The Gods of Atlantis

10

Over Europe

J ack scanned the instrument panel in front of him, noting that the airspeed indicator and altimeter had shown near-constant figures since they had flown over the northern shore of the Adriatic Sea fifteen minutes ago. He was strapped into the rear ejector seat of an RAF Tornado GR4, and since their exhilarating take-off from Incirlik airbase in Turkey he had managed to put aside thinking about his destination and let himself enjoy the thrill of flying in a fast jet. They had flown low over Troy, allowing him a fascinating view of the ancient site, as well as the Dardanelles Strait where any prehistoric exodus from the Black Sea to the west must have taken place. Now he peered sideways through the canopy over the swept-back starboard wing, looking past the silvery nacelle of the long-range drop tank and seeing the snowy peaks of the Alps some twenty thousand feet below. He turned back to face the upper part of the instrument panel, which blocked his view of the pilot’s seat in front, and spoke into the intercom. ‘That looks like Innsbruck in Austria below us, Paul. What’s our ETA?’

‘I’m dropping from six hundred to five hundred knots in fifteen minutes and then finding a lower altitude. All going according to plan, we should be flying over Hanover in Germany and coming in to land in about thirty-five minutes.’

‘Copy that.’

‘You okay? Lunch still inside you?’

‘I’m having the time of my life. I can’t see how this kind of flying could ever pale.’

‘That’s the problem. It’s a constant adrenalin kick. I’ve done thousands of hours in Tornados, including four big operational deployments – the Gulf War, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan. I’ve had enough of war, Jack, but I still love the flying. I can’t believe this is going to be my last official fast-jet flight.’

‘Congratulations on the Distinguished Service Order, by the way. Well deserved.’

‘Those things should go to the ground crews. They’re the ones who keep these birds flying. The unsung heroes.’

‘That’s the way I feel about my diving expeditions. It’s always a team effort.’ Jack cast his mind back more than two decades. Paul Llewelyn had been one of his close-knit group of friends at Cambridge University, where they had shared college rooms in their first year; he was a fellow diver and had gone along with Jack on his first expeditions to the Mediterranean. They had not seen each other for several years now, but Jack had spent an hour with Paul in the officers’ mess at Incirlik while the air-traffic controllers worked on clearance for a modified flight plan to his destination in Germany and the aircraft was fitted with long-range drop tanks. He had sworn Paul to secrecy and told him about their Atlantis dive, then briefed him about the excavation at the bunker site in Germany and about Maurice Hiebermeyer, another mutual friend from Cambridge. He had outlined the security and contamination risk at the bunker and why Paul would not be allowed out of the aircraft when they landed at the old NATO runway next to the excavation site. Beyond that he had let himself enjoy the experience of flying, and being with an old friend. He spoke into the intercom again. ‘Paul, do you remember the last time we flew together? In that rickety old Bulldog trainer in the University Air Squadron?’

‘That time you were in the driver’s seat. You actually got your wings just before I did. I’m still trying to live that down.’

‘Learning to fly was just part of my toolkit. I wanted to get all the skills I could under my belt. I guessed I was going to have to fly at some time in the future, and I was right. But for you, flying and getting into the RAF was always your main passion, like diving was for me.’

‘It’s still there, Jack. All I ever wanted was to get inside one of these things. And here I am now, an RAF group captain, about to be booted up to one-star rank so I can fly a desk in the Ministry of Defence in London. I’ll be like one of those mothballed planes in the Arizona desert, waiting for a reactivation everyone knows is never going to happen. All fast-jet jocks say the same when they reach my stage. It’s as if we’ve gone beyond our sell-by date, but they can’t quite bring themselves to scrap us.’

‘Ever think of retirement?’

‘I’d retire from the air force, but only to fly again. You?’

‘Rebecca says I need more sabbaticals, and to stop taking all the best projects. She said IMU needs to get more expeditions going with other people leading them. People like herself.’

‘I can’t wait to meet her. Her mother’s death must have been a terrible blow, but it’s amazing how kids can weather storms. So Elizabeth disappeared back to Naples without telling you she was pregnant? I bet you can’t believe you’ve only known Rebecca for three years.’

‘Her kidnapping last year really brought it all home again.’

‘ Kidnapping? Jesus, Jack, what have you been getting into?’

‘It was only for forty-eight hours. That was close to a lifetime for me, though. I found out a few things about myself, I can tell you. About what protecting your own will make you do. All I can say is I’ve got more blood on my hands than the last time we met. It’s wrapped up with the bunker discovery, so the security issue is ongoing.’

‘But she’s all right?’

‘Back at school in New York City after working with us at Troy. You met Ben Kershaw when you visited Seaquest II a few years ago? He heads up the IMU security team and is looking after her. Round-the-clock surveillance. And Rebecca’s developing quite a few survival skills of her own. She’s about to get her glider pilot’s licence, you know. If she can fit it in with her advanced nitrox diving course. And her weekend co-op programme at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.’

‘Christ, Jack. Sounds like a chip off the old block.’

‘That’s why I could never retire. She needs management.’

‘Been there, done that. Remember, I have three teenage daughters. Trying to keep Rebecca under control is exactly what you don’t want to be doing.’

Jack laughed. ‘Advice taken. But back to retirement. My friend Costas jokes that there’s an inner philosopher in me ready to retreat to some remote cabin and grow a long white beard like Charles Darwin, cogitating for my remaining years before producing the definitive tome on human prehistory.’

‘You always were the thinking action man, but I really don’t see it.’

‘Nope.’

‘I haven’t met Costas yet, but I’ve seen him on the IMU films. Seems like a good guy.’

‘He and I first met during my short-term commission in the Navy; you remember? Between graduating and my doctorate, before I founded IMU. Costas had been at MIT before going to the US Navy research establishment to work on submersibles, his metier. We actually met in the naval base at Izmir in Turkey, where I discovered he was a diver and cajoled him into doing some shipwreck exploration with me. He’s in charge of the engineering department at IMU, but he’s a lot more than that. I couldn’t imagine doing an expedition without him. He keeps me on the straight and narrow. He’s a rock.’

‘Efram Jacobovich still pumps money into your foundation?’

‘We had some pretty amazing friends at Cambridge, don’t you think? I remember the first time I met Efram in the dining hall at college. He’d thought up the internet ten years before it was officially invented. He had software tycoon written all over him. I took him on a frigid dive in the English Channel that put him in bed shivering for a week, but something about the experience must have struck a chord for him to give IMU its endowment ten years later. He’s been a fantastic friend and supporter.’

‘And your father gave IMU your family estate in the Fal estuary? I remember my visits there when we dived off the south coast looking for that elusive Phoenician shipwreck. Perfect place for a maritime research campus.’

‘It just seemed right. My father’s family had been in Cornwall since Tudor times, when the estate was given to my ancestor Captain Jack Howard by King Henry VIII for services rendered against the Spanish. In Spanish history books he was a pirate, but in ours a glorious hero. Since then the family history has seen quite a bit more adventure on the high seas but also a gentle decline into aristocratic impoverishment. My own apparently exotic childhood moving around the world was actually as much about my father evading financial inconvenience as it was his bohemian life as a painter. Luckily there was a trust fund that paid for my boarding school, and another one that kept the Howard Gallery and its art collection from the debt collectors. My father was a great supporter of the idea of IMU, but it also came as something of a relief to him, because he could bequeath the estate to our foundation as a tax break.’

‘I remember reading the obituaries. What was it now, eight years ago? I’ve got very fond memories of him, and your mother. How’s she doing?’

‘Still lives there and runs the place, really, in between mountain trekking expeditions. She and Rebecca get on like a house on fire. Still has her huge garden and her dogs.’

‘So what about old Heimy? You should be seeing him within an hour.’

‘It’s funny – that’s what Rebecca calls him, too. Of course he got married last year, as you know.’

‘Maurice Hiebermeyer, married. It beggars belief. I got an invite, but I was on deployment in Afghanistan. Amazing he remembered me, but I always knew there was a thoughtful and loving human being inside the fanatical Egyptologist. Lucky he found a woman who spotted that too. Makes my head reel to think of it. Does he still have those awful khaki lederhosen?’

‘Still wears them at half-mast.’

‘You remember our little escapade in Egypt that summer after graduation? You illegally scaling the Great Pyramid at Giza to spend the night on the top waiting with a camera, me flying Maurice in a dilapidated old Tiger Moth biplane for some dawn aerobatics over the Sphinx. It was something to do with re-creating a National Geographic picture Maurice had seen from the 1920s showing RAF biplanes over the pyramids. We just had to have a go, otherwise we weren’t going to hear the end of it.’

Jack laughed. ‘It was also a shrewd publicity stunt. Maurice had spent weeks camped outside the Egyptian Antiquities Authority, trying to get them to take his discovery in the Fayum desert seriously. If you remember how he looked in those shorts, you could see what the problem was. But our stunt got us hauled in front of the director-general himself, and Maurice instantly won him over with his knowledge of all things Egyptian. I can still see the two of them on their knees on the office floor poring over Maurice’s sketch map of his discovery, the mummy necropolis that was to make his name. And now there he is, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Alexandria and arguably the world’s foremost Egyptologist.’

‘Seems a long way from that to unearthing a Nazi bunker in Germany.’

‘He volunteered to take my place. His family home was not far from there, and he said he felt a personal responsibility as a German to address the past.’

‘We’re about to lose altitude now. Just in case you need it, the sick bag’s in the pocket in front of you.’ Jack felt his stomach lurch as the aircraft suddenly dropped out of the sky, hurtling at a forty-five-degree angle towards the patchwork of fields now visible below. They levelled out at three thousand feet, and Jack watched the wings sweep forward and the airspeed indicator drop to three hundred knots. Paul’s voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Okay, Jack? That’s Lower Saxony ahead of us. We’ll be over the airfield in a few minutes. I’m going to do several wide sweeps around so you can get your bearings.’

Jack swallowed hard, feeling his stomach return to normal. ‘Do you know this area? I remember your first RAF posting was in Germany, in the late 1980s.’

‘I was always fascinated with the Second World War. I spent a lot of my leave time travelling around, trying to come to grips with what happened in those final months in 1945. With the fall of Berlin and the confrontation with the Soviets, it was as if the history of that time was suppressed, almost as if there was a conscious effort by the Allied authorities to put a lid on it. Nobody in Germany wanted to dwell on the nightmare, and there was a desperate need to get people to look forward. But to me there still seemed an awful lot of unanswered questions. There’s plenty of unexcavated history here, just below the surface. With the end of the Cold War, I felt the lid might blow off. I know you can’t really say more, but I’m guessing that’s what this bunker excavation is all about.’

Jack looked out as the aircraft banked to starboard and saw runway lights in the haze ahead. Seconds later they swept over the airbase and the flat land beyond, a large area of low scrub and marsh punctuated by patches of plantation forest. Paul came on the intercom again. ‘We’re doing a wide turn to come in from the south. I did a stopover here once in the 1980s, and the Luftwaffe guys at the base told me a bit about the history. There was a large old-growth forest here, a former royal hunting ground. On the day the British liberated the camp at Belsen a few miles from here, this forest was the front line for the British 11th Armoured Division, part of 21st Army Group. On the other side of the forest, just about where we are now, remnant German forces including SS were about to establish defensive positions. Nobody on the Allied side wanted a repeat of the bloodbaths in the Hurtgen or Reichswald forests, so an RAF bomber raid was diverted here. Almost five hundred Lancasters, most carrying fourteen thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs. My Phantom squadron at the time prided itself on being the descendant of a wartime pathfinder Lancaster squadron that flew on that raid, and then dropped relief supplies to the survivors of Belsen. I often wonder what it would have felt like for those bomber crews on what we would now call humanitarian missions, saving lives instead of destroying them. I don’t think it would have been easy. It’s hard to change your mindset from being an instrument of destruction to an instrument of salvation. It puts too much of what you might have done before into sharp focus. Anyway, they achieved their objective in that forest. What wasn’t destroyed by blast was burnt in the firestorm. The airbase was originally an RAF forward operating field built immediately after liberation, on land cleared of smashed trees by German prisoners of war.’

Jack looked out of the other side of the canopy as the aircraft banked in the opposite direction, beginning a wide turn to bring it head-on with the runway. He spotted a camouflaged dome like a tennis-court bubble off the west side of the runway, with further camouflage netting covering what appeared to be a large Portakabin with several vehicles parked alongside. He took a deep breath. So that was it. ‘Is anyone else picking up our voices?’

‘The radio’s off-line. I was instructed to keep external chatter to a minimum by the intelligence officer when I was briefed on the phone about this landing. It was someone from the secret service, MI6. That’s when I knew this was big, and it’s why I haven’t plugged you for more.’

‘Okay. I’ll bring you into the picture. There was another outcome to that bombing raid. Where the north end of the base now lies was a small Arbeitslager, a labour camp. The Allied troops thought it was a satellite of Belsen, but we now know it had another purpose. By April 1945 it was overflowing with Jews who had survived the death march from Auschwitz. A small British force liberated the camp the day before the raid, and cleared out the last of the survivors just before the bombing began. It pretty well obliterated the camp, and the remains were then buried under the concrete and asphalt of the runways.’

‘Good God. A concentration camp here? I had no idea.’

‘In all the publicity about the death camps that so shocked the world in 1945, this one was never revealed. In this vicinity, the world only knew about Belsen.’

‘I take it the excavation site is under that camouflaged bubble?’ Paul asked. ‘But that must be a good two thousand metres from the northern perimeter of the base, well away from the location of the camp as you describe it.’

‘The bubble covers the site of an underground bunker that lay deep in the forest, linked to the camp only by a concealed track.’

‘How do you know all this?’

Jack paused. ‘When we were excavating at Troy last year, we were on the trail of treasures dug up by Heinrich Schliemann that found their way to Germany and may have been hidden by the Nazis. You remember my old classics tutor at Cambridge, James Dillen? Well, the guy who had taught Dillen Greek and Latin at school had been a wartime British army officer, and was one of the first soldiers into this camp. That was what led us to this place. He’d done some archaeology in Greece before the war, and saw something here he recognized. But after the war he was one of those people who put a lid on it. The camp must have been a horrific experience. He talked for the first time about it to Rebecca and James when they visited him in his flat in Bristol last year.’

‘Only last year? He must have been getting on a bit.’

Jack paused. ‘His name was Frazer. Captain Hugh Frazer. He’d bottled it up all those years, and I think it was a great relief to let it out. Afterwards we took him to Poland to see one of the survivors of the camp. It was very moving, but you can never talk about closure. That’s the hard truth of it. Hugh was already very ill, and he died six weeks ago.’

‘Sorry to hear it. He was with 11th Armoured?’

Jack paused. ‘30 Commando Assault Unit. A forward reconnaissance outfit.’

‘ Jesus, Jack. I know all about 30 AU. They were part of T-Force, searching for Nazi secret weapons. This isn’t just about stolen antiquities, is it? Take a look down there now. You don’t usually get guys in full CBRN suits at an archaeological site.’

Jack saw two figures in white chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear suits disappear into the camouflaged enclosure in front of the bubble. ‘All I can tell you is this. A lot of the Nazi propaganda about wonder-weapons was exactly that. As for the real stuff, some of the scientists located by T-Force were spirited away and re-emerged at the forefront of Cold War rocket and weapons technology, even in the technology of swept-wing aircraft design like the Tornado. That’s been common knowledge for decades. But some secrets remained. You were right to wonder about the hidden truth of those final months of the war. But you shouldn’t just have been concerned about history. You should have been terrified for the future.’

The Tornado levelled out at three hundred feet. ‘Okay, Jack. I’m switching to VHF airband, so everything we say is now being overheard. There’s a skeleton air-traffic-control crew in the tower. My orders are to land, power down, drop you off and fly out immediately. You copy?’

‘Copy that, Paul. And thanks for the ride. It’s been fantastic.’

The external intercom crackled. ‘NATO XJ4, this is RAF Tornado fiver niner kilo seeking clearing to land. Over.’

‘Fiver niner kilo, you are clear to land. Observe agreed protocol. Over.’

‘NATO XJ4, this is Tornado fiver niner kilo. Roger that. Over.’

Jack felt the landing gear lock and the increased air resistance as the Tornado angled upwards for its approach. A few moments later they touched down with a screech of rubber on asphalt, and the reverse thrusters roared into life. The aircraft came to a halt less than halfway down the runway. Paul increased the throttle, swung the Tornado round and taxied it back down to the start of the runway, then pulled it round again so it was poised for take-off. The camouflaged dome was about five hundred metres to their left, and Jack could see two figures beside a jeep with its lights on, watching them.

Paul powered the engine down and popped the canopy so that it rose above them. Jack took off his helmet and felt the cool breeze coming down the runway. He realized that he had been bathed in sweat, and he ruffled his hair. He unstrapped himself and clambered out of the cockpit and down the steps on the side of the fuselage, then hopped off and struggled out of the pressure suit. He climbed back up and put the suit on the rear seat, then clambered down again and jumped on to the tarmac. He gave the fuselage a pat, then stood back, looking at the sooty streak on the tail fin caused by the thrust reversers, and the light grey camouflage that showed the effect of months in the punishing conditions of Afghanistan. ‘She’s a fine old warhorse,’ he called up. ‘Let’s hope she finds a new master as good as the one she’s got now.’

Paul raised his arm in acknowledgement, then clamped his visor back down. Jack walked a few paces away, then turned round again. ‘Paul, I’ve been thinking. You flew helicopters once, didn’t you?’

Paul raised his visor again. ‘It’s what stalled my promotion for so long. Instead of going to staff college when I should have done, I jumped on an RAF vacancy at the Army Air Corps helicopter school, and then volunteered for an RAF placement scheme with the Royal Navy. I spent six months flying a Lynx helicopter off a frigate in the Caribbean on drugs interdiction. It probably ruined my chances of ever becoming Marshal of the Royal Air Force, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

Jack grinned. ‘Well, if you ever get bored at that desk in Whitehall, there’s a job for you at IMU. We’ve got an Embraer and three Lynxes, so there’s always plenty of flying. I want to expand our aerial survey capability, with the new technology for archaeological site detection now available.’ He paused. ‘But I’d be looking for more than that. Someone with your experience of command and control and your international contacts could be invaluable. We seem to get ourselves involved in some tricky situations these days, far more so than I envisaged when I founded IMU. Far more than I want. But it’s reality, and we need to beef up our security capability. Let me know if you’re interested.’

Paul eyed Jack. ‘Not just a charity job for a sad old fighter jock?’

Jack grinned. ‘Not a chance. You might even get to fly Maurice around Egypt again in a biplane.’

‘He still owes me for that little trip. He was going to take me to the Munich beer festival. Then he got distracted by some mummies.’

‘Sounds oddly like Maurice. I’ll remind him.’

‘I wouldn’t mind getting wet again either, you know. Only I’d be a little rusty.’

‘We’d soon get you up to speed. Rebecca will probably have her instructor rating by then and can fill you in on all the latest diving technology since the 1980s.’

‘The good old days,’ Paul said, grinning. ‘None of this nonsense about mixed-gas diving and rebreathers. Just good old compressed air, and a wing and a prayer.’

‘A wing and a prayer,’ Jack repeated. ‘I’d forgotten it was you and Peter Howe who used to say that. The good old days indeed.’

‘I’ve got great memories of him. We’ve got to hold on to that.’

Jack paused. ‘His death has really hit me again, diving at Atlantis where it happened. That’s why the good old days are exactly that. Things happen, and you can’t go back.’

‘Jack, seriously. I’m worried about you. This place, this bunker. This wasn’t what you got into archaeology for. Remember what you said about my flying. It was my passion, and always will be. Your passion is archaeology and diving, what you’ve just been doing at Atlantis and Troy. That’s the kind of adrenalin you thrive on, what makes you tick. Keeping that going is exactly what Peter would have wanted. The greatest discoveries are yet to come. Don’t ever lose sight of that.’

He dropped his visor again, waved and lowered the canopy. Jack put his hands over his ears as the twin turbofans started up, and hurried off the tarmac to be away from the blast of the exhaust. The whine of the engines rose to a scream and the Tornado rolled down the runway, its jet exhaust distorting the air for the length of the airfield behind. It rose at a sharp angle just before the end of the runway, its twin afterburners roaring and crackling as it powered up into the sky and disappeared into the clouds.

Jack could still feel the vibrations as he turned to face the jeep that was now accelerating towards him. For a moment he relished the quiet, hearing only a whisper of wind on the grass, before it was disrupted by the jeep engine. He wondered what it had been like for those Allied soldiers who had come upon this place that day in April 1945. He remembered what Hugh Frazer had said, and he sniffed the air. The hint of sulphur on his body from the volcano had gone, overwhelmed by the smell of aviation fuel and jet exhaust that lingered in a layer of black smoke from the Tornado’s departure. Hugh had talked of the terrible smell that day in 1945, a stench of squalor and decay, and the smoke rising from piles of fetid clothing that had been taken from the inmates by the emergency medical staff to be burnt in pyres across the camp.

He stared along the line of empty concrete aircraft shelters and remembered pictures of Belsen, trying to imagine what the camp here had looked like, and then he looked at the camouflaged bubble over the bunker. This place was not just about the horrors of the Holocaust. It was about another crime that had been commited here, a terrible, calculated crime in the name of twisted science, a crime whose outcome might yet exact a terrible price from humanity. It had kept Jack awake at night in the six months since the bunker had been discovered, turning over in his mind his own role in the events now unfolding. And there had been another price in 1945. Two Allied officers had disappeared in the forest, one British and one American, the British officer a close friend of Hugh’s whose death had haunted him for the rest of his life. For Hugh this place had come to represent the unbridled horrors of war, just as the burnt ruins of Troy had seemed to speak the same message to Jack when he had left them the day before his return to Atlantis.

He watched the two figures park the jeep on the tarmac and walk towards him. He thought about what Paul had said. This place was a long way from the archaeology he loved. Yet all archaeology was ultimately about understanding the present, and about truths that often had a dark side. Atlantis was about the foundation of civilization, when people had first learned to exult in the possibilities of the human condition, yet also had understood what the hunger for power could make men do. Troy had been about the descent into the abyss of war. And this bunker was archaeology too, but a new kind of archaeology, the excavation of a past almost within his own lifetime, but a past whose truth could only be revealed by the tried and tested techniques of archaeology, bringing all the forensic skills of his profession to bear. It was his job now, his responsibility, as much as the revelations of Atlantis or Troy. He took a deep breath and walked forward to meet the two men.