The Secret of Atlantis

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Shifting off their scooters, they finally stepped onto the surface of Atlantis and were met with another cloud of silty dust. An underwater current caught it and whipped it up around their faces before the area cleared again. From within the confines of his mask, Hawke looked around and took in the ancient site.

He was staring at what looked like a modern-day disaster zone and all around was the kind of devastation left behind by an earthquake or tsunami. Broken buildings jutted up out of banks of sand and silt and pieces of smashed pottery and twisted jewellery were scattered all across the site. It looked like pictures of the debris field he had seen around the wreck of the Titanic, and for the first time he was struck by the thought that this was not only an amazing archaeological site, but also a mass grave.

He called up to the ship and made his report while Ryan and Lea poked around in the detritus and shone their underwater flashlights into various nooks and crannies.

“It’s just ruins,” he said. “Clearly there was something here a very long time ago but it looks like it was totally destroyed.”

“Yes,” Ryan said. “But by what?”

“Maybe the same thing that sank Valhalla,” Lea said.

“It’s just amazing down here though,” added Ryan. “And talking of Valhalla — call me crazy but this place is a lot like there… some kind of holy site maybe. Outstanding!”

“I’m very pleased for you darling but we have a little problem up here.” Through the underwater comms Scarlet’s voice sounded like it was coming from the dark side of the moon.

Hawke instinctively looked up to the surface and immediately knew what she was talking about when he saw the shadow of another hull moving toward their ship. Kruger’s crew must have seen them and sailed over. “I see your problem,” he said. “How far away are they?”

“Four or five hundred metres,” Scarlet said.

Lea looked up. “You’ve drifted quite far away from the site,” she said. “That might be a good thing because we don’t want anything damaged down here.”

Scarlet responded, but her tone had changed. “Listen, we’re coming under fire and…”

Hawke frowned. “Scarlet?”

“Radio’s down,” Ryan said.

Lea sighed. “Isn’t that just plain… arsing… fantastic.”

“Forget it,” Hawke said. “There’s nothing we can do to help them and we’ve got our own mission down here. Focus on the job and trust them to do theirs, and then if…” he was interrupted by Ryan’s voice over the comms.

“This is more than weird,” he said, riding his scooter a few more yards and then coming to a stop again on the seabed. He climbed off and awkwardly hopped a few yards to the ruins. “Call me crazy but this looks almost identical to the Ishtar Gate.”

“Ishtar Gate for Dummies, please mate.”

“The Ishtar Gate was one of gates that led into inner Babylon.”

“Babylon being in Iraq?” Lea said.

“Yes — right in the center on the plain between the Euphrates and Tigris, just about fifty miles south of what today we call Baghdad.”

“But we’re not exactly fifty miles south of Baghdad, are we?” Hawke said, his voice crackling through the underwater comms.

“It’s definitely the same as the Ishtar Gate though,” Ryan repeated as he continued to shift sand and detritus off the ocean floor to reveal more of the ruins. “This is without a doubt a depiction of an aurochs, and this…”

“A what?”

“An aurochs — it’s a type of wild cattle that we used back then. Extinct now though — died out around three or four hundred years ago… but they were a key feature of the decoration on the Ishtar Gate, and that’s what his little fellow is right here — not to mention this band of flowers here — and here’s a lion too!”

“It’s too big and heavy for us to take back to the surface with the equipment we’ve got,” Hawke said.

“But we have to come back and get this thing!” Ryan said.

“I agree,” Lea said. “I’m more than a little curious to know how a bloody gate from Iraq wound up in Atlantis.”

“But I don’t think it’s from Iraq,” Ryan replied. “I’m saying it’s similar to the one we know from Bablyon — but there are differences. The Babylonians made heavy use of a semi-precious stone called lapis lazuli. It’s hard to tell because of the decay but it seems to me that this one is more like a simple indigo… like some kind of reproduction of the original Ishtar Gate. Call me crazy, but this whole place looks like it was destroyed on purpose.”

“Hold up,” Hawke said, peering ahead of them. “Looks like the tosspots have arrived.” Up ahead, emerging from the darkness of the ruins were three headlamps. “And it looks like they got here first, mate. Their boat must have been off course because of drift, not inaccuracy — they’d already found the place by the time we’d arrived.”

“And now they’re coming up from the center of the ruins,” Ryan said, crestfallen. “So Dirk Bloody Kruger gets to be Armstrong,”

“They’ve got scooters as well,” Lea said.

“And by the looks of that canvas bag around his neck I’d say he’s not letting the idol out of his sight,” Hawke said. “And it looks like they’re armed, too.”

His sentence was cut short when a metal bolt narrowly missed his head and flashed past into the gloom over his shoulder.

The fight was on.

Up on the surface, Reaper swung the GPMG around and fired at the tuna boat, punching holes in the wheelhouse cabin and smashing out the acrylic windows. Korać’s men dived for cover before firing back. By the looks of things, they were restricted to submachine guns. Reaper knew the Browning had a range of around half a mile or eight hundred meters, but the range of their Uzis was more like two hundred meters, so he told the captain to move the VCSM to a quarter of a mile and maintain that distance. This meant he could fire on them with impunity and they had no chance of striking back.

“You were saying?” Scarlet said.

He watched with growing anxiety as the men on the foredeck wheeled a large mortar into view and began to lock it into place. “And that’s what, exactly?” she said.

“It’s a Sani,” Maria said. “A Russian heavy mortar.”

“Range?” Lexi asked, looking through the binoculars.

“Depends on the model,” Maria replied. “Maybe five hundred meters, or maybe seven kilometers.”

“And we have the Browning,” Scarlet said. “Talk about bringing a bowl of custard to a knife fight.”

“No, we can take them, just make sure we…” Reaper suddenly looked off the ship’s starboard bow. “What the hell is that?”

Everyone followed his eyes to the horizon just in time to see the Hellfire air-to-surface missile tearing through the sky toward their ship.

“Jump!” Camacho yelled.

Bekri hit the alarm and it sounded through the klaxons all over the vessel. “Abandon ship!”

And then a second later there was no ship.

The merc approached fast through the gloom, and Hawke quickly saw he was holding a weapon of some kind. “Christ on a bike!” he yelled at the others. “They’re armed with APS rifles!”

“That’s just arsing fantastic!” Lea said, twisting her head to try and see the threat. She turned and looked over her other shoulder.

Hawke watched as the goon got closer and raised the APS to fire. He knew that because standard rounds had both poor accuracy and velocity underwater, the Russians had come up with the brainwave of redesigning the bullet into a much longer shape, almost like a miniature harpoon. The genius of the Soviet Union, he thought with a shake of his head.

The merc fired and the four inch-long steel bolt tore past him, leaving a trail of bubbles in its wake. The bolts were sharpened to a lethal point and had it hit him it would made just as much damage as a regular bullet, but thankfully it missed and raced off into the gloom of the ocean.

To his far left a second merc came into view, and then a third thundered down from above him. The man on the third scooter tried to hit him with the stock of his APS rifle but narrowly missed before pulling up sharply and turning around for a second attack. Before he could gather his thoughts, a familiar face joined the fray.

“It’s Kruger!” he told the others. “He’s firing!” He pulled the handlebars hard to the right to avoid the bolt, and was instantly reminded of how slow underwater movement really was. The sea scooter chugged painfully slow to the right and he leaned over just as the bolt raced past him leaving another trail of bubbles in its wake.

He spun around one-eighty degrees just in time to see the harpoon-bullet disappear into the gloom of the ocean, and then pulled up hard to gain more elevation. He thought he was getting the better of him, but then he heard a deep, bass roar from the surface a few hundred feet to the north that changed everything.

The former SBS man looked into the distance to where the VCSM had drifted only to see it disappear before his eyes — one minute it was there and then the next it was gone, and all that was left were chunks of burning wreckage and gnarled, bent steel from its carcass.

Reaper was first to emerge from the water. When he came to the surface he thought he’d arrived in hell and the spray dome was still hundreds of feet in the air above his head. Where the VCSM had once been was a wide field of broken, twisted detritus, slowly sinking through the burning oil all over the ocean. The sky above was gray from the storm and black from the fires, and everywhere was the smell of oil and grease and then the storm blew another layer of saltwater and dead fish into his face.

He took a deep breath and slowed his breathing before starting to search for his friends. He trod water while turning three-sixty to scan the horizon but there was nothing but carnage everywhere. The dead body of Maati Khatibi bobbed to the surface a few yards to his right and he offered the kindly professor a quick prayer, but the holy words were broken by the noise of helicopter rotors, and by the sound of it they belonged to a substantial machine.

Then Lexi broke the surface and screamed as she gasped for air. He yelled at her and swam over, and then Camacho appeared though the burning wreckage to the south and also began pushing his way through the water to join them. Maria called out in the smoky gloom, and he turned to see her rising high above him on the swell as the storm stirred the sea again and made things even worse.

“Are you okay?” he called out, spitting more seawater from his mouth.

“Yes.”

“Lexi?”

“I’ve been better, but I’ll live long enough to kill whoever fired that missile.”

“Me too,” Scarlet said, swimming toward them from the south.

“The Professor is dead,” Reaper said.

“That makes at least two then,” Maria called back. “I just saw Bekri’s body over there.”

“How the hell did Kruger get a chopper out here?” Camacho asked.

Maria pointed to the north. “Well, I don’t know but there goes his boat…”

They turned to see the old tuna boat moving away through the smoke.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Reaper said. “Why blow us up and then run away?”

And then it made sense.

Before anyone could think about the question, a second Hellfire scorched through the leaden sky and ripped into the tuna boat’s hull, tearing it to pieces. The detonation was colossal, and Reaper yelled at the others to dive before the shockwave reached them.