The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘You okay?’ Penn asked, shifting his shoulders to ease on the rebreather and tighten the straps, peering at him. ‘It’s normal to feel spooked. One of my corporals said it’s like a tunnel into a nightmare, as if the real history of this place is just beyond that plastic membrane and has never gone away. I know that’s hardly reassurance, but if you’re feeling something like that, you’re not the only one.’

  Hiebermeyer tried to relax. ‘I’ve been down tunnels before in Egypt and come face to face with some pretty nightmarish apparitions. It’s wearing the suit and being inside this bubble that takes a little getting used to.’

  Jones finished tightening Penn’s straps and lifted the rebreather on to Hiebermeyer’s back. ‘Before we put on our helmets, I’ll give you a quick rundown on the structure,’ Penn said. He glanced at the red light that was shining above the door, then at the watch strapped around his left arm. ‘We should be ready to go in five minutes.’ He pointed to a plan on a small clipboard hanging from his neck. It showed a long, rectangular building with an entrance passage lined by small rooms on either side, then a large central chamber and a further area at the far end of the bunker, shaded over in pencil. ‘It’s like a large Nissen hut, a massive corrugated-iron tunnel, a classic bomb-shelter design,’ Penn said. ‘You said your grandfather was a U-boat captain? Then you’ll be interested to know that the concrete outer shell is based on the design of U-boat pens. The roof is built using a Fangrost bomb trap, concrete beams about a metre apart laid over support beams on the roof, creating space where the blast from bombs detonating against the upper beams would dissipate sideways. That’s how the U-boat pens survived everything the Allies could throw at them, and that’s how this bunker survived the raid on the forest on 25 April 1945.’

  ‘It seems incredible overengineering, in an obscure place in a forest where they could hardly have expected an attack,’ Hiebermeyer said.

  ‘Some of the paperwork survived in the front office of the bunker. The place was built by Organisation Todt, the Nazi state construction agency run by Fritz Todt, and specifically by the naval construction department, the Marinebauwesens. The naval department had the greatest expertise in bombproof bunkers, as they built the huge U-boat pens at places like Brest and Lorient. The bunker would have been built using forced labour, of course, and the Organisation Todt had its own Polizei regiment as well as dedicated Schutzkommando who would have been perfectly at home supervising slave labour next to their fellow SS thugs in the camp. We think the labourers were Soviet prisoners of war, and that those who didn’t die on the job were executed to make sure that as few people as possible knew about this place. I mentioned an excavation in the camp, and you’ll see what I mean.’ Penn paused, glancing down. ‘Every time I look at these places and get wrapped up in the technology, I have to force myself to stand back and remember that everything the Nazis created, everything, had a cost in lives and blood. We’ve been brought up to think this was all about ruthless efficiency, about the expediency of employing people the Nazis regarded as subhuman. But there was more to it than that. It’s as if the Nazi bosses fed on the terror, as if the blood were an opiate. You see it in the eyes of those Nazis in the photographs, crazed and hungry for more. Every time we excavate one of these places, I feel as if we’re unlocking the ghosts they created who have been screaming ever since, and that we’re releasing them from the nightmare.’

  Hiebermeyer swallowed hard. As an archaeologist he had often thought about whether he was violating the dead, not in a spiritual sense but in terms of his own receptivity to the past: whether he was breaking a bond more important than the richest grave goods, whether by walking through a tomb entrance he was severing his empathy with people who had invested so much in sending their dead to the afterlife in tombs that were meant to be sealed for all time. But in this place, where the ghosts had not been laid to rest, where they seemed so close, it felt different, unnerving, as if he could sense the emotions, the terror, but also the most horrifying thing to him of all: the demonic certainty of the perpetrators that they were on a righteous path. It was like nothing he had felt before in all those tunnels of antiquity. He remembered the silhouettes of hands he had seen with Jack on a visit to the Lascaux cave in southern France when they were students, prehistoric hands that seemed in the flickering torchlight to be pressing out from inside the rock, spirits whose faces lay just beyond their vision. Here, looking at the shapes in the plastic, he felt the same, as if the swirling images he saw were faces caught in a scream, pressing against the membrane that had kept them locked in terrible torment.

  He shook the image from his mind, and forced himself to concentrate on the plan on the clipboard. ‘Albert Speer took over Organisation Todt, didn’t he?’

  Penn nodded. ‘From 1942. But that’s the odd thing. None of the paperwork was signed by Todt or by Speer. All we found were three sheets in a partly incinerated folder on the floor of the front office, beside a brazier. Someone had clearly been trying to burn it all, but must have left in a hurry. They were the usual Nazi foolscap order papers, with minutiae of costings for materials: concrete, steel girders, electrical and other equipment. But it was bizarre. Each of them had been approved and signed by the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler.’

  Hiebermeyer froze. ‘You’re sure of it?’

  ‘I know his signature. When I was studying Nazi construction design, I looked at some of the surviving documentation for Wewelsburg Castle, his SS headquarters in Westphalia. It reveals the same personal involvement and obsession with detail that Himmler showed with the Final Solution. Wewelsburg was Himmler’s private fiefdom, really nothing to do with Hitler, actually owned by Himmler himself since the early 1930s and as much his private fantasy as Hitler’s mad dream for his new capital at his home town of Linz in Austria. The papers we found in the bunker would fit perfectly within the archive for Wewelsburg, the same kind of thing. Though why Himmler should have had a personal involvement with a secret bunker in an obscure part of Lower Saxony is anyone’s guess.’

  The light above the door went green, and Penn picked up a phone hanging on the wall, waiting for a response. Hiebermeyer felt a chill course through him. Heinrich Himmler. The image of that pasty face, the boyish grin, the nervous movements, seemed to be imprinted on his mind. As a student, Hiebermeyer had made a special study of the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s Department of Cultural Heritage, and had read everything he could about its expeditions to uncover evidence of Aryan roots, expeditions that took Nazi scientists around the world as well as deep into German prehistory. It had been the only time that Hiebermeyer’s fascination with Egyptology had taken a back seat; it became a moral crusade he later recognized as a young man’s attempt at expiation, at combining his archaeological fascination with a need to grapple with the Nazi past that was part of his own heritage as a German. He had wanted to reveal all he could about artefacts and sites uncovered by the Ahnenerbe, to discover what was worthwhile. But in the end he had found it impossible to disentangle reality from fiction, the real archaeology from the monstrous edifice of lies and fantasy, of twisted racial theory that made the archaeology an inextricable part of the story of hate and murder.

  And behind it lay the man who more than all the other Nazis saw himself as a living god. When he viewed those newsreels and photographs, Hiebermeyer saw Himmler not as Hitler’s faithful acolyte but as absolute master of that world, as if all that was needed was a trick of the mind to create an alternative Nazi reality run by Himmler rather than by Hitler. For Hiebermeyer, the end of his project had come when he had interviewed a former Wehrmacht officer who had known Himmler in Berlin. Behind this man, the officer had said, one realized that there was something horrifying. By then Hiebermeyer had known that there could be no expiation, and that the version of the past created by this monster was a far bigger lesson from history than the stories that he might have been able to tease out of artefacts wrenched forever from their contexts and incorporated into the fabric of Nazi ideology.


  Penn put down the phone, then looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘Okay. They’re almost ready.’ He paused. ‘Himmler wasn’t obsessed with art like Goering, so it’s hard to believe that this bunker was built primarily as a private vault to secure a cache of paintings. That wasn’t like him. And there was something else, really curious. The folder we found with those papers had been marked Streng Geheim, “Top Secret”, odd enough for a group of construction order forms. But odder still was a strange symbol, a reverse swastika in red, and some words I’d never seen before. I know Himmler was obsessed with ancient heroes and kings, and Jack said that some of Schliemann’s lost treasures from Troy might be here. That’s what really got me. It was the name of the most famous king of the Greeks, from the Trojan Wars. They said Der Agamemnon Code.’

  Hiebermeyer stared at him. ‘Mein Gott. When did you find this?’

  ‘About two hours ago, during my last shift in there. You’re the first outside our group to hear about it.’

  Hiebermeyer remembered the whole horror story that might lie behind this bunker: the fear of a Wunderwaffe, a wonder-weapon; not some deranged Nazi fantasy, but something real, a terrible weapon that may have lain unused for all these years. A doomsday weapon. He glanced at Penn. How much had Jack told him? Six months ago, they had learned that the Agamemnon Code was an activation signal for a covert Nazi scheme in the final months of the war, a scheme that they could only guess about but which was linked with this place. He remembered all the evidence they had marshalled last year, all the speculation, and he had a sudden cold thought. ‘Tell me something,’ he asked quietly. ‘Those order lists. Did you see there anything out of the ordinary? Any strange equipment?’

  Penn hesitated. ‘There’s a guy in there now, our translator. He’s an expert on Nazi documents. We can’t risk taking anything out of this place and exposing it, so we have to do all of our work inside. I just had a quick word with him on the phone. He knows you’re German and wants your opinion on his translation. But the third sheet does contain something out of the ordinary. Something pretty bad, I’m afraid.’ He paused, again pursing his lips. ‘It’s laboratory equipment: Bunsen burners, test tubes, refrigerators, a centrifuge. That’s worrying enough, but there’s equipment not just for a lab, but for a medical lab: syringes, chloroform, metal gurneys with restraining straps, huge quantities of lime. It’s what we always hope we won’t find in these places, but it’s why all of these precautions are necessary.’ He looked at Hiebermeyer. ‘You can bail out now. Works of art are one thing, but this other stuff is way beyond your remit. We could be walking into a chamber of horrors.’

  Hiebermeyer shook his head and took off his glasses, blinking to get used to the blur. Sergeant Jones came up behind him and placed the helmet on the sealing ring around his neck, locking it in place and hooking up the hoses from the oxygen tank. He was closed off again, in another kind of tunnel. He heard the suck and rasp of his breathing on the oxygen regulator. He felt the sweat drip down his nose and over his lips, and he blinked it out of his eyes. He knew he was not sweating from the heat. He was sweating from fear.

  ‘All set?’ Penn’s voice sounded peculiar, tinny, through the earphones inside the helmet. Hiebemeyer looked across, and gave him a diver’s okay sign.

  ‘If you need to come out, you tell me. Otherwise we have one hour.’

  ‘I’m following you.’

  Penn opened the door to the airlock chamber and Hiebermeyer followed him inside, squeezing into the confined space. Sergeant Jones slammed the door behind them, and he could hear the cross-bolt being dropped. They were in total darkness, and all he could hear was the hiss of their oxygen regulators. Then the inside door swung open, and Hiebermeyer walked into his worst nightmare.

  7

  South-eastern Black Sea

  Jack turned in his chair as the door to the operations room on Seaquest II opened and two men entered. One had long, lank hair swept to the side, and was unusually neatly attired in trousers and a pressed shirt that must have been dug up especially for the visit by the inspection team. Dr Jacob Lanowski was one of IMU’s most unusual assets, an engineering genius from Caltech and MIT whose capacity for lateral thinking was matched by his eccentric character. He had the pale face and shadowy eyes of someone who spent most of his waking hours hunched in front of a computer screen, whereas the tall young man beside him was bronzed and fit, wearing old army trousers and a khaki T-shirt that was still streaked with the dust of Troy. Jack had first met Jeremy Haverstock four years earlier at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford, where Jeremy had been completing a doctorate on early-medieval scripts supervised by Jack’s old girlfriend Maria de Montijo, director of the institute. After their first project together researching Viking exploration, Jack had persuaded Jeremy not to return to an academic career in America but instead to take up a position with IMU, and since then he had gone from strength to strength. Like Lanowski, he was an expert in his field but had diverse talents, exactly what Jack looked for in a team member, in Jeremy’s case a boyhood fascination with robotics engineering that had quickly cemented his friendship with Costas.

  Jeremy took a portable hard drive out of his pocket and pointed to one of the computer workstations. ‘I need to get the program running,’ he said, veering off and sitting down in front of a console.

  Lanowski went straight to the ROV monitoring station on the other side of the room and clamped the earphones to his head with one hand, quickly tapping the keyboard with his other. He put down the earphones and walked over to Jack and Costas. ‘I’m running a system diagnostic. It should take about fifteen minutes. Any more noise from the ROV?’ he said, peering through his little round glasses at Costas.

  ‘Nothing since we spoke, but I did what you said and shut everything down. I want to see how you reboot the system.’

  Lanowski knelt down, reached under the table and extracted a portable blackboard, then propped it up on a chair and pulled a piece of chalk out of his pocket, tossing it in the air and catching it. He pushed up his glasses and gave Jack a lopsided grin, his eyes burning with anticipation, then cleared his throat and turned to the board.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ Costas said firmly, standing up and moving the blackboard back under the table. ‘Not the blackboard. Not the chalk.’

  ‘Just a little diagram to show how electromagnetic interference from a magma upsurge in the earth’s crust might be causing the problem with the ROV. To help you redesign the equipment so that next time it actually works.’

  ‘Not now, Jacob.’ Costas stood defiantly in front of the blackboard, his arms crossed. Lanowski sighed, tossed the chalk again, caught it and put it back in his pocket, then drummed his fingers on the chair beside him until Costas reached over and put his hand over Lanowski’s, stopping it.

  Jeremy pushed his chair back and loped towards them. ‘Okay, that’s loading. Might be about the same time frame, fifteen minutes or so.’ He stood in front of them, as tall as Jack, and smiled broadly. ‘Boy, am I glad to see you two. From what Costas said on the phone, it sounds like you really did it this time. Diving inside a live volcano. Hard to beat that.’

  ‘Watch this space,’ Jack said, smiling. ‘You know that officially it didn’t happen?’

  ‘Captain Macalister collared me on deck as soon as I got out of the Lynx, and gave me a rundown.’

  Costas reached over and slapped Jeremy on the back. ‘How’s my favourite ancient linguistics and submersibles technology expert?’

  ‘Excellent,’ Jeremy replied. ‘I’m really pleased with our final days at Troy. I left Professor Dillen in charge, after Maurice and his team had departed for Egypt. It was great to get Hugh Frazer out there, wasn’t it, before he passed away? It was heartbreaking when we took him to that care home in Poland to see the old lady with the harp, still sitting with it as he remembered her as a girl in that concentration camp in 1945. But he was really thrilled to be at Troy and see the wall painting Dillen discovered of Homer with his lyre. I think it brough
t back the joy of his time excavating with his friend Peter Mayne before the war, the strength of that friendship, their love of Homer. He and Dillen stayed up on the walls half the night declaiming passages in ancient Greek, and drinking wine from the golden cup of Agamemnon that Jack found in the shipwreck.’

  ‘You let them do that?’ Costas said, eyeing Jack. ‘You’ve just gone up even higher in my estimation.’

  ‘Far better than consigning it to a glass case,’ Jack murmured, turning to Jeremy. ‘Anything more on that Egyptian statue Maurice found?’

  ‘I think you’d better let him tell you about that,’ Jeremy replied. ‘He says he’s only going to reveal it when it’s cleaned up, but it’ll change our whole view of prehistory.’

  Jack grinned. ‘Maurice always says that when he finds something Egyptian outside Egypt.’

  Jeremy looked at Costas with concern. ‘I meant to say. About Little Joey. I’m really sorry for your loss. All those hours we spent together in the engineering lab over the winter, working on him.’

  Costas looked to one side, swallowing hard. ‘I keep saying to myself that the fun’s in making the toy, not in playing with it. But it doesn’t ease the pain. Lost forever, entombed inside a volcano. I can’t even bear to say his name.’

  ‘But he did good work.’

  Costas nodded; his voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘He did good work.’

  Jack looked at Jeremy. ‘And how’s my favourite daughter?’

  ‘Sends her love. To Uncle Costas too.’

  Lanowski was peering at Costas, and put a hand clumsily on his shoulder. ‘About the ROV. I’ve been thinking. What you need is children.’

  Costas looked down at the hand, and then at Lanowski. ‘Did I hear you right? I need what?’