empty compartment with unmanned banks of instruments to his port and starboard sides. Had all hands managed to abandon ship before she went down?
The captain's quarters were empty, too. There was only a phonograph with a warped album. Conrad could still read the peeling label on the album: Die Walkure. Von Berg had been playing Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' over the loudspeakers when the sub went down.
But no sign of Baron von Berg himself. Nor a metallic Kriegs-marine briefcase. Maybe the legend was true, and von Berg never carried secret papers with him, telling everyone instead: 'It's all in my head.'
Conrad's hopes of finding anything were sinking fast.
He swam up the cramped fore-and-aft passageway through the galley and officers' quarters. A creeping claustrophobia washed over him as he slipped through the open hatch into the forward torpedo bay.
At one end were four circular hatches-the torpedo tubes. The atmospheric pressure gauges, frozen in time, told him that the Nausicaa had fired off at least three torpedos and drained her tubes to fire more when the Brits sank her. Only the No. 4 tube was flooded. The Baron of the Black Order obviously had not gone down without a fight.
Conrad turned to the bomb racks and found a large protrusion. He fanned away the accumulated silt. An object took form, and he realized he was staring at a human skull with black holes for eyes.
The bared teeth seemed to grin at him in the eerie deep. The skull had a silver plate screwed into one side- the legacy of a bullet to the head in Crete, Conrad had learned in his research.
SS General Ludwig von Berg. The Baron of the Black Order. The rightful king of Bavaria. That was what the old top-secret OSS report Conrad had stolen had said.
Conrad felt a shock wave in the water, and the Nausicaa seemed to lurch.
'Stavros!' he called into his radio, but there was no response.
Suddenly, the black holes in the baron's skull glowed a bright red, and his skeletal arm floated up as if to grab Conrad.
Conrad backed away from the skeleton, figuring that the water was playing tricks on him. Then he noticed that the glow actually came from something behind the skull. Indeed, the Baron of the Black Order seemed to be guarding something.
Conrad's heart pounded as he brushed away more silt, revealing an odd hammerhead-shaped warhead. He shined a light on it and ran his hands across the torpedo's slick casing.
It had no markings save for a code name stamped across the warhead's access panel: Flammenschwert. Conrad's rudimentary grasp of German translated it to mean 'Flaming Sword' or 'Sword of Fire.'
He recalled from his research that von Berg claimed to have developed a weapon that the Nazis were convinced could win them the war: an incendiary technology that allegedly was Atlantean in origin and could turn water into fire and even melt the ice caps.
Could this be the relic he was searching for that would prove Antarctica was Atlantis?
The mysterious glow was coming from inside the hammerhead cone of the torpedo, outlining the square access panel like a neon light. But this was no mere illumination. The light seemed to be consuming the water around the warhead like a fire consumes oxygen.
Conrad's dosimeter gauge registered no radiation, so he put the fingertip of his glove to the glowing seam of the access panel. It didn't burn his glove, but he could feel an unmistakable pull. The warhead was sucking in the water around it like a black hole.
He sensed another shock wave through the water and turned to see four shadowy figures with harpoon guns enter the torpedo bay.
They must be after the Flammenschwert! he thought. He'd rather sink the sub than let this weapon fall into anybody's hands.
He reached up for the blow valves above the four torpedo tubes and twisted the wheels, flooding three of them. The sub tilted forward toward the Calypso Deep, throwing the others back. The rumbling was deafening. Breathing hard in his mask, heaving as he kicked, he was swimming madly to escape the torpedo bay when a harpoon dart stabbed his thigh.
Grimacing in pain, Conrad grabbed his leg as three of the divers swarmed around him. He broke off the harpoon dart and stabbed in the gut the diver who had shot him. The diver doubled over as a cloud of blood billowed out of his wet suit. The other two had grabbed him, however, and before Conrad could tear away, their leader swam over, drew a dagger, and sliced through Conrad's lifeline.
Conrad watched in shock as silver bubbles rose up before his eyes like a Roman candle, literally taking his breath away.
Then he saw the dagger again, this time its butt smashing the glass of his mask. Water began filling the mask, and he inhaled some against his will. His life flashed by in a blur-his father the Griffter, his childhood in Washington, D.C., his digs around the world searching for Earth's lost 'mother culture,' meeting Serena in South America, then Antarctica…
Serena.
His lips tried to repeat the prayer that Serena had taught him, the last prayer of Jesus: 'Into Thy hands I commit my spirit.' But the words refused to come. He could only see her face, now fading away. Then darkness.
When Conrad opened his eyes again, the phantom divers were gone. He wasn't breathing, but his lungs weren't filled with water, either-laryngospasm had sealed his airway. He would suffocate instead of drowning if he didn't surface immediately.
He looked out through his shattered dive mask to see the skull of SS General Ludwig von Berg smiling at him. The fire had gone out of the baron's eyes. Also gone was the Flammenschwert warhead, along with the shadow divers. But the divers had left behind something for him: a brick of C4 explosive with a digital display slapped next to the torpedo's open casing.
The numbers read: 2:43…2:42…2:41…
On top of the C4 was a metal ball bearing that glowed like a burning ember from hell. It must have been extracted from the Flammenschwert, which probably contained thousands of these copperlike pellets inside its core. The bastards were going to verify the design by detonating just one tiny pellet, simulating on a small scale the device's explosive power. In the process, they were going to destroy him and the Nausicaa.
Conrad mustered the last of his strength and tried to swim out, but his leg caught on something-the skeletal hand of SS General Ludwig von Berg. The baron, it seemed, wanted to drag him to hell.
Conrad couldn't break free. The clock was down to 1:33.
Thinking quickly, he grabbed the baron's steel-plated skull with both hands and broke it off the skeleton. Slipping his fingers into the eyeholes as if the skull were a bowling ball, he brought it down on the finger bones clasping his injured leg and smashed them to pieces.
He was free, but his fingers were now stuck like a claw through the skull as another shock wave hit the Nausicaa.
The entire forward torpedo bay dropped like a broken table-silt and debris sliding past him to the front, further tipping the submarine over the edge of the Calypso Deep. Conrad's back slammed against the bomb rack, and he saw the compartment hatch and entire fore-aft passageway beyond rising like a great elevator shaft above him.
The Nausicaa was about to go down nose-first into the Calypso. Conrad had only seconds left. He positioned himself under the hatch, forcing himself to resist the temptation to panic. He held his body ramrod-straight, like a torpedo, his hands arched together with the skull over his head. Then he closed his eyes as everything collapsed around him.
For a moment he felt like a missile shooting up out of its silo, although he knew it was the silo that was sinking. Then he was clear. He looked down into the Calypso Deep as it swallowed the Nausicaa with the tiny pellet from the Flammenschwert still inside its belly.
The powerful wake of the plunging sub began to pull him down like a vertical riptide. He knew if he fought it, he'd go down with it. Instead he made long scissor kicks across the wake and over the rim of the crater, putting as much distance between him and the abyss as possible. There was a flash of light behind him, and the water suddenly heated up.
Conrad looked back over his shoulder in time to see a giant pillar of fire shoot straight up from the depths of
