Atlantis

CHAPTER 26

The door slammed behind Costas as he flew into the bulkhead. It was a jarring impact, the protruding ridge of metal taking him full in the chest and leaving him fighting for breath. The blindfold had been ripped off but all he could see was a crimson blur. He rolled back slightly, his whole body convulsed with pain, and slowly raised his arm to feel his face. His right eye was swollen and closed over, numb to the touch. He moved his fingers to his left eye and wiped away the sticky sheen before opening it. Gradually his focus improved. From where he was lying he could see whitewashed piping running along the bulkhead, the front stamped with symbols and letters he could just make out as Cyrillic.

He had no sense of time or place. His last clear memory had been Jack collapsing inside the audience chamber. Then there was blackness, a hazy memory of movement and pain. He had come to strapped in a chair with a blinding light thrust in his face. Then hour after hour of torment, of screaming and agonizing blows. Always the same black-clad figures, always the same question shouted in broken English. How did you get from the submarine? He guessed he was on Vultura, but all powers of analysis had shut down as his mind focused on survival. Again and again he was hurled into this room, then dragged back just when he thought it was all over.

And now it was happening again. This time there had been no respite. The door crashed open and there was a violent blow to his back, forcing up a slurry of blood and vomit. He was hauled to his knees retching and coughing and the blindfold was yanked on again, so tight he could feel the blood squeezing out of his swollen eye socket. He thought he could never feel another type of pain, but this was it. He concentrated his whole being on his one lifeline, that he was taking the punishment and not Jack. He had to hold on whatever it took until Seaquest arrived and the discovery of the warheads was made known.

He came round facedown on a table with his hands tied behind the chair he was sitting on. He had no idea how long he had been there and could only see a nauseating speckle of stars where the blindfold pressed against his eyes. Through the throbbing of his head he could hear voices, not those of his tormentors but a man’s and a woman’s. Earlier he had gathered from snatches of overheard conversation that his captors were expecting the return of Aslan by helicopter from their headquarters complex. Even the worst of them seemed apprehensive. There had been some kind of crisis, a downed helicopter, an escaped prisoner. Costas prayed it was Jack.

The voices seemed to be some distance away, in a corridor or an adjoining room, but the woman’s was raised in anger and he could hear them clearly. They switched from Russian to English and he realized it was Aslan and Katya.

“These are personal matters,” Aslan said. “We will speak in English so my mujahedin do not hear this blasphemy.”

“Your mujahedin.” Katya’s voice was full of contempt. “Your mujahedin are jihadists. They fight for Allah, not Aslan.”

“I am their new prophet. Their loyalty is to Aslan.”

“Aslan.” Katya spat out the word with derision. “Who is Aslan? Piotr Alexandrovich Nazarbetov. A failed professor from an obscure university with delusions of grandeur. You do not even wear the beard of a holy man. And remember I know about our Mongol heritage. Genghis Khan was an infidel who destroyed half the Muslim world. Someone ought to tell that to your holy warriors.”

“You forget yourself, my daughter.” The voice was icy.

“I remember what I had to learn as a child. He who will abide by the Koran will prosper, he who offends against it will get the sword. The faith does not allow the murder of innocents.” Her voice was a ragged sob. “I know what you did to my mother.”

Aslan’s heavy breathing sounded to Costas like a pressure cooker about to explode.

“Your mujahedin are biding their time,” Katya continued. “They are using you until you become expendable. That submarine will be your tomb as well. All you have done by creating this terrorist sanctuary is hasten your own demise.”

“Silence!” The demented scream was followed by the sounds of a scuffle and something being dragged away. Moments later there were returning footsteps. They halted behind Costas. A pair of hands jerked his shoulders back against the chair.

“Your presence is polluting,” the voice hissed against his ear, still breathing heavily. “You are about to make your final journey.”

Fingers snapped and two pairs of hands wrenched him upright. In his world of darkness he was unaware of the blow when it came, an instant of pain followed by merciful oblivion.

Jack seemed to be in a living nightmare. He saw only pitch-blackness, a darkness so complete it eclipsed all sensory points of reference. All around him was an immense rushing noise punctuated by creaks and groans. His mind struggled to make sense of the unimaginable. As he lay contorted against the bulkhead he felt oddly lightweight, his body almost levitating as if he were caught in the grip of some demonic fever.

He now knew what it felt like to be trapped inside the bowels of a sinking ship as it plunged into the abyss. His salvation was Seaquest’s command module, its fifteen-centimetre-thick walls of titanium-reinforced steel protecting him from the crushing pressure that would by now have burst his eardrums and collapsed his skull. He could hear rending and buckling as the remaining air pockets imploded, a noise that would have spelled instant death had he failed to make it into the module in time.

All he could do now was brace himself against the inevitable. The fall seemed interminable, far longer than he had expected, and the noise increased in a shrieking crescendo like an approaching express train. The end when it came was as violent as it was unheralded. The hull crashed into the seabed with a sickening jolt, generating a G force that would have killed him had he not been crouched with his head in his arms. It took all his strength to keep from being thrown upwards as the hull rebounded, the surge accompanied by a horrific tearing sound. Then the wreckage settled and silence descended.

“Activate emergency lighting.”

Jack spoke to himself as he felt his body for further injury. His voice sounded strangely disembodied, its cadences absorbed by the soundproof panelling on the walls, yet it gave a measure of reality in a world that had lost all waymarkers.

As a diver Jack was used to orienting in utter darkness, and now he brought all his experience to bear. After his tumble through the hatch the missile impact had blown him past the weapons locker towards the control panels on the far side of the module. Fortunately Seaquest had come to rest upright. As he rose uncertainly to his feet he could sense the slant of the deck where the bow had ploughed into the seabed. He dropped back to his knees and felt his way across the floor, his intimate knowledge of the vessel he had helped design guiding him past the consoles that lined the interior.

He reached a fuse box in the wall to the left of the entry hatch and felt for the switch that connected the reserve battery in its protective lead housing to the main circuitry. His hand found the lever that activated the emergency lighting. Not for the first time that day he shut his eyes tight and prayed for luck.

To his relief the room was immediately bathed in fluorescent green. His eyes quickly adjusted and he turned round to survey the scene. The module was below the waterline, and the shells which had skewered Seaquest had passed through the hull above. The equipment and fixtures seemed shipshape and battened down, the module having been designed to survive precisely this kind of attack.

His first task was to disengage the module from the hull. He made his way unsteadily to the central dais. It seemed inconceivable that he had assembled the crew here for the briefing less than forty-eight hours before. He slumped heavily in the command chair and activated the control panel. The LCD monitor scrolled through a series of password requests before initiating the disengage sequence. After the third password a drawer sprang open and he took out a key which he slotted into the panel and turned clockwise. The electronic propulsion and atmosphere control systems would kick in as soon as the module was a safe distance from the wreckage.

Without Seaquest’s sensors, Jack would have no data on depth or local environment until the module was clear of the hull and had activated its own array. He guessed he had fallen into the chasm recorded by Seaquest to the north of the island, a gash ten kilometres long and half a kilometre wide that Costas had identified as a tectonic fault on the same line as the volcano. If so, he was mired in the dustbin of the south-eastern Black Sea, a collecting point for silt and a reservoir of brine from the Ice Age. With every passing minute the wreckage would be sinking further into a slurry of sediment more intractable than quicksand. Even if he managed to disengage, he might simply drive the module deeper into the ooze, entombing him with no hope of escape.

He strapped himself in and leaned back on the headrest. The computer gave him three chances to abort and each time he pressed continue. After the final sequence, a red warning triangle appeared with the word disengaging flashing in the centre. For an alarming moment the room reverted to darkness as the computer re-routed the circuitry to the internal battery pod.

A few seconds later the silence was broken by a dull staccato noise outside the casing to his left. Each muffled concussion represented a tiny explosive charge rigged to blow out the rivets in Seaquest’s hull and create an aperture large enough for the module to pass through. As the panel sheared off, the space surrounding the module filled with seawater and the bathymetric sensor came online. Jack swivelled towards the exit trajectory and braced himself as the water jets came to life, a low hum that increased in a crescendo as the engines bucked against the pivots that secured the module to the hull. A series of detonations erupted behind him as the module separated from its retaining bolts. Simultaneously the locking clamps retracted and he was thrown back violently in the seat, the compression as the saucer ejected equalling the multiple G force of a rocket launch.

The module had been designed to blast from a sinking ship beyond the suction vortex as the hull plummeted to the sea floor. Jack had experienced a simulation at IMU’s deep-water test facility off Bermuda, when the saucer came to a halt a hundred metres away. Here, the G force was followed by an equally violent jolt in the opposite direction, the module stopping only a few metres beyond the wreckage.

He had pitched his head forward in the standard safety posture and his only injuries were a series of painful welts where the straps dug into his shoulders. After taking a deep breath he unbuckled the harness and swivelled towards the workstation, his right hand pushed against the control panel to stop him sliding forward where the module had angled into the seabed.

To the left was a smaller monitor for the display of bathymetric data. As the numbers began to flicker he saw the depth gauge read a staggering 750 metres below sea level, a full hundred metres below the official maximum operating depth of the module. The base of the fault was far deeper than they had imagined, more than half a kilometre below the submerged ancient shoreline.

Jack switched on the sound navigation and ranging system and waited while the screen came to life. The active sonar transducer emitted a high-frequency narrowband pulse beam in a 360 degree vertical sweep to give a profile of the sea floor and any suspended objects up to the surface. During Seaquest’s run over the canyon two days previously they had established that the fault lay north-south, so he fixed the sonar trajectory east-west to give a cross-section of his position within the defile.

The speed of the beam meant the entire profile was visible on the monitor at once. The mottled green on either side showed where the canyon walls rose some four hundred metres apart. Near the top were jagged protrusions that narrowed the profile further still. The canyon bore all the characteristics of a horizontal tear fault, caused by plates in the earth’s crust wrenching apart rather than grinding sideways. It was a geological rarity that would have delighted Costas but was of more immediate concern to Jack because it compounded the gravity of his situation.

He realized his chances against surviving this far had been truly astronomical. If Seaquest had sunk only fifty metres west she would have impacted with the lip of the canyon, smashing him to oblivion well before the wreckage reached the sea floor far below.

He turned his attention to the base of the fault where the profiler showed a mass of light green, denoting hundreds of metres of sediment. Partway up was a horizontal line level with the apex of the sonar, a compacted layer which was the resting place for Seaquest. Above it a lighter scattering of colour denoting suspended sediment continued for at least twenty metres until the screen became clear, indicating open water.

Jack knew he was atop a drift of sediment at least as deep as the ocean above, immense quantities of silt derived from land run-off mixed with dead marine organisms, natural seabed clays, volcanic debris and brine from the Ice Age evaporation. It was continuously being added to by fallout from above and at any moment could swallow him up like quicksand. And if the quicksand did not get him, an avalanche could. The suspended silt above the wreckage was the result of a turbidity current. IMU scientists had monitored turbidity currents in the Atlantic cascading off the continental shelf at 100 kilometres an hour, carving out submarine canyons and depositing millions of tons of silt. Like snow avalanches, the shock wave from one could trigger another. If he was caught anywhere near an underwater displacement of such magnitude he would be doomed without hope of reprieve.

Even before he tried the engines he knew it was a forlorn hope. The erratic hum as he powered up the unit only confirmed that the water jets were clogged with silt and incapable of shifting the module from the grave it had dug itself. There was no way the IMU engineers could have anticipated that the first deployment of their brainchild would be under twenty metres of ooze at the bottom of an uncharted abyss.

His one remaining option was a double-lock chamber behind him that allowed divers to enter and exit. The casing above was enveloped in a swirling cloud of sediment which might still be sufficiently fluid for escape, though with each passing minute the chances were diminishing as more of the particulate matter came out of solution and buried the module ever deeper in a mass of compacted sediment.

After a final glance at the sonar profile to memorize its features, he made his way to the double-lock chamber. The retaining wheel turned easily and he stepped inside. There were two compartments, each little larger than a closet, the first an equipment storage and kitting-up room and the second the double-lock chamber itself. He pushed his way past a rack of E-suits and trimix regulators until he stood before a metallic monster that looked like something from a science-fiction B movie.

Once again Jack had reason to be grateful to Costas. With the command module as yet untested he had insisted on a one-atmosphere diving suit as a back-up, a measure Jack had only grudgingly accepted because of the extra time needed for installation. In the event he had helped to stow the suit inside the chamber so was closely familiar with the escape procedure they had devised.

He stepped onto the grid in front of the suit and unlocked the coupling ring, pivoting the helmet forward and exposing the control panel inside. After satisfying himself that all systems were operational, he disconnected the belts that secured it to the bulkhead and scanned the exterior to make sure the joints were all fully sealed.

Officially designated Autonomous Deep Sea Anthropod, the suit had more in common with submersibles like the Aquapod than conventional scuba equipment. The Mark 5 ADSA allowed solo penetrations to ocean depths in excess of four hundred metres. The life support system was a rebreather which injected oxygen while scrubbing carbon dioxide from exhaled air to provide safe breathing gas for up to forty-eight hours. Like earlier suits, the ADSA was pressure resistant with liquid-filled joints and an all-metal carapace, though the material used was titanium-reinforced high-tensile steel which gave an unprecedented pressure rating of 2,000 metres water depth.

The ADSA exemplified the great strides made by IMU in deep submersible technology. An ultrasonic multi-directional sonar fed a three-dimensional moving image into a snap-down headset, providing a virtual-reality navigation system in zero visibility. For mid-water mobility the suit was equipped with a computerized variable-buoyancy device and a vectored-thrust water-jet pack, a combination that gave the versatility of an astronaut on a space walk but without the need for a grounding tether.

After uncoupling the suit Jack stepped back into the main compartment and quickly backtracked to the weapons locker. From the top shelf he took a Beretta 9 millimetre handgun to replace the one confiscated by Aslan and shoved it into his flight suit. He then uncoupled an SA80-A2 assault rifle and grabbed three magazines. After slinging the rifle he extracted two small packages of Semtex plastic explosive, normally used for underwater demolition work, and two briefcase-sized boxes each containing a mesh of bubble mines and a detonator transceiver.

Back in the double-lock chamber he hooked the boxes to a pair of carabiners on the front of the ADSA and secured them with a retaining strap. He reached over and slid the rifle and magazines into a pouch under the control panel, the bull-pup SA80 fitting easily inside. After closing the hatch to the chamber and spinning the locking wheel he ascended the metal ladder and clambered into the suit. It was surprisingly spacious, providing room for him to withdraw his hands from the metal arms and operate the console controls. Despite its half-ton weight he was able to flex the leg joints and open and close the pincer-like hands. After checking the oxygen supply, he shut the dome and locked the neck seal, his body now encased in a self-contained life support system and the world outside the viewports suddenly remote and dispensable.

He was about to leave Seaquest for the last time. There was no chance for reflection, only an utter determination that her loss should not be in vain. Any sadness would come later.

He switched on the low-intensity interior lighting, adjusted the thermostat to 20 degrees Celsius and activated the sensor array. After checking the buoyancy and propulsion controls he extended the right-hand pincer against a switch on the door. The fluorescent lighting dimmed and water began to spray down. As the turgid liquid rose above the viewports, Jack felt the damp patch where the blood had oozed from his gunshot wound of the day before. He tried to steady his nerves.

“One small step for a man,” he muttered. “One giant step for mankind.”

When the hatch opened and the elevator raised him above the module, Jack was engulfed in darkness, a black infinity which seemed to imprison him with no hope of escape. He activated the floodlights.

The view was like nothing he had seen before. It was a world lacking all standard points of reference, one where the normal dimensions of space and shape seemed to continuously fold in on each other. The beam lit up luminous clouds of silt that swirled in all directions, slow-motion whirlpools that undulated like a multitude of miniature galaxies. He extended the manipulator arms and watched the silt separate into tendrils and streamers, shapes that soon gathered themselves together again and disappeared. In the harsh glare it seemed deathly white, like a pall of volcanic ash, the beam reflecting off particles a hundred times finer than beach sand.

Jack knew with utter certainty that he was the only living being ever to have penetrated this world. Some of the suspended sediment was biogenic, derived from diatoms and other organisms that had fallen from above, but unlike the abyssal plains of the Atlantic or the Pacific, the depths of the Black Sea lacked even microscopic life. He truly was in an underworld, a lifeless vacuum unparalleled anywhere else on earth.

For a moment it seemed as if the swirling mass would materialize as ghostly faces of long-dead mariners fated to dance a macabre jig for all eternity with the ebb and flow of the silt. Jack forced his mind to concentrate on the task at hand. The sediment was settling much faster than he had anticipated, the particles compacting with the glutinous density of mud in a tidal flat. Already it had buried the top of the command module and was creeping alarmingly up the legs of the ADSA. He had only seconds to act before it became an immovable sarcophagus on the seabed.

He engaged the buoyancy compensator and filled the reservoir on his back with air, quickly reducing the suit to neutral. As the readout turned to positive he pushed the joystick and twisted the throttle. With a lurch he moved upward, the sediment cascading past with increasing rapidity. He switched off the water jet to avoid clogging the intake and continued his ascent using buoyancy alone. For what seemed an eternity he rose through an unrelenting maelstrom. Then almost thirty metres above the wreckage he was free of it. He rose another twenty metres before neutralizing his buoyancy and angling his lights down towards the ooze that now entombed the wreckage of Seaquest.

The scene was impossible to fix to any kind of reality. It was like a satellite image of a vast tropical storm, the eddies of sediment swirling slowly like giant cyclones. He half expected to see flashes of light from electrical storms raging beneath.

He turned his attention to the sonar scanner he had activated moments before. The circular screen revealed the trench-like profile of the chasm, its features more sharply accentuated now the sensor array was clear of silt. He called up the NAVSURV program and tapped in the grid co-ordinates he had memorized for Seaquest’s final surface position and the north shore of the island. With known reference co-ordinates NAVSURV could plot present position, lay in a best-fit course and make continuous modifications as the terrain unfolded on the sonar display.

He flipped on the autopilot and watched as the computer fed data into the propulsion and buoyancy units. As the program finalized, he extracted the headset from its housing and pulled down the visor. The headset was hard-wired to the computer via a flexicord umbilical but still allowed complete freedom of movement, the visor acting as a see-through screen so he could still monitor the viewports.

He activated a control and the visor came to life. His view was filtered through a pale green lattice that changed in shape with every movement of his head. Like a pilot in a flight simulator, he was seeing a virtual-reality image of the topography around him, a three-dimensional version of the sonar display. The softly hued lines were a reassurance that he was not trapped in some eternal nightmare, that this was a finite world with boundaries that could be surmounted if his luck continued to hold.

As the water jets fired up and he began to move forward, Jack saw that the metallic joints of the arms had turned a vivid yellow. He remembered why the depths of the Black Sea were so utterly sterile. It was hydrogen sulphide, a byproduct of bacteria decomposing organic matter that flowed in with the rivers. He was mired in a vat of poison bigger than the world’s entire chemical weapons arsenal, a reeking brew that would destroy his sense of smell at the first whiff and kill him with one breath.

The ADSA had been designed to the latest specifications for chemical and biological exposure as well as extreme pressure environments. But Jack knew it was only a matter of time before sulphur corrosion ate through a joint where the metal was exposed. Even a tiny ingression would prove deadly. He felt a cold wave of certainty pass through him, a sure knowledge he was trespassing in a world where even the dead were unwanted.

After a final systems check he gripped the throttle and stared grimly into the void in front of him.

“Right,” he muttered. “Time to revisit old friends.”

Less than five minutes after emerging from the silt storm Jack had reached the western wall of the canyon. The three-dimensional lattice projected on his visor melded precisely with the contours of the rock face now visible ahead, a colossal precipice that reared four hundred metres above him. As he panned the light over the wall he saw that the rock was as stark as a freshly hewn quarry face, its surface untouched by marine growth since titanic forces had rent the sea floor a million years before.

He powered the transverse stern thruster and brought the ADSA round on a southerly course parallel to the rock face. Twenty metres below him the sediment maelstrom seemed to seethe and boil, a forbidding netherworld halfway between liquid and solid that lapped the wall of the canyon. By maintaining a constant altitude above the slope he was steadily climbing, the depth gauge registering a rise of almost a hundred metres in his first half-kilometre along the canyon wall.

As the gradient angled more sharply, a sector of the canyon floor appeared that was entirely denuded of sediment. Jack guessed it was an area where sediment had accumulated and then avalanched down the slope. He knew this was a danger zone; any disturbance could dislodge sediment further up the slope and engulf him.

The exposed sea floor was covered in a bizarre accretion, a crystalline mass stained a sickly yellow by the hydrogen sulphide that poisoned the water. He bled the buoyancy reservoir and sank down, at the same time extending a vacuum probe to sample the accretion. Moments later the results flashed up on the screen. It was sodium chloride, common salt. He was looking at fallout from the evaporation thousands of years before, at the vast bed of brine that had precipitated into the abyss when the Bosporus had sealed off the Black Sea during the Ice Age. The canyon Jack had christened the Atlantis Rift would have been a sump for the entire south-eastern sector of the sea.

As he jetted forward, the carpet of brine became patchy and gave way to a contorted landscape of shadowy shapes. It was a lava field, a jumble of frozen pirouettes where magma had welled up and solidified as it met the frigid water.

His view was interrupted by an opaque haze that shimmered like a diaphanous veil. The external temperature gauge soared to a horrifying 350 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt lead. He barely registered the change before he was jolted violently forward and the ADSA spiralled out of control towards the canyon floor. On impulse he switched off the thrusters just as the ADSA bounced and then came to rest facedown, the forward battery pod immobilized between folds of lava and the visor pressed against a jagged eruption of rock.

Jack raised himself on all fours inside the ADSA and crouched low over the control panel. He saw with relief that the LCD screens were still functioning. Once again he had been incredibly lucky. If there had been significant damage he would probably have been dead by now, the external pressure of several tons per square inch bearing down on any weakness and guaranteeing a swift if hideous end.

He put a mental block on the nightmarish world outside and concentrated on extricating himself from the lava folds. The propulsion unit would be of little use as it was mounted on the back and only provided lateral and transverse thrust. He would have to use the buoyancy compensator. The manual override was operated from a two-way trigger on the joystick, backward pressure bleeding air in and forward pressure venting it.

After bracing himself, he squeezed hard. He could hear the burst of air entering the reservoir and watched the dial creep up to maximum capacity. To his dismay there was absolutely no movement. He emptied the reservoir and filled it again, with the same result. He knew he could not repeat the procedure without depleting the air supply beyond safety margins.

His only fallback was to wrest the ADSA physically from the seabed. So far he had only been deploying the ADSA in submersible mode but it was also a true inner-space suit, designed for the underwater equivalent of moon walking. Despite its cumbersome appearance, it was highly mobile, its thirty-kilogramme submerged weight allowing movement that would have been the envy of any astronaut.

He carefully extended his arms and legs until he was spread-eagled. After angling the pincers into the seabed and locking the joints, he wedged his elbows against the upper carapace with his hands splayed below. Everything now depended on his ability to rip the battery pod from the vice of rock that was holding it.

With every fibre in his being Jack heaved upwards. As he arched back into the harness he was convulsed by pain from his gunshot wound. He knew it was now or never, that his body had been pushed to the limit and would soon lose the strength to do his bidding.

He was about to collapse in exhaustion when there was a grinding sound and a barely perceptible upward movement. He threw in all his reserves and strained one last time. Suddenly the ADSA broke free and sprang up on its feet, the jolt throwing him against the console.

He was free.

After flooding the buoyancy reservoir to prevent the ADSA from rocketing upwards, he looked around him. Ahead were undulations where slow-flowing rivers of lava had solidified into bulbous pillows of rock. To his right was a huge lava pillar, a hollow cast five metres high where quick-flowing lava had trapped water which had then boiled and pushed the cooling rock upwards. Next to it was another eruption of igneous rock, this one more like a miniature volcano that showed up yellow and red-brown in the floodlight. Jack guessed that the scorching blast of heat that had jolted him had come from a hydrothermal vent, an open pore in the seabed where superheated water belched up from the magma lake below the rift. As he looked at the miniature volcano, the cone ejected a jet-black plume like a factory chimney. It was what geologists called a black smoker, a cloud laden with minerals that precipitated to blanket the surrounding sea floor. He thought back to the extraordinary entrance chamber to Atlantis, its walls shimmering with minerals which could well have originated in a deep-sea vent thrust upwards as the volcano formed.

Hydrothermal vents should be teeming with life, Jack thought uneasily, each one a miniature oasis that attracted larval organisms drifting down from far above. They were unique ecosystems based on chemicals rather than photosynthesis, on the ability of microbes to metabolize the hydrogen sulphide from the vents and provide the first links in a food chain utterly divorced from the life-giving properties of the sun. But instead of armies of blood-red worms and carpets of organisms, there was nothing; the lava chimneys loomed around him like the blackened stumps of trees after a forest fire. In the poisonous depths of the Black Sea not even the simplest bacteria could survive. It was a wasteland where the wonder of creation seemed to have been eclipsed by the powers of darkness. Jack suddenly wanted to be away from this place that was so utterly devoid of life, that seemed to repudiate all the forces that had brought him into existence.

He tore his gaze away from the bleak scene outside and scanned the instrument display. The sonar showed he was 30 metres from the western face of the chasm and 150 metres shallower than the wreck of Seaquest, his absolute depth now reading just over 300 metres. He was a third of the way to the island, which now lay just over two kilometres due south.

He looked ahead and saw a milky haze like a towering sand dune. It was the leading edge of a drift of unstable sediment, an indication that the area of substrate exposed by the avalanche was coming to an end. All round him were scour marks caused by previous slides. He needed to be above the zone of turbulence in case his motion triggered another avalanche. He closed his left hand round the buoyancy control and his right hand on the thruster stick, at the same time leaning forward for a final look outside.

What he saw was a terrifying apparition. The wall of silt was slowly, remorselessly swirling towards him like some vast tsunami, all the more horrifying because there was no noise. He barely had time to press the buoyancy trigger before he was engulfed in a whirling storm of darkness.