Atlantis Found (A Dirk Pitt Novel)

by Cussler, Clive

  The ship trembled under his feet as its great bulbous bow rammed the ice and then heaved up and over the white surface. Then the weight of the forward part of the ship crushed the pack into piano-size portions that tore at the paint on the hull as they groaned and scraped against the steel plates until they were chopped to small chunks by the ship’s huge twelve-foot propellers and were left bobbing in the ship’s wake. The process was repeated until they reached a part of the sea a few miles off the continent where the ice pack had been slow to thicken.

  The Polar Storm incorporated the capabilities of both an icebreaker and a research vessel. By most maritime standards, she was an old ship, having been launched twenty years earlier, in 1981. She was also considered small alongside most icebreakers. She had an 8,000-ton displacement, a length of 145 feet, and a 27-foot beam. Her facilities supported oceanographic, meteorological, biological, and ice research, and she was capable of breaking through a minimum of three feet of level ice.

  Evie Tan, who had joined the Polar Storm when it had stopped at Montevideo in Uruguay on its way to the Antarctic, sat in a chair and wrote in a notebook. A science and technical writer and photographer, Evie had come onboard to do a story for a national science magazine. She was a petite lady with long, silky black hair, who had been born and raised in the Philippines. She looked over at Captain Gillespie and watched him scan the ice pack ahead before asking him a question.

  “Is it your plan to land a team of scientists on the pack to study the sea ice?”

  Gillespie lowered his binoculars and nodded. “That’s the routine. Sometimes as many as three times an Antarctic day, the glaciologists march out on the ice to take samples and readings for later study in the ship’s lab. They also record the physical properties of the ice and seawater as we sail from site to site.”

  “Anything in particular they’re looking for?”

  “Joel Rogers, the expedition’s chief scientist, can explain it better than I can. The primary goal of the project is to assess the impact behind the current warming trend that is shrinking the sea ice around the continent.”

  “Is it a scientific fact the ice is diminishing?” asked Evie.

  “During the Antarctic autumn, March into May, the ocean around the continent begins to freeze and ice over. The pack once spread out from the landmass and formed a vast collar twice the size of Australia. But now the sea ice has retreated and is not as thick and extensive as it once was. The winters are simply not as cold as they were in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Because of the warming trend, a pivotal link in the Antarctic sea chain has been disrupted.”

  “Beginning with the single-cell algae that live on the underside of the ice pack,” offered Evie, knowledgeably.

  “You’ve done your homework.” Gillespie smiled. “Without the algae to dine on, there would be no krill, the little shrimplike fellows, who in turn provide nourishment for every animal and fish in these southern waters from penguins to whales to phocids.”

  “By phocids, you mean seals?”

  “I do.”

  Evie gazed out over Okuma Bay, which divided the great Ross Ice Shelf and the Edward VII Peninsula. “That range of mountains to the south,” she said, “what is it called?”

  “The Rockefeller Mountains,” answered Gillespie. “They’re anchored by Mount Frazier on this end and Mount Nilsen on the other.”

  “They’re beautiful,” said Evie, admiring the snow-covered peaks that blazed under the bright sun. “May I borrow your binoculars?”

  “Certainly.”

  Evie focused the glasses on a complex of large buildings set around a large towerlike structure only two miles to the south in a sheltered part of Okuma Bay. She could distinguish an airfield behind the buildings and a concrete pier leading into the bay. A large cargo ship was moored to the pier, in the process of being unloaded by a high, overhead crane. “Is that a research station there at the base of Mount Frazier?”

  Gillespie peered in the direction the binoculars were aimed. “No, it’s a mining facility, owned and operated by a big international conglomerate based in Argentina. They’re extracting minerals from the sea.”

  She lowered the binoculars and looked at him. “I didn’t think that was economically feasible.”

  Gillespie shook his head. “From what I’ve been told by Bob Maris, our resident geologist, they’ve developed a new process for extracting gold and other precious minerals from seawater.”

  “Odd I haven’t heard about it.”

  “Their operation is all very secret. This is as close as we can come without one of their security boats coming out and shooing us off. But it’s rumored they do it through a new science called nanotechnology.”

  “Why in such a remote area as Antarctica? Why not on a coast or port city with easy access to transportation?”

  “According to Maris, freezing water concentrates the sea brine and forces it into deeper water. The extraction process becomes more efficient when the salt is removed—” The captain broke off and studied the ice pack beyond the bow. “Excuse me, Ms. Tan, but we have an iceberg coming on dead ahead.”

  The iceberg loomed up from the flat ice pack like a desert plateau covered by a white sheet. Its steep walls rose well more than a hundred feet from the sea. Brilliant white under a pure radiant sun and a clear blue sky, the berg seemed pristine and unblemished by man, animals or rooted plant life. The Polar Storm approached the berg from the west, and Gillespie ordered the helmsman to set the ship’s automated control systems on a course around the nearest tip. The helmsman expertly shifted the electronic controls on a broad console and nudged the icebreaker on a seventy-five-degree turn to port, scanning the echo sounder for any underwater spurs that might have protruded from the berg. The icebreaker’s stout hull was built to withstand a hard blow from solid ice, but Gillespie saw no reason to cause even the slightest damage to its steel plates.

  He skirted the berg from less than three hundred yards, a safe distance but still near enough for the crew and scientists on the outside deck to stare up at the icy cliffs towering above. It was a strange and wonderful sight. Soon the palisades slipped by, as the ship circled the huge mass and turned into the open pack beyond.

  Suddenly, another vessel sailed into view, having been hidden behind the berg. Gillespie was astonished to identify the encroaching ship as a submarine. The undersea craft was sailing through an open lead in the ice and passing on a course that took it directly across the icebreaker’s great bow from port to starboard.

  The helmsman acted before Gillespie’s orders issued across the bridge. He sized up the situation, judged the submarine’s speed, and threw the icebreaker’s big port diesel engine into Full Reverse. It was a wise maneuver, one that might have saved the White Star liner Titanic. Rather than reversing both engines in a futile effort to halt the momentum of the big icebreaker, he kept the starboard engine on Half Ahead. With one propeller thrusting the Polar Storm forward and the other pulling it backward, the ship began turning far more sharply than a simple rudder command. Everyone on the bridge stood mesmerized, as the big bow’s direction slowly angled from the sub’s hull toward the wake behind its stern.

  There was no time for a warning, no time for communications between the two vessels. Gillespie hit the great horn on the icebreaker and shouted over the intercom for the crew and scientists to brace for a collision. There was a cloud of restrained frenzy on the bridge.

  “Come on, baby,” the helmsman pleaded. “Turn, turn!”

  Evie stared enraptured for a few moments before the business and professional side of her mind shifted into gear. She quickly snatched her camera out of its case, checked the settings, and began snapping pictures. Through the range finder she saw no crew on the deck of the submarine, no officers standing in the top of the conning tower. She paused to refocus her lens, when she saw the submarine’s bow slip beneath the ice pack as it began to crash dive.

  The two ships closed. Gillespie was certain the massive reinforced
bow of the icebreaker would crush the pressure hull of the submarine. But a sudden burst of speed from the undersea vessel, the quick action of the helmsman, and the ability of the Polar Storm to make sharp turns made the difference between a near miss and tragedy.

  Gillespie ran out onto the starboard bridge wing and stared down, fearing the worst. The submarine had barely dipped under the surface when the icebreaker’s bow swung over her stern, missing the rudder and propellers by less than the length of an ordinary dining table. Gillespie could not believe the two vessels had not collided. The strange submarine had disappeared with barely a ripple, the icy water slowly swirling in a whorl and then turning smooth, as though the submarine had never been there.

  “My God, that was close!” the helmsman muttered with a thankful sigh.

  “A submarine,” said Evie in a vague voice, as she lowered her camera. “Where did it come from? What navy did it belong to?”

  “I saw no markings,” said the helmsman. “It certainly didn’t look like any submarine I’ve ever seen.”

  The ship’s first officer, Jake Bushey, came rushing onto the bridge. “What happened, Captain?”

  “A near collision with a submarine.”

  “A nuclear submarine, here in Marguerite Bay? You must be joking.”

  “Captain Gillespie isn’t joking,” said Evie. “I’ve got a photo record to prove it.”

  “It wasn’t a nuclear sub,” said Gillespie slowly.

  “She was an old model by the look of her,” the helmsman said, gazing at his hands, noticing for the first time that they were shaking.

  “Take the bridge,” Gillespie ordered Bushey. “Keep us on a course toward that ice ridge a mile off the starboard bow. We’ll drop the scientists there. I’ll be in my cabin.”

  Evie and Jake Bushey both caught the distant, puzzled expression on the captain’s face. They watched as he dropped down a companionway to the passageway on the deck below. Gillespie opened the door to his cabin and stepped inside. He was a man born to the sea and a lover of sea history. Shelves stretching around the bulkheads of his cabin were filled with books about the sea. His eyes wandered over the titles and stopped at an old ship’s recognition book.

  He sat in a comfortable leather chair and turned the pages, stopping at a photo in the middle of the book. There it was, a picture of the identical vessel that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The photo showed a large submarine cruising on the surface not far from a rocky coastline. The caption underneath read,

  Only known photo of the U-2015, one of two XXI Electro Boats to see operational service during World War II. A fast vessel that could stay submerged for indefinite periods of time and cruise nearly halfway around the world before surfacing for fuel.

  The caption went on to say that the U-2015 had been last reported off the coast of Denmark and had vanished somewhere in the Atlantic and was officially listed as Fate Unknown.

  Gillespie could not believe what his eyes told him. It seemed impossible, but he knew it to be true. The strange, unmarked vessel the Polar Storm had nearly sent to the icy bottom of the bay was a Nazi U-boat from a war that had ended fifty-six years before.

  10

  AFTER A LENGTHY CONFERENCE call with Admiral Sandecker, chief director of the National Underwater & Marine Agency, and Francis Ragsdale, the recently appointed director of the FBI, it was agreed that Pitt, Giordino, and Pat O’Connell would fly to Washington to brief government investigators on the strange series of events in the Paradise Mine. FBI agents were dispatched to Pat’s home near the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to take her daughter to a safe house just outside Washington, where they would soon be together. Agents also swooped into Telluride and hustled Luis and Lisa Marquez, along with their daughters, to a secret location in Hawaii.

  Escorted by a protective ring of deputies, courtesy of Sheriff Eagan, the three of them—Pitt, Giordino, and Pat O’Connell—boarded a NUMA jet and took off for the nation’s capital. As the turquoise-painted Cessna Citation Ultra V jet banked over the snow-mantled peaks of the San Juan Mountains and set a course northeast, Pat relaxed in her leather seat, reached out, and took Pitt’s hand in hers.

  “You’re sure my daughter is safe?”

  He smiled and gently squeezed her hand. “For the tenth time, she’s in the capable hands of the FBI. You’ll have her in your arms in a few hours.”

  “I can’t picture us living like hunted animals the rest of our lives.”

  “Won’t happen,” Pitt assured her. “Once the lunatic nut-cases of the Fourth Empire are rooted out, arrested, and convicted, we’ll all be able to live normal lives again.”

  Pat looked over at Giordino, who had fallen asleep before the wheels lifted off the runway. “He doesn’t waste any time drifting off, does he?”

  “Al can sleep anywhere, anytime. He’s like a cat.” He held up her hand to his lips and give her fingers a light kiss. “You should get some sleep, too. You must be dead on your feet.”

  It was the first display of affection Pitt had offered since they’d met, and Pat felt a pleasurable warmth course through her. “My mind is too busy for me to be tired.” She pulled her notebook from her case. “I’ll use the flight to begin an initial analysis of the inscriptions.”

  “The aircraft has a computer facility in the rear cabin, if it would be of any help.”

  “Does it have a scanner to convert my notes onto a disk?”

  “I believe so.”

  The fatigue seemed to ebb from her face. “That would be a great help. A pity my film was ruined after being immersed in the water.”

  Pitt reached down into his pants pocket, retrieved a plastic packet, and dropped it into her lap. “A complete photo survey of the chamber.”

  She was quite surprised as she opened the packet and found six canisters of film. “Where in the world did you get these?”

  “Compliments of the Fourth Empire,” he answered casually. “Al and I interrupted their photo shoot in the chamber. They were finishing up when we arrived, so I’m assuming they recorded the entire text. I’ll have the rolls developed first thing in the NUMA photo lab.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Pat said excitedly, kissing him on a cheek thick with stubble. “My notes only covered a smattering of the inscriptions.” As if he were merely a passing stranger on a busy street, she turned away from him and hurried toward the aircraft’s computer cabin.

  Pitt eased his aching body from his seat and walked forward to the compact little galley, opened a refrigerator, and lifted out a soft drink can. Sadly, to his way of thinking, Admiral Sandecker permitted no alcoholic beverages on board NUMA ships or aircraft.

  He stopped and stared down at the wooden crate that was firmly strapped in an empty seat. The black obsidian skull had not been out of his sight from the time he carried it from the chamber. He could only imagine the empty eye sockets staring at him through the wood of the crate. He sat in a seat across the aisle and raised the antenna of a Globalstar satellite telephone and punched a stored number. His call was linked to one of seventy orbiting satellites that relayed it to another satellite that relayed the signal to earth, where it was connected with a public telephone network.

  Pitt gazed out the port at the passing clouds, knowing the party on the other end seldom answered before the seventh or eighth ring. Finally, on the tenth, a deep voice came through the receiver. “I’m here.”

  “St. Julien.”

  “Dirk!” St. Julien Perlmutter boomed, recognizing the voice. “If I’d known it was you, I’d have answered sooner.”

  “And step out of character? I don’t think so.”

  Pitt could easily picture Perlmutter, all four hundred pounds of him in his ritual silk paisley pajamas, buried amid a mountain of nautical books in the carriage house he called home. Raconteur, gourmand, connoisseur, and acclaimed marine history authority, with a library collection of the world’s rarest nautical books, private letters, papers, and plans on almost every ship ever built, he was a wal
king encyclopedia of man and the sea.

  “Where are you, my boy?”

  “Thirty-five thousand feet over the Rocky Mountains.”

  “You couldn’t wait to call me in Washington?”

  “I wanted to shift a research project into first gear at the first opportunity.”

  “How can I help you?”

  Pitt briefly explained the mysterious chamber and the inscriptions on the walls. Perlmutter listened thoughtfully, interrupting to ask an occasional question. When Pitt finished, Perlmutter inquired, “What specifically do you have in mind?”

  “You have files you’ve accumulated on pre-Columbian contact in the Americas.”

  “A whole room full of data. Material and theories on all the seafarers who visited North, Central, and South America long before Columbus.”

  “Do you recall any tales of ancient seafarers who traveled deep inside other continents and built underground chambers? Built them for the sole purpose of leaving a message for those who came later? Were such acts ever mentioned in recorded history?”

  “I can’t recall any off the top of my head. There are any number of accounts of ancient trade between the peoples of the Americas and seafarers from Europe and Africa. It’s thought that extensive mining of copper and tin to make bronze took place as far back as five thousand years ago.”

  “Where?” asked Pitt.

  “Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin.”

  “Is it true?”

  “I, for one, believe so,” Perlmutter continued. “There is evidence of ancient mining for lead in Kentucky, serpentine in Pennsylvania, and mica in North Carolina. The mines were worked for many centuries before Christ. Then, mysteriously, the unknown miners vanished within a very short time, leaving their tools and other artifacts of their presence right where they were dropped, not to mention stone sculptures, altars, and dolmens. Dolmens are large prehistoric horizontal stone slabs supported by two or more vertical stones.”