The Hunt for Atlantis (3 page)

But that wasn’t his main concern right now. He looked for the helicopter; the noise grew louder, but it was nowhere in sight.

And neither was Jack.

Laura emerged behind him. “Where is it?”

Her question was answered a moment later as the helicopter swept into view.

Not Chinese, Henry saw immediately. No red star markings. No markings at all, not even a tail number. Just an ominous dark gray paint scheme that immediately made him think Special Forces. But whose?

He didn’t know enough about aircraft to recognize the type, but it was large enough to carry several people in its passenger compartment. He could see the pilots behind the cockpit glass, their heads turning from side to side as if looking for something.

Looking for someone.

For them.

“Get back in the cave!” he shouted to Laura. With a worried look, she disappeared into the darkness.

The helicopter moved closer. A blizzard whipped up from the ground, snow caught in its downwash. Henry backed up to the cave entrance.

One of the pilots pointed down at the ground. At him.

The aircraft swung around like some giant alien insect, the cockpit windows huge eyes taking a better look at him, then turned away again. A door slid open in its flank. A moment later two coils of rope fell out and whipped snakelike to the ground.

A pair of dark figures dropped from the bobbing helicopter, rappelling down.

Henry saw immediately that they were armed, automatic rifles slung over their backs.

The only weapon the expedition possessed was a simple hunting rifle, carried more to scare off wild animals than for its effectiveness. And it wasn’t even with them—it had been left at the camp.

Barely a second after the first two men reached the ground, another pair began to descend the ropes. They too were armed.

Henry jumped backwards through the hole and slid down the pile of stones, hitting the cave floor hard.

“Henry!” cried Laura. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t think they’re friendly,” he said, face grim. “There’s at least four men, and they’ve got guns.”

“Oh my God! What about Jack?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see him. We need to get that door open. Come on.” As Laura hurried towards the tomb, Henry snatched up the artifact from the ground near the bodies, wrapping it in the protective velvet as he ran.

The four Tibetans frantically searched the tomb walls. “There’s nothing here!”

“There’s got to be something!” Henry yelled. “A release, a keyhole, anything!” He looked back. A figure was silhouetted against the cave entrance. A moment later it dropped as if swallowed by the ground, to be replaced by another. “Shit! They’re in the cave!”

Laura grabbed his arm. “Henry!”

Another silhouette, and another, and another …

Five men. All armed.

They were trapped.

Red lines lanced through the darkness. Laser sights, followed by the intense beams of halogen flashlights. The dazzling lights swept back and forth, before coming to rest on the little group of people in the tomb.

Henry froze, almost blinded by the beams, unsure what to do. They had nowhere to run, and the laser spots dancing over their bodies meant they couldn’t fight either—

“Professor Wilde!”

Henry was stunned. They knew him by name?

“Professor Wilde!” the voice repeated. Deep and rich, with an accent—Greek? “Remain where you are. You too, Dr. Wilde,” he added to Laura.

The intruders advanced. “Who are you?” Henry demanded. “What do you want?”

The men holding the flashlights stopped, a single tall figure continuing towards the expedition members. “My name is Giovanni Qobras,” said the man, enough light reflecting from the tomb walls for Henry to pick out his features. A hard, angular face with a prominent Roman nose, dark hair slicked back from his forehead almost like a skullcap. “What I want, I regret to say … is you.”

Laura stared at him in bewilderment. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I cannot allow you to continue your search. The risk to the world is far too great. My apologies.” He lowered his head for a moment, then stepped back. “It’s nothing personal.”

The laser lines fixed on Henry and Laura.

Henry opened his mouth. “Wait—”

In the confines of the tomb, the noise of the automatic weapons was deafening.

Qobras stared at the six bullet-riddled bodies as he waited for the echoes of gunfire to die away, then issued rapid orders. “Collect everything that relates to their expedition—maps, notes, everything. And do the same for those bodies back there.” He pointed at the dead Nazis. “I assume that’s the remains of the Krauss expedition. One historical mystery solved …” he added, almost to himself, as his men split up to examine the corpses.

“Giovanni!” one man yelled a minute later, crouched over Henry’s body.

“What is it, Yuri?”

“You’ve got to see this.”

Qobras strode over. “My God!”

“It’s orichalcum, isn’t it?” asked Yuri Volgan, shining his light on the object he had just unwrapped. A deep orange glow reflected on the faces of the two men.

“Yes … but I’ve never seen a complete artifact made from it before, just scraps.”

“It’s beautiful… and it must be worth a fortune. Millions of dollars, tens of millions!”

“At least.” Qobras gazed at the artifact for a long moment, seeing his own eyes reflected in the metal. Then he straightened abruptly. “But it must be kept hidden.” He took out a flashlight and examined the tomb walls, but saw nothing except bas-reliefs of ancient gods. Turning to the altar, he quickly examined the inscriptions. “Glozel… but nothing about Atlantis.”

“Maybe we should search the tomb,” Volgan offered, taking one long last look at the artifact before carefully wrapping it in the velvet again.

Qobras considered it. “No,” he said at last. “There’s nothing here, it must have been looted. I really thought the Wildes might lead us further along the trail to Atlantis itself, but it’s just another dead end. We need to get out of here before the storm arrives.” He turned and strode back towards the cave entrance.

Behind him, Volgan glanced over his shoulder to make sure nobody was watching, then slipped the wrapped artifact into his thick jacket.

Qobras stood at the edge of the ledge, waving a flare to summon the circling helicopter, then turned back to the man standing by the doomed expedition’s camp. “You did the right thing.”

Jack’s face was hidden inside his hood. “I’m not proud of this. They were my friends—and what’s going to happen to their daughter?”

“It had to be done,” said Qobras. “The Brotherhood can never allow Atlantis to be found.” He frowned. “Least of all by Kristian Frost. Funding intermediaries like the Wildes … he knows we’re watching him.”

“What… what if Frost suspects I was working for you?” Jack asked nervously.

“You’ll have to convince him that there was an accident. We can fly you to ten kilometers from Xulaodang—there should be very little risk of your being seen with us. Then you can walk back to the village and contact Frost, give him the bad news: that you were the only survivor of an avalanche, a rock fall, whatever you choose.” Qobras held out a hand. “The radio?”

Jack dug into his pack, returning to its owner the chunky transmitter he had used to give Qobras’s team the location of the Golden Peak. “I’ll have to talk to other people as well. The Chinese authorities, the U.S. embassy…”

“Just keep your story consistent, and your payment will be waiting for you by the time you get back to America. Should you discover that anyone else is trying to follow the path of the Wildes in the future, you’ll inform me at once, of course?”

“It’s what you pay me for,” Jack said sullenly.

A cold smile, then Qobras looked up to watch the helicopter approaching, its navigation lights aglow against the darkening sky.

Five minutes later it departed, leaving behind nothing but bodies.

New York City

Ten Years Later

Dr. Nina Wilde took a deep breath as she paused at the door, her reflection gazing pensively back at her in the darkened glass. She was dressed more formally than normal, a rarely worn dark blue trouser suit replacing her casual sweatshirts and cargo pants, shoulder-length auburn hair drawn back more severely than her usual loose ponytail. This was a crucial meeting, and even though she knew everyone involved, she still wanted to make as professional an impression as possible. Satisfied that she looked the part and hadn’t accidentally smudged lipstick across her cheeks, she psyched herself up to enter the room, almost unconsciously reaching up to her neck to touch her pendant. Her good-luck charm.

She’d found the sharp-edged, curved fragment of metal, about two inches long and scoured by the abrasive sands of Morocco, twenty years before while on an expedition with her parents when she was eight. At the time, her head full of tales of Atlantis, she’d believed it to be made of orichalcum, the metal described by Plato as one of the defining features of the lost civilization. Now, looked at with a more critical adult eye, she had come to accept that her father was right, that it was nothing more than discolored bronze, a worthless scrap ignored or discarded by whoever had beaten them to the site. But it was definitely man-made—the worn markings on its curved outer edge proved that—and since it was her first genuine find, her parents had eventually, after much persuasion of the typical eight-year-old’s highly repetitive kind, allowed her to keep it.

On returning to the United States, her father made it into a pendant for her. She had decided on the spur of the moment that it would bring her good luck. While that had remained unproven—her academic successes had been entirely down to her own intelligence and hard work, and certainly no lottery wins had been forthcoming—she knew one thing for sure: the one day she had not worn it, accidentally forgetting it in a mad morning rush when staying at a friend’s house during her university entrance exams, was the day her parents died.

Many things about her had changed since then. But one thing that had not was that she never let a day pass without wearing the pendant.

More consciously, she squeezed it again before letting her hand fall. She needed all the luck she could get today.

Steeling herself, she opened the door.

The three professors seated behind the imposing old oak desk looked up as she entered. Professor Hogarth was a portly, affable old man, whose secure tenure and antipathy towards bureaucracy meant he’d been known to approve a funding request simply on the basis of a mildly interesting presentation. Nina hoped hers would be rather more than that.

On the other hand, even the most enthralling presentation in history, concluded with the unveiling of a live dinosaur and the cure for cancer, would do nothing to gain the support of Professor Rothschild. But since the tightlipped, misanthropic old woman couldn’t stand Nina—or any other woman under thirty—she’d already dismissed her as a lost cause.

So that was one “no” and one “maybe.” But at least she could rely on the third professor.

Jonathan Philby was a family friend. He was also the man who had broken the news to her that her parents were dead.

Now everything rested on him, as he not only held the deciding vote but was also the head of the department. Win him over and she had her funding.

Fail, and …

She couldn’t allow herself even to think that way.

“Dr. Wilde,” said Philby. “Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon,” she replied with a bright smile. At least Hogarth responded well to it, even if Rothschild could barely contain a scowl.

Nina sat on the isolated chair before the panel.

“Well,” Philby said, “we’ve all had a chance to digest the outline of your proposal. It’s quite … unusual, I must say. Not exactly an everyday suggestion for this department.”

“Oh, I thought it was most interesting,” said Hogarth. “Very well thought out, and quite daring too. It makes a pleasant change to see a little challenge to the usual orthodoxy.”

“I’m afraid I don’t share your opinion, Roger,” cut in Rothschild in her clipped, sharp voice. “Ms. Wilde”—not Dr. Wilde, Nina realized. Miserable old bitch—“I was under the impression that your doctorate was in archaeology. Not mythology. And Atlantis is a myth, nothing more.”

“As were Troy, Ubar and the Seven Pagodas of Mahabalipuram—until they were discovered,” Nina shot back. Since Rothschild had obviously already made up her mind, she was going to go down fighting.

Philby nodded. “Then if you’d like to elaborate on your theory?”

“Of course.” Nina connected her travel-worn Apple laptop to the room’s projector. The screen sprang to life with a map covering the Mediterranean Sea and part of the Atlantic to the west.

“Atlantis,” she began, “is one of the most enduring legends in history, but those legends all originate from a very small number of sources—Plato’s dialogues are the best known, of course, but there are references in other ancient cultures to a great power in the Mediterranean region, most notably the stories of the Sea People who attacked and invaded the coastal areas of what are now Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Spain. But most of what we know of Atlantis comes from Plato’s Timaeus and Critias.”

“Both of which are undoubtedly fiction,” cut in Rothschild.

“Which brings me to the first part of my theory,” Nina said, having anticipated the criticism. “Undoubtedly, there are elements of all of Plato’s dialogues—not just Timaeus and Critias—that are fictionalized, to make it easier for him to present his points, in the same way that timelines are condensed and characters combined in modern-day biopics. But Plato wasn’t writing his dialogues as fiction. His other works are accepted as historical documents, so why not the two that mention Atlantis?”

“So you’re saying that everything Plato wrote about Atlantis is completely true?” asked Philby.

“Not quite. I’m saying that he thought it was. But he was told about it by Critias, working from the writings of his grandfather Critias the Elder, who was told about Atlantis as a child by Solon, and he was told about it by Egyptian priests. So what you have is a game of Chinese whispers—well, Hellenic whispers, I suppose”—Hogarth chuckled at the joke—“where there’s inevitably going to be distortion of the original message, like making a copy of a copy of a copy. Now, one of the areas where inaccuracies are most likely to have been introduced over time is in terms of measurements. I mean, there’s an oddity about Critias, which contains almost all of Plato’s detailed descriptions of Atlantis, that is so obvious nobody ever seems to notice it.”

“And what would that be?” Hogarth asked.

“That all the measurements Plato gives of Atlantis are not only neatly rounded off, but are also in Greek units! For example, he says that the plain on which the Atlantean capital stood was three thousand stadia by two thousand. First, that’s one precisely proportioned plain, and second, it’s amazingly convenient that it would match a Greek measurement so exactly—especially considering that it came from an Egyptian source!” Nina found it hard to temper her enthusiasm but tried to rein it back to a more professional level. “Even if the Atlantean civilization used something called a stadium, it’s unlikely it would have been the same size as the Egyptian one—or the larger Greek one.”

Rothschild pursed her lips sourly. “This is all very interesting,” she said, in a tone suggesting she thought the exact opposite, “but how does this enable you to find Atlantis? Since you don’t know what the actual Atlantean measurements were, and nor does anyone else, I don’t see how any of this helps.”

Nina took a long, quiet breath before answering. She knew that what she was about to say was the potential weak spot in her theory; if the three academics staring intently at her didn’t accept her reasoning, then it was all over …

“It’s actually key to my proposal,” she said, with as much confidence as she could muster. “Simply put, if you accept Plato’s measurements—with one stadium being a hundred and eighty-five meters, or just under six hundred and seven feet—then Atlantis was a very large island, at least three hundred and seventy miles long and two hundred and fifty wide. That’s larger than England!” She indicated the map on the screen. “There aren’t many places for something that size to hide, even underwater.”

“What about Madeira?” asked Hogarth, pointing at the map. The Portuguese island was some four hundred miles off the African coast. “Could that be a location for what was left of the island after it sank?”

“I considered that at one point. But the topography doesn’t support it. In fact, there’s nowhere in the eastern Atlantic that the island Plato describes could be located.”

Rothschild snorted triumphantly. Nina gave her as scathing a look as she dared before returning to the map. “But it’s this fact that forms the basis of my theory. Plato said that Atlantis was located in the Atlantic, beyond the Pillars of Heracles—which we know today as the Straits of Gibraltar, at the entrance to the Mediterranean. He also said that, converted to modern measurements, Atlantis was almost four hundred miles long. Since there’s no evidence that would reconcile both those statements, either Atlantis isn’t where he said it was … or his measurements are wrong.”

Philby nodded silently. Nina still couldn’t judge his mood—but suddenly got the feeling that he had already made his decision, one way or the other. “So,” he said, “where is Atlantis?”

It was not a question Nina had expected to be asked quite so soon, as she’d planned to reveal the answer with a suitable dramatic flourish at the end of her pre sentation. “Uh, it’s in the Gulf of Cádiz,” she said, a little flustered as she pointed at a spot in the ocean about a hundred miles west of the Straits of Gibraltar. “I think.”

“You think?” sneered Rothschild. “I hope you have more to back up that statement than mere guesswork.”

“If you’ll let me explain my reasoning, Professor Rothschild,” said Nina with forced politeness, “I’ll show you how I reached that conclusion. The central premise of my theory is that Plato was right, and that Atlantis did actually exist. What he got wrong was the measurements.”

“Rather than the location?” asked Hogarth. “You’re ruling out any of the modern theories that maintain Atlantis was actually Santorini, off Crete, and the supposed Atlantean civilization was really Minoan?”

“Definitely. For one thing, the ancient Greeks knew about the Minoans already. Also, the time scales don’t match. The volcanic eruption that destroyed Santorini was about nine hundred years before Solon’s time, but the fall of Atlantis was nine thousand years before.”

“The ‘power of ten’ error by Solon has been widely accepted as a way to connect the Minoans with the Atlantis myth,” Rothschild pointed out.

“The Egyptian symbols for one hundred and one thousand are totally different,” Nina told her. “You’d have to be blind or a complete idiot to confuse them. Besides, Plato explicitly states in Timaeus that Atlantis was in the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean. Plato was a pretty smart guy; I’m guessing he could tell east from west. I believe that in the process of the story being passed from the Atlanteans themselves to the ancient Egyptians, then from the Egyptian priests of almost nine thousand years later to Solon, then from Solon to Plato over several generations of Critias’s family … the measurements got messed up.”

Philby raised an eyebrow. “Messed up?”

“Okay, maybe that’s not the most scientific way I could have put it, but it gets the point across. Even though the names were the same—feet, stadia and so on—the different civilizations used different units of measurement. Each time the story went from one place to another, and the numbers were rounded off, and even exaggerated to show just how incredible this lost civilization really was, the error grew. My assumption here is that whatever unit the Atlanteans used that was translated as a stadium, it was considerably smaller than the Hellenic unit.”

“That’s quite an assumption,” said Rothschild.

“I have logical reasoning to back it up,” she said. “Critias gives various measurements of Atlantis, but the most important ones relate to the citadel on the island at the center of the Atlantean capital’s system of circular canals.”

“The site of the temples of Poseidon and Cleito,” noted Philby, rubbing his mustache.

“Yes. Plato said the island was five stadia in diameter. If we use the Greek system, that’s slightly over half a mile wide. Now, if an Atlantean stadium is smaller, it can’t be too much smaller, because Critias says there’s a lot to fit on to that island. Poseidon’s temple was the biggest, a stadium long, but there were other temples as well, palaces, bathhouses … That’s almost as packed as Manhattan!”

“So how big—or rather, how small—did you deduce an Atlantean stadium to be?” Hogarth asked.

“The smallest I think it could be would be two thirds the size of the Greek unit,” explained Nina. “About four hundred feet. That would make the citadel over a third of a mile across, which when you scale down Poseidon’s temple as well leaves just about enough room to fit everything in.”

Hogarth made some calculations on a piece of notepaper. “By that measurement, the island would be, let’s see …”

Nina instantly did the mathematics in her head. “It would be two hundred and forty miles long, and over a hundred and sixty wide.”

Hogarth scribbled away for a few seconds to reach the same result. “Hmm. That wouldn’t just be in the Gulf of Cádiz … it would be the Gulf of Cádiz.”

“But you have to take into account the probability of other errors,” said Nina. “The three-thousand-by-two-thousand-stadia figure Plato gave for the island’s central plain is clearly rounded up. It could have been exaggerated for effect as well, if not by Plato then certainly by the Egyptians, who were trying to impress Solon. I think you have to assume an error factor of at least fifteen percent. Maybe even twenty.”

“Another assumption, Ms. Wilde?” said Rothschild, a malevolent glint in her eyes.

“Even with a twenty percent margin, the island would still be over a hundred and ninety miles long,” added Hogarth.