The Hunt for Atlantis (23 page)

Until he realized he was unsheathing his combat knife.

Chase suddenly became very aware of his position. He was hanging by one hand from a rope beneath a helicopter, already at least seventy feet in the air and rising as the Halo moved out over the jungle.

His gaze met Starkman’s one good eye. Starkman grinned—and sliced through Chase’s rope, severing it with a single brutal slash.

“Oh, fuck!” Chase just had time to gasp before he plummeted towards the endless jungle canopy below.

The rope was still in his left hand. In the split second before he hit the uppermost leaves, Chase let go of his gun and snatched for the black nylon line with his right.

Branches pummeled him as he plunged through them, each one thicker and more inflexible than the last. One slammed against his shoulder, and Chase flung the rope at it.

Suddenly he was clear and falling again, nothing between him and the ground—

The line snapped taut.

He clamped his hands around the rope, screaming as friction seared his skin. He was slowing, slowing …

The severed end of the rope shot through his grip, and was gone. He was free-falling, the canopy of foliage rushing away—

Impact.

Blackness.

A distant voice, echoing down a pipe, saying something familiar…

Saying his name.

“Eddie?” A woman’s voice, getting closer. “Eddie!”

Chase’s eyes snapped open. He could make out scattered spots of the dusk sky through the jungle canopy, one larger hole directly above him.

It took several seconds for a thought to congeal into words. “I just fell through there!” he gasped, trying to sit up.

And immediately regretting it. Every muscle in his body ached as though he’d been beaten. He flopped back down again with an anguished moan.

“Eddie!”

“Nina?” He squinted as a face appeared above him, looking down anxiously. “My God, you look beautiful …”

“Well, at least he can still see,” said another voice. Kari came into view behind Nina, peering at him before turning her head upwards to the trees. Leaves drifted down around them like green snow. “That must be over twenty meters high…”

“My God!” said Nina, leaning closer. “I can hardly believe he survived!”

“Takes more than that to kill me off, Doc,” he said, forcing a painful grin. Even his face muscles hurt.

She stared at him for a moment, a mix of emotions flooding across her face, before suddenly flailing at his chest with her hands. “You moron! You absolute, utter, complete idiot! What the hell were you thinking? Why did you do that? What’s wrong with you?”

“Ow, ow! It’s a long list …” Chase cautiously lifted his head. Pain rolled in from all over his body, but none of it seemed to be the sharp stab—or the numbed shock—of a broken bone.

Well, except for his nose.

To Nina and Kari’s amazement, he began to laugh, a wheezing cackle of pure relief at being alive. “Oh Christ. That really, really hurt. And I didn’t even get the bastard!” His face contorted as he slowly sat up, Nina kneeling to help him. “What happened? How long was I out?”

“Not long,” said Kari. “The helicopter’s gone, it flew off northeast.”

“You might have a concussion,” Nina warned him. “Keep still.”

Chase saw something that instantly dismissed the pain from his mind. “I think that’s the least of our worries,” he said, very slowly.

Nina followed his gaze. And froze.

They were surrounded by Indians.

Supporting Chase between them, Nina and Kari were taken back to the village.

Though they weren’t openly aggressive—yet—Nina could tell the Indians were angry. Hardly surprising, considering that many of them had been killed, their homes were wrecked and the temple they and their ancestors had protected for thousands of years was now a smoking ruin. She was amazed that any of the explorers were still alive.

Her surprise grew as they reached the village. A fire had been lit, and di Salvo was lying next to it, still alive and conscious. His bloodstained clothes had been cut open and bandages applied to the bullet wounds. Next to him, Castille, with Philby’s help, was giving first aid to one of the Indians. “Edward!” he called as the party approached. “Mon dieu! You’re still alive!”

“Just about,” Chase croaked. “What’s with the MASH?”

“We have some new friends. Well, perhaps friends is not quite the word. Nonbelligerents may be better.” Castille nodded at the Indians.

“What happened?” asked Nina as she and Kari set Chase down. The Indians escorting them backed away, watching warily.

“When they saw us fighting Jason and his men, it seems they had a change of mind about us. What’s the saying? ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’? Naive, perhaps, but it saved us.”

Nina looked at the Indians. Some of them were going through the items taken from the bodies of Starkman’s men, arranging them in piles and apparently taking a tally by making marks on pieces of parchmentlike bark. The bullets held a particular fascination; two of the women were clicking them out of the spare magazines with their thumbs, holding the shiny casings up to the firelight. “Is it really a good idea to let them play with bullets like that?”

“Better than letting them play with loaded guns,” Chase grunted. “How’s Agnaldo?”

Castille glanced at his patient. “I had to give him a shot, but he can still translate for us. Edward, we need to call for help. I’m sure the boat’s been destroyed, and that Captain Perez and Julio are dead.” Kari looked dismayed.

“Oh no,” Nina said softly. “Wait, if the Nereid’s been destroyed, how are we going to call for help?”

Chase managed an approximation of a smile. “Same way we’d order a pizza. We’ll ring for it. There’s a sat-phone in one of the packs.”

“That’s all well and good,” Philby snapped, voice tight with frustration, “but am I the only person concerned that a literally priceless archaeological find has just been blown up? This is worse than the Taliban!”

“You didn’t even see the interior, Jonathan,” said Nina sadly. “It was incredible. A replica of the Temple of Poseidon, exactly as Plato described it. And there was even a map showing the location of Atlantis …”

She trailed off. The map. There was something about it…

“Unfortunately, your gun-toting friends are already on their way there,” said Philby. She ignored him, thinking hard about what she’d seen inside the temple.

“Nina? What is it?” Kari asked.

“The map … Atlantis was definitely in the Gulf of Cádiz,” Nina insisted. “Starkman’s guy was wrong, he had to be. The Atlanteans were able to navigate across whole oceans—there’s no way their map could have been off by hundreds of miles with the position of their home! There’s something we’ve missed, something about the Atlantean … system …” She looked back at the women counting bullets. It was the way they were counting that caught her attention, opening up an unexpected line of thought.

She moved to crouch by di Salvo. “Agnaldo? Can you hear me?”

His face was drenched in sweat, but he was still responsive despite the painkiller. “Yes, I can. What is it?”

“I need you to translate for me.”

“I’ll do my best… What do you want to say?”

“First I need to know if it’s okay for me to go to those women, look at what they’re writing.” Di Salvo haltingly asked the two surviving elders, and nodded to Nina after getting a reply. Hands raised, she carefully approached the women. They reacted with surprise and a little fear, but it didn’t take long for her to persuade one of them to let her examine their pale sheet of bark.

Her guess was correct: it was a tally. She held it up to the firelight, trying to get a better look at the smudgy symbols, then spotted a chemical glow stick among the equipment. She bent it, releasing a vivid blue light. The Indian women jumped away, before slowly returning, fascinated. Other members of the tribe moved to stand around her, entranced by the sight. Nina gave them a reassuring smile, then returned her attention to the numbers.

Kari joined her. “What is it?”

“Remember how I thought the Atlantean numerical system used base eight?” Nina began, running a fingertip down one of the columns, careful not to smear the charcoal markings. “But that didn’t work for the Challenge of Mind, right? And the statues of the Nereids in the temple—according to Plato, there should have been one hundred, but you counted seventy-three?”

Kari nodded. “Have you found out why?”

“I’m not sure …” Nina looked down at the bullets on the ground. There was a pile of empty magazines next to them. She held one up. “Eddie! How many bullets does one of these hold?”

“UMP? Thirty rounds.”

“So there’s over a hundred bullets here, good …” She picked up one of the bullets. “Okay, let’s see …”

Kneeling, she moved closer to the nearest Indian woman, giving her what she hoped was a friendly, non-threatening look. The woman reacted with suspicion, but didn’t back away as Nina picked up a piece of charcoal and a blank scrap of bark. On it, she made a small mark—the symbol for a single unit. Then she held up the bullet, pointing to the mark and raising her eyebrows questioningly. “One, yes? One?”

The woman stared at her oddly for a moment, before suddenly smiling, saying something. “She says yes,” di Salvo told her.

“Great! Okay …” Nina reached back and picked up a handful of bullets, dropping them next to her knees, then lined up two of them below the parchment before making a second mark next to the first. “Two?”

The woman nodded again. Nina added another six bullets to the line, then made more marks. Eight little ticks in a line …

Another nod. Nina smiled, then took a ninth bullet, placed it by the first row, then added another tick to the line. “Nine?”

The woman shook her head. Nina wiped away the nine marks, then instead drew an inverted V and pointed back at the bullets. “Nine?”

A second shake of the head, this time accompanied by a somewhat exasperated expression and what sounded like a mocking comment to the other Indians. A few of them chuckled, as did di Salvo. “What did she say?” Nina asked.

“That she can’t believe you don’t even know how to count,” he replied, amused even through his weariness.

The woman took the charcoal from her hand and added a single mark to the left of the symbol, then pointed at the nine bullets. “So that’s nine?” Nina said thoughtfully.

“What have you found?” asked Kari.

“Starkman’s guy thought the circumflex symbol on its own represented nine,” said Nina, mind racing. “But it doesn’t—I started to realize it when I saw how they count. They don’t use their fingers—they use the gaps between them. Watch.” She moved one of the bullets away from the others, then tapped a finger between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. “One.” The Indian woman stared at her, not sure what she was doing. Nina put a second bullet by the first, and tapped the skin between her thumb and forefinger again, then that between her forefinger and middle finger. “One, two?”

The woman nodded, smiling again. She held up both her hands, quickly using the little finger of each to count off the gaps between the fingers of the other until she reached eight.

Nina realized the significance of the shape her hands formed, the tips of her little fingers touching after she stopped counting. “The circumflex—it represents eight ‘full’ gaps. So nine is represented by one circumflex plus one, which means that…” She pointed at the tally, where a single dot was followed by a pair of circumflexes. “That’s seventeen—one plus eight plus eight. But look, they don’t represent sixteen with two circumflexes, but with eight single units plus one circumflex. It’s like they’re filling up the gaps between their fingers, and each time they’re full, the next number is however many full hands of eight they have, plus one.”

“It’s not a linear progression,” Kari said, understanding.

“No wonder we couldn’t work out the puzzle in the temple—we were using the wrong system! It’s like a weird hybrid of notational and positional systems!”

“English, Doc,” groaned Chase.

“Okay, okay… In our system, you add a new column every time you multiply by ten, right? Tens, hundreds, thousands—it’s a regular progression. But in their system, which also seems to be the Atlantean system, the new symbols that we saw in the puzzle room aren’t introduced along the same regular progression—instead, they fill in the gaps …” she held up her open fingers, “so to speak. If they were using standard base eight, the next symbol, the circumflex, the little hat—”

“Yeah, I know what a circumflex is, Doc,” Chase said testily.

“Sorry. It would represent eight in a normal base eight system. But it doesn’t—it stands for eight, but doesn’t appear until you get to eight plus one. And the symbol after that, the leaning ‘L’—in base eight that would be sixty-four. But because this is a cumulative rather than linear progression, where you don’t advance until you’ve filled up each of the gaps between your fingers—”

“It comes in after eight groups of eight, plus eight,” Kari continued, excitedly pointing out the relevant group of symbols on the tally.

“Right! And the first time it’s used is at eight groups of eight, plus eight… and then plus one. Or—”

“Seventy-three!” they both cried simultaneously.

“Like the number of statues?” Chase asked, frowning as though he now had a new pain inside his head to add to all his other aches.

“Yes! Of course! That’s why Plato said there were a hundred! It was a misinterpretation of the Atlantean numerical system over the centuries. In their system, it’s the equivalent of one hundred, when the third digit comes in—but it’s not decimal or base eight. It’s a completely unique system.”

“But Qobras won’t know that,” Kari pointed out. “Which means that when he converts the latitudinal figures from the map into modern figures, they won’t be accurate.”

Nina brought the map into her mind’s eye. “No, they’ll be way off! They thought that the circumflex on its own was nine, and a circumflex plus a tick was ten. But a circumflex plus a tick really equals nine. Their figures are wrong—they’re one off! They thought the Cape of Good Hope was at latitude fifteen south—it’s not, it’s at latitude fourteen! So they should have divided the thirty-five degrees difference by seven Atlantean units, not eight, which means one Atlantean unit is five degrees. Atlantis is seven units north of the Amazon, and seven times five is—”

Chase laughed. “Even I can manage that! Thirty-five degrees north.”

“Plus one degree to account for the Amazon delta’s latitude above the equator,” Kari added. “So Atlantis is at thirty-six degrees north—which is in the Gulf of Cádiz! You were right!”

“They’re hundreds of miles off course!” Nina exclaimed, unable to hold in her excitement. “We can find it first; we can still beat them!”