“If I had my way we would end this now.” Costas could just make out the Russian words spat into Katya’s face. “And I will have my way. That veil will be your shroud.”
With a sickening jolt Costas realized it was Olga. The drab, yet handsome woman he had seen on the helipad at Alexandria, whose voice he had heard so many times over the last hellish hours. She must be a monster. As Olga continued to taunt Katya, Costas struggled to raise himself but was brought down by a paralysing blow to the back.
There was a commotion at the edge of the chamber where sunlight streamed through the entranceway. With his one good eye Costas saw Aslan heaving into view, supported on either side by a black-clad figure. He shuffled down the steps until he stood panting and wheezing in front of Olga, waving away his two helpers impatiently.
For a second Costas caught Aslan’s eyes darting to and fro between the two women, a hint of doubt in his expression before he settled on Olga. At that moment Costas realized she was no mere minion, that she held more sway than Aslan could ever have acknowledged. Katya’s expression showed that she too knew the truth, that his megalomania had been stoked by another evil force that had twisted the last vestiges of fatherhood from him.
“You will leave now.” Aslan spoke in Russian to Olga. “Fly Vultura’s helicopter back to Abkhazia and contact our customer. I believe our merchandise will be ready for transport shortly.”
Olga casually swept the knife past Katya’s face as she turned and mounted the steps with the two men. She was shaking slightly, her lips trembling with the sick excitement of what she had nearly done. Costas stared in horror, marvelling at the malevolence that emanated from her.
After they had gone Aslan laboriously bent towards Costas, his face now a terrifying image of rage. He yanked Costas’ head up and held a pistol under his chin. Costas could smell his breath, like stale meat. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy, his skin oily and deadened. Costas recoiled, but returned Aslan’s gaze.
“Before you emerged yesterday I sent three of my men down the same tunnel,” Aslan hissed. “They have not returned. Where are they?”
Costas suddenly remembered the bubbles coming up from the volcanic vent in the final stretch of underwater passageway.
“Took a wrong turning, I guess.”
Aslan whipped the pistol across his face and Costas jerked back in agony, blood spattering over the throne.
“Then you will lead us the right way.” He waved the gun over the diving equipment now arrayed on the floor, then gestured towards the adjacent throne where Katya was struggling against two of his thugs. “Or my daughter will be initiated into the rites of sharia rather earlier than she might have expected.”
As Jack rocketed up through the silt he focused all his attention on the navigation system. The radar terrain-mapper showed he was ascending perilously close to the eastern wall of the canyon; its rim was now less than fifty metres above. The depth read-out was rising at more than two metres per second, a rate that would increase dramatically as the external pressure reduced but which Jack could ill afford to slow until he was clear of the rift.
Suddenly a red light flashed as the radar sweep alerted him to a hazard overhead. In the split second that he saw the lip of the canyon he spun east and gunned the stern thrusters. He braced himself for an impact that miraculously never came, the ADSA just missing the overhang which would have eviscerated the propulsion and buoyancy pack and sent him plummeting to his death.
As soon as he had cleared the canyon, he bled the reservoir until he was neutrally buoyant, and then tilted forward using the vectored thrusters. He seemed to be flying above a giant slow-moving storm, a surging mass that lapped the rim of the canyon and obscured the yawning crevasse below. Jack had colleagues who would itch to return to this place, using sub-bottom probes to rediscover the hydrothermal vents, but he sincerely hoped he had made his only foray into a wasteland that seemed to encapsulate all the worst nightmares about the ocean abyss.
And now in the gloom ahead was the discovery that had brought them here, a prospect that made Jack’s heart race as he gunned the submersible towards the co-ordinates of the island. The depth gauge read 148 metres, almost the level of the submerged ancient shoreline. He was still in the reducing environment below the oxycline and the blue-grey mud was devoid of visible life. After several minutes he began to make out a ridge, a continuous low berm which he realized must be the ancient beach escarpment.
He would be entering the lost city over its eastern quarter, at the opposite end from the sector he and Costas had explored in the Aquapods two days previously. The first sight of silt-clad structures brought back the intense thrill he had felt then, the wonder of their discovery suddenly eclipsing the trials of the past twenty-four hours. With mounting excitement he rose over the berm and surveyed the scene in front of him.
His mind turned immediately to his friends. By now Sea Venture would have heard nothing from her sister ship for hours and would have alerted the Turkish and Georgian authorities. But they had agreed to inform the Russians of the submarine discovery first and a concerted response might take days.
Help could still come too late.
He prayed that Ben and Andy still held fast. Aslan’s men would try to make their way through the labyrinth, to take them by surprise. The only way they could do that would be to have Costas or Katya as a guide, to force them to tap the code on the submarine’s casing that would make the crewmen open the hatch. Jack knew they would have little chance of survival after that. He must do all he could to contact Ben and Andy, then somehow make his way back to the audience chamber and defend the passageway as best he could.
The battery was running dangerously low and he knew he must conserve it for the final effort. He dropped to the seabed and began to walk the ADSA along a wide roadway, each step detonating a small cloud of silt. To the right was a line of curiously familiar shapes blanketed in sediment. Jack realized with astonishment that he was looking at the world’s first carts, more than 2,000 years older than the first wheeled transport recorded in Mesopotamia.
To his left was a deep gully, once an inlet from the sea, which widened into a rectilinear basin about thirty metres across. He passed neatly stacked piles of logs, probably fir, aspen and juniper ancestral to the forests that still shrouded north-eastern Turkey, all perfectly preserved in the anoxic environment. The view beyond surpassed his wildest expectations. On the foreshore were two semi-complete hulls, each about twenty metres long and raised up on wooden formers. It could have been an image from any modern boatyard on the Black Sea. The vessels were open-hulled and narrow-beamed, designed to be paddled rather than rowed, but otherwise as sleek and refined as Viking longships. As he approached the first hull a gentle tap with the manipulator arm to dislodge the silt revealed sewn-plank joinery, precisely the technique he and Mustafa had guessed for the Neolithic mariners.
Further on the foreshore was littered with stacks of adzed planks and coils of thick cordage. In between lay five sets of formers aligned side-by-side towards the basin, each large enough for a hull forty metres in length. The supports were empty and the shipwrights long gone, but for a few desperate weeks in the middle of the sixth millennium BC they must have been a hive of construction activity unmatched until the Egyptian age of the pyramid builders. As the waters drowned the lower reaches of the city the people must have moved their tools and timber up the slopes, unable to comprehend that their home would soon be lost forever. Jack had found one of the key staging posts of history, the place where all the energy and wisdom of Atlantis had been poised to ignite civilization from western Europe to the Indus Valley.