The Gods of Atlantis

by David Gibbons

  Jack reached over and picked up the photograph showing the raft with the airman’s body slumped inside. He looked closely at the dark smears on the pontoons and the mass of marks the man had made with his own blood. He could just make out a sequence of numbers, possibly repeated several times, but the image needed to be magnified and sharpened for there to be any hope of reading it. He stared, his mind racing. Something was niggling him, something his father had told him when they had seen the survival equipment at the museum at Hendon, about how pilots were trained to think of what information the crew who escaped from a ditched aircraft might need to call in a rescue. He needed to get this image to Lanowski.

  At that moment Mikhail’s two-way radio crackled and he spoke into it briefly, then got up. ‘Okay. That was Ben. There’s a propane tanker truck beginning to back down the lane. This was scheduled. Ben’s going to remain concealed, and will stay at the top of the lane until he’s relieved by John. I need to go out and make sure the path’s clear for the men to drag the hose to the propane tank. It’s hidden under a cedar growth beyond the barn.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Jeremy said, getting up and stretching. ‘I need some fresh air. I’ll see if Rebecca’s out of the shower yet.’

  ‘Can I use the internet and a scanner?’ Jack asked.

  Mikhail pointed to a monitor on a desk in an alcove. ‘Be my guest. It can be a little slow out here. There’s Skype if you need it.’

  Mikhail and Jeremy left the room together, and Jack went over to the desk and sat down. He opened up the IMU home page and quickly logged on, then accessed his email account and clicked on the Skype. He checked his watch. Seaquest II was in a different time zone, one hour ahead of Bermuda, and he guessed that by now Lanowski and Costas would have their heads down over the computers in the operations room. He picked up the landline phone and dialled IMU Headquarters in Cornwall. The phone was answered immediately. ‘Hello, this is Jack Howard. Please patch me through to Seaquest II. Get me a secure line. This is a priority call.’

  21

  Seconds later, the line crackled as the satellite link connected Jack to the officer of the watch on Seaquest II, and then he was through to the operations room. A slightly annoyed voice answered. ‘Lanowski here.’

  ‘This is Jack. Switch on your Skype.’

  ‘Jack!’ The voice lightened up. ‘I was just in the process of terraforming the Caribbean during the Ice Age.’ A face materialized on Jack’s screen, the familiar lank fringe and little round glasses staring somewhere just below the webcam, presumably at another screen. Lanowski looked up and peered closely into the camera. ‘The computer isn’t up to it, as usual. But I refuse to dumb down and give it simplified data. Computer programs are only as big as the brains that create them. Costas tells me I need to make my own, and he’s right. But meanwhile here’s the score. We’ve just been looking at the Bahamas outer ridge abyssal plain. Interesting layering of megaturbitides along the fault line, with magma extrusions rising alarmingly high into the plate divide. Drop anything down there and it would sink through about a mile of silt and then into the molten core of the earth. I’ve got James Macleod and the geology team at IMU very interested in doing a sub-bottom probe survey.’

  ‘Is Costas with you now?’

  An unshaven face appeared from one side of the screen. ‘I’m with you, Jack.’

  ‘Okay. Keep all that geomorphology data up and running. I’ve got a possible lead from Mikhail.’ He quickly ran through the story of the Liberator attack and the airman’s account. As he talked, Lanowski emailed through a link that flashed on his screen. Jack clicked on it, opening up a detailed topographical and bathymetric map of the Bahamas islands. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can visualize the flight route east from Nassau to the sector of sea north of the island of San Salvador.’

  ‘That’s beside the fault line we’ve been looking at, about dead centre on the map,’ Lanoswki said.

  Jack zoomed in on the island. ‘Yesterday I called James Macleod and asked him to trawl through our database for anything that might hint at undersea research in the Caribbean in the late 1930s, anything odd. I need to know if he found anything on the Bahamas.’

  ‘We’re on to it already. He’s been liaising with us this morning,’ Lanowski said. ‘Let me give him a call now. This might take a few minutes. Stay online.’

  Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘How’s tricks?’

  ‘Mikhail’s got this place locked down,’ Jack replied. ‘Ben and the MI6 guy are doing perimeter security. They know Saumerre’s men have been shadowing Rebecca since she arrived in New York from Turkey two days ago. The farm is about as remote as you can get in the Adirondacks, but Mikhail’s not taking any chances.’

  ‘I found out something interesting,’ Costas said. ‘The MI6 file on Saumerre passed to our security people shows that he’s a diver. He trained at Cambridge when he was a student and qualified with the British Sub-Aqua Club. If he thinks this place in the Caribbean is going to give him his biggest prize, he might want to get involved personally this time and not just leave it to his henchmen.’

  ‘They’ll all be divers too. You remember his previous men, the Russians we encountered in the mineshaft in Poland last year?’

  ‘I remember how incompetent they were as divers, and how none of them got out alive.’

  ‘This time might not be so easy. Saumerre will have learned his lesson with the Russians. Shang Yong and the Brotherhood of the Tiger only employ the elite.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s them?’

  ‘Ben saw a man he was convinced was trailing Rebecca in New York. His description of the tattoo on the man’s wrist, the distinctive grimacing tiger, clinches it. We’ve seen that tattoo before, in Afghanistan two years ago, remember? And I trust Ben’s appraisal of the people he thinks we’re up against. He says they’re good, very good, skilled operators in an urban environment like Manhattan, where he thinks they stalked Rebecca while she was at school over the last two days. Mikhail’s calculation is that a group of Chinese gangsters are going to be less familiar with the forests of the Adirondacks, and that he’d have the upper hand out here.’

  ‘How is Rebecca?’

  ‘Not really woken up yet.’

  ‘Jeremy looking after her?’

  Jack gave a wry smile. ‘After the course in small arms that Katya seems to have given her in Kyrgyzstan, I think Rebecca can look after herself.’

  Costas moved aside and Lanowski reappeared, pushing his hanging fringe behind one ear and staring closely at the camera, his eyes gleaming. ‘Jack. Are you there?’

  ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Bingo,’ Lanowski exclaimed triumphantly. ‘Bingo. Macleod has worked through all the records he could find for the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. Because the Bahamas are British territory, a lot of the older archival material is readily accessible in England. He’s got security clearance to view material that’s still classified. Take a look at this.’ His face disappeared and a scanned document appeared on the screen, with the Government of the Bahamas logo along the top and a few brief paragraphs of faded typescript below, slashed across with thick lines in red pencil; below that was the text of another letter, in bolder Gothic typescript. ‘The upper text is a record duplicate of a letter signed by the military commander of the Bahamas garrison on the third of February 1938, nineteen months before the war started. Below it I’ve pasted in the text of the letter to which it’s a response, from the master of a German-registered cargo vessel. The military commander is acknowledging notice that the master intends to spend two weeks offshore along the north-eastern bank of the Bahamas. The master’s letter is a courtesy notice to explain that the vessel contains a scientific team studying the fault line between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. This was before plate tectonics were fully understood, so it’s plausible research. The master states that their expedition was a follow-up to a visit two years before, in the summer of 1936, when a German oceanographic group experiment
ing with diving equipment and underwater photography had spent several weeks in the same area of reefs beyond the territorial limits of the Bahamas, but had also made their presence known as a courtesy to the authorities.’

  ‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘That could only be the Ahnenerbe expedition that Frau Hoffman talked about. For oceanography, read archaeology. They were hunting for signs of Atlantis in the Bahamas, and they were the ones who found the place with the ancient symbols. Two years later, Himmler sends a team back. This is it. Jacob. We’re on target.’

  Lanowski nodded. ‘There’s more. The master explains that he’s written the letter to be forwarded to the Governor General of the Bahamas in order to ensure that the purely scientific nature of their work is understood and that their presence does not atract Royal Navy attention. That’s exciting enough for us, Jack. But there’s the clincher in the final little paragraph. They intend to stop at two places and lower seismic measuring equipment. In those days that meant fairly primitive heavyweight gear, probably in bulbous pressure capsules like the early bathyspheres developed after the war. Costas told me you said Frau Hoffman mentioned an underwater habitat secretly developed in the U-boat base at Lorient. That could be what we’re looking for, Jack. And check out the location noted by the German master. It’s not precise, surely deliberately so, a sector of about two hundred square miles of ocean, but the latitude and longitude co-ordinates encompass that undersea spur north of the island of San Salvador.’

  Jack stared, his heart pounding. It seemed inconceivable, but the location of Himmler’s lair might have been embedded in official British records all along. Rather than attempting to be secretive, something that would have been virtually impossible with a ship of the size needed to transport the undersea habitat, Himmler’s men had brazenly publicized their mission and relied on the British weakness for gentlemanly behaviour to ensure that their courtesy notice was taken at face value, meaning that the Nazi team would not be bothered while they established the site where Himmler intended to hide away the worst weapon of mass destruction the world had ever known.

  Costas’ voice came from offscreen. ‘That ridge would have been the perfect location. It’s right on the edge of the abyssal plain, so U-boats could have crossed the Atlantic and come up to it submerged, only having to surface for a few hundred metres to cross the reef edge before dropping down into a blue hole large enough to take a submarine. And remember what Frau Hoffman told you she saw in that wartime photograph, Jack. An underwater habitat like that would not have been meant for continuous use, but could have been a refuge established for a time in the future when Himmler intended his plan to come to fruition. He would never risk U-boats going to it during wartime, when Allied patrols might spot them. But two U-boats were to arrive after the Nazi surrender, the first one with Oberst Hoffman and his precious cargo, and the second one carrying Himmler himself. In the event, we know the boat carrying Himmler never set off from the Baltic, but the one with Hoffman certainly did.’

  ‘And that’s the U-boat sighted on the third of June 1945, when Liberator FK-856 just happened to be passing by,’ Lanowski murmured.

  ‘What’s the red mark across the text on that document?’ Jack asked. ‘I can see a date stamped on it: the twenty-seventh of November 1940.’

  ‘That’s an ugly twist in the tale,’ Lanowski said. ‘Before looking at the 1930s material, Macleod’s researchers began by examining wartime records, to see if there was any indication of secret U-boat bases that might have been established in the Caribbean in the lead-up to the war. British naval intelligence were on the case by late 1939, when U-boats had begun to sink merchant ships in the Atlantic. One particularly assiduous intelligence officer discovered these letters in the military commanders’ files in November 1940 and passed them on to the Governor of the Bahamas, requesting that a minesweeper and motor gun boat be sent to check out the ridge where that German ship had been in 1938. His fear was that mines might have been laid, but there was also the possibility of secret U-boat replenishment bases being established in the Caribbean before the war. Apparently the Governor angrily vetoed the request, saying that it was a waste of war resources. The intelligence officer noted in a sheet attached to those letters that the Governor often spoke openly to his staff about how he believed it was just a matter of time before the British Government struck a deal with Hitler, and how they would join forces against the Jews and the Slavs.’

  ‘Good God,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Of course. That was the Duke of Windsor, wasn’t it, the former King Edward VIII? He’d made no secret of his Nazi sympathies in the 1930s and was even photographed reviewing SS troops on a visit to Germany. To get him out of the way in 1940, Churchill had him appointed Governor of the Bahamas.’

  Lanowski nodded. ‘I’m sure Himmler would have considered the Duke far too dim-witted to include in his plans, but it would have been a matter of some convenience to have a Nazi sympathizer as governor of the area where his hideaway happened to be located, a position the Duke held until early 1945, when the U-boat war was effectively over in the Caribbean. The Duke himself may never have known that by vetoing that search he was aiding the efforts of Himmler, but anyone who sympathized with that regime was conniving in evil.’

  Jack tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘So what we now believe is that the U-boat that took Oberst Ernst Hoffman from the Baltic in the last days of the war very probably was the one attacked by the Liberator, just as the sub reached its destination. What we now need to find out is whether Hoffman was still on board, and whether he had that deadly phial with him. And we need to find the exact location of that blue hole.’

  ‘Is there anything else from the debriefing documentation on that airman?’ Lanowski asked. ‘Any maps, photos?’

  ‘Only this.’ Jack clicked the mouse to send the scanned photo of the airman in the raft. ‘This is Flight Sergeant Brown, the sole survivor of the Liberator crash. The markings on the pontoon, the slashes and the line of numbers below his head, were made with his own blood.’ He saw Lanowski peer intently at the screen for a few moments, then work the keys and turn away before looking back at him.

  ‘I’m trying to sharpen it up,’ Lanowski said. ‘I want to see what he’s written.’

  Jack stared at the photo as it repixellated, seeing the numbers clearly now: 242446, 742799, repeated exactly below. He suddenly remembered his flight in the RAF Tornado three days before, something Paul Llewelyn had told him once about wartime Coastal Command training. That was what he remembered from the visit with his father to the RAF museum. When aircraft were about to ditch into the sea, the pilots were trained to give a position fix over the intercom to ensure that the crew knew their co-ordinates and could relay them from their rafts if they survived and the pilot and navigator did not. The pilot would repeat the coordinates, over and over again. Jack’s heart suddenly began to pound. Of course. ‘Jacob, run that line of numbers as geographical co-ordinates.’

  ‘I’m there already, Jack. Translate that into degrees, minutes and seconds, and you have a point almost due north-east of San Salvador Island, about thirteen and a half nautical miles offshore. It’s bang on that ridge, just before it drops off into the abyss.’

  Jack tensed with excitement. ‘Mikhail says there’s no detailed bathymetry available because this was a military exclusion zone, but can you get a satellite view? What we’re looking for might be visible from the air.’

  ‘I’ve got Landsat imagery streaming online now. Click on the link I’ve just sent.’ Jack stared, waiting for it to appear. He looked up for a moment from the monitor and saw the dawn sky through the windows. The dogs suddenly barked and he heard a steady beeping sound, evidently the propane tanker reversing down the lane towards the house. Mikhail appeared up the stairs, quickly made his way to the table and picked up the Lee–Enfield and a box of .303 cartridges. ‘The licence plate of the truck checks out,’ he said. ‘It looks like the usual two guys in the cab. Jeremy’s going to meet them and keep an eye o
n things. Rebecca seems to be turning her shower into a sauna. Any luck?’

  Jack gave him a thumbs-up sign. ‘Touch wood. We might well be on to something.’

  ‘Okay. I’m off to do my usual morning recce around the treeline. I’ll be less than half an hour.’

  An icon flashed on the screen and Jack clicked on it, opening up a Landsat view of a sector of sea. The focus co-ordinates were the same numbers the airman had written on the pontoon of the boat. He clicked the mouse to zoom in on a line of white on the sea, evidently breakers over the edge of a reef, with deep azure waters to the right and lighter blue to the left. The target co-ordinates lay on the reef, at a spot indistinguishable in colour from the surrounding water. He zoomed in closer and saw a ripple on the surface, and realized that a wind was obscuring the view he would have had in calm conditions through the shallows to the bed of the reef. He looked at the webcam. ‘Jacob, can we do anything about that wind?’

  ‘I’m searching for an archive photo in calmer seas. Okay, here we go.’

  After a short delay, the image transformed. The line of breakers disappeared, and the distinction in colour between the reef and the deep water became more sharply delineated. ‘That drop-off must be awesome,’ Jack murmured. ‘A mile straight down into the abyss.’ He stared at the target co-ordinates, about five hundred metres into the reef from the abyss wall. Dark and light patches showed undulations in the reef depth. He estimated the underwater visibility at perhaps thirty metres, with the darker patches showing sea floor at about that depth or greater and the lighter areas no more than ten or fifteen metres deep. The arrow showing the target co-ordinates lay over a slightly darker circular patch perhaps two hundred metres across between two very light areas two or three times that size. He clicked to maximum zoom, looking down at the sea as if he were three hundred feet overhead, about the altitude from which the Liberator gunners might have seen it during an attack run. He tried to contain his disappointment. He remembered years before flying a helicopter over blue holes when the first Seaquest had sailed to the Caribbean. The holes were absolutely distinctive, deep blue circular patches in the reef, indigo against the aquamarine of the surrounding shallows. ‘I don’t think that dark patch is clear enough to be a blue hole.’