‘But we know child sacrifice may have been exaggerated by the Romans,’ Jack said, staring pensively at the image. ‘It may only have been in times of extreme duress, in the case of the Carthaginians when they were faced with annihilation by the Romans.’
‘But isn’t that what we’re seeing at Atlantis?’
Costas said. ‘I mean, extreme duress? The flood waters rising, and no way out?’
That was it. And no way out. Jack remembered the wal ed-over chamber, the pil ars freshly carved and the old paintings erased. Had this been a newly refurbished temple, on the verge of being revealed as the flood waters came, but instead used as a dungeon for the last remaining shamans, their death chamber? He stared at the skeleton. Had those people been driven in desperation to take human life, when the blood of bul s had no longer been sufficient?
‘It wasn’t just children,’ Jeremy said. ‘The osteologist reckons there are at least twelve other trussed-up bodies in there, al of them articulated skeletons and al of them decapitated. They seem to be of widely varying ages, adults and younger, probably male and female. Visionary ability is often perceived to be passed down in a family, isn’t it, from parent to child? That’s what I think we’ve got here. I think we’ve got entire families being locked in this chamber. It’s a real y chil ing image, like those Jewish families trapped at Masada by the Romans. It’s as Costas says: people driven to it by extreme duress.’
‘You mean driven to sacrifice?’ Costas said.
‘Cal it sacrifice. Or cal it assisted mass suicide.’
They were al silent for a moment, staring at the image. Costas coughed, and then spoke quietly. ‘So let me get this right. In this Garden of Eden, at the dawn of civilization, you’ve got vultures picking away at dismembered corpses. You’ve got a new order of priests that make the Jesuits of the Inquisition look like angels, forcing people to hack out limestone pil ars and drag them up the volcano to make this temple, a temple to themselves, the new gods. And you’ve got an old order of shamans, off their heads on some kind of psychedelic trip, trapped in this death chamber and performing human sacrifice. And al of that while the flood waters are rising, and their world is being annihilated.’
‘The old order swept away, the new world about to dawn,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘If you look at the Old Testament account and the Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood is represented as an act of God, an act of divine punishment. Maybe that idea was created by the new priests and became the myth. And maybe the flood was actual y propitious timing for the new priests, the new gods, who were ready for the diaspora to leave and found new cities and civilizations around the ancient world.’
‘In which case,’ Costas said, ‘who was Noah? A shaman survivor?’
Jeremy paused. ‘In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Uta-napishtim is cast up on a mountain far across the waters, cut off from the world of men and their gods.’
Jack stared at Costas, his mind racing. ‘It’s possible. Maybe one of them did survive. Maybe the annihilation wasn’t complete.’
‘Maybe he was a vacil ator,’ Jeremy said. ‘Maybe he had been unsure whether to stay with the old order or go with the new.’
‘Maybe he was guardian of the animals, of the bul s the shamans corral ed for sacrifice, and the new priests needed him to tend those they were taking with them.’
Jack stared at the image on the screen. ‘If I could get into that chamber this morning, then someone could have got out. That hole in the wal had been made deliberately, by pul ing the stones from the outside. Maybe someone dragged him out, at the last moment.’
Jack cast his mind back again to his image of those final hours. Had the shamans been sealed in, blamed perhaps for the flood, told to use al their powers to stem the waters? Or had that been a lie, and it had truly been a death chamber of the new priests’ devising? In the absence of bul s to sacrifice, sealed in that chamber and realizing they were facing certain death, had they crossed the boundary and committed the ultimate act of sacrifice? Had the new gods forced them to unspeakable horror?
Lanowski came bounding up to them, rubbing his hands. ‘Okay. I’m ready.’
Costas stared back at the wal . ‘But the ROV
monitor’s stil blank.’
‘I don’t mean that. I mean what I’ve been working on at the computer.’ Lanowski peered at the image on the screen. ‘Oh. I nearly forgot.’ He reached into his pocket and handed Jack a crumpled slip of paper.
‘The lab technician gave this to me as I was coming in. The test results on that red stuff on your glove.’
Jack smoothed open the paper and read the report. It was exactly as he had thought. It was human blood. It had been on his glove, in the cracks and crevices, clouding the water as he rubbed it off, the seven-thousand-year-old blood of that child, perhaps, of its family, blood that had fed the pool in that basin that someone was using desperately in an effort to get into the spirit world, to escape the horror of drowning as the flood waters began to lap the chamber. For a moment Jack wished he had pul ed himself further inside, up over the basin, so that he could peer into it, to glimpse what the one with the bloodied mace and the dripping knife had tried to see. But then he knew he would only have witnessed a reflection of that circle of pil ars looming over the basin, radiating in the circular shape of the bowl like the spokes of the Sonnenrad in Lanowski’s drawing, flickering in whatever firelight they had left in the chamber, a fiery image of the new gods leering through the spent blood of the old order.
He glanced again at the three circular shapes Lanowski had chalked on the blackboard, from spiral to Sonnenrad to swastika. He suddenly remembered the pal adion, the symbol of ancient Troy they knew had taken the swastika shape: a sacred meteorite forged and hammered into the crooked cross and melded with gold, stolen by the Greek king Agamemnon from Troy and then found by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae and secretly taken by the Nazis to Germany. He stared at the image of the swastika. ‘The star of heaven,’ he murmured. ‘ Of course.’
‘Come again?’ Lanoswki said.
‘The star of heaven,’ Jack repeated, his heart pounding with excitement. ‘It’s been staring us in the face al along. It’s in the Epic of Gilgamesh.’ He picked up his tablet computer and cal ed up the text of the Babylonian epic. ‘It’s on the first tablet, “The Coming of Enkidu”. Gilgamesh has a dream, and tel s his mother, the goddess Ninsun. Listen to this: “I walked through the night under the stars of the firmament, and one, a meteor of the stuff of Anu, fel down from heaven. I tried to lift it but it proved too heavy. Al the people of Uruk came round to see it, the common people jostling and the nobles thronging to kiss its feet; and to me its attraction was like the love of a woman. They helped me, I braced my forehead and I raised it with thongs and brought it to you.”’
Jack put the tablet down. ‘It’s incredible. I’m convinced that’s the same story as the Trojan foundation myth, which recounts the origin of the pal adion as a meteorite. I think both stories hark back to Atlantis: the Epic of Gilgamesh from the perspective of northern Mesopotamia, the Trojan myth from the viewpoint of those who fled Atlantis to the Dardanel es and actual y took the pal adion with them.
The “star of heaven” was the pal adion after the meteorite was forged and hammered into the shape of the swastika. Ninsun tel s Gilgamesh that in the dream the star was an analogue, that in fact he was dreaming of the coming of Enkidu, the wild man he wil tame and make his brother: the story may represent the tension between the first civilization, represented by Gilgamesh himself, and the ancient wildness that stil survived from prehistory. It puts the pal adion in a whole new context. No wonder it had such power through history, revered and feared, hijacked by the first priests of Atlantis as their new sacred symbol, and then rediscovered and given a terrible new lease of life almost ten thousand years later by the Nazis.’
Jack sat back, remembering the start of their trail six months before, a trail that had hinted at the devastating truth about the pal adion and its new symbolism in a currency o
f evil played out in the Second World War. He looked down, staring at his palms. Six months ago he had had other blood on his hands, the blood of those who had died violently in their quest for the pal adion, lives Jack had taken in his attempt to protect those closest to him. He thought of Maurice Hiebemeyer and the Nazi bunker, and a cold shiver ran through him. The swastika on the blackboard suddenly seemed to be swirling, drawing him into a different kind of history, one of horror and immolation that those first priests could scarcely have imagined. He tore himself away, and looked at Lanowski. ‘You were going to tel us something?’
Lanowski peered back, his face flushed and his eyes burning with fervour. ‘You want to know where the last shaman of Atlantis went? Where Noah went with his Ark? You want to find the new Atlantis?’
Costas and Jeremy peered at Jack. He glanced at his watch, exhaled forceful y and then looked at Lanowski. ‘Okay, Jacob. Give us what you’ve got.’
8
Near Bergen-Belsen, Germany
Maurice Hiebermeyer tripped over the step into the bunker and stumbled forward, putting his arm out to catch himself on an upright metal pole that loomed in front of him. He fel into it heavily, wincing as his wrist took his weight, then lost his footing and twisted round on to his back, jarring his head and losing his grip as his hand slid down the viscous exterior of the pole.
Major Penn caught him and heaved him back on to his feet, holding him upright while he regained his balance. Hiebermeyer panted hard, his heart pounding, his ears fil ed with the suck and pop of the diaphragm in his regulator as he drew hard on the oxygen in his backpack. He tried to calm himself, staring through the glass visor of his helmet at the mottled patch of concrete wal that was al he could see ahead. For a moment he felt disorientated, and then he realized that he had twisted around and was facing the entrance they had just come through into the bunker. The slight blurriness was a consequence of fol owing Sergeant Jones’ advice to remove his glasses to avoid having them fog up as he perspired.
It seemed to make little difference now, as the sweat on his face had already made the glass plate of his helmet seem opaque.
He breathed slowly, trying to catch his rising claustrophobia. He knew he could ask to leave and could be out of that door and back into some semblance of normality within minutes. He shut his eyes tight, then opened them again as his heart rate stabilized. A patch had cleared in the centre of his visor, al owing him to see the metal grid of the walkway in the beam of his headlamp.
‘Are you al right?’ The tinny voice through his earphones came from Major Penn, now visible beside him in his bulky white CBRN suit.
‘I’m fine,’ Hiebermeyer replied, his voice sounding oddly muffled inside the helmet. ‘A twisted wrist, but I can live with that.’
‘I’ve checked over your suit, and there’s no obvious damage,’ Penn said. ‘The worst-case scenario would be any kind of tear. Even the chance of contamination would be enough to put you in the quarantine chamber in the Portakabin for a month.’
‘No thanks,’ Hiebermeyer replied.
‘I forgot to mention that it can be a little slippery in here, like that pole. There’s not much dust because there have been no people in here for more than seventy years, so no dead human skin. But there’s a thin layer of old fungal growth over everything. The forensics guy thinks that something decayed in here and putrefied a long time ago. It’s on the floor too, so watch your step.’
Hiebermeyer stared at the yel ow-brown smear on his glove from the pole. Something decayed in here.
He felt a wave of nausea, swal owed hard and wiped his hand against his leg. He swung around, his headlamp beam traversing indeterminate shapes and shadows as he turned back towards their objective, the main chamber of the bunker, visible through an open door at the end of the entrance passageway. He walked forward, fol owing Penn. The halo of condensation around the edge of his visor made it seem as if he were in a tunnel, almost moving in slow motion. Penn stopped, clicked off the intercom button on the side of his helmet and activated the external link that al owed him to communicate with the phone in the Portakabin. It was strict procedure to activate it only when absolutely vital, to keep workers inside the bunker from being distracted, and even the other two men in the chamber ahead of them would only be included in their intercom audio loop if necessary.
Hiebermeyer could see that Penn was talking in an agitated manner. After about a minute he clicked the side of his helmet and his voice crackled again inside Hiebermeyer’s headset. ‘That was Sergeant Jones in the kitting-up room,’ he said, sounding annoyed. ‘The EU inspector Dr Auxel e has arrived ahead of schedule. He’s forced Jones to let him come into the bunker now. Auxel e knew I was in here already, and Jones doesn’t have the authority to stand up to him.
Auxel e probably threatened him, though Jones is too professional to tel me that. It’s al completely unnecessary. Auxel e could have waited twenty minutes as the schedule dictated, so that he and Jones could have gone in as planned and the turnover worked smoothly, keeping the maximum number in the bunker to four. But he knows the pair ahead of us are making the first entry into the laboratory at the back of the main chamber, and he wants to be in on the act. It’s always like that with these people. We have to deal with EU Health and Safety nabobs al the time. They like you to think they’re in charge, and you have to go along with it or risk being blacklisted.’
‘It sounds as if I’m the one who’s arrived on your doorstep at the wrong time,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘If you hadn’t been in here with me, you could have dealt with it and made him wait.’
‘Auxel e and Jones are in the double-lock chamber already, so there’s nothing I can do about it. And it was my cal to slot us in the schedule now. I promised Jack Howard that I’d personal y escort you and get you in and out as fast as possible. He said that he’d been against you coming here and that you had other priorities at the moment.’
‘I’m seeing this through.’
‘Okay. With Auxel e and Jones directly behind us, we’ve got to move more quickly. I’m going to take you directly to the storage crates, and then that’s it. I want to be in the scrubbing room waiting for Auxel e when he comes out. I think the time has arrived for a little showdown.’
‘Sounds like a little suspicion on your part that he might have picked up some contamination wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘I wish. That’s one area where he can’t override my authority. A month in the quarantine chamber would certainly get him out of my hair.’ He grinned at Hiebermeyer through his visor, than put a hand on his back. ‘You okay? Let’s try to do this within twenty minutes. We’l be using our headlamps al through.
The old electrics in here stil work, powered by a huge U-boat battery that we think was here mainly to keep some kind of refrigeration unit going in the laboratory, something they wanted guaranteed long-term. But we’re not risking the old electrical system. We always work with our own power supply. We should know what the electrics were powering soon enough, as the two sappers ahead of us wil be at the lab door by now. I’ve asked them to hold off reporting unless there’s urgent need so that we can focus on those crates, but to give me a situation report at 1420.
That’s eighteen minutes from now. I’ve just warned them on the intercom about Auxel e and Jones coming in.’
Hiebermeyer cautiously fol owed Penn along the metal grid on the floor. On one side his headlamp caught the window of a smal room, the glass covered with the yel ow-brown layer and reflecting a strange unearthly glow. Further ahead a machine gun sat on its tripod on the floor, an old German MG-42, the receiver stil closed over a cartridge belt that linked to an ammunition box below. Beyond that lay the opening to the main chamber of the bunker. He fol owed Penn through, their beams traversing the wal s. Two headlamps bobbed at the far end of the chamber, evidently the sappers at the entrance to the laboratory. He saw a smal jet of intense orange flame and a shower of sparks. ‘They’re using an oxyacetylene torch,’ Penn said. ‘Before now we’d
only seen the laboratory door over the crates. We work methodical y, inch by inch, and that’s as far as we’d got. We knew the door was slightly ajar, and we suspected it might be rusted on its hinges. Let’s hope they get through within fifteen minutes.’
They walked further on. With only his single beam stabbing into the gloom, Hiebermeyer found it difficult to get a good sense of the dimensions, but he began to see how they fitted with the plan that Penn had shown him of a structure about the size of an underground railway station, as if a huge section of corrugated culvert pipe had been half buried in the ground. The interior seemed to be glowing yel ow-green, and he realized that everything was covered with the same viscous layer he had encountered in the entranceway. He stumbled slightly, and the shadows of the crates loomed large on the wal , elongated on its concave surface. He saw Penn’s form in exaggerated silhouette as if it were advancing towards him, an unnerving image from a distant childhood nightmare, a story an older boy had told him of the trol s that lurked underground in these parts, waiting for boys like him. It had seemed frighteningly real, in the land where trol s and goblins had been invented and had then come hideously to life in the dark days of the Third Reich.
His breathing quickened, rasping and sucking through the regulator, and he stopped to calm himself.
Penn veered left between two rows of wooden crates of identical dimensions, each about a metre and a half high. They looked unopened and sealed up except for one at the back, its lid slightly ajar.
Hiebermeyer fol owed, his heart pounding. It could be an absolute treasure trove. Penn had told him about a crate he had seen containing what looked like paintings, and now they both stood in front of one isolated from the rest and narrower, with no cover.
Propped up on the back was a panel that looked as if it might have been the lid, but made up of a single board rather than joined planks. Penn pointed inside.
Gods of Atlantis Page 16
