“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. On
ly 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.”
He could feel her searching his eyes for clues. “What did happen, Conrad?”
He wanted to hold her in his arms, if she’d let him, and tell her everything was going to be OK. But they both knew that would be a lie. “I’m going to find out,” he told her. “I promise.”
The square of light overhead grew larger as Conrad neared the top of the shaft. It had been a steeper climb than he expected, slowed by the suction pads he needed for traction, and he was out of breath. The wind whistled as he gripped the outer edge of the shaft and pulled himself up to the light of day.
The brightness was harsh and he blinked rapidly, allowing several seconds for his eyes to adjust. When they did, he blinked again in disbelief.
Spread out a mile below him were the ruins of an ancient city. Temples, ziggurats, and broken obelisks lay strewn amid what had been-could be-a tropical paradise. He noticed a series of concentric, circular waterways radiating out from the base of the pyramid complex, which he deduced was the center of town. It was an advanced, otherworldly city grid hidden for twelve thousand years under two miles of ice.
Until now.
Conrad shaded his eyes. The subglacial terrain stretched out in a six-mile radius from the pyramid-a tropical island in a sea of ice. In the distance he could see the snowcapped Transantarctic Mountains.
The air smelled crisp and fresh, and he could hear the distant rumble of waterfalls. Somehow his fears and doubts and petty ambitions were swept away by the majesty of it all. But as he gazed out across the new world, he suddenly wondered what had happened to the old.
23
Dawn Minus Fifteen Hours
U.S.S.Constellation
Admiral Warrens plashed across the inside hangar deck of the U.S.S.Constellation, surveying the damage. The ship hadn’t capsized after all, but the deck had taken on enough water to sink the Titanic twice. And yet the old girl was still afloat, limping along on emergency power.
Initial reports coming in from the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, and some earthquake-forecasting agency in Japan blamed the tidal wave on a major quake in East Antarctica-11.1 on the Richter scale. But Warren couldn’t confirm it with McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott. All communications with American bases on the continent had been cut off by a burst of EMP.
All of which seemed to validate reports coming out of Moscow and Beijing that the “seismic event” in Antarctica was really a secret U.S.-sponsored nuclear explosion-a flagrant violation of the international Antarctic Treaty.
The electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, had also blinded spy satellites overhead. Warren was told that if he couldn’t get a bird up in the air to fly reconn over the epicenter, it was going to take at least sixteen hours before any U.S. forces could reach the target to either prove the nuke accusations false or cover up Yeats’s dirty work.
“Goddamn you, Yeats,” Warren muttered as he stepped around the floating pieces of a broken wing. Looked like one of their F/A-18 Hornets. The rest was mangled with what used to be an S-3B Viking.
Warren shook his head. Twenty-six wounded, three in critical condition and nine missing. And that was just the Constellation. News reports said one-third of the island of Male, the Maldives’s capital, was underwater. Even a small rise in sea levels at this point could wipe out the island nation-all 1,180 islands. The entire population of 263,000 inhabitants was at risk.
The only positive news Warren could report back to Washington was that his crew had managed to rescue the Greenpeace protesters from their now-sunken ship. The meddlers were helping out with the wounded and serving up some of the best damned coffee Warren had ever tasted.
He was on his fourth cup when one of his radio officers splashed over. “EAM coming over Milstar, sir.”
Warren watched a sock float past him on the hangar deck. Milstar was the president’s communications link to senior military commanders. The $17 billion Military Commanders’ Voice Conference Network was designed to enable commanders to discuss whether a ballistic-missile launch threatened North America and, if so, to determine the appropriate response.
“Priority one, sir.”
“I’m coming.”
Warren took a final gulp as he eyed the rad-hardened Black Hawk chopper that several of his maintenance crew were working on in the corner-at his orders. He then crumpled the Styrofoam coffee cup and tossed it on the hangar floor, where it floated away.
Inside the Constellation ’s war suite, the water was only ankle deep. Warren walked in to find his senior officer, McBride, seated at the conference table. Next to McBride, to Warren’s surprise and dismay, was the scruffy Greenpeace geek from the Arctic Sunrise whom CNN had featured. He was fiddling with some candy-colored laptop computer that looked like a toy.
Warren frowned. “What’s this civilian doing here, McBride?”
“This is Thornton Larson, a Ph.D. in geophysics from MIT,” McBride said. “He reviewed the Milstar downloads and has a presentation for you.”
“Couldn’t your officers figure it out, McBride?”
McBride said, “The data is so off the charts, sir, we felt we needed a second opinion. Dr. Larson has some valuable insights.”
Warren sat down and studied the disheveled Larson. The smart-ass hasn’t even discovered the razor blade, he thought to himself, and McBride was sharing national security secrets with him. “Enlighten me, Larson.”
“I was able to retrieve one final image from a satelli
te overhead before its innards were fried by that EMP,” Larson said excitedly. “I cleaned it up and here it is.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. A blue-tinted image of Antarctica, all too familiar to Warren these days, came into view. But in the middle of it, or rather just off center in East Antarctica, was a brown-yellow dot.
“Is that awesome, dude, or what?” Larson could only marvel at his work.
“God almighty, tell me that’s some storm and not ground zero,” Warren said.
Larson addressed the image on the wall screen. “Well, hello Mr. Ground Zero, are you ready for your close-up?”
The brown-yellow dot on-screen started to magnify, frame by frame, until Warren found himself looking at a crater in the ice, and at the bottom of it was a complex of pyramids, temples, and waterways. The kid was obviously playing them all for fools, Warren decided.
“You think you’re pretty funny, Larson, don’t you?” Warren said, starting to get up. “Let’s see how hilarious the brig can be.”
“Please, sir,” McBride said. “We checked it out and this guy hasn’t doctored anything.”
Warren slowly sat down, his thoughts immediately turning to Yeats. The SOB must have known all along. “So you’re telling me what I’m seeing on that screen is for real?”
“What you’re seeing is a localized event, like a garage band on the verge of stardom,” Larson said. “This is just the first single off an album I’ll call Mother Nature’s Cacophony in Doomsday Major.”
Warren gave McBride his “your ass is on the line here” stare, which his executive officer acknowledged.
Larson said, “Your attention, class.”
Warren looked up at the large wall screen. The image of an ancient city surrounded by ice was gone. In its place, spinning in the center, flickering with each power drain of the carrier’s electrical system, was what looked like a thermal image of the sun in space.
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