II about two hundred and eighty nautical miles north of San Salvador and a hundred miles west of the leading edge of the volcano at about 0900 tomorrow morning, after spending the night steaming south from Bermuda at maximum speed. That puts San Salvador within range of the Lynx using long-range fuel tanks, with the payload limited to two of us and basic diving equipment. It would be a close-run thing, but we could be dropped on the reef, do the dive, be winched up to the helicopter and then be flown out beyond the leading edge of the hurricane as it tracks west, to reach Seaquest II ’s position of safety to the north. If the storm comes on more quickly, the Lynx could drop us, return to the ship and stand off while the storm rolled over us, and then return to pick us up afterwards. It would be a risk for us, but if we were able to get under the collapsed material we think is clogging up the blue hole, we might be protected from the worst of the hurricane.’
‘What about permission to dive in the weapons test range?’ Jack said.
‘We might have to wing it. We don’t want to excite interest, and we haven’t got time to go through official channels. It hasn’t been used for that since the flight of Liberator FK-856 in 1945. And don’t think permission to dive is the issue that would be troubling Macalister, Jack. I think the issue will be that hurricane, and the possibility of Seaquest II becoming another statistic in the Bermuda Triangle.’
Jack remembered their dive at Atlantis three days before, under the noses of the international monitoring team and into a live volcano, with Seaquest II well within the danger zone. He had sworn he would never put Macalister through anything like that again. Seaquest II would have to stay outside the predicted path of the hurricane. It would all be down to the helicopter. ‘We’d need a pilot with a hell of a lot of nerve,’ he murmured. ‘He’d be seeing the leading edge of the hurricane on the horizon ahead of him. He’d have to go against all his instincts and fly directly towards it, then after dropping us make the decision himself whether to wait for us. I’d never ask it of one of our regular crew.’
‘What about your old RAF friend Paul? I thought he was at a bit of a loose end now. Didn’t you say he was a qualified helicopter pilot too?’
Jack thought hard. It might work. He nodded. ‘Okay. Stay online. I’ll use my cell phone to try to contact him.’ Three days before, after leaving Jack at the old NATO base beside the Nazi bunker in Germany, Paul had flown his Tornado to RAF Lyneham in England before taking leave ahead of his new posting at the Ministry of Defence. Jack prayed that he would have been unable to wrench himself away from aircraft for his final few days as an operational pilot and would still be at Lyneham. The second IMU Embraer was at its base in Cornwall at the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose, and could be at Lyneham in a matter of a few hours to pick Paul up and fly him out over the Atlantic.
Jack dialled, and a voice answered almost immediately. ‘Paul? This is Jack. You remember our parting words on the tarmac in Germany? I’ve got a job that might interest you.’ He quickly ran through a plan that would get Paul to Bermuda and out to Seaquest II overnight, in time to familiarize himself with the custom specs of the IMU Lynx and take off before dawn with Jack and Costas and their diving equipment for the Bahamas. Paul instantly agreed, and Jack gave him the IMU number to liaise with the Embraer pilot. Then he clicked off his phone and sat still for a moment, hearing only the morning chorus of the birds outside the windows. He stared at the aerial photo of the reef on the screen, trying to see in his mind’s eye down into the collapsed blue hole and imagining what might lie there. He spoke again into the webcam. ‘Okay, guys. Paul thinks we can do it.’
‘On a wing and a prayer, Jack,’ Lanowski said, slightly awkwardly.
‘Where have I heard that before?’ Costas said.
‘It’s what Paul used to say about our student expeditions when I first knew him, when we seemed to survive on minimal equipment and lots of duct tape.’
‘Sounds like we might be going back there again, Jack. With the Lynx stretching the envelope, it’s just going to be whatever equipment we can carry on our backs.’
Jack opened the directory on his cell phone. ‘I need to put in a call to the Bahamas.’
‘Anyone we know?’ Costas said.
‘The office of the Prime Minister. He was a student contemporary of mine at Cambridge.’
‘The old boys’ network?’
‘Something like that. I don’t want anyone near that site before we dive, but I want to arrange for backup from the Royal Bahamas Defence Force. If all goes well and we find what we want to find, the site will need round-the- clock surveillance while we get in a full IMU excavation team to reveal everything that might lie within that blue hole. I’ll see if the Prime Minister can have his people call through directly to Captain Macalister. Meanwhile, the next you’ll hear from me will be from the tarmac in Bermuda. Thank James Macleod at IMU for me. Excellent work, Jacob.’
‘I’ve just remembered something,’ Costas said. ‘Wasn’t San Salvador where Christopher Columbus first made landfall in the Americas?’
Jack paused. He had barely allowed himself to think about the archaeology. Since leaving Atlantis three days before, the extraordinary seven-thousand-year-old trail they were on had been overshadowed by the present-day danger. For a moment he focused his mind back on that sunken chamber they had found inside the volcano at Atlantis, on the fantastic vision it had given him of events at the very dawn of civilization. They were following perhaps the greatest ancient voyage of discovery ever made, not some hazy exodus lost in time but the voyage of one man who had become enshrined in the foundation myths of the Western world. Yet what they had found in that chamber in Atlantis, what they might find ahead of them now, would reveal a truth about the past that could rock those foundations to the core. Jack felt the familiar surge of excitement coursing through him. He looked intently at Costas. ‘Not just Christopher Columbus. We might find that he was pipped to the post seven thousand years before. If we’re lucky.’
‘A wing and a prayer, Jack,’ Costas said, grinning.
‘If that hurricane allows us. Over and out.’ Jack reached over and switched off the Skype. For a few moments he sat in silence, trying to clear his mind and relax. As soon as Mikhail returned, he would get Rebecca and Jeremy to collect their things and drive them to Syracuse airport. He suddenly needed to see Rebecca. The dark cloud that had hung over him since her kidnapping last year suddenly seemed finite, and for the first time he felt there was a chance they might see it disappear completely. He took a deep breath, and steeled himself. If the next twenty-four hours panned out as he had gambled. One horror would be taken out of the equation if they could recover the bacterium sample from Saumerre. As for the other, the Spanish influenza virus, they would only know whether that too survived, whether Hoffman had carried out the mission Himmler had given him, once they had dived into that hole. And with Saumerre’s people watching their every move, there was no time to waste. They could not risk Saumerre discovering their destination and getting there first.
He was no longer hearing the reversing sound of the propane truck; it had been replaced by the low roar of an auxiliary engine powering the pump. He leaned back and stretched, realizing how dog-tired he was, then reached down and drained the tepid coffee from his mug. He got up and climbed the steps towards Rebecca’s door, then glanced through the window towards the barn and saw the yellow top of the propane tanker parked beside his SUV. He walked towards one of Mikhail’s spotting scopes and peered out. Two men in dark overalls were talking to Jeremy at the rear of the truck, pulling the hose from its reel. He heard the screen door to the house slam and saw Rebecca walk up the path towards the truck wearing a fleece, her hair glistening from the shower. One of the men rolled up his sleeves and knelt down to reach under the truck. Jack took the caps off the spotting scope and trained it on the edge of the woods beyond the barn, remembering Mikhail’s concern about the proximity of the treeline. There was another problem in the morning mist: the likelihood that anyone in camouflage moving stealthily would be nearly invisible. He spotted a pair of deer, following their bobbing white tails until they disappeared beyond the trees. He moved the scope back towards the propane truck, and focused on the man who had stood back up and was rolling down his sleeves. Jack zoomed in, amazed at the quality of the optics. Suddenly he froze.
The man had a tattoo.
Jack took his hands off the scope to stop it wobbling, and stared. The man turned his wrist away to do up his sleeve. Then he turned it back, and Jack caught another glimpse. There was no doubt about it. He had seen that before, two years ago in the mountains of Afghanistan, through the scope of a Lee-Enfield rifle.
It was the tattoo of a tiger.
Jack turned and began to run.
