The Hunt For Atlantis

fixed in one position, and his inability to bend inside the suit made it a cumbersome process.

He reached the stairs. If the structure was like the one in Brazil, they would lead to the vast main chamber. He directed his flashlight down them. Water reflected the beam back at him, shimmering patterns rolling over the walls and ceiling.

“Good thing we didn’t take off our helmets,” he said, crossing the top of the stairway to check the wall on the other side. “If the water pressure outside’s at twenty-five ATA, then the air in here and in the temple will be as well.”

“You mean the temple itself isn’t flooded?” asked Kari.

“Only partly. The floor in here’s higher than the temple, but the ceiling’s at about the same height. There must be air trapped in there as well.”

Her voice filled with frustration. “If only we had time to investigate! It’s astounding that the temple survived the deluge.”

“Guess they really built ’em to last back then. How are you doing?”

Another flash from her camera. “About half finished.”

Castille stood by the entrance, watching the slight shifts of the fiber-optic cable as Chase moved around inside. Of all the times for Qobras to show up! Chase was undoubtedly right: somebody had given their location away to the opposition. But who?

At only a meter from the stone wall, the lights of his deep suit overpowered the stronger but more diffuse spotlights on the Atragon. So he didn’t notice as the glow slowly became brighter, the lights on Baillard’s submersible joined by another source…

Up in the Evenor’s pilothouse, Matthews observed the approaching ship through a pair of powerful binoculars. It was now three miles away, and still heading for them.

Definitely a deep-sea survey ship, a submersible crane on its foredeck, which meant it was almost certainly the one Qobras had chartered. Somehow he had found out about the true location of Nina Wilde’s discovery and directed it here at full speed. And in another few minutes it would reach the two-mile mark, at which point he would have no choice but to consider it a threat.

No sign of any boats being launched, however, even though a group of men in a Zodiac could reach the stationary Evenor much sooner than the ship itself. It looked as though they meant to close right in.

In which case, they were in for a surprise. The weapons Kristian Frost had provided-a P-90 submachine gun for each member of the crew, plus a pair of heavy machine guns and a number of rocket-propelled grenades and launchers-would be more than enough to drive off anyone who tried to take his ship.

No boats…

No boats being launched-for that matter, no boats even ready to be launched.

And if that was the crane for a submersible… where the hell was the sub itself?

Matthews realized with shock the significance of that fact, but too late to act upon it as the door of the pilothouse burst open.

In the control sphere of the Atragon, Baillard drummed a tune on one of the control panels with his fingertips. On the 3-D screen, he could see Castille standing with his back to him, observing the entrance to the sunken temple.

That was one disadvantage of the LIDAR system, he mused. The lack of color made it very dull to look at when nothing was happening. He glanced up at the monitor showing the feed from the submersible’s main video camera. The view wasn’t much better in color, the building obscured by too much light-sapping water for any real detail to be visible…

What the hell?

Something had just moved in the corner of his vision, outside the small porthole.

A fish? No, there was something different about the view…

It hit like ice.

The lighting had changed!

He hadn’t moved the exterior spotlights, and the sub was stationary…

“Evenor!” he yelled into the radio. “Evenor, there’s another sub-”

A loud crackle in his headphones, then silence. All the indicator LEDs on the communications console flicked from green to red.

“Evenor! Do you copy? What’s happening?”

The answer came a moment later. Something hit the top of the hull with a dull clonk. A long object snaked down in front of the LIDAR turret.

The umbilical. Neatly severed.

And now more light flooded through the porthole as his unseen attacker closed in.

“Shit!” He grabbed the controls, bringing the motors to life and blasting the Atragon off the seabed in an explosive cloud of silt. “Hugo! I’m under attack! Get out of there!”

Something plowed into his vessel, slamming him sideways against the steel wall.

A harsh buzz in Chase’s ear made him wince. His suit relay passed it on to Kari, who gasped in surprise. “What was that?”

All the Evenor’s underwater feeds went blank simultaneously, some of the screens turning black, others bright blue with a “No Signal” warning.

“What was that?” Nina asked.

“That, Dr. Wilde,” said a new voice from behind her, “was the end of your expedition.”

Nina whirled. “You!”

Starkman stared coldly down at her, flanked by two of his wet-suited men. All three had their guns raised, covering the occupants of the room. “If you’d like to join the rest of the crew on the aft deck?”

Castille spun at the garbled shout in his headphones, to see a second sub bearing down on the Atragon!

Baillard’s vessel had just started to rise from the seabed as the intruder, a smaller conventional submersible with a thick steel cage around its bubble cockpit, rammed into its side. The Atragon was driven back down, almost disappearing inside a roiling cloud of silt.

“Merde!” he gasped, before recovering his composure. “Edward! Edward, can you hear me? Kari!”

There was no answer. The radio relay on the submersible was down, cutting him off from the other divers.

The attacker rose from the cloud and made a sharp turn, thrusters swiveling and pumping out swirling toroids of bubbles in their wake. Its spotlights picked out white and orange metal within the billowing sediment.

Castille thought it was going to ram the Atragon again, but instead it extended its manipulator arm. Something was clutched between the pincers, a blocky package that it placed almost delicately against the side of the command sphere…

Baillard knew something bad was about to happen as he saw the shadow of the other sub’s outstretched manipulator arm move across the porthole. A second later, something rasped against the pressure sphere.