The Gods of Atlantis (58 page)

Jack ducked through the hatch into the second sphere, followed by Costas. Saumerre was sitting at the bench in the centre, wearing a wetsuit, his black hair slicked back; the other man was standing beside him. Jack had seen images of Saumerre many times in the media, his
face familiar from his public front as a European Union politician, but this was the first time he had seen him in the flesh. Beyond them he saw something that made his heart pound. It was a small metal container against the wall, like a safe, with the reverse swastika depression in the front. It was closed.
So far, so good
. He stared at Saumerre, saying nothing.

‘To business,’ Saumerre said. ‘Do you have the palladion?’

‘Give me the bacterium, and I will give you the palladion.’

‘I don’t believe you have it.’

Jack pointed at the leather satchel strapped to his waist.

Saumerre hesitated. ‘You don’t know any better than I do whether the virus phial is in there or not, do you?’

Jack looked at him impassively, and said nothing.

Saumerre narrowed his eyes. ‘Why would you be allowing me to have this virus?’

‘Because I believe there’s no chance you’ll use it. You’re an educated and civilized man. You’ll be like Himmler, keeping it as a bargaining chip for the future. Spreading the word in the underworld that you have a Nazi wonder-weapon will make you a hugely powerful man. As for me, every archaeologist who sees enough of it eventually succumbs to gold. With that amount, I can ditch the whole tiresome scientific business and set myself up as a treasure-hunter. Others of my team will come along with me.’ He jerked his head towards Costas, who smirked. ‘And be very rich men.’

Saumerre looked cautiously at Jack for a moment, and then a smile crept over his face. ‘So. The famous Dr Howard has seen the dark side, and he likes it.’

‘Leave us the gold, and you take the virus. But I want the bacterium. I can play your game, too. You know it’s far less deadly. It’s never been tried. And there’s an antidote.’

‘Not possible. Nobody has worked on this since the war.’

‘Professor Dr Heidi Hoffman has.’

‘Ah, yes. Of course. Your confidante.’ Saumerre hesitated again, then held out his hand. ‘The palladion?’

Jack reached down and unwrapped the leather satchel he had retrieved from the U-boat. The leather was strong enough to hold together, tough cowhide, but had perished on the surface and came away in his hands. He wiped them on his e-suit and took out the golden swastika inside. Saumerre gasped, and the other man’s eyes were riveted on it. Jack held it with one hand, his arm muscles straining with the weight, and held out his other hand, waiting. Saumerre unzipped the pocket of his buoyancy compensator, took out a waterproof box and opened it, revealing a cylinder inside the size of a large pen. Jack quickly checked it, seeing the marks Heidi had told him to look for and the sealing cover, still intact. Saumerre closed the box and handed it to Jack, who let him take the palladion and immediately slipped it into his leg pocket. Saumerre turned and slotted the palladion into the depression on the metal safe, where it fitted perfectly. A lock clicked, the door opened slightly and it was partly ejected from the hollow. Saumerre took it and placed it on the table, then turned back to the safe.

Jack glanced at Costas, looking at the grapple-gun handle just visible in his boilersuit. Costas nodded almost imperceptibly.

Jack held his breath. If the virus was in there, they were set for a deadly standoff in which there could be no winners. If it was empty, then he and Costas could seize the moment and gain the upper hand. He thought of Hoffman, of the U-boat outside with the fired torpedo tube, of Heidi’s absolute faith that Ernst would have done the right thing.

Saumerre opened the door to the safe.

It was empty
.

Costas whipped out the grapple gun and held it to Saumerre’s neck. Jack picked up the palladion and thrust it at the other man, who buckled under the weight, falling on his knees and allowing Jack to slam his fist into his temple and knock him out. He picked up the palladion, grabbed the satchel and retreated through the hatch to the first sphere. Costas followed, keeping his gun trained on Saumerre, who seemed too stunned to move. ‘Visor down,’ Jack yelled, closing his own visor and waiting until Costas had done the same before unscrewing the
regulators from the two tanks and cracking the valves open, thankful that their closed helmets dulled the noise of two-thousand-odd p.s.i. of compressed air escaping in such a confined space. After about twenty seconds the noise abated and the tanks emptied. Jack unhooked the hose from his own backpack and vented it for good measure, so that there was enough air in the chamber to ensure that Saumerre survived for at least a couple of hours. He hooked the hose back into his helmet, strapped the package with the palladion to his chest, and looked at Costas. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

They donned their fins and dropped one after the other through the entry hatch at the base of the sphere, then swam off over the U-boat. Jack checked his air pressure. He had vented half of his supply, but there was little risk with the surface only fifteen metres above them and Costas beside him with virtually full tanks in case of emergency. They stopped together beneath the crack between the rocks that led to the surface. ‘Good to go?’ Costas asked.

Jack looked around. There was one thing he had not seen. There had been no ancient symbols, no artefacts. He knew they would come back here after Saumerre was removed, would scour the place, but he still wanted to know now. He had spotted only one opening leading off the main chamber, about ten metres deeper beyond the bow section of the U-boat, a tunnel in the wall. He pointed. ‘I’d like to have a quick look down there.’

‘It’s too deep for the Ahnenerbe divers, probably almost thirty metres,’ Costas said. ‘We have to remember that the Nazi divers only had pure oxygen and that becomes toxic below ten metres depth. If you’re looking for the place where they might have found those symbols, that can’t be it.’

‘It could lead into a shallower cavern. And if you look at the wall directly ahead of us above that tunnel, there’s a place where I think there was a fissure connecting with this chamber, at about fifteen metres. It looks as if it was blocked by the explosions. That depth would have just about been possible with primitive oxygen rebreathers.’

‘How’s your air supply?’

‘Not a lot of margin, but if you stay close by, we’ll be fine.’

‘It’ll be an overhead environment in there, Jack. We haven’t got a safety line or spare tanks.’

‘No more than twenty metres in, I promise.’

Costas paused for a moment, floating still. ‘Okay. Your call.’ They dropped down and were soon at the tunnel entrance, a jagged hole about three metres wide and five metres long. They swam through into another chamber, the size of a small church, the walls rising high above them on every side. Jack ascended until his depth gauge read fifteen metres. Costas swam off to one side, looking hard at the cave walls, searching for anything man-made. ‘I’m remembering Lanowski’s CGI model of this place about 5500
BC
. Where we are now would have been inside one of the hills he thought lay on either side of the cavern that became the blue hole. We’d have been maybe ten metres above sea level at this point. I’m just thinking of a guy in a boat arriving here after a trip across the Atlantic, exhausted, famished, thinking he’d seen the promised twin-peaked volcano but then realizing it was an illusion, yet still needing shelter. The cavern below us would have been a subterranean cave beside the sea, perfect for pulling a boat into during a storm. Where we are, higher up, could have been a separate cavern, almost like a mezzanine. You can imagine him finding a way up the rock and holing up here.’

‘And slowly going mad,’ Jack said.

‘Maybe not so slowly,’ Costas replied. ‘If it was hurricane season, he could have collected rainwater from the rock pools on the surface, and anyone who’d survived an Atlantic crossing on an open boat like that must have been a reasonably adept fisherman. But once the rains stopped, that would have been it. He would have had to move on. I don’t see him building a new Atlantis here.’

Jack stared at the walls, remembering Heidi’s description of the underwater cave in the primitive photograph she had seen, and knowing himself what he was looking for. Suddenly he spotted something close to the base of the ledge of the upper cavern, and swam towards it. As he got close to the wall, his heart began to pound. ‘Bingo,’ he said.

Costas swam towards him, Together they stared at a line of five carved symbols, eroded and obscured by marine growth. ‘Look at that,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Those first three symbols: the pectiform symbol, the half-moon and the cluster of dots. That’s what Katya identified from the Stone Age code as the shaman name for Noah, Uta-Napishtim. It’s identical to the name Little Joey saw on the cave wall in Atlantis, except here I don’t see the symbols for Enlil-Gilgamesh. After Noah’s name, there’s the Atlantis symbol. And finally there’s the half-moon with dots over it, the symbol Katya interprets as meaning “west”.’

‘It’s like a carving on one of those castle dungeon walls in England. “I was here.”’

‘Dungeon is probably about right,’ Jack said. ‘But I think it says more than that. I think it says Noah-Uta-napishtim was here, from Atlantis, or going to Atlantis, to the west. It’s fantastic. It’s exactly what I wanted to find. It confirms one of the greatest voyages of discovery in prehistory, the fact that travellers from the most ancient civilization of the Old World went across the Atlantic more than seven thousand years ago. And I know where he was heading. I know where the new Atlantis lies.’

‘Jack, we have to move. Now.’

Jack felt a tug on his legs, but Costas was now several arm’s lengths away, moving rapidly across the cavern but somehow without finning. Jack suddenly realized what had happened.
The tide had turned
. He saw Costas drop down to the tunnel and begin to fin hard, making slow progress against the current that was suddenly racing through the lower part of the chamber from the blue hole into the bowels of the reef beyond. Jack realized that he was being propelled around the upper part of the chamber in an eddy created by the current, but he found it impossible to follow it to the point where Costas had managed to get down to the tunnel. He saw that Costas had disappeared, but his voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Jack. I’m through. There’s no way you can follow me now. The current must have increased by three knots in the last minute. It’s like a vortex in here, a twister that’s sucking the water down. But I’ve got a line I’m going to feed back into the hole for you to grab. I should be able to pull you through.’

Jack let the eddy take him to a rocky outcrop protruding above the current, now clearly visible as a turbulent stream in the water. He held the rock with one hand and reached into the current with the other, feeling his hand almost rip away. Then he saw Costas’ line snake through, a dark streak below him with a small orange buoy the size of a tennis ball at the end. It waved around violently, but it was at least three metres below the top of the current and there was no way he could reach it. He heard Costas again. ‘I always keep a buoy attached to float the line. It should come up to you.’

‘That’s a negative,’ Jack said. ‘The current’s too strong.’

‘I don’t have anything more buoyant on me.’

‘How long is this current going to last?’

The intercom crackled, the interference worse now. ‘A long time, Jack. It’s a spring tide at the moment, and it’s a high one. It’s like a bathtub emptying, and you’re somewhere down the sinkhole.’

‘You mean hours.’

There was no reply for a moment, then Costas came on clearly. ‘How’s your air?’

Jack glanced at his readout, and suddenly tensed. Five hundred p.s.i. He only had a few minutes left. ‘Bad,’ he said. ‘It was my call. I had to find the archaeology. I guess I’m paying the price.’

‘I’m coming in for you.’

‘Oh no you’re not.’

‘I’m going to find something to tie the line to out here, then tie myself off at the other end and work my way down the line through that tunnel. I should have the strength to kick out of the current long enough to grab you, and the line should be strong enough to allow both of us to use it to make our way back against the current. I’m probably going out of radio range, Jack. The interference is really bad out here. I’m going to find part of the submarine wreckage to tie on to. Hang in there.’

Jack pushed off and floated back up into the upper part of the chamber. There was no point struggling against the current. He tried to relax, to slow his breathing, to conserve his remaining air. He tried
to keep calm. It was always like this in diving. Things happened quickly. One moment everything is fine, euphoric, but you take a little risk along the way, and before you know it everything has gone very badly wrong, in an instant. He was in his element underwater, but he knew it was utterly unforgiving. In a cave, one poor decision, one gamble gone wrong, and that was it. His gamble with his air had been based on Costas being beside him in case he had to buddy-breathe. But then something had happened that he should have factored into the equation. They had even talked about the current on the way down. He put it down to experience, for the next time they dived in this place.

He looked at the rock, seeing the symbols again: the Atlantis symbol that had come to mean so much in his career. The eddy had pushed him into a place of stillness in the water, like the eye of a storm, and he used his breathing to acquire perfect neutral buoyancy. He had always loved doing that, the feeling he got when he knew he had achieved total equilibrium, a sensation of utter oneness with his environment that was far better than any altered-consciousness experience he could imagine. He forgot for a moment where he was, what was happening, and just revelled in being where he had always wanted to be, underwater. Each breath, each slight exhalation was precious now, because he knew what was coming next, the greatest fear of all divers. He tested his breathing, trying a deeper breath. It was tightening. He was running out of air. He tried not to panic, to breathe like someone trapped in a prison cell, banging against the walls; he had to keep measured and calm until the final moment.
He did not want to die
. He felt his fingers and legs begin to tingle. He remembered something, and delved into a pocket on his leg, pulling out a small writing board with a plastic sheet and a pencil. He quickly pulled out his knife, cutting a piece off the sheet, and wrote on it, feeling his air going, realizing that his vision was tunnelling. He dropped the board and tucked the note into the sleeve of his suit, where it would be found. He began gagging and retching. His neck felt as if it were about to explode. He wanted to get his helmet off, to drown rather than suffocate, but he could no longer raise his arms. He began to sink, dropping down towards the current.