David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Costas jerked his head back to the bungalow above the beach. They could just make out Schoenberg’s straw hat in the window, and a cell phone clamped to his ear. ‘You gave that one away. You told him that’s where we were heading.’

‘We’re all playing each other. Saumerre will be playing Schoenberg just as Himmler once played his Ahnenerbe cronies, convincing them that the archaeology was the main prize, letting only a chosen few know his true intent and then disposing of them when they’d served their purpose. Schoenberg’s telling him that as soon as I’ve followed the lead I told him about, I’ll get back to him to reveal where we’re heading. He believes I’ll do that because he offered me more information about the Ahnenerbe, about other treasures waiting to be discovered. Part of Schoenberg, the scholar and adventurer, just won’t believe I’d pass up on a chance like that, that somehow he and I will go off together on fantastic voyages of discovery. Another part of him, the Nazi, believes that what he revealed to us in that rant about Frau Hoffman will come as a terrible shock and persuade us that everything she said about Himmler and his plan was a pack of lies. Schoenberg would like to think that we’re after the archaeology, not the deadly weapon that Saumerre wants. Remember what we saw at Wewelsburg Castle. That place poisoned everyone who came in contact with it, whether real scholars like Schoenberg or the academic failures and thugs who formed the core of the Ahnenerbe, the spies and sycophants whom Schoenberg despised. For Schoenberg, sitting there overlooking the sea dreaming of unresolved quests, the fantasy is reborn in his mind after all these decades, something that we’ve used to get information out of him, just as Saumerre has too.’

‘So you really intend to tell him the probable location?’

‘As soon as Mikhail tells me, and just before I board the plane to Bermuda. That way I’m in control. I want to push this to a confrontation. Saumerre may become impatient and events may move faster than we predicted. Ben’s convinced that Shang Yong’s hitmen will know about the farm and will have assumed that’s where Ben went with Rebecca when she left school this morning in Manhattan, where they’ve been shadowing her.’

Costas looked at his watch. ‘Better get going. Our pilot will be waiting.’

Jack pulled the starter cord and the Mariner coughed to life. He stared for a moment back at the figure in the bungalow, now with the phone down, watching them. ‘Part of me would still like to think that he’s just another victim of that war.’

Costas shook his head. ‘Remember what you told me when we went to see him. What it was really all about, the Ahnenerbe. Racist theory that resulted in the corpses and the living dead in the concentration camps, and on those gurneys in that bunker. Those were the victims.’

Jack nodded. He gunned the engine, driving the boat out into the channel, then throttled back for a moment and gave Costas a steely look. ‘Forty-eight hours to endgame.’

‘Roger that.’

Above the Bahamas, 3 June 1945

S quadron Leader Peter White gripped the control wheel of the B-24 Liberator and straightened his back, straining against the harness and feeling the blood return to places in his legs that had been pressed against the unfamiliar seat for more than three hours now. It was his first long-haul flight in the Liberator, and he was not yet attuned to the nuances and idiosyncrasies that made an aircraft seem like an extension of the pilot’s being. For more than eighteen months before the Nazi surrender he had flown a Lancaster bomber, the four-engine warhorse of the British air offensive over occupied Europe. The Lancaster was an instrument of death and destruction, but he had grown to love his aircraft, to trust in its ability to return him again and again through the flak and the night fighters while other bombers were falling out of the sky around him. His crew believed that it was he who had the luck, he who would see them through when two thirds of their fellow-crews did not make it. They called him Uncle, because he was an old man of twenty-nine; he knew they revered him. Their faith was so strong that he had volunteered for another tour to skipper the men who were only partway through theirs. But for him there was nobody to elevate to god-like status, nothing except the machine. The relationship of a bomber pilot to his aircraft was impossible to explain to anyone who had not endured night after night flying to the seat of Satan himself, to the place where the simmering evil below seemed only to be stoked by the rain of bombs, where airmen who were about to die saw hell not as a nightmarish final vision but as the reality below them as they plummeted towards the raging firestorms they themselves had helped to create.

White leaned forward to peer over the instrument panel at the shimmering expanse of the Caribbean Sea some three thousand feet below. He had loved his Lancaster, but he had not yet learned to love the Liberator. It was not just the poor forward visibility from the flight deck that was the problem. When he had arrived at the Operational Conversion Unit in the Bahamas two weeks ago, his instructor had called the Liberator a cantankerous beast, lumbering and draughty, heavy on the controls. White had learned the ropes quickly enough doing circuits around the base at Nassau, but this flight was his first experience of wrestling with the controls over a long mission. The aircraft was a bugger to trim, and he was constantly having to horse it around to keep it on a straight line. And the din when he lifted his earphones was indescribable. The Liberator was fat-bellied by comparison with the Lancaster and the B-17 Flying Fortress, and the open ports for the waist-guns meant that the fuselage was like a musical soundbox that magnified the noise of the engines and the propellers and the slipstream as it roared by, reverberating through the aircraft. He was glad they were flying at low level and not at ten thousand feet or more as they had done over Europe, where the cold in the B-24 would have been horrendous. But as each hour had passed this morning, he had grudgingly begun to see the sense of her. She was like a charging bull, bellowing and roaring through the sky, reeking and pawing the air. He realized it was the first time he had thought of the aircraft as she. That was always a good sign. And he could see why they had been made to fly the Liberator before converting to the upgraded version, the B-32 Defender, the purpose of their flight scheduled for tomorrow across the United States to the US base on the island of Guam in the Pacific. The B-32 was by all accounts a thing of luxury, with a pressurized cabin. But by training on the B-24, they would never forget the beast within, one they would soon be riding into the whirlwind of another war.

‘Skipper, we’re two minutes from a course change.’ A clipboard with a nautical chart appeared from behind, and White took it from the navigator, Flight Lieutenant Alan Cook, an Australian, who crouched down beside him and pointed at the ruled lines in red pencil across the map. ‘We’re just coming up to the northern tip of the island of San Salvador,’ Cook said. ‘From there we turn to compass bearing thirty-five degrees and drop to five hundred feet above sea level to begin our run in. At a speed of two hundred and twenty knots, dead reckoning puts us over our target in just under fifteen minutes.’

White stared at the clipboard, reminding himself of the features he had memorized during the mission briefing at Nassau, then handed it back. He increased the volume of the intercom microphone to try to exclude as much of the din as possible. ‘Bomb-aimer, did you hear that?’

‘Righto, Skip,’ a New Zealand drawl responded. ‘Eyes peeled ahead.’