The Hunt For Atlantis

EIGHTEEN

Gibraltar

Chase examined the chart covering the table in the hotel suite, running his finger along the line marking thirty-six degrees north. “That’s a lot of sea to cover.”

“Fortunately, we don’t have to,” said Kari. “One of my father’s survey aircraft is already doing a high-resolution synthetic aperture radar survey of that region of the Gulf seabed. If there’s anything buried beneath the sediment, it will show up-even up to twenty meters deep.”

Chase raised an eyebrow. “And if it’s over twenty meters deep?”

“Then, as you like to say, we’re fucked.” Nina smiled; it was the first time she’d heard Kari swear, and it sounded incongruous coming from her. “Has there been any more word on Qobras?”

“Oh yeah,” Chase said. “I’ve got a friend in Morocco; she’s been keeping an eye on things.”

“She’s not pregnant as well, is she?” Nina couldn’t resist asking.

“Funny you should say that… She says Qobras’s people set sail from Casablanca yesterday. He’s got a survey ship-not as flashy as yours, Kari, but it had a submersible aboard. You were right, Nina-he’s looking in the wrong place. If he holds course, he’ll be over two hundred miles southwest of us.”

“We’ll just have to hope that he stays there,” said Kari. “I’m still very concerned that his people managed to track us so quickly in Brazil.”

“The Nereid would’ve attracted a lot of attention,” Chase mused, “but yeah, I don’t like it that Starkman came right to us. Could be there was a tracker on the boat, but we’ll never know now.” The burnt-out wreck of the Nereid had been found capsized in the river, hit by an antitank missile fired from one of the helicopters. “So we need to keep the knowledge of where we’re going to as few people as we can. How many crew are there on your ship?”

“Twenty-four,” said Kari, “but they’re all loyal to my father.”

“You absolutely, one hundred percent sure about that?” Kari’s lack of an immediate reply gave Chase his answer. “I’d keep exactly where we’ll be going to just the captain and the navigator until we actually arrive, if I were you. And even then…”

“We’ll just have to wait and see what the radar survey shows,” said Kari, seeming pensive. “Thank you, Mr. Chase.”

“If you need me for anything, I’ll be next door,” he said, before walking out.

“See you,” said Nina, looking back at the map. At its largest, the Gulf of Cádiz ’s northern and southern coasts were about three hundred miles apart. Smaller than Atlantis as described by Plato-but the ancient philosopher’s figures had already been proven wrong once before, thrown off by the conversion from the odd Atlantean numerical system into decimal. The actual size would be, at most, roughly two thirds of what Plato had said-and that was assuming that an Atlantean stadium was the same size as a Greek one, which now seemed unlikely. If the temple in the jungle were an exact replica of the original, then one Atlantean stadium-the length of the Temple of Poseidon -was only four hundred feet long, considerably smaller than its Hellenic counterpart.

The combined reductions in scale brought the size of Atlantis down to approximately 125 miles in length, and under a hundred wide. Which would easily fit within the Gulf-and more important, could be located on the relative shallows of the continental shelf before the seabed plunged away to the abyssal depths of the Atlantic itself. The Brotherhood’s search would be well off target.

The Brotherhood… She stared silently at the map.

“What’s on your mind?” Kari asked.

“I was thinking about the Brotherhood. About Qobras.” She looked up at Kari. “Who is this guy? Why is he so desperate to stop us from finding Atlantis?” A memory creased her brow, something Starkman had said. “Or rather, why’s he so desperate to stop you and your father from finding it?”

“I…” Kari’s expression became conflicted.

“What? Kari, what is it?”

Kari gestured at a nearby sofa. “Nina, there’s something I want to tell you.”

Unsettled, Nina sat, Kari next to her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, it’s just… There’s something else that my father and I are looking for as well as Atlantis itself.”

“Something else?” Nina said. “What else could there be?”

“This might sound strange, but… finding Atlantis is only the beginning of what we’re doing. You know that the Frost Foundation has been involved in medical aid programs all around the world?” Nina nodded. “We’ve also been taking genetic samples from as many different peoples as we could. Blood tests.”

Nina’s hand went to the little mark on her arm where she had been vaccinated before leaving for Iran, what seemed like years before.

“Yes, you too,” Kari said. “Please don’t make any judgments before I’ve told you everything! Everything we’ve done has been for a very good reason.”

“You tested my DNA?” asked Nina, shocked. “Without telling me?”

“We had to keep it a secret. Please, let me explain! Please?”

“Go on,” Nina told her, tight-lipped.

“What my father and I discovered-more my father; he had already found the first evidence while I was still a child-was that there is a particular genetic marker that is only present in approximately one person in every hundred. It’s rare-but it’s also widespread. We found it all over the world. We think…” Kari paused, as if reluctant to reveal a long-held secret. “We believe this genetic marker can be traced all the way back to the Atlanteans. In other words, those people who have that particular sequence of genes within their DNA-”

“They’re the descendants of the Atlanteans?”

Kari nodded. “Precisely. Atlantis may have fallen, but its people had an empire that wouldn’t be equaled for another nine thousand years. They became a diaspora, spreading throughout their former lands-and beyond. We found concentrations as far afield as Namibia, Tibet, Peru… and Norway.”

“ Norway?”

“Yes.” Kari took Nina by the hands. “Nina, the Atlanteans were never lost. They were here among us all along. They are us. My father and I, we have the marker in our DNA.” She looked straight into Nina’s eyes. “And so do you.”

“Me? But…”

“You’re one of us, Nina. You’re a descendant of the Atlanteans. That’s what we’re trying to find. Not just ancient ruins-but people, who are alive today.”

Nina’s head swam. She wanted to pull her hands away from Kari, but couldn’t. As confused and overwhelmed as she felt, the analytical, scientific part of her mind demanded to know more. “How?”

“We think that finding Atlantis will help us retrace the expansion of the diaspora. We’ve already seen how the Atlanteans tried to reproduce their civilization in Brazil -we believe there are other locations where they did the same. The map in the temple showed how far they had explored, all the way to Asia. We want to find those places, follow their paths. Maybe even-”

“Find their descendants?”

“The Indians wanted to know if I was one of the ‘old ones.’ There’s obviously some racial memory there, stories passed down through the generations.”

“So I guess at least we know the Atlanteans were blonds,” said Nina, managing a brief half-smile. Kari smiled back. “So where does Qobras fit into this?”

Kari’s face turned grim. “From what we’ve been able to find out, he considers the Atlantean descendants a threat.”

“Are they?”

“You tell me. You are one.”

Nina didn’t have an answer to that. “So what’s his problem with them-with us?” she asked instead. “Does he know about the DNA marker?”

“Almost certainly. About a year ago, we learned he had a mole working in our genetic research institute, though my father thinks he’s been spying on us for much longer. It’s obvious now that Qobras will go to any lengths to stop us from finding Atlantis-and the closer we get, the more desperate he’ll become.”

Nina sucked in her cheeks nervously. “I’m kind of starting to wish I’d gotten into UFOs or Bigfoot rather than Atlantis.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.” Kari squeezed her hands reassuringly. “Without you, we would never have come this far. And now that we know what the stakes are, we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe.”

Nina looked back at the chart. “Glad to hear it. Although that does assume that we even manage to find Atlantis.”

“If there’s anything down there, the SAR survey will find it.”

“But how are we going to get to it? God knows how deep the sediment will be. And it’s not as if we can just dig it up. Excavations are hard enough even in shallow water, never mind at several hundred feet.”

Kari flashed her a knowing grin. “You haven’t seen our subs yet. They’re quite impressive.”

“Subs? Plural?”

“Starkman was right when he said that the search for Atlantis was more than a mere hobby for my father. More than his businesses, even the work of the foundation, it’s the most important thing in his life.”

“More so than you?”

“It’s just as important to me too.” Nina was about to say that that wasn’t what she meant, but before she could, Kari released her hands. “It will be a while before the first results from the radar survey come in, so…” She gestured at the windows. The hotel looked out across Gibraltar ’s harbor, the Rock itself looming beyond. “Shall we do something?”

Nina shook her head. “I… I don’t know, Kari. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this.”

“Oh. Okay…” Kari sounded disappointed. “If you change your mind…”

“Thanks.”

Kari reluctantly left the room. Nina stayed, staring at the chart.

Not for the first time, she wondered: What the hell have I gotten myself into?

It took another day before the aerial survey yielded any results, and Nina was suffering slightly from cabin fever. Chase made it clear that she was not going to be left unaccompanied outside the hotel; while she enjoyed Chase and Castille’s company, even with Chase’s ribbing, their mere presence hammered home the threat she was facing. Kari tried to get her to go out, but Nina was still in a turmoil over her revelation. She suspected Kari was hurt by her rejection, but she needed time to think, alone.

That time came to an end, and Nina was no nearer untangling her feelings than before. But now she had something else to occupy her mind.

“There,” said Kristian Frost over the videolink. A second LCD monitor had been attached to the laptop, displaying a duplicate of the large radar survey printout being examined by the expedition members. On the screen, a cursor drew a red circle around a particular section.

Nina’s breath caught in excitement as she looked more closely at the area Frost had marked. The image on the printout was in shades of gray, variations in tone corresponding to different reflections of the radar signal as it penetrated the water-and the seabed beneath.

Dominating the printout was a series of concentric circles, narrowing the closer they got to the center. And at the center itself…

“What’s the scale?” she asked. “How big is it?”

“One millimeter is five meters,” said Kari, handing her a ruler. Nina laid it down to measure the circular area at the center.

“One hundred and twenty-five millimeters in diameter, more or less… that’s six hundred and twenty-five meters. Just over two thousand feet. And the proportions of the rings as you move outwards…” She looked up at Kari, her reservations completely blown away in her excitement. “They match what Plato wrote. The only difference is the size, but…”

She moved the ruler to the object at the center of the innermost circle, a rectangle made up almost entirely of solid whites and blacks rather than the shades of gray of the rest of the picture. “Four hundred feet long and two hundred wide,” she announced, quickly converting from metric to imperial measurements. “Exactly the same size as the temple in Brazil!”

“There’s no chance those circles could be some natural formation?” Philby asked. “A collapsed volcano, or a meteor crater?”

“It’s too regular,” said Nina. “It’s man-made, it has to be. How deep is it?”

Frost had the answer. “The seabed is two hundred and forty meters below the surface, with approximately…” He glanced off to one side, checking something on another screen, “five meters of sediment.”

“Eight hundred feet,” Nina said for Chase’s benefit, as he made a pained face trying to do the conversion in his head.

“Kind of deep,” he said, before turning to Kari. “Good job you’ve got subs, that’s close to the limits for scuba gear. We could only stay underwater for a few minutes at that depth.”

“Actually, we have some new diving gear that should help with that,” she replied. “I’ll show you when we’re on the ship.”

“How are we going to deal with the sediment?” asked Nina.

Kari smiled. “I told you, wait until you see our submersibles. We built something quite special. This will be our first chance to use them for real.”

Philby leaned closer to examine the printout. “Am I right in thinking that the lighter something is on the picture, the stronger the radar return?”

“Not quite-the white areas are more like shadows, blank areas where the radar was blocked. The black objects are particularly strong reflections,” Kari explained.

“Which means there must be a lot of solid objects down there.” Philby pointed east of the center. “Look at this, for example. To me, that looks almost like an aerial photograph of ruins. Everything’s jumbled, as though the walls have collapsed, but it still has a fairly regular outline.”

“It’s Atlantis,” said Nina. “It must be. It matches Plato’s description too closely for it to be anything else. The three rings of water around the citadel, the canal heading southwards…” She tapped a finger on the dark rectangle. “And this-it’s the Temple of Poseidon, the original. There’s nothing else it can be!”

“How did it end up so deep?” wondered Chase. “Eight hundred feet’s a long way down.”

“A major tectonic shift or the collapse of a subsurface volcanic caldera could easily cause part of the continental shelf to subside over a very short period. It’d cause massive tsunamis as well, which would account for the cataclysmic sinking of the island that Plato described-and over time, it would continue to settle and sink deeper. Also, global sea levels have risen since the end of the last ice age, about ten thousand years ago-after the sinking of Atlantis. Combine the two events and you have something that nobody would ever find-unless they knew exactly where to look.”

“Which you did.” Kari beamed at her. “My God, Nina, you did it! You found something that people thought was just a legend!”

“Yeah, they did, didn’t they?” said Nina, with a pointed glance at Philby.

“Yes, yes,” he harrumphed, “obviously I was mistaken.” He extended a hand. “Congratulations, Dr. Wilde.”

“Thank you, Professor,” she replied, shaking it. After a moment, he leaned forward and put an arm around her.

“Well done, Nina,” he said. “Outstanding work.” She smiled, filled with pride.

“Well, I don’t want to interrupt this archaeological orgy,” cut in Chase, “but we still actually have to get to the place. Eight hundred feet of water, remember?”

“I can take care of that,” said Frost. “I’ll tell the captain of the Evenor to set sail as soon as possible. He has already made all the preparations-you can catch up by helicopter tomorrow.” He smiled. “Once again, Dr. Wilde, congratulations are in order. You’ve made another incredible discovery. I just wish I could be there to see it for myself.”

“So do I, Far,” said Kari.

“The next time we speak…” Frost smiled again, more broadly, “you will have discovered Atlantis. I am certain of it. Good-bye… and good luck.” The screen went dark.

“I second that,” said Kari. “Congratulations, Nina!” She went to the minibar, taking out a bottle of Bollinger champagne. “We should celebrate!”

“Out of the minibar?” laughed Chase. “Christ, that’ll probably cost you more than you’ve spent on the whole expedition!”

“I think it’s worth it. Here, Nina.” She handed over the bottle. “You deserve the honors.”

“And you haven’t just won a Grand Prix, so don’t shake it up!” Chase added. “Don’t want to waste any booze.”

Nina tore away the foil and unwound the wire cap as Castille handed out glasses. She twisted the cork. “Oh, I always hate this bit. I’m scared that I’m going to take somebody’s eye out.”

“Like Jason Starkman’s?” said Chase with a cruel smirk.

“That’s not funny-aah!” The cork popped free, Chase swooping in to catch the overflowing froth. “Thanks.”

“No problem. Go on, fill it right up. It’s yours.”

“Trying to get me drunk?”

“Yeah, I bet you’re a right raver when you’re pissed! Here.” He took the bottle from her and handed her the full glass in return, pouring drinks for everyone else.

“To Nina,” said Kari, raising her glass. Everyone else echoed the toast.

Nina paused. “Thank you… but I think we should remember the people who got hurt, or… or didn’t make it this far with us. Hafez, Agnaldo, Julio, Hamilton, Captain Perez…”

The others solemnly repeated the names before sipping their drinks. “That was very thoughtful,” said Philby.

“It just seemed appropriate. I hope whatever we find is worth it…”

“It will be,” Kari assured her. “It will be.”