The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  ‘So you really intend to tell him the probable location?’

  ‘As soon as Mikhail tells me, and just before I board the plane to Bermuda. That way I’m in control. I want to push this to a confrontation. Saumerre may become impatient and events may move faster than we predicted. Ben’s convinced that Shang Yong’s hitmen will know about the farm and will have assumed that’s where Ben went with Rebecca when she left school this morning in Manhattan, where they’ve been shadowing her.’

  Costas looked at his watch. ‘Better get going. Our pilot will be waiting.’

  Jack pulled the starter cord and the Mariner coughed to life. He stared for a moment back at the figure in the bungalow, now with the phone down, watching them. ‘Part of me would still like to think that he’s just another victim of that war.’

  Costas shook his head. ‘Remember what you told me when we went to see him. What it was really all about, the Ahnenerbe. Racist theory that resulted in the corpses and the living dead in the concentration camps, and on those gurneys in that bunker. Those were the victims.’

  Jack nodded. He gunned the engine, driving the boat out into the channel, then throttled back for a moment and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Forty-eight hours to endgame.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  19

  Above the Bahamas, 3 June 1945

  Squadron Leader Peter White gripped the control wheel of the B-24 Liberator and straightened his back, straining against the harness and feeling the blood return to places in his legs that had been pressed against the unfamiliar seat for more than three hours now. It was his first long-haul flight in the Liberator, and he was not yet attuned to the nuances and idiosyncrasies that made an aircraft seem like an extension of the pilot’s being. For more than eighteen months before the Nazi surrender he had flown a Lancaster bomber, the four-engine warhorse of the British air offensive over occupied Europe. The Lancaster was an instrument of death and destruction, but he had grown to love his aircraft, to trust in its ability to return him again and again through the flak and the night fighters while other bombers were falling out of the sky around him. His crew believed that it was he who had the luck, he who would see them through when two thirds of their fellow-crews did not make it. They called him Uncle, because he was an old man of twenty-nine; he knew they revered him. Their faith was so strong that he had volunteered for another tour to skipper the men who were only partway through theirs. But for him there was nobody to elevate to god-like status, nothing except the machine. The relationship of a bomber pilot to his aircraft was impossible to explain to anyone who had not endured night after night flying to the seat of Satan himself, to the place where the simmering evil below seemed only to be stoked by the rain of bombs, where airmen who were about to die saw hell not as a nightmarish final vision but as the reality below them as they plummeted towards the raging firestorms they themselves had helped to create.

  White leaned forward to peer over the instrument panel at the shimmering expanse of the Caribbean Sea some three thousand feet below. He had loved his Lancaster, but he had not yet learned to love the Liberator. It was not just the poor forward visibility from the flight deck that was the problem. When he had arrived at the Operational Conversion Unit in the Bahamas two weeks ago, his instructor had called the Liberator a cantankerous beast, lumbering and draughty, heavy on the controls. White had learned the ropes quickly enough doing circuits around the base at Nassau, but this flight was his first experience of wrestling with the controls over a long mission. The aircraft was a bugger to trim, and he was constantly having to horse it around to keep it on a straight line. And the din when he lifted his earphones was indescribable. The Liberator was fat-bellied by comparison with the Lancaster and the B-17 Flying Fortress, and the open ports for the waist-guns meant that the fuselage was like a musical soundbox that magnified the noise of the engines and the propellers and the slipstream as it roared by, reverberating through the aircraft. He was glad they were flying at low level and not at ten thousand feet or more as they had done over Europe, where the cold in the B-24 would have been horrendous. But as each hour had passed this morning, he had grudgingly begun to see the sense of her. She was like a charging bull, bellowing and roaring through the sky, reeking and pawing the air. He realized it was the first time he had thought of the aircraft as she. That was always a good sign. And he could see why they had been made to fly the Liberator before converting to the upgraded version, the B-32 Defender, the purpose of their flight scheduled for tomorrow across the United States to the US base on the island of Guam in the Pacific. The B-32 was by all accounts a thing of luxury, with a pressurized cabin. But by training on the B-24, they would never forget the beast within, one they would soon be riding into the whirlwind of another war.

  ‘Skipper, we’re two minutes from a course change.’ A clipboard with a nautical chart appeared from behind, and White took it from the navigator, Flight Lieutenant Alan Cook, an Australian, who crouched down beside him and pointed at the ruled lines in red pencil across the map. ‘We’re just coming up to the northern tip of the island of San Salvador,’ Cook said. ‘From there we turn to compass bearing thirty-five degrees and drop to five hundred feet above sea level to begin our run in. At a speed of two hundred and twenty knots, dead reckoning puts us over our target in just under fifteen minutes.’

  White stared at the clipboard, reminding himself of the features he had memorized during the mission briefing at Nassau, then handed it back. He increased the volume of the intercom microphone to try to exclude as much of the din as possible. ‘Bomb-aimer, did you hear that?’

  ‘Righto, Skip,’ a New Zealand drawl responded. ‘Eyes peeled ahead.’

  White glanced at the co-pilot, who had been looking at him expectantly, and nodded at him. ‘Altering course now.’ He turned the wheel smoothly, pushing the control column forward and pressing the left rudder pedal. As the aircraft banked to port, he looked out and saw the northern tip of the island, and ahead of that the turquoise waters of the reefs that covered the outer banks of the Bahamas. He checked the mixture controls for each of the four engines to make sure they were on auto-rich, then levelled out at a compass bearing of thirty-five degress and pitched the plane forward into a shallow dive. He pulled the throttle levers back to reduce the airspeed, then let go of the levers and blew on his nose to equalize the pressure in his ears as they dropped in altitude. At eight hundred feet he began to level off, edging the throttle levers forward until the airspeed stabilized at two hundred and thirty knots at an altitude of five hundred feet. He trimmed the aircraft until she was slightly nose-heavy, then scanned the instruments: oil pressure, fuel pressure, oil temperature, cylinder head temperature, all good. He glanced again at the co-pilot. ‘Right. I’m taking a breather. She’s yours for five minutes.’

  Flight Lieutenant Bill Parker nodded. ‘Taking over the controls now.’

  White slowly let his feet up from the pedals, feeling the boards stay in place where the co-pilot had his own pedals in position, and then let go of the control column. He shifted his legs around, getting the circulation going again, and stretched his arms as far as they could go against the glass panes of the cockpit above him. He breathed in deeply a few times. He desperately needed a cigarette. Smoking was not allowed in RAF bombers, and the Liberator in particular always smelled strongly of fumes; there were horror stories of US crews lighting up and their B-24s igniting in a fireball. The craving usually kicked in about twenty minutes into an operation, and was why he had never taken the Benzedrine tablet that was given to them with their last meal before a sortie over Europe; the craving kept him alert until they were over enemy territory and the adrenalin and fear took over.

  There was no fear now, but he was still on edge. It seemed odd, five weeks after the death of Hitler, being in an aircraft that was all bombed up on its final run in to a target, albeit a decommissioned minesweeper that had been anchored for depth-charge and strafing practice off the north coast of the Bahamas. For
him, the end of the war had been a disconcerting experience altogether, nothing like his father’s memory of the moment of the 1918 Armistice, that instant when the guns stopped firing and there was a sudden shocking end to it all. They had flown their last bombing operation six weeks earlier, in April, as the lead pathfinder aircraft in a five-hundred-bomber raid destined for Bremen that had been diverted to destroy an area of forest infiltrated by remnant German troops near the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Their final op two days after that had been dropping relief supplies to a medical unit trying to help survivors of the camp. It should have felt good, a mission bringing succour rather than destruction, but it had not. Earlier in the war, White had stayed with his sister at Stechford in Birmingham during a devastating German raid. The experience had steeled him, had taught him about total war. It meant he knew exactly the effect of the bombs that he rained down night after night on the cities of Germany. He had become an instrument of destruction, the reason why the humanitarian mission was so jarring. And seeing the smouldering fires of the concentration camp had shown him what they had failed to prevent in six long years of war, an obscenity that could only haunt those whose bombs could have fallen years before on the camps and the railheads and perhaps thwarted the worst crime in history.

  At the back of every serviceman’s mind in Europe that summer had been the continuing war against Japan, and it had come as a relief when his crew and three others from his pathfinder group were selected for secret operations in the Pacific. That final op flying relief supplies had filled him with a terrible apprehension about his life after the war, a future he had never allowed himself to contemplate; even the few snatched days of leave with his wife and child in their little cottage had been about the present, not the future, and the sheer happiness he had experienced then had been contingent on the war itself protecting him from reflecting on what he had become and what he had done.

  On the night of VE Day, a senior US Air Force intelligence officer had arrived at their base in Lincolnshire and shown them the latest newsreels from the Far East. They had seen footage of the jungle war being fought by the British and Indian armies in Burma and the Australians in New Guinea, and the horrendous island battles of the Americans leading up to the assault of Okinawa. They had seen kamikaze attacks on US and British ships in the Pacific. The Germans had fought with savage professionalism, but not like that. The officer had warned that as the Allies reached the Japanese mainland it would become a war of attrition. He said the pathfinder crews had been chosen for their expertise at precision targeting, but also because they had all dropped the ‘Tallboy’ and ‘Grand Slam’ bombs, the huge 12,000- and 22,000-pound bombs that had been used to destroy the U-boat pens and fortified sites across Germany. He told them that the US had developed a new breed of battlefield weapon, bombs to be dropped behind the front line that could vaporize all life within a half-mile radius, far more powerful even than the Grand Slam. That was to be their new role, killing soldiers rather than civilians, destroying command and supply lines rather than cities. They and their US Air Force counterparts would be in action with the new battlefield bombs by the end of August, and would help to end the war against Japan before it sapped the lives of troops from Europe who were already being remustered to fight in the Far East.

  White remembered the last time they had dropped a Tallboy, looking down at the inferno, watching the flash of the explosion and the ripple of the shock wave as it pulsed out through the flames. It had been the night of their last raid against Berlin, before they had left it to the Russians to finish the job. That was another reason why VE Day seemed like a hollow victory. They all knew that Heinrich Himmler had tried to negotiate with the Americans for the remnant Wehrmacht and SS to join the Western Allies against the Russians. There was the prospect of a war ahead that would make the final chapter of the struggle against Japan seem nothing more than a mopping-up operation. At Bomber Command HQ he had seen strategic planning maps drawn up with half the world in red, as if a tide of blood were seeping into the nooks and crannies of the borders of Europe and Asia, ready to drip through and burst the barriers. Already the death of Hitler seemed like a historical sideshow, a footnote on a stage that had expanded to encompass the entire world, where the forces of war set in motion by the last six years had taken on a momentum of their own, creating the prospect and the weapons of true apocalypse.

  He banished the thought from his mind and settled back into his seat, concentrating on alleviating the discomfort of the next four hours as they hit their target and then flew back to Nassau. He looked at his coffee flask, and then at the piss tube beside his seat, remembering the last time he had used it and the howls of outrage from the waist gunner, who had been sunning himself in the open gunport and received a faceful in the slipstream. It was another small design glitch of the Liberator. He was pleased to have his old crew still with him, all except the tail gunner, who had been demobbed on compassionate grounds after his wife had been killed in one of the final V-2 rocket attacks on London. The US intelligence officer had said that the crew were to stay together for conversion training to the B-24 so that they would be most effective together in the new aircraft. The only problem was that the Lancaster had a crew of seven and the Liberator ten, so taking into account the absent rear gunner, there were four new faces: the co-pilot, the two waist gunners and the rear gunner, all of them experienced pathfinder crew. He had warmed to the rear gunner, Flight Sergeant Brown, when they had first met on the tarmac in Nassau and he had seen the ribbon and rosette of the Distinguished Flying Medal and bar above the silver pathfinder badge on Brown’s tunic. He was a cheeky chap, an English emigrant to Canada who had joined the RCAF three years ago, and the only one of them who had flown in Liberators before, in 1943, during a tour with Coastal Command. It was always good to have a cheerful rear gunner, given his chances of survival if the plane went down. The old Liberator hands called the pilot’s seat a coffin, from the shape of its armour-plated sides and back, leaving only the legs unprotected from below; but if anyone was in a coffin it was the rear gunner. The British Boulton Paul turret had no opening to allow him to bail out, and his only chance was to disengage himself from his harness and crawl back through the fuselage, a difficult enough task even while the plane was on the ground. The fire from a burning engine could wrap around the fuselage and cook the rear gunner alive. White had watched many times on raids over Europe as turrets had broken free from disintegrating bombers and fallen ten thousand feet or more, the gunners trapped inside. He had sworn that if he were ever to order his crew to bail out, he would remain on board and go down with the aircraft if he were unable to get the rear gunner out. It was a small pact with fate, and it meant that he always felt a particular affinity with the rear gunner. He clipped on his mask and spoke through the intercom. ‘How’s Tail-end Charlie?’

  The intercom crackled through his ear muffs. ‘That’s Charles to you, skipper.’

  White grinned to himself. ‘Seen anything interesting?’

  ‘Only those blue holes in the reef, hundreds of them.’

  ‘Anyone know anything about them?’ White asked.

  ‘Some of them are incredibly deep,’ Brown replied. ‘I had a week at Nassau before you lot arrived, and the station commander discovered I was a keen fisherman. He flew me out in a Catalina to a huge blue hole on Andros Island, where we landed on the sea and hauled in enough fish for all the messes on the base that night. The local Bahamians are terrified of the blue holes. They say fishermen and children who go too near them are sucked in. They think they contain monsters, and they say that seeing a whirlpool is a sign of a hurricane on the way. The station commander was some kind of geologist in Civvy Street and thinks it might be based on truth: a kind of vortex effect in the water when the tide comes in, maybe exacerbated by a rising onshore wind that makes the swell build up the water over a hole. When we dropped in altitude a few moments ago, I saw a hole with a white swirl in the centre, and I think that’s what he wa
s on about.’

  ‘All right,’ White said. ‘But if it turns out to be a monster, let us know. A little excitement wouldn’t go amiss.’ He leaned left and stared at the sea behind the aircraft, searching for the hole Brown had spotted but seeing only a turquoise bank of reefs extending into the blue depths, the beginning of the open Atlantic to the north of the Bahamas. He remembered that last sortie over Berlin, looking down and seeing a different kind of vortex. Instead of dropping marker flares with the other pathfinders, they had dropped ‘window’, thousands of thin aluminium strips that spoofed the German radar. As the huge searchlights played across the night sky, he had watched the silver strips swirling round and round, not falling but rising up around them, as if they were in the eye of a hurricane. A fully laden Lancaster ahead of them had exploded, and they had dropped hundreds of feet into the vacuum created by the fireball, a terrifying freefall through the swirling vortex of silver. They had been directly over one of the huge flak towers, a fortress like a medieval castle next to the site of the Berlin Zoo. The debriefing officer told him that the tower housed tens of thousands of Berliners seeking refuge from the bombing and the coming Russian onslaught. Perhaps what he had seen was the rising heat of confined humanity escaping upwards from the roof of the tower. It was the one image from those nights over Berlin that was seared on his retinas, and he saw it when he closed his eyes now. It had been like medieval paintings he had seen of the axis mundi, a link between heaven and earth and the underworld, a vortex that seemed not like an escape route for souls to heaven but a swirling funnel that had nearly sucked him down to hell.

  He felt a nudge on his arm, and turned to see the co-pilot looking at him. ‘Five minutes are up, sir. Do you want me to take her in for the attack?’