“Oh, that’s not good!” Sam said, when his initial worst fear came to an even more apocalyptic fruition.
“What now?”
“What other devices do you know display the time when they’re activated?”
“A bomb!”
“And didn’t the Secretary of Defense say something about the scientists at the time calculating the force to level 10 million pine trees at around 50 megatons, or the equivalent of about a thousand nuclear bombs? It might be a kinda good idea to find out just how much time we have.”
“All right, I’m working on it.” Inside the ADS machine, Sam quickly opened his advanced linguistics program on his tablet, designed for cracking these types of problems.
“The first line is years, months, days, hours…”
“The image just changed.”
“Christ, it’s counting down!”
“Okay I have it!”
“How much time have we got?” Tom asked hurriedly.
“Two years, twenty weeks, five hours and ten minutes.”
Tom stared at the projection on the wall again. “But that doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Because the last image changes every second.”
“Which means…” Sam looked up and counted the lines of images. There were four. That meant, if the first line represented seconds, the second must represent minutes, the third hours, and the fourth, weeks. “Holy shit, we have just over two weeks!”
“Sam, we didn’t just activate this — it was already running, we just brought up the display counter!”
“How can you be so certain?”
“Because the Secretary of Defense told you that everything from the Tunguska event was sealed, only to be reopened in just over two weeks from now, when none of it would matter! Damn it Sam, we’ve got to get out of here.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
“We’re not leaving until we find whatever the hell it was that Billie sent us here to find,” Sam said. “She told me that she’d only just come back from Atlantis, and that it was important that she find something in Amsterdam to help her with her discovery. Now, there’s no way she dived to this sort of depth on her own, so that means to me, that there’s another Atlantis.”
“You mean this isn’t Atlantis?”
Sam started to realize the truth. “No, this isn’t Atlantis. It was created by the ancient Atlantean people, but it doesn’t match up in any way with Plato’s description of its size or grandeur. Okay, if the Atlantean Archive we found in Tibet was created as a library of the events in Atlantis, like an almanac, then could it be possible that the other survivors attempted to rebuild Atlantis, here?”
“It’s possible. But why go to all the trouble of building a place like this if it served no purpose?”
“No, it wasn’t just a shrine to Atlantis. This was replacing it completely. Atlantis wasn’t just a place in ancient times. Atlantis was a machine that connected mortals with the stars. How or why, I have no idea. But it has the ability to yield immense power, as the American expedition discovered in 1908, when they too accidentally activated it.”
“But what good is that to us, if we can’t stop this bomb?” Tom asked.
“Nothing, unless we can find out what Billie knew about this place. There must be something that we can use to help her.”
Sam continued to search the room.
At its center, where Poseidon’s golden statue had most likely been removed, a series of strange shapes covered an area several feet wide. Placed precisely equidistant to the towering dome, it was impossible to believe that they were simply shapes.
“It looks like something important was here… or at least it was important once upon a time?” Sam said.
“Yeah, whatever it was — it’s easy to believe that it was long ago destroyed — most likely by whatever caused the Tunguska event.”
“Meaning we’ve lost whatever it was that Billie wanted us to find?”
“That was Billie’s writing in Nepal. She must have wanted us to come here for something,” Sam said.
“Or she specifically wanted us off their tail?” Tom pointed out.
“She intentionally sent us on a wild goose chase, and made us dive in frigid waters?”
“Possibly.”
Sam looked up at the ceiling again. The place had been stripped of all its orichalcum by the Russians years ago. Any writings on the wall were long destroyed. “What if it wasn’t such a case of wanting to send us here, but instead, a case of wanting to send someone else away from her?”
“You mean, her captives told her to write this GPS location?”
“No, she could have easily made up whatever she wanted. Only a handful of people in the world can interpret the ancient language of the Master Builders. Whatever reason she had to send us here, it was her decision to write it.”
“Which can mean only one thing.”
Tom looked at him expectantly.
“That she’s even more afraid that someone else will beat her to Atlantis.”
“And that someone must be on to us? Of course! No wonder she was trying to send us away. Someone else wants the coordinates of Atlantis.”
“Of course, Andrew Brandt! The man the mob leader from Nice warned us about. Originally I assumed that he was one and the same as Billie’s captor, but after the events in Nepal, I’m not so sure. Her captor could have sent a separate army in to kill us on Kangchenjunga, but if that was the case, she wouldn’t have sent us to the wrong place.”
“Which means…” Tom said.
“We’d better get out of here, while we still can.”
Sam was about to step into the water which covered the third challenge and leave the dry dome of Poseidon, when he felt the slightest of tremors under his feet.
Followed by the sound of a loud jet screaming through the water above.
“That can’t be good,” Tom said.
“No, if my ears don’t deceive me, I’d say someone’s just launched a torpedo.”
Chapter Sixty-Three
The tone of the seemingly innocent whirl of the torpedo’s electric motor increased sharply. Sam scanned the room for something structurally strong enough to resist whatever was about to rain down upon them. A single archway at the entrance to the room was the best he could come up with in the short time they had.
“Over there Tom, at the entrance. It’s our best chance of survival.”
“I see it!”
The two men began moving toward it as fast as they could — their ADS machines at a pace no faster than a walk.
The dome of Poseidon held true to its strength and resisted the destruction by the torpedo. But the ground below them shook violently.
At a depth of nearly five hundred feet of water, little had touched the ancient site since the Russians had rendered it worthless in 1908 during the Tunguska event.
Tom was the first to step into the water again. He returned before Sam had set foot into the second level of the temple.
“There’s no way out. The roof has collapsed and about a million tons of rubble is now blocking our way.”
Sam casually looked at the counter on his mechanical wrist. “So, we have around 36 hours to find another way out, before our life support runs out of juice.”
“I don’t know what your plan is Sam, but we already walked around the dome of Poseidon. There’s only one way in and one way out. And that way out is now blocked.”
A smile came over Sam’s face. “I have an idea there’s another way out — assuming it too hasn’t been blocked.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because this was built as a sister temple to whatever Atlantis Billie went to.”
“So what?”
“So there’s always a second way out when it comes to Atlantis.”