The Hunt for Atlantis_A Novel

  “I can take care of that,” said Frost. “I’ll tell the captain of the Evenor to set sail as soon as possible. He has already made all the preparations—you can catch up by helicopter tomorrow.” He smiled. “Once again, Dr. Wilde, congratulations are in order. You’ve made another incredible discovery. I just wish I could be there to see it for myself.”

  “So do I, Far,” said Kari.

  “The next time we speak…” Frost smiled again, more broadly, “you will have discovered Atlantis. I am certain of it. Good-bye … and good luck.” The screen went dark.

  “I second that,” said Kari. “Congratulations, Nina!” She went to the minibar, taking out a bottle of Bollinger champagne. “We should celebrate!”

  “Out of the minibar?” laughed Chase. “Christ, that’ll probably cost you more than you’ve spent on the whole expedition!”

  “I think it’s worth it. Here, Nina.” She handed over the bottle. “You deserve the honors.”

  “And you haven’t just won a Grand Prix, so don’t shake it up!” Chase added. “Don’t want to waste any booze.”

  Nina tore away the foil and unwound the wire cap as Castille handed out glasses. She twisted the cork. “Oh, I always hate this bit. I’m scared that I’m going to take somebody’s eye out.”

  “Like Jason Starkman’s?” said Chase with a cruel smirk.

  “That’s not funny—aah!” The cork popped free, Chase swooping in to catch the overflowing froth. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Go on, fill it right up. It’s yours.”

  “Trying to get me drunk?”

  “Yeah, I bet you’re a right raver when you’re pissed! Here.” He took the bottle from her and handed her the full glass in return, pouring drinks for everyone else.

  “To Nina,” said Kari, raising her glass. Everyone else echoed the toast.

  Nina paused. “Thank you … but I think we should remember the people who got hurt, or… or didn’t make it this far with us. Hafez, Agnaldo, Julio, Hamilton, Captain Perez …”

  The others solemnly repeated the names before sipping their drinks. “That was very thoughtful,” said Philby.

  “It just seemed appropriate. I hope whatever we find is worth it…”

  “It will be,” Kari assured her. “It will be.”

  NINETEEN

  The Gulf of Cádiz

  There she is!” said Kari, pointing ahead through the helicopter’s windscreen.

  The deep blue of the Gulf of Cádiz stretched out before them, sunlight glinting off its surface. They were ninety miles from the Portuguese coast, a hundred from Gibraltar, and their destination was itself in motion, making a steady twelve knots into the Atlantic. The RV Evenor stood out against the endless blue as a slice of gleaming white, a 260-foot oceanographic survey vessel representing the state of the art in undersea exploration. As with all his other concerns, Kristian Frost had not cut any corners.

  “Ah, finally!” said Castille. The Belgian had been extremely nervous throughout the flight, to the amusement of the other passengers. “I can’t wait to get my feet back on solid ground.” He considered this. “Solid deck. Rocking deck. Ah, so long as it’s not a helicopter, I don’t care!”

  “You got any idea how hard it is to land a helicopter on a moving ship?” Chase asked mischievously. Castille gave him a sour look, then took a green apple from a pocket and crunched deeply into it.

  “That won’t be a problem, sir,” the pilot assured him as the Bell 407 began its descent. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”

  “It’s number hundred and one I’m worried about,” Castille muttered through a mouthful of apple. Even Philby joined in the jovial mockery that followed.

  Nina looked over Kari’s shoulder as they approached the Evenor. The research vessel had an ultramodern and, to her admittedly inexperienced eyes, somewhat odd design. The hull was normal enough, but the superstructure seemed almost top-heavy, a tall, tapered block squeezed into the midsection of the ship with a radar mast towering above it.

  The reason for the unusual design became obvious as they got closer. At the stern, protruding out above the propellers on a fantail, was a helicopter pad, while most of the deck area at the bow was devoted to heavy cranes and winches to support the Evenor’s two submersibles. The people had to fit in the space between their machines.

  “Only a year old,” Kari said as they approached. “Three thousand two hundred metric tons, with five officers, nineteen crew and able to support up to thirty scientists for two months. My father’s pride and joy.”

  “After you, I hope,” said Nina.

  “Mmm … sometimes I wonder,” joked Kari.

  As the pilot had promised, the landing was performed quickly and safely. Castille practically leapt from the cabin as crewmen secured the aircraft to the deck. “Safe at last!” he proclaimed.

  “Just don’t throw up your hands in joy,” Nina told him, indicating the still-spinning rotor blades above him. “Remember what happened to Ajar!”

  “Least you’ll be safe from choppers down there,” said Chase, looking overboard. The sea was calm, the gentle waves the perfect disguise for what lay beneath.

  Kari led the group into the superstructure and up to the pilot house on level four, where they were met by the Evenor’s commander, Captain Leo Matthews, a tall Canadian in a spotless white uniform. Once the introductions were made, he updated them on the situation. “We’ll reach the target area in about three hours. Are you sure you want to send both subs down on the first descent, ma’am?” he asked Kari. “It might be better just to send the Atragon to inspect the seabed first.”

  Kari shook her head. “I’m afraid time is a factor. Qobras already has a ship at sea—it’s looking in the wrong place, but he must know by now that we’ve set sail. Sooner or later he’s going to investigate, and I suspect it will be sooner.”

  “Are you worried about an attack?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first one,” Chase pointed out.

  Matthews smiled. “Well, the Evenor might not be a warship, but… let’s just say we can look after ourselves.” He turned to Kari. “Your father sent some, ah, special equipment. We’ll be ready for any trouble, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  Matthews ordered one of his crew to show the team to their staterooms. Despite offering it to Nina, on the grounds that she deserved the title, Kari had the chief scientist’s stateroom below the pilothouse, while Nina took a cabin next to Chase a deck beneath.

  “Excellent,” he cackled, popping his head around Nina’s door. “Got a room to myself. No sharing with Hugo on this boat.”

  “Does he snore?”

  “He does much, much worse than that.” To Nina’s relief, he didn’t elaborate. “It’s not as posh as the Nereid, but it should be a lot harder to blow up.”

  “Please, don’t even joke about that.”

  “I wasn’t joking.” Chase came fully into the room. “Like Kari said, Qobras has got to know we’re out here. I know she thinks the crew’s loyal, but wave enough money around and anybody can be bought.”

  “You think Qobras has a spy aboard?” Nina sat on the bed, worried.

  “I’d put money on it. For that matter …” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  He sat next to her, lowering his voice. “Back in Brazil, Starkman found us way too fast. Those choppers couldn’t have just shadowed us as we went upriver, we were moving too slow. They would have run out of fuel. Which meant when they set off, they already knew where we were. Either there was a homing device on the boat, which is possible … or somebody aboard told them our position.”

  Despite the warmth of the cabin, Nina shivered. “Who?”

  “Couldn’t have been that idiot tree-hugger; nobody told him why we were really going there. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Captain Perez and Julio are on my list.”

  “But they were killed when the Nereid was blown up. You saw the bodies.”

  “Could be that Starkman kil
led them so there wouldn’t be any loose ends. So they’re still a possibility. On the other hand, I’m fairly sure Kari’s not trying to sell out her own dad …” He grinned at the understatement. “And you, well. Beyond reproach.”

  Nina smiled. “I’m glad you think so.”

  “Problem is, that doesn’t leave many suspects. There’s Agnaldo, the Prof … and, well, me and Hugo.”

  “It can’t have been Jonathan,” Nina said immediately. “I’ve known him for years. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”

  “Okay then,” said Chase, raising an eyebrow, “I trust Agnaldo, and hell, I trust Hugo with my life. Which leaves … aw, buggeration and fuckery. It was me all along, wasn’t it? Bollocks.”

  Nina giggled. “I think we can rule you out.”

  “Hope so. I’d hate to have to beat the shit out of myself.” He smiled again, then shook his head wearily. “I dunno. Anybody on the Nereid could have had a sat-phone hidden in their personal kit—I only checked through the stuff we took aboard in Tefé. And as for this boat…” He sighed. “All we can do is just keep an eye out, look for anything funny.”

  “What are you going to do if you find someone?” asked Nina.

  Chase stood. “Make the bastard walk the plank.” She could tell he wasn’t joking.

  Nina spent a while familiarizing herself with the layout of the Evenor, eventually making her way to the foredeck to check out the two submersibles. Kari was already there, talking to a pair of young men whose scruffy shorts and garish unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts went far beyond “beach casual” into actual “beach bum” territory.

  “Nina,” said Kari, “these are our submersible pilots. And designers, in fact.”

  “Jim Baillard,” said the taller of the two men, like Matthews a Canadian, only with a considerably more languid turn of speech. Nina shook his hand, his wristband of little seashells rattling. “So you think you found Atlantis, eh? Awesome.”

  “You want it dug up? We’ll get it done,” said the shorter, more tubby of the pair, a deeply tanned Australian with bleached spiky hair. “Matt Trulli. If it’s underwater, we can dry it off for you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Nina. She looked at the submersibles. “So these are your subs? They don’t look like I expected.” They resembled earthmovers or other industrial machinery more than submarines.

  “You thought they’d have the big bubble on the front, right?” Trulli said enthusiastically. “Jesus, you don’t want that! One crack, and splatto! Well, maybe you want one if all you’re doing is taking snapshots of weird fish or poncing about on the Titanic, but these beauts, we built them to work. Tough as hell.”

  “The last thing you want to do with a pressure hull is make a big hole in it,” added Baillard, continuing his partner’s train of thought as smoothly as if they were the same person. He pointed at the large white and orange metal sphere at the front of the smaller sub, the name Atragon painted on it in an elegant script. “Keep it in one piece and it’s a lot stronger—and you can go much deeper.”

  “How do you see out?” Nina could see a porthole in the sphere’s side, but it was only a few inches across.

  “We use a LIDAR virtual imaging system instead of a viewing bubble—like radar, but using blue-green lasers. The U.S. Navy designed them as a communications system, to contact their missile subs. They work on a wavelength that isn’t blocked by seawater.”

  “Two lasers,” Trulli jumped in, “one for each eye. Proper stereoscopics! The lasers sweep in front of the sub twenty times a second, and any light that gets reflected back, we see on the big screen inside the pod in 3-D. No need to suck your batteries dry with a load of spotlights that do squat more than twenty feet away. We can see for a mile!”

  “And because we have a much wider field of view than we would through a bubble, we can work a lot faster with the arms,” Baillard said, reaching up and patting one of the imposing steel manipulators. “It’s a revolutionary design.”

  “You said it!” Trulli high-fived his partner. “Too revolutionary. Nobody else even wanted to risk giving us development money. Kari’s dad, though? Bam! Soon as he saw what we had in mind, we were in business.”

  “And now, not only do you get to prove your design,” said Kari, “but you get to do so as part of the greatest archaeological discovery of all time.”

  “Like I said,” nodded Baillard, “awesome.”

  “Too right,” agreed Trulli. Nina smiled as they high-fived each other again.

  “So what do they do?” she asked. “I mean, I guess the Atragon’s like a regular sub, but that one?” She indicated the larger submersible, a bright yellow behemoth with what looked almost like the mouth of a giant vacuum cleaner beneath its crew sphere. A broad pipe led back from the nozzle into the main body of the vessel; at its rear a second pipe, a flexible concertina arrangement that looked as though it could extend for some length, ran into a second compartment that Nina realized could be detached from the submersible’s spine. Yet another length of extending pipe hung down from the module’s stern almost like a tail. The words “Big Jobs!” were spray-painted, graffiti-style, on the side of the sphere.

  “That?” said Trulli proudly. “That is the Sharkdozer. You know, like a bulldozer, only ’cause there’s no bulls underwater, we named it after a shark instead?”

  Nina grinned. “I think I get the idea.”

  “It’s a self-contained underwater excavator,” Baillard told her, pointing at its two heavy-duty arms. Rather than the claws on the smaller sub, these ended in buckets like those of an earthmover. “The arms move larger rock deposits, and the vacuum pump,” he indicated the maw of the pipe beneath the sphere, “removes silt and sediment—”

  “And because the main pump module’s detachable,” Trulli cut in, pointing at the “trailer” section of the vessel, “we can park it away from the site so all the crap we clear doesn’t hang around and wipe out visibility.”

  Nina was impressed. “How quickly will it be able to clear the silt over the site?”

  “Five meters?” said Baillard. “No time at all; at least enough to see that there’s something underneath it.”

  “Actually dredging out enough to see what it is, though …” Trulli shrugged. “Depends how big a hole you want to dig. It’s, what, two hundred feet wide? If it’s nothing but silt covering it, we could suck one end clear in a couple of hours.”

  “Then if there’s anything there, we can either use the Atragon’s manipulator arms to pick it up, or send in Mighty Jack.”

  “Who?” Nina asked.

  Baillard pointed out a small cage attached to the Atragon, inside which was a bright blue boxy object that turned out to be a tiny vessel in its own right. “Mighty Jack’s our ROV, Remotely Operated Vehicle. He’s a robot, basically, a Cameron Systems BB-101. He’s connected to the Atragon by a fiber-optic cable, and we’ve fitted him with a stereoscopic camera so I can operate him right from the pod. Even got his own little arm as well.”

  Nina smiled at Baillard’s anthropomorphization of the robot. “And this’ll be the first time you’ve used them?”

  “We’ve tested them, but yeah, this is the first full-on real operation,” said Trulli. “Can’t wait to see what we find!”

  “Nor can I.” Kari looked at the horizon ahead. “We should be in position in about two hours. How soon will you be ready to launch?”

  “We can do all the prelaunch prep in transit. Everything else … about an hour,” Baillard said.

  “We’ve got repeater monitors already set up in the main lab,” Trulli told Nina. “You’ll be able to see everything we see, as we see it—in 3-D, as well! Pretty smart, eh?”

  “Sounds great.” Nina felt a thrill of anticipation, a sense of impending discovery—but also of stress and tension. If there turned out to be nothing down there …

  Kari picked up on her unease. “Are you okay?”

  “I just haven’t got my sea legs yet,” Nina fibbed. “I think I’ll go and lie down fo
r a while. You’ll let me know when we arrive?”

  Kari adopted a deadpan expression. “No, I thought I’d let you miss the moment when we discover Atlantis.”

  “Don’t you start,” Nina chided as Kari cracked a smile. “I can’t cope with having two sarcastic friends!”

  Nina returned to her cabin and lay on her bed for a while, trying not to think about the enormous amount of money and labor the Frosts were putting behind her deductions. When she eventually realized this was a fruitless hope, the thought of “sarcastic friends” prompted her to get up and knock on Chase’s door. On being invited in, she was mildly surprised to see him on his bed reading a book—and more surprised when she saw the cover.

  “Plato’s dialogues?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” said Chase, sitting up. “Don’t look so shocked! I read. Thrillers mostly, but… Anyway, I thought that seeing as you’ve been going on about them so much, I ought to actually read the things. You know, the bloke doesn’t spend all that much time actually talking about Atlantis.”

  Nina sat next to him. “No, not really.”

  “I mean, in Timaeus there’s, what, three paragraphs on Atlantis? All the rest of it’s like some stoned student talking bollocks about the meaning of the universe.”

  Nina laughed. “That’s not the usual academic description … but yes, you’re right.”

  “And the other one, Critias, he doesn’t even start talking about Atlantis for about five pages. And when he does … it’s interesting.” There was a thoughtful tone to his words that caught Nina’s attention.

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t just mean about the description of the place, and how spot-on he was about the temple. I mean about the people, the rulers. It doesn’t really add up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, in the notes here, some scholars think that Critias was Plato’s blueprint of a perfect society, right? But it’s not. You read what he actually says, and the Atlanteans are a pretty nasty lot. They’re conquerors who invade other countries and enslave their people, they’re a completely militarized society, the kings have absolute power of life and death over the citizens with no democracy…” Chase leafed through the pages. “And then you get to the end, just before the bit that he never finished. ‘The human nature got the upper hand. They then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased.’ So Zeus calls up all the gods to punish them. Glug glug. Doesn’t sound like they were that great to me. In fact, seems like the world was better off without them.”