Not tonight, though. He wasn’t going to set one foot outdoors if he didn’t have to. He felt a brief stab of pity for the Marines stationed aboard the platform, who had guard duty no matter what the conditions. Poor bastards.

The unexpected weather aside, it had been a good day. The high-resolution sonar mapping of the citadel was ahead of schedule, and the excavation of the first site had already produced results, an exciting haul of Atlantean artifacts valuable in both historical and monetary terms. He may not have discovered Atlantis, but Raynes had already decided that he was damn well going to be the person famous for exploring it.

The actual discoverer of Atlantis was Dr. Nina Wilde, fifteen years Raynes’s junior and-on paper at least-his IHA superior. He wondered if the red-haired New Yorker had any idea that by accepting a senior post in the IHA she’d effectively ended her archaeological career before even turning thirty. Probably not, he decided. While she was certainly cute to look at, Nina also came across to Raynes as naive. It seemed to him that she’d been given the position of director of operations as a way to keep her-and her bodyguard-turned-boyfriend, Eddie Chase, whom Raynes regarded as little more than a sarcastic English thug-quiet and out of trouble while more experienced hands got on with the real work.

He made his way to the elevator cage running up the inside of the support leg, glancing at the dark void overhead. The SBX’s main deck, the size of two football fields, was twelve stories above sea level. Carrying the case of artifacts, Raynes slammed the gate closed and pushed the button to ascend.

Water sprayed up into the dock below as waves slapped noisily against the sides of the pool. He had never seen conditions inside the sub pen so bad before. Normally, the ocean surface inside the moon pool did little more than ripple. If it was this bad inside, he didn’t even want to think about what it would be like outside.