Jack stared. As if some creature had been trying to get out. It was suddenly an image of shocking clarity. These people had been alive and struggling when the flood waters rose, their last screams caught in the contorted grimaces of their skulls. And this was no accident of fate. They had been forced inside that tunnel and sealed in with the boulder. He could barely imagine what lay in the darkness beyond.
What had gone on here? Human sacrifice, mass suicide, then the last of the shamans sealed inside, doomed to an agonizing and terrifying death. Had this been the final apocalypse, the end of the old order and the beginning of the new? He remembered those stark stone pillars standing in the chamber. Had they presided over this, those new gods, like statues half formed that now would be able to reveal themselves in their final shape, wherever those who had carried out this act were destined to find landfall and hold sway over men again?
Then Jack remembered Lanowski’s chalk drawing on the blackboard: the crooked cross, the swastika, a shape that seemed to form in Jack’s mind out of the swirling images of the deep past. Now he knew that the end of the old order had been a time of appalling violence. But he also knew that those who had vanquished the old, these new priests, these gods, had not come from somewhere else, like invaders sweeping in on a wave of destruction. They had come from within. He remembered Hiebermeyer’s call, where he was going now, to a time when that cross had been resurrected to serve a new breed of gods. Suddenly the image of fear and desperation in those skeletons from seven thousand years ago seemed terrifyingly immediate.
There was a sudden jolt, and a blur. The camera appeared to move forward, as if the ROV were riding something underneath. Then there was a white flash and the screen went blank. A moment later the ship’s klaxon sounded, and a red light went on above the control-room door. ‘We’re moving again,’ Costas said. ‘Macalister must have registered another seismic disturbance, and he’ll be taking us further offshore. My guess is that’s the archaeology gone for good. That chamber’s going to be entombed in lava, Little Joey too.’
Jack sniffed the air. He thought he caught a whiff of sulphur, whether some effulgence of the volcano drawn in by the ship’s ventilators or a residue on their own bodies from the dive was unclear. Smell was the one sense he had been deprived of that morning; the dive had come to seem more like a voyage of the mind than reality. But the hint of acrid smell jolted him. Instead of a phantasm, an image now lost forever to history, the vision of those people in their death throes now seemed shockingly real. He knew that where he had to go next, the smell of death was more than just a ghostly exhalation. He realized what had been troubling him for the last six months, what had led him to block off the world around him, to totter on the edge on the dive that morning. It was not only Atlantis that had come at a price, with the death of Peter Howe five years ago. Troy had come at a price too. Six months ago they had opened up another cave from the past, another chamber with a dark revelation. It was unresolved business, and he needed to confront it head-on now. He straightened up, clicked on his phone, nodded at Jeremy and Lanowski and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Next time we meet in this room, it will be on the trail of a shaman of Atlantis who may have survived all this, a seven-thousand-year-old seafarer who might just have been called Noah. Until then, sit tight. You’ll be hearing from me.’
10
Over Europe
J ack scanned the instrument panel in front of him, noting that the airspeed indicator and altimeter had shown near-constant figures since they had flown over the northern shore of the Adriatic Sea fifteen minutes ago. He was strapped into the rear ejector seat of an RAF Tornado GR4, and since their exhilarating take-off from Incirlik airbase in Turkey he had managed to put aside thinking about his destination and let himself enjoy the thrill of flying in a fast jet. They had flown low over Troy, allowing him a fascinating view of the ancient site, as well as the Dardanelles Strait where any prehistoric exodus from the Black Sea to the west must have taken place. Now he peered sideways through the canopy over the swept-back starboard wing, looking past the silvery nacelle of the long-range drop tank and seeing the snowy peaks of the Alps some twenty thousand feet below. He turned back to face the upper part of the instrument panel, which blocked his view of the pilot’s seat in front, and spoke into the intercom. ‘That looks like Innsbruck in Austria below us, Paul. What’s our ETA?’
‘I’m dropping from six hundred to five hundred knots in fifteen minutes and then finding a lower altitude. All going according to plan, we should be flying over Hanover in Germany and coming in to land in about thirty-five minutes.’
‘Copy that.’
‘You okay? Lunch still inside you?’
‘I’m having the time of my life. I can’t see how this kind of flying could ever pale.’
‘That’s the problem. It’s a constant adrenalin kick. I’ve done thousands of hours in Tornados, including four big operational deployments – the Gulf War, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan. I’ve had enough of war, Jack, but I still love the flying. I can’t believe this is going to be my last official fast-jet flight.’
‘Congratulations on the Distinguished Service Order, by the way. Well deserved.’
‘Those things should go to the ground crews. They’re the ones who keep these birds flying. The unsung heroes.’
‘That’s the way I feel about my diving expeditions. It’s always a team effort.’ Jack cast his mind back more than two decades. Paul Llewelyn had been one of his close-knit group of friends at Cambridge University, where they had shared college rooms in their first year; he was a fellow diver and had gone along with Jack on his first expeditions to the Mediterranean. They had not seen each other for several years now, but Jack had spent an hour with Paul in the officers’ mess at Incirlik while the air-traffic controllers worked on clearance for a modified flight plan to his destination in Germany and the aircraft was fitted with long-range drop tanks. He had sworn Paul to secrecy and told him about their Atlantis dive, then briefed him about the excavation at the bunker site in Germany and about Maurice Hiebermeyer, another mutual friend from Cambridge. He had outlined the security and contamination risk at the bunker and why Paul would not be allowed out of the aircraft when they landed at the old NATO runway next to the excavation site. Beyond that he had let himself enjoy the experience of flying, and being with an old friend. He spoke into the intercom again. ‘Paul, do you remember the last time we flew together? In that rickety old Bulldog trainer in the University Air Squadron?’
‘That time you were in the driver’s seat. You actually got your wings just before I did. I’m still trying to live that down.’
‘Learning to fly was just part of my toolkit. I wanted to get all the skills I could under my belt. I guessed I was going to have to fly at some time in the future, and I was right. But for you, flying and getting into the RAF was always your main passion, like diving was for me.’
‘It’s still there, Jack. All I ever wanted was to get inside one of these things. And here I am now, an RAF group captain, about to be booted up to one-star rank so I can fly a desk in the Ministry of Defence in London. I’ll be like one of those mothballed planes in the Arizona desert, waiting for a reactivation everyone knows is never going to happen. All fast-jet jocks say the same when they reach my stage. It’s as if we’ve gone beyond our sell-by date, but they can’t quite bring themselves to scrap us.’