His face disappeared, and Jack’s screen transformed into a CGI rendition of a coastline behind a pulsating line of surf. He held his breath when he saw the dark silhouette of the land mass behind. It showed a jagged ridge line, but in the centre was a saddle flanked by two conical hil s. It looked just like the image of Atlantis before the flood. ‘ Yes,’ he said, bunching his fist. ‘That’s it. We need to move fast.’
Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘There’s a problem, Jack. A hurricane’s coming.’
Jack closed his eyes. A hurricane. ‘How far off?’
‘Macalister’s been in touch with the US National Hurricane Center. The eye is about three hundred and fifty nautical miles north-east of San Salvador, and it’s tracking directly towards the central Bahamas chain, exactly where we don’t want it to go.’
‘Time frame?’
‘Touchdown for the leading edge of the hurricane at that reef in about thirty hours.’
Jack looked at his watch. ‘That’s 1500 hours tomorrow. I can be out of here in an hour. I’l take Rebecca and Jeremy with me. The Embraer should be waiting for us at Syracuse by the time we get there. That puts us in Bermuda and then on Seaquest II by mid-evening. How far south does Macalister reckon we’d have to sail to be within helicopter range of the island?’
Costas leaned over and showed Jack a torn-off sheet of computer printout. ‘The best scenario puts Seaquest II about two hundred and eighty nautical miles north of San Salvador and a hundred miles west of the leading edge of the volcano at about 0900
tomorrow morning, after spending the night steaming south from Bermuda at maximum speed. That puts San Salvador within range of the Lynx using long-range fuel tanks, with the payload limited to two of us and basic diving equipment. It would be a close-run thing, but we could be dropped on the reef, do the dive, be winched up to the helicopter and then be flown out beyond the leading edge of the hurricane as it tracks west, to reach Seaquest II’s position of safety to the north. If the storm comes on more quickly, the Lynx could drop us, return to the ship and stand off while the storm rol ed over us, and then return to pick us up afterwards. It would be a risk for us, but if we were able to get under the col apsed material we think is clogging up the blue hole, we might be protected from the worst of the hurricane.’
‘What about permission to dive in the weapons test range?’ Jack said.
‘We might have to wing it. We don’t want to excite interest, and we haven’t got time to go through official channels. It hasn’t been used for that since the flight of Liberator FK-856 in 1945. And don’t think permission to dive is the issue that would be troubling Macalister, Jack. I think the issue wil be that hurricane, and the possibility of Seaquest II becoming another statistic in the Bermuda Triangle.’
Jack remembered their dive at Atlantis three days before, under the noses of the international monitoring team and into a live volcano, with Seaquest II wel within the danger zone. He had sworn he would never put Macalister through anything like that again.
Seaquest II would have to stay outside the predicted path of the hurricane. It would al be down to the helicopter. ‘We’d need a pilot with a hel of a lot of nerve,’ he murmured. ‘He’d be seeing the leading edge of the hurricane on the horizon ahead of him.
He’d have to go against al his instincts and fly directly towards it, then after dropping us make the decision himself whether to wait for us. I’d never ask it of one of our regular crew.’
‘What about your old RAF friend Paul? I thought he was at a bit of a loose end now. Didn’t you say he was a qualified helicopter pilot too?’
Jack thought hard. It might work. He nodded. ‘Okay.
Stay online. I’l use my cel phone to try to contact him.’
Three days before, after leaving Jack at the old NATO
base beside the Nazi bunker in Germany, Paul had flown his Tornado to RAF Lyneham in England before taking leave ahead of his new posting at the Ministry of Defence. Jack prayed that he would have been unable to wrench himself away from aircraft for his final few days as an operational pilot and would stil be at Lyneham. The second IMU Embraer was at its base in Cornwal at the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose, and could be at Lyneham in a matter of a few hours to pick Paul up and fly him out over the Atlantic.
Jack dial ed, and a voice answered almost immediately. ‘Paul? This is Jack. You remember our parting words on the tarmac in Germany? I’ve got a job that might interest you.’ He quickly ran through a plan that would get Paul to Bermuda and out to Seaquest II overnight, in time to familiarize himself with the custom specs of the IMU Lynx and take off before dawn with Jack and Costas and their diving equipment for the Bahamas. Paul instantly agreed, and Jack gave him the IMU number to liaise with the Embraer pilot. Then he clicked off his phone and sat stil for a moment, hearing only the morning chorus of the birds outside the windows. He stared at the aerial photo of the reef on the screen, trying to see in his mind’s eye down into the col apsed blue hole and imagining what might lie there. He spoke again into the webcam. ‘Okay, guys. Paul thinks we can do it.’
‘On a wing and a prayer, Jack,’ Lanowski said, slightly awkwardly.
‘Where have I heard that before?’ Costas said.
‘It’s what Paul used to say about our student expeditions when I first knew him, when we seemed to survive on minimal equipment and lots of duct tape.’
‘Sounds like we might be going back there again, Jack. With the Lynx stretching the envelope, it’s just going to be whatever equipment we can carry on our backs.’
Jack opened the directory on his cel phone. ‘I need to put in a cal to the Bahamas.’
‘Anyone we know?’ Costas said.
‘The office of the Prime Minister. He was a student contemporary of mine at Cambridge.’
‘The old boys’ network?’
‘Something like that. I don’t want anyone near that site before we dive, but I want to arrange for backup from the Royal Bahamas Defence Force. If al goes wel and we find what we want to find, the site wil need round-the-clock surveil ance while we get in a ful IMU excavation team to reveal everything that might lie within that blue hole. I’l see if the Prime Minister can have his people cal through directly to Captain Macalister. Meanwhile, the next you’l hear from me wil be from the tarmac in Bermuda. Thank James Macleod at IMU for me. Excel ent work, Jacob.’
‘I’ve just remembered something,’ Costas said.
‘Wasn’t San Salvador where Christopher Columbus first made landfal in the Americas?’
Jack paused. He had barely al owed himself to think about the archaeology. Since leaving Atlantis three days before, the extraordinary seven-thousand-year-old trail they were on had been overshadowed by the present-day danger. For a moment he focused his mind back on that sunken chamber they had found inside the volcano at Atlantis, on the fantastic vision it had given him of events at the very dawn of civilization. They were fol owing perhaps the greatest ancient voyage of discovery ever made, not some hazy exodus lost in time but the voyage of one man who had become enshrined in the foundation myths of the Western world. Yet what they had found in that chamber in Atlantis, what they might find ahead of them now, would reveal a truth about the past that could rock those foundations to the core. Jack felt the familiar surge of excitement coursing through him. He looked intently at Costas. ‘Not just Christopher Columbus. We might find that he was pipped to the post seven thousand years before. If we’re lucky.’
‘A wing and a prayer, Jack,’ Costas said, grinning.
‘If that hurricane al ows us. Over and out.’ Jack reached over and switched off the Skype. For a few moments he sat in silence, trying to clear his mind and relax. As soon as Mikhail returned, he would get Rebecca and Jeremy to col ect their things and drive them to Syracuse airport. He suddenly needed to see Rebecca. The dark cloud that had hung over him since her kidnapping last year suddenly seemed finite, and for the first time he felt there was a chance they might see it disappear co
mpletely. He took a deep breath, and steeled himself. If the next twenty-four hours panned out as he had gambled. One horror would be taken out of the equation if they could recover the bacterium sample from Saumerre. As for the other, the Spanish influenza virus, they would only know whether that too survived, whether Hoffman had carried out the mission Himmler had given him, once they had dived into that hole. And with Saumerre’s people watching their every move, there was no time to waste. They could not risk Saumerre discovering their destination and getting there first.
He was no longer hearing the reversing sound of the propane truck; it had been replaced by the low roar of an auxiliary engine powering the pump. He leaned back and stretched, realizing how dog-tired he was, then reached down and drained the tepid coffee from his mug. He got up and climbed the steps towards Rebecca’s door, then glanced through the window towards the barn and saw the yel ow top of the propane tanker parked beside his SUV. He walked towards one of Mikhail’s spotting scopes and peered out. Two men in dark overal s were talking to Jeremy at the rear of the truck, pul ing the hose from its reel. He heard the screen door to the house slam and saw Rebecca walk up the path towards the truck wearing a fleece, her hair glistening from the shower.
One of the men rol ed up his sleeves and knelt down to reach under the truck. Jack took the caps off the spotting scope and trained it on the edge of the woods beyond the barn, remembering Mikhail’s concern about the proximity of the treeline. There was another problem in the morning mist: the likelihood that anyone in camouflage moving stealthily would be nearly invisible. He spotted a pair of deer, fol owing their bobbing white tails until they disappeared beyond the trees. He moved the scope back towards the propane truck, and focused on the man who had stood back up and was rol ing down his sleeves. Jack zoomed in, amazed at the quality of the optics.
Suddenly he froze.
The man had a tattoo.
Jack took his hands off the scope to stop it wobbling, and stared. The man turned his wrist away to do up his sleeve. Then he turned it back, and Jack caught another glimpse. There was no doubt about it.
He had seen that before, two years ago in the mountains of Afghanistan, through the scope of a Lee–Enfield rifle.
It was the tattoo of a tiger.
Jack turned and began to run.
22
‘Freeze. Down on the ground. Now! ’
Jack snarled the words as he aimed the Webley at the head of the nearer man, shifting his aim quickly to the other one and then back again, the hammer cocked and both hands tightly on the grip. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rebecca and Jeremy, stil standing where they had been talking to the men while Jack had crept up from behind the truck. He kept the pistol trained but glanced at Jeremy. ‘Get back to the house, now,’ he said. Jeremy and Rebecca stumbled and then ran. A figure in black appeared with a Glock pistol, the MI6 man John who was helping to provide protection for Rebecca. The two men from the truck remained immobile where they had been reeling out the propane hose. A voice cal ed out from behind. ‘I’m here, Jack.’ He glanced over and saw Mikhail, his Lee–Enfield cocked and level ed.
Jack snarled again at the two men. ‘ Down. Hands on your heads.’ They both slowly dropped to their knees on the gravel, their hands raised. John came up behind them and expertly kicked both in the smal of the back so they fel forward on the ground, gasping. He holstered his Glock, took out two plastic wrist ties and in seconds had the two men handcuffed. Jack saw it again, the smudged tattoo of the tiger on one man’s wrist, identical to the tattoo he had seen on Shang Yong’s man two years previously in Afghanistan. John body-searched both men and removed a smal arsenal of handguns and knives from their overal s, and several cel phones. He unholstered his Glock and trained it again, glancing at Jack. ‘Ben and I only had one plan of action should this happen.
He scouted out a ravine a few miles away where body disposal won’t be a problem. Do you want to question them first?’
Jack knelt down beside the nearer man, seeing his Chinese features for the first time. He thrust the Webley into the nape of the man’s neck, and leaned down so close he could smel the man’s breath. ‘If you make the slightest move,’ he said quietly, ‘this .455
slug is going to empty your head of everything inside it.’
John approached from behind. ‘Let me do this, Jack.’
Jack put up his free hand to halt John, his other keeping the Webley pressed against the man’s neck.
He had just seen these men inches from Rebecca. It had been his worst nightmare, and it had nearly happened again. He felt a rage wel up inside him, the same rage he had felt six months ago after Rebecca’s kidnapping, when he had hacked one of her assailants to death in the mineshaft in Poland.
With the hammer cocked, it would take the slightest nudge of the trigger to fire the pistol. He would be protecting Rebecca again. But then the rational side of him took over, the side that had planned what to do from the moment he had spotted that tattoo from the house. He was in control of this situation, and he must continue to be in control if they were to reach the endgame he had planned.
He spoke up so the other man could hear too.
‘Listen to me, and listen wel . Two of our security men are going to put you in your truck and drive you out of here. They are going to release you, return your cel phones and give you back your truck. You wil tel your master that I know the location he wants in the Caribbean. I wil give you a piece of paper with the precise co-ordinates. My team are on their way there now. Listen very closely. You wil tel him that we know the prize he wants is in that place. We are wil ing to let him have it if we have the Nazi gold we know is there too. We both go away happy. But we also want the phial he already has, from the bunker. I wil meet Saumerre at the site at 1500 hours tomorrow afternoon. Do you understand me?’
The man said nothing. Jack pressed the pistol hard against his neck. He felt the temptation again, stronger than ever. ‘Do you understand me?’ he snarled.
‘Fifteen hundred hours tomorrow afternoon,’ the man mumbled into the ground. ‘The co-ordinates you wil give us. He gets the prize. You want the gold.
Bring the phial from the bunker or nothing happens.’
Jack kept the Webley pressed in hard, took a deep breath and then released it. He saw that Mikhail remained stock-stil , his rifle stil trained. He stood up, and nodded at John. ‘They’re al yours.’ He turned to the house, seeing Jeremy outside the door holding the Ruger and Rebecca with the shotgun. ‘Okay, you two. Get your things together. We’re out of here in ten minutes.’
Fourteen hours later, Jack sat strapped in the rear compartment of the Lynx helicopter, charting their progress on the digital flight map as they neared the Bahamas chain. Out of the door window on the port side, he could see the leading edge of the hurricane, an ominous bil owing darkness forked with lightning, a creeping malevolence that seemed immobile at this distance yet which Jack knew was a whirling maelstrom of wind. Paul had kept doggedly on course, having calculated their fuel consumption and the helicopter’s turnaround schedule with military precision. They would be on site in eight minutes now, would have four minutes to egress and then Paul would be able to return to Seaquest II having used almost exactly his fuel capacity, relying on the headwind in front of the hurricane to give him the edge he needed to get back. The storm would pass south of Seaquest II while they were diving, clearing off west by the time they expected to be back on the surface using their waterproof radio to cal Paul back to pick them up. That was, if their luck held out. And if they survived the showdown that lay ahead.
Jack had taken a huge gamble. He and Costas had given away enough to Schoenberg the day before to al ow Saumerre to prepare himself for operations in the Caribbean. He had given the co-ordinates to the two men on the farm assuming that Saumerre would not be able to get to the site any faster than he could.
The biggest gamble had been the bargain he had proposed. Saumerre knew that Jack had enough to discredit him, that J
ack would never meet him without having a contingency to expose him if anything went wrong. If he could convince Saumerre that they could maintain a stand-off, as they had done for the past six months, then the agreement to share the spoils might work. The Nazi gold was no more than an educated guess. If Himmler had dispatched a U-boat on its final mission to take the deadly weapon to his hideaway, the chances were he would have fil ed the boat with the loot that top Nazis like him were hoarding at the end of the war. Gold was the favoured commodity.
Himmler would have needed to buy himself a future if his plan to ransom the world with the threat of the biological weapon failed. He was too shrewd an operator not to have had a backup plan. Jack had no idea whether the virus phial was actual y at the site, but he desperately hoped that Frau Hoffman had been right in her instinct that Ernst would have managed to destroy it. He remembered the account of the Liberator bomber, the rear-gunner’s insistence that they had hit the U-boat as it entered the blue hole.
Even if Ernst had not already found a way of ditching the virus, the attack might have destroyed the submarine and prevented him from taking it into the underwater habitat that Heidi said had been instal ed at this site before the war.
And getting Saumerre to bring the other phial, the Alexander bacterium, was another gamble. Yet Saumerre would have known that the bacterium was not a proven kil er in modern times, that the virus was far more terrifying. He was a wily operator, an intel ectual,
a
politician,
very
probably
a
fundamentalist sympathizer, but above al a gangster at the head of a criminal empire. For people like that, the bargain Jack had offered would strike a chord that would make him forget who Jack was, forget that profit and greed were not the only motivations for engaging in a deadly duel like this. He had to believe that Jack – like most of those he dealt with – had been seduced by the lure of gold.
Jack shut his eyes tight for a moment. Somewhere in that blue hole, in a cavern that would have been accessible to Ahnenerbe divers, were the ancient symbols that Heidi had seen in the slide show at Wewelsburg Castle in 1944. Finding those – finding just one symbol that proved the truth of the exodus from Atlantis – would be worth al the gold in the world to him.
Gods of Atlantis Page 43
