‘Remember the only topographical hint we have, Jacob, from that encoded message you found in the Plato text,’ Costas said.
Jack felt himself tense. This was the real clincher. ‘Twin peaks, Jacob,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re looking for twin peaks, just like the appearance of the volcano behind Atlantis in the Black Sea.’
Lanowski tapped the keys again. ‘All I have to go on is those undulations in depth you can see in the reef surrounding that hole,’ he said. ‘But allowing for a bit of imagination, it could have looked like this.’
His face disappeared, and Jack’s screen transformed into a CGI rendition of a coastline behind a pulsating line of surf. He held his breath when he saw the dark silhouette of the land mass behind. It showed a jagged ridge line, but in the centre was a saddle flanked by two conical hills. It looked just like the image of Atlantis before the flood. ‘ Yes,’ he said, bunching his fist. ‘That’s it. We need to move fast.’
Costas’ face reappeared on the screen. ‘There’s a problem, Jack. A hurricane’s coming.’
Jack closed his eyes. A hurricane. ‘How far off?’
‘Macalister’s been in touch with the US National Hurricane Center. The eye is about three hundred and fifty nautical miles north-east of San Salvador, and it’s tracking directly towards the central Bahamas chain, exactly where we don’t want it to go.’
‘Time frame?’
‘Touchdown for the leading edge of the hurricane at that reef in about thirty hours.’
Jack looked at his watch. ‘That’s 1500 hours tomorrow. I can be out of here in an hour. I’ll take Rebecca and Jeremy with me. The Embraer should be waiting for us at Syracuse by the time we get there. That puts us in Bermuda and then on Seaquest II by mid-evening. How far south does Macalister reckon we’d have to sail to be within helicopter range of the island?’
Costas leaned over and showed Jack a torn-off sheet of computer printout. ‘The best scenario puts Seaquest II about two hundred and eighty nautical miles north of San Salvador and a hundred miles west of the leading edge of the volcano at about 0900 tomorrow morning, after spending the night steaming south from Bermuda at maximum speed. That puts San Salvador within range of the Lynx using long-range fuel tanks, with the payload limited to two of us and basic diving equipment. It would be a close-run thing, but we could be dropped on the reef, do the dive, be winched up to the helicopter and then be flown out beyond the leading edge of the hurricane as it tracks west, to reach Seaquest II ’s position of safety to the north. If the storm comes on more quickly, the Lynx could drop us, return to the ship and stand off while the storm rolled over us, and then return to pick us up afterwards. It would be a risk for us, but if we were able to get under the collapsed material we think is clogging up the blue hole, we might be protected from the worst of the hurricane.’
‘What about permission to dive in the weapons test range?’ Jack said.
‘We might have to wing it. We don’t want to excite interest, and we haven’t got time to go through official channels. It hasn’t been used for that since the flight of Liberator FK-856 in 1945. And don’t think permission to dive is the issue that would be troubling Macalister, Jack. I think the issue will be that hurricane, and the possibility of Seaquest II becoming another statistic in the Bermuda Triangle.’
Jack remembered their dive at Atlantis three days before, under the noses of the international monitoring team and into a live volcano, with Seaquest II well within the danger zone. He had sworn he would never put Macalister through anything like that again. Seaquest II would have to stay outside the predicted path of the hurricane. It would all be down to the helicopter. ‘We’d need a pilot with a hell of a lot of nerve,’ he murmured. ‘He’d be seeing the leading edge of the hurricane on the horizon ahead of him. He’d have to go against all his instincts and fly directly towards it, then after dropping us make the decision himself whether to wait for us. I’d never ask it of one of our regular crew.’
‘What about your old RAF friend Paul? I thought he was at a bit of a loose end now. Didn’t you say he was a qualified helicopter pilot too?’
Jack thought hard. It might work. He nodded. ‘Okay. Stay online. I’ll use my cell phone to try to contact him.’ Three days before, after leaving Jack at the old NATO base beside the Nazi bunker in Germany, Paul had flown his Tornado to RAF Lyneham in England before taking leave ahead of his new posting at the Ministry of Defence. Jack prayed that he would have been unable to wrench himself away from aircraft for his final few days as an operational pilot and would still be at Lyneham. The second IMU Embraer was at its base in Cornwall at the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose, and could be at Lyneham in a matter of a few hours to pick Paul up and fly him out over the Atlantic.
Jack dialled, and a voice answered almost immediately. ‘Paul? This is Jack. You remember our parting words on the tarmac in Germany? I’ve got a job that might interest you.’ He quickly ran through a plan that would get Paul to Bermuda and out to Seaquest II overnight, in time to familiarize himself with the custom specs of the IMU Lynx and take off before dawn with Jack and Costas and their diving equipment for the Bahamas. Paul instantly agreed, and Jack gave him the IMU number to liaise with the Embraer pilot. Then he clicked off his phone and sat still for a moment, hearing only the morning chorus of the birds outside the windows. He stared at the aerial photo of the reef on the screen, trying to see in his mind’s eye down into the collapsed blue hole and imagining what might lie there. He spoke again into the webcam. ‘Okay, guys. Paul thinks we can do it.’
‘On a wing and a prayer, Jack,’ Lanowski said, slightly awkwardly.
‘Where have I heard that before?’ Costas said.
‘It’s what Paul used to say about our student expeditions when I first knew him, when we seemed to survive on minimal equipment and lots of duct tape.’
‘Sounds like we might be going back there again, Jack. With the Lynx stretching the envelope, it’s just going to be whatever equipment we can carry on our backs.’
Jack opened the directory on his cell phone. ‘I need to put in a call to the Bahamas.’
‘Anyone we know?’ Costas said.
‘The office of the Prime Minister. He was a student contemporary of mine at Cambridge.’
‘The old boys’ network?’
‘Something like that. I don’t want anyone near that site before we dive, but I want to arrange for backup from the Royal Bahamas Defence Force. If all goes well and we find what we want to find, the site will need round-the-clock surveillance while we get in a full IMU excavation team to reveal everything that might lie within that blue hole. I’ll see if the Prime Minister can have his people call through directly to Captain Macalister. Meanwhile, the next you’ll hear from me will be from the tarmac in Bermuda. Thank James Macleod at IMU for me. Excellent work, Jacob.’
‘I’ve just remembered something,’ Costas said. ‘Wasn’t San Salvador where Christopher Columbus first made landfall in the Americas?’
Jack paused. He had barely allowed himself to think about the archaeology. Since leaving Atlantis three days before, the extraordinary seven-thousand-year-old trail they were on had been overshadowed by the present-day danger. For a moment he focused his mind back on that sunken chamber they had found inside the volcano at Atlantis, on the fantastic vision it had given him of events at the very dawn of civilization. They were following perhaps the greatest ancient voyage of discovery ever made, not some hazy exodus lost in time but the voyage of one man who had become enshrined in the foundation myths of the Western world. Yet what they had found in that chamber in Atlantis, what they might find ahead of them now, would reveal a truth about the past that could rock those foundations to the core. Jack felt the familiar surge of excitement coursing through him. He looked intently at Costas. ‘Not just Christopher Columbus. We might find that he was pipped to the post seven thousand years before. If we’re lucky.’