The Hunt for Atlantis_A Novel

  The soldiers paused for an instant, caught between trained instinct and the orders of their superior officer.

  The instant was all Chase needed.

  He grabbed the barrel of the nearest soldier’s rifle, jerking it out of the startled man’s grip and twisting his wrist to flip the gun over onto its back as his other hand stabbed at the trigger.

  He felt the heat of the bullet through the metal barrel as the gun fired, scorching his palm. The soldier lurched backwards, the bullet ripping right through him and showering the Land Rover with blood and mashed lung tissue.

  Before any of the other soldiers could react, Chase flipped the gun over again, jamming the selector switch to full auto and unleashing bursts of fire at the soldiers with the Dragunovs. They fell. If the remaining soldiers fired at him, they ran the risk of hitting their own comrades, which would deter them for a moment.

  “Nina!” he shouted. She stared uncomprehendingly at him, totally unprepared for his lethal flurry of action. He reached out to grab her arm, but one of the soldiers reacted more quickly than his companions and tackled Nina to the ground. Chase couldn’t shoot him without hitting her—

  For my family and friends

  PROLOGUE

  Tibet

  The sun had not yet risen above the Himalayan peaks, but Henry Wilde was already awake. He had been awake, waiting for the moment when the dawn light cleared the mountains, for over two hours.

  More than two hours, he mused. More like years, most of his life. What began as a boyhood curiosity had grown into an … he hesitated to use the word obsession, but there it was. An obsession that had brought him mockery and derision from the academic world; an obsession that had eaten up most of the money he had earned in his lifetime.

  But, he reminded himself, it was also an obsession that had brought him together with one of the two most remarkable women he had ever known.

  “How long to sunrise?” asked Laura Wilde, Henry’s wife of almost twenty years, huddled next to him in her thick parka. The two had first met as undergraduates at New York’s Columbia University. While they had already noticed each other—Henry was a six-foot-four ice blond and Laura had hair of such a deep shade of red it seemed almost unnatural—it wasn’t until after Henry had an essay on the subject of his obsession mockingly excoriated by their professor that they spoke. Laura’s first three words caused Henry to fall in love on the spot.

  They were: “I believe you.”

  “Any minute now,” Henry said, checking his watch before putting a loving arm around her. “I just wish Nina were here to see it with us.” Nina, their daughter, was the second of the two most remarkable women he had ever known.

  “That’s what you get when you schedule an expedition during her exams,” Laura chided.

  “Don’t blame me, blame the Chinese government! I wanted to come next month, but they wouldn’t budge, said it was this or nothing—”

  “Honey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m kidding. I didn’t want to miss this opportunity either. But yes, I wish Nina were here too.”

  “Getting a postcard from Xulaodang doesn’t really seem fair compensation, does it?” sighed Henry. “We drag her all over the world to dead end after dead end, and when we finally find a real lead, she can’t come!”

  “We think we’ve found a real lead,” Laura corrected him.

  “We’ll know in a minute, won’t we?” He indicated the vista before them. Three snowcapped peaks of roughly equal size rose beyond the rugged plateau on which they had made camp. At the moment they were held in shadow by the larger range to the east, but when the sun climbed above the obstruction, that would change. And if the stories they had gathered were true, it would change in spectacular style …

  Henry stood, offering a hand to pull Laura to her feet. She blew out a cloud of steaming breath as she rose; the plateau was over ten thousand feet above sea level, and the air was both thin and cold in a way that neither of them had ever before experienced. But it also had a purity, a clarity.

  Somehow, Henry knew they would find what they were searching for.

  The first light of dawn reached the three peaks.

  Rather, it reached one of them, a brilliant golden light exploding from the perfect white snow atop the central peak. Almost like a liquid, the sunlight slowly flowed down from the summit. The two mountains on either side remained in shadow, the dawn still blocked by the larger range.

  “It’s true …” Henry said quietly, awe in his voice.

  Laura was somewhat less reverent. “That pretty much looks like a golden peak to me.”

  He gave her a smile before looking back at the spectacle before them. The mountain was almost aglow in the dawn light. “They were right. Goddamn it, they were right.”

  “That’s almost depressing, in a way,” said Laura. “That a bunch of Nazis over fifty years ago knew about it first, and were so close to finding it.”

  “But they didn’t find it.” Henry set his jaw. “We will.”

  The Golden Peak—until today nothing more than a legend, a piece of ancient folklore—was the final piece in the puzzle Henry had been assembling his whole life. Exactly what he would find there, he wasn’t sure. But what he was sure of was that it would provide him with everything he needed to reach his final goal.

  The ultimate legend.

  Atlantis.

  The dazzling display of light on the Golden Peak lasted for barely a minute before the sun rose high enough to strike the two neighboring summits. By the time the expedition began to ascend the eastern slope of the peak, the sun was high overhead. Its companions now out of shadow, the mountain was indistinguishable from those around it in the harsh daylight.

  There were seven people in their group, three Americans and four Tibetans. The latter group had been hired as porters and guides; while they knew the area, they had been as amazed by the folktale come true as their foreign visitors. Even by Tibetan standards the region was bleak and isolated, and Henry realized they might be the only Westerners ever to have witnessed what they had just seen.

  Except, perhaps, for the people whose clues had led them here in the first place.

  Henry called the group to a stop. As the others gratefully brushed snow off nearby rocks and sat down, he removed his backpack and carefully took a slim binder from one of its pockets. Laura joined him as he flicked through the pages sealed inside protective plastic sheets.

  “Checking again?” she asked, teasing. “I thought you’d have them memorized by now.”

  “German’s not one of my strongest languages,” he reminded her, finding a particular page. The paper was discolored, stained by damp and time.

  The secret documents of the Ahnenerbe—the German Ancestral Heritage Society, part of Hitler’s SS under the direct control of Heinrich Himmler—had been found hidden behind bricks in a cellar of Wewelsberg Castle in northern Germany. Wewelsberg had been the headquarters of the SS, and the center of the Nazi obsession with mythology and the occult. At the end of the war, orders had been given to destroy the castle and the knowledge it contained. Someone had chosen to disobey those orders and conceal the documents instead.

  And now the Wildes had them.

  The previous year, Bernd Rust, an old friend and colleague of Henry’s, had contacted him about the discovery. Most of the rediscovered SS documents had been turned over to the German government, but knowing of the Wildes’ interests, Rust had—at considerable professional risk—secretly retained a few specific pages, those mentioning Atlantis. Even from a friend they hadn’t come cheap, but Henry knew they were worth every penny.

  While he felt a deep discomfort about using Nazi material to aid his search—to the
extent that he hadn’t even told his daughter about the documents’ origin—he also knew that without it, he would never find Atlantis. Somehow, half a century ago, the Nazis had discovered something that had enabled them to jump almost to the end of the trail.

  The Ahnenerbe had organized expeditions to Tibet during the 1930s, and even into the 1940s as the war raged in Europe. At the behest of the prominent Nazis who were members of the sinister Thule Society, Himmler among them, three expeditions had been sent to Asia. The Thule Society believed that beneath the Himalayas lay underground cities built by the legendary descendants of the Atlanteans, who shared a common ancestry with the Aryan master race. While the explorers made many discoveries about Tibetan history, they found nothing of the Atlanteans, and returned to Germany empty-handed.

  But what the papers now in Henry’s possession revealed was that there had been a fourth expedition, kept secret even from Hitler himself.

  The Führer was not as inclined as his followers to believe in myths. As the war escalated, he decided pragmatically that the country’s resources were better spent on the Nazi war machine than in sending expeditions halfway around the world to hunt for a legend.

  But Himmler was a true believer. And the Ahnenerbe’s discoveries had convinced him that legend was within his grasp.

  What came as a shock to Henry was that he and Laura were on the same path … but half a century too late. Piecing together clues from dozens, hundreds of historical sources, tiny scraps of evidence gradually forming a picture like a jigsaw, the Wildes had traveled with Nina ten years earlier to a site on the coast of Morocco. To Henry’s jubilation, they had found traces of an ancient settlement hidden beneath the African sands … only for delight to turn to despair when they realized someone had beaten them to it. Aside from a few worthless scraps, the site had been picked clean.

  Now Henry knew by whom.

  The Nazis had assembled the same puzzle pieces and sent an expedition to Morocco. The handful of Ahnenerbe documents he now held revealed only hints of what they had found, but on the strength of those discoveries another expedition had been mounted in South America. What they had found there, the documents didn’t reveal—but they did reveal that the mission had led the Nazis to Tibet, to the Golden Peak.

  To here.

  “I just wish we had more information,” Henry complained. “I’d love to know exactly what they found in South America.”

  Laura turned the pages. “We’ve got enough. They got us this far.” She read one phrase from the decaying, blotchy paper: “‘The Golden Peak, said to glow with the light of dawn between two dark mountains.’ I’d say …” she looked up at the looming mountain, “this fits the bill.”

  “So far.” Henry examined the text. Even though he had already read it a hundred, a thousand times, he checked it again to assure himself that he hadn’t made a mistake in the translation.

  He hadn’t. This was the place.

  “So the entrance is supposed to be at the end of the Path of the Moon … whatever that is.” He surveyed the rising landscape through his binoculars, seeing nothing but rocks and snow. “Why do legends always have to have cryptic names? Does it seem to lead to the moon; does it follow the movements of the moon; what?”

  “I think it looks like the moon,” said Laura meaningfully. “Specifically, a crescent moon.”

  “Why do you think that?” There was still nothing even remotely moonlike in view as he panned across the face of the mountain.

  “Because,” she replied, placing a hand on the binoculars and gently pulling them down from his face, “I can see it right in front of me.”

  Henry blinked, wondering what she was talking about… until he saw it himself.

  Ahead was a long, curving path that swung off to the left, rising up the flank of the peak before sweeping back around to the right and ending at a broad ledge some distance above. In contrast to the jumbled mix of dark rocks and patchy snow around it, the path was an almost unbroken crescent of pure white, indicating flatter, smoother ground. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before.

  “Laura?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is another one of those moments when I’m so glad that I married you.”

  “Yeah. I know.” They smiled at each other, then kissed. “So,” she said when they pulled apart, “how far do you think it is?”

  “A mile, maybe … about five hundred feet up. Fairly steep.”

  “If the ancient Atlanteans could get up there in sandals, I figure we can manage in hiking boots.”

  “So do I.” Henry returned the binder to his pack, then waved to the rest of the expedition. “Okay! This is it! We’re moving out!”

  The path proved trickier to negotiate than expected. The snow camouflaged a surface strewn with loose rubble from landslides, making each step treacherous.

  By the time they reached the ledge, the sun had passed over the summit of the mountain, casting the entire eastern face into shadow. Henry turned and scanned the horizon as he helped Laura up the last few feet of the path. Heavy clouds were rolling in from the north. He hadn’t noticed it during the effort of the ascent, but the temperature had definitely fallen.

  “Bad weather?” asked Laura, following his gaze.

  “Looks like we might be in for a blizzard.”

  “Great. Good thing we got up here before it starts.” She looked back at the ledge, which even at its narrowest was a dozen yards wide as it cut across the face of the mountain. “Shouldn’t be any trouble setting up camp here.”

  “Get the guides to pitch the tents before the weather turns,” said Henry. The path ended here; above the ledge, the rock face was steep enough to require proper climbing gear. That was no problem, as they had the necessary equipment. But if the Ahnenerbe documents were correct, they shouldn’t need it…

  Laura passed on Henry’s instructions to the Tibetans before returning to him. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to have a look around. If there are any entrances that might potentially lead into caves, they shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  Laura arched an eyebrow, a flash of amusement in her intense green eyes. “Anything to get out of pitching the tents, huh?”

  “Hey, that’s what we’re paying them for!” He turned to the man sitting alone on a rock nearby. “What about you, Jack? Coming?”

  The third American member of the group peered up at them from inside the hood of his parka. “Give me a chance to get my breath back, Henry! I think I’ll wait here, get some coffee once the water’s boiled.”

  “Can’t shake your caffeine habit even in Tibet, huh?” Husband and wife mockingly rolled their eyes at each other as they walked up the slope, leaving Jack on his own. “All those years he keeps telling us we’re mad for searching for Atlantis, then we finally come up with a solid lead and suddenly he practically begs to come along … and when we’re right on the doorstep, he decides to take a coffee break!” said Henry.

  After a few minutes Henry paused, staring at the rock face. “Something?” Laura asked.

  “These strata …” he said, pointing. Countless eons before, the immense forces causing the Himalayas to rise up where the Indian and Asian tectonic plates collided had also warped the rocks themselves, twisting the layers so they ran almost vertically instead of horizontally.

  “What about them?”

  “If you moved these stones,” Henry said, pointing to a pile of rubble, “I think you’d have an entrance.”

  Laura saw a slice of absolute darkness within the folded strata. “Big enough to get into?”

  “Let’s find out!” He pulled at the topmost rock. Snow and loose pebbles dropped from it as he threw it aside. The dark hole beyond grew deeper. “Give me a hand.”

  “Oh, so you’ll pay the locals to put up tents, but when it comes to moving heavy rocks, you drag in your wife …”

  “There must have been a landslip. This is just the top of the entrance.” He pulled more stones
aside, Laura helping. “Use your flashlight, see if you can see how far back it goes.”

  Laura took off her pack and pulled out a Maglite, shining it into the hole. “I can’t see the back.” She paused, then shouted, “Echo!” A faint reflection of her voice came from within the dark chamber. Henry raised an eyebrow. “Heh. Sorry.”

  “It’s big in there, anyway,” he said. “Nearly as big as your mouth.” Laura gently slapped the back of his head. “I think if we move this rock here, we might be able to squeeze in.”

  “You mean I might be able to squeeze in.”

  “Well of course! Ladies first.”

  “Stupid chivalry,” Laura complained jokingly. They both gripped the offending rock, then braced their feet and pulled. For a moment nothing happened, then with a grinding rasp it burst free. The opening was now about three feet high and just over a foot at its widest, tapering to nothing at the top.

  “Think you’ll fit?” Henry asked.

  Laura reached through the hole with one arm and felt around inside. “It widens out. I should be okay once I get through.” She leaned closer and aimed the flashlight downwards. “You were right about the landslip. It’s quite steep.”

  “I’ll rope you up,” said Henry, removing his own pack. “Any problems, I can pull you back out.”

  After the rope was attached to Laura’s climbing harness, she tied her hair into a ponytail and inched through the opening, feet first. Once inside, she cautiously stood, feeling the loose surface shift beneath her feet.

  “What do you see?” asked Henry.

  “Just rocks so far.” Her eyes adjusting to the gloom, Laura switched on the Maglite again. “There’s a flatter floor at the bottom. Looks like …” She raised the light again. The beam fell on rock walls—then nothing but blackness. “There’s a passageway back here, quite wide, and I’ve got no idea how far back it goes. A long way.” Excitement rose in her voice. “I think it’s man-made!”

  “Can you get down?”

  “I’ll try.” She took an experimental step, both hands raised for balance. Small pieces of debris skittered down the pile. “It’s kind of loose, I might have to—”