Adrian D'Hage - The Maya codex

They both looked at Arana. ‘If it’s meant to be, it will be,’ he said calmly. ‘When will you dive?’

O’Connor looked at his watch. ‘It’s nearly 11 p.m. now, and we’ve had a very long day. From a safety point of view, we’ll be more alert after a few hours’ sleep, not to mention a little more acclimatised to the altitude.’

F idel was waiting as O’Connor and Aleta, already in their wetsuits, walked down the dirt path to the jetty. The lake was like glass, the faint pink of dawn caressing the lake’s three sentinel volcanoes.

Across the lake, Sanders put down his night-vision binoculars and went inside to wake his partner. It was time to move.

O’Connor and Aleta made a slow and deliberate final check of the gear: cylinders, both stages of the regulators, tank-pressure gauges, depth gauges, compasses, BCDs – the buoyancy compensation devices – safety reels, weights, wrist dive computers, torches and dive lights. O’Connor checked the fastenings on the dive knife above Aleta’s booties and made a final check of his own.

Fidel eased the lancha away from the jetty and under O’Connor’s instruction, motored out to a point about fifty metres off the small promontory that jutted out into the lake. O’Connor took bearings on each of the three volcanoes and mentally calculated the backbearings.

‘Another ten metres, Fidel,’ he directed, pointing north-west. It took nearly ten minutes of manoeuvring and adjustment until O’Connor felt they were over the spot indicated on the map.

‘Keep the volcanoes on these two lines,’ O’Connor said, indicating directions to two prominent buildings on the far shores of the lake. He turned to Aleta. ‘Ready?’

Aleta nodded.

They sat on the gunwale and adjusted the straps on their big yellow fins. Aleta returned O’Connor’s ‘O’, her thumb and forefinger together, the rest of her fingers pointed upwards: the diver’s universal ‘I’m okay/are you okay?’ O’Connor put his regulator in his mouth, kept one hand over his mask, clamped the trailing hoses to his chest with the other, and rolled backwards into the lake. Out of habit, Aleta checked that the lake was clear behind her then followed O’Connor into the cold dark water. They both surfaced, and O’Connor gave the thumbs down signal to descend. Aleta raised her BCD hose, pressed the deflation button and followed O’Connor into the depths. Three metres below the surface, O’Connor stopped for a ‘bubble check’. He looked for any signs of leaks on Aleta’s gear and Aleta returned the favour.

O’Connor probed the depths with his powerful torch beam, looking for signs of the promontory. Lake Atitlan was close to 5000 feet above sea level and more than 300 metres deep. He had ensured the necessary altitude and freshwater adjustments were programed into both their wrist dive computers, but a high-altitude dive meant the atmospheric pressure was lower than at sea level: there would be a greater reduction in pressure when they surfaced. The distance to the nearest decompression chamber didn’t bear thinking about.

The water was very clear and O’Connor continued to search with his torch as they descended. The promontory had dropped away sharply, forming an underwater cliff-face, but at a gauge reading of fifteen metres, O’Connor was relieved to see that it had levelled out into a plateau. He and Aleta touched bottom and a large black crab scuttled away, leaving puffs of grey volcanic dust in its wake. O’Connor unhooked a long white nylon rope from his weight belt and, holding one end, gave the rest of it to Aleta to anchor on the floor of the lake. She gave him the ‘O’, and he swam out until Aleta held it fast at the five-metre mark. O’Connor began to swim in a circle in the classic ‘rope search’. The beams of their torches pierced the darkness, producing an eerie underwater kaleidoscope, and illuminating a grey stony bottom. Clear patches gave way to underwater plants and gossamer-like seaweed. Occasionally a large bass would be caught in the light.

The first 360-degree traverse revealed nothing of interest, and O’Connor tugged on the rope for Aleta to let it out another five metres. He swam another circle, and another. On the lake side, the promontory dropped away further, and on the next pass O’Connor’s gauge was showing twenty metres; but he kept swimming, slowly searching the bottom with his powerful torch. As he came back towards the promontory, the bottom began to slope up again to eighteen metres, and then sixteen metres, when suddenly he saw it. The entrance to the underwater cave was a small but unmistakeable ‘squeeze’. O’Connor inspected the broken plants at the entrance. It was hard to tell just how long ago, but the entrance had definitely been disturbed.

At the jetty at San Pedro, the CIA mercenaries were checking their gear.

O’Connor gave three short tugs on the rope, signalling Aleta to join him. He pointed to the entrance, recoiled the rope and hooked it to his belt. Once they had negotiated the squeeze, it opened into a wide cavernous passageway. Aleta looked around her in amazement. The grey stony bottom had given way to stalagmites, some of which had joined stalactites to form underwater columns. It was as if they had entered an underwater city. A little further on, a volcanic shelf appeared, and O’Connor gave the thumbs up to surface. At the six-metre mark, he called a halt and they waited for a three-minute safety stop before rising to the top.

‘Can you believe this?’ Aleta exclaimed. Her voice echoed in the huge underwater chamber. O’Connor looked around. Over millions of years, well before the chamber had flooded, fresh water had cascaded and dripped from the cavities above. The water held vast quantities of dissolved limestone and volcanic dust, and the calcite had gradually precipitated into brilliantly coloured geological formations in deep reds, purples, blues, ochres and yellows. Above them, glow-worms had attached themselves to the roof. Hundreds of sticky beaded strands, which the glow-worms manufactured from their mouth glands, formed a shimmering but deadly curtain for any insect attracted by the light show. Once an insect became enmeshed in the deathtrap, the glow-worm simply pulled in the long silvery-blue line and ate its prey alive.

O’Connor hauled himself onto the limestone shelf and helped Aleta out of the water. They divested themselves of their tanks and fins and began to explore. The shelf stretched for a hundred metres before sloping down again into the crystal-clear waters of the cave.

‘I wonder how far this goes?’

O’Connor shrugged. ‘Some of these caves go a long way; there’s one across the border in Mexico that’s over 150 kilometres long.’

‘Gives a lot of scope for hiding things. Does the line on the map make any sense?’

O’Connor steadied his wrist compass and searched the walls with his torch. Suddenly he stopped.

‘Look! Up there!’ he exclaimed, flashing his torch two metres above Aleta’s head. ‘Without the map, you’d never know it, but there’s another ledge.’ He gained a foothold on the limestone wall and levered himself up to the smaller ledge, at the end of which was an entrance to a much smaller cave. O’Connor eased his way through the narrow opening to discover another colony of glow-worms, their lethal curtain glimmering at the far end of the cave. He played his torch over the rough limestone floor. On one side of the cave four metal ingots, each indented with the eagle and swastika of the Third Reich, glinted in the light beam.

Aleta squeezed into the cave beside him and gasped.

‘Some of von Hei?en’s ill-gotten gains,’ O’Connor said grimly, knowing the probable origin would have been the gold fillings of thousands of Jews.