The Lost Angel

by Sierra, Javier

  “Ellen, relax. You need to rest,” Jenkins said, worried. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here.”

  “No . . . wait . . . ,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes focusing for the first time. “We can’t leave without the adamants. We swore to the president we’d bring them back.”

  “The adamants! We’ve got to get them,” Allen said.

  But before he could make a move toward Julia, a powerful blast of wind—as strong as steel—knocked the three of them against the glacier wall.

  Stunned and bruised, the three of them nevertheless noticed that the remaining electrical equipment was finally powering down. The room plunged into darkness save for the rhythmic pulsating glow enveloping the Ark, the invocation tablet and the group covered in the electric spiders.

  And then, just like that, the sound stopped.

  The room fell silent.

  But the calm didn’t last for long.

  Before Allen and Jenkins could decide what to do next, the ground began to tremble and the walls of the cave began to crumble overhead.

  “Oh, God!” Allen said, crouching over his rifles.

  It was as if the whole world was shaking now. The ground cracked under their boots, along with the glacier walls around the Ark, as if the entire mountain was trying to shake loose these intruders. A shower of icicles and chunks of ice rained down on them.

  It’s an earthquake! Allen thought.

  But the first tremor was just a warning. Three or four other quakes jostled the cave. Allen fell and slid down the icy floor, coming to rest against one wall. Ellen fell hard out of Tom’s arms and tumbled dangerously toward the electrified outline of William Faber. The old man, oblivious to the goings-on, remained frozen, his hands stretched toward the Ark, his feet planted firmly on the floor.

  But it was Tom who bore the brunt of it.

  He lost his balance and slammed his head against the corner of a metal lab table. The metallic taste of blood immediately filled his mouth. Flat on his back, he saw the cave’s icy dome shatter overhead, shards flying in all directions.

  And that’s when he saw it.

  It. He had no words for what it was.

  Some kind of phosphorescent wave flowed over the cave like cascading water. It was shapeless and floated down toward them like a silk scarf, like a beam of soft light from heaven itself. Despite its delicate translucence, it appeared solid in places, and it swayed delicately in the wind.

  Before Allen and the president’s men could move, the veil began sweeping over the room, moving over the angels still encased in electrical light. It was a singular sight, watching it sweep over them. Looking through this translucent membrane, you could make out the outline of the Ark, the invocation tablet and even the darkened flat-screen monitor that had shown the countdown. But strangely—and this is what most frightened Jenkins—it engulfed each person as it swept over them.

  William Faber was the first to disappear.

  Then his son.

  After that, the young man with the tattoo on his cheek disappeared, followed by the pilot, the towering man with long hair and then his companion. Then Sheila and Daniel.

  Finally, as if saving the best for last, the wave swept deliberately toward Julia Álvarez.

  “The adamants!” Tom yelled as he watched the wave move toward her. “We have to get them!”

  Allen jumped up, aimed his M16 toward the luminescent mass and sprayed a wave of bullets toward it.

  Bad move.

  The veil shuddered at the contact with the white-hot metal. It pulsed, immediately sending a fierce and powerful wave of energy in all directions, violently shaking the glacier. Chunks of icy wall crumbled down all around them.

  “The whole cave’s coming apart!” Allen yelled.

  “We gotta get out of here, now!” Tom said, dragging Ellen with him. “You have to get Julia, Colonel! For God’s sake!”

  Julia Álvarez was still unconscious and strapped to the gurney. Before her, the Ark had opened, revealing its cold, dark insides. But Allen couldn’t bother looking inside as the floor continued to shake. If the hull of the petrified ship came apart, it would crush the only person who had ever managed to control the adamants. Michael Owen would never forgive him.

  Allen broke toward Julia Álvarez at a full sprint.

  He had to save her.

  99

  It was the cold that made me come to. A dry, biting cold I felt deep in my bones. What a bitter awakening from such a sound and beautiful sleep. As I awoke to violent shivers and wet hair, I was sure that if I didn’t get somewhere warm soon, I was going to freeze to death.

  When I finally was able to open my eyes, I felt the sudden sting of daylight.

  “Where . . . where am I?”

  The last thing I remembered was being strapped to a gurney as Martin looked down on me warmly, peacefully, telling me to relax. I must have lost consciousness when I took the adamants in my hands.

  The adamants!

  I squeezed my fists, hoping to feel them. But they were gone. Instead, I got a handful of powdery snow.

  I was lying face-up, out in the open, under a thin gray fog, and I wasn’t sure whether I should try to move or just lie still. For some reason, I couldn’t think straight. My brain was numb. All I could think about was some strange dream where I had seen Jacob’s ladder come down to earth. What a crazy dream . . . Yet this pang in my gut told me this wasn’t just a dream; maybe I really had seen it.

  The Jacob’s ladder.

  And even the angels traveling up and down.

  “Look! Her eyes are open!”

  A friendly voice nearby perked up when I finally blinked.

  Ellen Watson was soon leaning over me, studying me. I barely recognized her under a wool cap and a scarf that covered all but her eyes.

  We were outside the cave. And there was a stranger standing behind Ellen. His nose and cheeks were rosy from the cold and his lips were cracked from the frigid wind. He looked young. He gave off a disctinctive air right up to the point when he put a cell phone to his ear and turned away, no longer interested in me.

  “That’s Tom Jenkins, my partner,” Ellen said. “He works for the president, too. He’s trying to figure out our coordinates so they can get us out of here. The solar storm knocked out several satellites and it’s been almost impossible to get a signal . . .”

  “Solar storm?” I stammered as I tried to sit up. I couldn’t think straight.

  “Please, Julia, don’t try to move,” she said, placing her hand on my chest. “We still don’t know whether you were hurt.”

  “Why would I be hurt?” I said, lying back down.

  “You don’t remember any of it, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nick Allen. You remember him?” she asked.

  “Of course . . . I met him in Santiago. He was talking to me when Artemi Dujok and his men kidnapped me.”

  “He was the one who got you out of the glacier in time. About an hour ago, a tremor brought down the whole cavern. He managed to shove you toward the mouth of the entrance just before. You’re lucky he’s not afraid to die . . .”

  “An . . . earthquake? Here?”

  “A big one,” Ellen said. “We think the magnetic field from your adamants combined with the proton shower to cause it. Damn storm knocked out all the satellite communications, too . . .”

  “What about the adamants?”

  “Lost inside the glacier.”

  “And the Ark?”

  “Same fate.”

  I lay my head back for a second, unsure if I was brave enough to ask my next question.

  “What about Martin?”

  Ellen turned away. She looked like she was searching for the right words. “Just before the avalanche, something bizarre happened inside the cave . . . ,” she said, as if still trying to convince herself of what she had seen. “The adamants attracted some kind of strange force. Like a cloud of light of some kind. It came sweeping down from the sky, right to
where all of you were standing . . .”

  “So what happened to Martin?” I asked insistently.

  “Martin . . . was swallowed up by that thing, Julia. He disappeared.”

  I could feel my heart in my throat. Tom and Ellen stood still, watching for my reaction. But I managed to keep it together. “How’s Colonel Allen?”

  “He has some bruises and burns from when he jumped in to save you. But otherwise, he’s fine.”

  “And . . . the others?”

  “All the angels disappeared.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

  “Dujok. Daniel Knight. Sheila . . . all of them. Whatever that cloud was, it took all of them.”

  “The ladder!”

  “The what?”

  “Jacob’s ladder,” I whispered, more to myself, the words sticking in my throat. “The stairway to heaven. Oh, God, it took them all . . . They were right. Don’t you see? They did it. They did exactly what they set out to do.”

  “Did it? Did what?” Jenkins asked, shrugging his shoulders, looking to each of us for answers.

  “Julia’s right. They went home, Tom,” Ellen said.

  Tom Jenkins looked at Ellen, then back at me, and shook his head. “Oh, brother . . . Both of you are nuts,” he said, turning back to his phone, looking for a signal. “I think that earthquake jogged something loose inside your heads.”

  100

  The Oval Office was still buzzing.

  From the moment he’d hung up the phone with Andrew Bollinger, he hadn’t wasted a single second. In a matter of minutes, the staff had moved the comfortable Chester couches out of the way to make room for a table with several flat-screens so the president could teleconference with four strategic centers at once. Watch and pray. Castle had given strict orders to hold off saying anything to the National Security Council and had even bypassed watching this all play out from the Situation Room in the basement.

  He needed to concentrate. And he could do it better in the Oval Office.

  Now, from his desk, he could see what was happening at all the important locations: the Goddard Space Flight Center, the radio telescope in Socorro, the National Reconnaissance Office and even the NSA. They’d all spent the last half hour scrutinizing any and every change in the ionosphere. They’d each been made aware, to some extent, of the existence of the stones and Operation Elijah. And so had the secretary of defense and the vice president, who stood next to their commander in chief, watching the monitors in stunned silence.

  Until we know just how big the crisis is, we should act with discretion, Castle thought.

  Andrew Bollinger had been the only one who guessed right. That’s why his was one of the faces on the screens. And it’s why everyone else waited to hear his opinion. The proton storm that he’d predicted would make landfall hours ahead of time was now, in fact, pounding the skies over Mount Ararat.

  “All right, Doctor,” Castle said, purposely not calling his friend by his first name. “There’s your storm, just as you said. What do you think’s going to happen next?”

  Bollinger cleared his throat. “There’s no precedent for a radiation storm of this category, Mr. President. This storm’s sixteen times more powerful than the last one, in 1989. And this one’s going to be worse. A lot worse, sir.”

  “Damage report,” Roger Castle said to the screens in front of him.

  “Dr. Bollinger’s right, Mr. President,” answered a female scientist at Goddard, on the center screen. “The first wave of protons has knocked out thirteen percent of our communications satellites. Just as he predicted.”

  “What other damage can we expect, Dr. Scott?”

  Edgar Scott straightened his glasses back at the National Reconnaissance Office. “Uh . . . it’s actually off the charts, Mr. President. If these emissions last m-much longer . . . ,” he stammered, “well, the next thing to go will be all shortwave radio transmissions. It’s still too early to know what kind of effect it will have on Earth’s magnetic field. So far, we’re seeing aurora borealis far south of the North Pole. And if you’re asking for my opinion, Mr. President, we’re going to see widespread radiation poisoning: eye damage, skin cancers, crop mutations, a breakdown in the food chain . . .”

  “It’s the Third Fall from Grace, just as the prophet Enoch predicted, Mr. President,” Michael Owen said from behind his mahogany desk at the NSA. “A biblical curse.”

  “The Third Fall, Michael?”

  “Well, at the risk of being the doomsayer of the group . . . Enoch predicted that after the Fall from Grace and the Great Flood, the next ‘end of the world’ would come by fire. And his metaphor seems pretty apt right now, don’t you think?”

  Castle’s face tensed up.

  “You know anything about Hopi Indian prophesies, Mr. Owen?”

  Owen looked back at him with a serious expression. On the screen next to him, Andrew Bollinger shifted uncomfortably.

  “Right, well, I was the governor of New Mexico and I did learn about them,” he said. “They believe Earth, and humanity, is sentenced to go through cycles of global catastrophes—unless their gods have mercy on them. They believe we’re living in the fourth world, and that the previous ones were destroyed by fire, ice and flood. So you see, it looks like your destruction by fire has already happened at least once . . .”

  “And the last time,” said the woman from the Goddard lab, “the Bible says we survived only because of divine intervention.”

  “The same story in the Bible is told the world over, on all five continents, in as many as two hundred seventeen different stories about the Great Flood. But more to the point, none of them say anything about divine intervention getting us out of this mess this time. We’re going to have to assume we’re on our own here, people. Let’s act accordingly.”

  Michael Owen’s eyes dropped, defeated. And Castle could imagine just what was going through his head: Operation Elijah, whose goal it had been for more than a hundred years to find some way to communicate with a superior being before the next apocalypse, had failed. Someone else had beaten them to it, and he hadn’t been able to do anything to stop it.

  “If this storm keeps up for another twelve hours,” the scientist from Goddard added, “the United States is going to get pummeled. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Did somebody say something about divine intervention?” Edgar Scott said, squinting toward the camera. It sounded like he either wasn’t paying attention or his satellite signal was on a delay. “You mean like some kind of Noah’s Ark . . . or like the ship from the Gilgamesh epic?”

  “Yes . . . something like that,” Owen grumbled, distracted. “But we don’t have anything like that to help us this time . . .”

  “Uh . . . well . . . maybe we do,” Scott said nervously.

  The president focused in on Scott’s screen. He appeared to be having an offline conversation while the video conference was going on.

  “Let’s have it, Mr. Scott. What do you mean?”

  “Take a look at this . . . The HMBB is sending us new information about the category-X emissions from Mount Ararat. All this happened so quickly that we didn’t have time to move the satellite from northern Turkey, out of the way of the solar shower. And it was still tracking the frequency from the stones at the time. It should’ve been fried in the storm, but somehow it’s still working, so . . .”

  “So . . . what, Mr. Scott? Save the explanations and get to it!”

  “The satellite’s still up and running, sir, and we’re still getting live readings from Ararat.”

  “Are you sure?” Goddard’s director turned to her own assistants and ordered them to double-check the information.

  Scott set his glasses on his head and rubbed his eyes. “Confirmed. Data’s just coming in, Mr. President . . . Looks like a six-point-eight-magnitude earthquake just struck near the very peak of that mountain range. Wait, there’s something else: The signal from the adamants has . . . disappeared . . . and so has the p
lasma storm!”

  For a second, everyone fell silent.

  “The solar storm is over? Mr. Scott, are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. Yes, sir, Mr. President!”

  Before Roger Castle could even breathe a sigh of relief, his secured cell phone started vibrating on his desk. At any other time, he would’ve ignored the call as cheers went up all around them. But the number that came up made him leap for it. Just reading the caller ID told him it was more good news.

  Incoming call: Thomas Jenkins.

  101

  The call lasted all of three minutes. One hundred and eighty seconds of sheer joy and celebration that soon spread to the rest of the group. Even before hearing all the details, Nick Allen and Ellen Watson hugged like old friends. The president of the United States had just promised Tom he’d be sending a special search-and-rescue team to get them off that mountain posthaste. Apparently, there was a NATO outpost in the nearby valley of Yenidogan that could have a team there in less than four hours. We’d be back to civilization before we knew it. That was the best news Tom had gotten since he’d seen his cell phone turn back on and he cheered like a schoolboy.

  They all celebrated.

  I was just trying to get my bearings. Maybe this will sound crazy, but I think I was the only one in our group who wasn’t eager to leave Mount Ararat. My eyes searched the landscape for the glacier where I had seen Martin for the last time.

  But it was nowhere to be found.

  My senses were still hazy. Images and sensations flashed in my mind, a patchwork of memories that I couldn’t manage to fit together: William Faber inside a radiant cocoon. Martin floating toward a whirlwind of pastel colors, his body wrapped in a soft, serene glow. His eyes smiled with joy and thankfulness—and when he turned his gaze toward me, seconds before disappearing into that shimmering veil, I was overcome with such a feeling of indescribable gratitude. I never felt afraid or anguished to see him disappear into the ether; I simply knew that it was our destiny. “Your gift has sent them home,” I heard a voice say.