Connor stood at the edge of the runway. He was never more than ten feet from Richards at any given time. Theirs was a relationship that transcended a mere financial transaction, but to what degree she didn’t care to speculate. All she knew was that anyone with designs on Hollis’s life—although she couldn’t imagine him capable of making a single enemy—would have better luck feeding themselves through a meat grinder than getting past Connor.
Anya reached Richards’s side as the door opened and the stairs swung down onto the snow. Excitement radiated from him in palpable waves. His entire face was covered with a yellow balaclava designed to look like a smiley face; she could see the real thing in his eyes. He winked at her and clapped his hands in his customary manner.
“What do you say? Shall we do this then?”
“No time like the present,” Anya said. Her breath gusted back over her shoulder. Ice had already formed around her nostrils and over her mouth despite her mask.
The people on the plane had absolutely no idea of the wonders that awaited them. She remembered being in their shoes, stepping tentatively from the plane into an arctic wasteland without the slightest idea what she was getting herself into. No amount of explanation would have prepared her for the journey ahead, and the mere idea of robbing them of the sense of awe and wonder they were about to experience was criminal. In fact, she almost envied them.
The first passenger appeared in the doorway, wearing a brand-new red parka he’d probably just put on for the first time. The others peered curiously from behind him.
“Welcome to Antarctica,” Richards said. “Come, come. We’re burning daylight.”
He laughed at the joke he’d made a thousand times and rushed to greet his guests.
13
EVANS
42 miles south-southeast of Troll Station
Evans had been cold before, but this was something else entirely. It was as though the wind somehow passed through his body and froze the very marrow inside his bones. Even with the vents open wide and the heat directed into his face, he couldn’t seem to stop shivering. If he somehow managed to survive this infernal journey, he’d never complain about the Egyptian heat again.
The Terra Bus was a cross between a Greyhound and a motorhome, if their offspring were bred to a monster truck. It had six sixty-six-inch wheels with tread so deep it could probably roll over his foot without making contact. The 250-horsepower Detroit Diesel Series 50 engine clocked in at twenty-five miles per hour, which felt a whole lot faster bounding over the imperfections in the thick ice, and burned through a kerosene-based fuel called JP-5 at a rate of roughly a gallon a mile.
All of their gear—what little they had, anyway—was stowed in the enormous cargo hold behind the rear wall, which left room for a dozen high-backed seats, aligned in three rows of two to either side of the center aisle. The driver, a man named Al Alberts from Alabama—whose sole job it was to drive this vehicle when infrequently called upon, droned on about the specs without seeming to take a breath, despite repeated attempts at conversation by those seated behind him. Richards smiled and encouraged him, while discreetly confiding that it wasn’t only the scientists who were hired for their expertise. It was a small gesture, but one that went a long way toward setting Evans at ease. He figured the best measure of a man was how he treated those whose station in life didn’t always command the utmost respect.
“This here’s as far as we go,” Al said.
The engine roared and the Terra Bus juddered to a halt. From his side of the vehicle, Evans could see only a vast expanse of white interrupted by the occasional rock formation. The granite escarpment on the other side was rimed with a crust of ice.
“There’s nothing here,” Liang said.
Since none of them had been able to sleep, they’d spent the remainder of the flight talking and trying to figure out what to expect when they reached Antarctica. Jade’s background was similar to his own: they both studied the deceased, although from vastly different historical perspectives, in an attempt to discern not just their causes of death, but their lives in the days and weeks leading up to their ultimate denouement.
“This ole girl might be about the most powerful thing on wheels, but even she ain’t getting up into those hills without tracks like a tank.”
Al popped the seal on the door and the subzero air rushed into the cab.
Evans cringed.
The stairs lowered from the side door with a hydraulic hum. Al bounded down into the snow and tromped to the rear to unload their supplies.
Kelly blew out a long exhalation and rose from the seat opposite him. Her face was so pale that the streaks in her hair stood out like traffic lights. The front pocket of her parka bulged where her hand did its thing.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“We call this place Snow Fell,” Richards said. He offered his hand and helped her down stairs that were already becoming slick with ice. Evans followed her into the brutal cold and around to the back of the bus. “It’s a bastardization of the Icelandic word Snæfell-sjökull, which is the name of the volcano beneath which Otto Lidenbrock found the entrance to the center of the Earth in Jules Verne’s classic novel. It really just means ‘snow glacier mountain,’ so I figure this qualifies.” He inclined his head toward the frozen cliff. “I also like the play on words, if you get my drift.”
Jade rolled her eyes, but Evans couldn’t contain a chuckle. There was something endearing about Richards, an almost childlike quality, as though he completely lacked self-consciousness.
The mountain was really more of a jagged outcropping reminiscent of a shard of broken glass embedded in the accumulation. A fin of snow blew from the pinnacle and stretched like a slipstream across the sky overhead. It was strange to think that this was just the peak of a mountain nearly concealed beneath two vertical miles of ice.
Richards took Kelly’s bag from her, slung it over his shoulder, and led them away from the bus toward a structure erected against the face of the cliff. Connor had already cleared the drifted snow from in front of the pressure-sealed door and held it open for all of them to pass through. The interior was more than shielded from the elements; it was actually warm. The floor subtly vibrated with the thrum of the gas generator that fueled the heat blowing through the exposed ductwork overhead. The antechamber was empty, save for the arctic gear hanging from the walls and the grate set into the floor to drain the melting snow from their boots.
Anya—who introduced herself as a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary anthropology, but barely looked old enough to drive—waited for everyone to enter the chamber and for Connor to seal the door behind them before opening the door at the other end. She smiled coyly at them and ducked through the doorway into a natural formation that smelled of earth and dampness, with the faintest hint of diesel smoke.
“What is this place?” Roche asked, echoing Evans’s thoughts.
“Once upon a time it was a Nazi communications outpost, quite possibly the fabled Base 211,” Richards said. “This is all of the original equipment over here. Most of it still works, if you can believe that. We decided to leave it as something of a memorial, but we removed all of the swastikas and other paraphernalia, for obvious reasons. We replaced the original concrete bunker and radar tower with that modular unit to help contain the heat and minimize the buildup of humidity in here, which nearly destroyed the maps on that wall ahead of you. We had them sealed in archival-quality polypropylene in an effort to preserve the original handwritten notes. If you look closely, you can still make them out. Assuming you can read German, of course.”
His laughter echoed through the cavern.
Evans had never seen anything like this place. It was as though he had stepped from his era into another time, if one could ignore the overhead vents and conduits that connected the domed lights hanging from the cavern roof.
“Why would anyone in their right mind put a communications outpost all the way out here?” Jade asked.
“They wo
uldn’t,” Roche said. “There were no satellites back then. This is all short-range VHF equipment. They didn’t design this station with the intention of intercepting Allied communications. They were looking for something.”
He nodded toward the far corner of the room and what almost resembled the entrance to a mineshaft. The stone wall beside it was etched with designs that appeared surprisingly ancient.
“Very good, Mr. Roche.” Richards smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. “But not entirely accurate.”
“How so?”
Evans walked toward the earthen orifice and stopped dead in his tracks.
The petroglyphs.
They were the same symbols as he’d discovered in the cave under the Royal Tombs of Akhetaten.
“They weren’t merely looking for something.” Richards looked at each of them in turn. “They found it.”
14
JADE
Jade wasn’t used to not being in control. Her life was structured in such a way that nothing was left to chance. That was the whole reason she’d gone into forensic anthropology in the first place. Her mother had died when she was twelve, leaving her alone with her father, an organized and meticulous man of Japanese ancestry who believed that within his private domain the chaos of the outside world could be bent to his will. If something broke, you learned how to fix it. If you wanted to eat something, you learned how to cook it. And there was no point in learning if you weren’t prepared to commit yourself to absorbing the totality of the available knowledge. So before she could even begin to come to grips with her mother’s passing, she’d embarked upon a quest to discover everything she could about the nature of death itself, launching her obsession with imposing some sort of order upon the maddeningly random events that had culminated in her mother’s death.
Walking through a tunnel braced with petrified wood beneath a mountain at the bottom of the world was far outside of her comfort zone, but the mystery intrigued her. Based on what she’d discovered in Nigeria and the picture she’d received with the plane ticket, she could only assume that somewhere ahead of her lay the secret to understanding how the two sets of remains were related.
The overhead lights cast strange shadows from the imperfections in the rock walls, where it was almost surprising not to find spiderwebs or any other sign of life that didn’t exist in this frozen environment. Evans stayed by her side. Under normal circumstances she’d have told him to back off, but she drew a measure of comfort from his proximity. Roche, not so much. He made her uncomfortable, although she couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was the whole crop circle thing, which had immediately branded him as insane in her book. He was still in the cavern behind them, taking pictures of the symbols carved into the stone. She didn’t much care for people who talked all the time, but she vastly preferred them to people like Roche, who seemed to take in everything around him without giving the slightest indication of what he was thinking.
The tunnel opened into another cavern. The back half was covered with a sheet of ice, above which a metal walkway extended. It wasn’t until she saw what looked like the top of a submarine protruding from the ice that she realized there was water underneath it.
Richards’s footsteps clanged from the pier as he walked out over the frozen water. He stopped at the end and, with a flourish, gestured toward the miniature conning tower.
“This astounding technological marvel is what they call a personal submersible. It holds a pilot and six passengers and has a depth rating of a thousand feet.”
He braced one foot beside the hatch and raised it open. The ice surrounding the conning tower crackled and water burbled across the frozen surface, through which the outline of the vehicle appeared vague at best. The vessel’s name was stenciled on the side of the conning tower: Nautilus.
“Another reference to Jules Verne,” Jade said. “I’m starting to sense a motif.”
“I grew up in rural Kansas,” Richards said. There was a hardness to his voice that hadn’t been there before. “My father farmed wheat. And his father before him. You could walk a full day in any direction from our house and not see anything other than wheat, wheat, and more wheat. My earliest memory is finding a box of science fiction books in the loft of my grandfather’s barn, and even at five years old I’d wanted nothing more than to be anywhere else. They were old and yellow and the spines barely held them together, but inside of them I found my means of escape to other places. Other worlds.”
His expression momentarily clouded before his smile emerged once more and he clapped his hands.
“What do you say? Shall we get this show on the road?”
Connor stepped across the gap and lowered himself through the opening.
“The Nautilus can travel up to three knots,” Richards said. “That’s three and a half miles an hour for you landlubbers. She has the maneuverability to pass through some pretty tight places—not that we ever really put that to the test, mind you—and she’s equipped with eight hours of air, which is way more than we’ll ever need.”
“For what?” Kelly asked.
Richards took her hand and helped her from the pier.
“To reach our destination, of course.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“At the other end of this lava tube.”
Unlike the others, Jade didn’t find Richards’s coyness endearing. She was cold and tired and in no mood for games.
The submersible’s headlights lit up the ice, revealing just how thin it was. There had to be a source of geothermal heat somewhere down there.
Jade hopped out onto the sub and straddled the hole. A short ladder led downward into a cabin that reminded her of a stereotypical bachelor’s pad from a seventies movie. The seats were plush and tan and seemingly only lacking an end table with a lava lamp between them. There were two chairs in the front, three in the middle, and a sofa-like bench running the length of the back. They were all narrow and set very closely together in order to cram them all into a space the size of a walk-in closet.
She ducked her head and descended into a giant glass sphere clamped between three stabilizers, like a marble in a bird’s claw. The two to either side had spotlights directed straight ahead into the greenish water and down at the rocks below them. Walking across the transparent floor was disorienting, as though her feet were striking the ground well before her mind thought they should. She took the nearest seat on the bench, right behind the ladder, and stuffed her bag under her seat.
“From inside you’ll be able to see everything,” Richards said from above her. “And just wait until you see what that entails.”
Evans climbed down and sat in front of her in the middle row, opposite Kelly, who pressed her hands and the tip of her nose to the glass bubble in an effort to look back up at the frozen surface.
Anya slid down and sat next to Jade.
“I know how overwhelmed you feel right now,” Anya said. “Trust me. I was in your shoes not even a week ago. There’s really no way to prepare yourself. You just have to see it to believe it.”
“And when will that be?” Jade asked.
The younger girl smirked.
“Not much longer now.”
Roche took the middle seat between Evans and Kelly, leaving Richards to seal the hatch behind them and climb over their legs to reach the front passenger seat. The control console formed a half ring in front of Connor and him. Two video monitors showed images from cameras mounted to the side stabilizers. The headlights diffused into the murky water, through which a curtain of bubbles rose.
The motor whirred and the cabin lights dimmed. The digital readouts imbued the sphere with a reddish glow as it inched away from the dock. A cloud of sediment churned from beneath them and rose like smoke toward the ice. The depth gauge and the GPS readouts started to move. The rocks fell away beneath them and the submersible canted forward.
Jade felt a twinge of panic as they dove straight toward the ground.
“It’s okay,” Anya said. “The fir
st time I thought I was going to pee my pants, too.”
The submersible leveled off and entered a tunnel barely larger than it was. The lights limned stone walls that were furry with sludge that reminded her of the East River. She realized with a start that it wasn’t an aggregation of pollutants.
It was life.
15
KELLY
“Because of the ice, most people don’t realize that this is one of the most volcanically volatile regions on the planet,” Richards said. “This entire area is essentially alive with geothermal activity. Lava tubes like this one are formed when a volcano erupts and produces lava flows, which cool from the outside in. As the outer layers harden, the molten core continues to move, leaving a hollow passage in its wake. The residual heat causes water trapped beneath the ice cap to remain in a liquid state. We’re only now beginning to discover all of the lakes and the networks of rivers and conduits like this one that connect them.”
Kelly watched the slimy walls pass as she listened to Richards talk and imagined how specialized these organisms had to be in order to thrive in such a brutal and isolated environment. There were species of bacteria called archaea that had evolved to thrive in the absence of oxygen and at temperatures that cooked higher orders of life. She’d studied a species found in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor that metabolized sulfur so it didn’t poison the surrounding ocean. Most scientists believed that similar organisms were responsible for processing methane and producing the earliest atmosphere as a by-product. She could only imagine what purpose these microbes served.
“Antarctica hasn’t always been covered by ice. We’ve found fossils of leaves and bones that contradict the prevailing wisdom that it froze fifteen million years ago. In fact, I’m more inclined to believe that it was free of ice until a mere fifteen thousand years ago.”
Kelly glanced at Evans, who’d proposed the same thing on the plane. He sounded exasperated when he spoke.
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