The Gods of Atlantis (52 page)

He edged the vehicle forward, hearing the tyres crunch on the gravel. After about two hundred metres he passed over a small creek with swampy ponds on either side, and saw the dark shadow of the barn ahead. Any hope of a quiet arrival was shattered by the raucous barking of the pair of German shepherds that Mikhail kept in a fenced compound beside the house; then a cluster of motion-sensor halogen lights lit him up. He accelerated to the end of the lane between the barn and the house and switched off the engine, taking his fleece and
getting out just as a figure appeared out of the gloom holding a rifle muzzle-down, like a soldier. Jack extended his hand. ‘Mikhail. Good to see you.’

‘Jack.’ Mikhail took his hand from the rifle grip and shook Jack’s, smiling warmly at him. He was about Jack’s age, a few inches shorter, with cropped grey hair, a Russian whose features were more Viking than Slavic, and he spoke English with a slight accent.

Jack pointed at the rifle, a British Lee–Enfield .303 that he knew Mikhail used for deer hunting. ‘Have you had any trouble?’

Mikhail shook his head. ‘Nothing yet. But we treat every arrival as suspicious. Your security chief Ben Kershaw and the British secret service guy, John, have both been here for the past two nights, ever since Rebecca and Jeremy arrived. One of them is always on the perimeter near the road. John does the day shift, Ben the night. Ben was probably within sniffing distance of you at the head of the lane, but I know he wouldn’t reveal himself even to you.’

‘When he was in the SAS in the 1980s, that’s what they got good at,’ Jack said. ‘Squatting in hedgerows in South Armagh in Northern Ireland for hours and days on end, waiting for IRA terrorists.’

‘Jeremy’s making breakfast. I expect you’ll need some. I’ve got some really exciting stuff to show you, Jack. It could be just what you want.’ They walked past the dogs, both quiet now, and then up the path to the house, where Mikhail opened the screen door and ushered Jack in, closing it and locking the main door behind them. They went through a room that had once been the pioneer log cabin and then into a spacious modern extension, up a wide staircase to a large open-concept pentagonal room that served as a living area as well as Mikhail’s study. On every side above bookcases were wide windows that gave an unimpeded view over the farm up to the edge of the field clearings, now visible in the light of dawn. Mikhail walked a few steps down to a sunken sitting area in the centre of the room, with easy chairs surrounding a rustic table made from sections of hardwood trunk. He opened the bolt of the rifle, extracted the round that had been in the chamber and pressed it back into the magazine, then closed the bolt
over the rounds, placing the rifle on the table beside several other guns. He and Jack sat down opposite each other as another figure appeared up the stairway. Jeremy looked half asleep, with dishevelled hair, and he wore a sweater and jeans that looked as if they had just been thrown on, but he was carrying a tray of coffee mugs and croissants.

‘Grub’s up,’ he said, putting the tray on the table and grinning at Jack. ‘Isn’t that what your old seadog grandfather used to say?’

Jack took a coffee and smiled. ‘Hello, Jeremy. Is Rebecca awake?’

‘I’ll knock on her door if you want.’

‘No,’ Jack said. ‘It’s only just dawn, and she is still a teenager.’

Jeremy grinned again. ‘As you keep reminding me. She can’t wait to see you.’

‘Let’s see what Mikhail has to say first.’ Jack leaned forward, took a gulp of coffee and put the mug down on the table. He pointed to where the Lee–Enfield lay beside three other weapons, a Ruger 10/22 semi-automatic rifle, a Beretta side-by-side 12-gauge shotgun and a revolver, alongside a cardboard box filled with ammunition. ‘That’s quite an arsenal.’

‘Ben and John are both carrying Glocks,’ Mikhail said. ‘These are just my farm guns, for hunting and personal defence. I know how good you are with the Lee–Enfield, from shooting with you here last year, but I’ve only just sighted it in for new ammunition I’ve reloaded myself so I’ll take that. If the need arises, Rebecca has the shotgun and Jeremy the Ruger.’

Jack looked questioningly at Jeremy. ‘Have you done much shooting?’

‘I grew up in rural Vermont, where just about every boy I knew had a 10/22. You just have to know the limitations of the .22, even the hyper-velocity rounds. For anything bigger than a squirrel, that means less than fifty yards and always a head shot. But with the right shot placement, that rifle could kill a man instantly.’

There was a rustle from a corner of the room and Rebecca appeared bleary-eyed around a door, her long dark hair hanging over an oversized T-shirt. She gave a small wave, then shut the door again. Jeremy turned back to Jack. ‘I know what you’re asking. I haven’t pulled
a gun on a man before, but I’ll do what it takes. We’ve got assets to protect.’

Jack reached over and picked up the revolver, a heavy break-top Webley. ‘So it looks as if this is mine.’

‘It’s an old British service revolver,’ Mikhail said. ‘A lot of Webleys were sold as surplus into the States in the fifties and sixties. It’s a man-stopper, .455 calibre, designed to put down fanatical tribesmen on the Afghan frontier. It’s my home defence weapon.’

Jack spun the cylinder, then cupped his hands around the grip and aimed the pistol. ‘Scott Macalister has one of these, and I’ve practised with it from the ship.’ He pressed the lever on the receiver with his right thumb and broke the pistol open, pivoting the barrel and cylinder forward and letting the ejector snap out and fall back again. He reached over to the cardboard box and took out a container of .455 ammunition, opened it and loaded six cartridges into the cylinder, leaving the pistol broken open and laying it back on the table. ‘If Saumerre’s men do try to attack, what’s the drill?’

Mikhail sprang up from his chair and went up to the window on the opposite side of the house from the barn, gesturing for Jack and Jeremy to follow. Jack mounted the stairs and stood beside him, looking over the lush green winter wheat that carpeted the field towards the pine and maple trees bordering the forest beyond. Mikhail opened the mosquito screen on the window, took a compact laser rangefinder from the ledge below and peered through it, finding a target and holding the rangefinder steady with both hands while he pressed the activator on the top. ‘That large dead pine at the end of the field is three hundred and twelve metres away,’ he murmured. ‘That’s the furthest line-of-sight distance in any direction from the house.’ He took down the rangefinder and pointed to a large aerial photograph of the farm pinned to the wall beside the window, showing the three main fields extending off from the buildings like fingers penetrating the forest. ‘It’s all near enough for me to shoot using the battle sights on the Lee–Enfield without any need for range adjustment.’ He looked back, scanning the far edge of the field for a moment, and then pulled shut the mosquito
screen. ‘It’s been done before,’ he said, looking at Jack. ‘During the war of 1812, the place withstood a combined British and Iroquois attack. The farmer and his boys only had flintlock longrifles, but it did the trick.’

‘Should one of us be standing lookout?’ Jeremy said.

Mikhail shook his head. ‘No need until we’re certain there’s a threat. Best to rest and keep alert. At the moment Ben is the first line of defence, and the dogs provide an early-warning system. I built the pen so they have a full run around the house. They’re very territorial and want to attack anything that intrudes on this place. They’ll let us know.’

Jack gestured at a spotting scope on a tripod beside the window. ‘It looks as if you designed this room as a defensive outpost.’

Mikhail gave a wry smile. ‘I’m a pretty serious birder. Rebecca’s probably told you all about it. I used to drag her along to all kinds of places to spend hours sitting beside some swamp at migration time. When we bought this farm, the house was derelict and I had this room built as part of an extension, custom-designed as an observatory.’

‘And a place to write your books. I envy you that.’

Mikhail paused. ‘There’s another reason for the design of this room, the open-plan concept with the continuous window. Even when I’m absorbed in writing, I’m not comfortable in a room where I’m not aware of my surroundings. I can’t sleep unless the windows are open. It’s a small legacy of war.’

Jeremy eyed him cautiously. ‘You were in Afghanistan during the Soviet war, weren’t you? Before you defected? Rebecca told me, but I know you don’t like it spread about. Plenty of people here haven’t forgotten the Cold War and still think of the Russians as the enemy.’

Mikhail walked over and opened the top drawer of a small wooden chest beside the sofa. He took out two badges and tossed them on the sheepskin carpet on the floor in front of them. One was a hammer-and-sickle design within a star surrounded by golden sheaves of wheat; the other was a red-enamel pentagonal star containing a white-metal image of a Soviet soldier holding a rifle. He looked at them ruefully. ‘The Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star. They
dished those out to everyone who fought in the battle for Hill 3234, to the men who survived and the families of the men who died. I was an intelligence officer attached to the 345th Independent Guards Airborne Regiment. We were ordered to occupy a nameless ridge 3,234 metres high overlooking the road from Gardez to Khost near the Pakistan frontier. It was the night of the seventh of January 1988. A single reduced company of thirty-seven men fought off waves of attacks by hundreds of mujahideen all night long. By the time we were relieved, we’d suffered thirty-four casualties.’

‘And you survived unscathed?’ Jeremy asked.

Mikhail pulled up his left sleeve, revealing an ugly scar under his bicep. ‘You may have noticed that I can’t really use all the fingers of my left hand. The mujahideen who shot me was using an old British service rifle, a Lee–Enfield. Somehow having one of those rifles here and being in control of it helps me to deal with the pain. He came right up to our perimeter and I killed him with a grenade.’

‘That’s one less Taliban today,’ Jeremy murmured.

‘Maybe. But if we hadn’t invaded Afghanistan in 1979, there’d have been no mujahideen and then maybe no Taliban and no al-Qaeda. The only thing I can be sure of is that I fought in the last campaign of the Cold War and that our defeat brought about what I so desperately wanted, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just like Korea and Vietnam and numerous other proxy conflicts between communism and the West, fighting mujahideen on the Afghan frontier served as a pressure-relief valve that kept the prospect of nuclear annihilation at bay. That’s the way I see it as a historian, though as a soldier you only see yourself and your mates. Without the breakdown in the Soviet security system that was precipitated by the Afghan War, Petra and I might never have defected and I wouldn’t be a professor of history in the United States today.’

‘And Rebecca wouldn’t have had such marvellous foster-parents,’ Jack said.

Mikhail walked around and peered out of the window facing the driveway. ‘The difference between here and Hill 3234 is that we held a
mountain ridge with three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility down into the surrounding valleys. What nearly finished us was the sheer force of mujahideen numbers, as well as the rocky terrain that allowed them easy concealment as they came up the slopes, and the limitations of our weapons and ammunition supply. What mainly concerns me here are the two places where the forest comes within seventy metres of the house. But let’s leave that to Ben and the dogs. I want to show you what I found in the archive, Jack.’

‘Good. The Embraer’s returning to Syracuse for me this afternoon.’

They walked down the steps and sat around the table. Mikhail picked up a large manila envelope from beside the guns and slid out a sheaf of papers that looked like scanned documents. He peered at Jack, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘You asked me for two things. First, to try to get the inside story on the discovery of those crates of Schliemann’s treasures in Moscow in the 1980s, the artefacts from Troy taken by the Russians in 1945 from Berlin. My contact in Moscow is looking into it, and it’s very promising. She says the curator who found the crates also discovered a package of documents with it, German military order books that the Russian soldiers who seized them must have shoved into one of the crates and then forgotten. She thinks they still exist in the museum store, and she’s on the trail.’

‘Hoffman’s diary,’ Jack murmured. ‘Frau Hoffman told us he’d mentioned it to her during their brief final encounter before he embarked on the U-boat, that he’d left it with the crates in the Zoo tower for the Soviet intelligence people to find. He told her it contained everything he knew about the final months of the Third Reich.’

‘That could be explosive,’ Jeremy said.

‘As soon as we’re done here and Rebecca’s safely in your hands, I’m on a plane to Moscow,’ Mikhail said. ‘This kind of thing comes to a historian once in a lifetime.’

‘And the second thing?’ Jack said. ‘The reason why I’m here?’

Mikhail leaned forward. ‘You asked me to look for any reports of U-boat sightings in the Caribbean after the German surrender on the eighth of May 1945, for anything unexplained or odd. At first I was
sceptical. The Caribbean was a major area of operations for long-range U-boats in 1942 and 1943, with many merchantmen torpedoed and at least a dozen subs sunk in the area by Allied aircraft and ships. But the last recorded attacks on Allied shipping in the Caribbean were in July 1944, and the last known U-boat patrol there ended the following month. Most reports of sightings after that can be put down to jittery coastguards, seeing dark shapes on the sea at night. But it’s true there has always been a big question mark over the final weeks of the war. There are some who believe that U-boats secretly sailed through the Caribbean on the way to Costa Rica and Brazil and other south American destinations, taking fleeing Nazis and their plunder.’