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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “Something special about the Dogon?” Lyle asked.

  “The Dogon are supposed to have received advanced astronomical knowledge from aliens,” Marano helpfully explained.

  “In case anyone hasn’t noticed,” Lyle said, “this picture doesn’t show aliens. Just people.”

  Jess’s flashlight joined the others moving back and forth along the mural. He was right. Stick figures, small and dark, were represented everywhere: on the ships, the piers, the pathways along the harbor side. All had two arms, two legs, one head.

  “Of course,” Ironwood said testily, “if they’re enough like us to interbreed, I bet they don’t look all that different at a distance.”

  Jess turned to David. “We need to keep going.”

  “I’ll catch up.” He began to take a panoramic series of flash photos. Before they reached the first turn, he was back at her side. “How much farther?”

  Jess didn’t need to look at the printout. “Next corner, twenty meters on the right.”

  That’s where they found a second mural. Even though some sections were damaged, Jess could still make out the groups of animals, herded together, some in fenced areas. In what seemed to be a slaughterhouse, animals were being butchered, skins tanned, bones being ground up for something that was unclear.

  “What are those?” David snapped picture after picture. “Llamas?”

  “Quite possibly.” Ironwood’s flashlight settled on the animals in question. “Definitely cold-adapted. Look at those shaggy coats.”

  “No one’s ever found mammal bones on Antarctica,” Marano said.

  Ironwood didn’t think that was important. “Nobody ever found this outpost, either. If these folks were sailing around the world, who’s to say they didn’t bring back useful animals from South America?”

  “Over here.” Twenty meters along, Jess stood once again before a closed set of double doors set into the sidewall of the corridor. These, however, weren’t made of wood. The others rushed to join her.

  “Gold?” David raised the camera.

  Ironwood shook his head. “They’re tarnished. Brass, maybe? Bronze?”

  “Bronze isn’t quite the cutting-edge space-age alien metal.” Jess regretted the words as soon as she’d said them. Without this man, she’d never have been here. He’d helped her when her own family had deserted her.

  Ironwood took her comment with good humor. “It is if that’s the recipe the aliens gave out, knowing it’s all that could be accomplished with primitive technology.” His flashlight beam played over the doors. “Anyone recognize these markings?”

  Each door was roughly four feet across, eight feet high, with twelve inset panels. The panels themselves contained rows of tiny embossed figures.

  “Some kind of writing?” David adjusted his camera lens for zoom.

  “Not cuneiform,” Ironwood said. He took his mitt off and ran a finger along the markings on the right-hand door. “There’s enough repetition for this to be an alphabet, not pictograms. Could be the basis of the first written language.”

  Marano rubbed some of the markings herself. “Or it could be the pattern home designers of 9000 B.C. thought worked best with the drapes.”

  Jess closed her ears to their chatter and tried not to think of the other defenders’ reactions to outsiders touching Family property. She pushed lightly against the left-hand door. It moved.

  “That’s astounding,” Ironwood exclaimed. “The hinges still work.”

  Jess pushed with more force. The door was resistant but slowly gave way with a high-pitched squeal. She took a step forward, and the others pressed close behind her, their flashlights moving back and forth over the room inside.

  Jess’s heart sank.

  “It’s not the same,” David said.

  The chamber here was twice the size of the one in Cornwall, and there were no stars embedded on its low, curved ceiling. The mural painted on its encircling wall was of a harbor city, perhaps the same one as on the first mural they’d found.

  Jess fought disappointment, struggling to even hear David’s next words. “Jess, I wonder if it’s what this place looked like.” With his flashlight, he drew her attention to how, on the land side, the horizon showed jagged black mountains crested by snow. Across the room, opposite those peaks, the harbor gave way to open sea. His flashlight moved to the horizon line of the ocean. “Are those icebergs?”

  Whatever they were, Jess thought, they were small, white, and irregular. Maybe distant sails. Maybe . . . snow and ice. Could that be why this continent was called the White Island? If the First Gods had temples all around the world, why was this the one they had to return to?

  “Whenever this was painted,” she said, “this place was cold.” Look closer, she thought. This place was different, but it still belonged to the Family. What makes it special?

  David shone his flashlight into the center of the chamber. “No table.”

  Jess walked to where the table should have been. Instead, there was a round metal disk, the diameter of a stone table but only an inch thick, embossed with symbols like those on the doors.

  “Is it covering something?” David asked. Camera in hand, he stood beside her.

  Jess’s flashlight swept the area around the disk. In dust undisturbed for millennia, she saw footprints.

  Fresh ones. Leading to the disk, then vanishing.

  “We’re not alone,” Lyle said.

  He drew his gun.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Merrit had heard the voices, indistinct but coming closer, and, following his map, had moved quickly to the double doors guarding the circular treasure room. Slowly and quietly he opened one of the doors just enough to squeeze through, then headed for the center of the room.

  No table—but the round trapdoor at the chamber’s center more than made up for it. It was hollow and lifted easily. Underneath was a stone staircase spiraling down through a tower of closely fitted stone blocks.

  He slipped into the opening. With one hand he slipped the disk back into place above him, then continued down, leaning against the curved stone wall to ease the stress on his injured ankle.

  One hundred and forty-four steps later, he faced a narrow, open doorway in the curved wall of the tower. He paused before stepping through, onto a stone-block path that led into pitch-black depths. His flashlight beam revealed a natural cavern beyond, with unusual metal stands, twelve feet high, supporting wide and shallow metal bowls. The stands flanked the pathway, alternating every fifty feet as far as his flashlight reached.

  Merrit moved into the cavern and made a new discovery. Around the base of the stone tower that enclosed the staircase to the room above, piles of charred wood were scattered randomly, as if many separate small fires had burned out. Among them were small mounds of cloth, as if this had once been a campground.

  Then the scrape of metal made him freeze in place. Metal on stone. Whoever else was in this place was coming down the staircase—in the tower with only one way out, through the narrow doorway.

  Merrit smiled.

  A perfect choke point.

  The perfect ambush.

  He moved swiftly into position, twenty feet to the side of the tower doorway, and turned off his flashlight. The darkness was instant and total.

  Merrit thought back to the last time he had been in the same situation, in the sunken chamber in the South Pacific.

  This was going to work just fine.

  “I’ll go first,” Lyle said.

  No one argued. Except for Marano.

  Jess listened as the two agents negotiated, but she didn’t intervene.

  “Seriously, Jack, whoever went down there first is sitting at the bottom waiting to pick off whoever’s dumb enough to follow.”

  “That would be me,” Lyle said, “and I have a gun.”

  “Seriously,” Marano repeated. “I’m small, I’m fast, let me draw fire, then you smoke ’em.”

  “I know what I’m doing, Roz.”

  “Boss . . .”


  He reached out and took her hand. “Give me your flashlight. I don’t care if it gets shot.”

  Marano handed over her flashlight, and Lyle stuffed it along with David’s into a pocket of his parka.

  Jess and Ironwood kept theirs.

  Lyle took the first step onto the spiral, then said to his partner, “Stay close, stay quiet. The rest of you, don’t come down till I give the all-clear.”

  “What if you don’t?” Jess asked.

  “Don’t come down. Go back the way we came. Dig out the radio. And get as far away as you can by dawn.”

  David and Ironwood immediately exchanged glances with Jess, letting her know they felt as she did. There was no chance any of them were leaving before seeing what lay below.

  Lyle started down, Marano behind him. After a few seconds, the spilled light from Lyle’s flashlight was imperceptible. Jess stared into the darkness, wishing she were in the lead, but knowing they were right. At least about going first.

  David turned to her. “Jess, what do you think the connection is? Between this place and your family’s temples?”

  Ironwood answered first. “This feels older to me, Jessica.” He pointed out details with his flashlight. “See? The stones are larger, not as precisely cut as in India or Peru. And look at the top steps of the stairway. See how worn they are? Folks went up and down them for centuries. There’s no wear like that in any of the other outposts. They were built ages ago but not used for long,”

  “You don’t suppose this is where it started, do you?” David said. “That first civilization?”

  “How does a civilization start in Antarctica?” Ironwood asked.

  “What about the murals?” David added. “When they were painted, the land wasn’t completely icebound the way it is now. In fact, the way the planet’s heating up, it probably won’t be icebound in another century.”

  “Don’t start with that global warming crap,” Ironwood warned.

  “I’m not saying why it’s warming up, just saying that it is. Natural or man-made, you can’t argue that the ice isn’t melting all over the place.” He turned to Jess. “What about it? You know about ancient climates. Was Antarctica ever as warm as this painting makes it look?”

  Jess wanted to shout that they were wasting time talking about intangibles, though she knew none of them could do anything until they got the all-clear from Lyle and Marano.

  “No.” She corrected herself. “Unless . . . there’s no question central Antarctica’s been icebound for millions of years, but the Antarctic Peninsula? It has the mildest conditions, and ten thousand years ago, coming out of an ice age . . . the sea level was so low, no one really knows how the deep ocean currents were affected—and those are what drive local climatic conditions. So maybe, with a different current pattern, this small part of the continent could have been habitable year-round back then. But not for long—a couple of hundred, a thousand years at most.”

  “From the Magna Carta to the moon landing,” David said. “A lot can happen in a thousand years.”

  Lyle descended slowly, and with each step, he asked himself what he was doing here.

  Arresting Ironwood had been the right thing to do. That did warrant the logistical nightmare of arranging this mission, made possible only because the condemned was picking up the tab for his own funeral. But there’d been gunfire aboveground. Men were dead. If he and Roz and the rest of them weren’t out of here by first light, more would die.

  And for what?

  Archaeology?

  He deeply regretted thinking this was a good idea. Mostly, he regretted having Roz here with him. Biggest road trip yet, she’d called it. Looked forward to it.

  At step 138, Lyle’s flashlight beam found the floor. At step 140, he could see the single opening in the curved wall that led out into darkness. There’d be no room for anyone to hide inside the stairwell. The shooter would be outside the doorway.

  Lyle stood on the last step and shone his light through the opening. The beam was swallowed up, ineffective. Whatever was out there, it was a huge space.

  “You ready?” he whispered.

  “For anything,” Roz whispered back.

  Lyle committed to memory the layout of the small space beyond the bottom step, then turned off his flashlight.

  He took three paces with his hand extended and touched the stone wall exactly when he anticipated he would. Next he moved his hand slowly to the right until it reached the open doorway.

  Then he listened, hearing nothing.

  He whispered to Roz. “Sideways, against the wall.”

  She moved to stand behind him, left shoulder against the wall.

  He slipped his gun inside his parka and, in one smooth motion flicked on a flashlight just as he threw it out the doorway to the right.

  The flashlight spun through the air, painting the floor of the space beyond, but nothing else—no walls or ceiling. Hitting the floor, it rolled, then rocked back and forth until the movement stopped. Its beam followed suit, eventually settling so the cone of light shone steady at a ninety-degree angle to the doorway, off to the left.

  Lyle didn’t wait for any reaction from the shooter outside. He repeated the toss with a second flashlight, this time to the left.

  The second flashlight struck the floor, its beam pointing away from the doorway.

  Lyle pulled off his parka, zipped it up, then held it out just at the doorway’s edge. Moved it slightly, angled it. Pulled it back a bit—

  Crack!

  The shoulder of the parka exploded in a puff of insulation made visible by the flash of ricochet sparks as the bullet caromed up the stairwell. Almost instantaneously, with the flash whiting out his vision, Lyle let the parka fall to the floor. The tossed flashlights had created just enough light for the shooter, whose eyes were by now dark-adapted, to pick out the white of the polar camouflage parka. Not in detail, but enough to know the shape was there.

  Another crack and another flash of ricochet sparks as the parka jumped and—Roz gasped. “Leg.” He heard the rustle of her parka as she slid to the floor. “Oh crap,” she breathed.

  A scrape beyond the doorway. “Shh . . .” Lyle warned, almost inaudible. Roz’s breaths were coming in short gulps. She was in pain.

  More footsteps. The shooter approaching to inspect his prey.

  Lyle’s hand sought Roz’s face. His fingers pressed against her lips. Felt the vibration of a hum from her. Please, Roz . . . please . . . He couldn’t speak.

  Roz tensed, and Lyle felt the unvoiced scream of pain as it was building.

  The footsteps were even closer now. Lyle knew the shooter had a gun in his hand. Knew they were vulnerable in the faint light from the fallen flashlights.

  If Roz so much as breathed now, they’d both be dead.

  The footsteps stopped. The shooter was right outside the doorway. Looking down at the parka, about to realize there was no one in it, that it was a trap and the enemy was just inside and—

  Lyle felt Roz’s mouth open against his hand as she tried to suck in breath to release her pain in the only way she could and—

  With no other choice, no other hope, Lyle threw himself over his parka with a primal roar, firing his gun blindly, sighting the shooter with each strobing muzzle flash, rolling as he fired and as the shooter returned fire, and then—

  It was over.

  Lyle lay prone on the cold rock, arms outstretched, gun ready, breathing hard, scanning back and forth, blinded by the gunfire, knowing at least that the shooter was blinded as well, calling up each strobelike image, certain he’d hit the shooter with his third or fourth shot. He pictured the man doubling over. Running off. Or was he just ducking for cover?

  Lyle’s breathing slowed. Roz was in the stairwell bleeding out. He had to get back to her—but was the shooter waiting for him to do just that?

  He blinked, eyes straining to pick up details in the dim light from the two tossed flashlights. Something beside him, a cloth-wrapped bundle? Cautious,
he tugged at it. Froze as he saw a skull, skin shriveled tight and black, cheekbones oddly flat. A body? Beyond it, more cloth-wrapped mounds. More bodies? All around him? How many? What had happened here?

  But this wasn’t the time. Couldn’t be the time. He was up and stumbling, running, diving through the tower doorway, and no one shot him. “Roz!”

  She answered, weakly. “Sorry . . .”

  Her right leg was soaked and limp.

  In the darkness, Lyle scooped her up, nearly tripping over his shredded parka, found stairs and started hurtling up them, knee forgotten.

  On step 54, descending flashlights found them.

  Bounding down the spiral staircase, David was first to see Marano in Lyle’s arms, her right leg crimson, her face dead white.

  Jess pushed past him, her utility knife already out.

  Working swiftly, she sliced open the padded trousers, cutting through every layer, one after the other with steady hands, no hesitation. She’d kept telling David she’d been trained. For what? he’d wondered. Now he knew.

  Next Jess ordered Ironwood to hold his flashlight on the wound she found, a small dark circle weakly pulsing with blood. “No exit wound,” she said, and, within seconds, from the trouser material and Marano’s own knife, she rigged a tourniquet that she tightened around the agent’s thigh, above the wound.

  “Can you find your way back?” she asked Lyle.

  He nodded, shaken. Jess was in charge now.

  “Get the survival packs. You can use them? The meds? IV fluids?”

  “Yeah,” Lyle said. “I can do that.”

  “Then do it fast. She’s in shock, but she’ll make it if you do it fast.”

  Lyle lifted Marano, held her close, started up the stairs again.

  “Did you get him?” David called up to him.

  “I think so,” Lyle called back

  Jess had a different question. “Did you see what’s down there?”

  “I did,” the answer floated down. “Bodies. Lots of them.”