The Gods of Atlantis (54 page)

‘So a fire caused the crash?’ Jeremy asked.

‘He claimed they were shot down.’

‘
Shot down?
’ Jeremy said in disbelief. ‘Nearly a month after the war had ended? No way.’

‘That’s what the intelligence officer thought. Flight Sergeant Brown was delirious, in and out of consciousness, and I think the officer recorded what I’m about to tell you only as a matter of getting something into the debriefing report before closing the file. Brown kept repeating that they had depth-charged a U-boat over a blue hole, but had been shot down. The officer noted in pencil on the side that he’d checked Brown’s personnel record and seen that before joining the pathfinders he had done a tour with Coastal Command and had a similar experience, flying rear gunner in a Liberator in 1943 that depth-charged a U-boat off Newfoundland but was hit by machine-gun fire and forced to ditch. The officer evidently thought that the 1943 ditching was a traumatic experience that came out in Brown’s delirium. Even the blue-hole story was dismissed out of hand. Blue holes are a striking feature of the Bahamas from the air, and the officer noted that from his position of boredom cramped in the rear turret for hours on end, Brown may have become fixated on them.’

‘You mean the sinkholes where so many cave divers die?’ Jeremy said.

Jack nodded. ‘The Bahamas land mass is a limestone plateau, and
during the last Ice Age the sea level was over a hundred metres lower than it is today. Rainwater percolated through the limestone and created huge cavern systems that became submerged as the sea rose after the end of the Ice Age. Where the roofs of the caverns have collapsed, they appear as deep blue holes in the reefs, or as depressions where the limestone fragments from the ceiling have collapsed and filled up the caverns.’

Jeremy turned to Mikhail. ‘But when you read the file, you believed Brown’s story?’

Mikhail paused. ‘I’ve been to war, and I know about post-traumatic flashbacks. The streets and hospitals of Russia are strewn with veterans of the Afghan war who’ve never been able to deal with it. The trauma, the flashback, is rarely generalized or conflated. It isn’t a mishmash of memories. It tends to be one specific event, remembered in exacting detail.’

‘You’re saying that Brown’s account wasn’t a product of delirium.’

‘I’m saying that if he was traumatized by his U-boat experience with Coastal Command in 1943, he wouldn’t have seen a blue hole in the flashback. He would have remembered everything from that event in 1943, but not added other memories. And anyway, the trauma idea doesn’t ring true. The intelligence officer was assuming what we might assume, that experiences such as that 1943 ditching must have been traumatic. But that’s just wrong. Flying night raids over Germany was about the most terrifying thing a man could do in that war, yet Brown and his fellow crew had done it over and over again, and volunteered for more. There was a reason they were selected for the nuclear programme. They were the toughest of the tough. Some people just don’t get traumatized.’

Jack peered at the map. ‘If he really was describing one specific blue hole, the trouble is there are hundreds of them in the Bahamas over several thousand square miles. All we have to go on is the last reported position of the aircraft over that sector north of the island of San Salvador.’

‘I looked into this with my oceanographer friend,’ Mikhail said.
‘At the co-ordinates of the target minesweeper noted in the file, the Liberator would have been beyond the land-mass plateau of the Bahamas and probably over the abyssal plain, beyond the huge underwater cliffs that run up from the Puerto Rico Fault along the Atlantic side of the Bahamas towards the coast of Florida. The plain is at least a mile deep and you won’t find blue holes there. But there’s one crucial feature we noticed. Off San Salvador there’s an undersea ridge that extends about twenty-five nautical miles north-east, rising up from the abyssal plain. The detailed bathymetry was unknown in 1945, but I wondered whether there might be sections of reef shallow enough to have been upstanding land mass in the Ice Age, enough for rainwater erosion to have formed caverns that might have become blue holes as the sea level rose. We just don’t know enough about the sea and reef at that point. That whole sector was a weapons test range, designated in April 1945 and in the event seeing little use. After the war it became part of the Atlantic Test and Evaluation range for anti-submarine weapons, continuing to be an exclusion zone even after the decision had been made to use another sector of undersea trench closer to Nassau for most testing. The San Salvador ridge extends beyond the twelve-nautical-mile Bahamas territorial limit, but the weapons test zone remains in force beyond the end of the ridge and we couldn’t find any record of exploration or diving there. So it’s possible that there
is
a shallow reef and a blue hole that has never been properly charted.’

Jack reached over and picked up the photograph showing the raft with the airman’s body slumped inside. He looked closely at the dark smears on the pontoons and the mass of marks the man had made with his own blood. He could just make out a sequence of numbers, possibly repeated several times, but the image needed to be magnified and sharpened for there to be any hope of reading it. He stared, his mind racing. Something was niggling him, something his father had told him when they had seen the survival equipment at the museum at Hendon, about how pilots were trained to think of what information the crew who escaped from a ditched aircraft might need to call in a rescue.
He needed to get this image to Lanowski
.

At that moment Mikhail’s two-way radio crackled and he spoke into it briefly, then got up. ‘Okay. That was Ben. There’s a propane tanker truck beginning to back down the lane. This was scheduled. Ben’s going to remain concealed, and will stay at the top of the lane until he’s relieved by John. I need to go out and make sure the path’s clear for the men to drag the hose to the propane tank. It’s hidden under a cedar growth beyond the barn.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Jeremy said, getting up and stretching. ‘I need some fresh air. I’ll see if Rebecca’s out of the shower yet.’

‘Can I use the internet and a scanner?’ Jack asked.

Mikhail pointed to a monitor on a desk in an alcove. ‘Be my guest. It can be a little slow out here. There’s Skype if you need it.’

Mikhail and Jeremy left the room together, and Jack went over to the desk and sat down. He opened up the IMU home page and quickly logged on, then accessed his email account and clicked on the Skype. He checked his watch.
Seaquest II
was in a different time zone, one hour ahead of Bermuda, and he guessed that by now Lanowski and Costas would have their heads down over the computers in the operations room. He picked up the landline phone and dialled IMU Headquarters in Cornwall. The phone was answered immediately. ‘Hello, this is Jack Howard. Please patch me through to
Seaquest II
. Get me a secure line. This is a priority call.’

S
econds later, the line crackled as the satellite link connected Jack to the officer of the watch on
Seaquest II
, and then he was through to the operations room. A slightly annoyed voice answered. ‘Lanowski here.’

‘This is Jack. Switch on your Skype.’

‘Jack!’ The voice lightened up. ‘I was just in the process of terraforming the Caribbean during the Ice Age.’ A face materialized on Jack’s screen, the familiar lank fringe and little round glasses staring somewhere just below the webcam, presumably at another screen. Lanowski looked up and peered closely into the camera. ‘The computer isn’t up to it, as usual. But I refuse to dumb down and give it simplified data. Computer programs are only as big as the brains that create them. Costas tells me I need to make my own, and he’s right. But meanwhile here’s the score. We’ve just been looking at the Bahamas outer ridge abyssal plain. Interesting layering of megaturbitides along the fault line, with magma extrusions rising alarmingly high into the plate divide. Drop anything down there and it would sink through about a mile of silt and then into the molten core of the earth. I’ve got James Macleod and the geology team at IMU very interested in doing a sub-bottom probe survey.’

‘Is Costas with you now?’

An unshaven face appeared from one side of the screen. ‘I’m with you, Jack.’

‘Okay. Keep all that geomorphology data up and running. I’ve got a possible lead from Mikhail.’ He quickly ran through the story of the Liberator attack and the airman’s account. As he talked, Lanowski emailed through a link that flashed on his screen. Jack clicked on it, opening up a detailed topographical and bathymetric map of the Bahamas islands. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can visualize the flight route east from Nassau to the sector of sea north of the island of San Salvador.’

‘That’s beside the fault line we’ve been looking at, about dead centre on the map,’ Lanoswki said.

Jack zoomed in on the island. ‘Yesterday I called James Macleod and asked him to trawl through our database for anything that might hint at undersea research in the Caribbean in the late 1930s, anything odd. I need to know if he found anything on the Bahamas.’

‘We’re on to it already. He’s been liaising with us this morning,’ Lanowski said. ‘Let me give him a call now. This might take a few minutes. Stay online.’

Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Mikhail’s got this place locked down,’ Jack replied. ‘Ben and the MI6 guy are doing perimeter security. They know Saumerre’s men have been shadowing Rebecca since she arrived in New York from Turkey two days ago. The farm is about as remote as you can get in the Adirondacks, but Mikhail’s not taking any chances.’

‘I found out something interesting,’ Costas said. ‘The MI6 file on Saumerre passed to our security people shows that he’s a diver. He trained at Cambridge when he was a student and qualified with the British Sub-Aqua Club. If he thinks this place in the Caribbean is going to give him his biggest prize, he might want to get involved personally this time and not just leave it to his henchmen.’

‘They’ll all be divers too. You remember his previous men, the Russians we encountered in the mineshaft in Poland last year?’

‘I remember how incompetent they were as divers, and how none of them got out alive.’

‘This time might not be so easy. Saumerre will have learned his lesson with the Russians. Shang Yong and the Brotherhood of the Tiger only employ the elite.’

‘You’re sure it’s them?’

‘Ben saw a man he was convinced was trailing Rebecca in New York. His description of the tattoo on the man’s wrist, the distinctive grimacing tiger, clinches it. We’ve seen that tattoo before, in Afghanistan two years ago, remember? And I trust Ben’s appraisal of the people he thinks we’re up against. He says they’re good, very good, skilled operators in an urban environment like Manhattan, where he thinks they stalked Rebecca while she was at school over the last two days. Mikhail’s calculation is that a group of Chinese gangsters are going to be less familiar with the forests of the Adirondacks, and that he’d have the upper hand out here.’

‘How is Rebecca?’

‘Not really woken up yet.’

‘Jeremy looking after her?’

Jack gave a wry smile. ‘After the course in small arms that Katya seems to have given her in Kyrgyzstan, I think Rebecca can look after herself.’

Costas moved aside and Lanowski reappeared, pushing his hanging fringe behind one ear and staring closely at the camera, his eyes gleaming. ‘Jack. Are you there?’

‘I’m waiting.’

‘Bingo,’ Lanowski exclaimed triumphantly. ‘Bingo. Macleod has worked through all the records he could find for the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. Because the Bahamas are British territory, a lot of the older archival material is readily accessible in England. He’s got security clearance to view material that’s still classified. Take a look at this.’ His face disappeared and a scanned document appeared on the screen, with the Government of the Bahamas logo along the top and a few brief paragraphs of faded typescript below, slashed across with thick lines in red pencil; below that was the text of another letter, in bolder Gothic typescript. ‘The upper text is a record duplicate of a letter signed by the military commander of the Bahamas garrison on
the third of February 1938, nineteen months before the war started. Below it I’ve pasted in the text of the letter to which it’s a response, from the master of a German-registered cargo vessel. The military commander is acknowledging notice that the master intends to spend two weeks offshore along the north-eastern bank of the Bahamas. The master’s letter is a courtesy notice to explain that the vessel contains a scientific team studying the fault line between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. This was before plate tectonics were fully understood, so it’s plausible research. The master states that their expedition was a follow-up to a visit two years before, in the summer of 1936, when a German oceanographic group experimenting with diving equipment and underwater photography had spent several weeks in the same area of reefs beyond the territorial limits of the Bahamas, but had also made their presence known as a courtesy to the authorities.’

‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘That could only be the Ahnenerbe expedition that Frau Hoffman talked about. For oceanography, read archaeology. They were hunting for signs of Atlantis in the Bahamas, and they were the ones who found the place with the ancient symbols. Two years later, Himmler sends a team back. This is it. Jacob. We’re on target.’

Lanowski nodded. ‘There’s more. The master explains that he’s written the letter to be forwarded to the Governor General of the Bahamas in order to ensure that the purely scientific nature of their work is understood and that their presence does not atract Royal Navy attention. That’s exciting enough for us, Jack. But there’s the clincher in the final little paragraph. They intend to stop at two places and lower seismic measuring equipment. In those days that meant fairly primitive heavyweight gear, probably in bulbous pressure capsules like the early bathyspheres developed after the war. Costas told me you said Frau Hoffman mentioned an underwater habitat secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient. That could be what we’re looking for, Jack. And check out the location noted by the German master. It’s not precise, surely deliberately so, a sector of about two hundred square miles of ocean, but the latitude and longitude co-ordinates encompass that undersea spur north of the island of San Salvador.’