Atlantis Found (A Dirk Pitt Novel) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE - AS CLOSE TO HELL AS YOU CAN GET

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART TWO - IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE ANCIENTS

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART THREE - TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY ARK

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  PART FOUR - CITY UNDER THE ICE

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  PART FIVE - ASHES, ASHES, ALL FALL DOWN

  PART SIX - FINAL BLESSING

  POSTSCRIPT

  “CUSSLER AT HIS STORYTELLING BEST.”

  —The San Francisco Examiner

  In Atlantis Found, Clive Cussler’s most thrillingly original blockbuster, Dirk Pitt takes on his most dangerous mission yet—when a mysterious relic from the past threatens the future of humankind . . .

  An Antarctic whaler stumbles across an aged wreck—her frozen crew guarding a priceless treasure.

  A team of anthropologists is buried under a mountain by a deliberate explosion.

  A ship that should have died fifty-six years ago reappears, and almost sinks a National Underwater and Marine Agency ship.

  Dirk Pitt knows that somehow these events are connected. His investigations lead to an ancient mystery with devastating modern consequences, and a diabolical enemy unlike any he has ever known. Now, he is racing to save not only his life—but the world. The trap is set. The clock is ticking. And only one man stands between the earth and Armageddon . . .

  A Main Selection of the Book-Of-The-Month Club®

  ATLANTIS FOUND

  “Once again, Clive Cussler rules the literary waves.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Enough intrigue to satisfy even the most demanding thrill-seekers.” —The Chattanooga Times

  “Wickedly engrossing.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Cussler’s skill at creating action scenes and his robust characters make Atlantis Found a romping read.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Cussler fans will have no complaint as the Master revs up his novel to forty knots per hour and sweeps the reader into the fabled past.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Cussler is back, and it’s business as usual . . . Atlantis Found is everything Cussler fans have loved and bought for years . . . Lots of fun.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  CLIVE CUSSLER

  “Just about the best storyteller in the business.”

  —New York Post

  DIRK PITT®

  is that rarest of individuals without whom the world could not survive. He is a man of swift, decisive action who lives by his honor—forever standing watch on the front lines in the enduring war between good and evil. As the son of a U.S. senator, graduate of the Air Force Academy, and special projects director for the U.S. National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), his courage and cool under fire are matched only by his forceful nature and ferocious determination to do whatever is necessary. Pitt reports directly to Admiral James Sandecker, the cunning commander of NUMA, and is backed up by the tough, streetwise Al Giordino—a childhood friend and partner in undersea adventure for more than twenty years.

  DIRK PITT® ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER

  Trojan Odyssey

  Valhalla Rising

  Atlantis Found

  Flood Tide

  Shock Wave

  Inca Gold

  Sahara

  Dragon

  Treasure

  Cyclops

  Deep Six

  Pacific Vortex

  Night Probe

  Vixen 03

  Raise the Titanic!

  Iceberg

  The Mediterranean Caper

  DIRK PITT® ADVENTURES BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND

  DIRK CUSSLER

  Treasure of Khan

  Black Wind

  FICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER WITH PAUL KEMPRECOS

  Polar Shift

  Lost City

  White Death

  Fire Ice

  Serpent

  Blue Gold

  FICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND JACK DU BRUL

  Skeleton Coast

  Dark Watch

  FICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND CRAIG DIRGO

  Sacred Stone

  Golden Buddha

  NONFICTION BY CLIVE CUSSLER AND CRAIG DIRGO

  The Sea Hunters II

  The Sea Hunters

  Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS BY CLIVE CUSSLER

  The Adventures of Vin Fiz

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ATLANTIS FOUND

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  Sandecker, RLLLP

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1999 by Clive Cussler

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced

  in any form without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  www.penguinputnam.com

  eISBN : 978-1-436-27059-5

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I AM VERY GRATEFUL to Major Joe Andrzejewski (Retired) for his generous and valuable advice on the Special Forces.

  My thanks also to K. Eric Drexler and Christine Peterson, the leading champions of nanotechnology, for their guidance, and John Stevens, who led me through the labyrinth of the Pandora Mine. Also to Colonel Howard A. Buechner, Donald Cyr, Graham Hancock, Charles Hapgood, and Plato, whose books and words were invaluable to me, and to Paul Mollar, for the loan of his incredible S
kycar.

  IMPACT

  7120 B.C.

  WHAT IS NOW HUDSON BAY, CANADA

  THE INTRUDER CAME FROM beyond. A nebulous celestial body as old as the universe itself, it had been born in a vast cloud of ice, rocks, dust, and gas when the outer planets of the solar system were formed 4.6 billion years ago. Soon after its scattered particles had frozen into a solid mass one mile in diameter, it began streaking silently through the emptiness of space on an orbital voyage that carried it around a distant sun and halfway to the nearest stars again, a journey lasting many thousands of years from start to finish.

  The comet’s core, or nucleus, was a conglomeration of frozen water, carbon monoxide, methane gas, and jagged blocks of metallic rocks. It might accurately be described as a dirty snowball hurled through space by the hand of God. But as it whirled past the sun and swung around on its return path beyond the outer reaches of the solar system, the solar radiation reacted with its nucleus and a metamorphosis took place. The ugly duckling soon became a thing of beauty.

  As it began to absorb the sun’s heat and ultraviolet light, a long comma formed that slowly grew into an enormous luminous blue tail that curved and stretched out behind the nucleus for a distance of 90 million miles. A shorter, white dust tail more than one million miles wide also materialized and curled out on the sides of the larger tail like the fins of a fish.

  Each time the comet passed the sun, it lost more of its ice and its nucleus diminished. Eventually, in another 200 million years, it would lose all its ice and break up into a cloud of dust and become a series of small meteorites. This comet, however, would never orbit outside the solar system or pass around the sun again. It would not be allowed a slow, cold death far out in the blackness of space. Within a few short minutes, its life would be snuffed out. But on this, its latest orbit, the comet passed within 900,000 miles of Jupiter, whose great gravitational force veered it off on a collision course with the third planet from the sun, a planet its inhabitants called Earth.

  Plunging into Earth’s atmosphere at 130,000 miles an hour on a forty-five-degree angle, its speed ever-increasing with the gravitational pull, the comet created a brilliant luminescent bow shock as its ten-mile-wide, four-billion-ton mass began to break into fragments due to friction from its great speed. Seven seconds later, the misshapen comet, having become a blinding fireball, smashed onto Earth’s surface with horrendous effect. The immediate result from the explosive release of kinetic energy upon impact was to gouge out a massive cavity twice the size of the island of Hawaii as it vaporized and displaced a gigantic volume of water and soil.

  The entire earth staggered from the seismic shock of a 12.0 earthquake. Millions of tons of water, sediment, and debris burst upward, thrown through the hole in the atmosphere above the impact site and into the stratosphere, along with a great spray of pulverized, fiery rock that was ejected into suborbital trajectories before raining back to earth as blazing meteorites. Firestorms destroyed forests throughout the world. Volcanoes that had been dormant for thousands of years suddenly erupted, sending oceans of molten lava spreading over millions of square miles, blanketing the ground a thousand or more feet deep. So much smoke and debris were hurled into the atmosphere and later blown into every corner of the land by terrible winds that they blocked out the sun for nearly a year, sending temperatures plunging below freezing, and shrouding Earth in darkness. Climatic change in every corner of the world came with incredible suddenness. Temperatures at vast ice fields and northern glaciers rose until they reached between ninety and a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, causing a rapid melt-down. Animals accustomed to tropical and temperate zones became extinct overnight. Many, such as the woolly mammoths, turned to ice where they stood in the warmth of summer, grasses and flowers still undigested in their stomachs. Trees, along with their leaves and fruit, were quick-frozen. For days, fish that were hurled upward from the impact fell from the blackened skies.

  Waves five to ten miles in height were thrown against the continents, surging over shorelines with a destructive power that was awesome in magnitude. Water swept over low coastal plains and swept hundreds of miles inland, destroying everything in its path. Endless quantities of debris and sediment from the ocean floors were spread over low landmasses. Only when the great surge smashed against the base of mountains did it curl under and begin a slow retreat, but not before changing the course of rivers, filling land basins with seas where none existed before and turning large lakes into deserts.

  The chain reaction seemed endless.

  With a low rumble that grew to the roar of continuous thunder, the mountains began to sway like palm trees under a light breeze as avalanches swept down their sides. Deserts and grassy plains undulated as the onslaught from the oceans reared up and struck inland again. The shock from the comet’s impact had caused a sudden and massive displacement in Earth’s thin crust. The outer shell, less than forty miles thick, and the mantle that lay over the hot fluid core buckled and twisted, shifting crustal layers like the skin of a grapefruit that had been surgically removed and then neatly replaced so it could move around the core of fruit inside. As if controlled by an unseen hand, the entire crust then moved as a unit.

  Entire continents were shoved around to new locations. Hills were thrust up to become mountains. Islands thoughout the Pacific Ocean vanished, while others emerged for the first time. Antarctica, previously west of Chile, slid over two thousand miles to the south, where it was quickly buried under growing sheets of ice. The vast ice pack that once floated in the Indian Ocean west of Australia now found itself in a temperate zone and rapidly began to melt. The same occurred with the former North Pole, which had spread throughout northern Canada. The new pole soon began to produce a thick ice mass in the middle of what once had been open ocean.

  The destruction was relentless. The convulsions and holocaust went on as if they would never stop. The movement of the Earth’s thin outer shell piled cataclysm upon cataclysm. The abrupt melting of the former ice packs, combined with glaciers covering the continents that had suddenly shifted into or near tropical zones, caused the seas to rise four hundred feet, drowning the already destroyed land that had been overwhelmed by tidal waves from the comet’s impact. In the time span of a single day, Britain, connected to the rest of the European continent by a dry plain, was now an island, while a desert that became known as the Persian Gulf was abruptly inundated. The Nile River, having flowed into a vast fertile valley and then on toward the great ocean to the west, now ended at what had suddenly become the Mediterranean Sea.

  The last great ice age had ended in the geological blink of an eye.

  The dramatic change in the oceans and their circulation around the world also caused the poles to shift, drastically disturbing the earth’s rotational balance. Earth’s axis was temporarily thrown off by two degrees, as the North and South Poles were displaced to new geographical locations, altering the centrifugal acceleration around the outer surface of the sphere. Because they were fluid, the seas adapted before the earth made another three revolutions. But the landmass could not react as quickly. Earthquakes went on for months.

  Savage storms with brutal winds swirled around the earth, shredding and disintegrating everything that stood on the ground for the next eighteen years before the poles stopped wobbling and settled into their new rotational axis. In time, sea levels stabilized, permitting new shorelines to form as bizarre climatic conditions continued to moderate. Changes became permanent. The time sequence between night and day changed as the number of days in a year decreased by two. The earth’s magnetic field was also affected and moved northwest over a hundred miles.

  Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different species of animals and fish became instantly extinct. In the Americas, the one-humped camel, the mammoth, an ice age horse, and the giant sloth all disappeared. Gone also were the saber-toothed tiger, huge birds with twenty-five-foot wingspans and many other animals that weighed a hundred or more pounds, most dying by asphyxiation from the
smoke and volcanic gases.

  Nor did the vegetation on land escape the apocalypse. Plant life not turned to ashes by the holocaust died for lack of sunlight, along with the algae in the seas. In the end, over 85 percent of all life on Earth would die from floods, fires, storms, avalanches, poison from the atmosphere, and eventual starvation.

  Human societies, many quite advanced, and a myriad of emerging cultures on the threshold of a progressive golden age were annihilated in a single horrendous day and night. Millions of Earth’s men, women, and children died horribly. All vestiges of emerging civilizations were gone, and the few pathetic survivors were left with nothing but dim memories of the past. The coffin had been closed on the greatest uninterrupted advance of mankind, a ten-thousand-year journey from the simple Cro-Magnon man to kings, architects, stonemasons, artists, and warriors. Their works and their mortal remains were buried deep beneath new seas, leaving few physical examples and fragments of an ancient advanced culture. Entire nations and cities that had stood only a few hours before vanished without a trace. The cataclysm of such magnitude left almost no evidence of any prior transcendent civilizations.

  Of the shockingly low number of humans who survived, almost all lived in the higher altitudes of mountain ranges and were able to hide in caves to escape the furies of the turbulence. Unlike the more advanced Bronze Age peoples who tended to cluster and build on low-lying plains near rivers and ocean shorelines, the inhabitants of the mountains were Stone Age nomads. It was as though the cream of the crop, the Leonardo da Vincis, the Picassos, and the Einsteins of their era had evaporated into nothingness, abruptly leaving the world to be taken over by primitive nomadic hunters, a phenomenon similar to what happened to the glory of Greece and Rome after it was cast aside in favor of centuries of ignorance and creative lethargy. A neolithic dark age shrouded the grave of the highly cultured civilizations that once existed in the world, a dark age that would last for two thousand years. Slowly, very slowly, did mankind finally walk from the dark and begin building and creating cities and civilizations again in Mesopotamia and Egypt.