The Hunt for Atlantis_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  There was no time to think about it, though. Another chamber opened up ahead.

  “Hold it,” said Chase, stopping at the entrance. He shone the light into the space beyond. “Smaller than the last one.”

  Compared to the expansive pool chamber, this one was miniscule, only about fifteen feet across. As Chase moved the circle of light around, Nina saw that the walls were covered with markings—the same language as on the Atlantean sextant arm, and the entrance of the temple itself.

  “Looks safe,” he announced, “but don’t quote me on that. Just be careful.” He stepped into the room, pausing as if expecting some hidden trap to be triggered, then signaled for Nina and Kari to follow. “Okay. So, Challenge of Mind. Go for it, Doc.”

  “Right …” she said, taking the flashlight so she could examine the inscriptions on the walls. “Oh God! This could take days to translate!”

  “We’ve only got thirty-three minutes to sunset. Think fast.”

  “Nina, over here.” Kari had gone to the wall opposite the entrance. A stone block, unmarked by text, appeared to be a door, and next to it was what looked almost like…

  “It’s a scale,” said Nina. “A weighing scale.” She aimed the beam beneath it. A trough was carved out of the stone, and inside it were a hundred or so lead balls, each the size of a cherry. “I guess we have to put the right number of balls into the scale. But how do we work out how many to use?” There was a lever by the scale’s copper pan; she reached for it, but Kari stopped her.

  “I have a feeling that we only get one attempt,” she said, pointing up at the ceiling. Suspended above them was a large metal grid of foot-long spikes, ready to impale everyone in the room when it fell. Nina hurriedly pulled her hand away from the lever.

  She flicked the light across the walls until she spotted large symbols carved over the closed door. They were arranged in three rows, one above the other, with groups of six different symbols in the uppermost one, five in the remaining two. Nina immediately recognized the first symbol. Groups of little marks like apostrophes …

  “They’re numbers,” she announced. “It’s some kind of mathematical puzzle. Working out the answer tells you how many balls to put into the pan.”

  “Is that all?” Chase sounded almost disappointed. “Christ, even I could do that. Let’s see … the top one, there’s three of those little dots, five upside-down Vs, seven bent-over Ls, two sideways arrows with a line under them, four backwards Ns and one backwards N with a line next to it. That’s 357,241. Doddle.”

  “And you’d be wrong,” said Nina, managing a smile. “The numerical order is reversed from ours—the first symbol, the little dot, is actually the smallest number; each one of them is one unit. So the first number’s actually 142,753. It’s the same symbol from the river map on the sextant arm, and I know I’m right about it being a one, because otherwise we would never have found this place.”

  “All right, smarty.” Chase grinned. “So the other numbers are … 87,527 and 34,164. So, what, we subtract them? That makes, uh …”

  “Twenty-one thousand and sixty-two,” Nina and Kari said together, almost immediately.

  Chase whistled, impressed. “Okay, so we don’t need a calculator. But there’s no way there’s twenty-one thousand balls in that trough.”

  “What if it’s a combination of operators?” Kari suggested. “Subtract the second number from the first, then divide by the third?”

  “Too complicated,” Nina said, staring at the numbers. “There’s no symbol suggesting that you need to perform different operations. Besides …” She frowned, working it out. “The result would be a fraction, and I don’t think putting one-point-six-two balls into the scale is likely to be the right answer.”

  Chase winced. “Bloody hell. It hurts just thinking about doing that in my head.”

  “The first number plus the third divided by the second is two-point-oh-two,” Kari suggested. “I doubt they would have calculated results down to one fiftieth accuracy. They may have rounded it to two …”

  “It’s still too complicated!” Nina cried. “And it’s too arbitrary. The first plus the third divided by the second? It’s like setting a crossword puzzle but missing all the down clues!” She pointed the light back at the other walls. “The clue must be somewhere else, in the other text. I just have to find it.”

  “Tick-tock, Doc,” said Chase, pointing at his watch. “Twenty-nine minutes.”

  Nina knelt at one of the walls, scanning the light over the symbols. After a minute, she blew out her breath in frustration. “All of this is about the building of the city and the history of the people afterwards. I don’t see anything that relates to the puzzle at all.”

  “There’s nothing about the people before they came here from Atlantis?” Kari asked.

  “Not that I can see.” Nina hurried across the chamber to look at the text on the opposite wall. “This is more of the same. It’s almost like a ledger, a record of the tribe year by year. How many children were born, how many animals they had … There must be a couple of centuries of data here. But none of it has anything to do with the challenge!” She jerked an angry thumb at the symbols over the door.

  “I just thought of something,” Chase said. “This thing’s a challenge of the mind, right? Well, what if it’s some sort of lateral thinking puzzle?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Kari.

  “This is obviously a door, right?” Chase stepped up to it. “We didn’t even think about just opening it.”

  “Give it a try!” Nina told him.

  Chase reached out and pushed the door. It remained completely still. He tried one side, then the other. Nothing happened. Just to be thorough, he also attempted to lift it, then pull it outwards from the wall. Still nothing.

  “Bollocks!” he exclaimed, stepping back. “I really thought that might work.”

  “So did somebody else,” Nina said, joining him. “Look! I just realized, the door’s not quite the same color as the rest of the chamber. It’s been carved from different rock. And there are marks on the stones around it—chisel marks, and crowbars. But none on the door itself. This is a newer door; the Indians have replaced it! Somebody didn’t want to solve the puzzle, so they just smashed the door open.”

  “The Nazis?” Kari wondered.

  “Sounds like their kind of approach,” said Chase. “They must have been able to persuade the Indians to let them bring more than just a flashlight inside.”

  Kari nodded. “Probably at gunpoint.”

  “Right. Problem is, we don’t have any crowbars. So we’ve got to do it the hard way.”

  Nina hurried back to the carvings on the side wall. “I think we still can. These numbers, there’s something odd about them. Look.” She ran her finger along the lines of symbols. “You see? They’re arranged in groups of eight, at most. Never nine or ten. Eight here, eight here, eight here…”

  “You think they could have been working in base eight?” asked Kari.

  “It’s possible. They wouldn’t be the only ancient civilization to use it.”

  “What’ve you found? What’s all this eight stuff?” Chase asked.

  “I think we’ve been projecting our own biases onto the people who built this temple,” Nina said, excitement glinting in her eyes. “We assumed they were using base ten math, like we do.” She caught Chase’s questioning look. “Our numerical system is based around multiples of ten. Tens, hundreds, thousands …”

  “Because we’ve got ten fingers, right. I did pass my GCSE maths,” he said. “Well, just about.”

  “It’s a very common system,” Nina went on. “The ancient Greeks used it, the Romans, the Egyptians … It’s common because it’s literally right there in front of you.” She held up her fingers to demonstrate. “But it’s not the only system. The Sumerians used base sixty.”

  “Sixty?” hooted Chase. “Who the hell would use that?”

  Kari smiled. “You would. Every time you look at your watch. It’
s the basis of our entire timekeeping system.”

  “Oh, right.” Chase nodded sheepishly.

  “There’ve been plenty of other bases used by ancient civilizations,” Nina continued. “The Mayans used base twenty, Bronze Age Europeans used base eight…” She snapped her head around to look at the symbols again. “Base eight! That’s it, it must be!”

  “Why would anyone use eight?” Chase asked. In response, Kari held up her hands, fingers splayed—but with her thumbs tucked against her palms. “Oh, I get it—they used their thumbs to count on their fingers, but didn’t actually count the thumbs?”

  “That’s the theory,” said Nina, searching through the inscriptions. “So instead of going one, ten, one hundred, the numbers actually go one, eight, sixty-four…” She rushed back to the door. “So the first column is single units, the second multiples of eight, then sixty-four, five hundred and twelve, four thousand and ninety-six and…”

  “Thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-eight,” Kari finished.

  “Right. So the number would be, let’s see … three single units, plus five units of eight, forty, plus sixty-four times seven …”

  Chase made a pained noise. “I’ll let you two work all that out.”

  Kari came up with the answer first. “Fifty thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven.”

  “Okay,” said Nina. “You do the second number, I’ll do the third.” Another burst of mental arithmetic produced the answers: 36,695 and 14,452. “All right! So the first minus the second minus the third is …”

  They both thought hard about it, Chase watching intently—only to see both their faces fall at almost the same moment. “What? What’s the answer?”

  “It’s minus four hundred and eighty,” Nina told him despondently. “It can’t be base eight.”

  “What about base nine?” asked Kari. “If decimal gives too large a result, and octal too small…”

  “The answer would still be in the thousands. Shit!” Nina gave Chase a questioning look.

  “Twenty-four minutes.”

  “Damn it! We’re running out of time!” She angrily kicked the door. “What the hell are we missing?”

  Chase crouched and rummaged through the lead balls, hoping there would be some hidden clue in the trough. There wasn’t. “What if we just take a best guess and put that many balls in the pan? There’s a chance we might get lucky.”

  Nina touched her pendant. “That would need the biggest piece of luck in the world.”

  “It’s all we’ve got. We can’t just give up—even if we go back through all the other challenges, the Indians’ll kill us as soon as we get outside. And Hugo and Agnaldo and the Prof.”

  “If we get it wrong, we’ll be killed anyway,” Kari reminded him, pointing at the spikes suspended overhead.

  “Maybe there’s some way we can pull the lever from outside the room…”

  But Nina was no longer listening. Something else Chase had said was now foremost in her mind.

  Back through all the other challenges …

  That was what had been troubling her, gnawing at her mind. And now that she knew what it was …

  “There’s another way through!” she burst out. “There has to be! The tribespeople maintain the temple, and the traps—they must, they need to be reset. And repaired.” She indicated the stone door. “But there’s no way the temple’s builders would have forced the very people who were supposed to be protecting it to go through the challenges every time they needed to go inside—one little mistake, and they’re dead! So there has to be some way for them to get through safely without running the gauntlet every time.”

  “A back door?” asked Chase.

  “Yes, like a service access, or even just some way to open the exit of each challenge without actually having to complete it.” Nina turned the light back to the chamber walls. “Maybe there’s a switch, or a loose block, some way to open the door.”

  They hurriedly searched the walls of the chamber, fingertips brushing over the cold stone to feel for anything out of place. After a minute, Chase raised his voice. “Here!”

  Nina and Kari joined him in one corner of the room. At floor level, right where the two walls met, was a small vertical slot. It wasn’t much of an opening—but compared to the precise joins of the other blocks, it was clearly a deliberate feature rather than poor workmanship. “What’s inside?” Kari asked.

  “No idea—it’s too small to get my hand into. Nina, you’ve got nice dainty little fingers—have a root around.”

  “And I’d like them to stay nice,” Nina complained, but she knelt by the slot anyway. “Oh God. I just hope there’s not some finger-chopping thing or a scorpion inside…”

  She warily slipped her fingers between the blocks. A little more … more …

  Her fingertip touched something. She flinched, afraid it was a hair-trigger that would drop the spikes onto them. But the trio remained unimpaled.

  For now.

  “What is it?” asked Kari.

  “There’s something metal in here.”

  “A switch?”

  “I don’t know … hold on.” Nina tried to slide her fingers around the obstruction. “It could be.”

  Chase leaned closer. “Can you pull it?”

  “Let me,” said Kari. “Nina, you should wait in the passageway. Just in case something goes wrong.”

  “If it doesn’t work, then we’re going to be dead soon anyway,” Nina said. “You two get out of the chamber. Go on!” she added, before either of them could object. She took several deep breaths as they backed through the entrance to the chamber. “Okay. Here goes …”

  She wrapped her fingers around the metal, paused for a moment to wonder what the hell she was doing, and pulled it.

  Clink.

  The hanging framework of spikes remained still.

  Another, louder clink of metal came from the stone door. Nina exhaled loudly. “I think it worked …”

  “Get out of the room,” Chase ordered, waving Kari to stay back as he walked to the door. Nina gratefully obeyed. He braced himself, then pushed. The door swung open, heavy stone rasping over the floor. Another dark passage lay beyond.

  “You did it!” Kari cried.

  “Nice work,” said Chase. “But we really need to shift—we’ve only got twenty-one minutes left.”

  “We’d better get a move on then.” Nina patted Chase’s arm as she passed him. “And you were right about the lateral thinking.”

  “We make a pretty good team, don’t we?” he said. “You’ve got the brains, I’ve got the brawn, and Kari’s got…”

  “The beauty?” suggested Nina. Kari smiled.

  “I was going to say agility, but yours works too.” He took the light from Nina. “Okay. So we beat the three challenges. Now what?”

  “Now we put the artifact back where it belongs, then get the hell out of here,” Nina said, advancing down the passage.

  Castille glanced nervously to the west. The sun had long since dropped behind the high canopy of trees, but pinpoints of bright light still made it through the dense foliage.

  It was very close to the horizon, though. And the sky overhead was rapidly turning a deeper blue as dusk crept in …

  He looked back at the temple entrance. The square of darkness was devoid of any movement, as it had been from the moment the glow of Chase’s flashlight had disappeared about forty minutes earlier.

  “Hurry up, Edward,” he said to himself.

  “Wh-what if they’re dead?” Philby asked, sweat covering his panicked face. The three prisoners were on their knees outside the elders’ hut, several hunters encircling them.

  “They’ll make it,” Castille said, wishing he felt as confident as he sounded.

  An unexpected harsh crackle cut through the mutterings of the Indians and the chatter of birds. It was coming from the abandoned packs.

  “Survey team, do you read me? This is Perez. Do you read me? Over.”

  The Indians reacted
with predictable shock, jumping into defensive positions and aiming their weapons out past the perimeter of the village as if expecting an attack.

  “Survey team, come in, come in, over.”

  “If we can answer him, he can call in the helicopter,” di Salvo said under his breath. “With some support.”

  “And guns!” Philby added, almost hopeful.

  “If we can persuade them to hand us the radio,” said Castille. The Indians had now worked out where the sound was coming from, and were cautiously investigating the packs, prodding them with their spears.

  “Survey team, I don’t know if you can hear me …” One of the tribesmen jabbed Castille’s pack, momentarily muffling the transmission. “…got company. I can hear at least one chopper, maybe two, approaching my position. They’re not ours, I say again, they are not our helicopters. Please respond.”

  “Military?” Castille asked, concerned.

  “I would have been told if they were planning any jungle operations,” replied di Salvo.

  “Merde.” Castille had a horrible idea who might be in the helicopters. “Agnaldo, try to get them to bring us the radio. We need to—”

  One of the Indians pulled out the walkie-talkie. Perez’s voice was now clearer. “Survey team, I see one of the choppers! It’s—Jesus!”

  A piercing screech of static blasted from the speaker, the Indian dropping the radio in fright. Philby looked between Castille and di Salvo in confusion. “What just happened? What was that?”

  Castille gave him a grim look, twisting to look in the direction of the river. A few seconds later, a sound like a distant clap of thunder reached them. “That was the Nereid exploding,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s Qobras. He’s found us.”

  Chase checked his watch. “We’ve only got eighteen minutes left.”

  “Then we need to keep moving,” said Kari. She took out the sextant arm. “Find where this needs to go.”

  “Maybe we could just leave it here and pretend we put it back,” Nina said, not entirely joking.