Gods of Atlantis

by David J. L. Gibbins

  ‘I remember how incompetent they were as divers, and how none of them got out alive.’

  ‘This time might not be so easy. Saumerre wil have learned his lesson with the Russians. Shang Yong and the Brotherhood of the Tiger only employ the elite.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s them?’

  ‘Ben saw a man he was convinced was trailing Rebecca in New York. His description of the tattoo on the man’s wrist, the distinctive grimacing tiger, clinches it. We’ve seen that tattoo before, in Afghanistan two years ago, remember? And I trust Ben’s appraisal of the people he thinks we’re up against. He says they’re good, very good, skil ed operators in an urban environment like Manhattan, where he thinks they stalked Rebecca while she was at school over the last two days. Mikhail’s calculation is that a group of Chinese gangsters are going to be less familiar with the forests of the Adirondacks, and that he’d have the upper hand out here.’

  ‘How is Rebecca?’

  ‘Not real y woken up yet.’

  ‘Jeremy looking after her?’

  Jack gave a wry smile. ‘After the course in smal arms that Katya seems to have given her in Kyrgyzstan, I think Rebecca can look after herself.’

  Costas moved aside and Lanowski reappeared, pushing his hanging fringe behind one ear and staring closely at the camera, his eyes gleaming. ‘Jack. Are you there?’

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Bingo,’ Lanowski exclaimed triumphantly. ‘Bingo.

  Macleod has worked through al the records he could find for the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas.

  Because the Bahamas are British territory, a lot of the older archival material is readily accessible in England. He’s got security clearance to view material that’s stil classified. Take a look at this.’ His face disappeared and a scanned document appeared on the screen, with the Government of the Bahamas logo along the top and a few brief paragraphs of faded typescript below, slashed across with thick lines in red pencil; below that was the text of another letter, in bolder Gothic typescript. ‘The upper text is a record duplicate of a letter signed by the military commander of the Bahamas garrison on the third of February 1938, nineteen months before the war started. Below it I’ve pasted in the text of the letter to which it’s a response, from the master of a German-registered cargo

  vessel.

  The

  military

  commander

  is

  acknowledging notice that the master intends to spend two weeks offshore along the north-eastern bank of the Bahamas. The master’s letter is a courtesy notice to explain that the vessel contains a scientific team studying the fault line between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. This was before plate tectonics were ful y understood, so it’s plausible research. The master states that their expedition was a fol ow-up to a visit two years before, in the summer of 1936, when a German oceanographic group experimenting with diving equipment and underwater photography had spent several weeks in the same area of reefs beyond the territorial limits of the Bahamas, but had also made their presence known as a courtesy to the authorities.’

  ‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘That could only be the Ahnenerbe expedition that Frau Hoffman talked about. For oceanography, read archaeology. They were hunting for signs of Atlantis in the Bahamas, and they were the ones who found the place with the ancient symbols. Two years later, Himmler sends a team back. This is it. Jacob. We’re on target.’

  Lanowski nodded. ‘There’s more. The master explains that he’s written the letter to be forwarded to the Governor General of the Bahamas in order to ensure that the purely scientific nature of their work is understood and that their presence does not atract Royal Navy attention. That’s exciting enough for us, Jack. But there’s the clincher in the final little paragraph. They intend to stop at two places and lower seismic measuring equipment. In those days that meant fairly primitive heavyweight gear, probably in bulbous pressure capsules like the early bathyspheres developed after the war. Costas told me you said Frau Hoffman mentioned an underwater habitat secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient. That could be what we’re looking for, Jack.

  And check out the location noted by the German master. It’s not precise, surely deliberately so, a sector of about two hundred square miles of ocean, but

  the

  latitude

  and

  longitude

  co-ordinates

  encompass that undersea spur north of the island of San Salvador.’

  Jack stared, his heart pounding. It seemed inconceivable, but the location of Himmler’s lair might have been embedded in official British records al along. Rather than attempting to be secretive, something that would have been virtual y impossible with a ship of the size needed to transport the undersea habitat, Himmler’s men had brazenly publicized their mission and relied on the British weakness for gentlemanly behaviour to ensure that their courtesy notice was taken at face value, meaning that the Nazi team would not be bothered while they established the site where Himmler intended to hide away the worst weapon of mass destruction the world had ever known.

  Costas’ voice came from offscreen. ‘That ridge would have been the perfect location. It’s right on the edge of the abyssal plain, so U-boats could have crossed the Atlantic and come up to it submerged, only having to surface for a few hundred metres to cross the reef edge before dropping down into a blue hole large enough to take a submarine. And remember what Frau Hoffman told you she saw in that wartime photograph, Jack. An underwater habitat like that would not have been meant for continuous use, but could have been a refuge established for a time in the future when Himmler intended his plan to come to fruition. He would never risk U-boats going to it during wartime, when Al ied patrols might spot them. But two U-boats were to arrive after the Nazi surrender, the first one with Oberst Hoffman and his precious cargo, and the second one carrying Himmler himself. In the event, we know the boat carrying Himmler never set off from the Baltic, but the one with Hoffman certainly did.’

  ‘And that’s the U-boat sighted on the third of June 1945, when Liberator FK-856 just happened to be passing by,’ Lanowski murmured.

  ‘What’s the red mark across the text on that document?’ Jack asked. ‘I can see a date stamped on it: the twenty-seventh of November 1940.’

  ‘That’s an ugly twist in the tale,’ Lanowski said.

  ‘Before looking at the 1930s material, Macleod’s researchers began by examining wartime records, to see if there was any indication of secret U-boat bases that might have been established in the Caribbean in the lead-up to the war. British naval intel igence were on the case by late 1939, when U-boats had begun to sink merchant ships in the Atlantic. One particularly assiduous intel igence officer discovered these letters in the military commanders’ files in November 1940

  and passed them on to the Governor of the Bahamas, requesting that a minesweeper and motor gun boat be sent to check out the ridge where that German ship had been in 1938. His fear was that mines might have been laid, but there was also the possibility of secret U-boat replenishment bases being established in the Caribbean before the war. Apparently the Governor angrily vetoed the request, saying that it was a waste of war resources. The intel igence officer noted in a sheet attached to those letters that the Governor often spoke openly to his staff about how he believed it was just a matter of time before the British Government struck a deal with Hitler, and how they would join forces against the Jews and the Slavs.’

  ‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘ Of course. That was the Duke of Windsor, wasn’t it, the former King Edward VI I? He’d made no secret of his Nazi sympathies in the 1930s and was even photographed reviewing SS troops on a visit to Germany. To get him out of the way in 1940, Churchil had him appointed Governor of the Bahamas.’

  Lanowski nodded. ‘I’m sure Himmler would have considered the Duke far too dim-witted to include in his plans, but it would have been a matter of some convenience to have a Nazi sympathizer as governor of the area
where his hideaway happened to be located, a position the Duke held until early 1945, when the U-boat war was effectively over in the Caribbean. The Duke himself may never have known that by vetoing that search he was aiding the efforts of Himmler, but anyone who sympathized with that regime was conniving in evil.’

  Jack tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘So what we now believe is that the U-boat that took Oberst Ernst Hoffman from the Baltic in the last days of the war very probably was the one attacked by the Liberator, just as the sub reached its destination. What we now need to find out is whether Hoffman was stil on board, and whether he had that deadly phial with him. And we need to find the exact location of that blue hole.’

  ‘Is there anything else from the debriefing documentation on that airman?’ Lanowski asked.

  ‘Any maps, photos?’

  ‘Only this.’ Jack clicked the mouse to send the scanned photo of the airman in the raft. ‘This is Flight Sergeant Brown, the sole survivor of the Liberator crash. The markings on the pontoon, the slashes and the line of numbers below his head, were made with his own blood.’ He saw Lanowski peer intently at the screen for a few moments, then work the keys and turn away before looking back at him.

  ‘I’m trying to sharpen it up,’ Lanowski said. ‘I want to see what he’s written.’

  Jack stared at the photo as it repixel ated, seeing the numbers clearly now: 242446, 742799, repeated exactly below. He suddenly remembered his flight in the RAF Tornado three days before, something Paul Llewelyn had told him once about wartime Coastal Command training. That was what he remembered from the visit with his father to the RAF museum.

  When aircraft were about to ditch into the sea, the pilots were trained to give a position fix over the intercom to ensure that the crew knew their coordinates and could relay them from their rafts if they survived and the pilot and navigator did not. The pilot would repeat the coordinates, over and over again.

  Jack’s heart suddenly began to pound. Of course.

  ‘Jacob, run that line of numbers as geographical coordinates.’

  ‘I’m there already, Jack. Translate that into degrees, minutes and seconds, and you have a point almost due north-east of San Salvador Island, about thirteen and a half nautical miles offshore. It’s bang on that ridge, just before it drops off into the abyss.’

  Jack tensed with excitement. ‘Mikhail says there’s no detailed bathymetry available because this was a military exclusion zone, but can you get a satel ite view? What we’re looking for might be visible from the air.’

  ‘I’ve got Landsat imagery streaming online now.

  Click on the link I’ve just sent.’ Jack stared, waiting for it to appear. He looked up for a moment from the monitor and saw the dawn sky through the windows.

  The dogs suddenly barked and he heard a steady beeping sound, evidently the propane tanker reversing down the lane towards the house. Mikhail appeared up the stairs, quickly made his way to the table and picked up the Lee–Enfield and a box of

  .303 cartridges. ‘The licence plate of the truck checks out,’ he said. ‘It looks like the usual two guys in the cab. Jeremy’s going to meet them and keep an eye on things. Rebecca seems to be turning her shower into a sauna. Any luck?’

  Jack gave him a thumbs-up sign. ‘Touch wood. We might wel be on to something.’

  ‘Okay. I’m off to do my usual morning recce around the treeline. I’l be less than half an hour.’

  An icon flashed on the screen and Jack clicked on it, opening up a Landsat view of a sector of sea. The focus co-ordinates were the same numbers the airman had written on the pontoon of the boat. He clicked the mouse to zoom in on a line of white on the sea, evidently breakers over the edge of a reef, with deep azure waters to the right and lighter blue to the left. The target co-ordinates lay on the reef, at a spot indistinguishable in colour from the surrounding water.

  He zoomed in closer and saw a ripple on the surface, and realized that a wind was obscuring the view he would have had in calm conditions through the shal ows to the bed of the reef. He looked at the webcam. ‘Jacob, can we do anything about that wind?’

  ‘I’m searching for an archive photo in calmer seas.

  Okay, here we go.’

  After a short delay, the image transformed. The line of breakers disappeared, and the distinction in colour between the reef and the deep water became more sharply delineated. ‘That drop-off must be awesome,’

  Jack murmured. ‘A mile straight down into the abyss.’

  He stared at the target co-ordinates, about five hundred metres into the reef from the abyss wal . Dark and light patches showed undulations in the reef depth. He estimated the underwater visibility at perhaps thirty metres, with the darker patches showing sea floor at about that depth or greater and the lighter areas no more than ten or fifteen metres deep. The arrow showing the target co-ordinates lay over a slightly darker circular patch perhaps two hundred metres across between two very light areas two or three times that size. He clicked to maximum zoom, looking down at the sea as if he were three hundred feet overhead, about the altitude from which the Liberator gunners might have seen it during an attack run. He tried to contain his disappointment. He remembered years before flying a helicopter over blue holes when the first Seaquest had sailed to the Caribbean. The holes were absolutely distinctive, deep blue circular patches in the reef, indigo against the aquamarine of the surrounding shal ows. ‘I don’t think that dark patch is clear enough to be a blue hole.’

  ‘Wrong,’ Lanowski replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wrong.’ Lanowski’s face appeared on the screen, flushed with excitement and shaking. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong.’

  Jack saw Costas’ hand clamp down on Lanowski’s arm. ‘Okay, Jacob,’ he said. ‘Slow down. Explain.’

  Lanowski tried to raise his arm, and seemed to shudder. His voice was hoarse with excitement. ‘Blue holes are col apsed caverns, right? Caverns have roofs. A lot of blue holes have rims remaining that overhang the edge of the hole, and those can col apse too. What happens when a U-boat dives into a blue hole fol owed by three depth charges total ing, what, two tons of high explosive? Bang.’ He chuckled, shaking his head. ‘And I mean bang. The U-boat sinks. The rim of the blue hole col apses. What we’re looking at here is not what Squadron Leader White or Flight Sergeant Brown saw as the Liberator went in for the attack. What we’re looking at is the blue hole after the equivalent of a smal earthquake, its appearance after the Liberator had done its work.’

  Jack stared at the satel ite picture. The depression in the reef was uniformly round, distinct from the irregular mottled patches indicating undulations in the reef depth around it. ‘I have to say it, Jacob, you’re a genius,’ he murmured.

  ‘I know,’ Lanowski replied, chuckling and shaking his head. ‘ I know.’

  Jack paused, thinking hard. ‘If we’re right, then this is also where the Ahnenerbe archaeologists in 1936

  discovered the Atlantis symbols we saw in Wewelsburg Castle. Jacob, can you use that terraform programme to give me a picture of the reef at this spot seven and a half thousand years ago?’

  ‘You mean at the time of the Black Sea flood?’

  ‘I mean the time when a shaman of Atlantis fleeing the flood might have made his way into the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic, and then found a landfal in the Caribbean.’

  ‘Okay.’ Jack heard the rapid tapping of keys. ‘We have a tree-ring date of 5545 BC on those freshly fel ed logs you found in the timber yard at Atlantis five years ago,’ Lanowski said. ‘Let me feed that date into the program.’ He paused. ‘Today there’s nothing in the entire Bahamas chain higher than sixty metres above sea level. That’s why I was interested in those abyssal megaturbitides, the layers of silt. Not only have you got sea-level rise since the Ice Age, you’ve also got massive erosion of surface land mass, especial y in an area that’s often hit by hurricanes. I think Macleod’s probes would find thick layers of coral debris at the bottom of those cliffs.’ He p
aused again, and Jack watched him scan the screen below the camera. ‘Okay,’ he continued. ‘I’m looking at the eustatic sea-level curve since the last glacial maximum. We’ve got an average of about one hundred metres’ rise in sea level from Meltwater Pulse 1A, about fourteen thousand years ago. 5545

  BC fal s just before the trigger event that happened about seven thousand years ago, a final big melt that brought the sea level close to its present state. Since 5545 BC we’re looking at around a thirty-metre rise.

  Add the effects of erosion, maybe another twenty to thirty metres in places, and you’ve got land at this point rising fifty or sixty metres high, with peaks as high as a hundred metres.’

  ‘Not exactly the mountain the fleeing priests were looking for,’ Costas murmured.

  ‘No,’ Jack said. ‘But imagine looking at a coastline in a storm with no way to gauge scale. A modest elevation could seem like a mountain. And remember, the only description we have is from the man who returned, the one Pliny recorded from the pil ar at Lixus as Alkaios, who we know was Enlil-Gilgamesh.

  He himself may only have seen the shoreline in the distance, perhaps deterred from going closer by a storm, or perhaps because he had only ever intended to accompany Noah-Uta-napishtim to the point where the prophesied destination was visible: where he knew Noah would go on and disappear from history, but where he, Enlil-Gilgamesh, would carry out his secret plan al along of turning back to make a triumphant return to Lixus as a hero and a god.’

  ‘Remember the only topographical hint we have, Jacob, from that encoded message you found in the Plato text,’ Costas said.

  Jack felt himself tense. This was the real clincher.

  ‘Twin peaks, Jacob,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re looking for twin peaks, just like the appearance of the volcano behind Atlantis in the Black Sea.’

  Lanowski tapped the keys again. ‘Al I have to go on is those undulations in depth you can see in the reef surrounding that hole,’ he said. ‘But al owing for a bit of imagination, it could have looked like this.’