David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

The man said nothing. Jack pressed the pistol hard against his neck. He felt the temptation again, stronger than ever. ‘Do you understand me?’ he snarled.

‘Fifteen hundred hours tomorrow afternoon,’ the man mumbled into the ground. ‘The co-ordinates you will give us. He gets the prize. You want the gold. Bring the phial from the bunker or nothing happens.’

Jack kept the Webley pressed in hard, took a deep breath and then released it. He saw that Mikhail remained stock-still, his rifle still trained. He stood up, and nodded at John. ‘They’re all yours.’ He turned to the house, seeing Jeremy outside the door holding the Ruger and Rebecca with the shotgun. ‘Okay, you two. Get your things together. We’re out of here in ten minutes.’

Fourteen hours later, Jack sat strapped in the rear compartment of the Lynx helicopter, charting their progress on the digital flight map as they neared the Bahamas chain. Out of the door window on the port side, he could see the leading edge of the hurricane, an ominous billowing darkness forked with lightning, a creeping malevolence that seemed immobile at this distance yet which Jack knew was a whirling maelstrom of wind. Paul had kept doggedly on course, having calculated their fuel consumption and the helicopter’s turnaround schedule with military precision. They would be on site in eight minutes now, would have four minutes to egress and then Paul would be able to return to Seaquest II having used almost exactly his fuel capacity, relying on the headwind in front of the hurricane to give him the edge he needed to get back. The storm would pass south of Seaquest II while they were diving, clearing off west by the time they expected to be back on the surface using their waterproof radio to call Paul back to pick them up. That was, if their luck held out. And if they survived the showdown that lay ahead.

Jack had taken a huge gamble. He and Costas had given away enough to Schoenberg the day before to allow Saumerre to prepare himself for operations in the Caribbean. He had given the co-ordinates to the two men on the farm assuming that Saumerre would not be able to get to the site any faster than he could. The biggest gamble had been the bargain he had proposed. Saumerre knew that Jack had enough to discredit him, that Jack would never meet him without having a contingency to expose him if anything went wrong. If he could convince Saumerre that they could maintain a stand-off, as they had done for the past six months, then the agreement to share the spoils might work. The Nazi gold was no more than an educated guess. If Himmler had dispatched a U-boat on its final mission to take the deadly weapon to his hideaway, the chances were he would have filled the boat with the loot that top Nazis like him were hoarding at the end of the war. Gold was the favoured commodity. Himmler would have needed to buy himself a future if his plan to ransom the world with the threat of the biological weapon failed. He was too shrewd an operator not to have had a backup plan. Jack had no idea whether the virus phial was actually at the site, but he desperately hoped that Frau Hoffman had been right in her instinct that Ernst would have managed to destroy it. He remembered the account of the Liberator bomber, the rear-gunner’s insistence that they had hit the U-boat as it entered the blue hole. Even if Ernst had not already found a way of ditching the virus, the attack might have destroyed the submarine and prevented him from taking it into the underwater habitat that Heidi said had been installed at this site before the war.

And getting Saumerre to bring the other phial, the Alexander bacterium, was another gamble. Yet Saumerre would have known that the bacterium was not a proven killer in modern times, that the virus was far more terrifying. He was a wily operator, an intellectual, a politician, very probably a fundamentalist sympathizer, but above all a gangster at the head of a criminal empire. For people like that, the bargain Jack had offered would strike a chord that would make him forget who Jack was, forget that profit and greed were not the only motivations for engaging in a deadly duel like this. He had to believe that Jack – like most of those he dealt with – had been seduced by the lure of gold.

Jack shut his eyes tight for a moment. Somewhere in that blue hole, in a cavern that would have been accessible to Ahnenerbe divers, were the ancient symbols that Heidi had seen in the slide show at Wewelsburg Castle in 1944. Finding those – finding just one symbol that proved the truth of the exodus from Atlantis – would be worth all the gold in the world to him.

Paul’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Apologies for the reception. We’ve got some kind of radio interference, maybe a localized electromagnetic phenomenon. There’s activity on site. The radar’s just showing a boat speeding away in the direction of San Salvador Island.’

‘Anything from the drone?’

‘It’s had to turn back because of the weather. But Lanowski’s just sent a message. It’s what you want to hear, Jack. The drone showed a boat bang over the blue hole, with two divers getting in the water before it sped off.’

Jack tensed. ‘Good. If there’s any sign of it returning, Macalister has a hotline to the head of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force to order an intercept. I don’t want it done yet in case the boat captain has some way of contacting Saumerre and he realizes what we’re doing. But if needs be, you can say we suspect it’s a drug-runner.’

That much had gone according to plan. The MQ-1 Predator drone had been an inspirational idea of Lanowski’s, and a masterpiece of string-pulling involving Macalister, their MI6 contact, Ben and finally Mikhail, who had gone straight to his CIA handlers at Langley and explained enough of the situation with Saumerre and the potential terrorist threat to have a drone launched from a secret US installation in Florida, with the imagery streamed via the airbase to Lanowski’s computer in the operations room on board Seaquest II.

‘Okay,’ Paul said. ‘Target in sight now. T minus two minutes.’

‘Roger that,’ Jack said. He made a diver’s okay sign at Costas, who was sitting beside him with his helmet visor already down, his e-suit covered by the tattered remains of the trusty old boilersuit he had somehow found time to patch and sew together after parts of it had melted during their volcano dive in the Black Sea four days previously. Costas patted his pockets, checking them, and Jack saw the grapple gun they had used in the volcano poking out of one side and attached by a metal carabiner to a hook under his arm. Jack snapped down his own helmet, made sure the rebreather system was operating and quickly scanned the digital computer readout inside his helmet. He listened to his breathing, keeping it cool, measured. He remembered what Paul had said. With their helmets now on and no intercom link to the pilot, the signal would be three sharp bangs on the metal bulkhead behind the pilot’s seat. Crude, but effective. He glanced at Costas again, visually checking his gear, and saw Costas doing the same for him. He reached up and grasped the sliding door handle, and then whispered the words he always said before a dive: Lucky Jack.

The helicopter pitched slightly to the rear and he felt it descend, seeing only a shroud of spray from the rotorwash out of the window. Then he heard three bangs. He looked at Costas, pointing his thumb down, and Costas did the same. They opened the sliding doors simultaneously, into a maelstrom of noise and water. Jack swung his legs out, contacted the skid with his fins, crouched down and rolled forward, holding his helmet with one hand and his backpack with the other as he somersaulted into the sea. He dropped a few feet underwater and then rose to the surface again, patting his head with one hand to show Paul that he was safe. He saw Costas do the same, his yellow helmet just visible in the sheets of spray against the looming blackness of the storm coming in from the east. Jack pressed his buoyancy compensator exhaust to expel air and then he was underwater, the tumult of the surface gone, feeling the instant sense of calm he always did at the beginning of a dive. Costas came alongside him, and they exchanged okay signals again and a thumbs-down. This was it.