Andy McDermott - The Hunt For Atlantis

“Oh yes.” Starkman’s voice was firm. “The hunt for Atlantis ends here.”

The two submersibles were lowered into the ocean, one on each side of the Evenor. Their pilots were already inside; the “cowboys,” crewmen in wetsuits standing on top of the vessels, checked that their systems were in order and the communications umbilicals properly connected before releasing them from the cranes. Once free, the submersibles dropped without ceremony beneath the waves. The cowboys were picked up by a Zodiac, which returned them to a dock at the fantail.

With only eight hundred feet of water to penetrate, the descent took less than ten minutes. Nina had pride of place in the lab before the various monitor screens, Kari sitting next to her. Philby, Chase and Castille watched over their shoulders, as did a handful of the Evenor’s crew.

Nina found the whole experience disorienting. Each of the two large screens in front of her displayed exactly what the pilots were seeing inside their pressure spheres, using an autostereoscopic LCD display that gave a 3-D image without needing special glasses. For most of the descent the illusion of depth was barely apparent, but every so often a fish would pass in front of the submersibles’ scanning lasers and leap out of the screen in a flash of ghostly night-vision green.

“Seven-fifty feet,” said Trulli over the communications link. “We’re in the pipe, five by five. Slowing descent.”

“Evenor , please confirm bearing to target,” Baillard said.

“Atragon , turn to two-zero-zero degrees,” Kari said into her headset. “You’re less than three hundred meters away. Sharkdozer , hold position until contact is confirmed.”

“We should be able to see it by now,” Trulli complained. The seabed swung into sharp dimensional relief in front of Nina as he turned his vessel, dropping the nose slightly to point the lasers downwards. The resolution was high enough for her to pick out crabs scuttling over the rippled sediment.

She turned her attention to the view from Baillard’s submersible, which was now advancing at walking pace, hanging about twenty feet above the seabed. A smaller screen showed the spotlit view from a standard video camera, but the LIDAR image extended much farther.

The sea floor rose ahead.

“Evenor , I have something here,” Baillard reported. “Getting a very strong sonar return… it’s not silt. Something solid coming up, and it’s big. Could be a shipwreck…”

“It’s no shipwreck,” Nina whispered as the object came into view on the 3-D screen. She recognized the shape instantly. It was the same as the replica of the Temple of Poseidon in the Brazilian jungle.

And unlike that now ruined structure, this one was intact.

“Bloody hell,” muttered Chase, leaning closer over her shoulder.

“Jesus. Evenor , do you see this?” asked Baillard.

“We see it,” Kari confirmed, handing Nina a headset. “Nina, you’re in charge.”

“Me? But I don’t know anything about submarines!”

“You don’t have to. Just tell him what you want to look at, and he’ll do it.”

“Okay…” Nina said nervously, suddenly terrified at the idea of accidentally causing the submersible to crash. She donned the headset, fiddling with the microphone. “Jim, this is Nina. Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” replied the Canadian. “I’m about a hundred and fifty meters away. Can you see it clearly?”

“Oh yes.” The lower parts of the temple walls were buried beneath a sloping mound of sediment, but the top of its curved roof rose a good thirty feet above the ocean floor. Reflected laser light shone back brightly in places where the sheath of precious metals over the stone had remained intact even through the deluge. “I can’t believe it’s still standing.”

Philby leaned closer, apparently having trouble with the stereoscopic effect and dealing with it by simply closing one eye. “The design must have been incredibly precise, so all the blocks would support their own weight. When the island sank, it held together even when everything else collapsed. Amazing!”

“What’s the current like?” Kari asked.

Trulli gave a reading. “I’m getting about half a knot of drift, heading northeast.”

“No wonder it’s not completely buried,” said Baillard. “If that’s the prevailing current, then it’ll sweep a lot of the sediment towards the Spanish coast.”

“Is there anything else above the surface?” Nina asked.

The 3-D image jolted disconcertingly; the Atragon hadn’t changed course, but the laser scanners had been redirected to look off to one side. “I can see a few bumps where there might be things under the surface, but nothing actually standing out. How tall is this thing?”

“If it’s the size we think it is, it should be about sixty feet tall. Eighteen meters.”

“If that’s the case, then it’s maybe half exposed. There’s a lot of silt piled up around it.” The image shifted back to the temple.

“Sharkdozer , move in closer,” Kari ordered. “Head to the north end, keep clear of the Atragon.”

“Gotcha,” said Trulli. The second 3-D display showed his advance.

“Jim?” Nina asked. “Can you circle the building, please? I want to see what it looks like from the other side.”

Baillard complied. The maneuver took a couple of minutes, revealing a view much the same as their first sight of the temple. Its curved back, partly buried by sediment, reminded Nina of a turtle’s shell.

“Hey, Evenor,” said Trulli excitedly, “the north end here, the sediment’s lower. It must have been cleared away by the current. I can see more of the wall.”

Nina quickly switched her attention to the Sharkdozer ’s screen. There was a smooth, almost bowl-like depression at the northern end of the temple, as though someone had used a giant scoop to clear the silt away. “Can you get in closer?”

“No worries. Hold on a tick.”

It took rather longer than the promised tick, but a few minutes later Trulli brought the hefty submersible to a hover a short distance from the temple wall. “I’m going to take a sonar reading,” he announced. “Hang on.”

One of the monitors flashed up a jagged graph. Nina couldn’t make head nor tail of it, but to the submersible pilot it was as clear as a photograph. “There’s something under the sediment-or rather, there’s something not under the sediment. Could be a hole in the wall.”

“Room to get Mighty Jack through?” asked Baillard.

“Maybe. Evenor , do I have permission to clear the sediment?”

Kari looked at Nina, who nodded in excitement. There was a way into the temple! “Go ahead, Sharkdozer.”

The operation that followed was frustratingly slow. Nina forced herself not to rap her nails on the desktop as Trulli moved his sub away from the temple. He carefully lowered the pump module to the surface about a hundred meters off to the northeast, extending its “tail” in the direction of the current, then returned to the temple. The Atragon’s LIDAR display showed the connecting tube stretching between the pump module and its mother ship as the Sharkdozer returned to position, taking up station above the base of the northern wall. The whole process took over twenty minutes.

“Ready to go, Evenor,” Trulli said at last. “Just give the word.”

“Go for it!” Nina cried, to everyone’s amusement.

The pump started.

Like the world’s largest vacuum cleaner, the Sharkdozer began to suck the accumulated silt into its gaping maw. The pressure difference created by the pump wasn’t huge, but it was more than enough to draw the layers of sediment into the pipe and through the detached module to spew out of the waste pipe one hundred meters away. The prevailing current gently swept the expanding cloud of suspended particles away from the temple. The value of a technique that had initially struck Nina as overcomplicated now became clear; simply digging up the silt would have wiped out visibility within seconds.