The two Aquapods rose slowly together over the parapet, their water jets kicking up a storm of silt as they powered away from the floor of the courtyard. The rearing form of the giant bull-sphinx was swallowed in the darkness behind them, but the image of the colossal head with its curved horns high above remained etched in their minds.
The south-eastern perimeter was higher than the rest, rising at least ten metres vertically.
“It’s a stairway,” said Jack. “A grand entrance into the courtyard.”
The two Aquapods veered off to either side, Jack to the left and Costas to the right. Soon each appeared to the other as no more than a distant smudge of yellow in the gloom. At the top was a wide roadway, which their water jets revealed had a lustrous white surface.
“It looks like marble pavement.”
“I had no idea people quarried stone this early.” Costas was already amazed by the scale of stone extraction in the courtyard, and now here was evidence for masonry. “I thought quarrying didn’t begin until the Egyptians.”
“Stone Age hunters dug for flint to make tools, but this is the earliest evidence for precision-cut building stone. It predates the first Egyptian quarries by at least two thousand years.”
They continued silently onwards, neither able to comprehend the enormity of their find. Churned up phosphorescence billowed behind them like vapour trails. The road followed the same orientation as the courtyard, leading from the ferocious gaze of the bull-sphinx directly towards the foot of the volcano.
“I can see structures to my right,” Costas announced. “Pedestals, pillars, columns. I’m just passing one that’s square-sided, about two metres across. It towers way up out of sight. It looks like an obelisk.”
“I’m getting the same,” Jack said. “They’re laid out symmetrically, just like the Egyptian temple precincts at Luxor and Karnak.”
The floodlights revealed a succession of ghostly forms on either side of the processional way, the shapes looming into view and then disappearing like phantasms glimpsed in a swirling sandstorm. They saw altars and plinths, animal-headed statues and the carved limbs of creatures too bizarre to make out. Both men began to feel unnerved, as if they were being lured by these beckoning sentinels into a world beyond their experience.
“It’s like the entrance to Hades,” Costas murmured.
They ran the gauntlet between the eerie lines of statues, a lurking, brooding presence that seemed to reproach them for trespassing in a domain that had been theirs alone for millennia.
Moments later the pall lifted as the roadway abruptly terminated at two large structures divided by a central passageway. It was about ten metres wide, less than half the width of the roadway, and had shallow steps like those which led up from the courtyard.
“I can see squared blocks, each four or five metres long and maybe two metres high.” Costas was suddenly elated. “This is where all the quarried stone went!” He stopped just inside the passageway and used his water jet to blow silt from the base of the wall. He angled his light so it shone up the structure.
Jack was about ten metres from Costas and could see his face in the dome as he looked across.
“My turn for a recce.”
Jack vented water and began to rise, but rather than receding gradually upwards, he abruptly vanished over a rim not far above.
Several long minutes later his voice crackled over the intercom.
“Costas. Do you read me? This is incredible.”
“What is it?”
There was a pause. “Think of the most outstanding monuments of ancient Egypt.” Jack’s Aquapod reappeared as he descended back into the passageway.
“Not a pyramid.”
“You’ve got it.”
“But pyramids have sloping sides. These are vertical.”
“What you’re looking at is the base of a massive terrace,” Jack explained. “About ten metres above us it turns into a platform ten metres wide. Above that there’s another terrace with the same dimensions, then another, and so on. I went along the entire length of this side and could see the terrace continuing on the south-east side. It’s the same basic design as the first Egyptian pyramids, the stepped pyramids of the early third millennium BC.”
“How big is it?”
“That’s the difference. This is huge, more like the Great Pyramid at Giza. I’d estimate one hundred and fifty metres across the base and eighty metres high, more than halfway to sea level. It’s incredible. This must rank as the oldest and largest masonry edifice in the world.”
“And on my side?”
“Identical. A pair of giant pyramids marking the end of the processional way. Beyond this I’d expect some form of temple or a mortuary complex, maybe cut into the side of the volcano.”
Costas activated the navigational monitor which rose like a fighter pilot’s gunsight in front of him. Jack looked down as the radio-pulse modem flashed the same image to his screen.
“A recently declassified hydrographic chart,” Costas explained. “Made by a British survey vessel taking manual soundings following the Allied defeat of Ottoman Turkey at the end of the First World War. Unfortunately the Royal Navy only had a limited window before the Turkish Republic acquired control and the Soviet buildup closed the door on the Black Sea. It’s the most detailed we’ve got, but at 1 to 50,000 it only shows broad contours of bathymetry.”
“What’s your point?”
“Take a look at the island.” Costas tapped a command for a close-up view. “The only irregular features large enough to appear in the survey were those two underwater mounts up against the north-west side of the island. Strangely symmetrical, aren’t they?”
“The pyramids!” Jack’s face broke into a broad grin. “So much for our detective work. Atlantis has been marked on a chart for more than eighty years.”
They eased along the centre of the passageway, the looming pyramids with their massive, perfectly joined masonry just visible through the gloom on either side. As Jack had estimated, they passed the far corners after 150 metres. The steps continued ahead into the darkness.
The only sound as they crept forward was the whirring of the water jets as they maintained a constant altitude a metre above the sea floor.
“Look out!”
There was a sudden commotion and a muffled curse. For a split second Costas’ attention had been diverted and he had collided with an obstacle dead ahead.
“You OK?” Jack had been trailing five metres behind but now drew up abreast, his face full of concern as he peered through the whirlwind of silt.
“No obvious damage,” Costas responded. “Luckily we were only going at a snail’s pace.”
He ran a routine diagnostic on his robotic arm and floodlight array before powering back a few metres.
“Number one driving rule, always look where you’re going,” Jack told him.
“Thanks for the advice.”
“So what was it?”
They strained to see through the silt. The disturbance had reduced visibility to less than a metre, but as the sediment settled they began to make out a curious shape directly in front of them.
“It looks like an outsized bathroom mirror,” Costas said.
It was a huge disc, perhaps five metres in diameter, standing on a pedestal about two metres high.
“Let’s check for inscriptions,” Jack suggested. “You blow away the silt and I’ll hover above to see if anything shows up.”
Costas unclamped a metallic glove from his instrument panel, inserted his left arm and flexed his fingers. The robotic arm at the front of the Aquapod exactly mimicked his movements. He angled the arm down to the water jet nozzles protruding from the undercarriage and selected a pencil-sized tube. After activating the jet, he began cleaning methodically from the centre of the disc outwards, tracing ever increasing circles on the rock.
“It’s a fine-grained stone.” The voice came from the halo of yellow that was all Jack could see of Costas in the silt below. “Granite or brecchia, similar to Egyptian porphyry. Only this has greenish flecks like the lapis lacedaemonia of Sparta. It must have been a local marble submerged by the flood.”
“Can you see any inscriptions?”
“There are some linear grooves.”
Costas jetted gently back to hover alongside Jack. As the silt settled, the entire pattern was revealed.
Jack let out a whoop of joy. “Yes!”
With geometric precision the mason had carved a complex of horizontal and vertical grooves on the polished surface. In the centre was a symbol like the letter H, with a vertical line hanging from the crossbar and the sides extending in a row of short horizontal lines like the end of a garden rake.
Jack reached with his free hand into his suit and triumphantly held up a polymer copy of the gold disc for Costas to see. It was an exact replica made by laser in the Carthage Museum where the original was now safely under lock and key in the museum vault. The copy had reached Sea Venture by helicopter shortly before their own arrival.
“Brought this along just in case,” Jack said.
“Atlantis.” Costas beamed at Jack.
“This must mark the entrance.” Jack was elated but looked determinedly at his friend. “We must press on. We’ve already overextended our recce time and Seaquest will be waiting for us to reestablish contact.”
They accelerated and swooped round either side of the stone disc, but almost immediately slowed down as they confronted a sharp incline in the slope. The passageway narrowed to a steep stairway not much wider than the two Aquapods. As they began to ascend they could just make out the vertiginous rocky slopes of the volcano on either side.
Costas elevated his floodlights and peered intently ahead, mindful of his collision a few minutes before. After they had risen only a few steps he said, “There’s something strange here.”
Jack was concentrating on a series of carved animal heads that lined his side of the stairway. They seemed to be processing upwards, drawing him on, and were identically carved beside each step. At first they looked like the snarling lions of Sumerian and Egyptian art, but as he peered closer he was astonished to see they had huge incisors like the sabre-toothed tigers of the Ice Age. So much to wonder at, so much to take in, he thought.
“What is it?” he asked.
Costas’ voice was puzzled. “It’s incredibly dark above us, almost pitch black. We’ve risen to a depth of one hundred metres and should be getting more vestigial sunlight. It should be getting lighter, not darker. It must be some kind of overhang. I suggest we…Stop!” he suddenly yelled.
The Aquapods came to a halt only inches away from the obstruction.
“Christ.” Costas forcefully exhaled. “Almost did it again.”
The two men stared in open-mouthed astonishment. Above them loomed a colossal shape that extended on either side as far as they could see. It cut directly across the staircase, blocking their progress and concealing any entrance that might lie beyond.
“My God,” Jack exclaimed. “I can see rivets. It’s a shipwreck.”
His mind reeled as it rushed from deepest antiquity to the modern world, to an intrusion that seemed almost blasphemous after all they had seen.
“It must have wedged between the pyramids and the volcano.”
“Just what we need,” Jack said resignedly. “Probably First or Second World War. There are plenty of uncharted ships sunk by U-boats all over the Black Sea.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Costas had been edging his Aquapod up the curve of the hull. “See you in a moment.”
He powered off to the left almost out of sight and then swung round and returned without pausing, his floodlights angled up against the dark mass. Jack wondered how much damage had been done, how much precious time was going to be needed to get over this unwelcome new obstacle.
“Well, what is it?”
Costas drew up alongside and spoke slowly, his tone a mixture of apprehension and high excitement.
“You can forget Atlantis for a while. We’ve just found ourselves a Russian nuclear submarine.”
IT’S AN AKULA-CLASS SSN, A NUCLEAR-POWERED attack submarine. I have no doubt this is Kazbek, the boat that went missing in this sector in 1991.” York hunched over the screens on Seaquest’s bridge console, his eyes flicking between the sonar image they had just acquired from an ROV run over the wreck and a set of specifications downloaded from IMU’s database on naval vessels of the former Soviet bloc.
Jack and Costas had arrived back in the Aquapods less than an hour before and had gone straight into conference with York and Howe. The storm that had been brewing up in the northern sky all morning was now making its presence felt, and Howe had activated the water ballast trimming system to keep the ship stable. It was an ominous development that heightened Jack’s anxiety about getting back underwater with maximum urgency, and all available hands were now huddled round the console as they attempted to troubleshoot the sinister presence that was blocking their way on the seabed.
“Akula is the NATO designation, Russian for shark. Kazbek is named after the highest mountain in the central Caucasus.” Katya walked over to the console, handing Jack a coffee with a smile. “The Soviet designation was Project 971.”
“How can you possibly know all this?”
The question came from a scientist named Lanowski who had joined Seaquest in Trabzon, a lank-haired man with pebble glasses who was eyeing Katya with evident disdain.
“Before studying for my doctorate I completed my national service as an analyst in the submarine warfare division of the Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet Navy.”
The scientist fiddled with his glasses and was silent.
“We considered these the best all-purpose attack submarines, the equivalent of the American Los Angeles class,” she added. “Kazbek was laid down at Komsomolsk-on-Amur in 1988 and commissioned in early 1991. Only one reactor, contrary to western intelligence assessments. Four 650 millimetre and six 533 millimetre launch tubes for multiple weapons, including cruise missiles.”
“But it has no nuclear warheads,” York said firmly. “This is not an SSBN, a ballistic missile boat. What puzzles me is why the Russians were so fanatical about keeping the loss a secret. Most of the technology had been familiar to us since the type first appeared in the mid-eighties. Just before I left the Royal Navy I participated in a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty visit to the Northern Fleet sub base at Yagel’naya near Murmansk where we were given a guided tour of the latest Akula. We saw everything except the reactor room and the tactical operations centre.”
“An IMU team decommissioned an Akula I during the Vladivostok clean-up two years ago,” Costas added. “I personally dismembered it bit by bit.”
One of the crew spoke up. “What happened to Kazbek? Reactor malfunction?”
“That’s what we feared at the time.” Mustafa Alk?zen stepped out to address the group. “A meltdown would have precipitated a massive radiation leak, killing the crew and irradiating the sea for miles around. Yet the Turkish early-warning monitors detected no abnormal radiation in territorial waters.”
“A reactor failure anyway rarely results in meltdown,” York said. “More often it actually reduces radiation emission. And it’s not the end of the road. If the core can’t be reactivated there are always the auxiliary diesels as back-up.”
“What we’re about to see may answer the question.” Costas directed their attention to the video monitor above the console, where images taken from his Aquapod on the seabed had been downloaded. He aimed a remote control and fast-forwarded through a series of extraordinary scenes of the bull-sphinx and the pyramids until the shapes became less distinct. He stilled the video at a mass of tangled metal, the wreckage outlined in a halo of yellow where the floodlights reflected off sediment suspended in the water.
“The stern,” Costas said simply. “The propeller, or what’s left of it. The seven blades are intact but it’s sheared off at the shaft. That mess in the foreground is the lower stabilizer fin, and the distinctive high aft fin of the Akula class is visible above it.”
“Must have been a hell of an impact,” a crewman said.
“We checked out the eastern pyramid just before we surfaced,” Costas continued. “There’s extensive damage to the masonry at the corner opposite the volcano. Our guess is the sub was making south-west at its maximum speed of over thirty knots and detected these structures too late for evasive action. They avoided a head-on collision by swerving to port but in doing so crashed the stern into the pyramid, with the results you can see. The sub carried on for another hundred metres until its bow jammed into a cleft just ahead of the ancient stairway. It sank upright between the pyramid and the volcano.”
“Incredible,” York said. “It would have been sheer madness to travel at speed so close to an island so poorly charted.”
“Something went badly wrong,” Costas agreed.
“As far as we can tell there were no survivors,” York continued. “Yet even at a hundred metres the crew would have stood a chance using the Soviet version of the Steinke-hood life jacket and breathing apparatus. Even a single floating corpse would have been detected by satellite monitors from the miniature radio transmitter incorporated in the hood. Why didn’t they eject a SLOT buoy, a submarine-launched one-way transmitter? The hull’s even more baffling. You say the damage is external and there’s no evidence the casing was breached. Why didn’t they blow the ballast tanks? The Akula is double-hulled, with three times the reserve buoyancy of a single-hulled boat.”
“All good questions.” Jack moved out of the shadows where he had been quietly listening. “And we may well find answers. But we must stick to our objective. Time is running out fast.”
He moved in front of the group beside Costas and scanned the faces intently.
“We’re here to find the heart of Atlantis, not to restart the Cold War. We believe the text is leading us inside that volcano, up the processional way from the bull-sphinx towards some kind of sanctuary. The stairway continues under the submarine but not beyond it. We checked.”
He put his hands on his hips.
“Our objective lies beneath a metal cylinder one hundred and eight metres long, weighing nine thousand tons. We have to assume the ballast tanks can’t be vented. Even if we had the equipment to shift the submarine, our activities would be obvious on the surface and the Russians would be onto us like a shot. Any attempt to get outside help and we’d lose the initiative. Atlantis would become a free-for-all for Aslan and his band of looters. The images of the site you’ve just seen would be our last.”
He paused and spoke slowly.
“We have only one option. We’re going to have to get inside and cut our way through to the rock face.”