David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

T en minutes later, Jack and Costas were sitting in wicker chairs around a low glass-topped table piled high with books and papers, with steaming mugs of coffee in front of them. Schoenberg had taken his hat off to reveal a full head of white hair, neatly swept back. He was a tall man, lean-limbed, with fine features, and moved with an easy confidence. It was hard to reconcile the genial image with the world the man had grown up in and his role in it, and for a fleeting moment Jack thought that maybe he had been wrong, that the man should be judged for what he had become and what he had made of his life. He looked at the brown leather document case that Schoenberg had placed on the table between them. They had exchanged niceties and news of Dillen’s latest work, but Jack had remembered that Schoenberg was not one for small talk.

‘I’ve been hoping for this moment for many years, to share what I know with the right person,’ Schoenberg said, his German accent still marked despite more than half a lifetime in Canada.

‘James Dillen said it was most important that I come to visit you now. I’m fascinated to hear what you have for us.’

‘You are, I know, very familiar with the Periplus Maris Erythraei .’

Jack stared at him, then nodded. ‘The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A Roman merchant’s guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, written in Greek in Egypt. One of the most extraordinary ancient texts on seafaring and maritime exploration to survive. Two years ago, we discovered a Roman shipwreck in the Red Sea with a huge trove of gold bullion destined for India, the best corroboration yet of the ancient trade across the Indian Ocean described in the Periplus.’

‘I followed the excavation on your website. It was a marvellous discovery. Then you know something of the Heidelberg Codex?’

‘ Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, containing the Periplus? A compilation of copied ancient texts on geography and exploration put together in about the tenth century, probably in a monastery in the Byzantine East. My colleagues Maria de Montijo and Jeremy Haverstock travelled with me to Heidelberg University to examine it. They’ve done a complete palaeographic analysis of the text of the Periplus, and Dillen has been working on a new translation.’

‘Ah. He didn’t say. We’ve been out of touch since my retirement.’

‘I expect he wanted to tell you first about the new passages of Homer, The Fall of Troy. They came from the ancient library we discovered three years ago in Herculaneum. That’s been the huge excitement of the last year, in conjunction with the excavation at Troy, which has even produced a wall painting of a bard called Homeros.’

Schoenberg nodded, his eyes rapt. ‘A remarkable find. Remarkable. Your work is so much what I envisaged all those years ago, when there were those of us in the Ahnenerbe, the genuine scholars, not the charlatans and the frauds, who saw our future had we won the war just as you must have first envisaged your own institute.’

Costas narrowed his eyes, and Jack said nothing for a moment, watching Schoenberg, then took a sip of coffee. ‘Back to the Periplus . While Costas and I were excavating the shipwreck, Maurice Hiebermeyer and his team dug up a Roman merchant’s house at the Red Sea port site of Myos Hormos. They found fragments of inscribed potsherds that seemed to be a first draft of the Periplus, containing digressions that were excised from the final version, the one copied by the monk who compiled the Codex Palatinus Graecus. One of the digressions mentioned Roman legionaries who escaped from Parthian imprisonment and went east through the mountains of central Asia towards China. Following that lead put us on the trail of a group of Romans who thought they’d found their own El Dorado, who had heard about the fabled riches of the First Emperor Shihuangdi’s tomb in China. They never made it that far, but settled on the distant reaches of the Silk Road, where their descendants still live today.’

‘Fascinating,’ Schoenberg said. ‘Blond-haired, blue-eyed? We heard these rumours in the 1930s. Himmler wanted to find descendants of the Aryan master race who might still exist in pockets of racial purity in isolated places around the world, as well as in Germany.’

‘The trail got us in a little bit of trouble, as usual,’ Costas grumbled. ‘Marxist guerrillas in the Indian jungle, then the cross hairs of a sniper in Afghanistan. We came up against some pretty sinister modern-day opponents.’

Jack glanced at Costas, then looked back at Schoenberg. ‘They were a Chinese secret society. For more than two thousand years they had been on the trail of a fabulous jewel they thought had been stolen by one of the custodians of the First Emperor’s tomb. The search for the jewel became enshrined in their mythology, the basis for a warrior cult. The society today is a fully modern criminal cartel steeped in the drugs and arms trades, with its headquarters somewhere in the Taklamakan Desert. But finding the jewel remained their paramount obsession. They thought one of the Romans had taken it from the fleeing tomb custodian two thousand years ago, and that we knew where it was. They’re called the Brotherhood of the Tiger, and the one who undertakes the quest to find the jewel is the Tiger Warrior. Have you heard of them?’

Schoenberg looked taken aback, then pointedly shook his head. ‘I’m just a scholar.’ He smiled, then curled his lip. ‘But you have nothing to fear. When I was still an undergraduate at Heidelberg in 1938, I was specially selected above dozens of others to join an Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet. We of course encountered many Mongoloids there, including agents of Chairman Mao sent to keep an eye on us. You were in no danger. They are an inherently weak race.’

Jack sat back. ‘All I know is that I personally shot the latter-day Tiger Warrior in a remote valley in Afghanistan. As far as I know his bones still lie there along with the dream of the jewel. Our information led to the Brotherhood’s activities outside China being shut down, and all they are now is a gang of guns for hire. Their leader Shang Yong would like to see me dead, but any threat he poses will evaporate in about a week’s time, when Chinese internal security finally takes out his headquarters in the Taklamakan. Any promise Shang Yong might make to his clients now is as hollow as the place in his fantasy world for that jewel. One thing, though, that his men are very good at is assassination. Once he realizes he is under threat, I have no doubt he will send out his remaining thugs to kill his clients to cover his tracks.’

Schoenberg looked uncertain for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively as if ignoring what Jack had just said. ‘You two, James Dillen, your palaeographers, your divers. A team effort. That’s what I love about your projects. They remind me of the best of our research in the 1930s, bringing together the clues that led us on fabulous expeditions to Tibet, to the Andes, to Iceland. It was an exciting time.’

‘All in the cause of Nazism,’ Costas murmured. ‘Searching for evidence of racial superiority.’

Schoenberg gave him a cold look. ‘Not all of us were ardent Nazis. And we had no choice. Either we worked for the Ahnenerbe, or Himmler put us on the blacklist of dissidents who ended up in Dachau. I personally found the anthropological research distasteful, but measuring skulls and photographing racial types seemed harmless. It was only later that we realized how much this was fortifying Himmler’s views. None of us had any idea then where it would lead. And for us as young men, searching for a lost Aryan civilization, for Atlantis, was a huge adventure. Surely we were not the only nation to use archaeology to search for our roots.’