“The beam automatically shut off five millimetres before completion. I’m reactivating now.”
He squeezed the trigger and remained motionless. After a few moments the green light suddenly reverted to flashing amber. Costas peered down the viewfinder, the sweat from his forehead dripping over the tube. He leaned back and relaxed.
“The plug held. We’re through.”
Costas moved aside to let Ben take his place at the console. Together they finished assembling the open-topped box to the left of the unit. Within it a lattice of lines glowed a luminous green like the stage backdrop of a miniature theatre.
“Ben’s had more practice,” Costas said. “Some of the software is so new I didn’t have a chance to play with it before we left for the wreck excavation.”
“You mean you haven’t tried this before?” Katya asked.
“Has to be a first time for everything.”
Katya closed her eyes momentarily. For all the high technology and military-style planning, it seemed that IMU operations, including defusing booby traps, ran on a wing and a prayer.
“Here’s where this baby comes into her own,” Costas enthused. “This is one of the most sophisticated multitask lasers ever produced. Watch that box.”
The dull green luminosity transformed into a shimmer of tiny particles which pulsated every few seconds. Each surge left an image of increasing complexity, the lines progressively more concrete. After about a minute the image had become three-dimensional. It was as if someone had pressed glowing green putty inside to create a miniature grotto.
“A hologram!” Katya exclaimed.
“Correct.” Costas remained glued to the image. “Phase two was the insertion of a low-energy ultraviolet laser through the hole in the casing, a mapping device which reproduces the image as a hologram in the box. You can adjust the laser so it only reflects off material of a particular density, in this case the vesicular basalt of the volcano.”
Jack looked at Katya. “We use it to replicate artefacts,” he said. “The mapping data are transferred to a high-intensity infrared laser which can cut virtually any material with an accuracy tolerance of one micron, less than a particle of dust.”
“It produced the synthetic polymer copy of the gold disc from the Minoan shipwreck.”
Jack nodded. “IMU also developed the hardware needed to reproduce the Elgin Marbles for the Parthenon in Athens.”
Costas leaned over the console. “OK, Ben. Maximum resolution.”
The surge of green pulsating up and down began to sharpen features which had appeared in outline moments before. They could make out the bulbous outcrops of basalt, a wall of lava formed millennia before the first hominids reached these shores.
It was Katya who first noticed the regularities at the base of the image.
“I can see steps!” she exclaimed.
They watched as the horizontal lines took on an unmistakable shape. The final half-dozen steps leading up from the cliff face terminated in a platform five metres wide. Above it a rocky overhang reached out as far as the submarine, completely sealing off the platform.
Ben began the final countdown with each pulse of the laser. “Ninety-seven…ninety-eight…ninety-nine…one hundred. Resolution complete.”
All eyes focused on the dark recess in the centre of the image. What at first seemed an opaque haze gradually resolved itself into a rectilinear niche four metres high and three metres wide. It was at the rear of the platform behind the stairs and had clearly been hewn out of the rock.
As the scanner retracted, the niche came into clear view. In the centre they could make out a vertical groove from floor to ceiling. Horizontal grooves extended along the upper and lower edges. Each panel was adorned with the unmistakable U shape of the bull’s horns.
Costas let out a low whistle as Katya leaned forward to see.
Jack rummaged in his front pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He quietly read out Dillen’s translation: “The great golden door of the citadel.”
Costas looked up at his friend and saw the familiar fire of excitement.
“I can’t vouch for the gold,” Jack said. “But I can tell you one thing. We’ve found the gateway to Atlantis.”
CHAPTER 16
Jack watched Katya on the other side of the walkway. She was leaning over the gap talking to Costas, her contorted position emphasizing the narrow confines between the weapons racks and the hull casing. The bobbing dance of their headlamps seemed to magnify the sepulchral gloom around them. There should at least be the groan of ageing bulkheads, the signs of fallibility that gave life to any hull. He had to remind himself that Kazbek had been laid down less than two decades previously and still had the integrity to withstand many times the current water pressure. It seemed at odds with the ghostly interior, with the shroud of precipitate that looked as if it had built up over eons like the secretions of a limestone cave.
As his gaze strayed into the dark recess beyond, Jack felt a sudden tightening, a jolt of primeval fear he was powerless to control.
He could not let this happen to him again.
Not here. Not now.
He forced his gaze away from the interior towards the activity below. For a moment he closed his eyes and clenched his jaw as he summoned all his strength to fight the nightmare grip of claustrophobia. The anxiety of the last hours had left him vulnerable, had opened a chink in his armour.
He would have to be careful.
Just as his breathing was settling, Costas glanced up at him and gestured at the holographic display with its virtual-reality image of the cliff face. It was mesmerizing proof they were exactly on target.
“Phase three is to get through the hull to that entranceway,” he said to Katya.
“A piece of cake, as you would say.”
“Just wait and see.”
There was a sudden hiss like water escaping through a radiator valve.
“There’s a five-metre gap between the submarine’s casing and the cliff,” Costas explained. “We need to create something like an escape tunnel.” He pointed to a cylinder attached to the unit. “That’s full of a liquefied silicate, electromagnetic hydrosilicate 4, or EH-4. We call it magic sludge. That hissing is the sound of it being forced by gas pressure through the hole we’ve just made onto the outside of the casing, where it’s congealing like jelly.”
He stopped to peer at a percentile display on the screen. As the figure reached one hundred the hissing abruptly ceased.
“OK, Andy. Extrusion complete.”
Andy closed the valve and clamped on a second cylinder.
Costas turned back to Katya. “In simple terms, we’re making an inflatable chamber, effectively creating an extension of the submarine’s casing out of the silicate.”
“The magic sludge.”
“Yes. That’s where Lanowski comes in.”
“Oh.” Katya grimaced as she remembered the new arrival from Trabzon, the ill-kempt figure who refused to believe she could possibly know anything about submarines.
“Maybe not the ideal dinner-party companion,” Costas said. “But a brilliant polycompounds engineer. We poached him from MIT when the US Department of Defense contracted IMU to find a way of preserving the Second World War wrecks at Pearl Harbor. He discovered a hydraulic sealant which can triple the strength of metal hull remains, extract damaging sea salts from old iron and inhibit corrosion. We’re using it for a different purpose here, of course. Lanowski discovered it’s also an exceptional binding agent for certain crystalline minerals.”
“How do you blow it into a bubble?” Katya asked.
“That’s the ingenious part.”
While they were talking, Ben and Andy had been busy assembling another component of the laser unit. Around the chalked circle they had placed a ring of small devices, each one secured to the casing by a suction cup activated by a vacuum gun. Wires fanned inwards to a control panel beside the console.