But as much as the truth felt good, he still felt like a bastard for what he said.
He sat down to enjoy the rest of the night with the old pilot and his interesting tales and advice. At the table next to theirs two men seemed to be discussing the whole episode they had just witnessed. The tourists spoke Dutch or Flemish, but they did not mind Sam seeing them talk about him and the woman.
“Women,” Sam smiled, and raised his beer glass. The men laughed in agreement and lifted their glasses in concurrence.
Nina was grateful they had separate rooms, or she might have killed Sam in his sleep in a fit of rage. Her anger did not come so much from the fact that he sided with Otto on her cavalier manner with men, but from the fact that she had to face that there was much truth in his statement. Bern was her bosom buddy when they were prisoners in Mönkh Saridag, mostly because she deliberately used her charms to soften their fate when she learned about being a dead ringer for his wife.
She opted for Purdue’s advances when she was pissed at Sam, instead of just jabbing it out with him. And what would she have done without Purdue’s financial maintenance while he was missing? Not once did she bother to look for him in earnest, but occupied herself with her studies, funded by his affection for her.
“My God,” she shrieked as quietly as she could after she had locked her door and fell on the bed, “they are right! I am just an entitled little girl using my charisma and status to keep myself alive. I’m the court whore to whatever king is in power!”
Chapter 40
Purdue and Alexandr ran scans of the ocean floor a few nautical miles from their destination already. They wanted to determine if there were any anomalies or unnatural fluctuations in the geography of the gradients below them that could indicate human structures or uniform peaks that could present ancient remains of architecture. Any geomorphologic discrepancies in surface features could mean submerged material different from the localized sediment and that would be worth inspecting.
“I never knew Atlantis was supposed to be this big,” Alexandr remarked, looking at the perimeter set on the deep sonar scanner. It stretched, according to Otto Schmidt, well across the Atlantic, between the Mediterranean and the Americas. On the west side of the screen it reached to the Bahamas and Mexico, which made sense in the theory that this was the reason why Egyptian and South American architecture and religions contained pyramids and similar building structures from one common influence.
“Oh yes, it was said to be bigger than North Africa and Asia Minor combined,” Purdue explained.
“But then it is literally too big to be found, because there are landmasses encroaching on those perimeters,” Alexandr mentioned, more to himself than to present company.
“Oh, but those landmasses are part of the underlying plate, I’m sure — like peaks of a mountain range hiding the rest of the mountain,” Purdue said. “God, Alexandr, think if we should discover this continent, what fame we would attain!”
Alexandr could not care less about fame. All he cared about was finding out where Renata was so that he could get Katya and Sergei off the hook before their time ran out. He had noticed that Sam and Nina were already very amicable with Comrade Schmidt and that was in their favor, but as far as the deal went, there was no change in the conditions and that kept him up all night. He constantly reached for the vodka to soothe him, especially when the climate of Portugal began to irritate his Russian sensibilities. The country was of breathtaking beauty, but he missed home. He missed the bitter cold, the snow, the burning Samogon and the hot women.
When they reached the islands around Madeira, Purdue looked forward to meeting up with Sam and Nina, although he was wary of Otto Schmidt. Perhaps Purdue’s affiliation with the Black Sun was still too fresh or maybe Otto did not like that Purdue had not explicitly picked a side, but the Austrian pilot was not in Purdue’s inner sanctum, that was certain.
However, the old man played a valuable role and had helped them a lot thus far toward translating parchments in obscure languages and locating the likely site they were looking for, so Purdue had to suck it up and accept the man’s presence among them.
When they met up, Sam mentioned how impressed he was with the boat Purdue purchased. Otto and Alexandr stepped aside and caught up on where, and at what estimated depth, the landmass was supposedly sleeping. Nina stood to one side, taking in the fresh ocean air and feeling a bit under the weather from the numerous bottles of Coral and countless glasses of Poncha she bought after she returned to the bar. Feeling depressed and angry after Otto’s insult, she cried on her bed for almost an hour, waiting for Sam and Otto to retire so that she could hit the bar again. And she did, properly.
“Hello, dearest,” Purdue spoke next to her. His face was reddened from the sun and salt of the past day or so, but he looked well-rested, unlike Nina. “What’s the matter? Did the boys bully you?”
Nina looked nothing short of distressed and Purdue soon realized something was truly amiss. He carefully coiled his arm around her shoulder, relishing the sensation of her small body against his for the first time in ages. It was uncharacteristic of Nina Gould to say nothing at all, and that was enough proof that she was feeling off.
“So, where are we going first?” she asked out of the blue.
“A few miles west of here Alexandr and I detected some irregular formations a few hundred feet down. I am going to start there. It definitely does not look like an underwater range or any kind of shipwreck. It stretches out about 200 miles. It is humongous!” he rambled on, clearly excited beyond words.
“Mr. Purdue,” Otto shouted as he approached the two of them, “will I be flying out above you to get aerial views of your dives?”
“Yes, sir,” Purdue smiled, giving the pilot a cordial slap on the shoulder. “I will radio you as soon as we reach the location of the first dive.”
“Right!” Otto exclaimed and gave Sam a thumbs-up. What it was for, neither Purdue, nor Nina could figure. “I will be waiting here then. You know pilots are not supposed to drink, right?” Otto chuckled heartily, and shook Purdue’s hand. “Good luck, Mr. Purdue. And Dr. Gould, you are a king’s ransom by any gentlemen’s measure, my dear,” he unexpectedly said to Nina.
Taken aback, she thought of a reply, but as always Otto did not care for one and just turned on his heel to head for the coffee shop overlooking the dikes and rocks of the immediate fishing area.
“That was odd. Odd, but strangely welcome,” Nina muttered.
Sam was on her shit list and she avoided him for most of the trip, save for the necessary notations here and there on diving gear and bearings.
“See? More explorers, I bet,” Purdue told Alexandr with a good chuckle, pointing at a very decrepit fishing boat bobbing a distance from them. They could hear the Portuguese men arguing incessantly about the direction of the wind, from what they could decipher in their gestures. Alexandr laughed. It reminded him of the night he and six other soldiers spent on the Caspian Sea, too drunk to navigate and getting hopelessly lost.
A rare two hours of relaxation blessed the crew of the Atlantis expedition while Alexandr steered the yacht out to the latitude locked by the sextant he consulted. Although they were engaged in small talk and folk tales of old Portuguese explorers, lovers eloping and drowning, and the authenticity of the other documents recovered with the Atlantis Scrolls, they were all secretly anxious to see if the continent was really below them in all its glory. Not one of them could contain their excitement for the dive.