The Gods of Atlantis (15 page)

It was one of the most remarkable images that archaeology had ever thrown at him, but also one of the most disturbing.
What had gone on inside that blocked-up chamber in those final desperate hours as the flood waters rose?
He took a deep breath, then leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs and arms out, feeling every sinew and muscle in his body. He was dog tired after the dive, but he was determined to use every moment they had. He shook his head to clear the image and then looked at Costas. ‘Okay. We need the best possible people here to brainstorm this one. Call them both in.’

Near Bergen-Belsen, Lower Saxony, Germany

M
aurice Hiebermeyer stared at the image on his iPad, moving it around so that the overhead light hanging from the tent roof caught the ancient Greek lettering on the papyrus to best advantage. His technician in the excavation house at Troy had worked long hours with Jeremy Haverstock to refine the image, taking advantage of IMU’s state-of-the-art computing facilities before Hiebermeyer and his Egyptian team had decamped from Troy at the end of the season to their home base at the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria. Hiebermeyer had never been part of an IMU diving team – he was an Egyptian tombs man, not a shipwreck explorer – but Jack was his oldest friend and sparring partner, the two having first met as boys when Hiebermeyer had been sent from Germany to boarding school in England, where they had discovered a shared fascination with archaeology. After having been at Cambridge University together, they had gone their separate ways, Jack to found IMU and Hiebermeyer to Egypt eventually to found the institute in Alexandria, but Jack had made him an adjunct professor of IMU and they still met to tick off
discoveries and plan future projects, just as they had done as schoolboys all those years ago.

He looked up from the iPad for a moment, feeling a surge of satisfaction at the work his team had done at Troy. His first major excavation outside Egypt in association with IMU had been a dig at Herculaneum in Italy four years ago in search of a lost Roman library, looking for clues to early Christianity after Jack and Costas had found the shipwreck of St Paul off Sicily. But the last five months at Troy had been the longest time he had ever spent excavating outside Egypt. Both Herculaneum and Troy had been redeemed in his estimation by the discovery of Egyptian artefacts, in the case of Troy by spectacular New Kingdom sculpture that showed the extent of Egyptian influence in the late Bronze Age Aegean. He had been looking forward to some time off in the institute’s castle headquarters alongside Alexandria harbour, time to reflect on his theory that the last kings of Troy were Egyptian, relishing the heated debate that would cause with Jack and their old Cambridge mentor, Professor James Dillen, who had been excavating with them and could counter with spectacular evidence for Mycenaean Greek involvement, for Agamemnon himself having been at Troy.

Then Hiebermeyer had received a request from the most bizarre quarter imaginable. Jacob Lanowski, IMU’s resident genius, a man who had never seemed to acknowledge Hiebermeyer’s existence let alone shown the slightest interest in anything Egyptian, had sent him an email requesting an urgent scan of the Atlantis papyrus. At first Hiebermeyer had baulked, reluctant to remove the centrepiece of the Alexandria museum from its case, but then he had looked again at the multispectral scans done on the papyrus fragments from Herculaneum and relented, realizing that the imaging lab at Troy provided a ready facility for processing a new scan using technology that had been unavailable when the Atlantis papyrus had been discovered five years before. Lanowski had flown out to Turkey from the UK to be on board
Seaquest II
, and his email had come just before the ship had sailed from Troy for the Black Sea and Atlantis; a day later – yesterday morning – Jack himself had slipped away from the wreck excavation at Troy and
followed in the helicopter. Before he had left, he had taken Hiebermeyer aside and told him of his plan to dive into the volcano. Whatever Lanowski’s reasons, resurrecting the papyrus that had started the search for Atlantis nearly six years ago meant that Hiebermeyer was part of that extraordinary project again, one that he was always privately pleased to think had begun not in the Black Sea or the Aegean but in Egypt: in the Egyptian desert with an Egyptian papyrus found in the wrapping of an Egyptian mummy.

He shifted uncomfortably and looked down at the bulky white suit half up his legs, remembering where he was. A little over an hour earlier, he had arrived by German military helicopter from Frankfurt, having flown in from Alexandria the night before. The sky had been overcast as the helicopter came in to land, with fog reducing visibility to less than two hundred metres. He had been taken from the helicopter by jeep to a large Portakabin that seemed to loom out of nowhere on the edge of the runway. As two German Bundeswehr military policemen escorted him to the entrance, he had seen a form behind the Portakabin like a grounded airship covered in camouflage netting. When he had been briefed about the bunker on the phone, he had been told about the pressurized tennis-court bubble that had been put over the excavation, sealing the outside world from any possible contamination. In the fog the place had seemed unreal, disconnected from any known points of reference, like an image in a dream.

He had to remind himself that six months before, only a handful of people still alive had known about the bunker: Hugh Frazer, a wartime British army officer; a nameless Jewish girl who had survived the adjacent concentration camp unable to speak, and who still lived in a care home near Auschwitz in Poland, the place where her parents had been gassed; and the EU commissioner and criminal mastermind Jean-Pierre Saumerre, whose grandfather – a Marseille gangster imprisoned by the Gestapo – had worked in the camp kitchens and escaped after liberation with knowledge of a secret Nazi bunker in the nearby forest, the place under excavation now. After the war, Hugh Frazer had become a classics teacher and had taught Jack and Maurice’s Cambridge
professor, James Dillen. It was Dillen’s memory of something in the teacher’s possession years before that had led him and Jack’s daughter Rebecca to Frazer’s flat in Bristol late last summer; there Frazer had told them the full story of what he had experienced in the concentration camp on that terrible day of liberation in 1945, and the disappearance of his close friend Major Mayne and an American officer somewhere in the forest nearby while they were searching for hidden works of art stolen by the Nazis, shortly before the forest was destroyed by massive Allied aerial bombing.

Hiebermeyer had spoken to Dillen at length about Hugh Frazer the evening before at Troy, where Dillen and Jeremy Haverstock had been left to close down the excavation. Dillen had run through the events of last year, and their lead-up, to prepare Hiebermeyer for what he might find in the bunker. The spark had been a drawing he had seen as a schoolboy in Frazer’s room, a drawing he and Rebecca learned had been made by the Jewish girl in the camp and given to Mayne on that fateful day in 1945, a drawing of an extraordinary and terrifying shape she had seen in the bunker: a reverse golden swastika that might have been the ancient Trojan palladion. By chance, Frazer had recognized the image from his student days before the war digging at Mycenae in Greece. There he had been told by an elderly foreman of an artefact sounding remarkably similar that had been taken at night from the grave of Agamemnon by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia more than fifty years before, a treasure that had been concealed and that may have fallen into the hands of the Nazis in their search for ancient artefacts they associated with the revered warrior-kings of antiquity.

Yet the discovery last year of the existence of the bunker – and the possibility that it contained not only stolen works of art, but also the greatest lost antiquities of Troy – had also drawn in Saumerre, whose grandfather had seen enough to guess that the palladion was associated with another purpose of the bunker, its most dreadful secret. For years the grandfather and his son and grandson had waited, hoping that the NATO airbase built over the camp site after the war would be
decommissioned so that they might search for the bunker. Saumerre’s conviction that the palladion itself lay in another secret Nazi storage site – deep in a flooded salt mine in Poland – had led him to kidnap Rebecca to force Jack and Costas to use their diving expertise to search for it. They had found only an empty container, but the outcome for Saumerre had been a showdown between his henchmen and Jack and Costas at Troy, where Rebecca had been rescued and Saumerre’s power to harm them further had been checked by Jack’s threat to expose his criminal empire, something Jack would only do once they were certain that Saumerre’s ability to hold others to ransom had been neutered. For decades Saumerre’s organization had been deeply involved in the search for hidden Nazi weapons, and there was no certainty what he might already have found. Hiebermeyer remembered what Jack had impressed on him in their final phone conversation yesterday, after he had spoken to Dillen: the only certainty was that Saumerre would now be watching this place with eagle eyes, and would be seeking any means possible to infiltrate the excavation to get his hands on what might lie inside.

The months since the bunker site had been discovered last year had seen a protracted process as Jack passed his knowledge to the British secret service, eventually leading to the site being opened up a week before by a specialist British army team under NATO authority. The situation, with Saumerre still in a position of power in Brussels, seemed extremely precarious to Hiebermeyer, who had never before been so closely involved in the present-day implications of one of Jack’s projects. Apart from an IMU geophysics team who had surveyed the airfield to determine where the camp lay, he was the first IMU representative at the bunker site. Yet his family home had been less than twenty kilometres away, and what had gone on here and in many other places like it during the Nazi period had shaped his own life and his passion for revealing the truth about the past, in this case with a personal family significance that had weighed on him over the last few days as the time for his visit had drawn nearer.

He pressed the icon to email the image of the papyrus to Lanowski, put the iPad on the trestle table in front of him and then fed his hands
into the arms of the suit, pushing them through the wrist seals into the attached gloves and pressing his head through the neck seal, finishing by zipping up the front of the suit until it completely encased him. He was inside a tent at the back of the Portakabin that served as a kitting-up room for those entering the bunker, with suits like the one he had been struggling into hanging in a row along one side. He stretched his neck to left and right, feeling the discomfort of the rubber latex seal against his Adam’s apple. ‘It’s a little tight, but I suppose that’s necessary,’ he grumbled.

The British Royal Engineers sergeant who had helped him into the suit finished wiping off the chalk powder he had used to ease Hiebermeyer’s head through the neck seal, and then yanked the chest zip to make sure it was closed. He spoke with a strong Welsh accent. ‘It has to be that way, sir. This is the latest-generation chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear suit. We used to call them NBC suits – nuclear, biological and chemical – but they added radiological because of the terrorist threat from dirty bombs. The CBRN suits are more like astronaut suits than the old NBC gear.’

‘What happens if I need to relieve myself?’

‘That’s why we asked you not to drink for two hours and to use the toilet just now. There’s a one-hour limit for each shift inside the bunker. If you feel claustrophobic, tell Major Penn and he’ll get you out. We’ve done a few of these old Nazi bunkers before, and they can be pretty grim. There’s a diaper with a urine bag if you need it.’

‘Sergeant Jones, I am
not
wearing a diaper,’ Hiebermeyer said firmly. ‘This suit is bad enough as it is.’

‘Okay.’ Jones slapped his back. ‘You’re good to go. I’ll do the helmet once Major Penn has briefed you.’ He handed Hiebermeyer his glasses, then picked up a towel from the table. ‘How bad’s your eyesight?’

‘Gets blurry beyond about two metres, but I don’t need them for reading.’

‘Then I recommend you don’t wear them inside. The helmets can get a little warm, and if you sweat from the face, spectacles can fog up. It’s a small glitch in the air circulation system we’re working on.’

‘There always seem to be glitches with equipment,’ Hiebermeyer grumbled. ‘My diver colleagues at IMU are forever burning the midnight oil in the engineering department trying to fix things.’ He stretched his neck again, grimacing. ‘Myself, I’m just an old-fashioned dirt archaeologist. All I need is a trowel, my desert boots, my trusty shorts and a decent hat.’

‘I’ve seen you on TV,’ Jones enthused. ‘I’ve watched you with my kids. They think you’re the star of the show. Those old khaki shorts flying at half-mast, somehow staying up? Pretty hard to forget, if you don’t mind me saying so. It was a programme about Atlantis, and you were in Egypt unwrapping a mummy to show how you’d revealed an ancient papyrus. There was an Egyptian woman with you, really good at explaining it all. I couldn’t work out which of you was in charge.’

‘That would be Aysha,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘In answer to your question, I was, but now she is. We got married about a year after that film, and now she’s six months pregnant.’

‘Congratulations. Your first?’

Hiebermeyer gave him a doleful look. ‘It wasn’t part of my plan.’

‘You’ll love it. It’ll change your life. I’ve got three, myself.’ He nodded towards a bag on the table. ‘Sure you don’t want to try the diaper? Could be good training.’