The Gods of Atlantis jh-6

by David Gibbins

  ‘How much time do we have?’ Jack asked.

  She looked at the sky, and then at the sea. ‘The wind’ll pick up by early afternoon. I want to be out of here by noon. If you plan to leave his place at eleven a.m., that gives you an hour and a half from now. Is that okay?’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ Jack said. ‘I’ve got the radio. Call if you need us earlier.’

  She nodded, let her hair loose from under her cap and sat down on the deckchair where Costas had been slumped. ‘My turn. This is the first sun we’ve had for a week.’

  Jack jumped into the inflatable, squeezed the fuel pump on the 40 h.p. Mariner outboard and pulled the starter cord. It coughed to life, and he sat down beside it with his hand on the tiller. Costas untied the painter and leapt in, and then Jack put the engine into gear and swung out past the dock and into the centre of the channel, slowly opening the throttle. Costas slid back halfway down the opposite pontoon and raised his voice above the engine. ‘So you’ve never been here before?’

  ‘I came to Vancouver Island on holiday as a kid, but never this far out. I had no idea that Schoenberg lived here until Dillen told me. I knew he’d been a university professor in Ontario and then retired out west twenty-odd years ago, after his wife died. He must be in his early nineties now. His name was von Schoenberg, originally. His family was Prussian, fairly aristocratic. There were plenty of Nazis among the old Prussian elite, but many of them were contemptuous of Hitler and his cronies. My guess is he ditched the von when he was captured by the Russians.’

  ‘He was a prisoner of war in Russia?’

  ‘In the Gulag, in Siberia. He was one of the last batch to be released.’

  ‘I’ve just been reading that most of the surviving German prisoners not released by 1949 were judged by the Russians to be war criminals, and weren’t let go until after Stalin died in 1953.’

  ‘Dillen said Schoenberg tried to pass himself off as an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier, but he thinks the Soviets must have suspected him. Discovering he was one of Himmler’s select followers in the Ahnenerbe would have been enough to brand him a criminal. He would have been lucky to escape execution.’

  ‘So Dillen knows him from way back?’

  Jack nodded, swinging the boat to port to avoid a patch of kelp. ‘Schoenberg came to Cambridge on sabbatical just before his retirement, and they worked together on a translation of ancient Greek inscriptions from Athens. Schoenberg had been a classical scholar before the war, and eventually finished his doctorate in Canada. He was in Cambridge when I was a graduate student, and I attended a seminar he gave on the early Greek geographers, his speciality. We talked afterwards, and he was fascinated by my diving expeditions. He said his greatest exhilaration had been an expedition he undertook to Iceland as a young man to search for archaeological sites. I think that talking to me took him back to the heyday of his youth in the late 1930s.’

  ‘That expedition was with Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, the Nazi Department of Cultural Heritage. Already the Jews in Germany were being persecuted and the language of racism was everywhere. It would hardly have been a carefree jaunt.’

  ‘Schoenberg told Dillen that his involvement in the Ahnenerbe was purely scholarly, and that he joined the Nazi party only because refusal was impossible.’

  ‘Didn’t a lot of ex-Nazis come to Canada?’

  ‘Quite a few former prisoners of war were allowed to come here after they were released by the Soviets in the late forties and early fifties. Plenty of them made new lives for themselves and the last thing they wanted was to hark back to the war. But there were some, including former SS, who remained diehard Nazis. Unlike released prisoners who went back to Germany – who saw the devastation and then the years of reconstruction, who themselves were part of the creation of the new Germany – some of those who went abroad after their release still lived in a fantasy world and refused to accept what had happened. I knew former German soldiers in Canada who would still openly celebrate Hitler’s birthday.’

  ‘Schoenberg?’

  Jack paused. ‘It’s hard to imagine how anyone who let slip that their greatest exhilaration was during their time working for Himmler could not be nostalgic, whatever they may say about being coerced. You’ve just been reading about the real purpose of the Ahnenerbe: to provide Himmler with so-called evidence for racial superiority that he then used to justify the Final Solution. When you see that old man today, remember the pictures of the concentration camp at Belsen, and those terrible images Maurice saw in the forest bunker. That’s what the Ahnenerbe was really all about. But we have to try to keep our cool. We’re here because he wants to tell us something. We have to encourage him to talk, not to clam up.’

  ‘He’ll presumably expect some questions about his Nazi past,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve got some fresh in my mind from that book. It would be odd if we didn’t ask him something. That might raise his suspicions.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Just don’t lay it on too thick.’

  ‘You could show annoyance with me for doing it. Might help to get you into his confidence, to open him up.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Whatever he says in response to queries about his Nazi past we have to take with a pinch of salt. But I doubt whether we’ll need to tease the truth of his convictions out of him. Those will come anyway, little words here and there, more openly if he thinks he’s in like-minded company. He’s very old and has been living as a recluse for more than twenty years, probably inhabiting that world of his past more and more in his mind. Anyway, I want to play him on something else. We have to find a way of bringing up the Brotherhood of the Tiger. I’ve expected Shang Yong to be on my tail ever since we took out most of his business assets two years ago, and the Brotherhood is just the kind of outfit Saumerre would contract after his disappointment with the Russian hitmen last year. Ben told me he thought he’d seen the tiger tattoo on a man in the airport concourse at JFK when he arrived there with Rebecca from Istanbul.’

  ‘You suspect Schoenberg is involved with Saumerre?’ Costas said.

  ‘It’s just a hunch. Frau Hoffman knew about him, and knew he was still alive. If they are the last survivors of those who may have been close to Himmler’s scheme, then we have to remember that Saumerre – and before that his father and his grandfather – have been on this trail for years. If we know about Schoenberg’s background and where he lives, then Saumerre almost certainly will too.’

  ‘You think Saumerre may have got to him and offered some kind of deal?’

  Jack throttled down and let the engine idle for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. ‘This is what I think. I think the fantasy world of the Nazis, all that nonsense at Wewelsburg Castle, disguised a terrible truth of ego and poisonous ambition in Heinrich Himmler. But I think that fantasy world was so embedded in the young men and women whose minds were warped by the Ahnenerbe that it will still be there in those few who survive today. Schoenberg may well have something genuinely exciting to tell us, as Dillen himself firmly believed, something about Atlantis that still burns within him because of the fervour for finding an Aryan proto-civilization that was kindled in his soul during his formative years. He could hardly have avoided being influenced by the Ahnenerbe, not only by the ideology but also by the compulsive, almost manic excitement that surrounded it, an infectious enthusiasm it would be hard for a young man to deny. For him, re-stoking that enthusiasm might be important now because he’s an old man harking back to his youth, and that’s something we can exploit. But there’s another, darker possibility: that the fantasy for a select few was also to be part of a terrifying vortex of escape and rebirth that Himmler had contructed for himself, one that required men like Ernst Hoffman to bring it to fruition.’

  ‘And you think Schoenberg may be one of those.’

  ‘I don’t know. He may just be a retired scholar with a past that was beyond his control. But if I’m right and Saumerre has got to him, then we have to be doubly cautious, because he could be playing us too.’

  ‘Ho
w do you mean?’

  ‘We’re looking for the site of Atlantis reborn, right? The place where the survivors of the exodus inscribed those symbols we know from Atlantis in the Black Sea, symbols that Himmler’s Ahnenerbe archaeologists who discovered the new Atlantis copied in that secret chamber in Wewelsburg that Frau Hoffman showed us. We know from her that the new Atlantis was where Himmler decided to build his secret hideaway, the destination for the U-boat dispatched with Hoffman and his deadly cargo in the final days of the war. We know that he shrouded the place with the mystique of Atlantis, which had for so long been the obsession of the Ahnenerbe, a mystique that may continue to motivate a man like Schoenberg. We’re on this trail now with such urgency because of the deadly virus that may have been successfully delivered by the U-boat to this new Atlantis, a virus Saumerre desperately wants to get his hands on. A man like Schoenberg could be caught in between, ignorant of the deadly biological weapon and Himmler’s true purpose, but passionately believing in the association of the place with the dream of revealing the Aryan roots of civilization that he now wants to see fulfilled before he dies.’

  ‘So you think Saumerre could have made a deal with him.’

  ‘I think Saumerre may have told him to give us all the information he has. Remember, Saumerre wants us to find this place. He has his contracted thugs, the Chinese gangsters of Shang Yong, but he doesn’t have the resources or the expertise to follow the archaeological trail we’re now on. He’s watching and waiting for us to get there. As soon as he knows enough to allow him to organize the logistics needed to get his men in place with the right equipment, he’s going to have a go again at kidnapping Rebecca so that he can blackmail me into revealing the location. It’s why I asked Mikhail to get Rebecca out of school to his place in the Adirondacks. I’m not going to let that happen again.’

  ‘You’d give away the location if it came to it?’

  Jack gave him a steely look. ‘I have a plan.’

  ‘Okay. Just keep me in the loop.’ Costas looked out, shading his eyes, and pointed ahead. ‘That must be it now.’

  Jack saw a narrow strip of beach on the shoreline to the right, and the eaves of a low wooden house in the forest behind. He turned the boat towards the beach, throttled down and stood up, one hand on the tiller and the other holding the painter line to steady himself. He steered into a small cove beside a spine of rock jutting into the bay, and then brought the boat against a small floating dock. He sat down, flipped the gear lever to neutral and threw the painter line to Costas, who leapt out and secured it to a wooden post. After switching off the engine, Jack climbed out, and together they made their way along a rickety boardwalk towards the beach.

  He clicked on his cell phone and paused to read two urgent text messages, one from Lanowski and one from Katya. He called Costas back. ‘Incredible stuff. It really takes us forward. You remember Lanoswki’s Plato code, the idea that Plato and Solon before him embedded Pythagorean messages in their texts? Well, take a look at this. He’s found a code in Solon’s text, the Atlantis papyrus that Maurice and Aysha discovered in the desert five years ago.’

  Costas peered at the message. ‘He says it’s a simple geometric code, easy enough to understand if you play chess in three dimensions. Typical Lanowski. For easy, read impossible. Sounds like he’s found a soulmate in Solon.’

  Jack scrolled down. ‘Lanowski translates the ancient Greek as The priestess prophesied that the new Atlantis would be founded over the western ocean, where the palladion becomes heavy again and where the two mountains form a saddle and two peaks like the horns of a bull.’

  ‘That’s what Lanowski thinks Solon was told by the high priest at Sais, but that he instructed Solon not to write it down because it was sacred.’

  Jack nodded. ‘It’s fantastic. Remember the weight of meteoritic iron along the North Anatolian Fault, at Atlantis, and the shape of the volcano? It may simply be saying that the new Atlantis will be founded at a site very similar to the old, but if that’s what the fleeing Atlanteans were looking out for, so should we.’

  ‘You’ve got something from Katya too? Not personal?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Read it. She’s worked on those Stone Age symbols on the cave wall at Atlantis. She’s convinced they’re syllabic, and two proper names. It seems incredible, but the nearest equivalents among known early names she can come up with are Uta-napishtim and Gilgamesh.’

  ‘Not really so incredible though, is it, Jack? They’ve been staring at us from the Epic of Gilgamesh all along.’

  ‘And now we know they’re embedded in the reality of the Neolithic, in Atlantis,’ Jack said, shaking his head slowly. ‘Maybe that’s who we should be trying to see, real men, not mythical demigods, when we imagine a voyage west to that place where the palladion was heavier and the mountain had twin peaks.’

  Costas jerked his head up to the treeline. ‘We’d better get moving if we’re going to use our time well.’

  Above the berm of seaweed at the high-tide mark were huge bleached logs that had been washed in by winter storms, jumbled on the beach like a line of natural sculpture. They clambered over them and made their way up a wooden stairway towards the house. They could see an old man with a stick waiting for them, wearing a bandanna neck scarf and a straw hat. Jack raised his arm, and the man waved back, then beckoned for them to follow him as he turned towards the open screen door of the veranda.

  18

  T en minutes later, Jack and Costas were sitting in wicker chairs around a low glass-topped table piled high with books and papers, with steaming mugs of coffee in front of them. Schoenberg had taken his hat off to reveal a full head of white hair, neatly swept back. He was a tall man, lean-limbed, with fine features, and moved with an easy confidence. It was hard to reconcile the genial image with the world the man had grown up in and his role in it, and for a fleeting moment Jack thought that maybe he had been wrong, that the man should be judged for what he had become and what he had made of his life. He looked at the brown leather document case that Schoenberg had placed on the table between them. They had exchanged niceties and news of Dillen’s latest work, but Jack had remembered that Schoenberg was not one for small talk.

  ‘I’ve been hoping for this moment for many years, to share what I know with the right person,’ Schoenberg said, his German accent still marked despite more than half a lifetime in Canada.

  ‘James Dillen said it was most important that I come to visit you now. I’m fascinated to hear what you have for us.’

  ‘You are, I know, very familiar with the Periplus Maris Erythraei .’

  Jack stared at him, then nodded. ‘The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, written in Greek in Egypt. One of the most extraordinary ancient texts on seafaring and maritime exploration to survive. Two years ago, we discovered a Roman shipwreck in the Red Sea with a huge trove of gold bullion destined for India, the best corroboration yet of the ancient trade across the Indian Ocean described in the Periplus.’

  ‘I followed the excavation on your website. It was a marvellous discovery. Then you know something of the Heidelberg Codex?’

  ‘ Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, containing the Periplus? A compilation of copied ancient texts on geography and exploration put together in about the tenth century, probably in a monastery in the Byzantine East. My colleagues Maria de Montijo and Jeremy Haverstock travelled with me to Heidelberg University to examine it. They’ve done a complete palaeographic analysis of the text of the Periplus, and Dillen has been working on a new translation.’

  ‘Ah. He didn’t say. We’ve been out of touch since my retirement.’

  ‘I expect he wanted to tell you first about the new passages of Homer, The Fall of Troy. They came from the ancient library we discovered three years ago in Herculaneum. That’s been the huge excitement of the last year, in conjunction with the excavation at Troy, which has even produced a wall painting of a bard called Homeros.’

  Sch
oenberg nodded, his eyes rapt. ‘A remarkable find. Remarkable. Your work is so much what I envisaged all those years ago, when there were those of us in the Ahnenerbe, the genuine scholars, not the charlatans and the frauds, who saw our future had we won the war just as you must have first envisaged your own institute.’

  Costas narrowed his eyes, and Jack said nothing for a moment, watching Schoenberg, then took a sip of coffee. ‘Back to the Periplus . While Costas and I were excavating the shipwreck, Maurice Hiebermeyer and his team dug up a Roman merchant’s house at the Red Sea port site of Myos Hormos. They found fragments of inscribed potsherds that seemed to be a first draft of the Periplus, containing digressions that were excised from the final version, the one copied by the monk who compiled the Codex Palatinus Graecus. One of the digressions mentioned Roman legionaries who escaped from Parthian imprisonment and went east through the mountains of central Asia towards China. Following that lead put us on the trail of a group of Romans who thought they’d found their own El Dorado, who had heard about the fabled riches of the First Emperor Shihuangdi’s tomb in China. They never made it that far, but settled on the distant reaches of the Silk Road, where their descendants still live today.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Blond-haired, blue-eyed? We heard these rumours in the 1930s. Himmler wanted to find descendants of the Aryan master race who might still exist in pockets of racial purity in isolated places around the world, as well as in Germany.’

  ‘The trail got us in a little bit of trouble, as usual,’ Costas grumbled. ‘Marxist guerrillas in the Indian jungle, then the cross hairs of a sniper in Afghanistan. We came up against some pretty sinister modern-day opponents.’

  Jack glanced at Costas, then looked back at Schoenberg. ‘They were a Chinese secret society. For more than two thousand years they had been on the trail of a fabulous jewel they thought had been stolen by one of the custodians of the First Emperor’s tomb. The search for the jewel became enshrined in their mythology, the basis for a warrior cult. The society today is a fully modern criminal cartel steeped in the drugs and arms trades, with its headquarters somewhere in the Taklamakan Desert. But finding the jewel remained their paramount obsession. They thought one of the Romans had taken it from the fleeing tomb custodian two thousand years ago, and that we knew where it was. They’re called the Brotherhood of the Tiger, and the one who undertakes the quest to find the jewel is the Tiger Warrior. Have you heard of them?’