Polar Shift

by Clive Cussler

  As a former soldier, Schroeder had accurately sized up the defensive situation. The city was a huge maze of hundreds of streets. Even with the omnipresent halo of light that shimmered over the city, as long as they kept alert and on the move through the labyrinth their pursuers would never catch them. At the same time, Schroeder was aware that they could only run for so long. Eventually, they would run out of food and water. Or luck.

  His goal was to get to the far side of the city. He had hopes, supported by the relatively good quality of the air, that there might be another way out. The people who built this subterranean metropolis seemed to have done so with logic and reason. Thus it would be logical and reasonable that they had more than one way to get in and out. They were more than halfway across the city when Karla cried out in alarm.

  She dug her fingers into Schroeder’s arm. He slipped the automatic rifle off his shoulder. “What is it?” He glanced around at the silent façades as if he expected to see the leering faces of the ivory hunters in the windows.

  “Something ran down that alley.”

  Schroeder followed her pointing finger with his eyes. Although the buildings produced their own light, they were built close together, and the narrow spaces between them were in deep shadow.

  “Something or some one?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She laughed. “Maybe I’ve been underground too long.”

  Schroeder had always trusted his senses above his analytical skills. “Wait here,” he said. He approached the alleyway with his finger tight on the trigger. He edged up to the alley, stuck his head around the corner and flicked the flashlight on. After a few seconds, he turned and came back. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Sorry. It must have been my imagination.”

  “Come,” he said, and, to Karla’s surprise, he headed toward the alley.

  “Where are you going?”

  “If there is something out there, it’s better that we sneak up on it rather than the other way around.”

  Karla hesitated. Her first impulse had been to flee in the other direction. But Schroeder seemed to know what he was doing. She hurried to catch up.

  The alley led to another street similarly lined with buildings. The street was deserted. There were only the squat little structures with their windows staring like vacant eyes in the strange half-light. Schroeder checked his internal compass, and again started in a direction he hoped would take them to the far side of the city.

  After they had walked for a few blocks, Schroeder stopped suddenly and raised his rifle. He lowered the weapon after a second and rubbed his eyes. “This strange light has me crazy. Now it’s my turn to start seeing things. I saw something run from one side of the street to the other.”

  “No. I saw it too,” Karla said. “It was large. I don’t think it was human.”

  Schroeder started off again. “That’s good. We haven’t had much luck with humans lately.”

  Karla’s nostrils picked up a familiar musky odor. The shed housing the baby mammoth had the same smell. Schroeder’s nostrils had picked up the scent as well.

  “Smells like a barnyard,” he said.

  The fragrance of mud, animals and manure became stronger as they made their way through an alley to another street. The street ended in a plaza similar to the public square they had encountered at the entrance to the city. The plaza was rectangular, about two hundred feet to a side. Like the earlier square it was dominated by a step pyramid about fifty feet high. But what caught Karla’s eye was the immediate area around the pyramid.

  Unlike the first plaza, whose pavement was made of the same glowing stone as the rest of the city, this space looked as if it were covered by a thick dark growth of weeds or grass. Karla’s first impression was that she was looking at an untended garden similar to something she might see in a public park. That didn’t make sense given the lack of sunlight. Drawn by her natural curiosity, she started toward the pyramid.

  The vegetation began to move.

  Schroeder’s aging vision had trouble seeing details in the half-light, but the movement caught his eye. The training ingrained long ago came into play. He’d been taught that the best insurance when faced with a potential threat was a lead curtain. He stepped in front of Karla, and he brought his rifle to his hip. His finger tightened on the trigger as he prepared to saturate the square with a lethal spray.

  “No!” Karla shouted.

  She put her hand in front of his chest.

  The plaza undulated, and from the moving mass came a sound of snorts and squeaks and heavy bodies starting to stir. The image of vegetation disintegrated, to be replaced by large furry clumps the size of large pigs.

  Schroeder stared at the strange creatures milling around the square. They had stubby trunks and upturned tusks, and their hides were covered with fur. The significance of what he was seeing finally dawned on him.

  “Baby elephants!”

  “No,” Karla said, amazingly calm in spite of her unbounded excitement. “They’re dwarf mammoths.”

  “That can’t be. Mammoths are extinct.”

  “I know, but look closely.” She pointed the flashlight at the animals. A few of them glanced at the light, showing shiny round eyes of an amber hue. “Elephants don’t have fur like that.”

  “This is impossible,” Schroeder said as if he were having a hard time convincing himself.

  “Not entirely. Traces of dwarf mammoths were found on Wrangel Island as recently as 2000 B.C. That’s only a blip in time. But you’re right about this being unbelievable. The closest I’ve come to these creatures has been the fossilized bones of their ancestors.”

  Schroeder said, “Why don’t they run away?”

  The mammoths seemed to have been sleeping when they were disturbed by the human intruders, but they weren’t alarmed. They moved around the square in singles, twosomes or small groups, and showed little or no curiosity at the strangers.

  “They don’t think we’ll hurt them,” Karla said. “They’ve probably never seen humans before. My guess is that they evolved from the full-grown animals that we saw in the murals. They’ve adjusted to the lack of sunlight and food through generations.”

  Schroeder gazed at the herd of pigmy mammoths and said, “Karla, how do they live?”

  “There’s an air supply. Maybe it seeps down from the ceiling, or through crevasses we don’t know about. Maybe they’ve learned to hibernate to preserve food.”

  “Yes, yes, but what do they eat?”

  She glanced around. “There must be a source somewhere. Maybe they get out into the open. Wait! Maybe that’s what happened to the so-called baby that the expedition found. It was looking for food.”

  “We must try to find out where they go,” Schroeder said. He made his way to the pyramid with Karla close behind. The mammoths moved aside to create a path. Some were slow to get out of the way and brushed against the humans, who had to wind their way through piles of manure. They reached the pyramid steps and began to climb. The effort put pressure on Schroeder’s weak ankle, and he had to climb on his hands and knees, but he made it slowly to the flat top of the structure.

  The elevation offered a total view of the square. The animals were still milling around with no rhyme nor reason to their movements.

  Karla was counting the animals and figured there were about two hundred of them. Schroeder had been scanning the disorganized mob with other goals in mind, and, after a few minutes, he saw what he was looking for.

  “Look,” he said. “The mammoths are forming into a loose queue over there near that corner of the plaza.”

  Karla looked at where Schroeder was pointing. The herding animals had squeezed into a street as if suddenly inspired by a common purpose. Other mammoths began to follow, and soon the whole group was moving toward the same part of the square. With Karla helping him, Schroeder climbed off the pyramid and hobbled after the departing herd.

  By the time they got to the corner, the entire herd had vanished from the square and was movi
ng slowly along a narrow street that led back to the main boulevard. They tried not to startle the animals, although that didn’t seem to be a danger. The mammoths seemed to have accepted the newcomers as part of the herd.

  After about ten minutes, they began to see a change in the character of the city. Some of the houses on both sides were damaged. Their walls were knocked in as if hit by a rogue bulldozer. Eventually, they came to an area that looked as if it had been bombed. There were no freestanding buildings, only glowing piles of rubble intermingled with huge boulders made of a different, nonluminous mineral.

  The sight revived unpleasant memories for Schroeder. He stopped to give his ankle a rest and looked around at the ruined landscape. “This reminds me of Berlin at the end of World War Two. Come. We must hurry or we’ll lose them.”

  Karla dodged a pile of manure. “I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that with the trail they’re leaving.”

  Schroeder’s deep laughter echoed off the walls of rubble that now arose high on both sides. Karla joined in despite her weariness and fears, but they picked up the pace more in eagerness to find a way out than concern at losing the herd.

  More of the rock they were seeing was composed of nonglowing material. Then all trace of the luminescent rock disappeared and the path in front of them darkened. Karla turned the flashlight on, and its dim beam caught the tails of the mammoths. The creatures had no trouble navigating the darkness. Karla guessed that their eyes must have adjusted to the lack of light in the same way their bodies had shrunk to accommodate a diminishing supply of food.

  Then the flashlight went dead. They followed the herd by listening to the scuffle of the many feet, and the chorus of grunts and snorts. The complete blackness assumed a bluer cast that slowly changed to dark gray. They could see the furry rumps about fifty feet ahead. The animals seemed to have picked up their pace. The grayness turned to white. The path made a right, then a left-hand turn, and they were out in the open, blinking their eyes against the sunlight.

  The mammoths rambled ahead, but the two humans stopped and shielded their eyes with their hands. As their vision acclimated to the change in light, they looked at their surroundings through narrowed eyes. They had emerged from a gap in a low bluff and were at the edge of a natural bowl several hundred yards across. The mammoths hungrily grazed the short grassy vegetation that covered the bowl’s floor.

  “This is quite amazing,” Karla said. “These creatures have adjusted to two worlds: one of darkness, the other of light. They are miracles of adaptation as well as anachronisms.”

  “Yes, very interesting,” Schroeder said in a disinterested voice. He wasn’t being rude, only practical. He realized that they were far from safe. Their pursuers could be on their heels. He scanned the wall of massive, blackened boulders surrounding the natural basin and suggested that they make their way to the perimeter to look for a way out.

  Karla was reluctant to leave the herd of mammoths, but she climbed with Schroeder up a gradually ascending hill to the edge of the boulder field. The rocks ranged in size from some as big as cars to others nearly as big as a house. They were tumbled in heaps more than a hundred feet high, in some cases. Some of the massive rocks were piled so tightly together that it would have been impossible to slip a knife blade between them.

  There were openings in the rocky ramparts, but the breaks only went in a few feet or yards. As they made their way along the impenetrable wall, Karla became discouraged. They had escaped the fire only to wind up in a very large frying pan. Schroeder, on the other hand, seemed to have been revived by the fresh air. He ignored the pain his ankle, his eyes darting along the face of the wall. He disappeared into a gap, and after a few minutes let out a yell of triumph.

  Schroeder emerged from the opening and announced that he had found a way through the barrier. He grabbed Karla’s hand as if he were leading a child, and they plunged into the mass of monoliths. They had only gone along the path a few steps when a man stepped out from behind a boulder. It was Grisha, the leader of the murderous ivory hunters.

  31

  AUSTIN LOOKED DOWN into the yawning caldera as the paraglider soared like a condor through the notch in the rim. The road they had been following up the side of the volcano went through the low spot and descended a gradual slope to the midpoint of the caldera, where it ended in a low bluff. On the opposite side of the crater, the rim dropped almost vertically to a boulder field at the bottom. A patch of green roughly shaped in a circle was sandwiched between the bottom of the slope and the field of black boulders.

  Austin put the glider into a lazy spiral into the crater and looked for a good landing site.

  “What’s that down there?” Zavala pointed to the base of the slope where the road ended. “Looks like a herd of cows.”

  Austin squinted through the lens of his goggles. “Too furry to be cows. Maybe they’re yaks.”

  “I could use a few yaks after all we’ve been through.”

  Austin cringed at the pun, but his mental pain was short-lived. Zavala called his attention to another section of the green area.

  “I’ll be damned,” Austin said. “People!”

  The group stood near the edge of the boulder field. As the paraglider drifted lower, Austin saw someone club another person to the ground. A third figure rushed to the aid of the fallen figure but was jerked away. The paraglider was low enough for Austin to see a flash of blond hair.

  “I think we just found Karla Janos,” Austin said.

  GRISHA’S THIN LIPS were peeled back in a grin that revealed his bad teeth. He spoke in Russian, and his murderous cohorts appeared from behind the rocks where they had been hiding.

  Schroeder quickly sized up the situation. While he and Karla pursued a zigzag path through the city, Grisha and his men could have come straight through the central boulevard and stumbled on the way out.

  Grisha motioned for his prisoners to go back the way they had come. As the Russians and their captives broke out of the rocks into the open, Grisha saw the woolly mammoths.

  “What are those?” he said. “Sheep?”

  “No,” Schroeder said. “They’re butterflies.”

  He was unprepared for the fury of Grisha’s response. The Russian didn’t like being humiliated in front of his men. He let out a feral snarl, raised his gun like a club and slashed Schroeder across the face with the barrel. As Schroeder crumpled to the ground, the last thing he heard was Karla’s scream.

  ZAVALA HAD been watching the drama unfold below. “Looks like she’s in bad company. How do you want to handle this? Hawk on a mouse or OK Corral?”

  Zavala was asking Austin whether they should make a stealth approach or go in with guns blazing.

  “How about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?”

  “That’s a new one, but anything works for me.”

  “Hand me your gun and take over the controls. We’ll come in from behind. The sun will be in their eyes.”

  “Wyatt Earp could have used one of these rigs against the Clan-ton boys.”

  “As I recall, he did pretty well without it.”

  Zavala slipped his Heckler & Koch from its holster. Handling the weapon with great care, he passed it to Austin, and placed his hands on the controls. They were descending rapidly. Austin positioned himself like a gunfighter, with a weapon in each hand.

  GRISHA HAD one arm around Karla’s neck, his fingers en-twined in her hair. The palm of his other hand was pressed against her face so that she could hardly breathe. With a simple twist, he could have broken her neck. He was angry enough to kill her, but his greed was stronger than his more violent tendencies. She was worth more alive than dead.

  But that didn’t mean he and his men couldn’t have some fun with the beautiful young woman. He removed his hand from her face and pulled down the zipper of her jacket. Frustrated by the layers of warm-weather clothing underneath, he cursed and knocked her to the ground. One of his men shouted.

  Grisha glimpsed a shadow moving on th
e ground and he looked up.

  His mouth dropped in amazement.

  A two-headed man was swooping down on him from out of the sky.

  WHEN THE distance narrowed to a couple of hundred feet, Austin started blazing away with both handguns. He aimed off to the side to avoid hitting Karla. Her captors ran for their lives.

  With Karla out of the way, Austin was free to aim at his fleeing targets, but it was difficult to get a clear shot while he was moving. Zavala yelled at Austin to get ready to land. He tucked one gun into its holster, the other in his belt.

  They attempted to land on their feet, but they had come in too fast. They hit the ground and lurched forward onto their hands and knees. Luckily, the vegetation cushioned the impact. They quickly unstrapped the power unit. While Zavala rolled up the lines to the sail, Austin went over to the blond woman who was kneeling beside an older man.

  “Miss Janos?” Austin said.

  She glanced up at Austin with her striking gray eyes. “Who are you?”

  “Kurt Austin. My friend Joe and I have been looking for you. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she said. “My uncle needs help.”

  Austin dug a first-aid kit out of his pack. The man was still conscious. He lay on his back with his eyes open. He could have been anywhere from sixty-five to seventy-five years old, but it was hard to tell because his long-jawed face was covered with blood that flowed from lacerations on the cheek and brow.

  Austin knelt by his side, cleaned the wound and applied antiseptic on the raw flesh. His ministrations must have been painful, but the man didn’t flinch. His arctic blue eyes watched every move Austin made.

  Austin had barely started his first aid when the man said, “That’s enough. Help me up.” With Austin’s aid, Schroeder struggled to stand. He was a tall man, several inches over Austin’s six foot one.

  Karla put her arm around her uncle’s waist. “Are you all right?”