of the AKSU had been numb for hours. Yet he knew how to compartmentalize pain, how to push away everything except what was needed to watch and wait. Years before he had learned that the true test of toughness was extreme endurance, the rare quality that had singled him out among all the other applicants for Special Forces.
He had taken his visor off and an acrid smell reached him before he sensed any movement.
“I managed to get up a brew.” Andy crept behind him and thrust a steaming mug under his face. “Some foul Soviet muck.”
Ben grunted but cradled the coffee gratefully in his free hand. They had no food other than the high-energy bars in their emergency packs, but had found some sealed water bottles in the wardroom and had made sure they were well hydrated.
“Anything yet?” Andy asked.
Ben shook his head. It had been almost eighteen hours since Jack and the others had left, a full day since they had last seen sunlight. Their watches told them it was early evening, yet with no link to the outside world they had little sense of the passage of time. Ahead of them their opponents had noisily consolidated their position below the escape hatch, periods of activity and raised voices punctuated by long silences. For hours they had endured the moans and wails of a wounded man until a muffled gunshot had put an end to it. Half an hour before there had been an intense commotion which Ben knew was the enemy submersible docking with their own deep submergence rescue vehicle, and he had heard the clatter of footsteps down the entry hatch. He had tapped a prearranged signal for Andy to join him in expectation of the worst.
“Here we go.”
Suddenly a torch shone down the passage towards them. Despite the harsh brightness neither man flinched. Ben put down the mug and flipped off the safety catch on the AKSU, and Andy pulled out the Makarov and melted into the darkness on the other side of the bulkhead.
The man’s voice that came down was hoarse and strained, the words half in English, half Russian.
“Crewmen of
Ben replied sharply in Russian. “Come any closer and we will destroy the submarine.”
“That will not be necessary.” The words this time were English and came from a woman. Ben and Andy kept their eyes averted, aware that a moment’s blindness in the torchlight could lose them their advantage. They could hear that she had advanced ahead of the man and stood only about five metres in front of them.
“You are pawns in other men’s games. Come over to us and you will be richly rewarded. You may keep your weapons.” The woman’s ingratiating tone made her accent seem even colder, harsher.
“I repeat,” Ben said. “One step closer.”
“You await your friends.” There was a contemptuous laugh. “Katya,” she spat out the word, “is an irrelevance. But I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Howard in Alexandria. Most interesting on the location of Atlantis. And most enjoyable to make his acquaintance and that of Dr. Kazantzakis again this morning.”
“You have been warned for the last time.”
“Your so-called friends are dead or captured. Your ship is destroyed. Nobody else knows the location of this submarine. Your enterprise is doomed. Join us and save your lives.”
Ben and Andy listened impassively, neither of them baulking or believing a word. Ben looked at Andy, then turned back.
“
Jack awoke with a start to the rays of morning sunlight playing across his face. He opened his eyes, looked round blearily, then shut them again. He must be dreaming, he thought. He was lying on his back in the middle of a king-sized bed on freshly laundered linen. The bed occupied one side of a cavernous room, its walls whitewashed and hung with half a dozen modernist paintings which all seemed vaguely familiar. Opposite him was a huge bay window, its tinted glass revealing a cloudless sky and a line of sun-bleached hills.
He began to raise himself and felt a stab of pain in his left side. He looked down and saw that a bandage covered his ribcage below a mass of bruising. Suddenly it all came back to him, their extraordinary adventure in the volcano, their final passage into the audience chamber, the image of Costas sprawled in agony and Katya standing beside him. He sat up with a jolt as he remembered her last word, his mind reeling in disbelief.
“Good morning, Dr. Howard. Your host is awaiting you.”
Jack looked up and saw a demure man of indeterminate age standing at the door. He had the Mongoloid features of central Asia, yet his English accent was as immaculate as his manservant’s uniform.
“Where am I?” Jack demanded gruffly.
“All in good time, sir. The bathroom?”
Jack looked in the direction the man had indicated. He knew there was little point in remonstrating and eased himself onto the richly hued mahogany floor. He padded into the bathroom, ignoring the Jacuzzi and opting instead for the shower. He returned to find new clothes laid out for him, an Armani black roll-neck shirt, white slacks and Gucci leather shoes, all in his size. With his three-day stubble and weather-beaten features he felt at odds with designer clothing, but he was thankful to be out of the E-suit with its unpleasant lining of congealed blood and seawater.
He smoothed back his thick hair and spotted the manservant hovering discreetly outside the doorway.
“Right,” Jack said grimly. “Let’s find your lord and master.”
As he followed the man down an escalator, Jack realized that the room he had occupied was one of a number of self-contained pods dotted around the ravines and slopes of the hillside, all linked together by a nexus of tubular passageways that radiated out from a central hub rising from the valley floor.
The edifice they were now entering was a vast circular building capped by a gleaming white dome. As they approached, Jack saw that the exterior panels had been angled to catch the morning sun as it shone down the valley, and below stood another battery of solar panels next to a structure that looked like a generating station. The whole complex seemed bizarrely futuristic, like a mock-up for a lunar station yet more elaborate than anything NASA had ever devised.
The attendant closed the doors behind Jack and he stepped guardedly into the room. Nothing about the utilitarian exterior had prepared him for the scene inside. It was an exact replica of the Pantheon in Rome. The vast space had precisely the dimensions of the original, capacious enough to accommodate a sphere more than forty- three metres in diameter, larger even than the dome of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. From the opening far above, a shaft of sunlight lit up the coffered vaulting, its gilt surface illuminating the interior just as the original would have done in the second century AD.
Below the dome the walls of the rotunda were broken by a succession of deep niches and shallow recesses, each flanked by marble columns and capped by an elaborate entablature. The floor and walls were inlaid with exotic marbles from the Roman period. At a glance Jack could identify the Egyptian red porphyry favoured by the emperors, green
To Jack, this was more than antiquarian whimsy on a grand scale. Instead of the catafalques of kings, the niches were filled with books and the recesses with paintings and sculpture. The huge apse beside Jack was an auditorium with rows of luxurious seats in front of a full-sized cinema screen, and computer workstations were dotted around the room. Directly opposite the apse was an immense window. It faced north; the distant ridge Jack had seen from his bedroom window here filled the view, with the sea to the left.
The most striking addition to the ancient scheme was in the very centre, an image at once supremely modern and completely in keeping with the Roman conception. It was a planetarium projector, gleaming on its pedestal like a Sputnik. In antiquity the initiate could gaze upwards and see order triumphing over chaos; here, though, the fantasy was taken one step further, into a dangerous realm of hubris the ancients would never have dared enter. To project an image of the night sky inside the dome was the ultimate illusion of power, the fantasy of total control over the heavens themselves.
It was the playroom of a man of culture and scholarship, Jack reflected, of incalculable wealth and indolence, someone whose ego knew no bounds and who would always seek to dominate the world around him.
“My small conceit,” a voice boomed. “Unfortunately I could not have the original so I built a copy. An improved version, you will agree. Now you understand why I felt so at home inside that chamber in the volcano.”
The remarkable acoustics meant the voice could have come from beside Jack, but in fact it emanated from a chair next to the window in the far wall. The chair swivelled round and Aslan came into view, his posture and red
