The Gods of Atlantis (44 page)

‘I’m sure he’ll be happy to oblige.’ Hiebermeyer took out his phone, then stood up, suddenly looking tired. ‘I’m going to take Tante Heidi home,’ he said. ‘Then I’ve got a pregnant wife to attend. Hope you don’t mind.’

Jack put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You know what I think.’

‘Aysha,’ Heidi said, suddenly beaming. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’

‘Sevety-two hours,’ Jack said, looking at Hiebermeyer. ‘Then we’ll be planning that expedition to find Akhenaten’s treasure in Egypt.’

‘Promise?’

Jack looked at his friend’s face, remembering what he had gone through in the bunker, something he had volunteered to do in Jack’s place. ‘You can count on it. But meanwhile, the clock’s ticking. I need to visit Professor Schoenberg. And I need to think about diving again.’

Near Tofino, Vancouver Island, British Columbia

T
he de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver banked and swept low over the treetops, the roar of its single Pratt & Whitney 350 h.p. propeller engine intensifying as they dropped below the level of the surrounding hills. Jack was in the co-pilot’s seat, having just relinquished the controls to the woman beside him, a Canadian bush pilot who had considerably more experience than he did at landing on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. He pressed the microphone on his headset. ‘Thanks for that. I haven’t flown a Beaver since I got my pilot’s licence when I was at school in Canada.’

‘Best plane ever made,’ she replied, flashing him a smile. ‘Built in 1946, and still going strong. Out here, the people living in these remote bays wouldn’t be able to function without us. The last road along this coast ended twenty kilometres back.’

The aircraft levelled out for its approach. To the right, beyond the forest, Jack could see the distant peaks of the Coast Mountains of mainland British Columbia, and to the west the glistening expanse of the Pacific. It had been an exhilarating half-hour flight north from the fishing port of Tofino, complete with the spectacular sight of humpback
whales breaching on their migration towards the waters off Alaska. Jack turned to Costas, who was sitting in the back gripping the pilot’s seat, looking like a wartime pilot in his headset and aviator sunglasses. ‘You good?’ he said.

‘Better now that you’re not flying. I always hated roller coasters.’

‘It’s called tactical flying.’

‘It’s called being rusty.’

Jack gestured at a book with a swastika on the cover that Costas had been reading, and a pad where he had been jotting down notes. ‘You missed the whales.’

‘I was boning up on this guy we’re visiting. What he and his colleagues in the Nazi Ahnenerbe were up to in the late 1930s. It makes for pretty unsavoury reading.’

The pilot interrupted them. ‘We’re landing now. Brace yourselves.’

Jack sat back, checked his seat-belt harness and watched as the floats beneath the aircraft skimmed the water and then sent up a sheen of spray, completely obscuring the view. A tremendous vibration shook the plane, as if they were in a car with a tyre blowout, and then the aircraft slowed and settled in the water, rocking on the ocean swell. He could see a wooden jetty sticking out of the rocky shore ahead, leading to a floating dock with a Zodiac inflatable boat tied up alongside. The pilot throttled down and manoeuvred the aircraft close to the dock, then switched the engine off, opened the hatch and jumped out, swiftly uncoiling the ropes that were lying ready and tying them to each end of the starboard float. She gestured for Jack and Costas to follow, and they both unbuckled themselves and jumped on to the dock. Costas made a beeline for a wooden deckchair at the end, splaying himself out and closing his eyes. ‘I’d really like to soak in the rays for a while.’

‘Don’t be duped by the weather,’ the woman said. ‘This place is shrouded in sea mist and rain for a lot of the year.’

‘Sounds as if that’d suit the guy we’re visiting.’

She shrugged. ‘We get a lot of recluses out here. We don’t ask questions.’ She pointed at the Zodiac. ‘You guys good with that? I guess so. It’s gassed up. His house is about two kilometres up the sound on
this side. I usually deliver supplies for him every two weeks. Keep at least a hundred metres offshore to avoid the rocks, and then you’ll see the beach and a little jetty where you can pull up.’

‘How much time do we have?’ Jack asked.

She looked at the sky, and then at the sea. ‘The wind’ll pick up by early afternoon. I want to be out of here by noon. If you plan to leave his place at eleven a.m., that gives you an hour and a half from now. Is that okay?’

‘You’re the boss,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got the radio. Call if you need us earlier.’

She nodded, let her hair loose from under her cap and sat down on the deckchair where Costas had been slumped. ‘My turn. This is the first sun we’ve had for a week.’

Jack jumped into the inflatable, squeezed the fuel pump on the 40 h.p. Mariner outboard and pulled the starter cord. It coughed to life, and he sat down beside it with his hand on the tiller. Costas untied the painter and leapt in, and then Jack put the engine into gear and swung out past the dock and into the centre of the channel, slowly opening the throttle. Costas slid back halfway down the opposite pontoon and raised his voice above the engine. ‘So you’ve never been here before?’

‘I came to Vancouver Island on holiday as a kid, but never this far out. I had no idea that Schoenberg lived here until Dillen told me. I knew he’d been a university professor in Ontario and then retired out west twenty-odd years ago, after his wife died. He must be in his early nineties now. His name was
von
Schoenberg, originally. His family was Prussian, fairly aristocratic. There were plenty of Nazis among the old Prussian elite, but many of them were contemptuous of Hitler and his cronies. My guess is he ditched the von when he was captured by the Russians.’

‘He was a prisoner of war in Russia?’

‘In the Gulag, in Siberia. He was one of the last batch to be released.’

‘I’ve just been reading that most of the surviving German prisoners not released by 1949 were judged by the Russians to be war criminals, and weren’t let go until after Stalin died in 1953.’

‘Dillen said Schoenberg tried to pass himself off as an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier, but he thinks the Soviets must have suspected him. Discovering he was one of Himmler’s select followers in the Ahnenerbe would have been enough to brand him a criminal. He would have been lucky to escape execution.’

‘So Dillen knows him from way back?’

Jack nodded, swinging the boat to port to avoid a patch of kelp. ‘Schoenberg came to Cambridge on sabbatical just before his retirement, and they worked together on a translation of ancient Greek inscriptions from Athens. Schoenberg had been a classical scholar before the war, and eventually finished his doctorate in Canada. He was in Cambridge when I was a graduate student, and I attended a seminar he gave on the early Greek geographers, his speciality. We talked afterwards, and he was fascinated by my diving expeditions. He said his greatest exhilaration had been an expedition he undertook to Iceland as a young man to search for archaeological sites. I think that talking to me took him back to the heyday of his youth in the late 1930s.’

‘That expedition was with Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, the Nazi Department of Cultural Heritage. Already the Jews in Germany were being persecuted and the language of racism was everywhere. It would hardly have been a carefree jaunt.’

‘Schoenberg told Dillen that his involvement in the Ahnenerbe was purely scholarly, and that he joined the Nazi party only because refusal was impossible.’

‘Didn’t a lot of ex-Nazis come to Canada?’

‘Quite a few former prisoners of war were allowed to come here after they were released by the Soviets in the late forties and early fifties. Plenty of them made new lives for themselves and the last thing they wanted was to hark back to the war. But there were some, including former SS, who remained diehard Nazis. Unlike released prisoners who went back to Germany – who saw the devastation and then the years of reconstruction, who themselves were part of the creation of the new Germany – some of those who went abroad after their release still lived in a fantasy world and refused to accept what had happened.
I knew former German soldiers in Canada who would still openly celebrate Hitler’s birthday.’

‘Schoenberg?’

Jack paused. ‘It’s hard to imagine how anyone who let slip that their greatest exhilaration was during their time working for Himmler could not be nostalgic, whatever they may say about being coerced. You’ve just been reading about the real purpose of the Ahnenerbe: to provide Himmler with so-called evidence for racial superiority that he then used to justify the Final Solution. When you see that old man today, remember the pictures of the concentration camp at Belsen, and those terrible images Maurice saw in the forest bunker. That’s what the Ahnenerbe was really all about. But we have to try to keep our cool. We’re here because he wants to tell us something. We have to encourage him to talk, not to clam up.’

‘He’ll presumably expect some questions about his Nazi past,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve got some fresh in my mind from that book. It would be odd if we didn’t ask him something. That might raise his suspicions.’

Jack nodded. ‘Just don’t lay it on too thick.’

‘You could show annoyance with me for doing it. Might help to get you into his confidence, to open him up.’

Jack nodded. ‘Whatever he says in response to queries about his Nazi past we have to take with a pinch of salt. But I doubt whether we’ll need to tease the truth of his convictions out of him. Those will come anyway, little words here and there, more openly if he thinks he’s in like-minded company. He’s very old and has been living as a recluse for more than twenty years, probably inhabiting that world of his past more and more in his mind. Anyway, I want to play him on something else. We have to find a way of bringing up the Brotherhood of the Tiger. I’ve expected Shang Yong to be on my tail ever since we took out most of his business assets two years ago, and the Brotherhood is just the kind of outfit Saumerre would contract after his disappointment with the Russian hitmen last year. Ben told me he thought he’d seen the tiger tattoo on a man in the airport concourse at JFK when he arrived there with Rebecca from Istanbul.’

‘You suspect Schoenberg is involved with Saumerre?’ Costas said.

‘It’s just a hunch. Frau Hoffman knew about him, and knew he was still alive. If they are the last survivors of those who may have been close to Himmler’s scheme, then we have to remember that Saumerre – and before that his father and his grandfather – have been on this trail for years. If we know about Schoenberg’s background and where he lives, then Saumerre almost certainly will too.’

‘You think Saumerre may have got to him and offered some kind of deal?’

Jack throttled down and let the engine idle for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. ‘This is what I think. I think the fantasy world of the Nazis, all that nonsense at Wewelsburg Castle, disguised a terrible truth of ego and poisonous ambition in Heinrich Himmler. But I think that fantasy world was so embedded in the young men and women whose minds were warped by the Ahnenerbe that it will still be there in those few who survive today. Schoenberg may well have something genuinely exciting to tell us, as Dillen himself firmly believed, something about Atlantis that still burns within him because of the fervour for finding an Aryan proto-civilization that was kindled in his soul during his formative years. He could hardly have avoided being influenced by the Ahnenerbe, not only by the ideology but also by the compulsive, almost manic excitement that surrounded it, an infectious enthusiasm it would be hard for a young man to deny. For him, re-stoking that enthusiasm might be important now because he’s an old man harking back to his youth, and that’s something we can exploit. But there’s another, darker possibility: that the fantasy for a select few was also to be part of a terrifying vortex of escape and rebirth that Himmler had contructed for himself, one that required men like Ernst Hoffman to bring it to fruition.’

‘And you think Schoenberg may be one of those.’

‘I don’t know. He may just be a retired scholar with a past that was beyond his control. But if I’m right and Saumerre has got to him, then we have to be doubly cautious, because he could be playing us too.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘We’re looking for the site of Atlantis reborn, right? The place where the survivors of the exodus inscribed those symbols we know from Atlantis in the Black Sea, symbols that Himmler’s Ahnenerbe archaeologists who discovered the new Atlantis copied in that secret chamber in Wewelsburg that Frau Hoffman showed us. We know from her that the new Atlantis was where Himmler decided to build his secret hideaway, the destination for the U-boat dispatched with Hoffman and his deadly cargo in the final days of the war. We know that he shrouded the place with the mystique of Atlantis, which had for so long been the obsession of the Ahnenerbe, a mystique that may continue to motivate a man like Schoenberg. We’re on this trail now with such urgency because of the deadly virus that may have been successfully delivered by the U-boat to this new Atlantis, a virus Saumerre desperately wants to get his hands on. A man like Schoenberg could be caught in between, ignorant of the deadly biological weapon and Himmler’s true purpose, but passionately believing in the association of the place with the dream of revealing the Aryan roots of civilization that he now wants to see fulfilled before he dies.’