The Hunt For Atlantis

“Why did your parents go there?”

“Again, I don’t know. They found something, but they didn’t tell me what it was.” She frowned. “Which was weird in itself, because normally I was a part of everything.”

“Maybe they didn’t want to distract you from your exams.”

“Maybe.” Nina’s frown didn’t go away. “But the last thing I ever heard from them was by postcard, believe it or not. From Tibet. I still have it, actually.”

“What did it say?”

“Not much, just that they were about to set off from a Himalayan village called Xulaodang. They were expecting to be gone for a week, but…”

Chase put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “Hey. We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s funny, though. I hadn’t even considered the Nazi connection until now. And my father did go to Germany the year before… Maybe that’s what they had, something from the Ahnenerbe expeditions. Something that led them to Tibet. But why wouldn’t they tell me?”

“ ’Cause they didn’t want you to know they were using something from the Nazis?” Chase suggested.

“I suppose.” She sat up with a sad sigh. “Not that it mattered. They were caught in an avalanche somewhere south of Xulaodang, and almost the entire expedition was killed. The bodies were never found, so whatever they had with them was lost.”

Chase raised an eyebrow. “Almost everyone? Who survived?”

“Jonathan.”

“Jonathan? What, you mean Philby? The Prof?”

“Yes, of course. I thought you knew. He was on the expedition with them. That’s why we’re so close-even though I’m sure there wasn’t anything he could have done, he said he felt responsible for not being able to save them. He’s been looking out for me ever since.”

Chase leaned back on the bed. “Philby, huh?”

“What?”

He looked away. “Nothing. Just never knew that was how you knew each other.”

“He worked with my parents for years, they were friends.”

“Hmm.” Something seemed to be on Chase’s mind, but before she could ask him about it, she heard knocking from outside. Not on Chase’s door, but from her own cabin. “In here!”

Kari cautiously leaned through the door. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

Chase snorted mockingly. “I wish!”

“I wanted to let you know that we’re almost at the coordinates. Captain Matthews is going to use the ship’s thrusters to hold position rather than drop anchor-we don’t want to risk damaging anything down there-and then we’re going to lower the subs. I thought you might want to watch.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Nina, standing up. “Eddie, are you coming?”

“Give me a couple of minutes,” said Chase. “You’ll be on the sub deck, right?”

The design of the Evenor meant there were few places where anyone could stand outside the superstructure without being in plain sight of the fore or aft decks. But after considerable exploration, Jonathan Philby found a short gangway on the second level that was open to the sea on one side.

He looked around nervously. Forward, he could see the extremities of the crane lifting the larger of the two submersibles into position. For his GPS receiver to work, its antenna needed to have unobstructed line of sight to at least half the sky-but leaning over the side of the ship to get coverage put him at risk of being seen.

There was no choice. He had to make the call.

The compact satellite phone had been a constant companion ever since he had informed Qobras that the Frosts had contacted him. Simply removing it from concealment inside his belongings sent him into a state of anxiety; if any of his companions saw it, even Nina, suspicions would immediately be raised, and it would all be over. Finding an opportunity in Gibraltar to give the Evenor’s approximate destination had been relatively stress-free, but trying to pass on the Nereid’s final position in Brazil without being discovered had almost given him a panic attack.

This was little better. The doors at each end of the gangway had no windows. At any moment, somebody could walk through them. He waited anxiously for the connection to be made…

“Yes?” said a voice. Starkman.

“It’s Philby. I don’t have much time. We’re almost at our destination-here are my current coordinates.” He relayed the figures from his GPS unit. “The Evenor’s final position will be a few miles west of there.”

“The Evenor’s final position will be eight hundred feet down from there,” said Starkman. “We’re already on our way. Good work, Jack. You’ll be rewarded.”

“The only reward I want is to get out of this.” Philby wiped sweat from his brow. “It’ll all be over, right?”

“Oh yes.” Starkman’s voice was firm. “The hunt for Atlantis ends here.”

The two submersibles were lowered into the ocean, one on each side of the Evenor. Their pilots were already inside; the “cowboys,” crewmen in wetsuits standing on top of the vessels, checked that their systems were in order and the communications umbilicals properly connected before releasing them from the cranes. Once free, the submersibles dropped without ceremony beneath the waves. The cowboys were picked up by a Zodiac, which returned them to a dock at the fantail.

With only eight hundred feet of water to penetrate, the descent took less than ten minutes. Nina had pride of place in the lab before the various monitor screens, Kari sitting next to her. Philby, Chase and Castille watched over their shoulders, as did a handful of the Evenor’s crew.

Nina found the whole experience disorienting. Each of the two large screens in front of her displayed exactly what the pilots were seeing inside their pressure spheres, using an autostereoscopic LCD display that gave a 3-D image without needing special glasses. For most of the descent the illusion of depth was barely apparent, but every so often a fish would pass in front of the submersibles’ scanning lasers and leap out of the screen in a flash of ghostly night-vision green.

“Seven-fifty feet,” said Trulli over the communications link. “We’re in the pipe, five by five. Slowing descent.”

“Evenor, please confirm bearing to target,” Baillard said.

“Atragon, turn to two-zero-zero degrees,” Kari said into her headset. “You’re less than three hundred meters away. Sharkdozer, hold position until contact is confirmed.”

“We should be able to see it by now,” Trulli complained. The seabed swung into sharp dimensional relief in front of Nina as he turned his vessel, dropping the nose slightly to point the lasers downwards. The resolution was high enough for her to pick out crabs scuttling over the rippled sediment.

She turned her attention to the view from Baillard’s submersible, which was now advancing at walking pace, hanging about twenty feet above the seabed. A smaller screen showed the spotlit view from a standard video camera, but the LIDAR image extended much farther.

The sea floor rose ahead.

“Evenor, I have something here,” Baillard reported. “Getting a very strong sonar return… it’s not silt. Something solid coming up, and it’s big. Could be a shipwreck…”

“It’s no shipwreck,” Nina whispered as the object came into view on the 3-D screen. She recognized the shape