The device was an EMP pulse generator, capable of generating a ten gigawatt wave of electromagnetic energy that would instantly disable any electronic devices it swept across.
Jaz spoke into her throat mike. “Go.”
The men stepped back as the tube emitted a low-pitched hum. Jaz kept her eyes on the oncoming ship, ticking off a silent countdown in her head.
Then, like a switch being thrown, the research vessel’s lights went black.
She spoke a command. From the sub’s forward tubes two torpedoes shot out, their churning wakes lost below the broken ice floes. Less than a minute later twin explosions shot columns of water from below the waterline of the research ship. Listing heavily toward starboard, the ship rolled sideways, its bow plunging into the black water in a burst of spray. Within minutes the stern and screws had disappeared beneath the waves.
Jaz let out a loud whoop of triumph. Grinning, she stabbed the button of a remote detonator. From the hull of the icebreaker three loud whumps echoed over the ice floes, followed by the grating scream of metal being torn apart. Foam spouted up in churning gouts as thousands of gallons of salt water flooded the ruptured hull.
Soon the hulk would settle upright on the floor of the Arctic Ocean, the titanium case bolted into its hold safeguarding its lethal cargo.
EIGHT
Alexandria, Egypt
TO Flinders, the Bibliotheca Alexandrinalooked like a gigantic flying saucer had crashed into the East Harbor. Of course, she knew the designers had meant the structure to represent the sun disk rising from the waters of the bay, but it didn’t matter. To her mind the five-hundred-foot circular slab of Aswan granite with its sun-struck, gridded glass roof was more like something out of Star Trek. Finished in 2002, the reincarnation of the great library of ancient Alexandria had been constructed near the location of the Brucheion, the Royal Quarter of the Ptolemies and the site of the original library. It exhilarated her to think that Alexander the Great had walked here, and breathed this same air that she was now breathing, as had Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, and a pantheon of famous scientists and scholars of the classical world.
At Luxor they’d boarded the train for Alexandria, so that Flinders could photograph Cowell’s papyrus in the library’s Digital Assets Repository. She could also store the papyrus here in a secure, climate-controlled vault.
Skarda would rather have flown for the sake of time, but on the train he could buy first-class tickets for cash and keep their names off any passenger lists. Once in Alexandria, however, he’d had no choice but to rent a BMW X5 for mobility.
Walking into the entrance lobby, she showed her scholar’s pass to the guard and he inspected the steel case she was carrying without questioning the papyrus, still in its silicone case, then waved her through. In the digital manuscripts facility she opened the case, then slipped on a pair of latex gloves and shook the papyrus from the silicone bag.
With careful fingers she unrolled the leading edge of the scroll.
A chill snaked down her spine. She was looking at a time-stained sheet of pressed and hammered papyrus paper about 8.5x13 inches, covered with cramped lines of crudely-drawn symbols, with approximately an inch border around each of the edges.
She bent her head lower, her eyes roaming over the ancient glyphs.
Then she gasped.
___
Ten minutes later she was standing on the sun-filled plaza near the Port Said Street entrance in the shadow of the twenty-three-foot-high colossus of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Her head reeled. Her pulse pounded in her ears. Across the bay, whose waters bobbed with brightly-painted red, yellow, and blue fishing boats, she could see the sandy embankment of the Silsilah Peninsula, and far away to her left, along the taxi-choked highway that was the Corniche, the dun-colored battlements of Fort Qait-bey at the tip of the western sweep of the harbor’s crescent arm, where once the ancient Pharos lighthouse guided sailors to safety.
If the scroll was right…
Inhaling a lungful of salt-laced air, she pulled out her smartphone to call Skarda.
An incongruous sound interrupted her.
Quick footsteps approaching.
She turned to see a muscular Egyptian man with a shaved head and a cheap dark suit blocking her way, staring at her.
“Dr. Laura Carlson?” His Arabic accent was thick.
Flinders didn’t answer. For some reason she couldn’t explain, her guard went up at the sight of this man. There was something menacing—violent—about him. Something cheap and greasy. And behind him, she caught sight of two more identically-dressed men standing in the background, their hands hovering at their sides, as if waiting for a signal to strike.
“You are Dr. Laura Carlson?” he repeated.
In spite of her reservations, she found herself nodding. Immediately she cursed herself.
“Come with me,” the man ordered.
“Who are you?”
“Come with me, he repeated.” Menace weighted his tone. He took a step forward, reaching for her arm.
Adrenaline spiked through her bloodstream. She took a step back, glancing around for a security guard. “Leave me alone!” Then she realized she was clutching her smartphone. Her fingers stabbed at the keyboard.
The man snarled and grabbed her arm, digging his fingers hard into her muscle. The phone dropped to the pavement, shattering.
Blood rushed to her head. “I’ll scream!”
“Go ahead,” the man said. It was a sneer.
His free hand shot out to clamp over her mouth. His fingers reeked of shisha tobacco, making her empty stomach roil.
Flinders’ senses reeled. She kicked out wildly, spasmodically, but the man easily sidestepped her. Past his shoulder she saw the other two men moving toward her.
And one was holding a hypodermic.
She bucked against the hands clamped on her arm and mouth, squirming to wrench herself free. But the more she struggled, the tighter his grip dug into her.
Jellyfish.
Jellyfish? From somewhere in the dark recesses of her consciousness, her brain was yelling at her about jellyfish.
And then she remembered: yesterday she’d overheard two British tourists talking about a jellyfish infestation at Agami, just down the coast.
With a sudden lurch, she twisted her neck, rolling her eyes toward the oncoming men. The man with the hypodermic had almost reached her. Bright sunlight silvered the needle, magnifying it in her imagination.
Jellyfish!
Without another thought she willed her muscles to go limp, as if she were a living puddle of flesh. Surprised, her attacker just marginally loosened his grip, but it was enough. She slid away from his grasp, at the same time stomping her foot down on his toe with all the power she could muster. He yelped, then swore loudly in Arabic.
She twisted away, free.
Flinders ran, her heart battering her ribcage. A flock of teenagers with backpacks burst from the edge of the granite façade and she merged into their midst, pivoting around, feeling suddenly safe in their numbers.
The three men had vanished.
The teenagers swarmed around her like a school of fish and then they were gone, running and laughing down the expanse of the plaza. For a moment she stood there, alone.
Then she ran for the safety of the library.
NINE
THEY were sitting at an outdoor table at a coffee bar in Saad Zaghloul Square, its pastel green walls cooled by the serrated shadows of clacking palm fronds. April sat with her back to one of the walls, keeping one eye on the door and the other on the crush of taxis, yellow trams, and donkey carts parading past the Cecil Hotel. The air was heavy with the scents of cardamom and falafel.
Peering at the screen of her laptop, Flinders was trembling, not only from the scare of the attempted kidnapping, but from the excitement of what she’d found on the papyrus. She lifted her head, glancing around at the other patrons as if she expected to see the three Egyptian attackers bearing down on her.
/>
Skarda rested a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry. April will keep a lookout.”
She nodded, grateful, but her eyes kept darting left and right as she rotated the screen to show him the photos of the papyrus she had taken. “What we have here is a hymn dedicated to Djehuty/Thoth. Dr. Cowell dated the shaft to the Gerzean period—starting about 4,000 BCE—which coincides with the introduction of writing on papyrus paper in Egypt. Gerzean script is proto-hieroglyphic—it’s my specialty—and this script is similar, but its forms are much older, less formalized. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Lowering her face closer to the screen, she shook her head back and forth in amazement. “I’m willing to bet that this is a copy of a much older document, maybe something that was carved in stone.”
“So what does that mean?” Skarda asked.
She sucked in a breath, not quite believing what she was seeing. Then she looked up, staring at him with wide eyes. “It means that the hieroglyphs on this scroll are at least seven thousand years old—two millennia before writing was supposedly invented.” Excitement glowed on her face. “Let me fill you in with some basic background info. As we talked about before, my specialty is archaic Egyptian—meaning Predynastic—scripts. That would be prior to around 3,000 BCE, before the beginning of the Pharaonic monarchy starting with King Menes. We’re talking Neolithic settlements here—small villages of nomads who built wattle-and-daub huts from reeds or animal skins, made pottery, wove cloth. This would be around 6,000 BCE. While there are quite a few archaic inscriptions from a couple of thousand years later, like the symbols on Gerzean pottery from 4,000 BCE and the Narmer Palette from 3,200, artifacts from this period are hard to come by because a lot were isolated symbols etched into the bottom of clay pots and much of the evidence has been buried by Nile silt over the millennia.
“But here’s the good news. Recently some new finds have been uncovered in Lower Egypt—carved ivory tablets and pottery shards that show a remarkable resemblance to the Vinca script found in eastern Europe. Vinca is also known as ‘Old European’. I personally believe it’s a continuation of the language spoken by the Cro-Magnons, who spread into Europe around fifty thousand years ago. It’s very clear that the Cro-Magnons had language—today it survives in isolates like Basque and Berber. For example, the Basque word for ‘ceiling’ means ‘top of the cavern’, and the word for ‘knife’ means ‘stone that cuts’. I think that by 7,000 or so BCE a system of writing was being developed in eastern Europe around the Black Sea. Eventually this evolved into Vinca—pictogram inscriptions found mainly on pottery shards discovered in Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine, dating as far back as 5,300 BCE, but no doubt having their origins much earlier. Some scholars think the symbols are religious iconography or votive offerings, and some think they’re a numeral system, but I think they’re an syllabary for a spoken language. So far no one has been able to decipher the Vinca script.”
She turned her laptop so he could see the screen covered with rectangles, inscribed circles, comb-like symbols, and triangles. “This is what Vinca looks like. The script has a remarkable resemblance to Minoan Linear A, which I think also evolved from Vinca.”
She maneuvered the computer back around. “Now imagine,” she went on, “a group of Neolithic people living on the shores of the Black Sea seventy-five-hundred years ago. At that time the sea wasn’t a sea at all, but a freshwater lake, which archaeologists call the Euxine Lake. There would have been villages and settlements all along the shore—probably a fairly large population. And here’s what’s amazing—using robot submarines researchers have found buildings from these settlements perfectly preserved on the anoxic bottom.”
Skarda raised a quizzical eyebrow at the word.
Flinders grinned. “It means there’s no oxygen on the bottom of the Black Sea, or at least very little. So anything organic, like wood, won’t rot. It will be perfectly preserved through the millennia.”
April kept her eyes on the crowd, but it was clear she’d been listening. “How about bodies?”
Flinders gave a little shudder of revulsion. “I guess they’re probably down there. I guess they’d have to be.”
“Cool.”
Flinders scrunched up her mouth, chasing the thought away. “At any rate, this would have been an almost Eden-like area, with a healthy population, farms and fields of grain, orchards, a huge lake teeming with fish, and prosperous trade.”
She leaned forward, pushing up her glasses, her sapphire eyes sparkling. “Now here’s where it gets a bit controversial. I think this was the location of Atlantis.”
___
Grinning, she let the bombshell hang in the air. She was enjoying Skarda’s stare of disbelief.
April let her eyes close in exasperation.
“You’re right,” Skarda said drily. He made no attempt to mask the skepticism in his tone. “That is a bit controversial.”
Flinders laughed. “Well, hear me out. First of all, the story of Atlantis as it’s come down to us is a myth, and was considered a myth by many in Plato’s time, when he wrote about it in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. It was supposed to have been located in front of the Pillars of Hercules, what we call the Strait of Gibraltar. But obviously there never was a huge island in the Atlantic Ocean in front of the Strait, sunken or otherwise. There’s a very small sunken island there called Spartel Bank that was inundated about twelve thousand years ago when the ice caps melted, but it’s really nothing more than a mud shoal and never could have supported such an advanced civilization. Of course, people have located Atlantis at many spots all over the world, from the British Isles to the Azores to South America and even in Antarctica.
“But the thing is, there’s absolutely no mention of Atlantis in ancient literature before Plato, so he might have made up the story himself. Or all the other manuscripts pertaining to it have been lost or just not yet found. But since his time, millions of words have been written about Atlantis, with the story growing with every re-telling, so now we have the Atlanteans using giant power crystals and piloting UFO’s and shooting down their enemies with death rays.
“Let’s look at Plato’s description of Atlantis: a vast plain surrounded by mountains that led down to the shore of a sea, flowing rivers, and frequent earthquakes. After Atlantis was deluged, the once-great port became blocked by shoals of mud. All this perfectly describes the northeast shore of the Black Sea, where the Kerch Strait empties into the Sea of Azov. I think there was a prosperous Neolithic city there, the envy of all, with advanced language and writing skills, including the origins of the Vinca script, that sunk beneath the waves and gave rise to the Atlantis myth.”
Skarda leaned forward. The subject fascinated him. But April was shifting in her seat. All this talk was making her antsy.
Flinders continued. “You have to realize that the designation ‘Pillar of Hercules’ was used in the ancient world to refer to any kind of natural gateway, like a strait. In fact, the term originally referred to the Black Sea region, before it was appropriated by the Greeks to use in their mythologies. The Phoenicians erected ‘Pillars of Hercules’ everywhere they traveled.”
“So explain the sinking part,” Skarda said.
“Well, this is where it gets really interesting. Based on archaeological evidence, in approximately 5,500 BCE the Aegean Sea overflowed, spilling over into the Sea of Marmara, and breaching the line of cliffs that held back the sea waters from the Euxine Lake. The result was a cascade of water, hundreds of times more powerful than Niagara Falls, thundering over the cliffs to inundate the great lake with sea water to create the modern Black Sea. The Neolithic settlements would have been wiped out almost overnight. ‘Atlantis’ would have sunk beneath the waves.”
Skarda nodded, swept up in her enthusiasm. “Is this the origin of the Biblical flood stories?”
“Quite possibly! The ancient Israelites borrowed their flood myth from already-existing Sumerian-Babylonian stories, who could easil
y have been writing down orally-transmitted tales from prehistory. Think about it—what would happen in the aftermath of a catastrophic event like this? There would have been a great diaspora, a massive migration of people away from the scene of the disaster to safer parts of the world. So some people traveled west to central Europe, where traces of the Atlantean language remain to this day, like Basque. Others traveled east into Mesopotamia and Sumeria, where the script they developed shows many correspondences to the Vinca symbols. And still others migrated south into northern Africa, where today the Berbers speak another language isolate that seems to be related to Basque, and where I think they originated the culture that would flower into the dynastic culture of ancient Egypt. As a matter of fact, the first century BCE Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who wrote a forty-volume history of the ancient world, describes the original Egyptians as being strangers in their land, the most ancient of men, who had settled on the banks of the Nile, bringing with them the civilization of their homeland, along with perfected writing and language skills. Of course, this is relative—we’re still talking about a Neolithic culture here. And the Egyptians just seemed to have appeared overnight in the historical record. So, if you ask me, the ancient Egyptians were the survivors of ‘Atlantis’. I think that Predynastic Egyptian hieroglyphic scripts took a thousand or so years to start evolving from the original Vinca script, and that’s what we have here.”
Emerald Page 5
