The Hunt For Atlantis

He tried to turn away. “I… Nina, I’m sorry, I…”

She grabbed him by his coat. “What do you know, Jonathan?”

“Come this way, Dr. Wilde,” said Qobras, pointing up the slope. Starkman pulled her away from Philby. Despite the cold, the professor was sweating.

The group trudged uphill, the second helicopter announcing its arrival with a biting spray of ice particles as it landed behind them. Qobras led the way, examining the rock face intently as he ascended. At last, he stopped.

“There,” he said. Nina looked where he was indicating. At first she saw nothing but snow and barren rock, the strata twisted to the vertical by eons of geological pressure, but upon closer inspection she spotted a patch of darkness against the cold blue-gray of the mountain.

A crack in the rock, an opening…

“Kind of a tight squeeze,” noted Starkman. At its widest, the crack was less than a foot across.

“There must have been another rock slide. Have the men bring the digging equipment.”

Starkman issued the order. Within minutes, another ten men arrived from the second helicopter. They set to work tearing into the pile of loose stones beneath the snow with picks. Before long the opening was clear enough to allow passage, but Qobras ordered his men to keep digging. “We need it wide enough to fit the bomb through.”

“Bomb?” gasped Nina. “What bomb?”

He shot her an almost impatient look. “This is not an archaeological expedition, Dr. Wilde. We came here to destroy the last link to Atlantis. Whatever lies inside this mountain, nobody else will ever see it.”

“You’re worse than the Taliban,” she growled. “They destroyed priceless artifacts out of dogma. You’re doing it for a conspiracy theory!”

“A conspiracy that I’m happy to say will end here. Once the last outpost is destroyed, every trace of the ancient Atlanteans will be gone forever.”

“So then what? You going to retire to the Bahamas? Or are you just going to keep on killing people you don’t like because of their DNA?” Qobras didn’t answer, looking back at the widening opening.

After another five minutes of activity, he finally seemed satisfied. “Bring the bomb,” he ordered. “We’re going inside.”

His men headed back to the helicopters as Qobras led the way into the cave, followed by Starkman and Philby. Nina came next, her two guards flanking her. Powerful flashlight beams flitted through the dark space. To Nina, it looked as though a natural cavern had been widened to form a passage leading into the mountain.

“Over here,” said Starkman, aiming his light off to one side. Nina gasped in surprise when she saw what he had found.

Bodies.

Five desiccated corpses stared silently back, their skin shriveled and reduced to parchment. The way they were sitting, in a row against one side of the cave, suggested to Nina that they had succumbed to starvation or exposure-but it also appeared that somebody had searched them after their death.

“The fourth expedition of the Ahnenerbe,” said Qobras grimly. “Jurgen Krauss and his men. They followed the path from Morocco to Brazil, and finally to Tibet.”

“The fourth expedition?” asked Nina. “There were only three.”

“Only three that were recorded. At least, in known records. There were other documents.” His tone became somber. “Your father came into possession of some of them. They were what led him first to Tibet, in search of the Golden Peak… and then to here.”

“Here?” said Nina, puzzled… but also with a growing sense of awful foreboding.

“This way.” Qobras directed his flashlight down the passage at the rear of the chamber, nodding at Starkman to bring Nina. Philby hung back, his face filled with fear.

And something else, Nina realized.

Guilt?

She followed Qobras down the passage. His light illuminated what lay at the end of the passage.

It was a tomb, an Atlantean tomb; the aggressive architecture and Glozel inscriptions were unmistakable. That realization, though, became insignificant when Nina saw what else was within the chamber.

More bodies.

But unlike the corpses of the Nazi expedition, these had not died peacefully. They lay against the walls in twisted, frozen poses of agony. She saw pockmarks in the stone behind them: bullet holes, surrounded by faded brown splashes that could only be long-dried blood.

And among the faces of the dead were…

Nina raised her hands to her mouth. “No…” she whispered. Qobras looked back at her, then gestured to Starkman, who pulled her forward. She resisted, only for him to drag her.

“No!” This time it was a wail, an uncontrolled release of horror and despair.

Time and cold had turned the skin a dry leathery brown, soft tissues long since decayed to leave the eye sockets as empty black holes. But Nina still recognized the faces. They had been in her thoughts every day for the past ten years.

Her parents.

They hadn’t died in an avalanche. They had died here, gunned down.

Murdered.

Starkman forced her forward, closer to the terrible reality pinned in Qobras’s light. She struggled and kicked at him, not wanting to look but unable to avert her gaze. “You did this!” she screamed at Qobras. “You killed them! You bastard, you fucker! I’ll fucking kill you!” The two guards moved as if to protect their boss, but he held up a hand for them to stop. They stood back and waited as Nina’s screams lost coherence, reduced to angry, anguished sobs.

“I’m sorry,” Qobras said in a low voice. “But it had to be done. Kristian Frost could not be allowed to obtain the secrets of the Atlanteans.”

“What secrets?” Nina cried bitterly. “There’s nothing here! It’s just a tomb!” Her eyes narrowed with hatred. “You killed my parents for nothing, you son of a bitch.”

“No…” Qobras slowly panned his flashlight around the walls. “I thought there was nothing here ten years ago, that the tomb had been plundered. But if the last inscription from the temple in Atlantis itself is true, there must be something more to this place.” He turned to the two guards. “Search every centimeter of the walls. Look for anything that might indicate another opening-a crack, a loose block, a keyhole-anything!” As they moved to obey, Qobras himself started examining the walls around him in minute detail. Starkman kept hold of Nina.

Her sobs of grief slowly died away… replaced by a cold, expressionless mask.

Almost expressionless. Only her eyes gave away the fury burning inside her.

The search took only a few minutes before one of the guards called out to Qobras. Everyone hurried to where he stood, carefully tracing a line almost concealed between the columns.

“Doors,” said Qobras, sliding a fingertip down the narrow gap. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to open them from outside. We’ll need to break them open.”

One of the guards was sent back to the helicopters to bring the necessary equipment. In the meantime, more of Qobras’s men arrived, hauling with them on a fattired cart the large crate Nina had seen being loaded onto the second helicopter. A chill of fear ran up her back. Even if the bomb it contained was only half the size of the crate, it would still be larger than a man.

The charges Qobras intended to use on the doors, however, were far smaller. A drill was used to carve out a fist-sized hole in the stone. Once the hole was made, Qobras placed the explosive-a fat disc the size of a silver dollar-into it.

“You’re just going to blow it up?” said Nina.

“Yes.”

“What about them?” She pointed at the bodies. “You going to blow them to pieces as well? It’s not enough that you killed them, now you’re going to desecrate them too?”