Costas looked crestfallen. ‘Afraid so.’
‘As for Dr Howard, who officially isn’t here, he needs to be spirited away on the helicopter before then. We need the helipad to be clear by mid-afternoon for the arrival of the inspection team, and we need all available space to accommodate them.’ He eyed Jack sternly. ‘You okay with Mustafa Alkozen taking your cabin?’
Jack nodded. ‘We’ve done it before. He and I rotated bunk space for a month in a submarine during a joint exercise in the Mediterranean, when he was the boat’s weapons officer and I was a seconded diver from the Royal Navy. And he is IMU’s Turkish representative, so he should have the best bunk.’
‘Okay.’ Macalister pulled on his cap, turned to go and then tapped his watch. ‘Fifteen hundred hours on the helipad, right?’
Jack nodded. ‘Roger that.’
Macalister stared at him for a moment, then shook his head and gave a wry smile. ‘A wing and a prayer, Jack.’
Jack took a deep breath, then exhaled forcefully. ‘A wing and a prayer.’
‘I saw some of the images. Those rock carvings. Pretty fantastic stuff. You can show me the rest when this is over.’ Macalister walked through the doorway and was gone, leaving them listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights and the whir of the computer fans.
‘Phew,’ Costas said.
Jack swivelled his chair back to the monitor. ‘That reminded me of my first term in the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, after Cambridge,’ he said. ‘I was always getting into trouble for stepping out of line. For taking too much initiative, I told them. My Howard seafaring ancestors were always mavericks. We’re not really designed to take orders.’
‘I’ve noticed,’ Costas said.
‘It was lucky the special forces guy at the college spotted me, otherwise I’d have been politely told to pack my bags.’
‘Macalister has got a point,’ Costas said.
Jack took another deep breath, and nodded. ‘Of course he has a point. And he’s the best damn captain we’ve ever had. I intend never to put him in that position again.’
‘You know what they say, Jack. Once you’ve taken that extra step beyond the boundary, you’ll only want to do it again.’
‘Then it’d be time for me to stand down. I can’t let my personal ambitions impede IMU’s other projects, not least ones with a major scientific and humanitarian outcome like this one. If Macalister hadn’t told us just now that our data on the volcano had made it worthwhile, I’d seriously be considering vacating my cabin for good.’
‘Don’t tell Rebecca that.’ Costas grinned. ‘She’s waiting on the sidelines ready to jump in.’
‘That’s the other factor. Every time I have a near-death experience underwater, I think of Rebecca. She’s already lost her mother.’
‘But you wouldn’t be the same person for her if you didn’t take the risks. It’s all part of the tapestry you’ve woven for yourself, Jack. What was it Othello said? “There’s magic in the web of it.”’
Jack gave a wry smile. ‘Well then I just need to keep that web from unravelling. We need to stay on the edge, not stray over it. Copy that?’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘My buddy.’ He slapped Costas on the shoulder. ‘And by the way, thanks for saving my life.’
Costas waved his hand. ‘I thought it was the other way round.’
‘Let’s get back to our images from this morning. I want as much of this wrapped up as possible before I have to leave.’ Jack turned to the computer screen, arched his back and stretched his arms. He seemed to feel every sinew and muscle in his body, and stretching released a sensation that coursed through him like a drug. He and Costas had just emerged from four hours in the recompression chamber breathing pure oxygen, but even so his system was still working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from their dive. His body was willing him to go up to his cabin and lie down, but he knew that the adrenalin that was still coursing through him would keep him alert. And he knew that if he did try to rest, his mind would only return to that moment when he and Costas could have safely returned after having discovered the pillar with the golden Atlantis symbol. What was it that had driven him on, driven him to risk everything? He put the thought from his mind, and refocused on the screen. The important thing was that they had less than two hours now to process the imagery from their dive, and if they let that opportunity slip, it might be weeks before they were together again on Seaquest II or at the IMU campus in England. Jack had seen astonishing things today, as astonishing as anything he had seen in his archaeological career, and he wanted those images to be in the forefront of his mind as the excavation at Troy wound down. He had gone back to Atlantis with questions, and they were still burning. Who were these people? Where had they gone? Who were their gods?
‘Jack, this is incredible. Lanowski’s just finishing his 3-D CGI map of the site. The final version should be streaming online in a few minutes.’
Costas turned back to his screen, and Jack continued staring at the image he had called up on his monitor before Macalister had come in. It was a still from the video he had taken with his helmet camera inside the volcano that morning; below it he had arranged a line of thumbnails of other Neolithic sites in the Near East that he had pulled up for comparison. The image from the morning was raw, unrefined, the foreground still specked with white where the light from his headlamp had reflected off particles in the water. But seeing it like that made it more vivid, as if he were still caught in the amazement of that moment when he had first entered the chamber. It showed the pillars standing like sentinels, three-metre-tall monoliths carved out of volcanic tufa, each one rising to a T-shape a metre or more wide. He could see animals carved in shallow relief on the pillars – lions, wild boar, scorpions and spiders, leopards and bulls. On the back wall of the cave he spotted something he had not seen on the dive: a bull’s skull fixed into a hole in the rock, half in and half out, the bone plastered over and the horns painted red. Above it was a painting of vultures swooping down on a headless human body, shaped crudely in outline; beside that were the spectral remains of painted animals, visible where they had not been hacked away and smoothed out. Not only the pillars but also the carvings on them seemed to have been freshly chiselled, sharply delineated. Out with the old, in with the new. Archaeologists had begun to talk about the Neolithic as a time of religious transition, a time when humans first conceived of gods with human characteristics, gods who were to play out all the human capacity for cruelty and greed in the mythologies of Mesopotamia and the Near East. Jack stared at the pillars. Was this where it had all begun? Was Atlantis the birthplace of the gods?
He held the mouse and dragged the image up to see the floor of the chamber. The lab analysis of the sample he had taken had just come through, showing that the stone floor had been covered in layers of terrazzo, burnt lime. Embedded within the lime was the most extraordinary sight of alclass="underline" the plastered human skulls that seemed to be emerging from the ground in the same way that the bull’s skull was emerging from the rock wall. He scrolled over the other skulls, the ones without plaster, some of them fallen alongside the three stone basins he could now see, each about half a metre high and carved out of the living rock. The scattered skulls and the basins were partly covered with the calcite accretion that had settled over the floor since the inundation. It was a haunting, ghostly scene, with the pillars like rough-formed bodies standing in the background, towering over the toppled skulls. Jack tried to retain a professional detachment, but it made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. What had been going on here?
Costas slid his chair alongside, minimized the image and tapped a key. A three-dimensional lattice appeared on the screen, angled as if they were viewing it from the upper right-hand corner. The terrain mapper had been designed to project a holographic image on to the miniature screens inside their e-suit helmets, to help them navigate over seabed features in poor light conditions, using GPS, sonar, photogrammetric and other data previously fed into the computer, but here it was being used to build up a flat-screen isometric image of the site. As they watched, the grid lattice disappeared below a contoured image of the Black Sea bathymetry, zooming down to the abyssal plain in the centre of the sea and then rising up the slope towards the Turkish shore and their present position some fifteen nautical miles off the border with the Republic of Georgia. Jack saw the twin peaks of the volcano just below the surface of the sea, and then the slope where the flow of lava and other volcanic fallout had buried the ruins of the ancient city five years ago, in a terrifying eruption that had nearly cost them their lives.