David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

‘Let’s focus on the here and now.’

‘So what’s the dive profile?’

Costas flipped open a notebook. ‘Lanowski gave me the specs. It’s all relevant stuff. No unnecessary science.’ He paused, looking up. ‘He’s really upset about Rebecca, you know. Distraught. He wanted to come with us.’

‘We don’t need distraught people here,’ Jack said coldly. ‘We need people who can kill.’ He put his hand up to his forehead, and shut his eyes for a moment. ‘You know what I mean. Lanowski’s a sweet man and Rebecca’s made many friends. But we’ve gone to war. That’s the only way I can think of it. The only way I can handle it. Rebecca’s like Helen of Troy. We’re fighting the Trojan War again. And if this goes belly-up, I swear to God those walls will burn. They’ll burn like they’ve never burned before.’

‘We’ll get her back, Jack.’

‘There’ll still be hell to pay.’ Jack’s hands were balled into fists, his knuckles white. ‘ Hell to pay.’

Costas put his hand on Jack’s shoulder, then looked down at his notebook again. ‘The mine. Folded saliferous Miocene deposits. It’s a huge area of salt karst, fissures going deep underground where the salt has dissolved. That’s how Neolithic miners would have got down there. Our kidnappers did their homework on that one. The actual mine workings date from the thirteenth century onwards. It’s huge, unbelievable. Three hundred kilometres of tunnels, going down more than three hundred metres. The section open to tourists is only about one per cent of that. We’re roughly one-forty to one-ninety metres above sea level, and the lower reaches are all flooded.’

‘Is it pumped out?’

Costas nodded. ‘The Nazis apparently pumped it out much deeper, to the depth we’re going. Wladislaw thinks the aquifer has risen dramatically since the war, with renewed mining and those deep tunnels acting like siphons. Where we’re going must have been accessible to the Nazis, but it’s now at least a hundred metres underwater.’

‘Have we got a route?’

‘Wladislaw’s been on it. Apparently, two weeks ago the caller purporting to be you specified a tunnel sequence, evidently something they’d found out about from the war. He has a 3-D CGI of the entire complex, with the fissure we’re following waymarked. I’ve downloaded it into our helmet computers so we can see it on screen. It’s a natural void, descending at about forty to sixty degrees from where we are now. The upper part’s all been mined out, so it looks like man-made caverns where the rock salt has been extracted. Below the pool – our entry point – there are more flooded mine workings, but then as we go deeper it reverts to natural. Up here, it’s all rock salt. Looks a little like grey limestone. Down there, a lot of what we’ll see is natural salt crystals, some of it recrystallized since the original halite was taken out by prehistoric workers. Wladislaw’s very proud of their dating for the salt growth, which shows we’re on the right track for the Neolithic remains he thinks we’ve come here to find.’

‘Okay. Tell me more as we go in.’ Costas took off the bag he had been carrying on his shoulder, then reslung it more securely. Jack jerked his thumb at it. ‘You managed to get that by your three stooges?’

Costas replied in a low voice. ‘That’s the other thing I need to tell you. Before we go in to Wladislaw. I’ve just got off the phone to Lanowski. He didn’t just research the geology. He’s also looked for any connection between salt mines and Nazis. This place was used as an aero engine assembly plant, using Jewish slave labour. It’s all very shady. It was shut down before the Soviets arrived and the Jews were sent to the death camps. We’re only about thirty miles from Auschwitz, you know. He also researched other instances of salt mines being used for storage, and found an account of the Astaussee salt mine in Austria, liberated by the Americans in May 1945. They found thousands of looted paintings and crates of other treasures, belongings stolen from Jews. In April 1945, the local Nazi Gauleiter sent in some more crates, only weeks before the war ended. The Gauleiter was a fanatical Nazi and was carrying out the Fuhrer’s last orders, the Nero Decree. Each crate contained a five-hundred-kilogram bomb. I read the account at IMU before flying out, so I had time to raid my tool kit. I’m fully prepared.’

‘That makes a change from last time.’

‘There’s more at stake here.’

‘These characters security-check you?’

‘They strip-searched me. Had all my tools out. Ham-fisted bunch of bastards. They wouldn’t let me have my diving knife. But I got away with a few metres of detonator cord.’

‘They didn’t recognize it?’

‘It’s hanging from the front of my e-suit, masquerading as a lanyard with hose clips to stop my gear dragging on the cave floor. It’s what you always say. People hide things in the most obvious places.’

‘That was a risk.’

‘What were they going to do if they found it? They need me too. They know we’re a team. And det cord’s not usually an offensive weapon.’

‘Your man, Wladislaw, knows nothing of this?’

Costas shook his head. ‘But how long we’re able to keep it up, I don’t know. I don’t exactly see eye to eye with the Chechnya guy. It’ll become pretty obvious to Wladislaw when we kit up. You make your own judgement about Wladislaw. Maybe there’ll be a chance for a swift word before we dive. He could be our contact with IMU. But if our stooges think he knows what’s going on, Wlady’s dead meat. They’re relying on his ignorance of all this to keep the mine closed off. They’d think he’d contact the police.’

‘He’s probably a marked man anyway. There’s only one reason these guys are here: they’ve been sent to kill us once we’ve got what their paymaster wants.’ Jack paused. ‘What about our own gear?’

‘Still bagged and locked up. I’ll know if it’s been tampered with. I doubt it will be, though. They want us to do the dive and get a result. They’ve been given strict instructions. Payout for them is when they show up with what we’ve found. And there are easier ways than fiddling with our equipment to make sure we don’t come back up. Cruder ways. Come on.’

Jack followed Costas towards the door. He stopped for a moment before going in. Costas had mentioned Auschwitz, how close it was. Jack looked again at the leaden sky. So close you could almost sense it, in the air. It was strange. James had mentioned Auschwitz on the phone the day before, the story of Hugh and the girl who had done the drawing, the girl with the harp. The image of that girl had stayed with Jack, had been with him over the last twelve hours, like a piece of music that would not go out of his head. He knew it was to do with Rebecca, as if that image of the other girl, a girl he had never even seen, was giving him something to hold on to. Something enduring, eternal, from a time of shock and horror, something like an old master painting, like one of those works of art the Nazis so coveted. He looked around. Everything here, the buildings, the ground, was pastel-coloured, washed out, and it was about as landlocked a place as you could find. It seemed inconceivable to be going underwater, let alone doing one of the most dangerous dives they had ever attempted. He took a final deep breath outside and stepped through the door.

Jack followed Costas into an office. A small, balding man was sitting behind the desk, writing. He looked up, smiled broadly and immediately bounded over to Jack. He was wearing jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and had an open, intelligent face, suffused with excitement. Jack felt a jolt of discomfort as he saw him. Someone else he was going to let down. Someone else he had put in terrible danger . He dismissed the thought. Wladislaw offered his hand, and looked up penetratingly. ‘Dr Howard. A pleasure to meet you. A real pleasure.’ He pumped his hand. ‘Everything is as you wished it. Dr Kazantzakis has seen to that. Anything else I can do, let me know. I’ll accompany you down to the pool. But before we go, this.’ He picked up a piece of paper and handed it to Jack with a flourish. ‘Came through yesterday. The uranium-thorium results. They date the halite recrystallization to the early Neolithic. To exactly the time of the Neolithic exodus.’ He slapped his hands together theatrically. ‘ To exactly the time of Atlantis.’