Lemuria
Page 34
~~~
FQ: Do your characters, in this case Matthew Bishop, share any characteristics with you personally?
CLINCHANDHILL: I don't think so, at least not much. He and I like fishing and traveling, but for the rest. I do think that all of my characters reflect some smaller traits of me. Even the bad guys. I do like strong but flawed character so in that way we might have more in common than I like to agree on.
~~~
FQ: With other titles, such as Kursk, 47 Hours, etc., you concentrated on true stories and real-life tragedies. Is this work more "out of the realm" for you when it comes to genre? If so, what made you decide to go in this direction with your writing?
CLINCHANDHILL: I love this current genre. This is absolutely my favorite. It took this long to write my first book in this genre because I simply believed I couldn't do it, that it simply would be too difficult to do. That's why I started with more or less true stories like Kursk. I felt that a story like Kursk was especially suited to start writing (again) because, being a true story, there was a sort of an outline there. Fortunately, there was also a lot of unknown mystery that I could fill in using my fantasy. In that first book, I created a character called James Mitchel that I felt deserved a sequel. And since I like trilogies, the James Mitchel trilogy was born.
~~~
FQ: What comes next? Can you give us a "sneak peek" in regards to Matthew Bishop's next step?
CLINCHANDHILL: Ah, well. Bishop's next adventure is called Atacama which I plan on to be Bishop’s final adventure. It’ll take him and his friends all across the globe again to find the truth behind the biggest secret yet. I plan to have the end of the journey plunge the reader into a new storyline in a brand new genre.
~~~
FQ: Is there a genre you have not explored as of yet that you would like to one day?
CLINCHANDHILL: Matthew Bishop's adventure comes as a trilogy, and currently, I'm writing the final installment, planned to be released in December 2021. That final chapter will end in a sort of cliffhanger into a new series that will be in a different genre. Think of it as more of a fantasy series that plays in our own current realm. Confused? Sorry, that's about all I can tell you about it now, and it changes just about every day in my mind, so who knows. I love the fantasy genre, but again, It seems so hard to write.
~~~
FQ: Is there one author you would love to sit down and talk to about writing? If so, who would that be and what would be one question you would like to ask them?
CLINCHANDHILL: Michael Crichton would absolutely be the one I'd like to sit down with. Unfortunately, that will never happen, of course. But I simply admire, maybe even worship, the man. Not just for his active writing style but also for the way he wrote his view of the near future into his adventurous stories. Many of them have a predictive value that I love. I love books that when you finished reading them, your first thought will be, What if?"
~~~
Please keep reading for....
Special Sneak Preview
Be sure to watch for the release of ATACAMA, the next installment (Book 3) in this “Matthew Bishop” series, in the fall of 2021.
~~~
[Cover Image Coming Soon]
~~~
Please enjoy this Special Sneak Preview we offer below, or....
~~~
TO REMAIN UP TO DATE ON THIS SERIES,
PLEASE STAY TUNED TO OUR WEBSITE HERE:
MATTHEW BISHOP Series at Evolved Publishing
~~~
Please keep reading for....
PROLOGUE
~~~
Kola, Murmansk Oblast, Russia, Spring 1992
A relative warm wind from the south gushed over the tundra, making it a nice, friendly April day of 30 degrees Fahrenheit at the North Pole. With temperatures varying between 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and -30 degrees in the winter, Mitya Morozov had seen it all in the past thirty years working the drill. Little over a decade ago, they enclosed the site in a vast superstructure, with the drill itself encased in a huge three-hundred-foot tower. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any heating in the building. In the winter, the workers would fire-up oil drums filled with the sparse wood they could find out there in the flatlands. Now, the men working the drill were glad the winter was over, and the oil drums stayed cold. At its peak, more than thirty people worked the site. Now, only about a dozen remained, half of them working the drill, and the other half either cooking, guarding, or staffing. Morozov, leaning against an empty drum, found no happiness in anything but the weather today. He sighed at the fact he’d spent his last Kola-winter without real heating.
“Mitya,” a drill-worker dressed in a bright yellow oilskin suit shouted out. “Why don’t you come here and get your hands dirty for the first and last time?” His coworkers laughed.
Morozov raised his hands in front of his face. “These?” he yelled back over the sound of metal from the drill clanking as it was pulled up. “These divine instruments? No way, man, that’s your job. That’s why you get paid the big bucks.” He gave a tiny smile as he took out a pack of cigarettes and an old, dented zippo. Before lighting the cigarette—for a long moment—he gazed at the lighter he bought with his first salary.
In 1965, Leonid Brezhnev, President of the Soviet Union, gave the order to start the deepest drill on Earth. Officially, the goal of the aimed forty-nine-thousand-foot-deep drill was to penetrate as far as possible through the Baltic Shield continental crust and perform extensive geophysical examinations. Unofficially, the reason for the drill was the fact that President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that the Lone Star Producing Company—from Washita County, Oklahoma—would start digging a thirty-thousand-foot-deep exploratory hole. Next to the arms race and the space race, the cold war rivalry now expanded to a race for the deepest drill into the Earth.
Morozov, born and raised in Murmansk, was halfway into his fifties. As a young man with scarce jobs in his hometown, he took a job guarding the new drill site some hundred miles from his home. He’d spent over half his life at the remote North Pole location, only two miles south of the Norwegian border. With only men to spend his days and nights with, he never got around to starting a family, something he regretted every now and then.
Now, almost thirty years later, his work was done. The deepest hole in the world, over forty thousand feet deep, had become a fact. They’d defeated the United States, who gave up decades ago. After forty thousand feet, the government decided they also had to give up. The greater porosity, unexpected reduction in density, and the unexpectedly high temperatures of over 365 degrees Fahrenheit at that depth made drilling any deeper impossible.
Today, they would officially terminate the drill, and at the end of the day, when they would close down the hole, Morozov would be out of work. Feeling somewhat melancholic as he smoked his Belomorkanal cardboard-tubed cigarette, he watched the drill workers retract the enormous length of drilling pipe he’d observed disappearing into the earth over the years. Many years ago, they’d offered him a job as a drilling worker. Even though it paid almost ten thousand rubles extra per month, he chose his security job over the dirty work in the mud every day. He’d never needed the money, since there were no ways to spend it at the dig. With no savings to speak of, he now regretted that. The government had arranged a small apartment for him in Murmansk, and with the small pension they provided, he could probably eat meat every day, though he wondered if it would be enough to provide his daily dose of Wodka.
Come to think of it, I never had to pay for rent or regular meals in all of my adult life. The state had always provided him with room and board.
Morozov looked at his watch as the sun went down over the tundra and another length of pipe was freed from the deep. This way, he figured, it would take another three to four hours before the last pipe would be retracted. Finally, the drill would see daylight again, and the closing of the hole would start. Everything should be finished before midnight, and he figured he could get a good night’s sle
ep before leaving the site in the morning.
His crewmate took off his working gloves and called out, waving at Morozov. “Are you coming for dinner?”
Morozov waved back at the man. “Thanks, but I have some dried fish left from lunch.” He took out a paper bag from his jacket and waved it in the air. “I’ll pick up something later.”
As the handful of workers left the building for the cantina, he realized this would probably be his last time alone in the drill building. Slowly, he walked up to the place where the remaining drill pipe disappeared into the earth beneath the thirty-foot steel construction and cranes. The hydraulics hissed, and steam vented from the valves on the side of the rig. A slight tremble vibrated from it, through the floor, and into Morozov’s body. He’d felt this tremble many times before when drilling, but this time the drill stood still.
He took a step forward to look inside the hole surrounding the drill pipe. The tremors seemed to generate from somewhere down there. He took a flashlight from his belt and shone it down the pit. The drill hole itself wasn’t much bigger than nine inches, and his flashlight only penetrated the first few feet. The trembling beneath his feet seemed to increase, and the drill pipe itself began to shake.
It’s like something is pushing it from below, he thought.
He stretched his arm to touch the pipe, but before his hand could reach it, the tube started shaking wildly and slammed against his hand for a second. It felt warm. Under the violent shaking, the steel pipe now started to bend, accompanied by the sound of buckling steel. Morozov quickly stepped backward, keeping his eye on the construction as the sound and the trembling increased. The high-pressure valves attached to the rig gave in under the growing pressure, and high-pressure hoses—under loud hissing sounds—broke off and swung wildly through the room while venting steam. Through his steam-obstructed view, he noticed the drill pipe rising a few inches before it slammed down again with a loud bang, then a few inches more up... and then down again.
He looked around him where tables, chairs, and workbenches were heavily shaking under the violent trembles. Is it an earthquake? As far as he knew, the region never had any.
The drill pipe shot some ten feet up in the air and broke the steel construction at the top, and pieces of metal started to fly around. Morozov looked around for a place to take cover but didn’t find any. Everything in the room was now moving. He decided to run for the door some fifty feet away, but only a few feet underway, a gas canister rolled by and ended his endeavor. He landed on the shaking floor.
Facing the remaining steel drill construction, which now buckled under the violence, he watched the drill pipe fire up further from the hole as a constant stream of pieces of pipe landed left, right, in front, and behind him. He raised his hands over his head, knowing that should a piece of pipe decide to land on his head, he would be dead for sure. Each piece of drill pipe, thirty-two feet long, weighed about eight hundred pounds.
It rained pipes for a little over a minute. Then the sound of metal clinking suddenly stopped, and a chilling sound, as if a thousand voices cried out in agony, took over. Morozov removed his hands from his ears as the last pipes landed on the floor, and the sound of something rising from the drill hole became louder and louder. Then, with a final violent rumble, a large steel object surrounded by smaller pieces of metal launched from the drill hole and high into the air. He recognized it as the drill head. It bounced off the steel roof construction and landed some ten feet in front of him, on the concrete floor, with a loud bang. In a few seconds, all the pieces had landed, and the room enveloped in complete silence.
Morozov got up from the floor and looked around at the devastation surrounding him. Furniture and tools lay strewn about, covered in a layer of grey dust and mud, pipes, and other pieces of metal. He checked out his body and smiled. He was okay.
How is this possible? I don’t have a scratch.
He carefully stepped over the debris and walked over to the hole, which now lay bare in the center of the building. He gazed into the completely silent hole. Nothing. He looked around and, finding his flashlight a few feet away from him, grabbed it and pointed it at the gap. Even without the drill pipe in it, he couldn’t see past a few feet down.
What the hell just happened here?
He looked around again, took a few steps back, and stopped next to the larger piece of distorted metal that had once been the drill head. Nothing stood out at first, but.... The drill head was made of three independent rotating bits that crushed everything that got in its way. One of the bits had completely broken off, and probably lay spread around the room in pieces. Morozov’s attention focused on the two remaining bits, and something that seemed to be stuck between them—something glistening.
He bent over and carefully, briefly touched the metal to see if it was warm. It was lukewarm, so he grabbed the piece between the bits and tried to pull it out. It wouldn’t budge. He wiped off some dirt to see what it was. It looked like a thin sheet of shiny, maybe golden metal. With one foot on the drill, he pulled the five-inch-long and three-inch-wide sheet of metal as hard as he could. Suddenly, the two bits rolled an inch and the sheet came loose, dropping Morozov on his back onto the floor. Upon rising, he took a closer look at the sheet and rubbed off more dirt.
Could it be gold?
“What the hell happened here?” a voice sounded as the crew ran into the building, looking at the ravage. “The entire mess hall was shaking.”
“Are you okay?” another crewmember asked as he neared Morozov.
Morozov looked at the nearing man, and quickly put the sheet of metal inside his jacket. “Um, yes, I think I am.”
“What did you do?” another oilskin suit asked.
“I didn’t do anything,” Morozov said, cleaning the dry dirt from his jacket. “One moment, I was smoking a cigarette, and the next, the whole installation started shaking and hissing, and pipes were blown all over the room. I’m lucky I wasn’t hit by anything.”
A crew member walked up to the drill hole, sat down on his knees, bent over, and sniffed the spot. “We must have hit and ruptured a gas pocket somewhere on the way up,” he said as he came up again.
“Well, on the bright side,” one of the men said, “nobody got hurt. And we don’t have to take out the drill pipe anymore. But on a less positive note, we’ve got an awful lot of cleaning to do.”
The men laughed out loud.
Morozov took a quick look through the opening in his jacket at the shiny piece of metal, and wondered if his retirement cloud might still have a golden lining.
—-End of Special Sneak Preview—-
TO REMAIN UP TO DATE ON THIS SERIES,
PLEASE STAY TUNED TO OUR WEBSITE HERE:
MATTHEW BISHOP Series at Evolved Publishing
~~~
Please keep reading for....
Acknowledgements
Special thanks and love to my wife Nathalie for her support and re-reading the Lemuria manuscript.
Thank you, Rose, for re-re-reading the book and keeping me consistent.
Erica, I’m glad you know where the commas go.
Special thanks to all those involved who contributed. You know who you are.
And another special thanks to Dan Brown, Michael Crichton, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy for the pleasure they gave me reading their work and giving me the inspiration to write.
~~~
Please keep reading for....
About the Author
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest | LinkedIn
Dutch renowned author, Clinchandhill, had long-discovered his passion for writing at a young age. Despite past career detours, his love for worldbuilding and the written word were rekindled into a furious blaze. He has since penned his acclaimed political thriller, Kursk, and its equally compelling sequel, 47 Hours, and will be releasing The Mogadishu Encounter in late 2020.
His irrefutable fascination for credible stories and true events is evident throughout all his fictional
works, including the “Matthew Bishop” series of conspiracy thrillers/religious mysteries from Evolved Publishing.
Clinchandhill now writes full-time in the Netherlands, with his beautiful wife of 20 years. In his spare time, he enjoys sipping tea with a good book and delving into his own adventures out on open waters.
~~~
Please keep reading for....
More from Evolved Publishing
We hope you loved LEMURIA as much as we did, and that you’ll take a moment to post your heartfelt review at whatever retail site you purchased it. Your reviews are so important to what we do as a small independent press, and to our authors, of course.
~~~
~~~
And... be sure to check out the full catalog of our great Thriller/Suspense Fiction (just some of which are pictured) at the link below:
Suspense Thrillers from Evolved Publishing
~~~
Please keep reading for....
Special Sneak Preview
Good or evil was never the choice.
~~~
~~~
Please enjoy this Special Sneak Preview we offer below, or....
~~~
GRAB THE FULL EBOOK TODAY!
YOU’LL FIND LINKS TO YOUR FAVORITE RETAILER HERE:
THE WAYWARD SONS OF THE EMPYREAN Series at Evolved Publishing
~~~
Please keep reading for....
CHAPTER 1 – IN THE BEGINNING: VERSE 1.5
~~~
Do you remember the old proverb about blood and water?
I always think of it when I recall the beginning. It is hard to believe such a simple phrase could explain our conflict. For my big brother, this proverb became the ultimate truth. It fueled his jealousy and hatred for those who sided against him. I was one of the many detested by him, though I was probably loathed the most. Like many others, I chose to put this old proverb to the test. For me, blood was important, but it was not the strongest tie that binds. In the end, I cannot tell you for certain which side was right. Whether this old proverb is true or not will always remain a mystery to me. However, I did learn one thing; even if blood is thicker than water, it can still pour like rain—a painful lesson my brothers and I were forced to learn.