David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

‘Copy that, Paul. And thanks for the ride. It’s been fantastic.’

The external intercom crackled. ‘NATO XJ4, this is RAF Tornado fiver niner kilo seeking clearing to land. Over.’

‘Fiver niner kilo, you are clear to land. Observe agreed protocol. Over.’

‘NATO XJ4, this is Tornado fiver niner kilo. Roger that. Over.’

Jack felt the landing gear lock and the increased air resistance as the Tornado angled upwards for its approach. A few moments later they touched down with a screech of rubber on asphalt, and the reverse thrusters roared into life. The aircraft came to a halt less than halfway down the runway. Paul increased the throttle, swung the Tornado round and taxied it back down to the start of the runway, then pulled it round again so it was poised for take-off. The camouflaged dome was about five hundred metres to their left, and Jack could see two figures beside a jeep with its lights on, watching them.

Paul powered the engine down and popped the canopy so that it rose above them. Jack took off his helmet and felt the cool breeze coming down the runway. He realized that he had been bathed in sweat, and he ruffled his hair. He unstrapped himself and clambered out of the cockpit and down the steps on the side of the fuselage, then hopped off and struggled out of the pressure suit. He climbed back up and put the suit on the rear seat, then clambered down again and jumped on to the tarmac. He gave the fuselage a pat, then stood back, looking at the sooty streak on the tail fin caused by the thrust reversers, and the light grey camouflage that showed the effect of months in the punishing conditions of Afghanistan. ‘She’s a fine old warhorse,’ he called up. ‘Let’s hope she finds a new master as good as the one she’s got now.’

Paul raised his arm in acknowledgement, then clamped his visor back down. Jack walked a few paces away, then turned round again. ‘Paul, I’ve been thinking. You flew helicopters once, didn’t you?’

Paul raised his visor again. ‘It’s what stalled my promotion for so long. Instead of going to staff college when I should have done, I jumped on an RAF vacancy at the Army Air Corps helicopter school, and then volunteered for an RAF placement scheme with the Royal Navy. I spent six months flying a Lynx helicopter off a frigate in the Caribbean on drugs interdiction. It probably ruined my chances of ever becoming Marshal of the Royal Air Force, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

Jack grinned. ‘Well, if you ever get bored at that desk in Whitehall, there’s a job for you at IMU. We’ve got an Embraer and three Lynxes, so there’s always plenty of flying. I want to expand our aerial survey capability, with the new technology for archaeological site detection now available.’ He paused. ‘But I’d be looking for more than that. Someone with your experience of command and control and your international contacts could be invaluable. We seem to get ourselves involved in some tricky situations these days, far more so than I envisaged when I founded IMU. Far more than I want. But it’s reality, and we need to beef up our security capability. Let me know if you’re interested.’

Paul eyed Jack. ‘Not just a charity job for a sad old fighter jock?’

Jack grinned. ‘Not a chance. You might even get to fly Maurice around Egypt again in a biplane.’

‘He still owes me for that little trip. He was going to take me to the Munich beer festival. Then he got distracted by some mummies.’

‘Sounds oddly like Maurice. I’ll remind him.’

‘I wouldn’t mind getting wet again either, you know. Only I’d be a little rusty.’

‘We’d soon get you up to speed. Rebecca will probably have her instructor rating by then and can fill you in on all the latest diving technology since the 1980s.’

‘The good old days,’ Paul said, grinning. ‘None of this nonsense about mixed-gas diving and rebreathers. Just good old compressed air, and a wing and a prayer.’

‘A wing and a prayer,’ Jack repeated. ‘I’d forgotten it was you and Peter Howe who used to say that. The good old days indeed.’

‘I’ve got great memories of him. We’ve got to hold on to that.’

Jack paused. ‘His death has really hit me again, diving at Atlantis where it happened. That’s why the good old days are exactly that. Things happen, and you can’t go back.’

‘Jack, seriously. I’m worried about you. This place, this bunker. This wasn’t what you got into archaeology for. Remember what you said about my flying. It was my passion, and always will be. Your passion is archaeology and diving, what you’ve just been doing at Atlantis and Troy. That’s the kind of adrenalin you thrive on, what makes you tick. Keeping that going is exactly what Peter would have wanted. The greatest discoveries are yet to come. Don’t ever lose sight of that.’

He dropped his visor again, waved and lowered the canopy. Jack put his hands over his ears as the twin turbofans started up, and hurried off the tarmac to be away from the blast of the exhaust. The whine of the engines rose to a scream and the Tornado rolled down the runway, its jet exhaust distorting the air for the length of the airfield behind. It rose at a sharp angle just before the end of the runway, its twin afterburners roaring and crackling as it powered up into the sky and disappeared into the clouds.

Jack could still feel the vibrations as he turned to face the jeep that was now accelerating towards him. For a moment he relished the quiet, hearing only a whisper of wind on the grass, before it was disrupted by the jeep engine. He wondered what it had been like for those Allied soldiers who had come upon this place that day in April 1945. He remembered what Hugh Frazer had said, and he sniffed the air. The hint of sulphur on his body from the volcano had gone, overwhelmed by the smell of aviation fuel and jet exhaust that lingered in a layer of black smoke from the Tornado’s departure. Hugh had talked of the terrible smell that day in 1945, a stench of squalor and decay, and the smoke rising from piles of fetid clothing that had been taken from the inmates by the emergency medical staff to be burnt in pyres across the camp.

He stared along the line of empty concrete aircraft shelters and remembered pictures of Belsen, trying to imagine what the camp here had looked like, and then he looked at the camouflaged bubble over the bunker. This place was not just about the horrors of the Holocaust. It was about another crime that had been commited here, a terrible, calculated crime in the name of twisted science, a crime whose outcome might yet exact a terrible price from humanity. It had kept Jack awake at night in the six months since the bunker had been discovered, turning over in his mind his own role in the events now unfolding. And there had been another price in 1945. Two Allied officers had disappeared in the forest, one British and one American, the British officer a close friend of Hugh’s whose death had haunted him for the rest of his life. For Hugh this place had come to represent the unbridled horrors of war, just as the burnt ruins of Troy had seemed to speak the same message to Jack when he had left them the day before his return to Atlantis.

He watched the two figures park the jeep on the tarmac and walk towards him. He thought about what Paul had said. This place was a long way from the archaeology he loved. Yet all archaeology was ultimately about understanding the present, and about truths that often had a dark side. Atlantis was about the foundation of civilization, when people had first learned to exult in the possibilities of the human condition, yet also had understood what the hunger for power could make men do. Troy had been about the descent into the abyss of war. And this bunker was archaeology too, but a new kind of archaeology, the excavation of a past almost within his own lifetime, but a past whose truth could only be revealed by the tried and tested techniques of archaeology, bringing all the forensic skills of his profession to bear. It was his job now, his responsibility, as much as the revelations of Atlantis or Troy. He took a deep breath and walked forward to meet the two men.