The Gods of Atlantis (49 page)

‘We’re going to the Adirondacks?’

‘
I’m
going to the Adirondacks.’ Jack picked up the phone again, then paused. ‘The Embraer’s all fuelled up at Tofino and it’s going to fly us to Syracuse in upstate New York, where I’m going to rent a car and drive into the mountains. I should arrive at Mikhail’s place before dawn tomorrow morning. You’re going on from Syracuse to
Seaquest II
off Bermuda. I need you in the operations room to kick up a brainstorm with your new best buddy Lanowski. As soon as we can pinpoint a location for the Nazi hideaway in the Caribbean, we need everything we can get on the geology and oceanography, and the predicted weather conditions over the next forty-eight hours. That’s the time frame we’re looking at. The Embraer’s going to return from Bermuda to Syracuse and I’ll aim to join you with Rebecca on
Seaquest II
tomorrow evening, after Mikhail’s told me what he’s found out. Then all eyes south to the Caribbean.’

Costas jerked his head back to the bungalow above the beach. They could just make out Schoenberg’s straw hat in the window, and a cell phone clamped to his ear. ‘You gave that one away. You told him that’s where we were heading.’

‘We’re all playing each other. Saumerre will be playing Schoenberg
just as Himmler once played his Ahnenerbe cronies, convincing them that the archaeology was the main prize, letting only a chosen few know his true intent and then disposing of them when they’d served their purpose. Schoenberg’s telling him that as soon as I’ve followed the lead I told him about, I’ll get back to him to reveal where we’re heading. He believes I’ll do that because he offered me more information about the Ahnenerbe, about other treasures waiting to be discovered. Part of Schoenberg, the scholar and adventurer, just won’t believe I’d pass up on a chance like that, that somehow he and I will go off together on fantastic voyages of discovery. Another part of him, the Nazi, believes that what he revealed to us in that rant about Frau Hoffman will come as a terrible shock and persuade us that everything she said about Himmler and his plan was a pack of lies. Schoenberg would like to think that we’re after the archaeology, not the deadly weapon that Saumerre wants. Remember what we saw at Wewelsburg Castle. That place poisoned everyone who came in contact with it, whether real scholars like Schoenberg or the academic failures and thugs who formed the core of the Ahnenerbe, the spies and sycophants whom Schoenberg despised. For Schoenberg, sitting there overlooking the sea dreaming of unresolved quests, the fantasy is reborn in his mind after all these decades, something that we’ve used to get information out of him, just as Saumerre has too.’

‘So you really intend to tell him the probable location?’

‘As soon as Mikhail tells me, and just before I board the plane to Bermuda. That way I’m in control. I want to push this to a confrontation. Saumerre may become impatient and events may move faster than we predicted. Ben’s convinced that Shang Yong’s hitmen will know about the farm and will have assumed that’s where Ben went with Rebecca when she left school this morning in Manhattan, where they’ve been shadowing her.’

Costas looked at his watch. ‘Better get going. Our pilot will be waiting.’

Jack pulled the starter cord and the Mariner coughed to life. He stared for a moment back at the figure in the bungalow, now with the
phone down, watching them. ‘Part of me would still like to think that he’s just another victim of that war.’

Costas shook his head. ‘Remember what you told me when we went to see him. What it was really all about, the Ahnenerbe. Racist theory that resulted in the corpses and the living dead in the concentration camps, and on those gurneys in that bunker. Those were the victims.’

Jack nodded. He gunned the engine, driving the boat out into the channel, then throttled back for a moment and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Forty-eight hours to endgame.’

‘Roger that.’

Above the Bahamas, 3 June 1945

S
quadron Leader Peter White gripped the control wheel of the B-24 Liberator and straightened his back, straining against the harness and feeling the blood return to places in his legs that had been pressed against the unfamiliar seat for more than three hours now. It was his first long-haul flight in the Liberator, and he was not yet attuned to the nuances and idiosyncrasies that made an aircraft seem like an extension of the pilot’s being. For more than eighteen months before the Nazi surrender he had flown a Lancaster bomber, the four-engine warhorse of the British air offensive over occupied Europe. The Lancaster was an instrument of death and destruction, but he had grown to love his aircraft, to trust in its ability to return him again and again through the flak and the night fighters while other bombers were falling out of the sky around him. His crew believed that it was he who had the luck, he who would see them through when two thirds of their fellow-crews did not make it. They called him Uncle, because he was an old man of twenty-nine; he knew they revered him. Their faith was so strong that he had volunteered for another tour to skipper the men who were only partway through theirs. But for him there was nobody to elevate to
god-like status, nothing except the machine. The relationship of a bomber pilot to his aircraft was impossible to explain to anyone who had not endured night after night flying to the seat of Satan himself, to the place where the simmering evil below seemed only to be stoked by the rain of bombs, where airmen who were about to die saw hell not as a nightmarish final vision but as the reality below them as they plummeted towards the raging firestorms they themselves had helped to create.

White leaned forward to peer over the instrument panel at the shimmering expanse of the Caribbean Sea some three thousand feet below. He had loved his Lancaster, but he had not yet learned to love the Liberator. It was not just the poor forward visibility from the flight deck that was the problem. When he had arrived at the Operational Conversion Unit in the Bahamas two weeks ago, his instructor had called the Liberator a cantankerous beast, lumbering and draughty, heavy on the controls. White had learned the ropes quickly enough doing circuits around the base at Nassau, but this flight was his first experience of wrestling with the controls over a long mission. The aircraft was a bugger to trim, and he was constantly having to horse it around to keep it on a straight line. And the din when he lifted his earphones was indescribable. The Liberator was fat-bellied by comparison with the Lancaster and the B-17 Flying Fortress, and the open ports for the waist-guns meant that the fuselage was like a musical soundbox that magnified the noise of the engines and the propellers and the slipstream as it roared by, reverberating through the aircraft. He was glad they were flying at low level and not at ten thousand feet or more as they had done over Europe, where the cold in the B-24 would have been horrendous. But as each hour had passed this morning, he had grudgingly begun to see the sense of her. She was like a charging bull, bellowing and roaring through the sky, reeking and pawing the air. He realized it was the first time he had thought of the aircraft as
she
. That was always a good sign. And he could see why they had been made to fly the Liberator before converting to the upgraded version, the B-32 Defender, the purpose of their flight scheduled for tomorrow
across the United States to the US base on the island of Guam in the Pacific. The B-32 was by all accounts a thing of luxury, with a pressurized cabin. But by training on the B-24, they would never forget the beast within, one they would soon be riding into the whirlwind of another war.

‘Skipper, we’re two minutes from a course change.’ A clipboard with a nautical chart appeared from behind, and White took it from the navigator, Flight Lieutenant Alan Cook, an Australian, who crouched down beside him and pointed at the ruled lines in red pencil across the map. ‘We’re just coming up to the northern tip of the island of San Salvador,’ Cook said. ‘From there we turn to compass bearing thirty-five degrees and drop to five hundred feet above sea level to begin our run in. At a speed of two hundred and twenty knots, dead reckoning puts us over our target in just under fifteen minutes.’

White stared at the clipboard, reminding himself of the features he had memorized during the mission briefing at Nassau, then handed it back. He increased the volume of the intercom microphone to try to exclude as much of the din as possible. ‘Bomb-aimer, did you hear that?’

‘Righto, Skip,’ a New Zealand drawl responded. ‘Eyes peeled ahead.’

White glanced at the co-pilot, who had been looking at him expectantly, and nodded at him. ‘Altering course now.’ He turned the wheel smoothly, pushing the control column forward and pressing the left rudder pedal. As the aircraft banked to port, he looked out and saw the northern tip of the island, and ahead of that the turquoise waters of the reefs that covered the outer banks of the Bahamas. He checked the mixture controls for each of the four engines to make sure they were on auto-rich, then levelled out at a compass bearing of thirty-five degress and pitched the plane forward into a shallow dive. He pulled the throttle levers back to reduce the airspeed, then let go of the levers and blew on his nose to equalize the pressure in his ears as they dropped in altitude. At eight hundred feet he began to level off, edging the throttle levers forward until the airspeed stabilized at two hundred and thirty knots at an altitude of five hundred feet. He trimmed the aircraft
until she was slightly nose-heavy, then scanned the instruments: oil pressure, fuel pressure, oil temperature, cylinder head temperature, all good. He glanced again at the co-pilot. ‘Right. I’m taking a breather. She’s yours for five minutes.’

Flight Lieutenant Bill Parker nodded. ‘Taking over the controls now.’

White slowly let his feet up from the pedals, feeling the boards stay in place where the co-pilot had his own pedals in position, and then let go of the control column. He shifted his legs around, getting the circulation going again, and stretched his arms as far as they could go against the glass panes of the cockpit above him. He breathed in deeply a few times. He desperately needed a cigarette. Smoking was not allowed in RAF bombers, and the Liberator in particular always smelled strongly of fumes; there were horror stories of US crews lighting up and their B-24s igniting in a fireball. The craving usually kicked in about twenty minutes into an operation, and was why he had never taken the Benzedrine tablet that was given to them with their last meal before a sortie over Europe; the craving kept him alert until they were over enemy territory and the adrenalin and fear took over.

There was no fear now, but he was still on edge. It seemed odd, five weeks after the death of Hitler, being in an aircraft that was all bombed up on its final run in to a target, albeit a decommissioned minesweeper that had been anchored for depth-charge and strafing practice off the north coast of the Bahamas. For him, the end of the war had been a disconcerting experience altogether, nothing like his father’s memory of the moment of the 1918 Armistice, that instant when the guns stopped firing and there was a sudden shocking end to it all. They had flown their last bombing operation six weeks earlier, in April, as the lead pathfinder aircraft in a five-hundred-bomber raid destined for Bremen that had been diverted to destroy an area of forest infiltrated by remnant German troops near the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Their final op two days after that had been dropping relief supplies to a medical unit trying to help survivors of the camp. It should have felt good, a mission bringing succour rather than destruction, but it had not. Earlier in the war, White had stayed with his sister at
Stechford in Birmingham during a devastating German raid. The experience had steeled him, had taught him about total war. It meant he knew exactly the effect of the bombs that he rained down night after night on the cities of Germany. He had become an instrument of destruction, the reason why the humanitarian mission was so jarring. And seeing the smouldering fires of the concentration camp had shown him what they had failed to prevent in six long years of war, an obscenity that could only haunt those whose bombs could have fallen years before on the camps and the railheads and perhaps thwarted the worst crime in history.

At the back of every serviceman’s mind in Europe that summer had been the continuing war against Japan, and it had come as a relief when his crew and three others from his pathfinder group were selected for secret operations in the Pacific. That final op flying relief supplies had filled him with a terrible apprehension about his life after the war, a future he had never allowed himself to contemplate; even the few snatched days of leave with his wife and child in their little cottage had been about the present, not the future, and the sheer happiness he had experienced then had been contingent on the war itself protecting him from reflecting on what he had become and what he had done.

On the night of VE Day, a senior US Air Force intelligence officer had arrived at their base in Lincolnshire and shown them the latest newsreels from the Far East. They had seen footage of the jungle war being fought by the British and Indian armies in Burma and the Australians in New Guinea, and the horrendous island battles of the Americans leading up to the assault of Okinawa. They had seen kamikaze attacks on US and British ships in the Pacific. The Germans had fought with savage professionalism, but not like that. The officer had warned that as the Allies reached the Japanese mainland it would become a war of attrition. He said the pathfinder crews had been chosen for their expertise at precision targeting, but also because they had all dropped the ‘Tallboy’ and ‘Grand Slam’ bombs, the huge 12,000- and 22,000-pound bombs that had been used to destroy the U-boat pens
and fortified sites across Germany. He told them that the US had developed a new breed of battlefield weapon, bombs to be dropped behind the front line that could vaporize all life within a half-mile radius, far more powerful even than the Grand Slam. That was to be their new role, killing soldiers rather than civilians, destroying command and supply lines rather than cities. They and their US Air Force counterparts would be in action with the new battlefield bombs by the end of August, and would help to end the war against Japan before it sapped the lives of troops from Europe who were already being remustered to fight in the Far East.