The American crew quickly obeyed and ditched the command center in orderly fashion. The Russians, however, looked around the empty command center, then dashed in the opposite direction to the outer air lock and their Kharkovchankas.
“Wait!” O’Dell called as he ran after them.
But they had cracked open the inner and outer doors and escaped by the time he reached the air lock. A blast of snow slapped O’Dell’s face as he grabbed a freezer suit, goggles, and gloves from the nearest storage compartment and ran outside.
The Russians were starting up their Kharkovchankas. O’Dell raced toward the row of Hagglunds transports and grabbed the door of the nearest forward cab.
“Where the hell do they think they’re going?” he said out loud, intending to hail them from the Hagglunds. The last thing he needed was Yeats or Kovich or the U.N. blaming him for more Russian deaths.
He was about to scramble aboard his Hagglunds when he felt a jolt. He looked down as a crack in the ice shot past his feet. His mouth opened in horror, and then he felt something sharp clamp down on his glove. It was Nimrod, Yeats’s dog, frantically pulling him with his teeth.
“Get out of here!” he yelled as he opened the door, but Nimrod jumped into the cab.
O’Dell heard what sounded like a series of thunderous explosions and looked back to see the base break away like an iceberg. Then he felt a rumble and watched in horror as the ice beneath him began to spiderweb.
The ice was melting!
He jumped into the cab with Nimrod. As soon as he closed the door, the Hagglunds lurched forward and back. Cracks radiated out on the ice below. My life is over, he thought, when the fiberglass cab dropped into the swirling, freezing water and was washed away. Then, feeling the transport bob up and down, he nearly choked with elation. “Goddamn, it does float!” he screamed to Nimrod, who was leaping from seat to seat in a frenzy.
The Russian Kharkovchankas, however, were dropping like stones beneath the bubbling surface of the icy waters.
O’Dell frantically switched on the windshield wipers. As the sheets of water were temporarily whisked away, he glimpsed a churning landscape. There was no Ice Base Orion, only what looked like a mushroom cloud forming in the air. For a wild moment he thought the reactor had blown, but the SP-100 didn’t possess the destructive power he was witnessing.
Another shock wave sent his head to the floor beneath the dashboard. He heard his skull crack against something sharp as the cab spun wildly away, Nimrod barking incessantly.
20
DESCENT HOUR NINE
THE RUMBLING INSIDE P4’S OBELISK CHAMBER grew so loud that Serena could barely hear herself shouting at Conrad, who stood frozen like a statue, the Scepter of Osiris tightly gripped in his hand.
“Put it back!” she screamed.
Conrad stepped toward the altar when suddenly the floor beneath his feet split open and a blazing pillar of fire shot up and turned Colonel Kovich into embers.
Conrad leapt back from the gaping hole as the altar disappeared down a fiery shaft. What was left of the Russian exploded in a cloud of dust. The obelisk fell to the floor.
Serena reached down to grab it but lunged too far and teetered over the edge. For a horrific few seconds she hovered above the hell hole and could feel its searing heat burning her cheeks. Then Conrad, coming up from behind, yanked her back from the brink.
For a moment she was safe in his arms, looking up into his concerned eyes with gratitude. But before she could catch her breath a shock wave rocked the chamber and threw them off their feet. The obelisk slid across the floor.
“The scepter!” she shouted.
Yeats dashed to retrieve it. But as the vibrations grew more violent, his right leg gave way, and he tumbled back into the floor shaft. He managed to catch the ledge at the last second. Serena could see his fingers sticking up above the shaft, clawing at the stone floor.
Conrad picked up the obelisk from the floor and grabbed Serena. “See if you can reach him!”
With Conrad firmly clasping her hand, she peered over the edge of the shaft and was surprised to see Yeats swinging above the infernal abyss.
She knew she didn’t have the strength to pull him up, but she shouted to Conrad, “I think I can give him a tug and he can climb out himself.”
She stretched out her hand when another jolt hit, sending Leonid’s corpse sliding into the shaft. The corpse struck Yeats on the way down. Yeats’s fingers disappeared and Serena heard Conrad cry out.
“Dad!” Conrad shouted.
Then she felt Conrad pulling her away so he could look down into the shaft. He stood there, paralyzed, trying to comprehend that his father was really gone.
Serena looked around the chamber as everything shook. She didn’t want to leave. But she didn’t want to stay behind and melt either. So she put her hand on Conrad’s shoulder and said, “There’s no time to mourn for those we’re about to follow.”
Her words were enough to bring Conrad back.
“This chamber is going to turn into a furnace in a few seconds,” he said, picking up the pack Yeats had left behind and slinging it over his shoulder. “Back to the gallery!”
They ran to the outer corridor. The rumbling wasn’t so loud here, she thought, following Conrad down the long tunnel. But when they emerged into the Great Gallery, Conrad stopped and looked up.
“Now might be a good time for you to say a brief prayer,” he said.
“Conrad, what’s happening?”
“I think P4 is releasing a burst of heat through the shafts, melting the ice outside,” he said. “And the water is being processed through this machinery.”
She followed Conrad’s gaze up the gallery and squinted her eyes. There was a shadow swirling in the distance at the top. Then she felt the first droplets of water splash against her cheek and realized what was coming.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed as the cascades of a gigantic waterfall began to tumble down the gallery behind them. “We’ve got to take cover!”
Now she was pulling him back to the chamber.
“Not yet,” he told her, “or we’ll fry.”
Already the water was knee-deep in the tunnel. By the time they were halfway back to the chamber, it was up to their waists. In seconds the current swelled to a torrent and swept them off their feet.
Serena reached for Conrad but couldn’t feel him anymore. She panicked and splashed desperately, taking in water, gasping for breath. She was going to drown, she realized. They were going to be flushed away and drown. Surely this is not what God intended for her life, she thought. But then she remembered the little girl in the ice and realized she had seen too many faces just like hers around the world to know for sure what God intended for her. All she knew was that she wanted to live, and she wanted Conrad to live too.
Oh, God, she prayed, help us.
A shadow fell across her, and she looked up to see Conrad standing in the entry of the tunnel to the star chamber, water swirling around his knees. He held the obelisk in one hand.
“Grab the other end!” he yelled above the rushing waters.
She reached up and clasped the obelisk and let Conrad pull her up. But she felt a tug at her ankle and looked down to see a bloody face emerge from the water.
It screamed something unintelligible, and she tried to shake it off. But it pulled still harder. Suddenly she recognized the disfigured face of one of Kovich’s men from the upper chamber.
“Hold on!” Serena yelled and let Conrad pull her up.
Once over the ledge, she turned to help the Russian. The soldier’s burned legs had barely cleared the ledge when Serena heard Conrad’s shout.
“Hurry!”
Then she saw the door to the star chamber closing down behind Conrad, a great granite slab dropping from the ceiling. Conrad, obelisk in hand, ducked into the chamber, which had apparently cooled back down, and started waving them in.
Serena was still dragging the Russian across the entrance to the chamber when
a massive crash behind her rocked the tunnel. She glanced back to see that the door had closed, sealing off the water. Pausing to catch her breath, she heard Conrad cry out her name. He was pointing to the ceiling. Three more great doors were dropping, the second one right over her head.
She lurched forward, her soaked parka weighing her down like a cement tomb as she struggled to drag the Russian, whose limbs had stopped moving.
“Serena!” Conrad shouted.
The third door was dropping.
She fell to her hands and knees and dragged the Russian across the floor. Then she felt Conrad’s hands clasp her ankles like leg irons and start to pull. Her knees slipped and she fell flat on her stomach.
“Let him go!” he shouted.
“No!” Serena gripped the Russian’s cold hands tightly, even as Conrad towed her inside.
The Russian was halfway through when the slab door sliced him in two. Suddenly Serena realized she was dragging only half a body. And still she found it hard to let go, to accept that there was nobody left for her to save.
With a massive scraping sound, the fourth and final door started to drop. She struggled to free herself from the cold grip of the legless corpse. Finally, the hand fell away, and at the last moment something whisked her inside as the final granite slab sank with a sickening thud.
Serena turned to thank Conrad but saw him sprawled on the floor, his hair matted with blood. He must have struck the back of his head against the falling door when he pulled her in.
“Conrad!” she called. “Conrad!”
She scrambled to his limp body. But there was no movement. And the chamber was shaking too violently for her to take a pulse. She saw the obelisk on the floor next to his pack—Yeats’s pack—and picked it up.
Another temblor hit, and she backed herself up against the shaking walls until they began to burn with tremendous heat. She moved away, stumbling across the floor, her body shaking uncontrollably as she tried to keep her balance.
She was alone now, she realized, and fell to her knees with the obelisk cradled in her arms, praying to God that the quaking would stop, all the while trying not to think about the little girl in the ice. There was a loud blast and she looked up as the whole chamber seemed to turn upside down.
21
DESCENT HOUR NINE
U.S.S. CONSTELLATION
THE BOOM OF THE HUGE GLACIER collapsing into the water was like a bomb blast, knocking Admiral Warren off his feet and shattering the glass of the bridge on the U.S.S. Constellation.
Another boom followed seconds later, and then he heard more still as the massive waves crashed over the bow. Glass fragments were scattered across the flight deck, where seventy-six attack jets were straining at their chains.
“Admiral?”
Warren turned. It was a signalman.
“FLASH traffic.” The petty officer handed over the clipboard and held a red-covered flashlight over the dispatch so Warren could read it.
“God Almighty,” said Warren as he started reading. “U.S. Geological Survey sensors at McMurdo just registered an eleven-point-one shock wave.”
“Admiral!” shouted a lieutenant.
Warren looked up in time to glimpse a towering, muddy green wall of water descend on the bow and wash over the flight deck, scattering the attack jets like toys and crashing into the superstructure where he stood. A deafening crack split his ears as the crush of water demolished the bridge. Desperately he searched for something to hang on to.
Water filled the compartment. Warren held the bar of a console and braced his back against the wall to stay upright. On calm waters, the 86,000-ton carrier rose 201 feet above the waterline. But these swells were lifting the aircraft carrier like an empty Cuban cigar box.
Warren coughed up some water and yelled to anyone who could hear him. “Turn us into the wave or we’ll capsize!”
He strained to hear his command received with an “Aye, sir!” from a helmsman, but there was no sound beside the crash of water.
When the wave broke, he looked around the bridge and saw two floating bodies. The rest had been swept to sea. He ran down the stairs to the wheelhouse, gripping the rail tightly. The wheelhouse was empty.
He turned toward the coast to see another towering gray mass, a cliff-size wave. He grabbed a chain reserved for one of his 55,000-pound planes and hoisted it on his broad shoulders and headed down to the flight deck.
Men and planes were thrashing about the tilting deck. Then a new wave lifted the carrier toward the sky. As he fell through the air, still clutching the chain, Warren saw a rail. Water crashed over the deck again, knocking him to his knees. But he saw his salvation. If he could just reach the rail in between waves, he could chain himself down.
The next wave split the twin-finned JSF attack jet in front of him, and Warren ducked to avoid being sliced in half by a broken wing. He willed himself to stand, his numb legs wobbling beneath him, and broke into a run, splashing through the shallows toward the rail.
Part of him wanted to slip and fall so he could just stop fighting and die, but he stayed on his feet until he rammed into the rail. He reached up and grabbed the heavy chain on his shoulders with both hands and lashed himself to the rail before the next wave crashed.
The winds and spray swept the deck as he clung for his life. The wave broke over the bow, and just as Warren could feel the force lift his body off the deck and sweep him aside, his chain caught and held.
For more than a minute he stayed that way, sure his arm would be torn off and he would be washed away like the remaining planes on deck. But God help him, he swore, he was going to survive this cataclysm if only to pay back Yeats. Then, slowly, he felt the carrier shifting and heard the creak of the massive steel buckling. He looked up and saw that the entire ship was on the verge of capsizing before the giant swell had passed.
“Goddamn you, Yeats!”
PART THREE
DAWN
22
DAWN MINUS FIFTEEN HOURS
INSIDE P4’S STAR CHAMBER, Conrad coughed as the whiskey stung the back of his throat. He looked up at Serena sitting next to him. Her wet hair was wiped back, her face pale.
“Jack Daniel’s?” he asked hoarsely.
“Found it in Yeats’s pack.” She reached over and touched his face. The feeling of her hand on his face brought him back to life. “You’re warm.”
“This whole place feels warm.” Conrad sat up and felt a terrific pain at the base of his skull. He groaned. “Where’s the obelisk?”
“I don’t know,” Serena said.
“It was right here.” Conrad quickly scanned the star chamber. He saw the empty altar standing in the middle of the cartouche. Something in his gut churned and he remembered a nightmare about the floor splitting open. “Where’s Yeats?”
“Disappeared down the floor shaft.”
Conrad looked for the shaft, but it had closed up again beneath the altar. He’s dead, thought Conrad. He felt himself shake, his heart beating rapidly.
“I’m so sorry about your father, Conrad.”
He looked into her eyes. She was indeed sorry, he thought. But there was something peculiar about the way she looked at him now. Something different. He wouldn’t call it fear, but there was something else in her eyes that put distance between them. Surely she didn’t believe Yeats’s bizarre revelation about his origins, did she? It was obviously a psychological ploy.
“You don’t actually believe—”
“Whatever else you may be, Conrad, you’re clearly not on anybody’s ‘most worthy’ list—not God’s, not the Atlanteans’ and not mine,” she said. “You’re still going to die for your sins. Only this time it looks like you’re going to take the rest of us with you straight to hell. That’s what I believe.”
Conrad could only stare at her. “You never stop, do you? You always have to have the last word.”
“Yes.”
Then Conrad saw something gleaming on the floor. He reached out to touch it. Was it
sunlight? He looked up at the ceiling and blinked his eyes. The two concealed shafts he suspected had been there all along were now wide open, and a beam of sunlight strained through the southern shaft and touched the center of the floor where the obelisk had been.
Had the ice chasm overhead collapsed? he wondered with alarm. What about Ice Base Orion? The horrific thought that P4’s geothermal vent might have melted the ice or even shifted the earth’s crust briefly drifted across his consciousness, but he quickly suppressed it. Had something so catastrophic happened, he and Serena would be dead.
“What time is it?” Conrad asked Serena.
“Three in the afternoon,” she said. “Antarctica has equal hours of daylight and darkness in September. So we only have a few hours until dusk.”
Conrad craned his neck at the shafts on the sloping north and south walls of the chamber. He could crawl out one to check. It was the only way out. But the angles of the shafts looked steep, and it was at least a thousand feet up to God knows what.
“I’ll need to have a look outside,” he told her.
She nodded slowly, as if she had reached the same conclusion long before he had regained consciousness. “You’ll need these to climb up the shaft.”
She was holding pressurized suction-cup pads for the knees and hands.
“Where did you get those?” he asked.
“Your father’s pack,” she said. “He seemed to have prepared for everything.”
Conrad looked at the altar in the center of the room covering the shaft that had swallowed his father. “Not quite everything.”
Conrad rose to his feet, took the suction gear from Serena, and crossed the floor to the southern shaft. He stared up at the sun and blinked. “Looks like the polar storm cleared.”
“That’s what it looks like.” Serena didn’t sound so sure. She didn’t even look like she wanted to know.
“If there are any search parties looking for us, we need to send a signal or flare,” he told her, strapping the suction pads on. “I’ll have to crawl up through the shaft. And I’ll carry up a line with me, just in case it’s our only way out and you’ll need to join me. Meanwhile, you try to raise Ice Base Orion on Yeats’s radio and tell them what happened.”
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