And what had he been doing when she called? Truth was, when he’d picked up the phone he had a king-size reefer hanging off his lip and a hangover the size of Manhattan behind the eyes. He’d been up all night hacking the Ministry of Defence in a bid to uncover evidence of UFOs. Even at the time he thought it was a threadbare life, but now with all this, just thinking about it almost made him want to break down.
Not that he would ever tell them, but these people had become the best friends he’d ever known, and for the first time in his life he’d stopped hating himself and realized he could do whatever he wanted with his life and not just want others decided for him. Hawke had taught him never to give in and not be afraid of adventure, and he would never forget that.
“Looks like it’s opening out a bit,” he radioed back to the others. He turned to look over his shoulder and saw two headlamps turning into the stairwell above him and close the gap.
“Just slow down, ya tool,” Lea said. “It’s been there for bugger knows how many millennia — it’s not going anywhere!”
“No can do,” he replied cockily. “I’ve got an ancient civilization to discover. This time next year people will talk about me in the same hushed tones of reverence currently reserved for the crew of Apollo 11.”
Inside his diving mask, Hawke rolled his eyes. “Not if you drive into a bloody wall they won’t, so just watch where you’re going.”
“I’m Armstrong though, right?” came the half-humorous reply.
Hawke heard Lea sigh. “Yes, mate. You can be Armstrong if you really want.”
“In that case, let me say — Houston, the Eagle has landed!”
Hawke pulled up beside him and Lea a moment later. They looked at each other through their masks and then followed to where Ryan was pointing.
Lea gasped. “What is it?”
“Atlantis!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Shifting off their scooters, they finally stepped onto the surface of Atlantis and were met with another cloud of silty dust. An underwater current caught it and whipped it up around their faces before the area cleared again. From within the confines of his mask, Hawke looked around and took in the ancient site.
He was staring at what looked like a modern-day disaster zone and all around was the kind of devastation left behind by an earthquake or tsunami. Broken buildings jutted up out of banks of sand and silt and pieces of smashed pottery and twisted jewellery were scattered all across the site. It looked like pictures of the debris field he had seen around the wreck of the Titanic, and for the first time he was struck by the thought that this was not only an amazing archaeological site, but also a mass grave.
He called up to the ship and made his report while Ryan and Lea poked around in the detritus and shone their underwater flashlights into various nooks and crannies.
“It’s just ruins,” he said. “Clearly there was something here a very long time ago but it looks like it was totally destroyed.”
“Yes,” Ryan said. “But by what?”
“Maybe the same thing that sank Valhalla,” Lea said.
“It’s just amazing down here though,” added Ryan. “And talking of Valhalla — call me crazy but this place is a lot like there… some kind of holy site maybe. Outstanding!”
“I’m very pleased for you darling but we have a little problem up here.” Through the underwater comms Scarlet’s voice sounded like it was coming from the dark side of the moon.
Hawke instinctively looked up to the surface and immediately knew what she was talking about when he saw the shadow of another hull moving toward their ship. Kruger’s crew must have seen them and sailed over. “I see your problem,” he said. “How far away are they?”
“Four or five hundred metres,” Scarlet said.
Lea looked up. “You’ve drifted quite far away from the site,” she said. “That might be a good thing because we don’t want anything damaged down here.”
Scarlet responded, but her tone had changed. “Listen, we’re coming under fire and…”
Hawke frowned. “Scarlet?”
“Radio’s down,” Ryan said.
Lea sighed. “Isn’t that just plain… arsing… fantastic.”
“Forget it,” Hawke said. “There’s nothing we can do to help them and we’ve got our own mission down here. Focus on the job and trust them to do theirs, and then if…” he was interrupted by Ryan’s voice over the comms.
“This is more than weird,” he said, riding his scooter a few more yards and then coming to a stop again on the seabed. He climbed off and awkwardly hopped a few yards to the ruins. “Call me crazy but this looks almost identical to the Ishtar Gate.”
“Ishtar Gate for Dummies, please mate.”
“The Ishtar Gate was one of gates that led into inner Babylon.”
“Babylon being in Iraq?” Lea said.
“Yes — right in the center on the plain between the Euphrates and Tigris, just about fifty miles south of what today we call Baghdad.”
“But we’re not exactly fifty miles south of Baghdad, are we?” Hawke said, his voice crackling through the underwater comms.
“It’s definitely the same as the Ishtar Gate though,” Ryan repeated as he continued to shift sand and detritus off the ocean floor to reveal more of the ruins. “This is without a doubt a depiction of an aurochs, and this…”
“A what?”
“An aurochs — it’s a type of wild cattle that we used back then. Extinct now though — died out around three or four hundred years ago… but they were a key feature of the decoration on the Ishtar Gate, and that’s what his little fellow is right here — not to mention this band of flowers here — and here’s a lion too!”
“It’s too big and heavy for us to take back to the surface with the equipment we’ve got,” Hawke said.
“But we have to come back and get this thing!” Ryan said.
“I agree,” Lea said. “I’m more than a little curious to know how a bloody gate from Iraq wound up in Atlantis.”
“But I don’t think it’s from Iraq,” Ryan replied. “I’m saying it’s similar to the one we know from Bablyon — but there are differences. The Babylonians made heavy use of a semi-precious stone called lapis lazuli. It’s hard to tell because of the decay but it seems to me that this one is more like a simple indigo… like some kind of reproduction of the original Ishtar Gate. Call me crazy, but this whole place looks like it was destroyed on purpose.”
“Hold up,” Hawke said, peering ahead of them. “Looks like the tosspots have arrived.” Up ahead, emerging from the darkness of the ruins were three headlamps. “And it looks like they got here first, mate. Their boat must have been off course because of drift, not inaccuracy — they’d already found the place by the time we’d arrived.”
“And now they’re coming up from the center of the ruins,” Ryan said, crestfallen. “So Dirk Bloody Kruger gets to be Armstrong,”
“They’ve got scooters as well,” Lea said.
“And by the looks of that canvas bag around his neck I’d say he’s not letting the idol out of his sight,” Hawke said. “And it looks like they’re armed, too.”
His sentence was cut short when a metal bolt narrowly missed his head and flashed past into the gloom over his shoulder.
The fight was on.
Up on the surface, Reaper swung the GPMG around and fired at the tuna boat, punching holes in the wheelhouse cabin and smashing out the acrylic windows. Korać’s men dived for cover before firing back. By the looks of things, they were restricted to submachine guns. Reaper knew the Browning had a range of around half a mile or eight hundred meters, but the range of their Uzis was more like two hundred meters, so he told the captain to move the VCSM to a quarter of a mile and maintain that distance. This meant he could fire on them with impunity and they had no chance of striking back.