‘Sounds like fodder for the fringe theorists,’ Jack replied. ‘The people who still think Atlantis could only have been built by extraterrestrials. The truth is, everything we saw here is paralleled elsewhere in early sites, only on a lesser scale. And we only have to look at the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge to see that doing things on a colossal scale was never as much of a problem in the past as the fringe theorists seem to believe.’
‘Man makes himself,’ Costas said. ‘Isn’t that the famous Jack Howard byline? Everything he builds, and all his ideas, come from within.’
‘And then he sometimes unmakes himself,’ Jack said. ‘That’s what I really want to find out here, whether these people were the first to take hold of their own destiny and see the potential within themselves, and the danger. That’s what seems to have fascinated Plato about Atlantis when he used the story to warn the Athenians about hubris, about flying too close to the sun. Call it the Icarus factor.’
‘My objective is to see whether little baby ROV will work inside a volcano,’ Costas said cheerfully, patting his oversized torso. The Michelin Man effect of the suit was compounded by the cargo Costas was carrying: a miniature remote-operated vehicle the size of a toaster, which he had zipped up inside a protective bag on his chest, like a kangaroo with a pouch. Costas was one of the world’s leading submersibles experts, and his passion was miniaturized ROVs, the focus of endless happy evenings tinkering in the engineering complex of IMU’s main campus at Cornwall in south-west England.
‘So how’s Little Joey doing?’ Jack enquired.
Costas held up the tethering cable that hooked the ROV’s battery to the submersible at the entrance to the tunnel, and checked a monitor on his wrist. ‘Only a few minutes more now.’
Jack turned again and stared at the golden disc. ‘Odd that we didn’t notice this pillar the last time we came this way.’
‘Jack, we were a little preoccupied, remember? You were having a gun battle, and I was about to be executed by a Kazakh warlord who was going to hurl me into the magma chamber.’
Jack stared ahead pensively, casting his mind back five years. There had been a dark side to the discovery of Atlantis, and a cost to himself personally that had preyed on him since returning here. Five years ago they had made another discovery, one that had turned the archaeological hunt into a modern-day race against time. At the end of the Cold War, a renegade Russian captain had taken his submarine full of nuclear warheads towards a secret rendezvous with a buyer in the Republic of Georgia, but had struck the uncharted submerged flank of the volcano and sunk. When Jack and his IMU team had stumbled across the submarine, the middleman had returned with a vengeance, seeking his merchandise. In the ensuing battle, the original Seaquest had been sunk and they had lost one of their team, Peter Howe, the IMU security chief. Peter had been a close friend of Jack’s from their schooldays and time in British Special Forces, and had been persuaded to join IMU when Jack had set it up soon after completing his doctorate at Cambridge. In the five years since his death, Jack had been driven by a feeling of responsibility to the dream he had shared with the original few – with Peter, with Costas, with Maurice Hiebermeyer – a dream that had seen them chart discoveries far more extraordinary than they could ever have imagined when he had founded IMU. But there was still a shadow over this place: the discovery of Atlantis had come at a price, one he never wanted to have to pay again.
Costas peered at him. ‘We could call it a day, Jack. This is going to be a dangerous dive, and we’ve got a spectacular result now with that disc. It’s hardly as if IMU activities have been out of the spotlight for the last five years, but when you decide the time is right to reveal this to the media, it’ll boost public interest big time. And we’re not even supposed to be here at all. It’s your call.’
Jack took a deep breath. Costas was right. They had returned to Atlantis on a wing and a prayer. Two weeks ago they had been in Seaquest II off the ancient site of Troy in the northern Aegean Sea, excavating the remains of a galley from the time of the Trojan Wars in the late second millennium BC. At the citadel of Troy itself, his oldest friend Maurice Hiebermeyer and their Cambridge professor James Dillen had been in charge of clearing an extraordinary underground chamber they had found beneath the ancient palace, searching for clues to support Jack’s theory that Troy had been founded at the time of the exodus from Atlantis four thousand years before the Trojan War; that it was a staging post for the diaspora of people who had taken their language and knowledge of farming south and west across the Mediterranean at the dawn of civilization.
At Troy, his mind had never been far from Atlantis, only a few hundred miles east of the Bosporus in the Black Sea, but the chances of a return had seemed remote. Then, two weeks ago, the Turkish and Georgian surveillance team who monitored the Atlantis site had requested IMU assistance in boring a sample shaft into the volcano. Several months previously they had recorded a fall-off in seismic activity, and for the first time in five years a limited intervention for geological purposes seemed feasible, though it was still deemed too risky for diving. The main concern was to understand better the seismic characteristics of the North Anatolian Fault, the huge rent in the earth’s crust that ran west under the southern shore of the Black Sea to the Bosporus Strait, threatening Istanbul. Jack had seized on the chance and offered Seaquest II, which had the right sub-sea boring equipment and could sail immediately from the excavation site at Troy. Costas and their brilliant if quirky engineering genius Jacob Lanowski had spent several sleepless nights downloading all the survey data from five years ago so that they could position the boring tunnel exactly where Jack wanted it to go, towards an unexplored entranceway he had seen five years before; at the same time, the priority remained to get the tunnel into the upper magma chamber to satisfy the geologists’ needs.
After heated discussion with Seaquest II ’s captain, Scott Macalister, Jack had won the day, and Macalister had agreed to allow a dive, on the condition that Jack himself arrived from Troy only the day before and then left as soon as he had off-gassed enough nitrogen to allow him to fly. He and Costas had departed that morning in the submersible under cover of darkness, from Seaquest II ’s internal docking bay. It was a covert mission in every sense of the word, and went against many of Jack’s better instincts. The international protocol following the eruption five years before had been to leave the site undisturbed until improved technology and seismic conditions allowed further research, with IMU acting as the overseeing agency and the Turkish navy enforcing a no-dive zone to deter looters. The site was beyond the twelve-mile territorial limit and the protocol was therefore not protected by law, but Jack knew that any attempt openly to dive at the site would upset the agreement and might make the Turkish authorities think twice about continuing IMU’s permit to excavate at Troy. He had weighed it all in his mind over and over again, but he knew that the chance to be where they were now might never come up again in his lifetime. Anything they found would have to be reported as incidental to supposed emergency repair work on the boring equipment, and his own presence in the tunnel – which could only have been for archaeological exploration – kept strictly hushed up.