Atlantis

CHAPTER 27

Costas blinked furiously as the scalding water dripped off his face. He had been sent sprawling on the rock floor after being thrust for an appalling moment into the vapour column, the vast pillar of white that rose in front of him to the oculus far above.

He was back in the audience chamber, back where he had last seen Jack. He had passed out so many times over the last few hours that he had lost all measure of time, but he guessed that a night had gone and it was now a full day since they had stumbled out of the labyrinth into the glare of Aslan’s searchlight.

He steeled his mind for what would come next. How did you get from the submarine? Over and over again, so often his body had become a continuous mass of welts and bruises. Yet Costas was a born optimist, and each time Aslan’s thugs beat him he felt a sliver of hope, a hint that Ben and Andy had stayed the course and were still holding out against the intruders.

With his face pressed against the floor he could just make out a veiled and blindfolded figure seated on the throne a few metres from him. As it came into focus the blindfold was ripped off and he realized it was Katya. She looked at him without recognition, and then her eyes widened in horror at his appearance. He gave her his best effort at a smile.

What happened next sent a chill of helplessness through him. A short, stocky figure came into view, wearing the standard black overall but clearly identifiable as a woman. She held a vicious curved knife of Arab design against Katya’s throat, then slowly trailed it towards her midriff. Katya shut her eyes but the whites of her knuckles showed where her hands gripped the throne.

“If I had my way we would end this now.” Costas could just make out the Russian words spat into Katya’s face. “And I will have my way. That veil will be your shroud.”

With a sickening jolt Costas realized it was Olga. The drab, yet handsome woman he had seen on the helipad at Alexandria, whose voice he had heard so many times over the last hellish hours. She must be a monster. As Olga continued to taunt Katya, Costas struggled to raise himself but was brought down by a paralysing blow to the back.

There was a commotion at the edge of the chamber where sunlight streamed through the entranceway. With his one good eye Costas saw Aslan heaving into view, supported on either side by a black-clad figure. He shuffled down the steps until he stood panting and wheezing in front of Olga, waving away his two helpers impatiently.

For a second Costas caught Aslan’s eyes darting to and fro between the two women, a hint of doubt in his expression before he settled on Olga. At that moment Costas realized she was no mere minion, that she held more sway than Aslan could ever have acknowledged. Katya’s expression showed that she too knew the truth, that his megalomania had been stoked by another evil force that had twisted the last vestiges of fatherhood from him.

“You will leave now.” Aslan spoke in Russian to Olga. “Fly Vultura’s helicopter back to Abkhazia and contact our customer. I believe our merchandise will be ready for transport shortly.”

Olga casually swept the knife past Katya’s face as she turned and mounted the steps with the two men. She was shaking slightly, her lips trembling with the sick excitement of what she had nearly done. Costas stared in horror, marvelling at the malevolence that emanated from her.

After they had gone Aslan laboriously bent towards Costas, his face now a terrifying image of rage. He yanked Costas’ head up and held a pistol under his chin. Costas could smell his breath, like stale meat. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy, his skin oily and deadened. Costas recoiled, but returned Aslan’s gaze.

“Before you emerged yesterday I sent three of my men down the same tunnel,” Aslan hissed. “They have not returned. Where are they?”

Costas suddenly remembered the bubbles coming up from the volcanic vent in the final stretch of underwater passageway.

“Took a wrong turning, I guess.”

Aslan whipped the pistol across his face and Costas jerked back in agony, blood spattering over the throne.

“Then you will lead us the right way.” He waved the gun over the diving equipment now arrayed on the floor, then gestured towards the adjacent throne where Katya was struggling against two of his thugs. “Or my daughter will be initiated into the rites of sharia rather earlier than she might have expected.”

As Jack rocketed up through the silt he focused all his attention on the navigation system. The radar terrain-mapper showed he was ascending perilously close to the eastern wall of the canyon; its rim was now less than fifty metres above. The depth read-out was rising at more than two metres per second, a rate that would increase dramatically as the external pressure reduced but which Jack could ill afford to slow until he was clear of the rift.

Suddenly a red light flashed as the radar sweep alerted him to a hazard overhead. In the split second that he saw the lip of the canyon he spun east and gunned the stern thrusters. He braced himself for an impact that miraculously never came, the ADSA just missing the overhang which would have eviscerated the propulsion and buoyancy pack and sent him plummeting to his death.

As soon as he had cleared the canyon, he bled the reservoir until he was neutrally buoyant, and then tilted forward using the vectored thrusters. He seemed to be flying above a giant slow-moving storm, a surging mass that lapped the rim of the canyon and obscured the yawning crevasse below. Jack had colleagues who would itch to return to this place, using sub-bottom probes to rediscover the hydrothermal vents, but he sincerely hoped he had made his only foray into a wasteland that seemed to encapsulate all the worst nightmares about the ocean abyss.

And now in the gloom ahead was the discovery that had brought them here, a prospect that made Jack’s heart race as he gunned the submersible towards the co-ordinates of the island. The depth gauge read 148 metres, almost the level of the submerged ancient shoreline. He was still in the reducing environment below the oxycline and the blue-grey mud was devoid of visible life. After several minutes he began to make out a ridge, a continuous low berm which he realized must be the ancient beach escarpment.

He would be entering the lost city over its eastern quarter, at the opposite end from the sector he and Costas had explored in the Aquapods two days previously. The first sight of silt-clad structures brought back the intense thrill he had felt then, the wonder of their discovery suddenly eclipsing the trials of the past twenty-four hours. With mounting excitement he rose over the berm and surveyed the scene in front of him.

His mind turned immediately to his friends. By now Sea Venture would have heard nothing from her sister ship for hours and would have alerted the Turkish and Georgian authorities. But they had agreed to inform the Russians of the submarine discovery first and a concerted response might take days.

Help could still come too late.

He prayed that Ben and Andy still held fast. Aslan’s men would try to make their way through the labyrinth, to take them by surprise. The only way they could do that would be to have Costas or Katya as a guide, to force them to tap the code on the submarine’s casing that would make the crewmen open the hatch. Jack knew they would have little chance of survival after that. He must do all he could to contact Ben and Andy, then somehow make his way back to the audience chamber and defend the passageway as best he could.

The battery was running dangerously low and he knew he must conserve it for the final effort. He dropped to the seabed and began to walk the ADSA along a wide roadway, each step detonating a small cloud of silt. To the right was a line of curiously familiar shapes blanketed in sediment. Jack realized with astonishment that he was looking at the world’s first carts, more than 2,000 years older than the first wheeled transport recorded in Mesopotamia.

To his left was a deep gully, once an inlet from the sea, which widened into a rectilinear basin about thirty metres across. He passed neatly stacked piles of logs, probably fir, aspen and juniper ancestral to the forests that still shrouded north-eastern Turkey, all perfectly preserved in the anoxic environment. The view beyond surpassed his wildest expectations. On the foreshore were two semi-complete hulls, each about twenty metres long and raised up on wooden formers. It could have been an image from any modern boatyard on the Black Sea. The vessels were open-hulled and narrow-beamed, designed to be paddled rather than rowed, but otherwise as sleek and refined as Viking longships. As he approached the first hull a gentle tap with the manipulator arm to dislodge the silt revealed sewn-plank joinery, precisely the technique he and Mustafa had guessed for the Neolithic mariners.

Further on the foreshore was littered with stacks of adzed planks and coils of thick cordage. In between lay five sets of formers aligned side-by-side towards the basin, each large enough for a hull forty metres in length. The supports were empty and the shipwrights long gone, but for a few desperate weeks in the middle of the sixth millennium BC they must have been a hive of construction activity unmatched until the Egyptian age of the pyramid builders. As the waters drowned the lower reaches of the city the people must have moved their tools and timber up the slopes, unable to comprehend that their home would soon be lost forever. Jack had found one of the key staging posts of history, the place where all the energy and wisdom of Atlantis had been poised to ignite civilization from western Europe to the Indus Valley.

The terrain-mapper began to reveal the contours of the slope ahead. He switched to submersible mode and jetted beyond the ancient coastal plain over a plateau the size of a racetrack, a wide opening in its centre. He remembered the water conduit in the volcano and guessed this was the second stage in the system, a huge rock-cut reservoir that served as a dispersal point for aqueducts fanning down into the industrial and domestic quarters of the city.

He continued in a southerly direction up the slope. According to the sketch map he had fed into the computer he should now be approaching the upper reaches of the processional way. Seconds later the terrain-mapper provided vindication, the 3-D display showing the stepped face of the eastern pyramid. Just beyond it the irregular outline of the volcano was beginning to materialize, and in between was a telltale cylindrical shape that blocked the gap between the pyramid and the jagged rock face.

Out of the eerie gloom a mass of twisted metal came into view. The ADSA seemed insignificant beside the submarine’s immense bulk; the hull casing towered higher than a four-storey building and extended the length of a football pitch. Cautiously he made his way over the sheared-off propeller, thankful that the electric motor in the ADSA was barely audible and the water jets produced minimal turbulence. He deactivated the floodlights and dimmed the LCD displays.

As he passed over the rear escape hatch behind the reactor chamber, he thought briefly of Captain Antonov and his crew, their irradiated corpses another addition to the harvest of death reaped by this grim sea. He tried to dispel the gruesome image as he approached the soaring form of the conning tower. In the gloom beyond he could just make out the halo from a searchlight array above the starboard foredeck. The lights were mounted on a submersible that had settled like a predatory insect on the DSRV where it was docked to the submarine’s forward escape hatch. Aslan’s men had gained access to the Kazbek by docking to the DSRV’s rear hatch, using a single-lock mating ring.

Jack set the ADSA down gingerly on the anechoic coating of the submarine. He pushed his hands into the manipulator arms and extended them outwards until he could see the joints at the elbows and wrists. The metal was yellow and pitted from the hydrogen sulphide but the sealings had held. He flexed both arms inwards until they touched the outer of the two metal boxes he had strapped to the front of the suit above the battery pack. He used the three metal digits at the end of each arm to prise open the box and extract the contents. He then cut the binding with the pincer and unravelled a mesh of Ping-Pong sized balls, all joined together by a web of fine filaments.

Normally the mines were divided into strands and deployed as a floating umbrella over an archaeological site. Each of the two hundred charges was primed to explode on contact and was potentially lethal to a diver. Kept together they formed a single high-explosive charge, enough to put a submersible out of action permanently.

After activating the detonator he withdrew his hands and grasped the control stick, using the buoyancy trigger to rise cautiously off the submarine. Although he was beyond the main arc of illumination, he was wary of being spotted and flew in a wide sweep off the port side of Kazbek and back again dead astern of the enemy submersible. He closed in behind the metre-wide drum that protected the submersible’s propeller, putting the buoyancy system on automatic to ensure he would remain neutral while his hands were off the controls. He feathered the stern thruster until he was as far forward as he could go and then quickly reinserted his hands in the manipulator arms.

Just as he was about to secure the mines under the shaft with a carabiner, he was thrown back from the propeller housing. He began to spiral like an astronaut out of control, the orb of light from the submersible receding alarmingly as he struggled to right himself using the lateral thrusters. After finally coming to a halt he looked back and saw the turbulence coming from the propeller shaft. He had already felt uneasy that the submersible’s floodlights were on, an unnecessary drain of battery reserves, and now he saw a radio buoy being winched inside.

He gunned the stern thrusters and jetted back towards Kazbek’s conning tower. The bubble mines were precariously balanced where he had left them on the submersible’s propeller housing. If they slipped off, his enterprise was doomed. He would need to blow the charge as soon as he was behind Kazbek’s fin and out of range of the explosive shock wave.

He reached into his chest pocket to ready the remote detonator, a small unit almost identical in appearance to a hand-held radio. He had preset the downlink to channel 8.

Jack allowed himself a quick glance to starboard as he approached Kazbek’s upper casing. To his dismay the submersible had decoupled and was now less than ten metres away, its cylindrical form rising towards him like a predatory shark. Through the viewport a face stared directly at him, its expression showing shocked surprise and fury.

Jack had to think fast. He could never hope to outrun the submersible. He was closely familiar with the type, a derivative of the British LR5 rescue sub with hydraulic thrusters tiltable through 180 degrees that gave it the agility of a helicopter. It was too close to risk detonating the charges, not only because of the danger to himself but also because the shock wave might damage Kazbek’s emergency life support system and destabilize the warheads. His only chance was to stand and fight, to lure the submersible into a duel that would seem suicidally one-sided. His gamble rested on the dead weight of the submersible. With a full passenger complement it would be sluggish, and each lunge would require a wide turning circle which might take it beyond the danger zone.

Like some space-age matador, Jack landed upright on the casing of Kazbek and turned to face his assailant. He barely had time to flex his legs before the submersible was on him, its pontoons missing him by a hair’s breadth as it sped over the hull. He prepared for another onslaught with his arms outstretched, a toreador taunting a bull. He saw the submersible vent its ballast tanks and slow down as it climbed the cliff face and pivoted round for another dive. It swooped down with terrifying velocity, the floodlights blinding him as he fell facedown on the casing. As it rocketed overhead, the ferment rolled him onto his back and the dangling end of the bubble mines swept perilously close. There was no way the mesh could survive another roller-coaster ride without slipping off or becoming entangled in the propeller, a potentially deadly outcome if it triggered an explosion too close to the submarine.

Jack watched as the submersible hurtled off to a new starting point, its diminishing form framed against the vast southern face of the pyramid. This time Jack remained prostrate on the casing as he estimated the distance. Twenty metres. Twenty-five metres. Thirty metres. It was now or never. Just as the submersible began to turn he pressed channel 8.

There was a searing flash followed by a succession of jolts that pummelled his body like sonic booms. The explosion had torn off the submersible’s rudders and left the wreckage spiralling crazily towards the seabed. The shock wave would have killed the occupants instantly.