“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.”
CHAPTER 13
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.