Atlantis

a scream and a clatter followed by retreating footsteps. Katya ran out behind Jack, her ears ringing from the gunfire. They were quickly joined by Ben and the three of them crouched side by side against the smashed base of the periscope housing.

“How many more?” Ben asked.

“Two, maybe three. We got one of them. If we can hold them in the passageway that’ll limit their field of fire.”

The two men ejected their magazines and reloaded. While Ben pressed the loose rounds from his pouch into the magazine, Katya looked at the scene of carnage beside them.

It was a sickening sight. Amid a slew of congealing blood and spent Uzi casings the man’s body sat bizarrely angled, his torso bent double and his head resting facedown. The bullets had torn apart his breathing pack, the cylinders and regulator array splattered with fragments of bone and flesh. In the space below was a ragged hole where his heart and lungs had been. A ruptured hose from his oxygen regulator had blown into the cavity, producing a bloody froth that hissed and bubbled in a grotesque parody of the man’s final breaths.

Katya knelt down and lifted the man’s head. She shuddered and quickly let go. Jack felt sure she recognized him. He reached over to put a hand on her shoulder and she turned round.

“There has been enough death in this boat.” She suddenly looked tired. “Now is the time to end it.”

Before Jack could stop her she stood up and raised both arms in surrender. She stepped into the gap between the periscopes.

“My name is Katya Svetlanova.” She spoke loudly in Russian, the words resonating through the chamber.

There was an immediate commotion and the sound of muffled conversation. At length a male voice responded in a dialect neither Jack nor Ben recognized. Katya lowered her arms and began a heated dialogue which lasted several minutes. She seemed in complete command of the situation, her voice exuding authority and confidence, whereas the man was wavering and deferential. After a final curt sentence she slumped down and shoved the pistol into her belt.

“He’s a Kazakh,” she said. “I told him we’d booby-trapped the passageways between here and the torpedo room. I said we’d only negotiate face to face with their leader. That won’t happen, but it’ll buy us time while they work out their next move.”

Jack looked at her. She had twice been instrumental in averting disaster, first by preventing an attack by Vultura in the Aegean and now by negotiating with the gunmen. It seemed that as long as she was present, their adversaries would keep their distance and bide their time.

“Those men,” he said. “I’m assuming they’re our friends from Vultura.”

“You are correct,” she replied quietly. “And they are utterly ruthless.”

“What do we do now?” Ben asked.

There was a dull thumping noise from far off in the submarine.

“There’s your answer,” Jack replied. It was a prearranged signal from Costas that the operation to cut through the hull was complete. Jack got up and led the other two out of the control room, skirting round the slick of blood still seeping out of the corpse by the dais. As they retreated down the corridor, Jack glanced back one last time at the wreckage of the room to make sure they were not being followed.

They left Ben squatting in the shadows beside the top of the loading chute. He had signalled his intention and waved Jack and Katya on. With only a magazine and a half at his disposal the odds were stacked against him, but Jack knew if it came to a showdown every round would find its mark.

It took only a few minutes for Jack and Katya to traverse the now familiar route down the chute and round the edge of the torpedo room. As they reached the opening in the grating, they wordlessly donned the SCLS packs they had left there, checking each other’s straps and activating the regulator consoles.

They knew what they had to do. There was nothing to be gained from lingering with Ben and Andy, a siege that could have only one outcome. Their defence rested on the potency of Katya’s threat and as soon as that failed their numbers would make no difference. This was their only chance, their only hope of reaching help while the storm raged overhead.

The stakes were terrifyingly high.

As they lowered themselves onto the bilge floor they could see Costas had already shut his visor and sealed his helmet. They quickly followed suit, but not before Katya handed her pistol to Andy at the console.

“You may have more need of this than me,” she said.

Andy nodded appreciatively and holstered the weapon before turning back to the screen. While Jack quickly recounted the stand-off in the control room, Costas finished retracting the telescopic arm. The laser had cut a perfect circle a metre and a half wide in the hull casing.

“It pivots on the hinge we inserted,” Andy said. “All I need to do now is reduce the air pressure in the chamber and it should spring outward like a hatch.”

They looked with mixed emotions at the casing, apprehensive about the perils awaiting them yet drawn by the overpowering excitement of a lost world beyond their wildest imaginings.

“OK,” said Costas. “Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER 17

Costas crouched through, careful to avoid the razor-sharp rim where the laser had cut into the casing. He reached forward to test the strength of the magnetized membrane and then turned to help Katya and Jack. Once they were safely through, he heaved the hatch shut, fearful that a tear in the membrane would cause uncontrollable flooding in the submarine. The flush join where the hatch closed was testament to the microsurgical precision of the laser.

Although the membrane was translucent there was scarcely any natural light at this depth, and it was further blocked by the rocky overhang which extended all the way to the submarine and cut them off from the sea outside.

When they activated their headlamps, all around them the light reflected off the crystalline lattice of the membrane, producing a brilliant shimmer of white. Ahead of them the cliff face seemed startlingly unfamiliar, the monochrome green of the hologram giving little sense of its lustrous surface. It was as if they were looking at an old-fashioned sepia photograph, a hazy border framing the tinted image of some long-lost grotto.

They walked slowly forward, their posture becoming upright as the tunnel widened. The membrane was rock-hard and provided a sure grip despite the trickle of water that ran down from the platform ahead. About eight metres in, they reached the point where the membrane had bonded magnetically with the cliff face. Costas led the way onto the stairs and crouched down to inspect the surface.

“Almost total absence of marine encrustation, not even algae. I’ve never seen a sea more dead than this one. If we took off our helmets this place would reek of rotten eggs from the hydrogen sulphide in the water.”

He joggled the volume setting on his communications console and looked over to make sure the others could hear. Jack murmured in acknowledgement but was preoccupied by the image in front of him. He and Katya stood side by side only a few metres from the darkness at the rear of the platform.

As Costas joined them, his headlamp added further definition to the scene. Directly in front was a rectilinear rock-cut niche about twice their height and three times as wide. It was recessed about three metres into the cliff face and had been polished to an immaculate finish. On the back wall was the image that had transfixed them on the hologram, the outline of a great double door.

Katya was the first to state the obvious, her voice taut with excitement.

“It’s gold!”

As their beams converged they were nearly blinded by the glare. Katya cautiously trained her headlamp on the lower edge below the brilliant shimmer.

“Gold-plated, I’d guess,” Costas said matter-of-factly. “Beaten and burnished and then attached to stone slabs underneath. There was plenty of river gold in the Caucasus at this period but it would have stretched the resource to make these solid gold. They would have been too soft anyway.”

Through the chink round the edge a fine sheen of water sprayed out from the cavity beyond. The light from