Atlantis

CHAPTER 17

Costas crouched through, careful to avoid the razor-sharp rim where the laser had cut into the casing. He reached forward to test the strength of the magnetized membrane and then turned to help Katya and Jack. Once they were safely through, he heaved the hatch shut, fearful that a tear in the membrane would cause uncontrollable flooding in the submarine. The flush join where the hatch closed was testament to the microsurgical precision of the laser.

Although the membrane was translucent there was scarcely any natural light at this depth, and it was further blocked by the rocky overhang which extended all the way to the submarine and cut them off from the sea outside.

When they activated their headlamps, all around them the light reflected off the crystalline lattice of the membrane, producing a brilliant shimmer of white. Ahead of them the cliff face seemed startlingly unfamiliar, the monochrome green of the hologram giving little sense of its lustrous surface. It was as if they were looking at an old-fashioned sepia photograph, a hazy border framing the tinted image of some long-lost grotto.

They walked slowly forward, their posture becoming upright as the tunnel widened. The membrane was rock-hard and provided a sure grip despite the trickle of water that ran down from the platform ahead. About eight metres in, they reached the point where the membrane had bonded magnetically with the cliff face. Costas led the way onto the stairs and crouched down to inspect the surface.

“Almost total absence of marine encrustation, not even algae. I’ve never seen a sea more dead than this one. If we took off our helmets this place would reek of rotten eggs from the hydrogen sulphide in the water.”

He joggled the volume setting on his communications console and looked over to make sure the others could hear. Jack murmured in acknowledgement but was preoccupied by the image in front of him. He and Katya stood side by side only a few metres from the darkness at the rear of the platform.

As Costas joined them, his headlamp added further definition to the scene. Directly in front was a rectilinear rock-cut niche about twice their height and three times as wide. It was recessed about three metres into the cliff face and had been polished to an immaculate finish. On the back wall was the image that had transfixed them on the hologram, the outline of a great double door.

Katya was the first to state the obvious, her voice taut with excitement.

“It’s gold!”

As their beams converged they were nearly blinded by the glare. Katya cautiously trained her headlamp on the lower edge below the brilliant shimmer.

“Gold-plated, I’d guess,” Costas said matter-of-factly. “Beaten and burnished and then attached to stone slabs underneath. There was plenty of river gold in the Caucasus at this period but it would have stretched the resource to make these solid gold. They would have been too soft anyway.”

Through the chink round the edge a fine sheen of water sprayed out from the cavity beyond. The light from their headlamps refracted into a myriad tiny rainbows, a kaleidoscopic halo that added to the dazzling effect of the gold.

“They’re butted against a sill, a low jamb in the rock all round the edge.” Costas was peering at the lower right-hand corner. “That’s what’s keeping the doors from bursting out on us. They’re designed to open inwards as we thought.”

He stood back and turned to Jack. “We need to flood this chamber to equalize the water pressure on both sides of the door. Are we ready?”

The other two nodded and adjusted their regulator consoles, changing their breathing gas from compressed air to the trimix necessary to survive almost one hundred metres below sea level. Katya swayed slightly, feeling a rush of light-headedness as the unfamiliar mixture came online. Costas reached over to steady her.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “It’ll clear your head for all those inscriptions you’re going to translate.”

Katya and Jack checked each other’s cylinder pressures before giving the OK signal to Costas, who slid back along the membrane to the submarine. After activating his own regulator he gave a succession of sharp raps on the casing with his multi-tool. Seconds later a violent jet of water burst through the hole in the centre of the hatch, slamming into the cliff with the force of a water cannon. Andy had reversed the high-pressure pump and drawn the water up from the bilges through a filtration device to cleanse it of toxins and solid matter.

They flattened themselves against the wall to avoid the blast of water that thundered past them. As it rebounded off the rock and began to soak them, Jack gasped in pain.

“What is it?” Katya demanded. “Are you all right?”

“It’s nothing.”

Jack’s posture said exactly the opposite, his body contorted as he held himself against the rock. It was only as the water welled up around their legs that he slowly straightened himself, his rasping breath clearly audible through the intercom.

“It was during our little showdown.” His tone belied his agony. “I took a hit on the right side when we rushed the room. I didn’t say anything because there was nothing to be done. The bullet penetrated the Kevlar so I’ve got a leaky chamber. The water’s cold. It’ll pass.”

The reality was more serious. Even though it was only a low-velocity Uzi round, the bullet had fractured a rib and left a penetrating flesh wound. He had already lost a lot of blood and he knew he would soon be running on borrowed time. The rush of water had staunched the bleeding and was numbing the pain, but the rent in his suit was worse than he had intimated. In the near-freezing conditions it would only be a matter of time before his core temperature dropped to danger level.

As he tried to control his breathing he felt a sudden wave of dizziness, a sure sign of oxygen depletion. His body’s craving for nourishment after losing so much blood was not being satisfied. He began to hyperventilate.

Not again.

He went rigid as the water seethed up and enveloped him. He felt a clawing need for space as the gap above the water diminished, a rising fear as claustrophobia began to take hold.

He desperately needed to convince himself it was physiological, a natural reaction as his body struggled to adjust, not blind panic.

Relax. Let it go.

His breathing was coming in ragged gulps as he knelt on the floor, his arms hanging and his head bowed as the noise of his regulator was drowned out by the seething cauldron around him. He was only just conscious of Katya and Costas in front, seemingly oblivious of him, their bodies swathed in white water as they watched the surface level rise.

He closed his eyes.

A surge of water suddenly pushed him back, encircling his body as if he were in the vortex of a whirlpool. On either side it seemed to caress him as the weight in front pressed down hard, a cloying mass that pinned him against the membrane.

He opened his eyes onto horror.

All he could see was a hideous visage pressed up against him, its eyeless sockets and leering grin rebounding like a demented puppet, its ghostly arms flapping as it tried to encircle him in a deathly embrace. With each surge the water clouded with flecks of white and grey that seemed to detach from the apparition like snow.

Jack was powerless to resist, caught in a nightmare of paralysis with no escape. It bore down on him relentlessly, overwhelmingly.

He stopped breathing, his mouth frozen in mid-scream.

It was a hallucination.

His rational mind told him he was in the grip of narcosis. The man they had killed in the gun battle. The hanging corpse in the sonar room. It was the ghosts of the submarine, wraiths who had stayed on to haunt them.

He closed his eyes tight, all his reserves fighting the slide into darkness.

In a flash he was back in the mineshaft five months ago, in the place of his nemesis. Once again he felt the shock as the gas surged up the shaft and slammed him against the beam, severing his air supply and extinguishing all light. The choking suffocation in the pitch darkness before Costas found him and buddy-breathed him back to life. The horror as the second surge blew him out of Costas’ grasp and towards the surface. The hours in the recompression chamber, hours of crushing exhaustion punctuated by moments of sheer terror as consciousness sent him back to the instant of panic over and over again. It had been the experience all divers dread, the one that shatters the confidence built up precariously over the years, toppling him into a world where all the controls, all the parameters, had to be painstakingly rebuilt from scratch.

And now it was happening again.

“Jack! Look at me. Everything’s all right. It’s gone.”

Costas stared into Jack’s wide-open eyes and gripped him by the shoulders. As the noise of the water jet subsided and he began to hear his exhaust again, Jack heaved a shuddering breath and began to relax.

It was Costas. He was still in the chamber.

“It must have been one of the bodies Kuznetsov ejected from the torpedo tube. Got lodged in the rock niche and was then blown out by the water jet. Not a pretty sight.” Costas gestured towards the white-flecked form now wafting in the water towards the submarine’s casing, its torso obscenely mangled where Costas had punched it aside, causing the adipose tissue that still clung to the skeleton to disintegrate.

Instead of revulsion Jack felt an enormous elation, the exhilaration of the survivor who has faced oblivion and beaten it. The rush of adrenaline would propel him through whatever lay ahead of them.

Katya had been blown back by the force of the water against the membrane and had been oblivious to his panic. Jack looked up at her and spoke hoarsely through the intercom, his breath still coming in ragged bursts.

“My turn for a shock, that’s all.”

She could never know the demons that had haunted him, the force that had beckoned him on and nearly spelled the end for him.

The swirling maelstrom ended and the water attained a limpid clarity soon after the turbulence had ceased. Costas’ eyes remained locked on Jack’s until he could see he had fully relaxed. After a moment Costas reached down and undid the Velcro straps that held Jack’s fins to his legs, pulling the silicon blades over his feet and snapping them in place.

Jack rolled over and watched the bubbles from his exhaust coalesce into little pools of translucence that wobbled and shimmered into each other on the ceiling of the membrane. He felt his cylinder pack scrape along the bottom and quickly injected a blast of air into his suit to achieve neutral buoyancy.

Costas swam from the casing towards the rock face. As he reached it an incomprehensible high-pitched noise filled their earphones. Jack found himself shaking uncontrollably, the terror of the last few minutes having transformed into delirious relief.

“Hey, Mickey Mouse,” he said. “I think you should activate your voice modulator.”

The combination of extreme pressure and helium distorted the voice to a comical degree, and IMU had developed a compensating device to avoid precisely the response Jack was finding so difficult to control.

“My apologies. I’ll try again.” Costas turned a dial on the side of his visor. He found a best-fit frequency and switched to automatic, ensuring the modulator would respond to changes in pressure and gas make-up as their depth altered.

“Andy has relaxed the magnetization to make the membrane semi-flexible, allowing the ambient pressure of the sea to pass through into this space and match the pressure of the water behind that door. It’s 9.8 bar, almost 100 metres. At this depth the trimix only gives us half an hour.”

With their headlamps reduced to half-beam to limit the reflection, they could make out more features of the entranceway. On each panel was the magnificent bull’s horn symbol which had been visible in the hologram, life-size forms, beaten in gold, which stood out in low relief.

Costas extracted another contraption from his tool belt.

“Something I knocked up in the geophysics lab at IMU,” he said. “Ground penetrating radar, generating broadband electromagnetic waves to reveal subsurface images. We call them acoustic flashlights. The GPR signal only goes five metres but should tell us whether there’s solid obstruction on the other side.”

He extended the transducer antenna and swam to and fro along the base of the entraceway, eventually coming to rest beside the crack between the doors.

“It’s clear,” he announced. “No resistance after half a metre, which must be the thickness of the doors. I looked closely along the lower jamb and there’s nothing that should cause us trouble.”

“Metallic corrosion?” Katya enquired.

“Gold doesn’t corrode perceptibly in seawater.”

Costas replaced the unit in his belt and arched his fingers over the sill below the doors. He pulled his body back and forth a few times, then rested.

“Here goes,” he said.

In a sudden frenzy of finning he rocketed himself forward, bringing the full force of his body to bear on the door. He continued heaving for a few moments before settling down exhausted. The doors seemed like solid rock, the two-metre-high outline mere etchings on the cliff face.

“Nothing doing,” he gasped bleakly.

“Wait. Look at this.”

Jack had been hovering a metre above and had been enveloped in a sheen of bubbles from Costas’ exhaust. His eye had been caught by a curious feature refracted through the turbulence, an anomaly too small to have been picked up by the hologram laser.

It looked like a shallow, saucer-sized depression centred between the two sets of bull’s horns. The crack between the doors was concealed beneath it, making it seem like a seal stamped into the metal after they had been shut for the last time.

Katya moved up beside him and reached out to touch it.

“It feels crystalline,” she said. “It’s complex, lots of right angles and flat planes.”

The crystal was immaculate, so nearly flawless it was almost invisible. The movement of Katya’s hand as she traced the shape looked like the gesticulations of a mime artist. It was only when they dimmed their headlamps that a form began to emerge, the light refracting like a prism to reveal lines and angles.

When Jack moved, the lines suddenly coalesced into a familiar shape.

“My God,” he breathed. “The Atlantis symbol!”

For a moment they stared in amazement, the trials of the last few hours suddenly fallen away as they were sucked back into the extraordinary excitement of discovery.

“In the Aquapods we saw the symbol carved into a roundel in front of the pyramids,” Jack said. “It would seem consistent to have it here as well.”

“Yes,” said Katya. “A sort of talisman to proclaim the sanctity of the place.”

Costas pressed his visor against the crystal. “The carving’s incredible,” he murmured. “Most silica compounds wouldn’t last this long in seawater with such high sulphur content without forming a reaction patina.”

Jack’s mind was racing as he stared at the door. Suddenly he grunted and pulled out an oblong package which he had wedged in beside the Beretta.

“I brought along a little talisman of my own.”

He unwrapped the copy of the gold disc from the Minoan wreck. As he turned it over to reveal the symbol, the light from his headlamp danced off the surface.

“Behold the key to Atlantis,” he said jubilantly.

Costas erupted with excitement. “Of course!” He took the disc from Jack and held it up. “The convex shape exactly matches the concavity on the door. The symbol on the disc is in reverse, pressed into the metal, whereas the crystal is a mirror image in obverse. The disc should fit like a key into a lock.”

“I had a hunch it might prove useful,” Jack said.

“That door isn’t going to budge an inch,” Costas said. “This could be our only chance.”

Jack finned upwards a few strokes until he was directly in front of the symbol on the door, Katya immediately to his left.

“Only one way to find out,” he said.