Atlantis

There was a long silence while the others digested her words. Jack tried not to let his emotions get in the way as he turned over all the possibilities. He shrank from putting her in danger, but he knew she was right. A look at her expression confirmed he had little choice.

“All right.” He stood up. “I invited Katya along, so this is my call. Open a secure channel and patch me through to Vultura.”

CHAPTER 6

Jack raised his binoculars and levelled them at the far-off speckle that was the only point of reference between sea and sky. Even though it was now dark he could make out every detail of the distant vessel, the optical enhancer intensifying the available light to give an image as clear as day. He could just read the Cyrillic letters below the bow.

Vultura. How very appropriate, he thought. She was exactly that, a hideous scavenger lurking around the kill zone until the time was right to pounce and devour the fruits of others’ labour.

Tom York stood beside him. “Project 911,” he said, following Jack’s gaze. “The Russians call them escort ships, the equivalent of corvettes and frigates in NATO code. This is the latest, produced after the events of 2001 for anti-terrorist patrolling. About the same as our Sea-class vessels but sleeker. The machinery’s in another league altogether. Two GT diesel gas turbines producing 52,000 hp for a cruising speed of 36 knots. Turbojet-boosters capable of hydrofoil speeds of 60 knots, almost as fast as a light aircraft. Vultura is one of half a dozen decommissioned when the Russian Navy went through its latest downsizing. The Oslo Treaty requires the Russian Federation to sell surplus warships only to governments recognized by the UN, so this one must have been picked up in some shady deal even before it left the shipyard.”

Jack trained his binoculars on the pods on either side of Vultura’s stern, then shifted slightly to take in the forward turret with its barrel trained directly at them.

York noticed his movement. “Tulamahzavod 130 mm automatic cannon. Computerized GPS ranging that makes adjustments instantaneously on impact. Capable of firing a uranium-depleted armour-piercing shell that would punch a hole through Seaquest’s command module at twenty miles.”

They were standing on Seaquest’s helipad, the cool breeze gently ruffling the IMU flag at the stern. They had watched anxiously as Katya, now dressed more appropriately in an IMU jumpsuit, drove one of Seaquest’s Zodiacs into the darkness, the twin 90 hp outboards powering her over to Vultura in a matter of minutes. Before she descended the ladder, Jack had quietly taken her aside, running one last time over the operation of the Zodiac and reiterating York and Howe’s briefing on her possible course of action if everything went badly wrong.

She had only been gone for twenty minutes and already the waiting seemed interminable. Costas decided to call a teleconference with Dillen and Hiebermeyer to occupy Jack’s mind more productively, and the two men went into the navigation room behind Seaquest’s bridge.

Costas tapped a command and the monitor in front of them came to life, revealing two figures as clearly as if they had been sitting on the opposite side of the table. Jack shifted closer to Costas so their image would be similarly projected. They would miss Katya’s expertise but a teleconference seemed the obvious way to conclude the proceedings. Dillen and Hiebermeyer had stayed on in Alexandria to await news from Seaquest, and Costas had already filled them in on the threat posed by Vultura.

“Professor. Maurice. Greetings.”

“Good to see you again, Jack,” Dillen said. “I’d like to start where we left off, with these symbols.”

At the touch of a key they could call up a set of images that had been scanned in earlier. In the lower right- hand corner of the monitor they were currently viewing Costas’ own triumphant discovery, the remarkable golden disc from the Minoan wreck. The strange symbols on the surface had been digitally enhanced so they could study them more closely.

Hiebermeyer leaned forward. “You said you’d seen that central device before, Jack.”

“Yes. And those symbols running round the edge, the little heads and paddles and so on. I suddenly realized where as we were flying out of Alexandria. The Phaistos discs.”

Costas looked on questioningly as Jack called up an image of two pottery discs, both seemingly identical and covered by a spiralling band of miniature symbols. One symbol looked remarkably like the device on the papyrus and the gold disc. The rest looked otherworldly, especially the little heads with hooked noses and Mohican haircuts.

“Aztec?” Costas hazarded.

“Nice try, but no,” Jack replied. “Much closer to home. Minoan Crete.”

“The disc on the left was found near the palace of Phaistos almost a hundred years ago.” Dillen clicked on the screen as he spoke, the projector flashing up a view of a wide stone forecourt overlooking a plain with snow-capped mountains in the background. After a moment the image reverted to the discs. “It’s clay, about sixteen centimetres across, and the symbols were impressed on both sides. Many are identical, stamped with the same die.”

Dillen enlarged the right-hand disc. “This one came up with the French excavations last year.”

“Date?” Hiebermeyer demanded.

“The palace was abandoned in the sixteenth century BC, following the eruption of Thera. Unlike Knossos, it was never reoccupied. So the discs may have been lost about the same time as your shipwreck.”

“But they could date earlier,” Jack suggested.

“Much earlier.” Dillen’s voice had a now-familiar edge of excitement. “Costas, what do you know about thermoluminescence dating?”

Costas looked perplexed but replied enthusiastically. “If you bury mineral crystals they gradually absorb radioactive isotopes from the surrounding material until they’re at the same level. If you then heat the mineral the trapped electrons are emitted as thermoluminescence.” Costas began to guess where the question was leading. “When you fire pottery it emits stored TL, setting its TL clock back to zero. Bury it and the pottery begins to reabsorb isotopes at a set rate. If you know this rate as well as the TL level of the surrounding sediment you can date the clay by heating it and measuring the TL emission.”

“How precisely?” Dillen asked.

“The latest refinements in optically stimulated luminescence allow us to go back half a million years,” Costas replied. “That’s the date for burnt hearth material from the earliest Neanderthal sites in Europe. For kiln-fired pottery, which first appears in the fifth millennium BC in the Near East, combined TL-OSL can date a sherd to within a few hundred years if the conditions are right.”

Costas had built up a formidable expertise in archaeological science since joining IMU, fuelled by his conviction that most of the questions Jack posed about the distant past would one day be resolved by hard science.

“The second disc, the one discovered last year, was fired.” Dillen picked up a sheet of paper as he spoke. “A fragment was sent to the Oxford Thermoluminescence Laboratory for analysis, using a new strontium technique which can fix the date of firing with even greater accuracy. I’ve just had the results.”

The others looked on expectantly.

“Give or take a hundred years, that disc was fired in 5500 BC.”

There was a collective gasp of astonishment.

“Impossible,” snorted Hiebermeyer.

“That’s a little earlier than our wreck,” Costas exclaimed.

“Just four thousand years earlier,” Jack said quietly.

“Two and a half millennia before the palace at Knossos.” Hiebermeyer was still shaking his head. “Only a few centuries after the first farmers arrived on Crete. And if that’s writing, then it’s the earliest known by two thousand years. Near Eastern cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics don’t appear until the late fourth millennium BC.”

“It seems incredible,” Dillen replied. “But you’ll soon see why I’m convinced it is true.”