by Rob Jones
“Why? You’re not thinking of running out on us, are you darling?”
“As a matter of fact,” Hawke said, enjoying the banter, “there’s a great little bar down here I wanted to try.”
The three of them continued to push down into the depths, turning on their headlights. Now, a trio of white arcs shone into the darkness of the ocean and lit their way as they cruised down to the sea floor.
Hawke took a few moments to search around for Kruger and his men but saw no one. According to the latest report from Bekri, Kruger’s ship was now half a kilometre to the north but they had clearly not found the place with their sonar yet or they would already be here. Peering into the gloomy water from behind the safety of his scooter’s windshield, he thought he saw an arc of light that might indicate a headlamp belonging to Kruger’s crew, but it was nothing, so he returned his attention to their mission and pushed onwards.
Unrestrained by his lack of fitness thanks to the scooter, and motivated by sheer enthusiasm, Ryan was now in the lead and so far ahead he was almost out of sight. If it weren’t for his headlight Hawke would never have been able to make out in the gloom.
“Slow down, mate,” He said over the comms.
“Yeah, take it easy, Ry,” Lea added. She was in between the two men and slightly higher in elevation.
“I’m fine,” the young man replied. “But I can’t see a thing yet – not even those sodding circles. There’s nothing here!”
Lea shook her head with frustration. “What a waste of frigging time!”
“No, wait,” Hawke said, steering his scooter to the right and heading toward a ridgeline running north-south. “I see something over there!”
They made their way north for a few seconds, and he got the feeling they were being watched and turned to check over his shoulder once again. Kruger and the rest of his monkeys hadn’t come all the way out here for the swimming, and it was only a matter of time before their survey led them to this exact spot.
But for now, they were still alone.
“Holy crap in a bucket,” Lea said. “Check that out!”
Another hundred yards ahead of them was a long fissure in the seabed. At first it looked like one of the countless splits and cracks in the ocean floor, but as they got closer they recognized the same oddly shaped features the sonar had picked up earlier back on the ship.
“That’s it!” Ryan said, increasing the power to his scooter and speeding up in a bid to get there first.
“You’re not trying to be the first man to set foot on Atlantis, are you, mate?”
“Of course I bloody am!” came the reply.
Hawke and Lea accepted the challenge and also increased their revs. Both scooters shot forward, their headlamps shining three pale white arcs onto the ocean floor ahead of them. As they headed for what was looking more and more like the steps the sonar had revealed, Hawke thought he saw a flash of light in his peripheral vision but dismissed it so he could focus on the more important task ahead of him.
He was no archaeologist, and neither were Lea or Ryan, but he thought there had to be some kind of rules about maintaining the integrity of a newly discovered site, especially one as incredible as Atlantis. This had to be the greatest discovery of all time, after all.
“It’s the steps all right,” Ryan said. “And I’m going in!”
“Just take it easy, mate,” Hawke said, now a hundred yards behind and closing. “We don’t know what’s down there, or where it goes.”
Up ahead, Ryan Bale was buzzing like a swarm of wasps. All those years he’d spent drinking in front of a computer and getting keyed on dope all day and night seemed like an eon ago now, as he raced on an underwater scooter down a smashed-up stairwell beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. If it hadn’t been for Lea calling him that day none of this would be happening.
And what had he been doing when she called? Truth was, when he’d picked up the phone he had a king-size reefer hanging off his lip and a hangover the size of Manhattan behind the eyes. He’d been up all night hacking the Ministry of Defence in a bid to uncover evidence of UFOs. Even at the time he thought it was a threadbare life, but now with all this, just thinking about it almost made him want to break down.
Not that he would ever tell them, but these people had become the best friends he’d ever known, and for the first time in his life he’d stopped hating himself and realized he could do whatever he wanted with his life and not just want others decided for him. Hawke had taught him never to give in and not be afraid of adventure, and he would never forget that.
“Looks like it’s opening out a bit,” he radioed back to the others. He turned to look over his shoulder and saw two headlamps turning into the stairwell above him and close the gap.
“Just slow down, ya tool,” Lea said. “It’s been there for bugger knows how many millennia – it’s not going anywhere!”
“No can do,” he replied cockily. “I’ve got an ancient civilization to discover. This time next year people will talk about me in the same hushed tones of reverence currently reserved for the crew of Apollo 11.”
Inside his diving mask, Hawke rolled his eyes. “Not if you drive into a bloody wall they won’t, so just watch where you’re going.”
“I’m Armstrong though, right?” came the half-humorous reply.
Hawke heard Lea sigh. “Yes, mate. You can be Armstrong if you really want.”
“In that case, let me say – Houston, the Eagle has landed!”
Hawke pulled up beside him and Lea a moment later. They looked at each other through their masks and then followed to where Ryan was pointing.
Lea gasped. “What is it?”
“Atlantis!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Shifting off their scooters, they finally stepped onto the surface of Atlantis and were met with another cloud of silty dust. An underwater current caught it and whipped it up around their faces before the area cleared again. From within the confines of his mask, Hawke looked around and took in the ancient site.
He was staring at what looked like a modern-day disaster zone and all around was the kind of devastation left behind by an earthquake or tsunami. Broken buildings jutted up out of banks of sand and silt and pieces of smashed pottery and twisted jewellery were scattered all across the site. It looked like pictures of the debris field he had seen around the wreck of the Titanic, and for the first time he was struck by the thought that this was not only an amazing archaeological site, but also a mass grave.
He called up to the ship and made his report while Ryan and Lea poked around in the detritus and shone their underwater flashlights into various nooks and crannies.
“It’s just ruins,” he said. “Clearly there was something here a very long time ago but it looks like it was totally destroyed.”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “But by what?”
“Maybe the same thing that sank Valhalla,” Lea said.
“It’s just amazing down here though,” added Ryan. “And talking of Valhalla – call me crazy but this place is a lot like there… some kind of holy site maybe. Outstanding!”
“I’m very pleased for you darling but we have a little problem up here.” Through the underwater comms Scarlet’s voice sounded like it was coming from the dark side of the moon.
Hawke instinctively looked up to the surface and immediately knew what she was talking about when he saw the shadow of another hull moving toward their ship. Kruger’s crew must have seen them and sailed over. “I see your problem,” he said. “How far away are they?”
“Four or five hundred metres,” Scarlet said.
Lea looked up. “You’ve drifted quite far away from the site,” she said. “That might be a good thing because we don’t want anything damaged down here.”
Scarlet responded, but her tone had changed. “Listen, we’re coming under fire and…”
Hawke frowned. “Scarlet?”
“Radio’s down,” Ryan said.
Lea sighed. “Isn’t that
just plain… arsing… fantastic.”
“Forget it,” Hawke said. “There’s nothing we can do to help them and we’ve got our own mission down here. Focus on the job and trust them to do theirs, and then if…” he was interrupted by Ryan’s voice over the comms.
“This is more than weird,” he said, riding his scooter a few more yards and then coming to a stop again on the seabed. He climbed off and awkwardly hopped a few yards to the ruins. “Call me crazy but this looks almost identical to the Ishtar Gate.”
“Ishtar Gate for Dummies, please mate.”
“The Ishtar Gate was one of gates that led into inner Babylon.”
“Babylon being in Iraq?” Lea said.
“Yes – right in the center on the plain between the Euphrates and Tigris, just about fifty miles south of what today we call Baghdad.”
“But we’re not exactly fifty miles south of Baghdad, are we?” Hawke said, his voice crackling through the underwater comms.
“It’s definitely the same as the Ishtar Gate though,” Ryan repeated as he continued to shift sand and detritus off the ocean floor to reveal more of the ruins. “This is without a doubt a depiction of an aurochs, and this…”
“A what?”
“An aurochs – it’s a type of wild cattle that we used back then. Extinct now though – died out around three or four hundred years ago… but they were a key feature of the decoration on the Ishtar Gate, and that’s what his little fellow is right here – not to mention this band of flowers here – and here’s a lion too!”
“It’s too big and heavy for us to take back to the surface with the equipment we’ve got,” Hawke said.
“But we have to come back and get this thing!” Ryan said.
“I agree,” Lea said. “I’m more than a little curious to know how a bloody gate from Iraq wound up in Atlantis.”
“But I don’t think it’s from Iraq,” Ryan replied. “I’m saying it’s similar to the one we know from Bablyon – but there are differences. The Babylonians made heavy use of a semi-precious stone called lapis lazuli. It’s hard to tell because of the decay but it seems to me that this one is more like a simple indigo… like some kind of reproduction of the original Ishtar Gate. Call me crazy, but this whole place looks like it was destroyed on purpose.”
“Hold up,” Hawke said, peering ahead of them. “Looks like the tosspots have arrived.” Up ahead, emerging from the darkness of the ruins were three headlamps. “And it looks like they got here first, mate. Their boat must have been off course because of drift, not inaccuracy – they’d already found the place by the time we’d arrived.”
“And now they’re coming up from the center of the ruins,” Ryan said, crestfallen. “So Dirk Bloody Kruger gets to be Armstrong,”
“They’ve got scooters as well,” Lea said.
“And by the looks of that canvas bag around his neck I’d say he’s not letting the idol out of his sight,” Hawke said. “And it looks like they’re armed, too.”
His sentence was cut short when a metal bolt narrowly missed his head and flashed past into the gloom over his shoulder.
The fight was on.
*
Up on the surface, Reaper swung the GPMG around and fired at the tuna boat, punching holes in the wheelhouse cabin and smashing out the acrylic windows. Korać’s men dived for cover before firing back. By the looks of things, they were restricted to submachine guns. Reaper knew the Browning had a range of around half a mile or eight hundred meters, but the range of their Uzis was more like two hundred meters, so he told the captain to move the VCSM to a quarter of a mile and maintain that distance. This meant he could fire on them with impunity and they had no chance of striking back.
“You were saying?” Scarlet said.
He watched with growing anxiety as the men on the foredeck wheeled a large mortar into view and began to lock it into place. “And that’s what, exactly?” she said.
“It’s a Sani,” Maria said. “A Russian heavy mortar.”
“Range?” Lexi asked, looking through the binoculars.
“Depends on the model,” Maria replied. “Maybe five hundred meters, or maybe seven kilometers.”
“And we have the Browning,” Scarlet said. “Talk about bringing a bowl of custard to a knife fight.”
“No, we can take them, just make sure we…” Reaper suddenly looked off the ship’s starboard bow. “What the hell is that?”
Everyone followed his eyes to the horizon just in time to see the Hellfire air-to-surface missile tearing through the sky toward their ship.
“Jump!” Camacho yelled.
Bekri hit the alarm and it sounded through the klaxons all over the vessel. “Abandon ship!”
And then a second later there was no ship.
*
The merc approached fast through the gloom, and Hawke quickly saw he was holding a weapon of some kind. “Christ on a bike!” he yelled at the others. “They’re armed with APS rifles!”
“That’s just arsing fantastic!” Lea said, twisting her head to try and see the threat. She turned and looked over her other shoulder.
Hawke watched as the goon got closer and raised the APS to fire. He knew that because standard rounds had both poor accuracy and velocity underwater, the Russians had come up with the brainwave of redesigning the bullet into a much longer shape, almost like a miniature harpoon. The genius of the Soviet Union, he thought with a shake of his head.
The merc fired and the four inch-long steel bolt tore past him, leaving a trail of bubbles in its wake. The bolts were sharpened to a lethal point and had it hit him it would made just as much damage as a regular bullet, but thankfully it missed and raced off into the gloom of the ocean.
To his far left a second merc came into view, and then a third thundered down from above him. The man on the third scooter tried to hit him with the stock of his APS rifle but narrowly missed before pulling up sharply and turning around for a second attack. Before he could gather his thoughts, a familiar face joined the fray.
“It’s Kruger!” he told the others. “He’s firing!” He pulled the handlebars hard to the right to avoid the bolt, and was instantly reminded of how slow underwater movement really was. The sea scooter chugged painfully slow to the right and he leaned over just as the bolt raced past him leaving another trail of bubbles in its wake.
He spun around one-eighty degrees just in time to see the harpoon-bullet disappear into the gloom of the ocean, and then pulled up hard to gain more elevation. He thought he was getting the better of him, but then he heard a deep, bass roar from the surface a few hundred feet to the north that changed everything.
The former SBS man looked into the distance to where the VCSM had drifted only to see it disappear before his eyes – one minute it was there and then the next it was gone, and all that was left were chunks of burning wreckage and gnarled, bent steel from its carcass.
*
Reaper was first to emerge from the water. When he came to the surface he thought he’d arrived in hell and the spray dome was still hundreds of feet in the air above his head. Where the VCSM had once been was a wide field of broken, twisted detritus, slowly sinking through the burning oil all over the ocean. The sky above was gray from the storm and black from the fires, and everywhere was the smell of oil and grease and then the storm blew another layer of saltwater and dead fish into his face.
He took a deep breath and slowed his breathing before starting to search for his friends. He trod water while turning three-sixty to scan the horizon but there was nothing but carnage everywhere. The dead body of Maati Khatibi bobbed to the surface a few yards to his right and he offered the kindly professor a quick prayer, but the holy words were broken by the noise of helicopter rotors, and by the sound of it they belonged to a substantial machine.
Then Lexi broke the surface and screamed as she gasped for air. He yelled at her and swam over, and then Camacho appeared though the burning wreckage to the south and also began pushing his way through the wate
r to join them. Maria called out in the smoky gloom, and he turned to see her rising high above him on the swell as the storm stirred the sea again and made things even worse.
“Are you okay?” he called out, spitting more seawater from his mouth.
“Yes.”
“Lexi?”
“I’ve been better, but I’ll live long enough to kill whoever fired that missile.”
“Me too,” Scarlet said, swimming toward them from the south.
“The Professor is dead,” Reaper said.
“That makes at least two then,” Maria called back. “I just saw Bekri’s body over there.”
“How the hell did Kruger get a chopper out here?” Camacho asked.
Maria pointed to the north. “Well, I don’t know but there goes his boat…”
They turned to see the old tuna boat moving away through the smoke.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Reaper said. “Why blow us up and then run away?”
And then it made sense.
Before anyone could think about the question, a second Hellfire scorched through the leaden sky and ripped into the tuna boat’s hull, tearing it to pieces. The detonation was colossal, and Reaper yelled at the others to dive before the shockwave reached them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Alex Reeve was still in shock as Richard Eden pushed her along the carpeted corridor at the heart of Elysium and tapped in the keycode to get into the bunker. Kim was beside them and as he calmly tapped in the secret numbers, they all heard the sound of the Apaches as they continued their attack on the island.
An enormous, deep explosion from somewhere above rocked the whole building, and they all knew they had started shelling the ECHO GHQ with their compliment of Hellfire missiles. Eden shook his head and cursed. The AGM-114 Hellfire was a savage anti-armor air-to-surface missile that would wreak devastating damage on their compound.
“Jesus!” Alex said, as Eden moved them inside the bunker and sealed the door. “How many of those things have they got?”
