The Gods of Atlantis (5 page)

Jack pressed his hand against the surface of the disc, wishing he could remove his glove and feel it against his skin. He had found gold before: gleaming coins of the Roman emperors, dazzling cups and jewellery on the Bronze Age wreck, gold fit for a king. But this disc was extraordinarily old, at least as old as the flooding of Atlantis more than seven thousand years ago. That was three thousand years before the earliest site elsewhere to produce worked gold, at Varna in Bulgaria. The gold in the disc could have come here with the first hunter-gatherers who had sought shelter in the caves on the slopes of the volcano during the Ice Age, who had painted the rock with images of mammoths and fearsome lions and leopards: a band of humans of precocious intellect and vision who had travelled south from the retreating glaciers with their most precious belongings. Their talent with metals was clear from the finds five years ago, their ability to collect and work copper and then to make an alloy to produce bronze, thousands of years before bronze technology re-emerged and became widespread in the ancient world. They could have brought the gold with them from the nearest rich source, the gold-bearing streams of the Caucasus Mountains to the east, laying woolly mammoth skins in the water and collecting the precious flecks just as the Greek myths had Jason and the Argonauts do with the Golden Fleece. And they could have smelted and fashioned the gold into a disc bearing their sacred symbol, perhaps at the time they were transforming their world – moving beyond the natural caves in the volcano to cutting their own passageways and chambers in the rock, then fashioning mud-brick and lime and volcanic ash into the walls of houses, creating the world’s first civilization.

To Jack, the golden disc represented everything that was fascinating
about this place: the symbol of a people on the cusp of the greatest revolution in human history, a symbol that allowed them to look forward to a new world and yet also back to the time of their ancestors. He wanted to feel what they had felt, to see the world as they had seen it, to look far back in prehistory to the time before the memory of the deep past had become clouded by the foundation myths that followed the first cities and the first dynasties; and he wanted to look forward to where these people were going, to understand what motivated them as they poured all their energy into creating this place and then fleeing the oncoming flood. If he could see those things, then he would have found the greatest treasure of this place. He wanted to discover their past. Above all, he wanted to find out about their beliefs, how these people saw their existence at the dawn of modern religion.
He wanted to find the gods of Atlantis
.

Costas tapped Jack’s helmet. ‘You happy?’

Jack drew his eyes away from the symbol and looked at Costas, his form now visible as the sediment cleared. Beneath a tattered boiler suit filled with tools, Costas was completely encased in white, like an astronaut. His helmet bore the anchor logo of the International Maritime University, partly obscured by a laser range-finding device that he had spirited up in the engineering department, one of numerous gadgets that always festooned him when he went diving. Underneath the white outer layer they were both wearing e-suits, Kevlar-reinforced drysuits with integrated buoyancy systems, back-mounted oxygen rebreathers and dive computers with readouts visible inside their helmets. But the famed environmental resilience of the e-suit did not extend to diving in near-boiling water inside an active volcano, so they were entirely encased in thermal protection developed at IMU from the latest NASA and Russian spacesuit technology. Jack had to remind himself that they were not inside some lunar simulator, but under the Black Sea off Turkey, more than thirty metres below a solidified lava flow and heading for a place that made outer space seem distinctly congenial by comparison.

He tapped the intercom on the side of his helmet. ‘Happier now I
know we’re on target. Lucky that pillar wasn’t crunched by the borer.’

‘I was driving it, remember? Rule number one. Never trash the archaeology.’

‘You mean you got lucky.’

‘We used the 3-D terrain map of the site from five years ago, and put the borer dead on the entrance to the chamber leading to the holy of holies.’

‘I’ve lost all sense of direction. My compass has gone haywire.’

‘Did Lanowski mention the magnetic anomaly?’ Costas said. ‘We noticed it yesterday when we did a magnetometer run over the site. The readouts showed some pretty spectacular spikes, centring over the likely location of the magma chamber. The Turkish geological survey guy with us said he’d recorded a similar anomaly at several other places along the North Anatolian Fault, though nowhere as spectacular as here. You get anomalies like this at a few other places in the world where an upsurge in magma has a localized effect on the earth’s magnetic field – along the Puerto Rico Fault in the north Caribbean, for instance. The guy said there’s a lot of variation in how magnetic materials react to these field changes, but they’d noticed that meteoritic iron is the most dramatic. Several samples they had from one meteorite impact site in Siberia felt twice as heavy as normal at one place along the North Anatolian Fault where they tried them, and he reckoned it might even be more marked here.’

‘Sounds like fodder for the fringe theorists,’ Jack replied. ‘The people who still think Atlantis could only have been built by extraterrestrials. The truth is, everything we saw here is paralleled elsewhere in early sites, only on a lesser scale. And we only have to look at the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge to see that doing things on a colossal scale was never as much of a problem in the past as the fringe theorists seem to believe.’

‘Man makes himself,’ Costas said. ‘Isn’t that the famous Jack Howard byline? Everything he builds, and all his ideas, come from within.’

‘And then he sometimes unmakes himself,’ Jack said. ‘That’s what I really want to find out here, whether these people were the first to take
hold of their own destiny and see the potential within themselves, and the danger. That’s what seems to have fascinated Plato about Atlantis when he used the story to warn the Athenians about hubris, about flying too close to the sun. Call it the Icarus factor.’

‘My objective is to see whether little baby ROV will work inside a volcano,’ Costas said cheerfully, patting his oversized torso. The Michelin Man effect of the suit was compounded by the cargo Costas was carrying: a miniature remote-operated vehicle the size of a toaster, which he had zipped up inside a protective bag on his chest, like a kangaroo with a pouch. Costas was one of the world’s leading submersibles experts, and his passion was miniaturized ROVs, the focus of endless happy evenings tinkering in the engineering complex of IMU’s main campus at Cornwall in south-west England.

‘So how’s Little Joey doing?’ Jack enquired.

Costas held up the tethering cable that hooked the ROV’s battery to the submersible at the entrance to the tunnel, and checked a monitor on his wrist. ‘Only a few minutes more now.’

Jack turned again and stared at the golden disc. ‘Odd that we didn’t notice this pillar the last time we came this way.’

‘Jack, we were a little preoccupied, remember? You were having a gun battle, and I was about to be executed by a Kazakh warlord who was going to hurl me into the magma chamber.’

Jack stared ahead pensively, casting his mind back five years. There had been a dark side to the discovery of Atlantis, and a cost to himself personally that had preyed on him since returning here. Five years ago they had made another discovery, one that had turned the archaeological hunt into a modern-day race against time. At the end of the Cold War, a renegade Russian captain had taken his submarine full of nuclear warheads towards a secret rendezvous with a buyer in the Republic of Georgia, but had struck the uncharted submerged flank of the volcano and sunk. When Jack and his IMU team had stumbled across the submarine, the middleman had returned with a vengeance, seeking his merchandise. In the ensuing battle, the original
Seaquest
had been sunk and they had lost one of their team, Peter Howe, the IMU security
chief. Peter had been a close friend of Jack’s from their schooldays and time in British Special Forces, and had been persuaded to join IMU when Jack had set it up soon after completing his doctorate at Cambridge. In the five years since his death, Jack had been driven by a feeling of responsibility to the dream he had shared with the original few – with Peter, with Costas, with Maurice Hiebermeyer – a dream that had seen them chart discoveries far more extraordinary than they could ever have imagined when he had founded IMU. But there was still a shadow over this place: the discovery of Atlantis had come at a price, one he never wanted to have to pay again.

Costas peered at him. ‘We could call it a day, Jack. This is going to be a dangerous dive, and we’ve got a spectacular result now with that disc. It’s hardly as if IMU activities have been out of the spotlight for the last five years, but when you decide the time is right to reveal this to the media, it’ll boost public interest big time. And we’re not even supposed to be here at all. It’s your call.’

Jack took a deep breath. Costas was right. They had returned to Atlantis on a wing and a prayer. Two weeks ago they had been in
Seaquest II
off the ancient site of Troy in the northern Aegean Sea, excavating the remains of a galley from the time of the Trojan Wars in the late second millennium
BC
. At the citadel of Troy itself, his oldest friend Maurice Hiebermeyer and their Cambridge professor James Dillen had been in charge of clearing an extraordinary underground chamber they had found beneath the ancient palace, searching for clues to support Jack’s theory that Troy had been founded at the time of the exodus from Atlantis four thousand years before the Trojan War; that it was a staging post for the diaspora of people who had taken their language and knowledge of farming south and west across the Mediterranean at the dawn of civilization.

At Troy, his mind had never been far from Atlantis, only a few hundred miles east of the Bosporus in the Black Sea, but the chances of a return had seemed remote. Then, two weeks ago, the Turkish and Georgian surveillance team who monitored the Atlantis site had requested IMU assistance in boring a sample shaft into the volcano.
Several months previously they had recorded a fall-off in seismic activity, and for the first time in five years a limited intervention for geological purposes seemed feasible, though it was still deemed too risky for diving. The main concern was to understand better the seismic characteristics of the North Anatolian Fault, the huge rent in the earth’s crust that ran west under the southern shore of the Black Sea to the Bosporus Strait, threatening Istanbul. Jack had seized on the chance and offered
Seaquest II
, which had the right sub-sea boring equipment and could sail immediately from the excavation site at Troy. Costas and their brilliant if quirky engineering genius Jacob Lanowski had spent several sleepless nights downloading all the survey data from five years ago so that they could position the boring tunnel exactly where Jack wanted it to go, towards an unexplored entranceway he had seen five years before; at the same time, the priority remained to get the tunnel into the upper magma chamber to satisfy the geologists’ needs.

After heated discussion with
Seaquest II
’s captain, Scott Macalister, Jack had won the day, and Macalister had agreed to allow a dive, on the condition that Jack himself arrived from Troy only the day before and then left as soon as he had off-gassed enough nitrogen to allow him to fly. He and Costas had departed that morning in the submersible under cover of darkness, from
Seaquest II
’s internal docking bay. It was a covert mission in every sense of the word, and went against many of Jack’s better instincts. The international protocol following the eruption five years before had been to leave the site undisturbed until improved technology and seismic conditions allowed further research, with IMU acting as the overseeing agency and the Turkish navy enforcing a no-dive zone to deter looters. The site was beyond the twelve-mile territorial limit and the protocol was therefore not protected by law, but Jack knew that any attempt openly to dive at the site would upset the agreement and might make the Turkish authorities think twice about continuing IMU’s permit to excavate at Troy. He had weighed it all in his mind over and over again, but he knew that the chance to be where they were now might never come up again in his lifetime. Anything they found would have to be reported as incidental to
supposed emergency repair work on the boring equipment, and his own presence in the tunnel – which could only have been for archaeological exploration – kept strictly hushed up.

He turned to Costas. ‘You know my answer. I’ve taken too much of a risk with IMU’s reputation getting here to bail out now. And I want more than gold. I want to find the inner sanctum of Atlantis.’

‘You remember what Macalister said?’

Jack recalled Macalister’s briefing just before they set out in the submersible. Although Jack was archaeological director of IMU, Macalister as captain of
Seaquest II
had the final say over anything that might affect the safety of his ship and crew, and one of those concerns was holding position over an active sub-sea volcano that might burst forth at any moment. ‘He said don’t push this place. We’ve seen what it can do.’

‘You remember what else he said?’

‘Just the usual.’

‘He said no frigging about. Do not let Jack Howard see something else that intrigues him and disappear off alone down some tunnel. He knows you pretty well, Jack. We go in, we take pictures, we come out. Full stop. He told me if needs be, tie a rope to your ankle.’