The Gods of Atlantis

21

S econds later, the line crackled as the satellite link connected Jack to the officer of the watch on Seaquest II, and then he was through to the operations room. A slightly annoyed voice answered. ‘Lanowski here.’

‘This is Jack. Switch on your Skype.’

‘Jack!’ The voice lightened up. ‘I was just in the process of terraforming the Caribbean during the Ice Age.’ A face materialized on Jack’s screen, the familiar lank fringe and little round glasses staring somewhere just below the webcam, presumably at another screen. Lanowski looked up and peered closely into the camera. ‘The computer isn’t up to it, as usual. But I refuse to dumb down and give it simplified data. Computer programs are only as big as the brains that create them. Costas tells me I need to make my own, and he’s right. But meanwhile here’s the score. We’ve just been looking at the Bahamas outer ridge abyssal plain. Interesting layering of megaturbitides along the fault line, with magma extrusions rising alarmingly high into the plate divide. Drop anything down there and it would sink through about a mile of silt and then into the molten core of the earth. I’ve got James Macleod and the geology team at IMU very interested in doing a sub-bottom probe survey.’

‘Is Costas with you now?’

An unshaven face appeared from one side of the screen. ‘I’m with you, Jack.’

‘Okay. Keep all that geomorphology data up and running. I’ve got a possible lead from Mikhail.’ He quickly ran through the story of the Liberator attack and the airman’s account. As he talked, Lanowski emailed through a link that flashed on his screen. Jack clicked on it, opening up a detailed topographical and bathymetric map of the Bahamas islands. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can visualize the flight route east from Nassau to the sector of sea north of the island of San Salvador.’

‘That’s beside the fault line we’ve been looking at, about dead centre on the map,’ Lanoswki said.

Jack zoomed in on the island. ‘Yesterday I called James Macleod and asked him to trawl through our database for anything that might hint at undersea research in the Caribbean in the late 1930s, anything odd. I need to know if he found anything on the Bahamas.’

‘We’re on to it already. He’s been liaising with us this morning,’ Lanowski said. ‘Let me give him a call now. This might take a few minutes. Stay online.’

Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Mikhail’s got this place locked down,’ Jack replied. ‘Ben and the MI6 guy are doing perimeter security. They know Saumerre’s men have been shadowing Rebecca since she arrived in New York from Turkey two days ago. The farm is about as remote as you can get in the Adirondacks, but Mikhail’s not taking any chances.’

‘I found out something interesting,’ Costas said. ‘The MI6 file on Saumerre passed to our security people shows that he’s a diver. He trained at Cambridge when he was a student and qualified with the British Sub-Aqua Club. If he thinks this place in the Caribbean is going to give him his biggest prize, he might want to get involved personally this time and not just leave it to his henchmen.’

‘They’ll all be divers too. You remember his previous men, the Russians we encountered in the mineshaft in Poland last year?’

‘I remember how incompetent they were as divers, and how none of them got out alive.’

‘This time might not be so easy. Saumerre will have learned his lesson with the Russians. Shang Yong and the Brotherhood of the Tiger only employ the elite.’

‘You’re sure it’s them?’

‘Ben saw a man he was convinced was trailing Rebecca in New York. His description of the tattoo on the man’s wrist, the distinctive grimacing tiger, clinches it. We’ve seen that tattoo before, in Afghanistan two years ago, remember? And I trust Ben’s appraisal of the people he thinks we’re up against. He says they’re good, very good, skilled operators in an urban environment like Manhattan, where he thinks they stalked Rebecca while she was at school over the last two days. Mikhail’s calculation is that a group of Chinese gangsters are going to be less familiar with the forests of the Adirondacks, and that he’d have the upper hand out here.’

‘How is Rebecca?’

‘Not really woken up yet.’

‘Jeremy looking after her?’

Jack gave a wry smile. ‘After the course in small arms that Katya seems to have given her in Kyrgyzstan, I think Rebecca can look after herself.’

Costas moved aside and Lanowski reappeared, pushing his hanging fringe behind one ear and staring closely at the camera, his eyes gleaming. ‘Jack. Are you there?’

‘I’m waiting.’

‘Bingo,’ Lanowski exclaimed triumphantly. ‘Bingo. Macleod has worked through all the records he could find for the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. Because the Bahamas are British territory, a lot of the older archival material is readily accessible in England. He’s got security clearance to view material that’s still classified. Take a look at this.’ His face disappeared and a scanned document appeared on the screen, with the Government of the Bahamas logo along the top and a few brief paragraphs of faded typescript below, slashed across with thick lines in red pencil; below that was the text of another letter, in bolder Gothic typescript. ‘The upper text is a record duplicate of a letter signed by the military commander of the Bahamas garrison on the third of February 1938, nineteen months before the war started. Below it I’ve pasted in the text of the letter to which it’s a response, from the master of a German-registered cargo vessel. The military commander is acknowledging notice that the master intends to spend two weeks offshore along the north-eastern bank of the Bahamas. The master’s letter is a courtesy notice to explain that the vessel contains a scientific team studying the fault line between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. This was before plate tectonics were fully understood, so it’s plausible research. The master states that their expedition was a follow-up to a visit two years before, in the summer of 1936, when a German oceanographic group experimenting with diving equipment and underwater photography had spent several weeks in the same area of reefs beyond the territorial limits of the Bahamas, but had also made their presence known as a courtesy to the authorities.’

‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘That could only be the Ahnenerbe expedition that Frau Hoffman talked about. For oceanography, read archaeology. They were hunting for signs of Atlantis in the Bahamas, and they were the ones who found the place with the ancient symbols. Two years later, Himmler sends a team back. This is it. Jacob. We’re on target.’

Lanowski nodded. ‘There’s more. The master explains that he’s written the letter to be forwarded to the Governor General of the Bahamas in order to ensure that the purely scientific nature of their work is understood and that their presence does not atract Royal Navy attention. That’s exciting enough for us, Jack. But there’s the clincher in the final little paragraph. They intend to stop at two places and lower seismic measuring equipment. In those days that meant fairly primitive heavyweight gear, probably in bulbous pressure capsules like the early bathyspheres developed after the war. Costas told me you said Frau Hoffman mentioned an underwater habitat secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient. That could be what we’re looking for, Jack. And check out the location noted by the German master. It’s not precise, surely deliberately so, a sector of about two hundred square miles of ocean, but the latitude and longitude co-ordinates encompass that undersea spur north of the island of San Salvador.’

Jack stared, his heart pounding. It seemed inconceivable, but the location of Himmler’s lair might have been embedded in official British records all along. Rather than attempting to be secretive, something that would have been virtually impossible with a ship of the size needed to transport the undersea habitat, Himmler’s men had brazenly publicized their mission and relied on the British weakness for gentlemanly behaviour to ensure that their courtesy notice was taken at face value, meaning that the Nazi team would not be bothered while they established the site where Himmler intended to hide away the worst weapon of mass destruction the world had ever known.

Costas’ voice came from offscreen. ‘That ridge would have been the perfect location. It’s right on the edge of the abyssal plain, so U-boats could have crossed the Atlantic and come up to it submerged, only having to surface for a few hundred metres to cross the reef edge before dropping down into a blue hole large enough to take a submarine. And remember what Frau Hoffman told you she saw in that wartime photograph, Jack. An underwater habitat like that would not have been meant for continuous use, but could have been a refuge established for a time in the future when Himmler intended his plan to come to fruition. He would never risk U-boats going to it during wartime, when Allied patrols might spot them. But two U-boats were to arrive after the Nazi surrender, the first one with Oberst Hoffman and his precious cargo, and the second one carrying Himmler himself. In the event, we know the boat carrying Himmler never set off from the Baltic, but the one with Hoffman certainly did.’

‘And that’s the U-boat sighted on the third of June 1945, when Liberator FK-856 just happened to be passing by,’ Lanowski murmured.

‘What’s the red mark across the text on that document?’ Jack asked. ‘I can see a date stamped on it: the twenty-seventh of November