‘I’ve just remembered something,’ Costas said. ‘Wasn’t San Salvador where Christopher Columbus first made landfall in the Americas?’
Jack paused. He had barely allowed 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 following 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 allows 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 collect 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 completely. 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He was no longer hearing the reversing sound of the propane truck; it had been replaced by the low roar of an auxiliary engine powering the pump.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 yellow 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 overalls were talking to Jeremy at the rear of the truck, pulling 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 rolled 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, following 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 rolling 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
‘F reeze. 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, still 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 called out from behind. ‘I’m here, Jack.’ He glanced over and saw Mikhail, his Lee-Enfield cocked and levelled.
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 small of the back so they fell 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 small arsenal of handguns and knives from their overalls, and several cell 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 smell 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 well 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 well. 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 cell phones and give you back your truck. You will tell your master that I know the location he wants in the Caribbean. I will give you a piece of paper with the precise co-ordinates. My team are on their way there now. Listen very closely. You will tell him that we know the prize he wants is in that place. We are willing 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 will 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 will 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-still, his rifle still trained. He stood up, and nodded at John. ‘They’re all 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 togethe
r. 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 billowing 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 call 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 allow 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 Jack 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 filled 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 actually 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 installed 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 killer in modern times, that the virus was far more terrifying. He was a wily operator, an intellectual, a politician, very probably a fundamentalist sympathizer, but above all 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 all the gold in the world to him.
Paul’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Apologies for the reception. We’ve got some kind of radio interference, maybe a localized electromagnetic phenomenon. There’s activity on site. The radar’s just showing a boat speeding away in the direction of San Salvador Island.’
‘Anything from the drone?’
‘It’s had to turn back because of the weather. But Lanowski’s just sent a message. It’s what you want to hear, Jack. The drone showed a boat bang over the blue hole, with two divers getting in the water before it sped off.’
Jack tensed. ‘Good. If there’s any sign of it returning, Macalister has a hotline to the head of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force to order an intercept. I don’t want it done yet in case the boat captain has some way of contacting Saumerre and he realizes what we’re doing. But if needs be, you can say we suspect it’s a drug-runner.’
That much had gone according to plan. The MQ-1 Predator drone had been an inspirational idea of Lanowski’s, and a masterpiece of string-pulling involving Macalister, their MI6 contact, Ben and finally Mikhail, who had gone straight to his CIA handlers at Langley and explained enough of the situation with Saumerre and the potential terrorist threat to have a drone launched from a secret US installation in Florida, with the imagery streamed via the airbase to Lanowski’s computer in the operations room on board Seaquest II.
‘Okay,’ Paul said. ‘Target in sight now. T minus two minutes.’
‘Roger that,’ Jack said. He made a diver’s okay sign at Costas, who was sitting beside him with his helmet visor already down, his e-suit covered by the tattered remains of the trusty old boilersuit he had somehow found time to patch and sew together after parts of it had melted during their volcano dive in the Black Sea four days previously. Costas patted his pockets, checking them, and Jack saw the grapple gun they had used in the volcano poking out of one side and attached by a metal carabiner to a hook under his arm. Jack snapped down his own helmet, made sure the rebreather system was operating and quickly scanned the digital computer readout inside his helmet. He listened to his breathing, keeping it cool, measured. He remembered what Paul had said. With their helmets now on and no intercom link to the pilot, the signal would be three sharp bangs on the metal bulkhead behind the pilot’s seat. Crude, but effective. He glanced at Costas again, visually checking his gear, and saw Costas doing the same for him. He reached up and grasped the sliding door handle, and then whispered the words he always said before a dive: Lucky Jack.
The helicopter pitched slightly to the rear and he felt it descend, seeing only a shroud of spray from the rotorwash out of the window. Then he heard three bangs. He looked at Costas, pointing his thumb down, and Costas did the same. They opened the sliding doors simultaneously, into a maelstrom of noise and water. Jack swung his legs out, contacted the skid with his fins, crouched down and rolled forward, holding his helmet with one hand and his backpack with the other as he somersaulted into the sea. He dropped a few feet underwater and then rose to the surface again, patting his head with one hand to show Paul that he was safe. He saw Costas do the same, his yellow helmet just visible in the sheets of spray against the looming blackness of the storm coming in from the east. Jack pressed his buoyancy compensator exhaust to expel air and then he was underwater, the tumult of the surface gone, feeling the instant sense of calm he always did at the beginning of a dive. Costas came alongside him, and they exchanged okay signals again and a thumbs-down. This was it.
Below them lay a massive jumble of rock and coral, fragments as large as houses that Jack knew must have been blown off the side walls of the blue hole by the explosions of the three depth charges dropped by the Liberator in 1945. In the centre was an opening, a gap between the rocks about ten metres in circumference, ten metres or so below the surface. They dropped through it, and were immediately confronted by an astonishing sight.
Wedged into the hole beneath the rocks was the rusted hulk of a submarine, clearly identifiable from its conning tower as a German Type XXI U-boat. It was angled down at about forty-five degrees, and they could see in the gloom below that the bow had been sheared off. As they swam slowly down the hull, they became aware of extensive evidence of damage from gunfire, with holes peppering the outer casing and the gun turrets; the forward deck gun was still loaded with a round in the breech and the barrel was angled high off to starboard. Costas stopped just before the bow section
and put his hand on the casing, raising a puff of rust. ‘This confirms the airman’s story,’ he said into his intercom. ‘This U-boat was sprayed with machine-gun rounds, fifty-calibre, and then the bow was blown off by one of those depth charges that also collapsed the blue hole all around it.’
‘Remember Heidi telling us that Ernst had mentioned the torpedo tubes?’ Jack said. ‘If we’re going to find any evidence of whether or not he carried out his plan, it’s going to be there.’
They swam down into the twisted wreckage, immediately recognizing the forward tubes. Costas swam closer, and then backed out. ‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘The forward left tube’s been fired, and hasn’t been sealed shut. It must have happened just before the Liberator attack, even during it. Hoffman cut it fine.’
‘God only knows what was going on in those final moments in this boat. I only hope he had the satisfaction of knowing he’d succeeded before the end came. My guess is he would have been holed up in here, with no chance.’
‘Jack, take a look below you. You’re not going to believe it.’
Jack swam back about a metre and stared into the silt. He looked again, astonished. An object lay there, half inside a rotting leather satchel, something that seemed to have preoccupied them for as long as he could remember now, the object that had caused Rebecca’s kidnapping. It was a golden swastika, the reverse side up, the other side a slightly rusty iron colour. The palladion. He quickly reached down, pushed it into the satchel and picked it up, then strapped it to the front of his e-suit. It was incredibly heavy for its size. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Hoffman must have been given this by Himmler as the key to get into a chamber to store the virus phial. We can use it as a bargaining chip with Saumerre.’
The Gods of Atlantis jh-6 Page 42
