The Gods of Atlantis

1940.’

‘That’s an ugly twist in the tale,’ Lanowski said. ‘Before looking at the 1930s material, Macleod’s researchers began by examining wartime records, to see if there was any indication of secret U-boat bases that might have been established in the Caribbean in the lead-up to the war. British naval intelligence were on the case by late 1939, when U-boats had begun to sink merchant ships in the Atlantic. One particularly assiduous intelligence officer discovered these letters in the military commanders’ files in November 1940 and passed them on to the Governor of the Bahamas, requesting that a minesweeper and motor gun boat be sent to check out the ridge where that German ship had been in 1938. His fear was that mines might have been laid, but there was also the possibility of secret U-boat replenishment bases being established in the Caribbean before the war. Apparently the Governor angrily vetoed the request, saying that it was a waste of war resources. The intelligence officer noted in a sheet attached to those letters that the Governor often spoke openly to his staff about how he believed it was just a matter of time before the British Government struck a deal with Hitler, and how they would join forces against the Jews and the Slavs.’

‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘ Of course. That was the Duke of Windsor, wasn’t it, the former King Edward VIII? He’d made no secret of his Nazi sympathies in the 1930s and was even photographed reviewing SS troops on a visit to Germany. To get him out of the way in 1940, Churchill had him appointed Governor of the Bahamas.’

Lanowski nodded. ‘I’m sure Himmler would have considered the Duke far too dim-witted to include in his plans, but it would have been a matter of some convenience to have a Nazi sympathizer as governor of the area where his hideaway happened to be located, a position the Duke held until early 1945, when the U-boat war was effectively over in the Caribbean. The Duke himself may never have known that by vetoing that search he was aiding the efforts of Himmler, but anyone who sympathized with that regime was conniving in evil.’

Jack tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘So what we now believe is that the U-boat that took Oberst Ernst Hoffman from the Baltic in the last days of the war very probably was the one attacked by the Liberator, just as the sub reached its destination. What we now need to find out is whether Hoffman was still on board, and whether he had that deadly phial with him. And we need to find the exact location of that blue hole.’

‘Is there anything else from the debriefing documentation on that airman?’ Lanowski asked. ‘Any maps, photos?’

‘Only this.’ Jack clicked the mouse to send the scanned photo of the airman in the raft. ‘This is Flight Sergeant Brown, the sole survivor of the Liberator crash. The markings on the pontoon, the slashes and the line of numbers below his head, were made with his own blood.’ He saw Lanowski peer intently at the screen for a few moments, then work the keys and turn away before looking back at him.

‘I’m trying to sharpen it up,’ Lanowski said. ‘I want to see what he’s written.’

Jack stared at the photo as it repixellated, seeing the numbers clearly now: 242446, 742799, repeated exactly below. He suddenly remembered his flight in the RAF Tornado three days before, something Paul Llewelyn had told him once about wartime Coastal Command training. That was what he remembered from the visit with his father to the RAF museum. When aircraft were about to ditch into the sea, the pilots were trained to give a position fix over the intercom to ensure that the crew knew their co-ordinates and could relay them from their rafts if they survived and the pilot and navigator did not. The pilot would repeat the coordinates, over and over again. Jack’s heart suddenly began to pound. Of course. ‘Jacob, run that line of numbers as geographical co-ordinates.’

‘I’m there already, Jack. Translate that into degrees, minutes and seconds, and you have a point almost due north-east of San Salvador Island, about thirteen and a half nautical miles offshore. It’s bang on that ridge, just before it drops off into the abyss.’

Jack tensed with excitement. ‘Mikhail says there’s no detailed bathymetry available because this was a military exclusion zone, but can you get a satellite view? What we’re looking for might be visible from the air.’

‘I’ve got Landsat imagery streaming online now. Click on the link I’ve just sent.’ Jack stared, waiting for it to appear. He looked up for a moment from the monitor and saw the dawn sky through the windows. The dogs suddenly barked and he heard a steady beeping sound, evidently the propane tanker reversing down the lane towards the house. Mikhail appeared up the stairs, quickly made his way to the table and picked up the Lee-Enfield and a box of. 303 cartridges. ‘The licence plate of the truck checks out,’ he said. ‘It looks like the usual two guys in the cab. Jeremy’s going to meet them and keep an eye on things. Rebecca seems to be turning her shower into a sauna. Any luck?’

Jack gave him a thumbs-up sign. ‘Touch wood. We might well be on to something.’

‘Okay. I’m off to do my usual morning recce around the treeline. I’ll be less than half an hour.’

An icon flashed on the screen and Jack clicked on it, opening up a Landsat view of a sector of sea. The focus co-ordinates were the same numbers the airman had written on the pontoon of the boat. He clicked the mouse to zoom in on a line of white on the sea, evidently breakers over the edge of a reef, with deep azure waters to the right and lighter blue to the left. The target co-ordinates lay on the reef, at a spot indistinguishable in colour from the surrounding water. He zoomed in closer and saw a ripple on the surface, and realized that a wind was obscuring the view he would have had in calm conditions through the shallows to the bed of the reef. He looked at the webcam. ‘Jacob, can we do anything about that wind?’

‘I’m searching for an archive photo in calmer seas. Okay, here we go.’

After a short delay, the image transformed. The line of breakers disappeared, and the distinction in colour between the reef and the deep water became more sharply delineated. ‘That drop-off must be awesome,’ Jack murmured. ‘A mile straight down into the abyss.’ He stared at the target co-ordinates, about five hundred metres into the reef from the abyss wall. Dark and light patches showed undulations in the reef depth. He estimated the underwater visibility at perhaps thirty metres, with the darker patches showing sea floor at about that depth or greater and the lighter areas no more than ten or fifteen metres deep. The arrow showing the target co-ordinates lay over a slightly darker circular patch perhaps two hundred metres across between two very light areas two or three times that size. He clicked to maximum zoom, looking down at the sea as if he were three hundred feet overhead, about the altitude from which the Liberator gunners might have seen it during an attack run. He tried to contain his disappointment. He remembered years before flying a helicopter over blue holes when the first Seaquest had sailed to the Caribbean. The holes were absolutely distinctive, deep blue circular patches in the reef, indigo against the aquamarine of the surrounding shallows. ‘I don’t think that dark patch is clear enough to be a blue hole.’

‘Wrong,’ Lanowski replied.

‘What?’

‘Wrong.’ Lanowski’s face appeared on the screen, flushed with excitement and shaking. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong.’

Jack saw Costas’ hand clamp down on Lanowski’s arm. ‘Okay, Jacob,’ he said. ‘Slow down. Explain.’

Lanowski tried to raise his arm, and seemed to shudder. His voice was hoarse with excitement. ‘Blue holes are collapsed caverns, right? Caverns have roofs. A lot of blue holes have rims remaining that overhang the edge of the hole, and those can collapse too. What happens when a U-boat dives into a blue hole followed by three depth charges totalling, what, two tons of high explosive? Bang.’ He chuckled, shaking his head. ‘And I mean bang. The U-boat sinks. The rim of the blue hole collapses. What we’re looking at here is not what Squadron Leader White or Flight Sergeant Brown saw as the Liberator went in for the attack. What we’re looking at is the blue hole after the equivalent of a small earthquake, its appearance after the Liberator had done its work.’

Jack stared at the satellite picture. The depression in the reef was uniformly round, distinct from the irregular mottled patches indicating undulations in the reef depth around it. ‘I have to say it, Jacob, you’re a genius,’ he murmured.

‘I know,’ Lanowski replied, chuckling and shaking his head. ‘ I know.’

Jack paused, thinking hard. ‘If we’re right, then this is also where the Ahnenerbe archaeologists in 1936 discovered the Atlantis symbols we saw in Wewelsburg Castle. Jacob, can you use that terraform programme to give me a picture of the reef at this spot seven and a half thousand years ago?’

‘You mean at the time of the Black Sea flood?’

‘I mean the time when a shaman of Atlantis fleeing the flood might have made his way into the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic, and then found a landfall in the Caribbean.’

‘Okay.’ Jack heard the rapid tapping of keys. ‘We have a tree-ring date of 5545 BC on those freshly felled logs you found in the timber yard at Atlantis five years ago,’ Lanowski said. ‘Let me feed that date into the program.’ He paused. ‘Today there’s nothing in the entire Bahamas chain higher than sixty metres above sea level. That’s why I was interested in those abyssal megaturbitides, the layers of silt. Not only have you got sea-level rise since the Ice Age, you’ve also got massive erosion of surface land mass, especially in an area that’s often hit by hurricanes. I think Macleod’s probes would find thick layers of coral debris at the bottom of those cliffs.’ He paused again, and Jack watched him scan the screen below the camera. ‘Okay,’ he continued. ‘I’m looking at the eustatic sea-level curve since the last glacial maximum. We’ve got an average of about one hundred metres’ rise in sea level from Meltwater Pulse 1A, about fourteen thousand years ago. 5545 BC falls just before the trigger event that happened about seven thousand years ago, a final big melt that brought the sea level close to its present state. Since 5545 BC we’re looking at around a thirty-metre rise. Add the effects of erosion, maybe another twenty to thirty metres in places, and you’ve got land at this point rising fifty or sixty metres high, with peaks as high as a hundred metres.’

‘Not exactly the mountain the fleeing priests were looking for,’ Costas murmured.

‘No,’ Jack said. ‘But imagine looking at a coastline in a storm with no way to gauge scale. A modest elevation could seem like a mountain. And remember, the only description we have is from the man who returned, the one Pliny recorded from the pillar at Lixus as Alkaios, who we know was Enlil-Gilgamesh. He himself may only have seen the shoreline in the distance, perhaps deterred from going closer by a storm, or perhaps because he had only ever intended to accompany Noah-Uta-napishtim to the point where the prophesied destination was visible: where he knew Noah would go on and disappear from history, but where he, Enlil-Gilgamesh, would carry out his secret plan all along of turning back to make a triumphant return to Lixus as a hero and a god.’

‘Remember the only topographical hint we have, Jacob, from that encoded message you found in the Plato text,’ Costas said.

Jack felt himself tense. This was the real clincher. ‘Twin peaks, Jacob,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re looking for twin peaks, just like the appearance of the volcano behind Atlantis in the Black Sea.’

Lanowski tapped the keys again. ‘All I have to go on is those undulations in depth you can see in the reef surrounding that hole,’ he said. ‘But allowing for a bit of imagination, it could have looked like this.’

His face disappeared, and Jack’s screen transformed into a CGI rendition of a coastline behind a pulsating line of surf. He held his breath when he saw the dark silhouette of the land mass behind. It showed a jagged ridge line, but in the centre was a saddle flanked by two conical hills. It looked just like the image of Atlantis before the flood. ‘ Yes,’ he said, bunching his fist. ‘That’s it. We need to move fast.’

Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘There’s a problem, Jack. A hurricane’s coming.’

Jack closed his eyes. A hurricane. ‘How far off?’

‘Macalister’s been in touch with the US National Hurricane Center. The eye is about three hundred and fifty nautical miles north-east of San Salvador, and it’s tracking directly towards the central Bahamas chain, exactly where we don’t want it to go.’

‘Time frame?’

‘Touchdown for the leading edge of the hurricane at that reef in about thirty hours.’

Jack looked at his watch. ‘That’s 1500 hours tomorrow. I can be out of here in an hour. I’ll take Rebecca and Jeremy with me. The Embraer should be waiting for us at Syracuse by the time we get there. That puts us in Bermuda and then on Seaquest II by mid-evening. How far south does Macalister reckon we’d have to sail to be within helicopter range of the island?’

Costas leaned over and showed Jack a torn-off sheet of computer printout. ‘The best scenario puts Seaquest II about two hundred and eighty nautical miles north of San Salvador and a hundred miles west of the leading edge of the volcano at about 0900 tomorrow morning, after spending the night steaming south from Bermuda at maximum speed. That puts San Salvador within range of the Lynx using long-range fuel tanks, with the payload limited to two of us and basic diving equipment. It would be a close-run thing, but we could be dropped on the reef, do the dive, be winched up to the helicopter and then be flown out beyond the leading edge of the hurricane as it tracks west, to reach Seaquest II ’s position of safety to the north. If the storm comes on more quickly, the Lynx could drop us, return to the ship and stand off while the storm rolled over us, and then return to pick us up afterwards. It would be a risk for us, but if we were able to get under the collapsed material we think is clogging up the blue hole, we might be protected from the worst of the hurricane.’

‘What about permission to dive in the weapons test range?’ Jack said.

‘We might have to wing it. We don’t want to excite interest, and we haven’t got time to go through official channels. It hasn’t been used for that since the flight of Liberator FK-856 in 1945. And don’t think permission to dive is the issue that would be troubling Macalister, Jack. I think the issue will be that hurricane, and the possibility of Seaquest II becoming another statistic in the Bermuda Triangle.’

Jack remembered their dive at Atlantis three days before, under the noses of the international monitoring team and into a live volcano, with Seaquest II well within the danger zone. He had sworn he would never put Macalister through anything like that again. Seaquest II would have to stay outside the predicted path of the hurricane. It would all be down to the helicopter. ‘We’d need a pilot with a hell of a lot of nerve,’ he murmured. ‘He’d be seeing the leading edge of the hurricane on the horizon ahead of him. He’d have to go against all his instincts and fly directly towards it, then after dropping us make the decision himself whether to wait for us. I’d never ask it of one of our regular crew.’

‘What about your old RAF friend Paul? I thought he was at a bit of a loose end now. Didn’t you say he was a qualified helicopter pilot too?’

Jack thought hard. It might work. He nodded. ‘Okay. Stay online. I’ll use my cell phone to try to contact him.’ Three days before, after leaving Jack at the old NATO base beside the Nazi bunker in Germany, Paul had flown his Tornado to RAF Lyneham in England before taking leave ahead of his new posting at the Ministry of Defence. Jack prayed that he would have been unable to wrench himself away from aircraft for his final few days as an operational pilot and would still be at Lyneham. The second IMU Embraer was at its base in Cornwall at the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose, and could be at Lyneham in a matter of a few hours to pick Paul up and fly him out over the Atlantic.

Jack dialled, and a voice answered almost immediately. ‘Paul? This is Jack. You remember our parting words on the tarmac in Germany? I’ve got a job that might interest you.’ He quickly ran through a plan that would get Paul to Bermuda and out to Seaquest II overnight, in time to familiarize himself with the custom specs of the IMU Lynx and take off before dawn with Jack and Costas and their diving equipment for the Bahamas. Paul instantly agreed, and Jack gave him the IMU number to liaise with the Embraer pilot. Then he clicked off his phone and sat still for a moment, hearing only the morning chorus of the birds outside the windows. He stared at the aerial photo of the reef on the screen, trying to see in his mind’s eye down into the collapsed blue hole and imagining what might lie there. He spoke again into the webcam. ‘Okay, guys. Paul thinks we can do it.’

‘On a wing and a prayer, Jack,’ Lanowski said, slightly awkwardly.

‘Where have I heard that before?’ Costas said.

‘It’s what Paul used to say about our student expeditions when I first knew him, when we seemed to survive on minimal equipment and lots of duct tape.’

‘Sounds like we might be going back there again, Jack. With the Lynx stretching the envelope, it’s just going to be whatever equipment we can carry on our backs.’

Jack opened the directory on his cell phone. ‘I need to put in a call to the Bahamas.’

‘Anyone we know?’ Costas said.

‘The office of the Prime Minister. He was a student contemporary of mine at Cambridge.’

‘The old boys’ network?’

‘Something like that. I don’t want anyone near that site before we dive, but I want to arrange for backup from the Royal Bahamas Defence Force. If all goes well and we find what we want to find, the site will need round-the-clock surveillance while we get in a full IMU excavation team to reveal everything that might lie within that blue hole. I’ll see if the Prime Minister can have his people call through directly to Captain Macalister. Meanwhile, the next you’ll hear from me will be from the tarmac in Bermuda. Thank James Macleod at IMU for me. Excellent work, Jacob.’

‘I’ve just remembered something,’ Costas said. ‘Wasn’t San Salvador where Christopher Columbus first made landfall in the Americas?’

Jack paused. He had barely allowed himself to think about the archaeology. Since leaving Atlantis three days before, the extraordinary seven-thousand-year-old trail they were on had been overshadowed by the present-day danger. For a moment he focused his mind back on that sunken chamber they had found inside the volcano at Atlantis, on the fantastic vision it had given him of events at the very dawn of civilization. They were following perhaps the greatest ancient voyage of discovery ever made, not some hazy exodus lost in time but the voyage of one man who had become enshrined in the foundation myths of the Western world. Yet what they had found in that chamber in Atlantis, what they might find ahead of them now, would reveal a truth about the past that could rock those foundations to the core. Jack felt the familiar surge of excitement coursing through him. He looked intently at Costas. ‘Not just Christopher Columbus. We might find that he was pipped to the post seven thousand years before. If we’re lucky.’

‘A wing and a prayer, Jack,’ Costas said, grinning.

‘If that hurricane allows us. Over and out.’ Jack reached over and switched off the Skype. For a few moments he sat in silence, trying to clear his mind and relax. As soon as Mikhail returned, he would get Rebecca and Jeremy to collect their things and drive them to Syracuse airport. He suddenly needed to see Rebecca. The dark cloud that had hung over him since her kidnapping last year suddenly seemed finite, and for the first time he felt there was a chance they might see it disappear completely. He took a deep breath, and steeled himself. If the next twenty-four hours panned out as he had gambled. One horror would be taken out of the equation if they could recover the bacterium sample from Saumerre. As for the other, the Spanish influenza virus, they would only know whether that too survived, whether Hoffman had carried out the mission Himmler had given him, once they had dived into that hole. And with Saumerre’s people watching their every move, there was no time to waste. They could not risk Saumerre discovering their destination and getting there first.

He was no longer hearing the reversing sound of the propane truck; it had been replaced by the low roar of an auxiliary engine powering the pump. He leaned back and stretched, realizing how dog-tired he was, then reached down and drained the tepid coffee from his mug. He got up and climbed the steps towards Rebecca’s door, then glanced through the window towards the barn and saw the yellow top of the propane tanker parked beside his SUV. He walked towards one of Mikhail’s spotting scopes and peered out. Two men in dark overalls were talking to Jeremy at the rear of the truck, pulling the hose from its reel. He heard the screen door to the house slam and saw Rebecca walk up the path towards the truck wearing a fleece, her hair glistening from the shower. One of the men rolled up his sleeves and knelt down to reach under the truck. Jack took the caps off the spotting scope and trained it on the edge of the woods beyond the barn, remembering Mikhail’s concern about the proximity of the treeline. There was another problem in the morning mist: the likelihood that anyone in camouflage moving stealthily would be nearly invisible. He spotted a pair of deer, following their bobbing white tails until they disappeared beyond the trees. He moved the scope back towards the propane truck, and focused on the man who had stood back up and was rolling down his sleeves. Jack zoomed in, amazed at the quality of the optics. Suddenly he froze.

The man had a tattoo.

Jack took his hands off the scope to stop it wobbling, and stared. The man turned his wrist away to do up his sleeve. Then he turned it back, and Jack caught another glimpse. There was no doubt about it. He had seen that before, two years ago in the mountains of Afghanistan, through the scope of a Lee-Enfield rifle.

It was the tattoo of a tiger.

Jack turned and began to run.