The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘That time you were in the driver’s seat. You actually got your wings just before I did. I’m still trying to live that down.’

  ‘Learning to fly was just part of my toolkit. I wanted to get all the skills I could under my belt. I guessed I was going to have to fly at some time in the future, and I was right. But for you, flying and getting into the RAF was always your main passion, like diving was for me.’

  ‘It’s still there, Jack. All I ever wanted was to get inside one of these things. And here I am now, an RAF group captain, about to be booted up to one-star rank so I can fly a desk in the Ministry of Defence in London. I’ll be like one of those mothballed planes in the Arizona desert, waiting for a reactivation everyone knows is never going to happen. All fast-jet jocks say the same when they reach my stage. It’s as if we’ve gone beyond our sell-by date, but they can’t quite bring themselves to scrap us.’

  ‘Ever think of retirement?’

  ‘I’d retire from the air force, but only to fly again. You?’

  ‘Rebecca says I need more sabbaticals, and to stop taking all the best projects. She said IMU needs to get more expeditions going with other people leading them. People like herself.’

  ‘I can’t wait to meet her. Her mother’s death must have been a terrible blow, but it’s amazing how kids can weather storms. So Elizabeth disappeared back to Naples without telling you she was pregnant? I bet you can’t believe you’ve only known Rebecca for three years.’

  ‘Her kidnapping last year really brought it all home again.’

  ‘Kidnapping? Jesus, Jack, what have you been getting into?’

  ‘It was only for forty-eight hours. That was close to a lifetime for me, though. I found out a few things about myself, I can tell you. About what protecting your own will make you do. All I can say is I’ve got more blood on my hands than the last time we met. It’s wrapped up with the bunker discovery, so the security issue is ongoing.’

  ‘But she’s all right?’

  ‘Back at school in New York City after working with us at Troy. You met Ben Kershaw when you visited Seaquest II a few years ago? He heads up the IMU security team and is looking after her. Round-the-clock surveillance. And Rebecca’s developing quite a few survival skills of her own. She’s about to get her glider pilot’s licence, you know. If she can fit it in with her advanced nitrox diving course. And her weekend co-op programme at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.’

  ‘Christ, Jack. Sounds like a chip off the old block.’

  ‘That’s why I could never retire. She needs management.’

  ‘Been there, done that. Remember, I have three teenage daughters. Trying to keep Rebecca under control is exactly what you don’t want to be doing.’

  Jack laughed. ‘Advice taken. But back to retirement. My friend Costas jokes that there’s an inner philosopher in me ready to retreat to some remote cabin and grow a long white beard like Charles Darwin, cogitating for my remaining years before producing the definitive tome on human prehistory.’

  ‘You always were the thinking action man, but I really don’t see it.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I haven’t met Costas yet, but I’ve seen him on the IMU films. Seems like a good guy.’

  ‘He and I first met during my short-term commission in the Navy; you remember? Between graduating and my doctorate, before I founded IMU. Costas had been at MIT before going to the US Navy research establishment to work on submersibles, his métier. We actually met in the naval base at Izmir in Turkey, where I discovered he was a diver and cajoled him into doing some shipwreck exploration with me. He’s in charge of the engineering department at IMU, but he’s a lot more than that. I couldn’t imagine doing an expedition without him. He keeps me on the straight and narrow. He’s a rock.’

  ‘Efram Jacobovich still pumps money into your foundation?’

  ‘We had some pretty amazing friends at Cambridge, don’t you think? I remember the first time I met Efram in the dining hall at college. He’d thought up the internet ten years before it was officially invented. He had software tycoon written all over him. I took him on a frigid dive in the English Channel that put him in bed shivering for a week, but something about the experience must have struck a chord for him to give IMU its endowment ten years later. He’s been a fantastic friend and supporter.’

  ‘And your father gave IMU your family estate in the Fal estuary? I remember my visits there when we dived off the south coast looking for that elusive Phoenician shipwreck. Perfect place for a maritime research campus.’

  ‘It just seemed right. My father’s family had been in Cornwall since Tudor times, when the estate was given to my ancestor Captain Jack Howard by King Henry VIII for services rendered against the Spanish. In Spanish history books he was a pirate, but in ours a glorious hero. Since then the family history has seen quite a bit more adventure on the high seas but also a gentle decline into aristocratic impoverishment. My own apparently exotic childhood moving around the world was actually as much about my father evading financial inconvenience as it was his bohemian life as a painter. Luckily there was a trust fund that paid for my boarding school, and another one that kept the Howard Gallery and its art collection from the debt collectors. My father was a great supporter of the idea of IMU, but it also came as something of a relief to him, because he could bequeath the estate to our foundation as a tax break.’

  ‘I remember reading the obituaries. What was it now, eight years ago? I’ve got very fond memories of him, and your mother. How’s she doing?’

  ‘Still lives there and runs the place, really, in between mountain trekking expeditions. She and Rebecca get on like a house on fire. Still has her huge garden and her dogs.’

  ‘So what about old Heimy? You should be seeing him within an hour.’

  ‘It’s funny – that’s what Rebecca calls him, too. Of course he got married last year, as you know.’

  ‘Maurice Hiebermeyer, married. It beggars belief. I got an invite, but I was on deployment in Afghanistan. Amazing he remembered me, but I always knew there was a thoughtful and loving human being inside the fanatical Egyptologist. Lucky he found a woman who spotted that too. Makes my head reel to think of it. Does he still have those awful khaki lederhosen?’

  ‘Still wears them at half-mast.’

  ‘You remember our little escapade in Egypt that summer after graduation? You illegally scaling the Great Pyramid at Giza to spend the night on the top waiting with a camera, me flying Maurice in a dilapidated old Tiger Moth biplane for some dawn aerobatics over the Sphinx. It was something to do with re-creating a National Geographic picture Maurice had seen from the 1920s showing RAF biplanes over the pyramids. We just had to have a go, otherwise we weren’t going to hear the end of it.’

  Jack laughed. ‘It was also a shrewd publicity stunt. Maurice had spent weeks camped outside the Egyptian Antiquities Authority, trying to get them to take his discovery in the Fayum desert seriously. If you remember how he looked in those shorts, you could see what the problem was. But our stunt got us hauled in front of the director-general himself, and Maurice instantly won him over with his knowledge of all things Egyptian. I can still see the two of them on their knees on the office floor poring over Maurice’s sketch map of his discovery, the mummy necropolis that was to make his name. And now there he is, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Alexandria and arguably the world’s foremost Egyptologist.’

  ‘Seems a long way from that to unearthing a Nazi bunker in Germany.’

  ‘He volunteered to take my place. His family home was not far from there, and he said he felt a personal responsibility as a German to address the past.’

  ‘We’re about to lose altitude now. Just in case you need it, the sick bag’s in the pocket in front of you.’ Jack felt his stomach lurch as the aircraft suddenly dropped out of the sky, hurtling at a forty-five-degree angle towards the patchwork of fields now visible below. They levelled out at three thousand feet, and Jack watched the wings sweep forward a
nd the airspeed indicator drop to three hundred knots. Paul’s voice crackled on the intercom. ‘Okay, Jack? That’s Lower Saxony ahead of us. We’ll be over the airfield in a few minutes. I’m going to do several wide sweeps around so you can get your bearings.’

  Jack swallowed hard, feeling his stomach return to normal. ‘Do you know this area? I remember your first RAF posting was in Germany, in the late 1980s.’

  ‘I was always fascinated with the Second World War. I spent a lot of my leave time travelling around, trying to come to grips with what happened in those final months in 1945. With the fall of Berlin and the confrontation with the Soviets, it was as if the history of that time was suppressed, almost as if there was a conscious effort by the Allied authorities to put a lid on it. Nobody in Germany wanted to dwell on the nightmare, and there was a desperate need to get people to look forward. But to me there still seemed an awful lot of unanswered questions. There’s plenty of unexcavated history here, just below the surface. With the end of the Cold War, I felt the lid might blow off. I know you can’t really say more, but I’m guessing that’s what this bunker excavation is all about.’

  Jack looked out as the aircraft banked to starboard and saw runway lights in the haze ahead. Seconds later they swept over the airbase and the flat land beyond, a large area of low scrub and marsh punctuated by patches of plantation forest. Paul came on the intercom again. ‘We’re doing a wide turn to come in from the south. I did a stopover here once in the 1980s, and the Luftwaffe guys at the base told me a bit about the history. There was a large old-growth forest here, a former royal hunting ground. On the day the British liberated the camp at Belsen a few miles from here, this forest was the front line for the British 11th Armoured Division, part of 21st Army Group. On the other side of the forest, just about where we are now, remnant German forces including SS were about to establish defensive positions. Nobody on the Allied side wanted a repeat of the bloodbaths in the Hürtgen or Reichswald forests, so an RAF bomber raid was diverted here. Almost five hundred Lancasters, most carrying fourteen thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs. My Phantom squadron at the time prided itself on being the descendant of a wartime pathfinder Lancaster squadron that flew on that raid, and then dropped relief supplies to the survivors of Belsen. I often wonder what it would have felt like for those bomber crews on what we would now call humanitarian missions, saving lives instead of destroying them. I don’t think it would have been easy. It’s hard to change your mindset from being an instrument of destruction to an instrument of salvation. It puts too much of what you might have done before into sharp focus. Anyway, they achieved their objective in that forest. What wasn’t destroyed by blast was burnt in the firestorm. The airbase was originally an RAF forward operating field built immediately after liberation, on land cleared of smashed trees by German prisoners of war.’

  Jack looked out of the other side of the canopy as the aircraft banked in the opposite direction, beginning a wide turn to bring it head-on with the runway. He spotted a camouflaged dome like a tennis-court bubble off the west side of the runway, with further camouflage netting covering what appeared to be a large Portakabin with several vehicles parked alongside. He took a deep breath. So that was it. ‘Is anyone else picking up our voices?’

  ‘The radio’s off-line. I was instructed to keep external chatter to a minimum by the intelligence officer when I was briefed on the phone about this landing. It was someone from the secret service, MI6. That’s when I knew this was big, and it’s why I haven’t plugged you for more.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll bring you into the picture. There was another outcome to that bombing raid. Where the north end of the base now lies was a small Arbeitslager, a labour camp. The Allied troops thought it was a satellite of Belsen, but we now know it had another purpose. By April 1945 it was overflowing with Jews who had survived the death march from Auschwitz. A small British force liberated the camp the day before the raid, and cleared out the last of the survivors just before the bombing began. It pretty well obliterated the camp, and the remains were then buried under the concrete and asphalt of the runways.’

  ‘Good God. A concentration camp here? I had no idea.’

  ‘In all the publicity about the death camps that so shocked the world in 1945, this one was never revealed. In this vicinity, the world only knew about Belsen.’

  ‘I take it the excavation site is under that camouflaged bubble?’ Paul asked. ‘But that must be a good two thousand metres from the northern perimeter of the base, well away from the location of the camp as you describe it.’

  ‘The bubble covers the site of an underground bunker that lay deep in the forest, linked to the camp only by a concealed track.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  Jack paused. ‘When we were excavating at Troy last year, we were on the trail of treasures dug up by Heinrich Schliemann that found their way to Germany and may have been hidden by the Nazis. You remember my old classics tutor at Cambridge, James Dillen? Well, the guy who had taught Dillen Greek and Latin at school had been a wartime British army officer, and was one of the first soldiers into this camp. That was what led us to this place. He’d done some archaeology in Greece before the war, and saw something here he recognized. But after the war he was one of those people who put a lid on it. The camp must have been a horrific experience. He talked for the first time about it to Rebecca and James when they visited him in his flat in Bristol last year.’

  ‘Only last year? He must have been getting on a bit.’

  Jack paused. ‘His name was Frazer. Captain Hugh Frazer. He’d bottled it up all those years, and I think it was a great relief to let it out. Afterwards we took him to Poland to see one of the survivors of the camp. It was very moving, but you can never talk about closure. That’s the hard truth of it. Hugh was already very ill, and he died six weeks ago.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it. He was with 11th Armoured?’

  Jack paused. ‘30 Commando Assault Unit. A forward reconnaissance outfit.’

  ‘Jesus, Jack. I know all about 30 AU. They were part of T-Force, searching for Nazi secret weapons. This isn’t just about stolen antiquities, is it? Take a look down there now. You don’t usually get guys in full CBRN suits at an archaeological site.’

  Jack saw two figures in white chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear suits disappear into the camouflaged enclosure in front of the bubble. ‘All I can tell you is this. A lot of the Nazi propaganda about wonder-weapons was exactly that. As for the real stuff, some of the scientists located by T-Force were spirited away and re-emerged at the forefront of Cold War rocket and weapons technology, even in the technology of swept-wing aircraft design like the Tornado. That’s been common knowledge for decades. But some secrets remained. You were right to wonder about the hidden truth of those final months of the war. But you shouldn’t just have been concerned about history. You should have been terrified for the future.’

  The Tornado levelled out at three hundred feet. ‘Okay, Jack. I’m switching to VHF airband, so everything we say is now being overheard. There’s a skeleton air-traffic-control crew in the tower. My orders are to land, power down, drop you off and fly out immediately. You copy?’

  ‘Copy that, Paul. And thanks for the ride. It’s been fantastic.’

  The external intercom crackled. ‘NATO XJ4, this is RAF Tornado fiver niner kilo seeking clearing to land. Over.’

  ‘Fiver niner kilo, you are clear to land. Observe agreed protocol. Over.’

  ‘NATO XJ4, this is Tornado fiver niner kilo. Roger that. Over.’

  Jack felt the landing gear lock and the increased air resistance as the Tornado angled upwards for its approach. A few moments later they touched down with a screech of rubber on asphalt, and the reverse thrusters roared into life. The aircraft came to a halt less than halfway down the runway. Paul increased the throttle, swung the Tornado round and taxied it back down to the start of the runway, then pulled it round again so it was poised for take-off. The c
amouflaged dome was about five hundred metres to their left, and Jack could see two figures beside a jeep with its lights on, watching them.

  Paul powered the engine down and popped the canopy so that it rose above them. Jack took off his helmet and felt the cool breeze coming down the runway. He realized that he had been bathed in sweat, and he ruffled his hair. He unstrapped himself and clambered out of the cockpit and down the steps on the side of the fuselage, then hopped off and struggled out of the pressure suit. He climbed back up and put the suit on the rear seat, then clambered down again and jumped on to the tarmac. He gave the fuselage a pat, then stood back, looking at the sooty streak on the tail fin caused by the thrust reversers, and the light grey camouflage that showed the effect of months in the punishing conditions of Afghanistan. ‘She’s a fine old warhorse,’ he called up. ‘Let’s hope she finds a new master as good as the one she’s got now.’

  Paul raised his arm in acknowledgement, then clamped his visor back down. Jack walked a few paces away, then turned round again. ‘Paul, I’ve been thinking. You flew helicopters once, didn’t you?’