatiently as Costas checked the timer and flicked a switch on the keyboard.

“The viewfinder is a positioning device which allows us to fire the beam perpendicular to the fix on the hull,” he continued. “The laser is currently burning a hole in the casing one centimetre in diameter. I’ve just fired in a one-way valve which allows us to extrude material while keeping seawater out.”

“In theory,” Jack retorted.

“Nothing wrong with a cold shower.”

The module began emitting a low warning sound. Costas resumed his position behind the screen and began running a series of diagnostics. After a pause he placed his right hand round the handle.

“The beam automatically shut off five millimetres before completion. I’m reactivating now.”

He squeezed the trigger and remained motionless. After a few moments the green light suddenly reverted to flashing amber. Costas peered down the viewfinder, the sweat from his forehead dripping over the tube. He leaned back and relaxed.

“The plug held. We’re through.”

Costas moved aside to let Ben take his place at the console. Together they finished assembling the open-topped box to the left of the unit. Within it a lattice of lines glowed a luminous green like the stage backdrop of a miniature theatre.

“Ben’s had more practice,” Costas said. “Some of the software is so new I didn’t have a chance to play with it before we left for the wreck excavation.”

“You mean you haven’t tried this before?” Katya asked.

“Has to be a first time for everything.”

Katya closed her eyes momentarily. For all the high technology and military-style planning, it seemed that IMU operations, including defusing booby traps, ran on a wing and a prayer.

“Here’s where this baby comes into her own,” Costas enthused. “This is one of the most sophisticated multitask lasers ever produced. Watch that box.”

The dull green luminosity transformed into a shimmer of tiny particles which pulsated every few seconds. Each surge left an image of increasing complexity, the lines progressively more concrete. After about a minute the image had become three-dimensional. It was as if someone had pressed glowing green putty inside to create a miniature grotto.

“A hologram!” Katya exclaimed.

“Correct.” Costas remained glued to the image. “Phase two was the insertion of a low-energy ultraviolet laser through the hole in the casing, a mapping device which reproduces the image as a hologram in the box. You can adjust the laser so it only reflects off material of a particular density, in this case the vesicular basalt of the volcano.”

Jack looked at Katya. “We use it to replicate artefacts,” he said. “The mapping data are transferred to a high-intensity infrared laser which can cut virtually any material with an accuracy tolerance of one micron, less than a particle of dust.”

“It produced the synthetic polymer copy of the gold disc from the Minoan shipwreck.”

Jack nodded. “IMU also developed the hardware needed to reproduce the Elgin Marbles for the Parthenon in Athens.”

Costas leaned over the console. “OK, Ben. Maximum resolution.”

The surge of green pulsating up and down began to sharpen features which had appeared in outline moments before. They could make out the bulbous outcrops of basalt, a wall of lava formed millennia before the first hominids reached these shores.

It was Katya who first noticed the regularities at the base of the image.

“I can see steps!” she exclaimed.

They watched as the horizontal lines took on an unmistakable shape. The final half-dozen steps leading up from the cliff face terminated in a platform five metres wide. Above it a rocky overhang reached out as far as the submarine, completely sealing off the platform.

Ben began the final countdown with each pulse of the laser. “Ninety-seven…ninety-eight…ninety-nine…one hundred. Resolution complete.”

All eyes focused on the dark recess in the centre of the image. What at first seemed an opaque haze gradually resolved itself into a rectilinear niche four metres high and three metres wide. It was at the rear of the platform behind the stairs and had clearly been hewn out of the rock.

As the scanner retracted, the niche came into clear view. In the centre they could make out a vertical groove from floor to ceiling. Horizontal grooves extended along the upper and lower edges. Each panel was adorned with the unmistakable U shape of the bull’s horns.

Costas let out a low whistle as Katya leaned forward to see.

Jack rummaged in his front pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He quietly read out Dillen’s translation: “The great golden door of the citadel.”

Costas looked up at his friend and saw the familiar fire of excitement.

“I can’t vouch for the gold,” Jack said. “But I can tell you one thing. We’ve found the gateway to Atlantis.”